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Is anybody paying attention to what’s happening on the gridiron? Who’s on first? Not so slowly the Super Bowl is becoming more and more about social media and brands and less and less about football. If history is an example, there will be far more talk online about the commercials than the game. And this year several prominent brands will be drifting away from TV ads in favor of social media. What can communicators take away from the developments influencing this cultural phenomenon?

Smart brands keep their separate channel audiences in mind and develop content with a specific purpose for each channel. One such brand, Boingo Wireless, uses Facebook to repost content that reflects its audience’s interests, Instagram to share behind-the-scenes moments, Twitter to showcase thought leadership and Spotify as a space for users to have fun and blow off steam.

Beyoncé announced on Instagram that she is once again pregnant, a revelation that sent the social media world into a frenzy. The post, a photo of the star posing nearly nude holding her belly, won 6.4 million likes and broke the record for most-liked post on Instagram (the previous record holder was Selena Gomez, with 6.3 million likes). While most PR pros probably can’t claim the nearly 100 million Instagram followers the pop icon boasts, here are a few major takeaways to consider the next time your brand has a big announcement.

For Arby’s, Twitter isn’t just a platform on which to advertise, it’s a chance to delight. The fast-food chain’s evolving Twitter strategy isn’t concerned with promoting its sandwich of the month or the latest addition to its menu. Instead, Arby’s is focused on engaging in conversation, identifying niche areas and most of all, having fun with its followers.

This still-young year has felt like a midtown traffic scrum of competing, colliding crises, stoked by the overheated engine of a new presidential administration. Brands are nervously checking Twitter, seeing if the president has mentioned… Continued

Ken Peterson minces no words about the dangers of having no formal crisis plan in today’s angry, heated climate: “Our reputations are more vulnerable today because we have less time to recover. There are examples of this every week now. In that context it’s more important than ever to be prepared and to have the best messengers for the organization—the PR professionals—working hand in hand with the entire executive leadership team so your organization can weather any crisis in any form. “

Facebook Live has a lot of advantages for communicators: It is novel enough that people are drawn to the medium per se out of curiosity, Facebook’s algorithm privileges it above other forms of content and the medium prompts engagement probably more than any other. But can you take those advantages and turn them into a winning strategy for capturing audience attention?

In this era of the 24/7 news cycle, Moments, Twitter’s curated collection of tweets and videos, has become a favorite stop for a fast check of the news and celebrity tidbits. But last week it seemed to disappear from mobile screens. It hasn’t. Moments has been moved somewhere less conspicuous. True, that seems like we should be preparing its obituary, but Twitter swears Moments is alive and well. And at least one social media insider says there’s a silver lining in all this for brand communicators.

All brands must have a plan in place to combat a fake news attack. This plan should be four-fold encompassing digital media, PR, influencer marketing and social media—employees in each discipline should be ready to engage at a moment’s notice. The faster a brand can combat the fake news, the better the results will be for mitigating its impact.

In crisis communication, more than any other facet of PR, planning is crucial; allowances must be made for various possibilities, and responses need to be deployed with utmost speed. It may seem a daunting task to develop such plans, but if you have a set of underlying principles, you may find that your plans flow out of that foundation in a very natural way.