Stories by Steve Goldstein

Communications professionals must constantly be learning while they’re working overtime to make their messages heard, help their brand’s bottom line and beat the competition. Their inspiring leaps in skill, creativity and versatility find no better showcase than at PR News’ annual Platinum PR Awards, which celebrate the best communications programs and teams of the past year. We’ll announce the winners and honor all the finalists for the 2016 Platinum PR Awards at our luncheon on Oct. 19 at the Marriott Marquis in New York.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if a content idea will resonate with your audience. In the search for great content that inspires engagement, we so often forget to look in the most obvious place.

According to Facebook-owned Instagram, the new tools provide an easy—and free—way to get recognized as a business on Instagram and, most importantly, to get insights about customers. Audience insights can be gleaned without leaving the app. Well-performing posts can then be promoted as ads, again, within the app.

YouTube is the Vegas casino of social content platforms. Brand communicators are constantly told that video reigns supreme—no one reads anymore and still images are so 20th century. So they pour resources into videos, and post them to their YouTube channels and wait for the returns. And wait.

Anxiety will run high during the Aug. 5 opening ceremonies for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, especially for Olympics organizers and the Brazilian organizing committee. They’re already dealing with three (by our count) categories of ongoing crises specific to the Olympic Games, and a fourth potential crisis that is the stuff of nightmares.

Snapchat usage statistics are tempting for even the most risk-averse brand communicator. But can a brand communicator measure her success on Snapchat? The lack of a good answer to that question may be keeping many brands away from the app. Leslie Douglas, senior social media manager for PwC, has faced this tough question head-on as she has led her intrepid company onto Snapchat.

Polarization is deeply embedded in the American psyche, a reality brands must accept and deal with. It affects them beyond the hot-button political issues of the day—immigration, race, gender identity, climate change, for instance—that they have to either tiptoe around or address head-on. The polarization affects the way our minds now function and speaks to the question of how to convince the undecided of anything when, for so many of us, our minds are already made up.

By 2018, 3.6 billion people—90% of the world’s internet-enabled population—will be registered to use at least one messaging app, according to Activate, a strategy and technology consultancy. Facebook would like to have its Messenger app on each of those 3.6 billion devices, and it may get there. The company has just announced that 1 billion people globally use Messenger every month.

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.

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.