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If you’ve ever scoured the internet for an elusive answer to an arbitrary question, chances are you ended up on the popular Q&A site Quora. But the site is more than just an information repository; it’s a fully functioning social network. There are 100 million monthly unique visitors on Quora who are potentially looking for reliable information about your brand. If you don’t provide it, someone else will.

Even though Snapchat lacks many of the brand-friendly features of Facebook and Twitter—native analytics, business profiles, etc.—it’s never been a better time to join the growing community. For cautious communicators, there are plenty of ways to participate in the conversation on Snapchat. At PR News’ Snapchat Boot Camp on July 12 in New York City, speakers offered a variety of case study examples to show how PR can use the burgeoning platform effectively.

Access Intelligence, parent of PR News and other business-to-business media brands, has acquired The Social Shake-Up, a preeminent conference serving marketing, public relations, customer experience, technology and digital strategists. The annual conference and trade show, to be held May 22-24, 2017, in Atlanta, will be produced by PR News in partnership with online destination Social Media Today.

PR News recruited a Snapchat expert, Leslie Douglas, senior social media manager at PwC, for a crash course in Snapchat layout and navigation. At the Snapchat Boot Camp in NYC, she walked the audience through the app’s sometimes-counterintuitive interface. We share a few takeaways from Leslie’s presentation.

We’ll likely never know if the companies behind Pokémon Go—Nintendo, the Pokémon Co. and Google spinoff Niantic—had a hand in spreading the word about the tall and tall-ish tales related to an augmented reality scavenger hunt. In any case, the release of the game has tapped into a wellspring of media coverage.

What more could any brand ask for than to achieve a high level of trust, while also effecting real, tangible change? Cause marketing may seem like a no-brainer, but it requires a lot of brain, as things can go very wrong if a campaign is ill-conceived or badly executed. Here is a time-tested approach for achieving maximum impact from a campaign with minimum blowback.

It could describe nearly all the data sets we’ve been looking at recently. The 30 most-engaged U.S. brands on a social media platform turned out a bit less content than they had during a quarter the previous year, yet consumer interaction with the content rose. Once again, consumer engagement with mobile video drove that engagement. Filling in the blanks, this week’s Shareablee data, provided exclusively to PR News, examines consumer actions, or engagement, with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter. Actions are defined as the sum of consumer likes and retweets. Brands listed have significant B2B revenue, although some also have B2C businesses. Specifically in Q1 ’16 (Jan 1-March 31), total consumer actions with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter rose 31% compared to the same quarter in 2015. The increase occurred despite a 3% reduction in the number of tweets the brands produced. An increase in consumer engagement with U.S. B2B brands’ videos, up a gargantuan 240%, and more retweets, a 14% rise, fueled the growth in actions.

You know how bloggers have invented a writing subgenre of mocking the PR pitches they get? Recently I saw a lengthy takedown of a PR firm’s effort to publicize what the blogger felt was a hollow startup. The blogger portrayed the PR firm’s pitch as comically superficial. I’ll forego linking to the post because I prefer to avoid boosting ad revenue for crass blogs that bully people. Admittedly, the pitch material was superficial. It went against every principle of clear writing that I teach. All things being equal, the PR firm’s staff should have pushed back on the startup to get more concrete facts about the new company’s goals, what it does and why it’s credible. But that wasn’t the main problem, and it didn’t prevent the startup from ultimately succeeding elsewhere; more on that below. The biggest problem is where the startup’s material landed: in other words, where the material was pitched. Granted, the pitch was directed to a blog that’s well read among the startup’s target market: millennials. But this particular blog also is known for snarky opposition to PR outreach. It was like putting red meat in front of a gaunt, stray dog.

It’s rare when significant parts of business, government or sports change dramatically. Incremental change is far more common. Yet we find both incremental and significant change in a new Nasdaq Corporate Solutions/ PR News survey of nearly 400 communicators regarding press release distribution and SEO. Nearly 75% of those surveyed last month said the most important objective of sending a press release is to “generate media interest and/or press coverage.” That’s a traditional reasoning. Yet a full 25% said their top priority in sending out a release is “to be seen in web search results” [see infographic and chart on page 4]. That finding about SEO seemed inconsistent with another result: nearly 40% said they fail to consider SEO when it comes to allocating time and resources for press releases. In other words, while PR pros want their press releases to be found in web searches, nearly half are ignoring SEO when they prepare their releases.

After a reported two years of testing recipes, researching and listening to consumers, PepsiCo admitted June 27 it had goofed regarding artificial sweeteners. The result: Not even one year after spurning aspartame and launching Diet Pepsi with sucralose, the soft drink brand was forced to reverse course. Amid falling sales and consumer outcry, it said Diet Pepsi with aspartame will return shortly. Adding a touch of confusion to the situation, PepsiCo also will continue to offer Diet Pepsi with sucralose. Importantly for communicators, this sour episode occurred when it’s easier than ever to gather information about customer preference via social media.