Stories by Ian James Wright

The blame for the Moonlight/La La Land mix-up seems to be falling on PwC, caretakers of the Oscar ballots, whose carefully guarded “ballot briefcase” tours the nation each year on its way to Hollywood. The accounting firm tweeted an early-morning statement, but has otherwise remained quiet on social media.

This update is important because it takes over a function of Facebook, long the platform of choice for posting albums of pictures. Another important consequence for brands: Instagram users will get in the habit of swiping left and right to see more content, thereby becoming more comfortable with carousel ads, which have already been available to advertisers but different enough from a normal Instagram post that users might not have been inclined to swipe—until now.

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.

When it comes to visual storytelling, it certainly helps if your brand is associated with a product that literally makes people salivate. Since Margaret Coleman, director of digital platforms with Certified Angus Beef, will be a featured speaker on the topic of Instagram at the PR News Digital Summit, February 24 in Huntington Beach, California, we decided to take a look at a few posts from the brand’s Instagram account to see how she works her savory magic.

None of the brands behind the most-talked-about Super Bowl ads (Budweiser, Mr. Clean, Skittles, Kia, Audi), took to Twitter and Facebook the morning after the Big Game when the water-cooler chatter was in full swing. Why?

Facebook Live has a lot of advantages for communicators: It is novel enough that people are drawn to the medium per se out of curiosity, Facebook’s algorithm privileges it above other forms of content and the medium prompts engagement probably more than any other. But can you take those advantages and turn them into a winning strategy for capturing audience attention?

In crisis communication, more than any other facet of PR, planning is crucial; allowances must be made for various possibilities, and responses need to be deployed with utmost speed. It may seem a daunting task to develop such plans, but if you have a set of underlying principles, you may find that your plans flow out of that foundation in a very natural way.

In the age of social media, employee messages can be very slippery indeed: The harder you squeeze to keep them in your grasp, the more they slip between your fingers and out into the world. Such seems to be the case with President Trump’s orders to the Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service and the Forest Service to cease all communications with news media and otherwise stop disseminating facts about the climate.

“Flack” is an ugly word to those of us in the public relations discipline, and it seems that for a while—thanks to the principled work of those in modern PR—it had been riding an ebb tide out to sea. That tide may now be coming in again; The Washington Post, Politico and Wired, among others, used the term in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in effect the nation’s PR-pro-in-chief, in his first week on the job.

Communicators looking to jump on the Facebook Live trend should spend some time seeking inspiration from brands doing it well, and one of the foremost brands of that category is matchmaker eHarmony. We asked social media director Kerianne Mellott for some best practices, and she obliged us with these four Facebook Live tips.