Stories by Ian James Wright

We asked Katy Martin, senior account manager at Google, who chiefly works with large customers within consumer electronics verticals, to imagine a time-travel scenario: If she were talking to herself a year in the past and had to get that self up to date with AdWords, what would be the main takeaway?

Facebook IQ, the social media giant’s consumer and advertising insights team, recently made public the results of a survey it commissioned to understand video trends. The study, based on 1,500 respondents aged 18-64 in the U.S. and Canada, offers some insights and takeaways that help communicators understand what their video’s purpose should be on various platforms.

More and more, users prefer a conversation to web browsing for their shopping and customer service needs. But for brands with large audiences, responding to each comment personally can be a nigh-impossible task. Enter the chatbot, a technology that’s rapidly coming into its own and turning into a valuable communications asset.

One of the most successful kinds of live stream videos is when the audience is waiting for something, some kind of countdown. Counterintuitively, nothing much is happening in these videos for most of the time; the audience is simply anticipating something happening. But the real action can be in the discussion around what’s on camera, not what’s actually on camera.

Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, Google: This is just the beginning of the list of prominent companies that have joined the chorus to call for the preservation of net neutrality on July 12, 2017, the “Day of Action.” But your brand may not seem to be as directly affected if it is not a content provider. How, then, is this controversy relevant to you?

So you’re writing keyword-rich copy in the inverted pyramid style, including backlinks and making sure all your pages have unique and clear titles? That’s great, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to maximizing SEO potential. At the 2017 Social Shake-Up, Carolyn Shelby, SEO director at tronc, Inc., took the audience to school on all of the above, plus more key areas where communications pros have a blind spot.

Sometimes you hear about a change being made in the name of optics and think “wow, how has that escaped an update for so long?” Such is the case with a section of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland Resort known as the “Wench Auction,” which features animatronic women characters tied together to be auctioned off for marriage to lusty buccaneers.

Paid social just got a little easier on our favorite ephemeral social network. Snapchat announced that users can now design Custom Geofilters within the app via an easy-to-use interface. Just open the Settings menu, tap On-Demand Geofilters and you’ll be able to select from a list of occasions, such as Graduation, Wedding and Birthdays. Then you can choose from a number of templates and edit them with the same text, Bitmoji and sticker tools that you use on snaps.

Imagine that one day you wake up to find that your brand’s web domain has been seized by the FBI and there is a warning blazoned across the page alleging the brand and its customers have committed federal crimes—and that prison time and fines may be involved. Reputation trouble doesn’t get much worse than that. But this was exactly the situation PokerStars found itself in.

So you’ve decided you want to work with influencers, you’ve determined what your business needs and goals are and you’re ready to locate people with the magical touch to amplify word of your brand far beyond what you could do alone. But don’t leap into a relationship; many of the professionals we’ve talked to compare finding the right influencer to dating. Are you sure that you’re aware of exactly what you’re looking for?