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Yelp may not always come up in conversation as a social network the likes of Facebook or Instagram, but for small businesses and their customers, Yelp is a godsend. Yelp’s senior manager of business outreach, John Carroll, will be speaking at The Social Shake-Up as part of a “Tying Social Media to the Bottom Line” session on May 7. We spoke to Carroll about his tips for social monitoring, brand evangelism and on-camera storytelling in 2019.

Some PR pros may find it difficult to know exactly what constitutes a crisis. Calls may increase at your customer service center. A company may appear on Google Trends. Or, as Margaret Standing, director, corporate communications at Designer Brands, put it, “you can watch your Apple watch, and see the increase of beats per minute. That’s when you know there is a crisis.” After that, you must decide how to respond. See how crisis experts advised attendees during PRNEWS’ Crisis Management Workshop.

Adidas and Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) used Apple’s AirDrop to distribute free sneakers at Coachella. To those who accepted Glover’s AirDrop invitation, it was a highly personalized experience that ended with free Adidas. For others, it was a creepy use of an app designed for people who actually know each other.

PR pros often focus on the “fun” side of social: the stories, images and conversations that bring a brand to life. Unfortunately, darker forces also exist. Brands face a number of adversaries; from account hacks to bot attacks. Sometimes, brands are their own worst enemy, violating federal regulations that a communicator may not have even been aware of.

The New York Times published a story Saturday detailing how Google shares its location-tracking database with police to identify potential suspects whose devices were within the vicinity of a crime. The police then use this information as evidence while building a case, sometimes going after the wrong suspects. Google’s unwillingness to acknowledge its reputation for surveillance offers PR lessons about recognizing negative trends.

There’s no question that measuring the value of PR is one of a communicator’s biggest challenges. Whether you’re charged with handling your brand’s media relations, social media campaigns or both, a pointed question from the C-suite lingers: “How does this tie to our bottom line?” At the Measurement Conference later this week, experts will explain how to get senior leaders to see the value of your PR efforts. Here are some tips to get you started.

It’s amazing, the amount of content the annual SXSW festival packs into 10 short days. But for savvy communicators, the lessons learned in March become the refined business strategies of April and May. These trends from SXSW 2019 offer more than real-life lessons for communicators: it’s a glimpse into PR’s future.

There’s much PR pros can learn about communicating the intricacies of AI from a story this week. It seems Amazon’s Alexa indeed is listening to our conversations. In fact, the hockey-puck-looking device has an army of 1,000 humans who listen to what it picks up in homes around the world. One lesson is that communicators need to urge brands to be transparent in their AI activities.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Public relations professionals live and breathe this mantra for their clients, but they should also look inward when it comes to developing relationships with journalists.

As the boundary between marketing and PR continues to blur, two surveys provide perspective into building a sound media relations strategy. They also remind us that marketing and PR must not be operating with siloed measurement strategies. Ahead of PRNEWS’ Measurement Conference, April 17-18 in D.C., these surveys emphasize that correctly measuring influencer ROI and communicating up are greatly unrealized opportunities for PR and marketing to be on the same page.