Stories by Seth Arenstein

The early bird gets the worm. That certainly applied to the pre-Social Shake-Up workshops, which featured plenty of personalized instruction on topics ranging from customer journey mapping, SEO and building online communities. The Social Shake-Up, which begins in earnest May 23, is sold out, yet the pre-show workshops were intimate and filled with important takeaways or shakeaways, perhaps.

Several situations last week prompted us to think about how brands respond (or don’t) to situations that could become crises. Ken Peterson, communications director of Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Bell Helicopter CCO Robert Hastings urge brands to include an evaluation process in their emergency plans to determine whether or not a situation is a crisis. This evaluation process should include monitoring social conversations and news coverage. That’s step 1 at the Aquarium, Peterson says. Step 2 is an initial assessment to “ramp up or stand down.”

Brands are grappling with several issues that have become political with the new administration in Washington, D.C., including energy policies and immigration. Data from APCO Worldwide , shared with PRNews Pro exclusively, looks at the issues surrounding buy American, hire American, namely, What is an American brand?

As PR pros know, media exposure can be a double-edged sword. What stories should be picked up and receive coverage and which should be tossed to the scrap heap? And who decides? Certainly we hope “the system” weeds out self-serving publicity hounds, but that doesn’t happen all the time. Unfortunately in our media culture outrageousness sometimes is rewarded. When that happens deserving stories can get crowded out. Here’s our attempt to make sure one good story gets told.

Our weekly roundup of trends, news items and personnel announcements. This week we debate whether or not it’s good for brands to admit their mistakes quickly (Chipotle) or wait until they’re forced to do so and risk death by 1,000 cuts (Wells Fargo, Volkswagen and Fox News Channel). And do you get turned on by the smell of pizza baking? You’re not alone. And IPR plans a report detailing CCO pain points.

Many PR pros tend to ignore LinkedIn as a messaging platform for their brands. Shame. LinkedIn said Apr. 24 it has 500 million members. That’s up from August, when it said it had 450 million members. This announcement prompted us to think about how brands can tap into the LinkedIn base with their messages. We asked a brand communicator as well as a LinkedIn executive about best practices for brands trying to build engagement and market services on the platform.

How do you create the perfect dashboard? Does such a thing exist? And if so, will it change your life as a communicator? Probably not, Katie Paine of Paine Publishing and Johna Burke of BurrellesLuce say during PR News’ Measurement Conference in Washington, D.C. Dashboards can make your life easier and should, but they’re not the silver bullets of PR. The human element and the insights you can glean from dashboard are far more important, they say.

In Q4 2016 (Oct. 1 – Dec. 31), consumer engagement, or total actions, defined as the sum of reactions, comments and shares on Facebook, rose 6% year over year for U.S. B2B brands, according to Shareablee data. Video engagement jumped 151%, though. Data were provided exclusively to PR News Pro. Enterprise data integration and management software firm Informatica maintained its top spot on the B2B list that it established in Q3 2016. Consumer engagement with the brand’s posts rose 38% compared with the same quarter last year, says Shareablee’s Nathalie Nuta. Video was just 8% of Informatica’s engagement. Its top post was an image wishing all a happy Diwali, which is the Hindu festival of lights.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” has been attributed to different people, from the actors Jack Lemmon and Gregory Peck to thespians Edmund Kean and Edmund Gwenn. Perhaps we can augment that aphorism: “Dying is easy, communicating is hard.” Examples abound why this is so. United, Pepsi and Wells Fargo are only the latest.

Right or wrong, media is in the crosshairs. The White House targets the press regularly. Distrust of the press is rising, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer and journalists themselves feel the struggle to maintain the public trust, a new report from Cision says. With media in a precarious state, Starbucks’ SVP, global communications & international public affairs Corey duBrowa believes it’s important for brands to have an alternative and create content themselves. He discussed this during the Arthur W. Page Society’s New CCO podcast. In an in-depth interview with us after the podcast, we asked duBrowa about branded content, storytelling, integration and challenges ahead.