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The author argues that PR pros can make small changes to the way they do business and as a result help their brand’s sales grow. PR can and should provide content to sales that will boost confidence and knowledge.

As it’s Super Bowl weekend we pull a bit of razzle-dazzle from our playbook and offer you two brand communicators who are heavily involved in activities around the big game. Each offers trends and their brand’s reactions to them in the form of Super Bowl communications and campaigns.

Taking a cue from the social media model of two-way, authentic communication, The Coca-Cola Company upended the traditional model of a brand website with the introduction of Coca-Cola Journey. The platform serves as a digital destination for Coca-Cola consumers and a variety of audiences including partners, investors, journalists and yes, even critics. Once it had done that, it the Coke team realized it had to devise a new way to measure communications success. So it did.

Uncertainty could be one of the handmaidens of crisis. So you can imagine the mood in Washington, D.C., as a new administration transitions into the White House. Presidential transitions often are bumpy, even when the new administration is from the incumbent’s party (think the balky path from the Reagan White House to the Bush team in 1989). The phones of brand communicators and PR firms alike are ringing a lot at the moment. Many of the calls are about crisis or potential crisis. As such, we asked communicators who will be speaking at PR News’ Crisis Management Boot Camp in Huntington Beach later this month for best practices to prepare for and react to crisis.

By now you know the score, but the real Super Bowl stakes were social. Shareablee data below shows brands with the most consumer engagement for the 2016 Super Bowl. Pepsi might reign this time. Talkwalker’s image-recognition software eyed 40K Super Bowl-related posts last week and told us consumers saw Pepsi’s logo more than that of any other brand by far.

Our weekly roundup of news items, trends and personnel moves from the past week. This edition highlights Snapchat’s IPO announcement, Volkswagen’s pyrrhic victory and a new book from Marian Salzman.

Concerned about alternative facts and fake news? Apparently PR agency clients were not, at least during the fourth quarter of 2016, a new survey from The PR Council shows.

Our weekly roundup of trends and personnel moves. Featured this week is a story about regulating influencers and involving the Kardashians. In addition the heads of PRSA and The Arthur W. Page Center blast alternative facts and fake news.

As the first month of the year comes to a close, there’s still time to take a fresh look at how you build awareness for your brand. We asked Mo Moorman of Aurora Healthcare to share a short case study about how he publicized a hospital and its services.

There will be no fake news here.

We’d like to say we and our data partner Shareablee timed the chart (below), which shows the top 30 most-engaged B2B brands on Twitter, to coincide with the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, a tremendous fan of Twitter. In fact, one of the first stories to emerge from the White House after President Trump’s inauguration was that the new president assumed Barack Obama’s @POTUS Twitter handle at 12:01pm ET on Inauguration Day.