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Strong writing skills can propel a PR pro’s career, but the opposite is also true—weak writing skills can undermine your message and professional growth. Whether it’s a press release seen by thousands or an email seen by one, a PR pro’s goal is to make any piece of writing concise, impactful, polished and clear, said Sid Orlando, managing editor of curation and content at Kickstarter, at PR News’ Writing Workshop.

For many PR pros, media interviews can be the most and the least rewarding aspect of their job. Ultimately your message is in the hands of the journalist, and perhaps his/her editor. OK, but you control your spokesperson or the executive being interviewed, right? Not so fast….

“Flack” is an ugly word to those of us in the public relations discipline, and it seems that for a while—thanks to the principled work of those in modern PR—it had been riding an ebb tide out to sea. That tide may now be coming in again; The Washington Post, Politico and Wired, among others, used the term in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in effect the nation’s PR-pro-in-chief, in his first week on the job.

Fundamentally our profession is about people—understanding how they feel and behave, what they want and where their concerns and interests lie, and adapting the organization accordingly. It’s almost counterintuitive that cold, unfeeling data can help us engage more authentically and effectively with humans. But evidence literally is all around us.

There will be no fake news here.

We’d like to say we and our data partner Shareablee timed the chart (below), which shows the top 30 most-engaged B2B brands on Twitter, to coincide with the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, a tremendous fan of Twitter. In fact, one of the first stories to emerge from the White House after President Trump’s inauguration was that the new president assumed Barack Obama’s @POTUS Twitter handle at 12:01pm ET on Inauguration Day.

Although Twitter has been around for a decade, never in its history have 140 characters had the power and influence they’ve enjoyed since Nov. 9. Sure, when the Pope began tweeting, it made headlines but it didn’t move markets the way @realdonaldtrump has in the last few months. One outlet estimated that one 140-character screed about Lockheed Martin cost the company $28 million per character.

We gathered select members of PR News’ Social Shake-Up Conference board of advisors for a roundtable on social trends for PR News’ premium PR News Pro (and offered to you for free). We also asked about best practices for social storytelling, how to spend little and get a lot from social and how to surmount obstacles to social media in regulated industries, all topics related to sessions on the agenda for the Shake-Up (May 22-24 in Atlanta, socialshakeupshow.com).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can strike fear into PR pros and communicators, who are concerned that robots eventually will take their jobs. In fact, AI combined with human intelligence is the most powerful combination. As such, communicators should embrace technology.

Communicators looking to jump on the Facebook Live trend should spend some time seeking inspiration from brands doing it well, and one of the foremost brands of that category is matchmaker eHarmony. We asked social media director Kerianne Mellott for some best practices, and she obliged us with these four Facebook Live tips.

James Chong, senior manager of social customer engagement at TOMS, is tasked with managing TOMS’ social budget while spreading its cause-related messaging to new audiences. Chong, who will be speaking at PR News’ Digital Summit Feb. 24 in Huntington Beach, CA, shares the arguments for paid social that he’s made to senior leaders.