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The latest and greatest usually is the rage at industry events such as last week’s Social Shake-Up Show in Atlanta. Beneath all the talk about social media, though, Shakers found top-flight influencers urging them to mix social platforms with good, old-fashioned PR tactics. And at least one influencer believes the secret power of social media calls for brands to be social instead of pushing sales.

The influencer with the largest audience certainly has a leg up on the competition, yet there are other factors involved when generating consumer engagement. This week we examine Travel influencers and how they’ve fared in getting consumers to engage with the content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

We take a look at food influencers and find that consumer engagement with their posts was down nearly 50% in the first quarter of 2018. Once again our data partner Shareablee provides the data exclusively to PR News.

Brands and organizations can rest on their laurels no longer. Even darlings of the media and Wall Street, such as Tesla, are prone to crises these days. Katie Paine looks at how Tesla and founder Elon Musk and the White House Correspondents’ Association handled recent crises.

Customers want personalized experiences, but brands, despite the plethora of technology available to them, are failing to provide them in a satisfactory way, a new survey from Accenture says. The key, it argues, is to guide consumers through experiences as opposed to dictating them.

Podcasts remain a niche marketing tool, though they can be an attractive element. Those who listen to them regularly often take in some 7 shows each week and tend to stick through the entire podcast. The demo is young and male, a marketer’s delight.

eMarketer makes its predictions for global media spending, estimating rises for media spending overall and digital spending. N America will continue to lead spending, although Asia-Pacific will eclipse it around 2020, eMarketer says.

With brands and government finding their reputations on the wane, companies are turning to employee-advocates to augment their public relations. Executives from T-Mobile, Advanced Energy and Bloomberg discuss best practices.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in PR and marketing. This week’s stories include tough lessons in transparency for Nike and the NY Times, Southwest gets hit with a lawsuit from a passenger on flight 1380 and nine new partners at rbb Communications.

What can be done about fake news and who will do it? A new study shows Americans prefer a bit of fake news in their online media diet than letting Washington regulate freedom of information. They even prefer tech companies do the monitoring of fake news over government doing it.