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If you are following the crisis communications playbook, you know that taking swift, deliberate and public action to right a wrong is enough to not only mitigate a brand’s crisis—it can even flip the narrative and earn that brand new followers. So after singer/songwriter SZA was racially profiled in a store and blasted the brand on social media, Sephora’s declaration that it would shut down operations for an inclusiveness and diversity training today seemed a smart crisis response. So why is the brand declaring its training has nothing to do with the incident?

Digital teams and SEO experts are no longer comprised strictly of data nerds and left-brainers, but include writers and journalists, sociologists, and anyone with a vested interest in better understanding how people search the web. With this trend, it’s also high time to remember that your content is best optimized for search when everyone in your organization embraces SEO from the start—including PR pros.

Your company has had a data breach. No, it’s potentially had a breach. What’s your counsel to the C-suite? Should the brand reveal this information to the public or wait until you have perfect knowledge? These questions are at the crux of the communicator’s dilemma in the age of cybercrime.

Communicators can perform what looks like magic when they win approval from the C-suite. But what looks like magic starts with reading and understanding data, and presenting it in a comprehensive way. Check out the strategic takeaways from our webinar: How to Prove Social Media ROI to the C-Suite

Crisis is going to strike your clients. This is just reality. So not preparing in advance for a crisis means exposing your clients to potential disaster. In an age when bad news and missteps become public and go viral at the speed of social media, it is absolutely essential to have a concrete crisis prevention and response plan in place. Here are four tried-and-true steps to keep your clients’ reputations safe.

To kick off Pride Month, Budweiser UK announced its partnership with London Pride by launching a “Fly The Flag” campaign featuring nine different brightly-colored Budweiser pint glasses, each depicting a different pride flag. Suffice to say, Twitter wasn’t having it. Advocates in the queer community resented seeing their flags used to sell beer, calling it opportunistic and insincere. Others lamented that Budweiser went too far by over-explaining what the various flags meant.

We asked our data partner Shareablee to look at blockchain influencers and see who the most active was during Q1 2019.

As readers of this publication know, we like to gauge the mood of the industry at frequent intervals. So after returning from The Social Shake-Up last month in Atlanta, we examined how communicators are assessing the bevy of data that social media generates. PRNEWS and partner InfoVision Social surveyed 150 PR executives to discover trends and pain points.

A career in PR can be wonderful. But it’s also regularly associated with high levels of stress, which can lead to mental health problems. A modest proposal urges PR leaders to provide a supportive culture and resources to employees to recognize and treat mental health issues.

Communicators need to take a different approach to crisis management, three senior executives from APCO Worldwide argue. They must utilize research capabilities to constantly monitor the opinions and expectations of key stakeholders. This information will prove invaluable when a crisis hits.