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Kelly Stone is on a mission to evangelize careers in information technology. As the senior social media manager for CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for Information Technology professionals, Stone is tasked with softening the IT industry’s image to a younger demographic. And Instagram has emerged as one of her most effective weapons in fighting negative stereotypes. Here are four ways she uses the platform to humanize the industry and her own organization.

In part II of our interview with Taco Bell’s social media and brand engagement manager Matt Prince, we ask him about how the brand manages during the initial moments of a potential crisis. With 7,000 restaurants across the country, incidents pop up constantly, he tells us, making social listening crucial. We also discuss the particulars of how Prince and his team measurement and report metrics to the C-Suite.

If the lines between paid, owned and earned media have become blurred, why is the internal structure at most organizations still so linear? In this commentary, Brooks Thomas, social business advisor with Southwest Airlines, argues for a more integrated approach and provides four tips for smaller organizations looking to bust down the silos between those three types of content.

Uber is facing another PR crisis after a June 13 sexist boardroom exchange led to the ouster of board member David Bonderman. This shows Uber’s discriminatory culture is still deeply ingrained at the highest levels, according to Jessica Fish, senior consultant at Leader Networks. And the incident serves as a reminder for communicators to examine their own personal beliefs and workplaces for implicit and unconscious biases about race and gender long before they are exposed in a public setting.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contained fewer than 300 words and it’s considered one of the greatest speeches in the history of this country. In an era when we can tap out brief, usually cogent, messages on social media platforms, why do many of us revert to long, Proustian prose when we get behind the keyboard in our offices? Let’s do away with lengthy press releases, laden with jargon and numerous buzzwords. Perhaps social media and Papa Hemingway can help solve this epidemic in the making.

YouTube videos can sometimes seem like the one-hit wonders of the content universe. But the good news is that through strong SEO strategy and tactical outreach, little-noticed YouTube videos can still be a powerful vehicle for drawing in new audiences. Matt Goldberg, who creates and promotes video content for Chicago-based machine tool manufacturer Lyndex-Nikken—as well as founding production company MBG Films, which boasts 8.5 million views and over 13,000 subscribers—shares 10 recommendations for increasing YouTube views.

Shakespeare in the Park’s new Caesar stages the title character as looking very similar to Donald Trump. Although much art is meant to provoke discussion, enacting the assassination of a deeply controversial president on a prominent stage crosses a line. Visualizing violence against a sitting president is nowhere near being considered acceptable—and your brand probably doesn’t belong anywhere near such displays.

Marketers are trained to watch engagement, track reach, respond to comments and keep an eye out for influencers on social media. But above and beyond how many shares and click throughs a post receives, the question your senior leaders really want to know is, “What’s the ROI of your social media efforts?” If you want more budget, headcount or respect within your organization, then you better have an answer to that question.

Kristy Gillentine spends a lot of time chatting about Snapchat. Host of the popular “ChatSnap—The Twitter Chat All About Snapchat,” Gillentine interviews such social superstars as Shonduras, Brian Fanzo and Madelyn Sklar once a week to share cutting-edge tips and tricks about the platform. But for those brand communicators just looking to establish their presence on Snapchat, she offered the following tips.

In the course of your career, you’ll have attended dozens if not hundreds of industry events where – if you’re like most human attendees – you’ve exchanged business cards as if by rote, refilled your… Continued