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Did you know 74% of Americans order a takeout pizza or a delivery pizza at least once a month? We didn’t either, but DiGiorno did. And it also knew from social listening that last year 80% of posts about delivery pizza were not positive. That led to a pizza party, er, experiment.

Is there anything new under the Sun when it comes to PR crisis management? Absolutely a pair of veteran crisis communicators tell us. One is to upgrade your planning and take an holistic approach. What you’re not planning? Oops.

To many of us the Super Bowl is about advertising, not football. Twitter launched a competition for Super Bowl LII with just those people in mind. Its inaugural #BrandBowl pitted Super Bowl advertisers against each other in various categories looking at the highest engagement across a given industry while the game aired. One category, #Interception, looked solely at brands without a Super Bowl ad that drove high engagement. The #Interception award winner, Ally Bank, had to cut through the online noise generated by some of the nation’s largest brands.

The Super Bowl is one of the most highly anticipated annual events in popular culture. But for many people tuning in, the advertising breaks are every bit as compelling and competitive as the game itself. This year, ads from Tide, Amazon and the NFL won the day and gave their brands a lift, while Dodge Ram shot itself in the foot with a tone-deaf spot.

At the start of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that big changes are coming to Facebook’s news feed—specifically, a de-emphasis of branded and publishers’ content in news feeds—and we’re already seeing the effects of some of those changes. PR News spoke with five communicators to see if the decrease in time spent on Facebook, and the company’s recent changes in its news feed algorithm, is cause for concern and augers a shift in their own content strategy.

It’s a relative walk in the park when a PR pro is asked to create messaging around a glamorous or high-profile event. Perhaps the mark of a great PR pro is when you are able to craft compelling messages around a seemingly routine event or product. Here’s a mini-case study of how communicators created buzz around the renovation of the San Diego Convention Center.

PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame members have a thing about data or, rather, a thing about the casual disregard of data in the PR discipline. Few things aggravate them more than a PR professional who worries openly about proving the value of communications efforts yet shies away from taking the first steps toward using data to inform their work and show the effect of their work on an organization’s goals.

The speed of communications is ever-increasing, and new channels are constantly emerging. There’s also a greater need to micro-target messages using interconnected cross-platform campaigns to create a continuous story experience. But getting the basics right still applies.

In a move that was long overdue, Instagram announced that it would allow for scheduling of posts ahead of time—but with a twist. You can’t schedule a post directly on the app, but you can schedule through one of Instagram’s partners, such as Hootsuite, Sprinklr or Sprout Social. The feature, announced yesterday, has long been on the wish list of social media managers looking to simplify content management on the platform, and is the latest in a series of updates being rolled out for the Instagram Graph API redesign.

In her nearly two decades as a PR pro, Maire Griffin, VP, global communications for the Wyndham Hotel Group, has been a witness to many changes in the PR pro/reporter relationship. What hasn’t changed is the need to work equally hard on relationships with internal and external stakeholders. One feeds into the other, and back again.