Is your business's online community optimized? Online communities can yield substantial business results for organizations that do them well. But, like all dynamic systems, they need a check up, so you can identify and implement the right changes to keep your community on track.

Does your Net Promotor Score (NPS) give you all the information you need? NPS is a helpful start to understanding how your users feel about your brand. Digging deeper, a vibrant online community can provide much valuable insight into the sentiments beyond the score itself, giving your company a clear path forward for improvement.

Collaboration between humans and machines can make our online communities much more vibrant and relevant. Companies looking to understand and engage with customers through online communities need to consider how artificial intelligence and human collaboration can be used together to augment understanding of data and advance know-how.

That’s because user engagement doesn’t just happen on its own. As a community manager, you’ve got to constantly encourage users to visit, participate, and add their wisdom to the community. The key to making that happen is knowing which stage of activity each user is in—and what prompts are likely to spur him or her to the next stage.

Influencer marketing in the B2B world is a viable strategy, and there are real influencers out there who can help you achieve real marketing and business results. But they are not all created equal. Pick the wrong type of influencer and you won’t get the return you’re after.

Content has always been a major part of PR, but now it’s become an integral part of all marketing. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, 91 percent of B2B brands and 86 percent of B2C brands use it. But it’s still an emerging tactic and far too many companies are “flying blind”—just pumping out content without any strategy. (Only 37 percent of B2B marketers and 38 percent of B2C marketers have a content marketing strategy.)

If you’re studying PR, or you’re working in the industry, the recent study from USC Annenberg should be by your bedside. The report covers the disruption of the PR industry, what’s changing, what talent is needed in the new model of PR, and where the industry is headed. Here’s the Cliff Notes version.

Two-thirds of the CMOs polled in the 2017 Marketing Performance Management Benchmark study said the pressure to measure value, impact, and contribution is growing. Enterprise marketers plan to ramp up their spending on analytics technology a stunning 83 percent over the next three years, according to the latest CMO Survey out of Duke University.

If the idea of technology invading the practice of PR freaks you out a little, perhaps all you need is a different perspective. Yes, technology can be daunting, but it can also make your life a lot easier, help you achieve better results and demonstrate the value of your work.

Dave Feldman, Sr Director of Digital at the NFL, is running one of the biggest, most complex, real-time social content teams on the planet. With this level of content creation, distribution and management, it’s all about strategy, scalable process, extreme coordination and everyone and I mean everyone, must be on their A game. So, when I sat down for a full hour long interview with Dave to talk about the social content machine of the NFL, I was hanging on every word.