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In a Wall Street Journal article about delays in the production of the Tesla Model 3, Tesla chairman and CEO Elon Musk compared Ford unfavorably to his own company, calling the legacy car maker a “morgue.” Ford’s head of communications took to Twitter and challenged Musk to visit a Ford plant.

It’s the early days for Instagram’s IGTV, a mobile-first, YouTube-esq social experience that will facilitate longer, vertical videos. It also will let brands get closer to audiences and allow people to discover them. Bell’s social media manager David Wolpert offers three ways communicators can work with IGTV to tell their brand’s stories.

It’s so tempting. There’s a large media list at the ready. All one needs to do is craft a compelling narrative, attach it to the media list, hit send and wait for journalists to call. It’s the digital age, after all. Why not deploy the eponymous technology and send out hundreds of pitches with the click of a mouse? If it only was that easy.

In a perfect world, your summer vacation would begin the moment you set your inbox’s “out of office” message and leave your desk. As most professional communicators know, though, PR is far from a perfect world. Crises materialize that require your advice or input, while requests come down from the C-suite that you would be wise to address in a time-sensitive fashion.

For many companies, business plans involve creating a product and then trying to figure out whom to sell it to. But it turns out that some of the most profitable companies in the world, such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, found success by structuring their business plan the other way around. What it comes down to is this: What is the customer looking for, and how can you fit your company into those wants and needs to increase engagement and brand loyalty?

This month, talk of Instagram’s bold new features has been everywhere. On June 20, the platform announced it has surpassed 1 billion active monthly users. One week later, Instagram now launches three features that were teased at Facebook’s F8 event.

Though email and social media pitching is a cornerstone of public relations, sometimes it can feel impersonal, especially if you’re sending out dozens of pitches and hearing nothing back from inundated journalists. But what if you could meet these reporters offline, and get to know them as real people? Then your emails would no longer be lost in an overcrowded inbox, but instead move to the top of the list.

The CCO often is seen as a brand’s last line of defense, in theory supervising what the brand releases externally and monitoring and sometimes responding to what is said about the company outside the corporate walls. In the Netflix case, though, the CCO was the person who made the insensitive remarks. Twice.

It’s one thing to have an active social media strategy. It’s quite another to measure its success and adjust accordingly to achieve program objectives. As VP, audience engagement, for Audubon Society, Elizabeth Sorrell has an intimate knowledge of social media measurement trends and will share her expertise at PR News’ upcoming Social Media Summit.

Now that Instagram considers everyone to be a creator on IGTV, we all can learn from the numerous ways that brands are crushing it with their photos and videos on the platform this summer. While brands aren’t exactly pumping out the summer fun on IGTV just yet, here are three examples of brands that have perfectly captured summer elsewhere on the platform.