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Some of us—make that most of us—who’ve spoken at conferences and in boardrooms consider ourselves to be passable speakers at best. You can’t change your basic character and erase years of habits and phobias overnight, but you can create a mental toolkit that can slowly transform you from a tic-plagued live speaker into a true performer who’s always in sync with an audience.

Does your brand’s Instagram channel stand out among the other 25 million business profiles on the platform? If not, it could be because your feed and profile don’t embrace a strong visual identity.

Facebook released its long-hidden community guidelines this week in another move to curry favor with the public after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. A post on the company’s newsroom explains how Facebook’s content policies are developed and enforced, and introduces a new appeals process for posts that may have been removed by mistake. But will this newfound transparency be enough to rebuild public trust in the social giant?

What’s in a Name? Is it fair to call the fatal accident that occurred aboard Southwest Airlines flight 1380 last week a PR crisis? Was what happened at a Philadelphia Starbucks April 12 a PR crisis

Most measurement initiatives proceed in three stages: defining the goal, determining the KPIs that align with the goal and communicating the results to senior leaders. But the devil is in the details. Given the mountain of data available to communicators, moving from the first to the second step—from defining the goal to identifying specific KPIs that will help you achieve it—can be a mighty challenge. Here’s a segmentation of metrics aligned with four main business goals, including measuring brand reputation and sales leads.

There is a growing tendency to overuse data and graphics to prove a point that might not even be worth proving, and to underuse good old-fashioned human thinking and storytelling. The data we get from myriad sources can give a false sense that getting from Point A to Point B is a straight line. All too often, communicators in their reporting to senior management, clients and other stakeholders, will let the data speak for itself.

YouTube is once again in hot water for running ads on channels promoting disturbing content, a CNN investigation has uncovered. More than 300 organizations had their ads running on channels promoting Nazis and North Korean propaganda, to name two. For now, brands are still willing to take the risk.

Snapchat has announced a new feature, Shoppable Lenses, that aims to win brands’ advertising dollars by trading “soft” metrics like opens and impressions for clickthroughs, conversions and calls to action that can be tied directly to sales. The feature, which uses Snapchat’s AR lenses and allows users to virtually try a new product, could be a game changer for B2C brands, while acting as a proof-of-concept for companies wary of the platform.

Bringing together people who share common concerns and interests while putting a brand’s immediate needs in the background—or, even better, on the moon—is easier said than done. But maybe that’s what we really mean when we talk about authenticity in communications and community-building—a willingness on the part of a brand to be quiet about itself and encourage others to do the talking.

As communicators know, crisis communication begins well before a crisis occurs. Southwest’s communicators demonstrated they were prepared for April 17’s fatal incident aboard flight 1380 from NY to Dallas. Beyond their technical competence, Southwest used several tactics to inject a human touch in its crisis communications.