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We all know social media has changed brand communications and crisis management. The latest example of the trend is Disney. Account Coordinator Amey Owen reflects on the issue:

Recently, Disney crowned Merida, the main character of the popular Walt Disney Pixar movie "Brave," the 11th Princess in the Disney brand. To conform Merida to the appearance of the other princesses, Disney redesigned her to have a more slender waist, slightly larger bust, make-up, tamer hair, and no appearance of her trademark weaponry.

Soon after this change was made, social media buzzed as thousands of people, predominately women, voiced opposition to the princess's redesigned appearance. This buzz quickly let to a Change.org online petition ("Disney: Say No to the Merida Makeover, Keep Our Hero Brave!"), which gained over 213,300 signatures in less than two weeks. Talk about a movement.

Despite initially refusing to budge (issuing a statement saying that the "new" Merida "remains the same strong and determined Merida from the movie whose inner qualities have inspired moms and daughters around the world"), Disney ultimately responded to the outcry by quietly returning Merida to her original character design on their official princess website.

As one pundit added, "Social media obviously allows for rapid fire communication, and when savvy opponents got wind of what Disney was planning, they took the now well worn path of Twitter, Facebook and online campaigns and created an online buzz that Disney couldn't ignore."

Lesson learned?

Social media changes the pace of everything. Twitter and Facebook have made it incredibly easy for people to express their concerns, vent even more if frustrations go unanswered, and team up with like-minded people to create change - all with a few keystrokes and a click of a button.

This creates uncomfortable situations for brands caught in crossfire and emphasizes the growing need for crisis communications. Social media cannot-and should not-be ignored. To keep up with the often explosive nature of social media, businesses need to proactively listen and be prepared with clear messaging to provide consumers and/or customers with an answer.

Last night, SM&'s Catherine Blancard attended Root Cause's Social Innovation Forum. The Forum provides a unique opportunity for innovative nonprofit organizations and social enterprises to gain visibility, expand their networks, and build capacity through funding support. Similar to a venture capital round table in the financial industry, the entrepreneurs pitch their model to a crowd of funders in hopes of attracting investment or other support.

Launched in 2003, the Forum has been working to create a social impact market that distributes resources to organizations based on performance in order to most efficiently and effectively solve social problems in Greater Boston. It strives to build a social impact investment community that will invest and re-invest resources in innovative, results-oriented nonprofits, thus advancing innovation in social impact.

Since 2007, SM& employees have been involved to varying degrees to help the social innovators with communications strategy and support. It's amazing to see how the Forum and the innovators have both evolved over the past five years.

Click here or below to learn more about the social innovators that were featured yesterday:

• AgeWell West Roxbury
  AgeWell West Roxbury is an Ethos-sponsored initiative that promotes the development of an age-friendly community and the creation of successful aging-in-place strategies for the Boston neighborhood with the highest concentration and highest absolute number of elders.

• Groundwork Lawrence
  Groundwork Lawrence (GWL), through environmental and open space improvements, fresh food access, education, youth employment, and community events, they truly create the building blocks of a healthy community, and empower residents and other stakeholders to make the city a great place to live, work, and play.

• GRLZradio
  GRLZradio is a unique afterschool and summer program that gives girls from Boston the opportunity to change their lives and their communities. The girls learn radio technology and communication skills and spread the message of possibility rather than despair; respect rather than abuse.

• Safe City Academy, a program of Dorchester Youth Collaborative
  Safe City Academy is a stipended GED, work readiness, mentoring, and community service program for high school dropouts ages 16 to 19. In addition to coursework, students obtain job skills on a work crew that provides maintenance services to city‐owned, foreclosed properties.

• Shelter Music Boston
  Shelter Music Boston presents high-quality classical chamber music concerts in homeless shelters. They believe that all people deserve access to the dignity, creativity, and passion of classical music, whether or not they have a home.

• City Feed and Supply
  City Feed and Supply is a small scale, full service market cafe focused on building community through service to our neighborhoods, our employees, and our regional food economy.

• Green City Growers
  Green City Growers installs and maintains urban farms for community and commercial locations, fostering a deeper connection to the food we eat.

• Global Research Innovation & Technology
  GRIT's all-terrain wheelchair helps people with disabilities get off-road and on with their lives.

• Project Repat
  Project Repat makes it fun and easy to upcycle your excess clothing into fashionable and functional new products, while creating fair-wage jobs in the United States.

And a special congratulations to Blu Homes, an amazing organization and the winner of this year's Business Innovator Award!

Throughout my childhood, my mother had a daily subscription to our local newspaper. Keeping up-to-date on what's happening in the community and world is something she taught me to value, and newspapers were her primary source of information. Even as newspapers struggled financially, the daily deliveries kept coming to our house.

About a year ago, my mother opted for Sunday-only delivery. While she continued to read the daily news on her laptop (Sunday delivery gave her access to the newspaper's website), I was surprised that she made the jump. I joked to my friends that newspapers are really in trouble if my mother isn't willing to pay for one.

This weekend, I got the shock of my life when my mother declared she was dropping her newspaper subscription entirely-both Sunday's print edition and online access.

She's not the only one. Numbers released Tuesday by the Alliance for Audited Media indicates Sunday subscriptions dropped 1.4% in the last year. While paid digital subscriptions are up 14.2% in that same timeframe, it's clear everyone from millennials to baby boomers are changing their media consumption habits. Those of us in PR have to be ready to adapt to these changes.

My mother says she canceled her subscription for several reasons. She found herself finding more compelling stories from other sources. While her morning used to start with a newspaper, it now starts with a cable news program like Morning Joe. She'll catch the local afternoon news on television, and says she's getting great information about the state and city from reporters there. If she's out running errands, she'll listen to the radio-which is how she found out about the Boston Marathon bombing. We have to cover all these outlets when pitching for our clients.

I doubt my mother-a fellow media junkie-will be able to resist the call of her daily paper for long. The New York Times announced it is exploring cheaper subscription rates for content in specific areas such as, politics, arts, and sports. If the Times has success with this structure, it's likely the corporation that owns our local paper will look into the possibility as well. Which would help the newspaper's bottom line, as well as restore order to my childhood home.

That has to be the conclusion of watching, listening and reading the news of the Marathon bombing and its aftermath for the last week.  While social media sites like Twitter were ablaze with bits and bites of information crossing at lightning speed and Reddit was putting out information from police scanners, there was still so much that was reported that was just wrong.  Most notably, CNN reported that authorities had a suspect in custody two days before that was the case and The New York Post erroneously had photos of innocent individuals labeled as the perpetrators.  What struck me throughout this ordeal was that when there was live action to watch - like Friday's chase down of "Suspect #2"-TV and in this case, local TV, was the place to get the news. In fact, you couldn't stop watching.  It was like viewing a real life episode of "Homeland".  But early on, in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, local TV seemed locked into their "storm coverage" formula of repeating the same thing over and over again without advancing the story.  In the meantime, The Boston Globe sent reporters to find personal stories of survivors, first responders and victims, which gave us a fuller picture of what had happened.  It's clear that the inevitable and understandable race to be first is as intense as ever.  But in the 24/7 world of social media, accuracy may be a casualty that makes the job of filtering fact from fiction harder than it's ever been and the role of the reporter one that still has real value. Because just as we all fashion ourselves detectives from watching enough Law and Order and CSI episodes, we're not; and just as we might like to think that we are all reporters, we're not.

Reporters are trained to ask tough questions, to sift through raw information and find the facts and tell the story.  We need that now as much as we ever have.  We're fooling ourselves to think otherwise.

By Michal Regunberg, Senior Vice President at Solomon McCown & Company @MRInTouch

Today I had the experience of attending a luncheon hosted by The Commonwealth Institute (TCI), featuring the eloquent, intelligent, and incredibly motivational Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.  After blazing through her captivating new book Lean In in just a matter of hours last week, I could hardly wait for the opportunity to hear her speak in person and perhaps offer a taste of the secret recipe that has helped her become the respected business-woman she is today.

Just as I was hoping and fully expected, Sandberg's talk closely mirrored the ideas in her book, and I walked away feeling stronger and even prouder to be a woman than when I walked through the elegant conference hall doors just a few hours earlier.  As a young woman just entering the workforce myself, Sandberg's message, illustrated both in Lean In and by her discussion at the TCI luncheon, strikes a particularly strong chord.  For me, today's event was the perfect opportunity to see first-hand how hundreds of women in the Boston area are breaking gender stereotypes in the work place and embracing their gender as an asset rather than shying away from it, taking their hard-earned "seats the table," as Sandberg puts it.

Sandberg's central argument is there needs to be some serious gender reform in the United States, particularly in the workforce, and she calls on both men and women to jumpstart the conversation.  She especially encourages women to take control of breaking down gender stereotypes in the workplace by leaping into their careers with heads held high and beaming senses of self-confidence.  After all, according to Sandberg, "One of the best ways to break down an institution is to run it."  At the luncheon, she explained that a heated national conversation about gender is a great place to start the reform - it's time to talk openly about barriers to women's success openly, and then take these barriers and work together as a society to tear them down.

My first few months as a working woman fully "leaning in" to my job have been exciting and fast-paced, and I fully intend to take Sandberg's words to heart when she stresses the importance of young women entering their blossoming careers with no anticipated roadblocks already in mind.  Instead, as women, we must enter the work place with the expectation that we can, and will, be just as successful as our male colleagues, and that it is completely possible to have both a fulfilling personal life and full-time career.

I will remember Sandberg's main tokens of advice, which I believe are: run confidently into challenges rather than meagerly tip-toe away, take the time to connect and build meaningful relationships with the people around you, and perhaps most important, do not under any circumstance underestimate your own worth and capabilities.  So, as I continue to lean forward into my own career, my professional goal is to someday achieve an influential and respected voice in the working world; my personal goal, however, is to earn this status in a society that no longer punishes successful women with harsh judgments and instead celebrates them for their success, intelligence, and invaluable contributions to their workplaces, homes, and communities.

By Molly Chase, Account Coordinator at Solomon McCown & Company

Lately, there has been a lot of news about the news. Here in Boston, the nearly 50-year-old alternative weekly, Boston Phoenix, announced last week that it was suddenly closing-sending shock and awe through the readership community and prompting calls for a kick starter campaign to fund the printing of its last issue. This come on the heels of last month's news that the New York Times Company is once again selling the Boston Globe. While its fate is unknown, the Globe seems to be on a hiring spree lately-adding at least three new  reporters to its team in the last month.

Now we have the official "State of the Media" report, released this week by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reports that years of shrinking newsrooms has affected the quality of journalism and consequentially readership and viewership. With layoffs down 30 percent and the smallest journalism industry since 1978, Pew reports that professionals in politics, government and at companies are taking their story right to the public.

While I've seen the effects of shrinking newsrooms on the quality of beat reporting, as Slate's Matthew Yglesias argues, we've never had more or better information at our disposal-the channels are just changing and sadly affecting the economics of the traditional media industry.

But what does this new world in which there's more news-but less people writing news for the traditional news organizations that our clients so adore-mean  for public relations pros? Here are a few thoughts:

1)      Find compelling stories. Regardless of whether you're pitching a reporter, drafting a Tweet or penning prose for your client's corporate blog, the story must be interesting and newsworthy. With fewer reporters, be sure you have stories that are timely, significant, in proximity to the papers readers and include a human interest element.

2)      Know your audience. When I was a reporter at a financial magazine, I vividly remember getting an email pitch about a new Goody brand hair product. My readership was chief financial officers and the like-many lacking hair themselves in fact. I still hear my friends at community newspapers complain about pitches they get with no local angle. This applies to the publication's readership and the audience your client seeks to reach as well.

3)      Respect reporters. More jobs in PR and less in newsrooms make journalists' time more precious. Reporters are inundated with pitches by email, tweets, probably even text-so always respect a reporters' time especially if they're on deadline!

By Kate Plourd, Senior Account Executive at Solomon McCown & Company

Bloomberg reporter Nadja Brandt recently featured three Solomon McCown clients as part of her in-depth coverage of the Boston's dynamic real estate boom. Brandt's report and accompanying video - "Boston Booms as Workers Say No to Suburbs: Real Estate" - chronicled the transformative progress of prominent projects located in all corners of the city, from South Boston's waterfront to Cambridge to the Fenway-Kenmore area.

Tapped to offer perspective for the national story were Brian Kavoogian, president and founder of Charles River Realty Investors LLC, who spoke about the South Boston waterfront specifically; Shawn Hurley, executive vice president of Skanska USA Commercial Development, who discussed projects in Boston's Seaport and in Cambridge; and, Ted Tye, managing partner for National Development, whose company is active in the city Longwood Medical and Academic area.

Brandt's turned to Kavoogian, Hurley and Tye to help explain the region's current boom, which is being fueled by unique ingredients for urban growth, including favorable financing conditions, a highly educated young workforce, cumulative job gains, and a strong life-science and tech industry. Click here to see how SM& clients make national news as industry leaders.

Yesterday The Boston Globe was once again put up for sale by The New York Times Co.  They did this once before in 2009, but the bids that were amassed were rejected.  Now, as the players who were thought to have an interest in the paper back then decline comment, we begin to wonder, who will save our daily source of news?

Could it be crowdfunding site Kickstarter? Michael Morisy from the Boston.com blog Inside the Hive says no way, even if people could raise the money, investment bankers have yet to successfully pitch a large-scale Kickstarter project.

So who will save the Globe? It remains to be seen right now, but that hasn't stopped the Twitterverse from speaking out about what they would do if they bought it.  @heyratty and @dbernstein have launched a conversation with the hashtag #whenibuytheglobe. Check it out to get in on the conversation. And hey, if you have $400 or so million dollars, maybe you can make it happen.

While watching the State of the Union Address on Tuesday night, two additions to the program stood out: the use of graphics during the speech and the use of social media in the days that follow.

One addition that amplified the President's speech was the enhanced version available on the White House website. Aided by tables, charts, and personal photos, President Obama's points were enhanced by visuals that corresponded to the topic. These graphics attracted visual learners providing them new way to listen and understand the issues.

The second addition is the use of social media in the days that follow the Address. For the first time, the White House is holding "interactive events" allowing people to Tweet, Facebook, and Google + their questions into the Administration throughout the week. This includes a "Fireside Hangout" with President Obama himself. Needless to say, American interaction has come a long way since the Fireside Chats of Franklin Roosevelt; from evening radio addresses in the 1930's to tweeting and messaging the White House, President Obama, and senior advisors at any time of the day. For the first time, this virtual Q & A session allows people to discuss given topics in more depth and with the policy makers themselves.

So what does this mean for the Obama Administration and its use of graphics and social media in the future? To put it simply, they are here to stay. The Administration is using Q & A sessions to connect with the public and put forth a more transparent government interaction. The use of graphics allowed individuals to better understand complicated issues and statistics, creating better informed public. With the White House at the tip of your fingers and the click of a mouse, citizens are becoming more engaged and now have better platforms to get their voices heard.

By Caitlin Culver, Co-op at Solomon McCown & Company

The cover story in the Globe yesterday was hard to miss - front and center a photo of a medical marijuana grower in New Mexico inspecting his crop. The article, by Jenn Abelson, took a deep dive into the cannabis industry in New Mexico, one of the 17 states whose ranks Massachusetts recently joined by legalizing medical marijuana. New Mexico has one of the country's strictest medical marijuana programs, and could serve as a model for Massachusetts as the Department of Public Health writes their rules, due out in May, regulating the substance.

What stood out in Abelson's article is the special attention the owners of medical marijuana treatment centers pay to their image and messaging. One of the people the reporter talked to was especially careful to refer to the drug as medical cannabis, to refrain from calling it weed, and referred to his clients as patients, not potheads. Others are located in urban areas, and don't have signage outside, in an effort to make patients more comfortable coming in, and to avoid upsetting neighboring businesses. No doubt, as medical marijuana businesses open in Massachusetts, they will encounter the same public opinion hurdles as others have before them.

In this burgeoning industry that is rife with misconceptions and strong opinions, presenting themselves the right way to patients, industry regulators, neighbors and physicians is especially important to potential business owners as they find their way.

By Isabel Black, Account Executive at Solomon McCown & Company