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Each month we’ll be asking communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There’s no better duo to begin this feature than Manu Muraro, founder of Your Social Team, and Danielle Brigida, national social media manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We asked them what tools they use to bolster their Instagram feeds.

Katie Paine looks at how two crises were handled. Sanofi’s Twitter retort to Roseanne Barr’s shot at Ambien for allowing her to create insensitive tweets and Purdue Pharma’s missteps at the outset of the situation and its close-lipped handling of the OxyContin-addiction mess. In the end, every compelling narrative needs a villain, Paine writes

It’s far from a secret that Instagram is a visual channel. Still, some communicators use color palettes, grid layouts and themes to boost engagement on their Instagram feeds. For apartments.com AVP of social media Erica Campbell Byrum, color choice and layout are critical to crafting an Instagram personality that consumers will recognize and engage with at high rates.

Leave it to Cisco’s charismatic Carmen Collins to serve Southern-style sweet tea while explaining the sales funnel. Well, she doesn’t exactly serve sweet tea, but she describes how tea and the sales funnel have plenty in common. She also provides insight on using data to report your social media story to the C-suite. Drink up.

Is there an industry that’s changed more lately or received more attacks than media? With this background PR News surveyed more than 400 communicators about their views of media relations in this uncertain environment and beyond. In short, communicators believe media relations will continue to be an important part of PR, but to be successful they’ll need to adapt to how it has changed. It is unclear they’re prepared to do so.

Our weekly roundup of news, trends and personnel moves in communications and marketing. This week’s stories feature the the un-apology of baseball player Robinson Cano, President Trump’s Spygate, Facebook’s fight against fake news and an honor for Finn Partners’ Gil Bashe.

Elon Musk and Bill Gates have roughly the same number of social followers and posted nearly the same amount of content in Q1 2018. Yet each of Musk’s posts generated an incredible 266,000 consumer engagements, propelling him to the top of the quarter’s Business influencers’ list. Gates’ posts did well, at about 18,000 consumer engagements each.

What data do consumers value most? Another way of asking that question: What pieces of information about themselves are consumers least concerned about sharing with brands? A survey provides some surprising answers.

Hardly anyone is suggesting abandoning the internet, though it’s probably not a bad thing for communicators and marketers, whose professional lives often revolve around digital communications, to appreciate a declining number of people see the internet as a good thing for society. The findings of a Pew poll might be more marked had it been conducted after Facebook-Cambridge Analytica come to light.

A pair of major PR firms are taking a page from the playbook of consulting firms, offering clients easier paths to a variety of expertise. Weber Shandwick is launching a unit that will consult to brands about corporate culture. On its 90th birthday Ketchum is promising to encircle clients with 14 industrial specialities as well as the traditional PR communications offerings.