Stories by Matthew Schwartz

As any PR pro can tell you, it’s all in the timing. Whether it’s when you reach a reporter just as he’s in the thick of a story for which your brand can provide some much-needed insight or launch a PR campaign that attaches itself to the zeitgeis…

Hardly a week goes by without Facebook tossing some more digital spaghetti against the wall to see what will stick with consumers. The latest effort started in earnest on Monday when the social networking giant rolled out an upgrade of Graph Search.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Used correctly, photo-sharing site Instagram can be worth a lot more to brands constantly trying to cut through the clutter.

The phrase has become a mantra among PR and marketing mavens: Your employees are your brand’s best ambassadors. Regardless of the size or the company, employees need to feel that they are integral to the brand’s success.

In abruptly firing Men’s Wearhouse founder and executive chairman George Zimmer, the men’s clothing company has sent a few messages to the marketplace, none of which are likely to help the brand’s reputation or its PR efforts.

If PR pros want to improve their writing skills, perhaps they need to carve out some time to read Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary lions whose writing talents have transcended the generations. It’s one piece of advice for how PR pros can improve their writing skills, compliments of Beth Haiken, VP of corporate citizenship and communications at WayPoint Homes.

The San Francisco Giants have hit it out of the ballpark. And the team isn’t doing too shabby on the baseball diamond, either. We’re referring, of course, to the Giants rolling out a new social media café at AT&T Park.

Public relations executives must step up their efforts to integrate paid media into their overall communications strategy, according to Leslie Campisi, managing director, United States, for Hotwire PR.

A knock on the PR profession is that too many marketing communications agencies still don’t know how to manage their agency like a business.

PR managers have to be more cognizant of what the expectations are for employees the other 364 days of the year and not just the performance review.