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When you’re putting together preparations for the possibility of a crisis, internal communications is usually not the first thing to come to mind. But it’s an essential part of crisis response preparedness; you must loop in employees, owners, board members, investors and the wider community (including the families and business associates of all the above) if you want to maintain your reputation.

Twitter was abuzz on National Equal Pay Day. Top tweeters seemed to be politicians, political organizations, media brands and unions. A few brands touted their gender-neutral compensation bona fides today on social. On the other hand, many brands seemed to approach the day cautiously, preferring to remain silent on social rather than wade in on what could be seen as a controversial topic.

Jumping on trending hashtags is something that brands should take very seriously. We’ve all seen brands haphazardly insert themselves into a trending topic only to go down in flames moments later. At times, social media is serious business and it pays to keep a close eye on the conversations happening online. But at other times, like today’s #NationalGrilledCheeseDay, jumping on trends is relatively safe and can add some fun to your branded communications.

Media relations experts often tell PR pros to “think like a reporter” when pitching story ideas or news. Perhaps a more useful and specific recommendation would be to take great care with each word, sentence and paragraph. This checklist of questions to ask before sending email pitches should help you do just that.

Litigation PR serves a few purposes: it’s a tactical way for lawyers to help win a case, defend a client against a case or try to influence a case in their client’s favor. It’s also led to a cottage industry in the PR business: the litigation PR specialist.

While litigation PR can also be connected to a crisis with some of the similar skills needed for PR in both instances, it’s a unique subset of PR.

The path to effective engagement in any sector can be far from easy. In healthcare, while there are countless opportunities to connect with patients, making engagement meaningful and successful still can pose problems. Similar to the target audience for many brands, patients are a diverse group, representing every demographic cohort. There is no one way to reach them all.

As a PR pro, writing speeches can be one of the most challenging things to do. It becomes especially difficult when writing a speech for someone else, like your CEO, COO or another C-suite executive, whether you’re in-house or at the company’s agency of record.

Many communicators and marketers make their bones on consumer engagement. Mission accomplished, for Q1 on Instagram at least. Spurred by B2B brands’ 21% increase in Instagram posts, consumer engagement rose 97% vs the same period in ’15, according to Shareablee data provided exclusively to PR News.

Very much in the Facebook style of rollouts, some brands had been provided the additional 45 seconds months earlier, allowing them to preview their Super Bowl ads on the platform and compete for television’s ad dollars. Although video might seem an afterthought on photo-dominated Instagram, Shareablee data, provided exclusively to PR News, argues otherwise.

With April 18 looming, we certainly expected to be conversing about income tax this time of year. But who could have predicted the words “Panama Papers,” “Mossack Fonseca” and “tax inversions” would be rolling off our tongues during last weekend’s barbeque?