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PR News will announce the winners of its 2017 Agency Elite Awards at the annual Platinum PR & Agency Elite Awards luncheon at New York’s Grand Hyatt on Sept. 14, 2017. The Agency Elite Awards benchmark excellence in PR agencies’ key practice areas, from advocacy, crisis communications and social media to internal communications, media relations and reputation management.

With all the good that comes from social media, there also are negatives. One is that employees can criticize their company online and make life even more anxious for communicators. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) encountered such an instance a few months ago when it introduced random drug and alcohol testing of employees. An outcry went up in some quarters over this policy. Here’s how TTC handled the situation.

As you know, speed is of the essence when dealing with a social media crises. Fortunately, tools exist that can help brands large and small monitor social media conversations, which can buy a bit of time for brands when a social media crisis occurs.

Internal communications is a pain point for brands and organizations large and small in normal times. When significant changes are occurring inside an organization it can make communications even more difficult. Ally Bunin, a VP for internal communications at Brighton Health Plan Solutions, explains how her brand communicated during a period of radical internal changes.

A long “manifesto” decrying efforts at addressing diversity has been making the rounds inside Google via internal message boards and social networks. The author, a male software engineer, argues that there are inherent differences between men and women that account for perceived gender gaps. Thus Google’s Danielle Brown, who took up the mantle of vice president of diversity, integrity & governance at the end of June, already finds herself in a delicate internal communications test.

A few years ago, each of Southwest Airline’s departments used social media in their own way, independent of each other. But the firm quickly moved to create “an enterprise-level function with multiple players and dotted lines back to operational units, while still maintaining a master strategy,” according to Linda Rutherford, Southwest’s CCO. To her, the question of who should own social media centers around how an organization approaches customer engagement.

Hershey is embracing employee advocacy programs as a way to pull back the curtain on life at the company, helping to improve recruitment, retention and reputation. The giant chocolatier has devoted an Instagram account (@HersheyCompany) to celebrate its employees, who in turn use the platform to celebrate the company. Here are some examples of successful posts, as well as four tips to keep in mind when crafting your own advocacy program.

All that glitters is not gold. That seems to be true with MixBin. The brand recalled nearly 300,000 of its glittery mobile phone cases after an unnamed liquid started dripping from them, burning customers’ skin. While MixBin responded quickly to the situation, offering a full refund, its written statement seems tone deaf and unapologetic.

This season, you’ll find your Trending tab awash in bizarre holidays like National Watermelon Day (Aug. 3), National Lazy Day (Aug. 10) and National I LOVE My Feet Day! (Aug. 17). We took a look at three brands in different verticals who saw high engagement around their #NationalWatermelonDay posts, and pinpointed how each contender entered the conversation in a relevant way.

Facebook engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo explained in a newsroom post Aug. 2 that an update to News Feed will soon show users more stories that will load quicker on mobile. This will take into account not only the speed of the site itself, but also the users’ network connection at the time they are browsing. Here are 10 tips from Facebook to ensure your site is up to speed.