Stories by Sophie Maerowitz

A memo that reads,”For your eyes only?” Not in showbiz. On May 10, Chicago media blog RobertFeder.com leaked a harshly worded internal memo sent by talk show host Steve Harvey to all “Steve Harvey Show” employees at the start of this year’s season. The memo airs Harvey’s grievances around a lack of privacy on set and requires employees to make an appointment with Harvey prior to any direct contact. “IF YOU OPEN MY DOOR, EXPECT TO BE REMOVED,” the memo reads, before listing several other studio locations Harvey claims to be regularly “ambush[ed]” by NBC staff.

“Saturday Night Live” cast member Cecily Strong has joined the speaker roster for the Social Shake-Up, a three-day digital communications conference that will be held May 22-24 in Atlanta, and presented by PR News in partnership with Social Media Today. Strong will be joined onstage by Rob Gregory, president of content and influencer marketing company WhoSay, with whom she’ll discuss how social media conversations have influenced her character choices, impacted her performances and helped build her audience.

Every brand commits social media mistakes, from skimping on audience research to waiting too long to respond to complaints. One gaffe that brands sometimes commit on social: focusing more on generating eye-catching content than on how audiences will likely interact with that content. Monitoring Instagram can be a particular challenge for brands seeking to stay on top of user trends. To help your brand better match its Instagram presence to audience behavior, chew on these five morsels of Instagram wisdom cooked up by protein bar company RXBAR.

“Luxury music festival” or “$100 million lawsuit”? All it took was one weekend of social media outrage for the Fyre Festival, a music festival scheduled to start April 27 in the Bahamas, to see its reputation shift from the former to the latter. Concertgoers who had paid up to $12,000 per ticket arrived at a bare-bones campsite in disarray, learned that musical acts had pulled out of the festival and had a difficult time leaving the island location.

Every fall, PR News benchmarks excellence in PR, marketing and communications campaigns with its annual Platinum PR Awards luncheon. At the luncheon, award winners are recognized for outstanding contributions to the communications and marketing landscape, from video campaigns to social media initiatives to media events and more. With the Platinum PR Awards entry deadline around the corner on May 5, it’s an ideal time to take a look back at one of 2016’s Platinum awardees, Michelin, and examine how their campaign is having a lasting impact in the communications world and beyond.

Daniella Peting follows one cardinal rule for live streaming: Don’t wing it. Peting, who manages Motorola Solutions’ social media presence in North America and co-leads the company’s Global Social Media Center of Excellence, makes a point of fully preparing every element of a live broadcast from conception to execution.

Each fall, PR News recognizes the best and most innovative marketing, communications and PR campaigns of the last year with its Platinum PR Awards program. The winners of awards in categories like best Social Media Campaign, Blog, Annual Report and many more have gone on to launch even more successful campaigns in following years. Some Platinum PR Award winners, like Happy Family, have taken successful campaigns and repurposed them as evergreen content.

Twenty-six words. That’s all it took for 21st Century Fox to announce star host Bill O’Reilly’s departure from Fox News on April 19: “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel.”

Burger King has transformed a simple TV ad into a mouthwatering engagement goldmine…almost. The fast-food chain would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids at Google (and on the internet at large). On April 12, Burger King aired an ad in which an actor asks, “OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?” The line was intended to prompt Google Home devices to read a list of Whopper ingredients from Wikipedia, but anonymous pranksters edited the Whopper Wikipedia article to include some less-than-appetizing ingredients.

Al Golin, founder of global PR firm Golin and noted PR luminary, passed away peacefully at the age of 87 on April 8. More than just the mind behind one of PR’s most successful agencies, Al Golin made many contributions to the evolution of public relations, launching groundbreaking socially minded initiatives, mentoring scores of PR professionals and making the greater good a core part of his company’s culture.