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Legendary Hollywood director John Huston was fond of saying that he didn’t direct actors—he cast them. He would cast actors because they were right for a particular role, and that judgment alone was the limit of his direction of their performances. You can apply this same approach to the ways in which your brand works with influencers. The bulk of the job is in finding and vetting the right influencers.

Comedian/actor Jim Carrey has begun a campaign to dump Facebook due to the company’s profiting off fake news and ads it sold to Russian agents during the U.S. presidential election. Part of Carrey’s beef is that Facebook still isn’t doing enough to stop it. He’s removed his Facebook page, given up his Facebook shares and urges concerned investors to do the same. Should Facebook consider Carrey’s actions a crisis or a bad day?

A day after experiencing the biggest one-day point drop in its history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average continues its wild ride—and investor relations pros are likely working overtime to minimize the damage. So, how should communicators calm jittery stakeholders? We asked five communicators who specialize in investor relations and crisis communications how they’re approaching messaging during today’s stock market crisis.

If the fragmented media environment is a sick patient, machine learning may be the cure. That was the proposition Andrew Heyward, visiting scholar from MIT’s Media Laboratory and former president of CBS News, outlined in his presentation, “Can Robots Solve Your PR Problems?” at the New York offices of agency Makovsky on Feb. 6.

Our weekly roundup of trends, news and personnel announcements in marketing and communications. This week we feature stories about the US Olympic Committee in the wake of the Dr. Larry Nassar case, Instagram finally allows brands to schedule posts and Jill Zuckman is promoted at SKDKnickerbocker.

To many of us the Super Bowl is about advertising, not football. Twitter launched a competition for Super Bowl LII with just those people in mind. Its inaugural #BrandBowl pitted Super Bowl advertisers against each other in various categories looking at the highest engagement across a given industry while the game aired. One category, #Interception, looked solely at brands without a Super Bowl ad that drove high engagement. The #Interception award winner, Ally Bank, had to cut through the online noise generated by some of the nation’s largest brands.

The Super Bowl is one of the most highly anticipated annual events in popular culture. But for many people tuning in, the advertising breaks are every bit as compelling and competitive as the game itself. This year, ads from Tide, Amazon and the NFL won the day and gave their brands a lift, while Dodge Ram shot itself in the foot with a tone-deaf spot.

At the start of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that big changes are coming to Facebook’s news feed—specifically, a de-emphasis of branded and publishers’ content in news feeds—and we’re already seeing the effects of some of those changes. PR News spoke with five communicators to see if the decrease in time spent on Facebook, and the company’s recent changes in its news feed algorithm, is cause for concern and augers a shift in their own content strategy.

It’s a relative walk in the park when a PR pro is asked to create messaging around a glamorous or high-profile event. Perhaps the mark of a great PR pro is when you are able to craft compelling messages around a seemingly routine event or product. Here’s a mini-case study of how communicators created buzz around the renovation of the San Diego Convention Center.

PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame members have a thing about data or, rather, a thing about the casual disregard of data in the PR discipline. Few things aggravate them more than a PR professional who worries openly about proving the value of communications efforts yet shies away from taking the first steps toward using data to inform their work and show the effect of their work on an organization’s goals.