Stories by Seth Arenstein

As it’s Super Bowl weekend we pull a bit of razzle-dazzle from our playbook and offer you two brand communicators who are heavily involved in activities around the big game. Each offers trends and their brand’s reactions to them in the form of Super Bowl communications and campaigns.

Uncertainty could be one of the handmaidens of crisis. So you can imagine the mood in Washington, D.C., as a new administration transitions into the White House. Presidential transitions often are bumpy, even when the new administration is from the incumbent’s party (think the balky path from the Reagan White House to the Bush team in 1989). The phones of brand communicators and PR firms alike are ringing a lot at the moment. Many of the calls are about crisis or potential crisis. As such, we asked communicators who will be speaking at PR News’ Crisis Management Boot Camp in Huntington Beach later this month for best practices to prepare for and react to crisis.

By now you know the score, but the real Super Bowl stakes were social. Shareablee data below shows brands with the most consumer engagement for the 2016 Super Bowl. Pepsi might reign this time. Talkwalker’s image-recognition software eyed 40K Super Bowl-related posts last week and told us consumers saw Pepsi’s logo more than that of any other brand by far.

Our weekly roundup of news items, trends and personnel moves from the past week. This edition highlights Snapchat’s IPO announcement, Volkswagen’s pyrrhic victory and a new book from Marian Salzman.

Have the efforts of Wells Fargo’s PR, communications and marketing teams shifted the conversation about the brand away from the bogus credit card scandal of early September? We asked TrendKite to crunch the numbers.

Concerned about alternative facts and fake news? Apparently PR agency clients were not, at least during the fourth quarter of 2016, a new survey from The PR Council shows.

There will be no fake news here.

We’d like to say we and our data partner Shareablee timed the chart (below), which shows the top 30 most-engaged B2B brands on Twitter, to coincide with the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, a tremendous fan of Twitter. In fact, one of the first stories to emerge from the White House after President Trump’s inauguration was that the new president assumed Barack Obama’s @POTUS Twitter handle at 12:01pm ET on Inauguration Day.

We gathered select members of PR News’ Social Shake-Up Conference board of advisors for a roundtable on social trends for PR News’ premium PR News Pro (and offered to you for free). We also asked about best practices for social storytelling, how to spend little and get a lot from social and how to surmount obstacles to social media in regulated industries, all topics related to sessions on the agenda for the Shake-Up (May 22-24 in Atlanta, socialshakeupshow.com).

Take a glance at various data firms and news outlets that track communications and marketing trends. If there’s one that failed to mention Facebook Live (FBL) as among the top communications trends of 2016 we’d be surprised. We include ourselves in this, with IBM Global Technology Services’ digital experience manager Brandi Boatner saying in these pages last week that FBL had just gotten started last year and predicting it will be far bigger in 2017.

Sometimes it seems hopeless: Millennials on your team have different attitudes about work and rewards than you, the slightly older professional who manages them. What are these differences? Do gender and years on the job influence these attitudes? And likely you’re thinking about the bottom line: Can answering these questions help your communications team and the company you work for modify culture and processes to better nurture and retain millennial talent? Can you adopt best practices to appeal to millennials who’ll be entering the workforce in the future? The issues are far from academic: Millennials comprise 35% of today’s workforce, and are its largest generation. In addition, they’ll be leaders in PR and communications for the next three to four decades.