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To look at the news about Instagram last week you’d be forgiven if you didn’t think it also is a tool for business, particularly suited to small communications shops. The rapper Nicki Minaj, who hinted all week she was about to do something big, posted a photo of her sitting on a small bed in what appears to be a tiny bedroom. True to Instagram’s acceptance of informality, the photo seems far from the highly stylized, professional picture of a celebrity that the public usually sees. The photo’s lighting is spotty, Minaj isn’t centered and the bed is disheveled. Still, it’s a very effective photo. Clad in six-inch heels with tassels, wraparound shades, bikini bottom and nothing else, Minaj makes an arresting subject. Quickly the post had in excess of 10,000 comments and thousands of likes.

[Editor’s Note: This regular feature asks communicators to spot trends and discuss their reactions to them. In this edition we hear from Larissa von Lockner, PR & social media manager, PwC.] The Trend: We’ve all been there. You’re scrolling through your social feeds wondering what your friends and family are up to and you just can’t escape the those targeted ads. Those shoes you found last week during your lunch break—the ones you added to your shopping bag but never bought—they’re haunting you!

Sponsoring a tent pole event such as the Grammy Awards does not insure you’ll pull big engagement numbers on social. In fact, none of the sponsors of the 2017 Grammys, held Feb. 12, made the Top 10 list of most-engaged brands on social that you see on this page, according to Shareablee data provided to PR News Pro.

When it comes to social listening, it can be difficult to cut through the noise. While many analytics tools attempt to measure sentiment—to quantify how positive or negative a social media post or engagement is received—it has proven to be an elusive metric, even for a brand as big as Nissan. “One big misconception is trying to model the information in social media into something you want it to be, instead of listening to what the customer is saying and fixing the problem presented to you,” says Bryan Long of Nissan.

Snap Inc.’s upcoming IPO is the talk of the tech world, and now the Wall Street Journal has reported that the company set its valuation between $19.5 billion and $22.2 billion, according to inside sources. Speculation about the success of the IPO hinges on a few important questions. New independent research might quell some people’s fears, however.

With several months left before the chill lifts for much of the country, it can be easy to slip into the winter blues during the work week (that is, unless you’re joining us in sunny SoCal next week at PR News’ Digital Summit & Crisis Management Boot Camp, Feb. 23-24 in Huntington Beach, CA). To ease your winter blues, we asked PR News’ Twitter followers to share the mantras and inspirational quotes that help them stay motivated.

No doubt you learned the essential aspects of PR as a student in communications school. But let’s face it. You could have purchased PR textbooks and learned some of the same fundamentals, less the tuition costs. You probably learned how to craft a program, the importance of strategies, tactics and objectives. Also, what your professors said was the correct method of pitching a story. There is, however, one critical facet of PR that you probably never learned in the classroom.

Social media has become more than another brand marketing platform. For consumers, it has created a front door to directly communicate with organizations and seek support in a timely manner. Nonetheless, it’s clear that many brands have yet to grasp the importance of customer support on social media and what a critical part it plays in overall brand marketing. So let’s debunk the top three myths about social customer care and see how brands can best benefit from having a robust plan.

It certainly takes a village to run a company, small, medium or large. Yet the landscape is filled with brands where one part of a company doesn’t seem to know what the other parts are doing. Ditto the lack of communication between business units. In an era of social media, this lack of coordination between business units can be devastating. Communicators should be leading the charge for integration.

“No man is an island entire of itself…” John Donne wrote in 1624. Ah, but get that man, or woman, to work and he or she can be positively insular. Large, public companies, midsize firms and… Continued