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Marketer of the Year Dawn Callahan is an award-winning marketing visionary who is part of the leadership team that took Boingo Wireless from a small startup to a global Wi-Fi leader. Meanwhile, Callahan’s co-winner Luke DeRouen has been responsible for solidifying Arby’s brand communications strategy over the past three years—a strategy that has resulted in the brand delivering exceptional programming and increased sales results.

Knowing how to handle a crisis arguably is the most important skill in a PR pro’s toolkit. When it’s a social media crisis, the need to act quickly often can be paramount, requiring PR pros to have items ready to deploy almost immediately. Here are a few tips that will bolster your efforts at apologizing for a crisis on social media.

Shortly after Media Relations Professional of the Year Wimberly led a launch of the Galaxy Note7, the world turned its attention to incidents of the Note7 battery catching fire. Far from losing her cool, Wimberly immediately orchestrated a full and transparent response to a crisis without precedent. Not only did her campaign help recover 98 percent of the recalled devices, it also set the stage for future successful product launches.

Throughout his long career playing baseball, Derek Jeter was thought to have the PR sense of a crafty politician. Little if anything stuck to him. In just a few months as CEO and co-owner of the Florida Marlins, though, he seemingly has torched his good name by unloading the team’s top talent and several other questionable moves. Here are suggestions designed to help him repair his public image.

Lauren Herchert has counseled H+K’s largest clients throughout her nine-year tenure with the agency, establishing a reputation as a compassionate and inspiring team leader, leading internal coaching and training programs and building H+K’s client roster with significant new business wins.

Veteran PR pro and former journalist Arthur Solomon continues his series of communications lessons pulled from 2017 news headlines. In this edition, Solomon concentrates on lessons learned from crises that involved Equifax, BP and the White House.

When Lacey Haines joined HP in 2016, she saw an opportunity to reinvent how the company approaches product reviews by expanding the scope of the program to include lifestyle media. In short, Haines created HP’s consumer media program, building it into what it is today.

Historically, content marketers and communicators have been frustrated by separate, disconnected content marketing analytics. There are different systems to measure SEO, social sharing, engagement and quality of content. Enter Christopher Penn, who created SCALE on behalf of SHIFT Communications to solve this problem. SCALE, short for Shared Content And Link Evaluation, is a cloud-based software package designed to ingest URL-based marketing data from multiple, disparate data sources, unify the data and, leveraging best-in-class analytics engines, provide actionable insights from data.

Over the past two months, the #MeToo movement has sparked a long-overdue national conversation around sexual harassment. And now, one of the nation’s biggest companies is moving beyond talk to action. Microsoft has announced that it would end the common corporate practice of “forced arbitration,” which requires victims of sexual harassment to settle cases privately rather than through a court of law. Will other companies follow its lead?

The fires in California have brought devastation to people, property and animals in the Golden State since the beginning of the month. While some fires continue to rage, those in the area of the Ojai Valley Inn have been contained. Faced with a large clean-up, the Inn refused to cut corners and instead will remain closed into 2018, resulting in a large financial loss as it will miss prime holiday weeks. Its decision to remain closed is firmly rooted in its brand promise.