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PR News celebrated some of the year’s best social media campaigns on May 2 at the Yale Club in New York City, as well as the digital leader and social media team of the year. Karen Raskopf, chief communications officer at Dunkin’ Brands, delivered a keynote address on the future of social media and how to create relevant social experiences.

More than 5,000 press releases are issued each day and reporters get roughly 100 pitches daily via email. So, how can you produce a release that stands out from the crowd? That was the question tackled by Mandy Menaker, head of PR and brand development for Shapr, and Erin Burke, director and vice president of APCO Worldwide, at the PR News Press Release Writing Workshop at the Yale Club in New York.

“Luxury music festival” or “$100 million lawsuit”? All it took was one weekend of social media outrage for the Fyre Festival, a music festival scheduled to start April 27 in the Bahamas, to see its reputation shift from the former to the latter. Concertgoers who had paid up to $12,000 per ticket arrived at a bare-bones campsite in disarray, learned that musical acts had pulled out of the festival and had a difficult time leaving the island location.

Many PR pros tend to ignore LinkedIn as a messaging platform for their brands. Shame. LinkedIn said Apr. 24 it has 500 million members. That’s up from August, when it said it had 450 million members. This announcement prompted us to think about how brands can tap into the LinkedIn base with their messages. We asked a brand communicator as well as a LinkedIn executive about best practices for brands trying to build engagement and market services on the platform.

What if we could change the course of the next crisis before it got out of hand? Speaking with people in and out of government, I came to believe that we were missing our moment of maximum impact. If we pre-constructed some of what I began calling counter-crisis capabilities (CCC), they could be ready when problems started to percolate. We might reduce the frenzy factor, increase our focus, and enhance performance, argues Brett Bruen, a former White House official.

There’s little question that brands, even so-called unglamorous B2B brands that might seem to lack a compelling visual story, are finding Instagram a useful outlet for messaging. That was illustrated in our lead story last… Continued

What? Another press release to write? Fine. Before you reach for the keyboard, however, think about journalists who must read scores of jargon-filled, dense releases that tired PR pros crank out on demand. With a little practice and a fresh red pen, though, any press release can be transformed from a total bore to a piece of messaging your brand (and the media) will appreciate.

Most of us wish we could apologize to people in our past for one thing or another. As time passes, though, an apology can become a form of stalking or a self-centered quest for redemption. That person whose feelings you hurt badly when you were 18? She doesn’t want to hear from you now. If only you could board a magical aircraft, zoom back in time and make things right. Speaking of aircraft, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz sent an email on April 27 to customers apologizing for breaking the bonds of trust “when a passenger was forcibly removed” from one of its planes.

Leave it to a media company to offer a mini-case study in media relations. ESPN cut around 100 jobs on Wednesday, about half of which affected on-air talent. While the cuts were expected, they went deeper than many industry-watchers anticipated. Thanks to ESPN’s transparency about the layoffs, many of its talking points in its prepared statements became the foundation of coverage from media outlets.

When the mighty Google changes its algorithm, all of PR is pushed in the same direction by the shockwave; here’s hoping that the most recent change will nudge us into a better place. The search engine’s latest move is to demote (but not remove) pages that propagate lies, hoaxes, conspiracy theories and other junk content that more and more is collectively being labeled “fake news.”