Strategic Communications: Taylor Wheeler

As I casually scrolled through my Twitter feed last Thursday night (as casually as one can scan the news of the situation currently ongoing in Ukraine), I noticed a couple of tweets with videos of an Applebee’s ad playing on CNN while the news tickers relating information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued to occupy the screen. Well, that’s unfortunate placement,” I thought at the time and moved along.   The next morning at work, however, I received an email from PR Daily, a website that rounds up relevant public relations articles and information each day. There in their Daily Scoop segment was the headline “Applebee’s pulls ads from CNN after controversial placement.”    Here is how it all got started—during CNN’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, CNN cut to commercial following a video shot of air raid sirens going off in Kyiv. The chyron read “Air raid sirens ring out in Ukraine’s capital.” CNN and other TV networks will frequently use split-screen...

Somedays, it feels like social media has been around forever, and I have to remind myself that I have only been using it since 2005. (My first platform was Facebook—I had to wait until I received my troy.edu email address because at that time it was available only to college students.)  But then I do some math—it HAS been around for a while. That’s seventeen years of liking, poking, Myspacing, tweeting, DM’ing , scrolling, swiping...    When I read the ThoughtCo article from this week’s readings, "How Social Media Has Changed Politics,” I had the same feeling of altered time. Social media has been around forever, so why focus now on how it has changed politics? More math—I realized that especially specific to presidential elections, social media IS relatively new , considering that we only hold elections every four years. When Barak Obama first won in 2008, Facebook had only been open to everyone (of age) for two years (Abram, 2006). Twitter was just taking off (Levy, )...