Stories by Allen Plummer, Vanguard

Marketers are trained to watch engagement, track reach, respond to comments and keep an eye out for influencers on social media. But above and beyond how many shares and click throughs a post receives, the question your senior leaders really want to know is, “What’s the ROI of your social media efforts?” If you want more budget, headcount or respect within your organization, then you better have an answer to that question.

What can “The Walking Dead” teach us about digital PR? Here, Carmen Collins, a social media manager with Cisco, takes us through four lessons that the zombie hit sensation can teach us about the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of social media, including the importance of building your digital tribe, the need to stay humble and take nothing for granted, and the need to find and use just the right tools.

Generating new and exciting content is essential to any social media strategy, but it’s no small feat. Brands spend a good chunk of their marketing budget on copywriters, agencies and influencers to build a library of rich, dynamic content that captures and captivates their audience’s attention. But there’s another way. Here, Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, senior director of HR digital strategy at Hilton Worldwide, shows how the hotel giant built a tribe of passionate content creators in-house.

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is true, then you could argue that video and other multimedia content are worth millions. This is especially the case in the very crowded brand journalism waters, where The Coca-Cola Company is using content to simultaneously build brand love and corporate trust. Coca-Cola Journey makes (and sometimes breaks) Coca-Cola news, bringing to life the stories bubbling just beneath the surface of our business. We made this big bet because we believed that authentic stories matter.

Owing to social media, consumers have never felt closer to the world of entertainment and entertainers. They color nearly everything we do. So, what is the best way for brands to take advantage of the public’s thirst for show business? While it might seem that hiring Beyoncé or Frank Ocean is the way to go, there are myriad options for brands.

Our weekly roundup of trends, news and personnel moves in communications and PR. This week we have stories about The Macallan scotch using touchable, more woes for United, interactive video for storytelling, the PR lessons from the Comey firing and Reuters finds the identities of influencers and brands who received FTC letters.

In just a few weeks, hundreds of social media-savvy professionals will descend upon the W Atlanta-Midtown hotel for The Social Shake-Up Show. And in this personal account, author Chris Strub details three interactions he had at a past Shake-Up—including one with the show’s late founder, Robin Fray Carey—that forever altered the course of his career.

Instagram now has over 400 million daily active users, making it the fastest growing social media platform. Given that swelling volume of activity, the marketing opportunities on Instagram abound. Making the most of your brand’s presence on the platform all starts with elevating your feed through such best practices as visual consistency, user-generated content and on-point messaging. Here are three tips to keep in mind.

A salesperson, a PR manager and a marketer walk into a bar…or so your bottom line wishes. The birth of social media forced organizations to draw up new business strategies to stay competitive in the digital space. And so they did—one department at a time. Ask a salesperson what their social strategy is, or even what social media means to her profit goals and she will probably give you a completely different answer than the PR or marketing manager within the same organization. So how can you build a truly integrated communications team? By following these three steps.

What enables some customer communities to be financially productive while others remain a cost center? In the research study “The Business Impact of Online Communities,” we found that almost half (49%) of community leaders report revenue gains from their online community. This is an exciting proof-point, but it warranted further investigation. So, we analyzed the data to identify the winning conditions of the top communities and identified three key steps toward a better ROI.