Stories by Ian James Wright

With the 2016 Olympics just around the corner, bringing with it concerns about Zika as well as the water and air quality in Rio de Janeiro, it’s a good time to refresh our awareness for handling health crises. When you think about it, there are countless organizations that could be damaged by associations with a health crisis at any moment.

Beleaguered, embattled PR pros have been trying hard to keep up with all the updates from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube and more, but it may be time to monitor another blip on the radar: Tumblr. On July 26, the microblogging/social networking platform announced it would introduce ads “so that later this year people can start making money from their blogs.”

Although DNC officials are bound by the rules of their own party to remain neutral in the primary contests, the leaked emails show some of them discussing how to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton. Among the more objectionable content were suggestions to question his religious beliefs and raise questions about whether he is an atheist.

Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention on the evening of July 18 included a passage that was clearly plagiarized nearly word for word from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. PR pros, take heed: If you’re working with a high-profile personality who’s going to be giving a speech, you need to vet it for plagiarism.

People watch 100 million hours of video on Facebook each day. If you do a good job of making and promoting video content for Facebook, you could end up with a lot of eyes on your message. But for a lot of communicators, it’s a struggle to make the viewer care, and even to get the video in front of the potential viewer in the first place.

On July 6 Snapchat began rolling out Memories, a new feature that, depending on your point of view, adds to the app or chips away at something unique to the platform: impermanence. Users will now be able to save their Snaps and Stories to Memories, find them again by opening Memories (located under the camera button) and scrolling or typing keywords, and re-Snap them to your friends.

Once you have the basics of Snapchat down, Geofilters are a next-level tool for reaching your audience. It may not be obvious at first how to use both Community (free) and On-Demand (paid) Geofilters to engage an audience, but once you learn how to think about them from various angles, there are several ways to be smart and strategic about Geofilter use.

For a brand that so aligns itself with happiness and childlike wonder, it must be difficult even to address the tragedies that have occurred on and near its property recently. But since addressing them is necessary, brevity has been the name of the game when it comes to official messaging from Disney.

It’s the equivalent of spraining your ankle during warmups for the big game: Lots of people are expecting something great from you, and you fail to deliver. Sunday night’s Game of Thrones episode, “Battle of the Bastards,” was one of the year’s most highly anticipated, but when they went to log on to HBO Go or HBO Now, the GoT network’s streaming services, would-be viewers across the United States were greeted with error messages.

Microsoft has finally become a player in the social media arena: It has entered into an agreement to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, the software giant announced on June 13. LinkedIn is to keep its branding, and its CEO, Jeff Weiner. Aside from intra-organization network Yammer (acquired in 2012), this will be Microsoft’s first widely used social media platform.