We’re only a few months into 2026, and the stress test of AI-generated everything is causing noticeable tension across PR and social channels. So, before something breaks, what should we do?
I spent three days at Ragan’s Social Media Conference in Orlando earlier this month, surrounded by social media leaders from Meta, Intel, Pfizer, Salesforce, Nat Geo, U.S. Soccer, and others. Here’s what was top of mind across those sessions, what’s trending today, and what AI and B2B marketers should be thinking about heading into the rest of the year.
Trust isn’t a brand attribute anymore. It’s an infrastructure problem.
A recent PANBlast survey found 43% of people “don’t trust much of anything anymore.” That’s beyond a messaging or creative problem. It’s structural and societal, and it requires an all-hands-on-deck solution.
How do brands build trust with skeptical audiences in 2026?
The brands navigating trust well have stopped trying to win on brand voice alone. Instead, they’ve built a real system of human voices: creators, employees, customers, and advocates who carry credibility that a polished, everything-by-committee brand approach simply can’t manufacture. This wider spokesperson bench extends beyond traditional channels like newsrooms into growing closed and open communities like Reddit, Discord and Substack.
At the conference, I learned how Salesforce built a Super Bowl campaign around a creator cohort on a football field. AAPA launched a physician ambassador program that reached over a million followers on Instagram and drove 205 conference registrations in its first year. Nat Geo built a creator cohort of historians and conservationists who feel distinctly unique while still part of the Nat Geo brand, not expensive influencer add-ons with a logo in the corner.
For B2B brands and the PR folk supporting them, the implication is uncomfortable but clear: Your expertly media-trained spokesperson and carefully worded messaging doc aren’t enough anymore. Real people, with real opinions, real expertise, and real audiences, are your most credible distribution channel.
Edutainment: Create content that informs as much as it stops the scroll.
What kind of content performs best on social media right now?
“Edutainment” is made up of two words, but most brands instinctively lean toward the entertainment side. Make it fun. Make it shareable. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Make it go viral. But audiences in 2026 are increasingly opting to learn rather than just consume.
Nat Geo finds a single astonishing fact buried in a dense scientific paper and builds a post around it. FFA creates content that teaches non-farmers why agriculture touches every part of their daily life. Neither feels like a lecture. Both leave you knowing something you didn’t know before.
You’re sitting on expertise your audiences genuinely want. You just need to package it in a way that draws attention first: strong hook, real insight or how-to answers. No jargon.
Before hitting publish, ask yourself: What will someone know or believe differently after seeing this? If you can’t answer that, it’s not done yet.
There’s also room for both short and long form here.
- Short-form video is eating search traffic: 30% of search results now include video, meaning brands without answer-based video content are forfeiting a significant share of potential reach. One question per video; answer in the first 3 seconds; one insight only; caption everything.
- At the same time, long-form YouTube is quietly making a comeback, and it matters more for B2B than most people realize. Google’s Gemini is trained on YouTube content, which means high-quality, long-form educational videos have a real shot at being cited in AI-generated answers.
AI should make you faster and more innovative. Not blander.
How should marketing teams use AI without losing their brand voice?
The “human-led, AI-powered” framing has been repeated enough times that it’s starting to sound like a bumper sticker. Cue eyeroll, I get it. But the underlying point is still being ignored by too many brands, especially in the race to automate everything.
AI is genuinely useful for repetitive, time-consuming tasks that eat up your team’s bandwidth: scheduling, captioning, b-roll templating, sentiment analysis and reformatting content across channels. That’s real time back in the hands of people who should be focused on experimentation, blue-sky ideation, and strategy.
What AI is not useful for: replacing the voice, perspective, and earned expertise that make your content worth reading in the first place. AI saturation is real, and audiences are getting faster at detecting it. The brands doubling down on distinct human POV right now will have a significant advantage over those that optimized for volume.
One session described a practical framework for smaller teams:
- Pick one workflow to improve with AI
- Test it for a defined period (30 days, 3 months).
- Measure it.
- Repeat.
Don’t overhaul everything at once. Compound the gains slowly and protect what makes you worth following.
Crisis prep is a system. Build it before you need it.
How do brands prepare for a social media crisis before it happens?
A panel featuring leaders from Intel, Pfizer, Meta, and a major airport spent an hour making the same case from four different angles: By the time a crisis hits, it’s too late to build your response infrastructure.
The brands that handled crises well had already built social listening setups that catch velocity shifts, not just volume spikes. They had pre-built scenario playbooks and legal alignment sorted before anything went sideways. They had a clear framework for when to say something versus when to monitor and wait.
Two things worth flagging specifically for B2B. First, no brand is immune to a coordinated bot attack, a disgruntled employee post that spreads cross-platform, or an AI-generated narrative that moves faster than you can respond. Second, early warning signals aren’t always what you’d expect. Sometimes it’s a new community or influencer entering a conversation. Sometimes it’s an internal “did you see this?” email that arrives before any engagement metrics move.
Trust times infinity
In 2026, the bar for “good enough” keeps rising. The brands building trust by treating authenticity, expertise and human connection as strategic assets are the ones pulling ahead.
If you’re thinking about how to apply any of this to your PR or social programs, let’s talk.