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When a massive, five-alarm fire broke out on a Saturday evening in busy Gilbert, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb home to nearly 250,000 residents, the Gilbert Fire and Rescue Department partnered with Gilbert’s Digital Communications Department to take a teamwork and technology approach to communication and community outreach. Here’s how they did it.

Most of us are familiar with the core KPIs of Google Analytics such as users, sessions, page views, bounce rate, average time on page, search and CTR. These metrics are important to The Coca-Cola Company too. But do they provide the holistic view the company needs? The answer is, no, because they alone do not capture engagement. So, the company created its own KPI.

Journalists and influencers believe that factual content ranks higher with online audiences than emotional content, according to a recent Cision report. Yet at a panel discussion in New York this week, communicators said that emotionally driven content has undeniable power to attract audiences and can even build trust in a brand.

Timely content is king. The good news in today’s digital world is that companies are now in the content driver’s seat. But with so many channels and platforms at their disposal, many brands struggle to be relevant on all of them, all the time. That is leading some to make poor decisions about content type, timing and topic. Here are two examples of how Southwest Airlines strikes while the iron is hot.

The social media giant has launched Stories, a Snapchat clone that gives Facebook users access to the two most unique aspects of the Snapchat interface: content that disappears after 24 hours and augmented reality lenses. This is the first Snapchat-pioneered feature to make its way into the central panel of Facebook’s marquee app.

Forget about Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer marketing for a moment. Instead, consider Human-to-Human. If you treat your customers like the humans they are and communicate with them in human ways, you are more likely to succeed on social media. Whether you are tweeting, posting, gramming or snapping, your human customers expect to be educated, enlightened or entertained.

Social media exposes many ironies, including the possibility that we are less social because of social media. Remember the days when we used our phone for talking, not typing? And when a friend was someone… Continued

Customers have four kinds of needs: functional, emotional, life-changing and social. How do communications professionals incorporate values that meet these needs into strategic PR, social media and content development plans? We should begin with why: People in every industry “don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” which spurs us to examine the underlying causes of buyer behavior.

PR is a fairly young industry. The average age of a person in the industry is 35-39, according to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. This is why it’s such a vibrant and exciting space. Yet millennials are known for job-hopping more than generations past. How can employers in PR retain millennial talent? An experienced executive shares a few tips.

Whatever one’s stance is regarding United’s decision to uphold its dress code policy, one thing is clear: United’s response has been swift and consistent across channels. Responding and listening in a crisis, though, are two very different—and sometime disconnected—things.