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Good journalists and editors can smell when brands are looking for media coverage about how wonderful they are. By contrast, editors and journalists seek pitches that will touch their readers. They want stories about interesting problems. Issues or problems that large groups of people may be facing can make excellent stories. A pitch about one brand’s journey, told in its own words from start to finish, will not.

Full Court Press (Release): It’s almost become de rigueur for sports superstars to take a retirement victory lap: Announce you’re retiring the following year and spend your last season being showered with gifts and accolades from opposing teams when you visit their venues for the final time. It’s fine when you’re no longer at top form. It’s a different matter when you club a home run or sink a basket to defeat your opponent, which hours earlier presented you with a custom-built rocking chair and a Harley. 40-year-old David Ortiz has done that all season. His 22 home runs and league-leading 34 doubles have given the Dominican his best first half in Boston. Basketball star Tim Duncan, also 40, would have none of the swan song hoopla.

People watch 100 million hours of video on Facebook each day. If you do a good job of making and promoting video content for Facebook, you could end up with a lot of eyes on your message. But for a lot of communicators, it’s a struggle to make the viewer care, and even to get the video in front of the potential viewer in the first place.

Japanese messaging app Line went public July 14, with the potential to raise $1.14 billion in the largest tech IPO of the year. According to MarketWatch, the company is valued at $7 billion. While the app has the largest following in Asia, its well-publicized IPO in New York today will likely stoke curiosity in U.S. mobile users, and Line’s global potential for brand-to-consumer reach should not be ignored by communicators keeping an eye out for the next Snapchat.

At its initial launch, Snapchat touted the disappearance of uploaded user content as a core feature of the service. Yet this format was never really conducive to brands and advertisers that wanted to reach these audiences, but rarely had on-the-spot imagery to share. Snapchat’s recently launched Memories feature changes that scenario drastically.

Did Disney do all it could from a PR perspective following the fatal gator attack on 2-year-old Lane Graves at its Disney World property? How about the Cincinnati Zoo’s handling of the incident where Zoo employees killed Harambe, a rare, 450-pound lowland gorilla, after a 3-year-old child fell into the animal’s moat? And don’t forget the Academy Awards and #OscarsSoWhite.

If you’ve ever scoured the internet for an elusive answer to an arbitrary question, chances are you ended up on the popular Q&A site Quora. But the site is more than just an information repository; it’s a fully functioning social network. There are 100 million monthly unique visitors on Quora who are potentially looking for reliable information about your brand. If you don’t provide it, someone else will.

Even though Snapchat lacks many of the brand-friendly features of Facebook and Twitter—native analytics, business profiles, etc.—it’s never been a better time to join the growing community. For cautious communicators, there are plenty of ways to participate in the conversation on Snapchat. At PR News’ Snapchat Boot Camp on July 12 in New York City, speakers offered a variety of case study examples to show how PR can use the burgeoning platform effectively.

Access Intelligence, parent of PR News and other business-to-business media brands, has acquired The Social Shake-Up, a preeminent conference serving marketing, public relations, customer experience, technology and digital strategists. The annual conference and trade show, to be held May 22-24, 2017, in Atlanta, will be produced by PR News in partnership with online destination Social Media Today.

PR News recruited a Snapchat expert, Leslie Douglas, senior social media manager at PwC, for a crash course in Snapchat layout and navigation. At the Snapchat Boot Camp in NYC, she walked the audience through the app’s sometimes-counterintuitive interface. We share a few takeaways from Leslie’s presentation.