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In our personal and working lives, relationships get frayed; friends, colleagues, competitors and customers get angry at us. We have to decide when to just let things blow over, and when to reach out to the angry party. The same holds true for organizations. The only thing that’s different for organizations, perhaps, is today’s heightened political climate and the speed of news cycles.

In today’s rapid-fire world of communications, brand reputations can be torn down in a moment by a single tweet or Facebook post. One of the major facets of being prepared for such a crisis is having a staff that’s ready to respond and rebuild at a moment’s notice. To investigate the process behind preparing staff for a calamity, PR News opened its Crisis Management Boot Camp on Feb. 23 with a session on building a flameproof crisis team.

This update is important because it takes over a function of Facebook, long the platform of choice for posting albums of pictures. Another important consequence for brands: Instagram users will get in the habit of swiping left and right to see more content, thereby becoming more comfortable with carousel ads, which have already been available to advertisers but different enough from a normal Instagram post that users might not have been inclined to swipe—until now.

Imagine that a restaurant’s menu offers a delicious-looking entree of spaghetti, meatballs and red sauce. Wonderful. Well, sorry, but you are prohibited from ordering them together, on a single plate. Absurd, right? Sounds like a Seinfeld episode. That is the state of earned, paid and owned media. You can use PR for earned media, digital marketing or advertising for paid media, or content marketing for owned media. But mixing them? Blasphemy.

It looks like WhatsApp is taking a page out of Snapchat’s book, just as Instagram did before it. On Monday, WhatsApp unveiled a new wrinkle to its “Status” feature, adding the ability for users to share videos, GIFs and pictures with their friends for just 24 hours before disappearing. Those visuals can be customized with emojis, written upon and captioned as well. In the past, users could only update their status with text—now you can show, rather than just tell, your friends what you’re up to.

It’s too early to say with a lot of certainty, but it appears Uber has absorbed several PR lessons concerning crisis management. It’s had a fair amount of practice. The most recent incident for the SF-based company has Susan Fowler, a former employee, penning a widely circulated blog post about sexual harassment at Uber. It’s hard to fault the response of the company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, this time. He’s taken several of the basic steps of crisis management and done so promptly.

As someone old enough to remember the 1980s, I pondered a question while organizing my thoughts before putting figurative pen to paper to write this article: In our age of social media, would today’s youth be able to comprehend J.R. Ewing of the old Dallas series? (Hint: Think Billy the Kid in a board room, only less ethical.)

To look at the news about Instagram last week you’d be forgiven if you didn’t think it also is a tool for business, particularly suited to small communications shops. The rapper Nicki Minaj, who hinted all week she was about to do something big, posted a photo of her sitting on a small bed in what appears to be a tiny bedroom. True to Instagram’s acceptance of informality, the photo seems far from the highly stylized, professional picture of a celebrity that the public usually sees. The photo’s lighting is spotty, Minaj isn’t centered and the bed is disheveled. Still, it’s a very effective photo. Clad in six-inch heels with tassels, wraparound shades, bikini bottom and nothing else, Minaj makes an arresting subject. Quickly the post had in excess of 10,000 comments and thousands of likes.

[Editor’s Note: This regular feature asks communicators to spot trends and discuss their reactions to them. In this edition we hear from Larissa von Lockner, PR & social media manager, PwC.] The Trend: We’ve all been there. You’re scrolling through your social feeds wondering what your friends and family are up to and you just can’t escape the those targeted ads. Those shoes you found last week during your lunch break—the ones you added to your shopping bag but never bought—they’re haunting you!

Sponsoring a tent pole event such as the Grammy Awards does not insure you’ll pull big engagement numbers on social. In fact, none of the sponsors of the 2017 Grammys, held Feb. 12, made the Top 10 list of most-engaged brands on social that you see on this page, according to Shareablee data provided to PR News Pro.