One of the most interesting trend stories to pop up so far this month concerned Nike‘s decision to take its social media efforts away from third-party agencies and do everything in-house.

Some industry observers see this move as a sign of larger trends. Given the fact that we recently wondered whether social media responsibilities would fall to PR or marketing departments in the future, we think the topic is extremely relevant to all communications professionals.

Nike claims that keeping all social operations in-house will help its team “gain a deeper understanding” of its fans in the interest of boosting brand loyalty. It started the transition in October by hiring Musa Tariq, former social media marketing director for Burberry, to “kick start” its social strategy.

The sneaker king isn’t the only company to take a greater degree of responsibility for its own social media efforts in recent months: Competitor Reebok conducted an internal audit of all its social channels after rejecting contract offers from agencies, and Digiday reports that other big names like Ford and Campbell’s Soup have done the same.

This isn’t to say that Nike will sever ties with all third-party firms.

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There’s been a bit of drama on the social media photo-sharing front recently, hasn’t there? We didn’t spend too much time following the playground Twitter vs. Instagram “filter fight” that had tech bloggers wondering which property would come out on top or the recent outrage over new privacy policies–and we still think Instagram will be the visual branding tool of choice for the foreseeable future.

On that note, we thought we’d highlight a few  successful Instagram projects from 2012 via brands that know how to do visual PR.

(Quite a few brands have great Instagram accounts, but for the purposes of this post we only considered theme-driven branding campaigns.)

Five names that stood out in 2012:

1. Ben and Jerry’s
2. Ford
3. Burberry
4. Urban Outfitters/Free People
5. Bergdorf Goodman

Click through for some notes on each:

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We didn’t get the Roll Call column up yesterday, so here’s the belated Wednesday column.

Jenna Littler has been promoted to Burberry‘s VP of PR and corporate relations, a new title at the company that brings together the fashion and corporate PR functions. Littler joined the company two years ago to build the corporate relations function. She was previously with the business consulting company McKinsey & Company. She’ll be working out of Burberry’s London HQ.

Tshepo Matseba has been elected the president of the Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa. Matseba is a 33-year-old corporate comms strategist and was recently named the head of marketing for a company called Discovery. [via AllAfrica]

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Denim company True Religion Apparel has a new VP of brand strategy, marketing, and PR. Jordan Daly has joined the company, and will be managing brand positioning, campaigns, special events, and other areas of the marcomms effort on a global scale. Previously, Daly was the VP of PR in the Americas for Burberry.

Joe Eyer has been named director of The Dewey Square Group‘s new director of grassroots. Eyer has been with the firm for six years and was previously a principal in the group. The division also has two new principals. Tracey Lewis was the New Hampshire field director for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential run and the general election director for President Obama’s New Hampshire campaign. And Jonathan Drobis, who has worked on a number of political campaigns, including President Obama’s and AG Jack Conway‘s campaign for Senate in Kentucky.

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Burberry’s YouTube channel has a few cool new videos from the fashion label’s runway show in Beijing, China, which took place last week. Included, a performance by the band Keane (yay!) and models/holograms that go poof on stage. Check out the video above, and another after the jump.

(h/t to Matt van Hoven @SkinnyNYC)

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