Social Media & SEO

For brands and organizations of all stripes it could be the next frontier for continuing education: Twitter school. The NYPD is signing up, sending its top commanders to take a course on the microblogging service following two Twitter fails.

When consumer activists come knocking, it doesn’t have to unfold into a full-blown crisis. There are ways to work with them on social media that can be beneficial.

We queried our audience on Twitter and Facebook, asking for some fun facts about PR that most people don’t know. Here are some of our favorite answers.

Pinterest, the world’s fourth most popular social media site with over 40 million active users last month, is getting serious about analytics.

In a blog post Monday, Facebook announced a strategy to weed out spammy posts with headlines that lead on and purposefully deceive users about what a full article will be about.

As if PR managers didn’t need another excuse for working more closely with their sales and marketing counterparts, here’s a pretty good one. Twitter will reportedly roll out a “buy” button later this year, making it easier for consumers to buy things directly from the microblogging network.

No longer at the margins of communications, social media has moved to the epicenter of PR and marketing. The rub for PR managers is how to monetize their social platforms and convince C-level managers that Facebook, Twitter et al. can add to the company’s top and bottom lines.

Twitter is a powerful tool that can take your brand to new heights, but in the wrong hands it can be a terrible weapon that can lead to a PR disaster.

Catherine Allen, executive vice president for SHIFT Communications, has learned from long experience what kind of communicators have a tendency to rise to leadership levels. In this Q&A, she looks at those qualities through the prism of social media.

Getting your timing down can make the difference between a purchase and unsubscribe, a happy customer and a disgruntled one.