Stories by Hayley Jennings

Twitter has finally banned conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones from the platform, citing violations of its abusive behavior policy. While this may seem like a step in the right direction for the social media site, which has been criticized over the past month for allowing Jones to remain active on Twitter despite evidence of previous policy violations, there are still questions surrounding whether this was just the platform bending to public pressure and how the policies actually deal with hate speech and will do so going forward.

After an Emirates Airline flight originating from Dubai landed in New York just after 9 a.m. on Sept. 5 with over 100 passengers complaining of illness symptoms, the spread of information was seemingly as swift as the reported illness. And as is typical during public health concerns, much of the information was later proven to be incorrect or misleading.

Snapchat’s foray into ecommerce has proved to be very successful, as shown by its most recent campaign with Adidas. The two companies collaborated on the new Snapchat show “Fashion 5 Ways,” which was used to market a pre-release of Adidas’ new Falcon W shoe on Aug. 21. While watching the show, users were able to swipe up and buy the shoe directly in the app, with ecommerce company Shopify powering the shopping experience. The shoes sold out in six hours. Here are some best practices from the campaign.

LG Mobile has partnered with actress Aubrey Plaza to bring $200K worth of LG G7 ThinQ smart phones and service to aid recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, which is still recuperating from the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season. Plaza announced the initiative on Twitter, and LG sent her to Puerto Rico to hand-deliver phones with the non-profit The Hispanic Federation.

Brand newsrooms are becoming an essential part of any business venture, but too often they become a repository for press releases and marketing materials. With the right strategy and editorial direction, a brand newsroom can transform into an engaging content hub to help you truly connect with your readers. The question is, how to take your brand newsroom to the next level? Here are some tips from Monster’s B2C content lead.

Though social media marketing is vital to the success of any business, staying abreast of changing trends can be a challenge. To help communicators keep up, Pan Communications has released an infographic of user and marketing data for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn that shows how much things have changed in the past year.

A recent Grand Jury report detailed over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by “more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years” by leaders in the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. Several Catholic bishops in Pennsylvania released statements immediately after the report was filed, but there was obvious disagreement among the responses. And Pope Francis didn’t release a statement until the morning of Aug. 20, a full six days after the report came to light.

An exclusive Associated Press investigative report on August 13 revealed that “many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.” The investigation was confirmed by computer-science researchers at Princeton.

Several airlines have been in the news recently for crises, many of which were criticized for how the situations were handled. Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon, however, seems to have learned lessons from these situations, as its communications surrounding this tragic incident were quick, measured and informative. Here are some takeaways for communicators from the Alaska Airlines situation.

Though daily social media use is ingrained in many peoples’ lives, it seems that major social media companies may have reached a saturation point when it comes to adding new users—at least in a few markets. Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat all reported stagnant or declining user numbers in the second quarter of 2018, prompting speculation about whether they had reached their growth limits.