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Building a dashboard seems easy enough. Make sure it presents relevant metrics and tracks your path toward success. A former communications executive at a major U.S. bank, Peter Osborne explains how it’s a bit more complicated. He also provides step-by-step instructions so you can create a dashboard that links communications metrics to relevant business goals.

If you’re in the market for a new job in communications, assume that anybody you might be meeting for an interview once made the mistake of hiring somebody without having given that person a writing test (it’s a mistake you make just once). Expect to be asked to take a writing test, and take these four tips to heart.

It seemed that the Matt Lauer scandal was behind us now that the former star was gone and his replacement, Hoda Kotb, was installed in his anchor chair. In addition, Katie Couric said the ousted Lauer was “not the Matt we knew.” But this morning former Today Show anchor Ann Curry said the Lauer incident was not a surprise to her and that there was a culture of verbal abuse at NBC. Has the network really moved on from this scandal?

In an effort to combat harmful advertising in the beauty industry, CVS has made a commitment to keep it real. The retail chain has unveiled its Beauty Mark campaign, promising that it will no longer “digitally alter or change a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color or enhance or alter lines, wrinkles or other individual characteristics” in the imagery it creates for its stores and marketing.

The Consumer Electronics Show is already a loaded PR coin. On one side there’s the opportunity to amplify messaging to hundreds of thousands of attendees and an exponential audience tuning in to media coverage. On the other is the challenge of rising above the throng, which this year includes a 146-inch TV and laundry-folding bots. Stir in some torrential rainstorms, power outages and grumpy attendees, and we’ve got a good list of challenges and takeaways from this year’s spectacle.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in the world of communications, marketing and PR. This week we have stories about President Trump’s awards for the awful media, and journalism’s response, France’s attempt to legislate away fake news, Facebook’s algorithm changes and Univision’s Jennifer Ball has a new job.

Is anyone listening? When it comes to social listening, the answer is yes. The trouble is that nearly 40% of brands lack a formal plan for social listening, according to new survey from PRNews and LexisNexis. Even more concerning is that these brands have failed to implement procedures for what happens when social listening picks up a potential issue.

It’s easy to get distracted by the flash if not the substance of the yearly consumer electronics show known as CES. This year’s edition was every bit as gaudy as those of past years, even without the lights on. The question, however, is what all the gadgets and promises of revolutionary capabilities mean for communicators? David Wolpert, social media manager at Bell Helicopter, offers some thoughts.

If you thought Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution to “fix” Facebook was just like your resolution to stop eating candy (as in, never going to happen), think again. Late Thursday, Zuckerberg announced major changes coming to the platform—namely, a de-emphasis of branded content in news feeds—and those changes will likely have a serious impact on your brand’s approach to the platform.

In 2017, Carmen Collins became the manager of Cisco’s talent brand social media team globally, a year after creating one of the industry’s top employee advocacy programs. Launched as a pilot in the spring of 2016 and a full-fledged program in the summer of 2016, the WeAreCisco Snapchat channel was Collins’ brainchild. In the last 12 months, the program has doubled unique daily views while flashing completion rates of 60% to 70% completion rates are way above industry average research.