For Immediate Release

View Details

Most companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing to help them guide their teams. That will become more and more problematic as challenges continue to mount—like the two issues that have emerged recently: companies shifting the models they’re using, and employees stepping out of their areas of expertise because AI can give them information they would normally turn to internal subject matter experts for.

Links from this episode:

‘Tokenmaxxing’ hits limits as workplaces look for cheaper artificial intelligence
Workers are crossing job boundaries with AI, OpenAI research shows
Managers say they don’t feel ready to lead an AI-fluent workforce

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz:

When companies change something they’ve been extolling for the last six months, managers are expected to support that change. When employees step outside their lane, managers are supposed to manage that. But can managers do these things when they haven’t been prepared?

That’s the case with some of the fallout from the introduction of artificial intelligence in organizations. The details are coming up in this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 524 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz, and you’ve got just me again this week.

I have three artificial intelligence stories to share with you. Organizational communicators are going to have to live at the intersection of all three of these issues, whether we’re ready or not, so let’s tackle them as parts of a bigger whole.

I’ll dive into these stories right after this.

Let’s start with the whiplash.

For the past year or so, companies have been in what some have come to call the “token-maxing era”: Throw AI at everything, reward employees for burning through as many tokens as possible, and worry about the ROI later.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was quoted as saying that if your half-million-dollar engineer isn’t burning $250,000 in tokens, something’s amiss. Meta reportedly ran an internal competition rewarding token usage.

That was the mood last spring.

Summer’s mood is different.

The Associated Press—and, by the way, this same reporting ran in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere—describes companies now hitting a wall. Costs went up, productivity didn’t keep pace, and the bill is coming due.

We covered this in episode 517 back in early June, but just as a reminder: Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget in four months, according to its CTO, and has since rolled out spending tiers starting at $1,500 a month per employee.

Some companies aren’t just tightening budgets; they’re switching platforms entirely. One AI startup called Lindy moved 100% of its traffic off Claude and onto DeepSeek, the cheaper Chinese alternative. Its CEO told CNBC that the cost curve “crashed to the ground.”

Multiply that kind of switch across every company currently having the same conversation, and you’ve got a specific communication problem: How do you explain to a workforce that, after spending months enthusiastically evangelizing one tool, you’re now moving employees to a different one—possibly overnight—for reasons that are mostly financial and don’t actually involve the employees who have been building things on the original tool?

That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is going to make problem number one look simple, because it’s not just about which tool people use. It’s about what people are allowed to do with it.

Axios got an exclusive look at new OpenAI research drawn from more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from business users. The finding is that workers are routinely doing other people’s jobs.

Roughly 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks typically associated with a different profession. After stripping out generic activities such as drafting emails, customer service employees, designers, and HR professionals are the biggest boundary crossers. Something like three-quarters of their profession-specific prompts touch work that belongs to somebody else’s job title.

People are using ChatGPT to draft marketing materials, troubleshoot software, run financial calculations, and interpret regulations—jobs that used to require reaching out to a specialist for help.

OpenAI’s chief economist told Axios that the boundaries between jobs are already becoming more flexible because of this.

Now, if you’re in communications, you can probably already hear the governance questions stacking up.

Who’s accountable when a well-meaning employee uses AI to draft something that touches legal, financial, or regulatory territory in which they have no training?

What happens to your carefully built subject-matter-expert review process when everyone feels like a generalist?

And when something goes wrong because of bad advice, off-brand sentiment, or a compliance miss, who owns that failure? Is it the employee, the tool, or the manager for not seeing it coming?

That brings us to the third piece, and honestly, it’s the one that worries me most.

HR Dive reported on new research from Indeed and YouGov. The headline number is that 43% of managers say they feel poorly equipped—or not equipped at all—to lead a workforce that’s fluent in AI.

More than half of workers say they’re not getting the AI training they need. Employer expectations for what workers should be doing with AI are running two or three times ahead of what workers actually feel comfortable doing.

Indeed pointed out that companies have spent two years building AI-ready workforces. The next challenge—and arguably the harder one—is building AI-ready leaders.

Now, put these three stories together and you get a pretty clear picture.

Companies are going to keep switching models and vendors as the economics shift. Employees are going to keep wandering across job boundaries because the tools make that easy and, honestly, tempting.

The people standing in the middle of both trends—the frontline managers who must explain the switch, catch the boundary problems, and answer the “Wait, am I even allowed to do this?” questions in real time—are the group companies have prepared the least.

That is a communication problem, and it’s ours to fix.

If managers don’t understand why the company moved off the model they spent six months championing, they can’t credibly explain it to their teams. They’ll either go silent, which breeds suspicion, or they’ll improvise, which is worse.

If managers don’t have clear guardrails explaining what kinds of AI-assisted work outside someone’s lane are acceptable and what kinds require a specialist’s involvement, they’ll either rubber-stamp everything or block everything. Neither option serves the business.

And if leadership training lags this far behind workforce adoption, managers become the bottleneck at exactly the moment the company needs them to be the translators and interpreters.

Here are three things I’d be pushing for internally right now:

First, build the change narrative for platform and model switches before you need it. Develop a plain-language explanation of why these decisions happen that managers can use without having to invent their own justification on the spot.

Second, give managers an actual decision framework for cross-boundary AI use. Provide a simple test for determining when an employee’s AI-assisted work needs specialist review so managers aren’t left guessing.

Third, take the Indeed numbers to leadership. Make the case that you can’t roll out AI training for the frontline while skipping the people who manage the frontline.

It’s the difference between an AI rollout that sticks and one that quietly falls apart at the manager layer.

Thanks for putting up with a lone voice again this week. With luck, Neville will be back in the saddle next week.

As I mentioned last week, Neville and I are set to have lunch in San Francisco on Thursday. It’s the first time we’ll have seen each other face-to-face in almost seven years, if I’m remembering correctly. I’m looking forward to that. Watch for photos.

And that’s a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates.

Links from this episode:

How Marketers Should Rethink Thought Leadership
Treat Thought Leadership as a Lasting Asset, Not a One-Off Campaign
A 5-Step Framework for Genuine Thought Leadership
Why thought leadership is no longer optional for tech companies
The ROI of Thought Leadership
CEO thought leadership can drive $367M in value
Why Thought Leadership Is Failing — and How to Solve It
Reclaiming Brand Sovereignty In The AI Era
The paid brand mention problem in GEO
Can Hedging Make You a Better Communicator?
Effectively communicating uncertainty: The persuasive impact of different types of hedges
The Role of Different Markers of Linguistic Powerlessness in Persuasion
Hedges, Tag Questions, Message Processing, and Persuasion

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool
Attie: AI for the Atmosphere
Instagram will charge for AI access
Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI
Roadmap to 7.1
Investigation into TikTok’s compliance with duties to protect children from encountering harmful content under section 12

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz

It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment.

Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it?

And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing.

That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own.

You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record.

He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support.

It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients.

Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host.

But today, you get just me.

At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes.

Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs.

There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody.

It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.”

Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it.

Tim Sutton left a comment saying:

“Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.”

Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs.

Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts.

The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually.

Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying:

“They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.”

Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new set of protocols Adam Curry is working on with an engineering colleague named Dave Jones.

We talked about whether this would be good for podcasting and podcast listeners, the likelihood of widespread adoption, and some of the obstacles standing in its way.

Vincent Bruneau wrote:

“The slower-than-hoped-for adoption is the most interesting part of the Podcasting 2.0 story. Richer metadata, transcripts, chapters, and better accessibility are genuinely useful features. So why hasn’t it moved faster? That gap between good technology and actual adoption is always where the real communication lesson lives.”

Juraj Schaefer, a podcast producer and editor, wrote:

“Interesting perspective. As podcasting evolves, ownership, discoverability, and meaningful connections will become even more important.”

And Dakshina Senadheera, a podcast editor and manager, shared this thought:

“Interesting conversation, especially around keeping podcasting open while improving the listener experience.”

Thanks to everybody who commented on our previous episodes. You are always welcome to comment.

You can leave comments on LinkedIn, where we announce the episodes, as everybody whose comment I read today did.

You can also send us an audio or text comment by email at FIRComments@gmail.com. You can record a comment directly from the FIR website, FIRPodcastNetwork.com, by clicking the “Send Voicemail” button on the right-hand side of the screen.

Or you can leave a comment in our show notes. There are all kinds of ways you can comment and participate in the show.

I also want to let you know that the interview we did with Pete Blackshaw about the Answer Economy is now available.

It has been getting some really good reactions. People have found real value in this discussion about how AI answers are now the answers people are getting about your product, regardless of where the information the frontier models accumulated came from.

You can find that in FIR Interviews.

The latest episode of Circle of Fellows is also available. Episode 131 is about the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations.

Our panelists included Diana Degan, a new IABC Fellow from the 2026 class of Fellows, along with Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Wah.

They talked about whom we reach out to when there are fewer reporters available to tell our stories through the mainstream and trade press we have been accustomed to.

The next episode, coming up on the third Thursday in August at 6 p.m. Eastern, is about AI and the kinds of pivots communicators will have to make as AI becomes a more widely used tool in the communication toolkit.

The panelists will be Bonnie Caver, Adrian Cropley, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. I’m looking forward to that.

Now I have three reports, as I usually do in the monthly long-form episode of FIR. You just don’t get three from Neville.

As I mentioned earlier, this is going to be a shorter episode than usual.

Two pieces landed in the search press recently that I think belong together, even though they were written a few weeks apart by people who probably weren’t talking to each other.

The first is by Bill Hunt at Search Engine Journal. Search Engine Journal has been around a long time and has been a great source of information about search and adjacent topics.

Hunt points out that, for 20 years, digital strategy meant driving people to webpages. We deliberately fragmented our information across dozens of pages, each optimized for a different stage of consideration.

The example Hunt uses is Ford and its F-150 pickup truck.

The homepage sells the lifestyle. Model pages introduce the trim levels. A configurator lets you picture yourself owning it. Feature pages handle towing and off-road performance. Specifications live even deeper in the site, next to regional offers and financing.

For a human being, that architecture is beautiful. Every page does a job.

For a machine, it’s just friction.

When an AI can’t find a dense, complete answer on your own domain, it doesn’t give up. It assembles the best answer it can from whatever is easiest to retrieve.

Consider the story that broke last week about an OpenAI model escaping from its sandbox and hacking its way into Hugging Face.

What was it looking for? It was looking for the answer sheet—the cheat sheet for the test it had been told to solve.

Rather than do the work to solve the test, it went hunting for the cheat sheet that had all the answers in one place.

That’s no different from this.

Hunt searched for the gas mileage of an F-150 Raptor. The AI Overview built its answer from Reddit, an automotive publisher, and a local dealership. It never touched the Ford website.

Ford has that number. Ford has every number.

Gemini just found it easier to assemble an answer from somewhere else where all that information was in one place.

Hunt calls the thing you’re trying to protect “brand sovereignty”: your ability to remain the authoritative source about your own products, services, and expertise, no matter where the answer eventually gets delivered.

He is emphatic that this is not a search engine optimization problem. It is a governance problem, because no single team owns the whole picture.

Product information, documentation, customer support, legal policy, and commerce are all owned by different parts of the organization. All of them shape how your organization gets represented, and they have been evolving independently for years.

His summary line is one I would hang on my wall: Your website is no longer your digital asset. Your knowledge is.

Communicators have spent 30 years arguing that the corporate website is the front door.

Hunt’s case is that the front door is now a machine reading whatever knowledge it can find. If yours is scattered across content management systems, PDFs, and support portals, the machine will find the gaps—and it will fill them from Reddit.

Meanwhile, Gaetano DiNardi, writing in Search Engine Land—not Search Engine Journal, but another great, longstanding search-focused publication—looked at what is being sold to companies that want to fix exactly this problem.

Once the industry decided that off-site brand mentions drive AI visibility, a market miraculously appeared to sell them. He audited several highly rated vendors selling brand-mention services.

What they are selling turns out to be variations on one thing: renting space on websites nobody reads.

Some of it involves placement on what the SEO world calls private blog networks. These are clusters of sites that exist for no purpose except to sell mentions and links to whoever is willing to pay for them.

DiNardi found those going for 10 to 15 times what a comparable link cost in the old SEO market.

Some of it involves placement on sites with no actual subject-matter focus.

One example he cites has a page about learning-management software sitting alongside listicles ranking the best crypto wallets. That is basically a billboard that will print anything.

Some of it is Reddit astroturfing.

Agencies use what are called aged accounts—profiles built up over months so they look like real community members—and use them to post brand mentions in subreddits that have nothing to do with the brand.

Those posts are frequently removed within 30 days for violating community rules, which tells you exactly what the communities make of them.

Then there are the mechanics.

There is a Slack workflow. The agency generates a placement opportunity. A junior marketing assistant with no way to evaluate whether the publisher is legitimate approves a fee.

In DiNardi’s example, that fee is $250 to add the mention. The agency pays the publisher and then invoices the client to recover it, on top of the retainer.

The Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides—and that is a U.S. agency, so these are applicable only in the U.S.—require clear disclosure of paid placements.

These pages generally are not updated to say that the mention was purchased.

Lily Ray, who is quoted in the piece, says this is another evolution of spammy link-building. We have seen this movie before, going back to Google’s first Penguin update in 2012.

The reason it appears to work right now is that large language model citation systems are still immature compared with Google’s spam detection.

Volume from low-quality sources may be rewarded in ways it would not be in old-school search.

DiNardi puts that window at perhaps one to two years before the platforms build countermeasures. He also notes that marketers chasing volume may be confusing the models about their own entities in the process.

Here is why I mashed these two stories together: They are the legitimate and illegitimate answers to exactly the same question.

Who controls what the machine says about us?

One answer says: Organize your knowledge so you are the most useful source available.

The other says: Pay strangers to say your name.

The first is a governance project, and it is the one you should be focusing on rather than waiting to be invited to participate.

Nobody else in the building has responsibility for how the organization is represented as a whole. That is within the purview of the communication function.

The second is going to show up on your desk as a pitch or proposal, probably coming from the marketing department, probably with a persuasive percentage attached to it, along with a deadline.

When it does, the questions you should ask are the old ones.

Is it disclosed?

Would we be comfortable if a reporter published the invoice?

Are we buying a spot on a page that also sells spots to our competitors?

We spent a couple of decades getting pay-for-play out of media relations. I would hate to watch us import it into AI visibility just because the metric is new.

Dan York

Greetings, Shel, Neville, and FIR listeners all around the world. It’s Dan York coming at you from Vienna, Austria, where I’ve been attending the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF.

These are the engineers and others who make the internet work through all the various protocols—HTTP, email, and all those kinds of things.

One of the big topics this week, of course, was AI. There were a number of sessions looking at what kind of work needs to be done.

For instance, in a world where everybody talks about “agentic, agentic, agentic, agentic,” do we need new protocols for communicating when an agent goes to book airfare and interact with all sorts of systems? Are new protocols needed?

Part of the genius of the internet is that it is built from small building blocks that can be used to do things and then reused in many different ways.

One of the things people are finding is that many of the existing protocols work well. But we are still trying to figure out, in this new world, what is happening and what new things are needed.

One thing happening in the standards world is the same thing we are seeing throughout the rest of the communication world: a lot of slop.

There is a positive side to this. The IETF conducts all of its work and develops all of its standards in English. If you are not an English speaker, or English is not your primary language, it can be challenging to help create new standards.

Back in the early 2000s, before we had all these new tools, I helped some people for whom English was not their primary language. It was painful because they were trying to create standards and describe how they worked, but their English was difficult to read. I helped them improve it.

Now, with these tools, people can contribute in English. They can put their material into the large language model of their choice and get good English back in the format of an internet draft or standard.

That is the positive side. Suddenly, millions or billions more people around the world are able to participate in the standards process in English.

The negative side, of course, is that people are generating so many contributions that they take a long time to triage. This creates a tremendous amount of work for reviewers, leaders within the IETF, and others. Everything is taking much longer.

We have seen this in many other areas. Put up a job advertisement and you get a bazillion applications. Publish a blog post and you get a ton of comments. All these things are happening.

One thing I had not paid as much attention to was the fact that all these email tools now have a feature that says, essentially, “Write a better email.”

People are using that feature, turning what might have been short, not particularly well-worded emails into big, voluminously long messages. That is generating a lot more traffic on the email lists people use within the IETF.

It gets us back to the situation we have seen many times: You have five bullets, feed them into an LLM, and it generates a long block of text. Then the text is too long for someone to read, so they use another LLM to turn it back into five bullets.

There we are, with the snake eating its tail.

There have been a lot of interesting conversations. We’ll see where all this goes.

Speaking of AI, a couple of other things have happened in the broader industry.

First, you may or may not have noticed that Bluesky announced Attie—A-T-T-I-E—its AI assistant. It started as something you could use to build social feeds within the Atmosphere, the broader AT Protocol ecosystem.

You could use Attie to create these feeds. Bluesky has now announced that it is expanding Attie into more of a chatbot that you can ask for information and news from across the broader Bluesky network—the Atmosphere, as it is called.

I don’t have access yet. I’m on the waiting list.

They say these are not chats. They are “quests.” Yes, you heard that right. They are quests—a new way to explore the Atmosphere.

You could ask questions such as, “What’s trending in my network today?” “Who’s worth following in climate tech?” or “Put together a daily briefing on indie game development.”

We will have to see what this looks like, how it works, and all those kinds of things. But it is another example of AI coming into the Bluesky space.

AI systems, of course, cost money to operate. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has said this is really expensive and that the company will eventually have to throttle people or ask them to pay.

If you are a communicator who has been using Instagram’s built-in AI to generate campaign content, create images, or perform similar tasks, casual use is still free right now.

At some point, however, if you use it at high volume, you will probably wind up being charged for credits or have to take those costs into account.

Stay tuned on that.

Switching to newsletters—but remaining on the subject of AI—Beehiiv, B-E-E-H-I-I-V, one of Substack’s competitors, had a major release this month.

It rolled out something called Communities, which lets you create a community around your newsletter that people can join, where they can chat with one another and do those kinds of things.

At the same time, Beehiiv added AI components, including an AI assistant that can help you examine your content and subscribers, particularly on the administrative side.

Again, we are seeing more AI appearing in different places.

Speaking of AI—as that seems to be the theme of my report this month—I’ll also tell you that WordPress 7.1 is currently scheduled to arrive on August 19, before my next report. The timing aligns with WordCamp US here in the States.

The release will bring a number of new features, including more of the collaboration functionality that was part of the original plan for WordPress 7.0.

It will include notes and other features, along with more collaboration and AI elements. That is coming on August 19.

Finally, let me close with a policy topic.

The U.K.’s Ofcom is pursuing two different initiatives. It has announced a forthcoming ban on anyone under 16 using social media. I’m not entirely sure what that means in practice.

It has also announced that it is investigating TikTok’s compliance because it does not believe the platform did enough to prevent people under 13 from using it.

This will be a test of the U.K.’s law, so we will see where it goes when it reaches the courts.

There is also a proposal under which people younger than 16 would be banned from social media, while 16- and 17-year-olds would somehow magically be blocked from using social media between midnight and 6 a.m.

It remains to be seen how any of that can be turned into reality.

The other problem people have pointed out is that all you are doing is blocking children from seeing some of the harmful material. You are not actually getting rid of the terrible content on the internet.

Everybody else is still exposed to it, including seniors and others who may have as many issues and challenges with it—if not more—than some of the young people in that space.

Anyway, that’s all from here, Shel. I think I’ll go get some Wiener schnitzel and a beer.

Until next month, that’s all. Back to you.

Bye for now.

Shel Holtz

Thanks, Dan. I really enjoyed that report. I was particularly struck by two of the items that you reported on. The first was Addy for Blue Sky. I just really like the idea of using AI this way within social networks. That would come in so handy if I could do that with, say, LinkedIn, rather than use the current search tool, which is fundamentally worthless unless I’m just looking for a person.

Or a company, but if I’m looking for threads around certain topics, it’s really tough, and something like that would be very useful. I’m not on Bluesky enough to really make a difference, but you know, on LinkedIn, maybe even Facebook, that would be awesome. Maybe they’ll pay attention to this and follow suit. Also, beehive with the communities, I think, is terrific because building a community around a newsletter can be tough.

And I think this might signal a way that Substack and Ghost and the others might be able to play in that space. So it was all interesting, Dan, but those were the two that stood out for me.

We talk about thought leadership from time to time on FIR. It has been a tried-and-true content marketing tool for a long time.

It has also been a source of some cynicism.

A stack of research has landed over the past few months that says two things at once: Thought leadership is producing measurable financial value, and most of what organizations are publishing under the label of thought leadership is utterly worthless.

Since two things can be true at the same time, both of those things are true.

The gap between them is where the opportunity lies for those of us who do this kind of work.

Let me start with the number from Axios that got my attention in the first place.

In April, Axios reported on a study from a firm called Cardinal 40 that found high-quality CEO thought leadership was associated with an average of $367 million in shareholder value in a single week.

Here is how the researchers got to that number.

They analyzed more than 1,000 examples of CEO thought leadership from S&P 500 companies and measured each against abnormal stock returns, deliberately excluding anything tied to market-moving news or disclosures.

They were trying to isolate the effect of the words themselves.

Then they did something really interesting.

They tested more than 60 common writing traits—tone, readability, and the kinds of things we all obsess over when we are editing copy.

They found nothing that explained why some pieces outperformed.

So they used AI, because of course they did.

They compared each document with a curated canon of genuinely standout thought leadership and found that communications that sat semantically closer to that canon were associated with stronger returns.

The gap between top-tier and bottom-tier thought leadership worked out to about a nine-tenths-of-a-percentage-point swing in stock performance the following week.

For the biggest companies, that is not a rounding error.

The report estimates as much as $25 billion across the Magnificent Seven—the seven megacap U.S. technology companies: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla.

The research also found that more thought leadership does not produce more value.

Weak or low-quality communications correlated with neutral or negative outcomes. In the age of AI slop, volume is not merely useless. It can cost you.

Compare that with The Harris Poll’s research on the ROI of thought leadership.

Nine in 10 executives say thought leadership is critical to building authority, and only 20 percent say theirs is actually effective.

Executives in that study estimated a 14-times return on investment, and Fortune 100 executives put the annual value at about $3.6 million.

I need to hedge here a little.

The Harris fieldwork was conducted in May 2022 among 500 U.S. employees at the director level or above. It is still being cited in 2026 as though it is fresh, and it is not.

Second—and this applies across the board—nearly every organization publishing research on the value of thought leadership sells thought leadership.

Harris has a thought-leadership practice. IBM’s Institute for Business Value is a thought-leadership shop. Cardinal 40 evaluates thought leadership for a living.

That does not invalidate the work, but it should temper any enthusiasm you feel about the research.

For what it is worth, IBM’s research is the most consistent of the batch.

Eighty-eight percent of executives consume thought leadership, 87 percent say it shaped a purchase decision within the previous 90 days, and about half of C-suite leaders credit it with driving revenue growth.

One more data point from the Axios piece is something I cannot stop thinking about.

Mentions of “storytelling,” “narrative,” and “storyteller” on corporate earnings and investor calls are up 65 percent since 2020, according to AlphaSense.

The language of our discipline has migrated into the language of capital markets.

It is important to treat the dollar figures as directional rather than literal. Correlation is doing a lot of work in these studies.

Coherent, original executive communication may well be a proxy for a well-run company rather than a cause of its performance.

But the through line across all this research is consistent, and it is the one you can actually act on: Quality is doing the work, and quantity is doing damage.

If the value is real, why is only 20 percent of it working?

The Content Marketing Institute brought together a group of practitioners in July to work through exactly that question: Jill Roberson from Dataweavers, Andrea Ames from Eaton, Lindsey Hagen from Conductor, and the Content Marketing Institute’s own Robert Rose, one of my favorite people to read and listen to.

I love This Old Marketing with Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Jill Roberson made a point that stood out for me: We have to reset expectations for what thought leadership even is.

Hagen’s point was that the bar has simply risen.

You have to be useful and unique now, and the standard for what qualifies as valuable is much higher than it was.

Roberson recommended putting the hypothesis at the beginning of a thought-leadership piece and making it unmistakable, then delivering on it immediately.

If people are not getting the insight they came for, and getting it quickly, they are gone.

But delivering quickly is not the same as creating quickly.

Ames’s advice was to slow down and be genuinely intentional about the topic.

Robert Rose made the observation that I suspect a lot of you have been waiting for someone senior to say out loud: Our industry has convinced itself that speed is its foundational value, and it just isn’t.

Then there is gating.

Ames said Eaton does not require contact information for its content. There are no forms you have to fill out before you get the download link.

Her reasoning is the reasoning of 2026: She wants large language models to be able to include Eaton’s thought-leadership pieces in the results they produce.

Being exclusionary, she argues, mostly hurts you.

That means the lead-capture form—which has always been a tax on distribution—is now also a tax on being cited by the systems your buyers are querying before they ever contact you.

The Content Marketing Institute also ran a piece in the fall by Abid Rahman, written with Kate Houston, who runs executive thought leadership at Amazon Web Services.

Their diagnosis is pretty blunt.

AI can draft, polish, and structure this content with remarkable efficiency, but it cannot supply credibility, lived experience, or judgment.

It reads as though anyone could have prompted it because anyone could have prompted it.

They offer three ingredients for the real thing.

The first is credible experience.

I talk about “genuine lived experience” somewhat derisively because I read people on LinkedIn saying, “AI has no lived experience,” and then I look at the kinds of things they are writing, which required absolutely no lived experience.

But in the case of thought leadership, it really does matter.

You have to have credible experience to support your ability to make these proclamations.

You also need a genuine audience need and an insight that not many other people can provide.

Then you apply a five-step framework: Define the goal. Choose the focus. Shape between one and three core themes. Build a voice ecosystem of leaders, customers, and advocates who actually have some standing. And map the stories to the right channels.

Their measurement point is one I would like to tattoo on a few people’s foreheads: Thought leadership is not an engine for marketing-qualified leads.

In one of their programs, they do not blast out content at all. They put a CEO in credible venues.

Under those circumstances, brand awareness among the ideal customer profile rose from 17 percent to 51 percent in one year, and request-for-proposal volume increased three-and-a-half times.

Could they attribute a single article to a single lead?

Of course not.

That is the honest answer most of us should be giving.

Now, a different angle.

Yogesh Shah, writing in Entrepreneur—and this goes back to January—argues that the problem is not the thinking. It is the container.

We are in a zero-click world. Audiences do not leave the platform they are on.

Roughly 90 percent of decision-makers say they are more receptive to companies producing high-quality thought leadership, yet engagement keeps declining anyway.

His question is: If a report can be summarized in ChatGPT in seconds, why would anyone read it?

His answer is what he calls experiential thought leadership.

Turn the insight into something people are in rather than something they open.

Think of a live discussion, a workshop-style webinar, a tightly curated roundtable, or a podcast that puts listeners inside a recognizable scenario instead of offering an expert monologue.

He is emphatic that this does not require a large budget. It requires one well-designed moment in which attention is protected.

You can see the tension between these two pieces of advice.

The Content Marketing Institute says to slow down and do the deep work. Entrepreneur says the document is the wrong delivery mechanism.

I do not think those ideas conflict.

There is a line in a Savanta piece from June that I think captures the entire argument in 12 words: You can replicate a product, but you can’t copy a point of view.

The case study from the author of that piece, Matthew Mott, is aimed at technology companies, but I think it applies elsewhere.

A competitor can reverse-engineer your features, match your pricing, copy your positioning, and even hire your people.

What it cannot copy is a track record of saying interesting things that turned out to be correct.

That builds slowly, and it compounds.

His second observation is that buyers cannot really evaluate an AI product.

The technology is opaque, and every vendor’s claims sound alike. Buyers stop assessing the product and start assessing the people behind it, looking for evidence of judgment.

They are conducting that assessment before they ever talk to you.

The sales conversation does not start from zero. It starts from whatever reputation you have already built.

He also argues that relatively few companies are publishing practical, original research on AI right now.

Most of what exists is either so hedged that it is useless or so optimistic that it is not credible.

In a few years, everyone will have a program, and standing out will cost far more.

So, if you are already publishing thought leadership or planning to, what does all this mean for you?

I have a list.

Of course I have a list.

First, audit your top pieces from last quarter and apply the swap test.

If a competitor could have published the same piece with its logo on it, you did not produce thought leadership. You just cranked out content.

Second, find your proprietary data.

This is where I think communicators sell themselves short.

You have more than you think: your own operational data, customer-service logs, field observations, and the ability to conduct surveys.

Survey your employees. Survey your customers. Survey the industry.

The Content Marketing Institute’s Jasmine Williams makes the case for treating thought leadership as a platform rather than a campaign.

One flagship study becomes the hub, and articles, webinars, sales enablement, and employee advocacy become the spokes.

That is a repeatable model.

Third, put the thesis in the first 60 seconds.

Not the context. Not the setup.

Put the claim in the first 60 seconds.

Fourth, reopen the gating conversation and reframe it.

It is no longer lead capture versus reach. It is lead capture versus being cited by the machines your buyers consult first.

Segment your library.

Some assets should stay gated because a download genuinely signals buying intent. But your flagship research probably should not be among them.

Fifth, take one asset you published this year and turn it into an experience: a roundtable, a working session, or a recorded session with someone who disagrees with you.

I think we call that a debate.

Sixth, change what you are measuring—and change it before someone asks you to defend it.

Measure speaking invitations. Measure journalists citing your framework. Measure analysts referencing your numbers. Measure employees sharing the work without being asked.

Denise Brosseau of the Thought Leadership Lab calls the underlying discipline “stick-to-itiveness”: the willingness to keep showing up long enough for any of that to accumulate.

Seventh, protect the executive’s actual voice.

This is the piece only we can do.

AI is a genuinely useful accelerant. It can turn an interview into an article, sharpen the structure, and catch the flabby paragraph.

What it cannot do is have a point of view.

If your CEO’s byline reads like a competent prompt response, you put your CEO’s and your company’s credibility at risk.

Let me end this segment with a little history.

The term “thought leader” is generally credited to a fellow named Joel Kurtzman, who was editing Strategy+Business back in 1994.

He meant something specific: someone addressing the questions senior executives were actually wrestling with.

More than 30 years later, the term has become a punchline.

It became one because we industrialized it. We turned a description of rare people into a content category with a production quota.

The research that came out this year is essentially the market telling us it can still tell the difference—and that it is willing to pay for the real thing.

That is not a bad position for communicators to be in, is it?

Now for another awkward transition to my final report.

I’m going to end with something a little lighter, although there is a real point buried in it.

Knowledge at Wharton wrote up a new research study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology titled “Effectively Communicating Uncertainty: The Persuasive Impact of Different Types of Hedges.”

You know hedges: “That could work.” “That might be a good approach.”

We all hedge.

Yet most communication training treats hedging as a bug to be trained out of us.

Jonah Berger’s research team ran seven studies and split hedging into two dimensions.

The first is likelihood.

Is your hedge low-probability—“might,” “could,” or “it feels like”—or higher-probability—“likely,” “should,” or “arguably”?

The second is perspective.

Is the hedge floating free, as in, “It sounds like”? Or is it attached to a human being, as in, “In my opinion,” or “It sounds likely to me”?

All seven studies agreed: Higher-likelihood hedges and personal-perspective hedges are more persuasive because they make the speaker seem more confident.

Berger’s example is a mechanic saying, “The repair might work,” versus, “I believe this repair will solve the problem.”

Both statements convey uncertainty, but they have a completely different effect.

The personal version means someone is taking ownership.

Berger describes this as a communication sweet spot. You get the protection of not overclaiming without paying the credibility tax.

It is important to point out that the effect weakened when the communicator was a brand rather than a person, because confidence mattered less.

That is one more argument for having actual humans deliver your message.

I went looking for research that either supports or contradicts this, and it turns out the findings land right between two camps that do not agree.

On one side are decades of work on what is called powerless language: hedges, hesitations, and tag questions.

This research suggested that hedges may be the most damaging of all the powerless markers.

Researchers found something genuinely alarming: When a topic mattered to people, powerless markers did not merely make the speaker less appealing. They flattened the arguments.

Strong arguments performed no better than weak ones once the hedges were added.

On the other side are the uncertainty-communication researchers.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Winton Centre have spent years studying how to convey uncertainty in facts and numbers.

Another study involving more than 10,000 participants found that putting a numeric uncertainty range around COVID statistics slightly reduced trust in the number itself but had no effect whatsoever on trust in the source.

Being candid cost the communicator nothing.

A meta-analysis published this year finds the overall effect small and highly dependent on how uncertainty is expressed, with verbal hedges doing more damage than numbers.

Put all of this together, and here is my take: The problem was never uncertainty. It is vagueness.

Saying, “Here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and here is what would change my mind,” reads as confidence.

Mumbling, “It could go sort of either way,” reads as evasion.

It is the same actual state of knowledge, but the way it is expressed produces the opposite effect.

I would argue that this matters more for us now than it has in years, because the machines drafting our first drafts hedge constantly—and they hedge in the weak way: low likelihood, no perspective, and nobody’s name attached.

You may have noticed that Neville and I hedge our way through every episode of this podcast.

We say things like, “This is correlation, and correlation is not causation.” We say that you should treat a figure as directional.

We note, as I did just a few minutes ago, that a survey being cited is four years old.

It turns out that hedging might have been the right call.

Or let me try that again.

In my view, that was almost certainly the right call.

I would love to tell you when the next monthly episode will be, but Neville and I have not settled on that yet.

Nor do I know when he will be up for recording a short midweek episode.

I may do one solo. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see what kind of news or research crosses the transom.

Until I get answers to all those questions, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Podcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative’s core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms.

Links from this episode:

Podcasting 2.0 — Making Podcasts Better for Everyone
What Is Podcasting 2.0? And Why Should I Care?
Podcasting 2.0
What Is Podcasting 2.0?
What You Need to Know About Podcasting 2.0

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 522. I’m Neville Hobson

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, we’ve been doing this show for more than 21 years. When we started, there were maybe 400 podcasts. There was no Apple Podcasts to help people find and subscribe to shows, and every podcaster was what today they seem to be calling an indie podcaster. What’s not an indie podcaster? That would be Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify collecting money. He’s not an indie, he’s mainstream media. So I try to follow the podcast industry. I subscribe to some newsletters. I read some people who talk about it. But somehow I only recently encountered Podcasting 2.0. This thing has been around since 2020. Despite the name, it’s not a new audio format. It’s not a new app or a replacement for RSS. It’s an open source movement launched by, guess who? Adam Curry, the podcasting pioneer, along with a developer named Dave Jones. God, there’s a lot of Dave Joneses out there. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. Now, that word open matters. Traditional podcasting works because creators like us publish an RSS feed that many different apps can read. Nobody has to upload a separate master copy to each player. But over time, discovery and listening have become concentrated in large corporate directories and platforms like Apple, increasingly Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, but there are others. These companies set their own rules for their own services. Spotify’s rules explicitly say that it can remove content and suspend or terminate accounts. You can call that moderation, deplatforming, censorship. There’s no denying the underlying power these services have. Spotify can remove a podcast from its service. If the creator independently controls the RSS feed and hosting, Spotify can’t erase the podcast from the entire internet. The danger comes when creators and audiences become so dependent on one proprietary platform that removal there is effectively removal from public view. Podcasting 2.0 was designed to reduce that gatekeeper risk. Its answer isn’t that every app has to carry every show, it’s that no single app or company should be able to make a show disappear everywhere. Now, the initiative has several major pieces. The Podcast Index is an open directory that apps can use instead of depending on one company’s catalog. I checked, and FIR is listed, as are our other active shows on the FIR Podcast Network. The podcast namespace adds new backward-compatible tags to RSS feeds. Those tags can provide creator-controlled transcripts, richer chapters, information about hosts and guests, live stream notifications, alternate audio and video versions, licensing information, and a podroll of shows creators recommend. Remember blog rolls? This is podrolls. There’s also PodPing which alerts apps quickly when a feed changes, and there’s a really much-discussed thing called Value for Value. It’s a model that lets listeners support creators directly, often through tiny Bitcoin payments called sats, S-A-T-S, and attach messages known as boosts or boostagrams. And, yeah, I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show with Curry and Jones, and they were shouting out everybody who gave them a boost the Bitcoin element gets disproportionate attention, but it’s optional. Podcasting 2.0 is much broader than cryptocurrency. And by the way, there’s a vertical market application of Podcasting 2.0 called Godcaster. That’s a defined community of religious podcasters who have embraced Podcasting 2.0. The question is whether this model could work for, say, corporate ecosystems, universities, trade groups, nonprofits, and the like. And that explains why communicators should care or at least know about all this, because this really is a conversation about channel ownership, interoperability, accessibility, and resilience. Accurate transcripts improve access and make our content easier to search and reuse. Chapters and person tags make expertise more discoverable. Podrolls let organizations recommend trusted voices without surrendering discovery to Spotify or YouTube and their algorithms. And open distribution reduces the risk of building an audience on rented space. Now, there are caveats. Support remains uneven. I didn’t even learn about it until a couple weeks ago. Hosts like Libsyn, which hosts FIR, and podcasting apps implement different subsets of the standards. Open infrastructure doesn’t eliminate legal obligations. It doesn’t change hosting company policies. There are other choke points. And decentralization doesn’t automatically make the content accurate, ethical, or responsible. But the core idea is important, and that’s that podcasting began as an open medium, not a collection of corporate content silos. Podcasting 2.0 is an effort to modernize that open model without giving up what made podcasting distinctive in the first place. For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond audio. Distribute widely, but retain control of the source, the identity, and the relationship with the audience

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s quite a story, Shel, I think. Like you, I hadn’t really heard of this other than the fact I did come across Podcasting 2.0 website when Adam Curry launched it back in, what was it, 2021, 20- 2020. But since then, no, haven’t heard anything about this at all really other than some kind of, aside comments here and there on on a couple of tech podcasts. And I’m thinking what you’ve outlined or makes complete sense to me. So why hasn’t this been thought about before even? I think it has in part. I’ve read people talking about this online, particularly on making content more easily consumable as they see it and there we’re talking about an idea that’s not new. Apple’s been offering this for a while, which is chapters, splitting up your content into chapters. But that’s only Apple. It doesn’t transport, and therein lies one of the issues with this, I think. How could you put it? There are some concerns I can see. I’ll come onto the pros in a minute. But I think is this not fragmentation of something that’s going to require quite a bit of a learning curve to figure out what to do with this? I’m also thinking that, is this going to open another standards race? Open standards only work if enough people adopt them, otherwise there is becoming another well-intentioned technical layer that only enthusiasts use. We’ve seen that. But, A broader, top-level question is, are we looking at the next stage in podcasting’s evolution, or are these features primarily serving podcast creators rather than podcast listeners? In other words, who’s getting the greatest benefit? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think it, it does… The fragmentation issue I think creates complexity. Features, bolting on new features more metadata doesn’t compensate for weak storytelling, and you have to have that sorted out. And I think there’s a risk of enthusiasts becoming excited by all this, while listeners simply want worthwhile content. The interesting thing, though, a-and you pointed this out in your intro, that the where we’re at now with podcasting is the marketplace is largely controlled or dominated by big platforms. You mentioned Spotify, you mentioned Apple. If we go to look at the analytics on Libsyn as to where, how people get our content, there’s a long list of 20-plus podcast platforms. Some of them, some of them never even heard of, yet there’s, you can imagine an episode has got, six downloads on that platform and 200-and-something on another platform. So it’s like we like to say, “Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.” So how do we introduce this into that landscape in a way that literally isn’t complexity from the fragmentation? Because it will be fragmentation. And not– And who’s not– who’s to say that Spotify and the others aren’t going to respond not in a positive way to this, ’cause this is their control slipping away. So this is what I spot as some of the issues. I think the… Another standards race is maybe- more concern one of podcasting’s great strengths has always been its relative simplicity. Wasn’t like that when we started, mind you, but that’s how it is today. This introduces another layer of standard, certification, and implementation. We’ve seen this before. Social media standards, RSS extensions, schema markup, countless proprietary platform features. So it’s not a pretty looking landscape, I would say. Plus as we are talk– We’ve talked about this ourselves, but others are talking about this. This is podcasting’s time. It’s going to play a bigger role in organizational communication, particularly as podcasts play a growing role in organizational and employee communication. So how does this all work, where you’ve suddenly got these things that sound appealing to very appealing to creators? I think probably not so much from listeners whose sense complexity is what they’d be looking at. So you’ve have to make it very easy and simple. That said, I think there are some big advantages from it. You’ve mentioned some. One that strikes me immediately, richer, more accessible content. It turns an audio file into a more complete communications asset, it seems to me. So transcripts, chapters, structured metadata makes a podcast easier, and this is a big appeal, Shel I would say. Easier to search, easier to quote, easier to repurpose, easier to reference internally, and make accessible to people who cannot or don’t want to listen to something. So you make it broader. So you could also say, many organizations already struggle to maximize the value of long-form content. These features make it much easier to reuse a single conversation across newsletters, blogs, social posts, knowledge bases, internal communication. We’re always talking about content reuse as communicators. Podcasting 2.0 makes that much easier because the structure is built into the episode itself. There’s tons more we could talk about in this vein, but I think that’s enough for now. I think there are some major cons that would worry me if I were thinking about, let’s see how we can take advantage of this. It’s got a homebrew feel about it, which isn’t a criticism by any means. That’s how podcasting started. The landscape’s way different now. I could see a big role for AI in constructing the landscape, if you like, constructing it and helping you bring this into your plans. But this again it’s big work to get this done, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: yeah, I think the biggest challenge that Curry and Jones face with this is building awareness and support. If I’m a podcaster for 21 years and hadn’t heard of it, you heard about it when it launched and heard nothing since then there’s a serious awareness problem here. And that’s what’s going to keep this from adoption. I’m not worried about fragmentation. Podcasting started with the RSS feed. This is something that Dave Winer came up with working in hand-in-hand with Adam Curry, who developed the podcatcher that would recognize that extension that Winer created. This did not render those RSS feeds useless to the RSS newsreaders that were out there. They still got them. They just ignored that extension because they didn’t have any way of playing a media file. So they still saw it. I have to believe that an RSS feed with all the new stuff in it is still going to be an effective RSS feed. The problem is that you have the hosting services, as I mentioned, we have been hosted with Libsyn, not since the very beginning, but pretty darn close

Neville Hobson: Yeah

Shel Holtz: Right. Let me start that thought again. The problem is convenience. If you make Spotify the place you go for podcasts and they’re listening to FIR and we say something offensive and they decide to take us off they’re not going to go look for us elsewhere. They’re just going to find other podcasts because they use Spotify. If you do a deal with Spotify, and you have to be pretty good, pretty famous guarantee a lot of downloads. But if you do a deal with Spotify, that’s the only place people are going to find that podcast. And again, you do something that violates the terms of service or their standards and they take you off, then you’re off. You’re gone everywhere. So I like the idea of this standard. I would just like to see some agreement across all of the hosting platforms and the discovery platforms that we will enable all of these on our platform so that listeners get the benefit. And you articulated some of those benefits to the listener. They don’t have to know that’s courtesy of Podcasting 2.0 any more than they need to understand that there’s an extension in the RSS feed in Podcasting 1.0. They just know that this is what they get when they subscribe to a podcast. But I love the idea of they’re not having to go to the show notes on our website to get the transcript. And frankly, I like the idea of people who love the show being able to support it with a micropayment that sends a message to us. I think that enhances the listener-podcaster relationship more than just commenting on a LinkedIn post or on our website or whatever. So yeah, I think there’s a lot to, to recommend this, but I think there are lots of obstacles in the way. And as you mentioned, there are also issues that don’t get resolved because of this Yeah, and Dave Jones is a developer, so I’m sure he’s working on all of this and probably has answers to some of those questions. I think it’s largely in his and Adam Curry’s hands to get the word out about this. If I were them or if I were counseling them, I would suggest that the audience that you need to be aiming at is podcasters the creators. And the message is tell your hosting service that you want these features implemented. The more they hear this and the more they see their customers changing hosting platforms to one that does embrace all of this, the faster they’re going to adopt the standard, and this will work for everybody. But I don’t see that effort underway, and I would advise listeners if you’re curious about this, visit their Podcasting 2.0 website, but also give a listen to the Podcasting 2.0 podcast. It’s typical Adam Curry. There’s a lot of digression and a lot of talk about completely off-topic subjects. But when they do zero in on Podcasting 2.0 it’s really interesting to hear them talk about this and where it is and where it’s going.

Neville Hobson: I would say Libsyn, we’ll be in touch

Shel Holtz: You can count on it. And that’ll be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release

The post FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you.

That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé.

As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve.

In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future.

For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes.

In this conversation, we discuss:* Why Pete believes AI is becoming an auditor of organisational credibility rather than simply another information retrieval tool. * What he means by the idea that “your brand is as strong as its answers.” * Why evidence increasingly matters more than messaging in an AI-driven world. * The concept of a “book of truth” and why organisations need to make trusted information easier for AI systems to understand. * How and why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI models can develop different perspectives on the same brand. * Whether communicators need to understand AI “worldviews” as well as human audiences. * Why corporate communications could become one of the most strategically important functions in the age of AI. * How organisations should prepare for AI-generated reputation challenges and new governance responsibilities. * What AI agents could mean for marketing, purchasing decisions and brand influence. * Pete’s advice for communication professionals on becoming “answer ready.”

About Pete BlackshawPete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands.

A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives.

Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology.

Resources Pete Blackshaw on LinkedIn * BrandRank.ai * The book: The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future * Pete’s The Answer Economy* newsletter * Search previous FIR interviews with Pete Blackshaw (2005, 2007 and 2009) on the FIR archive site.

TranscriptA transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Shel Holtz (00:04)
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson (00:09)
And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:11)
And we are thrilled to have Pete Blackshaw back with us. Pete, this is your fourth appearance, I believe, on FIR. And it’s been a while. I think is what? It was 2009, I think, was the last time. But it’s great to have you back. I’ve been following you ever since then. Certainly read your content on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. So very happy.

Pete Blackshaw (00:21)
It has been a while.

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (00:38)
Anxious to have this conversation and the reason we reached out to bring you back on FIR interviews is because of some research that you have been doing for a couple of years that has resulted in quite a LinkedIn post and a new book coming out in September. tell us about all this and yourself.

Pete Blackshaw (00:57)
Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a native Californian who’s here in kind of adopted Cincinnati as my is my home. I have kind of had a mix of is my s you know, two time startup founder, first one I sold to Nielsen, which was in that space that you and I were talking about, you know, viral complaints and early social media. And and I’ve always been, you know, if there’s any through line across my career, I’d say it’s

The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I

was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint

Neville Hobson (02:18)
Ha ha.

Pete Blackshaw (02:22)
after Switzerland was recruited by P and G and Kroger and some of the Cincinnati companies to launch a startup accelerator and did a little bit of work in venture capital. But I’ve loved being back in the startup world and yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

Neville Hobson (02:39)
Terrific. So we should to kind of warm us up. I’ve got a question to start with that is a very, very simple one, actually, Pete. when I was looking into the the book that you’re publishing and looking at the content, what you’re covering and all that stuff, I saw I saw some huge kind of resonance with what we talk about in FIR. And there’s a lot of overlap, which I which I found really, really exciting because that that’ll fuel some of what we’re gonna talk about today, I think. But

Pete Blackshaw (02:45)
Yeah.

Neville Hobson (03:09)
First question, which is kind of a framing question. You’ve been talking about consumer trust and digital influence since the early social media era, if not earlier than that even. So this question this is my question. What feels genuinely different about this AI moment compared with previous platform shifts?

Pete Blackshaw (03:29)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what’s fundamentally different this time is

Is accountability. You know, I often say that, you know, the big aha for me when I quit my last job to launch brand rank, my current startup, is that I was shortly after Chat GBT came out, kids were asleep, we were skiing, and I was just doing what I typically do, what I’m sure you guys do all the time, just exercising my curiosity. And then typing in things into ChatGBT like, can Nestle be trusted? Are Pampers diapers really sustainable?

And it dawned on me within seconds that this medium that is evolving is the world’s greatest BS detector. And and we started to see some of the platforms are really on the extreme side of that, like anthropic cloud, where you just can’t throw spinner slogans at them. They just kind of cut through it. And that was like the big unlock for me. It’s like, my gosh, this is not only gonna become a new purchase funnel.

This is going to become really tricky terrain for marketers that are used to controlling the message, managing the spin, maybe getting away with overflated claims. And and I was like, my gosh, I gotta measure this. Someone’s gonna have to create like a Nielsen ratings of what these answer engines say. And I really wanted to focus. I know there’s a lot of players that are out there doing.

you know, AEO or GEO, but I really wanted to focus on the hard issues, like, my gosh, are brands going to be held more accountable for sustainability? Are these very sophisticated LLMs going to just digest an entire supply chain and either say thumbs up or thumbs down? Are, you know, and and maybe and and maybe, just maybe, will brands finally be forced to do some of the things that you all three of us have been talking about across the four sessions.

Which is, are they finally gonna kind of start responding to feedback? Are they gonna start inviting questions? Are they gonna start acting more with empathy? Because remember, digital started there. Digital started, we called it interactive. And the whole promise was like, we’re gonna be able to answer questions for consumers. They’re gonna come to us. And I remember when I started interactive marketing at PNG, that was like the North Star. And then we kind of moved into targeted advertising at scale.

We got very programmatic, we got digital, we kind of forgot about the consumer in control. And now I think that’s really waking up. However, one of the things I say in my book is

Listen, we totally messed up search two point And I’ve talked to the folks that wrote books about that, like John Battel, or like, my gosh, that quickly became a tragedy of the commons. Nobody could tell the difference between organic and paid and and even when it moved to mobile. And we as an industry are gonna have to decide like, do we want to preserve this incredible gift to consumers? And the things that are good for consumers are also really good for business, where they’re getting, you know.

reliable, trusted, you know, answers that are just solving like everything for them. Or do we want to pollute the commons by moving too aggressively the paid advertising? Do we want to dance in the gray zone? And so the book is kind of a the answer economy is this true shift and we have got to get in front of it.

To make sure that it is nurtured in the right way. And the timing couldn’t have been better because just last week, you know, all the folks from OpenAI are running all over cons trying to grab ad dollars. And that’s that’s good. You need, you know, you need an advertising model, but marketers have a historic tendency of dancing in the gray zone. And I just think we need to really get in front of it. And that’s like the heart and soul of the answer economy. We are in a world where the brands that actually answer the questions win. It’s such a basic

pre-digital concept that now is kind of getting extra life. Brands that tell the truth win. Why? Because the answer engines kind of call your BS. you know, so so that’s kind of the heart of what I’m getting into. And I just think it’s a really important conversation. And I’m hoping that it dusts off some of these conversations that we had in the past that maybe just were too damn early.

Shel Holtz (08:06)
Yeah, I remember those days, what, around 2004, when everybody was talking about how we were now going to have brands and consumers engaged in conversation and this was going to change everything and really didn’t. But Pete, you outlined this prescription of making everything sourced, timestamped, structured, LLM findable. that’s good hygiene for sure. but you’re describing how to feed the model, the inputs it

reward. So if a brand does this well enough, hasn’t it just learned to pass Claude rather than actually be trustworthy? I mean, how how would how would Claude or or you tell the difference between a brand with real substance and a brand with just a really great brand book of truth?

Pete Blackshaw (08:50)
Yeah, well, I think a lot of that goes hand in hand if you do it right. And again, you know, there’s a difference between a verified, trustworthy book of truth and marketing. I mean, they’re not the same thing. And so what I’ve learned, you know, I’ve I’ve been at this for two years, have worked with about 80 of the world’s top brands, big brands that you know that really, you know, have really challenging issues.

In fact, the whole business model started on sustainability, you know, Nestle Canada. And I they kind of invited me in for Earth Day. And we really took a hard look at, okay, will Nestle be rewarded or punished? And the good news is that they were severely rewarded. But there are ways where you need to market. I and maybe not the word market is the wrong term. You need to make your the good work that you’re doing.

Discoverable. So for example, I have found that a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with are getting lower sustainability scores than they deserve. You know, if you look at their science and their commitments, it’s actually pretty damn good. However, they’re so backwards on digital strategy that they put all of their science in PDFs, which LLMs can’t read. And we call that content liquidity. So there’s it’s not about manipulation. It’s a lot of it is like about getting the credit that you’re due. Now, I say that.

I don’t want to sound naive with that because I realize there’s a whole industry that’s mushrooming around me that’s all about manipulation and gaming and whatever it takes to kind of get credit you probably don’t deserve. I’m not playing that game. I think there is so much upside for companies that are actually already doing good things, have products that actually work, have credible supply chains, treat their employees well, that aren’t getting the credit they deserve. And I like those.

Challenges and we’ve been able to significantly move the needle with a lot of big companies just by making sure that they load up their FAQs with their sustainability commitments that are already verified by third parties or by these LLMs are very biased towards trust signals. And so we’ve always known that quality seals, BBB, you know, fair trade,

Good housekeeping, those have always mattered, but they’re really important to the LLMs. Because if you think about what’s happening right now,

They’re in a arms race to be the single source of truth. And so they are very, very biased towards trust signals. There’s a lot of misinformation out in the marketplace that everybody goes to Reddit first. That’s not true at all. They go to the brand websites first because they know those are places where content is typically vetted, reviewed by lawyers. Brands kind of are close to their stuff and they look at that. And then if they don’t have what they want, then they’ll go to other sources.

So what marketers do, what we do is we focus on three simple metrics. And I try to, yeah, I think a lot of us in the industry are just throwing too much vernacular, too many metrics. And I try to keep it really simple. Visibility. Are you visible? So what’s the best podcast show that has to do with, you know, you know, public relations or crisis? I suspect you would probably show up. If not, then I may become your digital coach to make sure you do.

Neville Hobson (12:14)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (12:15)
You know, vulnerability is the second one, which is how do you show up? And it’s different than sentiment because I often say the visibility gets you seen, vulnerability gets you remembered. And I think companies underestimate the degree to which you can be visible, but in a very negative context. And a good pre-AI example is that when I was running digital at Nestle, Wikipedia was a big pain in the butt because you type in

Nestle into Wikipedia and like 40% of the entry had to do with the company’s history with activist. And so it was like the gift that kept on punishing all the time. And so you know, A and and AI kind of compounds that it’s almost like you can’t. so that gets into misinformation, hallucination, and then what I call brand alignment, which is do the LLMs fundamentally agree with the promise that you’re putting out there on your website, your Amazon page, your TV ads?

And this is very, very humbling. Sometimes executives throw chairs at me, but that’s where the big unlock takes place. And the third area is readiness. Do you head out and market to algorithms? and then we focus on three buckets. You know, availability, do you even have available content that algorithms can read? clarity, do you speak in a consumer language? And right now, at least, they’re very biased towards conversational vernacular, which I think is good. And then the third one is depth, where

You have to have substance, the third party seals, the the validation. And so I think right now the criteria they’re using is good for the consumer, because I think it means a consumer’s more likely to get a good and a trusted response. And I think for the good actors out there that actually really that don’t BS and actually live up to their claims, I think they’re benefiting as well. but it’s gonna be very tricky environment where you’re gonna have lot of bad actors that don’t deserve to be at the top. They’re gonna

fight the bloody hell to get to the top. And there’s going to be a million vendors out there kind of say, we will get you to the top. And so it’ll be interesting. But that’s why I think we have to really think about like what this is our this is our moment right now. Like what type of digital space do we want? We messed up the previous ones. We’re 25 years into us. We still are like deluged with spam. My entire phone is loaded with artificial voices pitching me on stuff. None of them are real. And

So now we’ve got this chance to like really nurture something special. Can we do it? I don’t know.

Neville Hobson (14:42)
It’s good one. It’s a good one. Pete, one thing that really struck me is how you describe AI as an auditor rather than simply an information retrieval system. So you say, for instance, AI answer engines are now the auditors of brand credibility. We’ve talked a lot on FIR about organizations needing a human in the loop for AI. But and indeed, there are examples that are large, highly visible, very prominent of organizations who’ve really screwed up on that area.

by not having a human in the loop. But what you’re suggesting, I think, is almost the reverse. AI is now putting organizations themselves in the loop, constantly evaluating whether their behavior matches their claims. Is that how you see it?

Pete Blackshaw (15:28)
Yeah, no, it no exactly. I think the and I think there’s a number of different yeah, so what we’ll do, it’s it’s my favorite part of the model. It’s a little bit evil, but but it really is crazy insightful to clients. So we’ll take your brand promise, and every company has one, and then we’ll take like the top 10 comp claims. Oftentimes the things that you you’re sending out to the marketplace or the analyst, and we will kind of have each of the LLMs interrogate.

those claims. And then we’ll come up with scores one to ten. And it’s absolutely fascinating. And this is the ultimate unlock in understanding how the algorithm thinks. Like, you know, and and again in the book I get into all these different segments, like how does Claude think? How does Grot think? I mean, you know, right now at least, Claude is like the student radical who just is like doesn’t believe the man is like

y they’re just not gonna believe marketing whatsoever. And so I did a brand alignment test on our dashboard with Amazon. I’ve got a dashboard with Amazon. I can send it to you afterwards where I had Amazon has this statement like Earth’s most consumer centric company and then you know blah blah blah. And then I had the LLMs interrogate it and you know who gave it the lowest score? It was Claude. Claude gave it like a four out of ten.

Shel Holtz (16:47)
Claude?

Pete Blackshaw (16:51)
And then they got into all these specifics about why they simply don’t measure up. Now, the irony and the beauty of that is that, you know, Amazon is a huge partner with Claude. In fact, Claude is what undergirds Rufus or Alexa for shopping. I think Amazon’s even put some money into Claude. But, you know, this is like the beautiful irony of these, of these crazy systems. They’re kind of holding everyone accountable. And I’m like,

And what I’ve been telling brands lately is that, you know, you got to be really careful before you spend a ton of money on paid advertising, where, you know, people are just one question away from calling your BS. and then the other thing that I think is getting really tricky, and you’ll love this. One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is really telling.

Corporate communications teams, CEOs, boardrooms design for Clyde, because this is one platform that continues to grow and influence.

They act like a college radical and they are absolutely loved for better or worse by journalists, NGOs, determined detractors, yeah, financial analysts. And so I always say, like, if you can pass the Claude test, you’re probably in a good place. And I’ve actually done briefings with clients before earnings calls where I’ve literally looked at the data from like Claude, where they’re just like, no, we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it.

And they’ve almost become practice fodder to kind of figure out how do you really but the point is that yeah, we’re in this tricky environment where you got to be really accountable for what you say because these very, very smart algorithms are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t necessarily agree with you. And marketers have never lived with that type of accountability. I mean, it’s like Spin City, and I’m I’ve been part of that. And so I do think, yeah, the marketers that really have superior products can back their claims.

But they’re also gonna have to think about all these other areas that are gonna creep into the algorithmic judgment. Like I do think you talked about human in a loop, and you had a lot of CEOs. You know, you have Mark Pritchard was talking about that at Khan. I mean, I think everyone’s gonna be talking that, but these algorithms will kind of know whether you’ve completely sold everybody out to AI or whether you’ve kind of kept a blend. And I think some purchase behavior is gonna be based on that.

I mean, I could I could see I could see frustrated teenagers that are like already skeptical about AI creating shopping tools that say, I’m only gonna buy from companies that don’t go go too far on AI. It’s not difficult to hack, you know, on on one of the vibe coding tools.

Shel Holtz (19:32)
Pete, you out you outlined the the concept of a brand book of truth, mentioned that a few minutes ago, and I’d I’d I’d like you to sort of articulate what that is. But if every brand builds one and f and floods the zone with sourced timestamped LLM findable proof, does does Claude’s discernment survive that or do you end up in an arms race where the brands with the biggest content budgets win again? And

Pete Blackshaw (19:56)
I did.

Shel Holtz (20:01)
That’s the dynamic that that you’re saying is dead.

Pete Blackshaw (20:05)
Yeah, I do. I think a lot of the listen, I think some of the LLMs will submit to the chaos that you described. But I do think yeah, I think I think these, you know, it’s interesting because Claude is not as dependent on a paid ad model or getting all their money from subscriptions. So I think the ones that’ll get really trickier are are open AI and some of the other, you know, Google’s already a little bit fuzzy.

but they’re still, you know, wowing consumers with, you know, you know, AI overviews. But yeah, they’re just gonna have to be really careful about how they they blend. But I think it’s, you know, it’s a fair point. But I do think that you know, when I talk about book of truth, it’s not just the marketing slogans, it’s like how the product’s made. It is literally, is it truly superior and can you verify that?

You know, yeah, how do you stack up versus competition? Who are the people behind the brand? What’s the supply chain behind the brand? They’re kind of looking for all those different ingredients, even even for the purpose of like Amazon. I mean, this stuff is so real. I just put out a note to my clients this morning. I put a little blurb on LinkedIn as well, but

Amazon Prime Day was really insightful. I didn’t go, I couldn’t, I didn’t go to con last year, but I did stay glued for four days straight on Prime Day. And it was probably the biggest conversational boost we’ve seen in the history of commerce. Almost every single, you know, now it’s like every product you look at is surrounded by questions. I mean, what the hell’s going on? And then a lot of the you know, I’ve saw a lot of advertising trying to work into that. But on that platform, you can go in there and say, is this product sustainable or should I buy sustainable products?

Or should I I mean in and it’ll really give you very, very deep perspective before they start shoving products your way. And that is an absolute game changer. And so and I do think like the smart retailers will want to make sure that that the consumer kind of gets what they need. So so I may be, you know, long way of saying I’m optimistic. Where where it can get scary, you know, is if where everything got out of whack.

before was it Google was a monopoly and they had like 90% market share screw they can do whatever they want. I do think because you’ve got genuine competition, there is this real effort to like provide maximum value to the consumer. And that’s why I say we’re in a moment. You know, the answer economy is a moment. Either we’re gonna screw it up like we did before, or we’re gonna kind of turn it into a true win-win for consumers and business alike. But it’ll take some work to do that right.

Neville Hobson (22:53)
Interesting that is. I’ve been thinking when I listen to what you’re saying, Pete, a question I need to I I’m really curious about this because it I’ve been asking myself this question as I try to figure out where we’re at with all of this. What do you think? Could two different AI models, whether it’s Claude and ChatGPT or any any two, develop materially different views of the same company, the same brand?

What will that look like, do you think?

Pete Blackshaw (23:23)
it I I do this every day for clients. I we literally kind of give them we filter them through all the major LLMs, you know, from ChatGBT to Deep Seat to Perplexity and Grok. They all have different personalities. It’s no different than going after influencers, right? And influencers kind of, you know, they beat to different drummers. And so and and again, I would say Claude is the extreme librarian. They just don’t like marketing BS. They kind of just focus on the facts.

The credentialing, the science. you know, Grok is almost like hard to predict. And they do lean on a lot of the former tweets that kind of fall into it. but they are a little bit, they’re definitely they almost like personify not the politics of Elon Musk, but definitely like the almost like the unpredictable side of him and what you see. It’s like a different personality.

Gemini still, you know, you know, it’s it’s you know, the the it depends on if you’re looking at Gemini AI overviews. I mean, they all have different thinking processes in terms of the way they synthesize data, but absolutely, and I would say the new, you know, just in the same way that like a PR term might you might say we gotta we’ve gotta figure out how to break through the New York Times, the Financial Times.

And so and so you gotta think the same way. It’s like they they they think differently, they source differently. And so this is I spent the whole weekend doing this fascinating source analysis where I looked at, you know, tens of thousands of prompts and then I analyzed the sources and they have different favorites. And just recently the New York Times is finally starting to to creep into open AI, which does start to impact the character of their output.

You know, Claude tends to look a little bit more seriously at consumer reports than Joe’s review site. And so you have to know this. I mean, this is like the new PR. This is like the new influencer management. If you do not know how these LLMs think, if you don’t know what their brand archetype is, if you don’t know what they eat for breakfast from a content perspective, you’re not on top of what your client needs, in my view.

Shel Holtz (25:42)
I have a follow up to that question. Does does does this mean a brand needs to have a message strategy for every LLM or is there a through line that satisfies them all?

Pete Blackshaw (25:44)
Yeah.

Know if they have to have different messages, but they need to be very attentive to how they are filtered. I do think all the LLMs, like for example, in my analysis this weekend, they all pay a lot of attention to your brand website. Far more than I think the media has let on. And I know because I’ve just run like a million audits and I see this all the time. And so

Brands have a lot of leverage in influencing the story, especially when there’s bad information out there and the brand website or the own media is in a position to kind of correct the record. And we’ve done some really interesting work around crisis or recalls where some brands have been able to actually train the LLMs within 12, 24 hours based on getting that right information in there. But but yeah, I mean you’ve got

So I don’t think brands need to overcustomized. I think they need to be very, you know. I mean, if I were, you know, if I were heading corporate communications today, I would probably say, yeah, there’s some that I would focus on the ones that are most critical. You know, and the the ones that are most critical often have also tend to be the most loved by other influencers.

that we care about, like journalists and NGOs and the like. And so, so that’s where I would kind of put the focus on in that. Now, now that said, they’re all going to be introducing, with the exception of Claude, advertising models. And so those will be micro opportunities to influence. And we saw, you know, a lot of that, you know, OpenAI is already doing a lot of that. And there’s gonna be, you’re gonna have they’re gonna have to study like, you know,

Is it appropriate to advertise? I do have a strong point of view there that if you have high vulnerability, you shouldn’t advertise. If you have low vulnerability but low visibility, I’d say, yeah, spend all the money you want on advertising. But brands are gonna have to be really sensitive about they’re gonna have to learn the art of not making things worse. And I don’t think brands, I mean, again, going back to the conversations that we’ve had for 20 years, brands don’t know how to manage conversations. I mean, they’re like, I mean, they’re like.

Most brands are maybe are barely there on like the first question. But in the answer economy, I have this term that I use in the book called ask through, not click-through. Click through is like if I can just get that one click. You and I know we’re we’re using these tools all the time. It’s a sequence of questions. You go in there with a health query, and it’s like multiple. And every single additional question that’s satisfied that gets you further down the sail.

Or further down the path of happiness. And like brands don’t know how to do that at all. and so, but the the second you submit to these ad models where you’re sitting right in the middle of the prompt, you almost have to figure that you always have to know that stuff. So this is gonna be really tricky. It’s not gonna be one of those push a button kind of get media. You know, there’s gonna be a whole accountability that comes with it when you’re kind of in the answer stream.

Neville Hobson (29:05)
Hmm. Let’s I let me talk go back to I I guess something we discussed just a short while ago. In fact, Shel’s question about should brands ever tailor themselves differently for different models, which I if I understood you right, Pete, you basically say that’s ultimately a dead end, not really what what what they should be doing. So I’m thinking you mentioned Claude hates marketing BS or corporate spin or whatever whatever it might be.

and you describe the models like Claude or like Grok, etc., almost as having editorial personalities or or value systems. But that’s fascinating, I think, because I’ve sometimes questioned that myself, because organizations, brand managers have spent years trying to create one consistent narrative about their brand or or their organization. So I think

The question I had originally was worded are we, in other words of question. I think it’s more like we are as opposed to are we, which is entering a world where communicators have to understand not just audiences, but different AI worldviews. And I think it’s it it is interesting. my experience in this is not deliberate trying to get an answer to this, but I use myself usually a mixture between Claude and Chat GPT. So I I alternate between the two.

Claude is more rounded and rich because I fed it with so much information about who I am, a lot more than ChatGPT has. That I I I’m okay with I’m literally asking vague questions a lot of the time, and it never disappoints my experience so far. Chat GPT needs a little bit more nurturing in that regard, although it does surprise me at times with the depth of answers I get to some things when I’m doing research. So I guess I I

confuse myself even because I have no idea what the answer to this is. But I think it is something communicators should think about. Those who haven’t settled on one, you know, notwithstanding the topic Shawn and I’ve talked about recently where, you know, shadow AI is is growing like crazy in companies as people use their own thing, ignore what the what the company says. So it what what would you what would your advice be to communicators in this earth? Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (31:25)
No, it this is the new this is the new you’re knowing it. I mean, this is the new influencer

marketing, right? That’s always been at the core of like issues management and communication and and you know, you have to know your influencer, you have to know their hot buttons, you have to know their biases, you gotta know you know, how they evolve and there is a lot of evolution and and again this is where I think we may find a year from now that hey, you know.

They’re patty cakes with brands because they want the ad dollars. Who knows? I don’t know. But but yeah, and so and brands need to think this through. And I didn’t want you to think you made the comment about dead end. I I obsess with the nuances of the platforms, but I’m not convinced brands need to over tailor the message to different…

I again I think there’s a few where they gotta be really careful about the BS factor, like anthropic, where it’s just they just gotta make sure that their claims can hold water with these judges and these filters that are processing their their information. And I think I really think brands are just they’re not ready. In fact, what I’ve concluded is that across all the major, you know, Fortune 1000 companies, they’re only like 20% AI ready.

I mean, the most obvious thing is, you know, and sometimes companies get, you know, annoyed with me. And I have been doing this all the way back from my plan of feedback days, but like most companies cannot answer questions. I mean, you can go go to your after this podcast, go to your favorite brands and like type in a really basic question, like, how do I use the product? What’s in the product? Is it sustainable? But 90% of the time they’re gonna slap you in the face with a pop-up ad. They’re not gonna, they’re either gonna fire a blank.

Or they’re gonna answer something completely differently. Like brands don’t know how to do this. In the last 25 years of digital, the most basic human need of interactivity, I want to question brands can’t do it, including the big ones. They get all the awards and spend all the money. It’s crazy. And there’s a lot of people on the inside that are like, hey, that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t pay out. Or consumer services was always considered a non-strategic call cost center.

But again, I’m sort of saying the answer economy, that’s the new purchase funnel. Like this is the new skill that we need to learn. So it’s not only how to influence the algorithms, it’s almost like how do we fundamentally change our mindset where we’re more receivers of intent. And then we have to use that as the new engagement. You know, to some extent, when someone casts Amazon’s CEO had a great quote that everybody in marketing should put on their forehead, where he basically said it was so beautifully simple.

Neville Hobson (33:59)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Blackshaw (34:12)
He was doing an earnings call and he’s talking about the progress of Amazon Rufus, which I think at that time was already generating like $10 billion in incremental sales. And he said, Hey, it’s pretty simple. Every consumer that asks one question is 60% more likely to buy. And this is almost like the North Star that brands have always been looking for in terms of engagement, right? A click half the time you’re trying to get rid of the brand, right? So get out of my face. A question is like a big lean in.

Where if you can’t convert that. And so I think brands need to understand that, like, you know, inviting the consumer to ask a question, making the website more receptive to questions, not only wins with the consumer, but it builds your database to feed LLMs. You know, because where brands are underrepresented in all the LLMs, if they that book of truth is partly an inventory issue. It’s like you have to have enough.

Scenarios, you know, how to use the product, what’s it made of, blah, blah, blah, to even start to market the algorithms. And brands don’t do that. They you’re lucky if you see maybe 20 FAQs. And of course, brands could be problem solvers for like a million things if you do it right. Tech companies are very good. So I’m I I want to be careful here. Tech companies, I think, are very good. Apple has a fantastic and have for many years, pre-AI, have just

Bent over backwards to make content available when you have a challenge. And that’s why almost every app Apple question you ask through an LLM is like pretty much right. Same thing with Microsoft. I think tech companies have always been good at having a lot of FAQs and knowledge. Bigger brands that spend the big bucks on the Super Bowl are really, really, I gotta be careful what I say, have opportunities.

Shel Holtz (36:08)
Yeah.

Pete, in in chapter nine, see, I I actually went through the book, y you argue that the next big comms crisis isn’t going to be a social media firestorm, but an AI generated answer, a brand can’t correct. because the infrastructure for rebuttal was never built. This is really interesting. I was just on a panel in Covington, Kentucky, by the way. If I’d known you were in Cincinnati, I’d have given you a call. where

Pete Blackshaw (36:33)
no way.

Shel Holtz (36:37)
We talked about pre bunking as a way to address crises, that you’ve all got all this content out there already. but y you’re saying the crisis is going to come because they haven’t done this. The con the content isn’t there to rebut what the the LLM is is saying. Can you walk me through what that crisis actually looks like and why the old crisis playbook is not gonna be effective in these circumstances?

Pete Blackshaw (36:55)
Yeah.

One of the big issues that I’ve had with a lot of our top clients is about kind of crisis and governance, which is that

You know, winning with answers is a governance issue. And it’s a big reason why I’m been really hesitant to

you know, suggests that this is all about SEO 2.0 or this is something that the search manager deals with. I mean, and you know, if your brand is as strong as your answers, a lot of people are implicated. And I think where companies really struggle in crisis is figuring out who owns it and who’s accountable.

And I do think, you know, I do make a pretty strong pitch in the book that brands have really got need to get in front of this. And, you know, there is a there’s an accountability. Like the they’re they’re bullshit detectors, who’s accountable? they’re kind of saying your products aren’t made the way you claim. Who’s accountable? there’s there’s all sorts of legal liability issues, and I think we are just in the very early stages. At some point you’ll need to interview my

My co-founder Hank Hudipol, who’s doing some really breakthrough breakthrough work around hallucination and accuracy. But you’ve got states that are now filing laws that if if the answer comes out wrong, even through an LLM, you are liable. Think about that in the health zone, right? And so so who so who is responsible? Is that the marketing team? Is that so there’s a you know, I think brands need to start thinking now, and I’m having a lot of leadership meetings and summits on this topic, they’ve really got to figure out the governance area here. And, you know, and it’s one reason why we’re trying to keep the metrics relatively simple so they really have a clear eye into what’s going on. It’s a big reason why we put almost I’d say vulnerabilities is kind of at the top of the list. But let me tell you what you get if you have governance. So without naming names, yeah, we work with some brands that have had

Very, very severe crisis issues where misinformation is even from the government is kind of stirring up the pot in terms of, you know, how the answer engines. And you’ve just you’ve got to get RD to the table, you gotta get legal compliance, marketing, even the CEO, you know, they need to kind of play a critical role. And the good news is there is I’ve done a lot of boardroom discussions and

There’s a lot of heightened sensitivity when a CEO says, My daughter just typed in this and they say we’re this. And they’re like, Why the hell is that? And who’s responsible? So But yeah, these these issues are really, really tricky, and a lot of stakeholders need to come together. And and that is and I think it’ll probably be a little bit blurry in terms of who owns it. Like right now, brands have these AI

Heads of AI. I don’t know if those jobs will last very long. Sometimes you know are they gatekeepers, are they enablers? Are they just, you know, I mean AI is now kind of part of everything. So I think who owns what will be a bit fluid for the coming years.

Neville Hobson (40:17)
Yeah, that’s that’s really good. I think it is. Yep. So it actually interesting Pete what you’re saying, listening listening to how you describe it it amazes me how some companies just are so off the trail with with a lot of what they need not to be in that position. They need to to truly pay attention to where this is all going. And we’ve mentioned this in a number of episodes where we could

Pete Blackshaw (40:24)
That helpful?

Neville Hobson (40:51)
you know, share many examples of where we see instances where that is simply not happening. so let’s talk about AI agents. Yeah. Mm.

Pete Blackshaw (40:58)
But but in fair but in fairness, in fairness.

Let’s just put this in perspective. We’re still only what a little over three years into this. I mean, we’re up to like five billion prompts a day, and this stuff started three years ago. So yeah, companies are always gonna be slow. But the good news with this, I do feel like

There’s a feeling of a sense of urgency. Like there it’s it’s a bit of an shit moment. Like we’ve got to figure this out. And so and then, you know, how do you, you know, how do you really capitalize on this? And even it’s funny, like launching a startup, the one thing you dread is like, my gosh, it’s gonna take forever to get to get a vendor number. And we’ve had some companies that typically take like three years to get a little small startup in Cincinnati a vendor number to literally three weeks. So I do think there’s

There’s a memo, there’s a bell that’s ringing inside the organization. It’s like, shit, the purchase funnel has changed. we are really accountable. Every stock analyst is now digging up dirt on us. Or good news, through these tools, we’ve got to act. Then they’re like, Well, who owns this? Is it wait? It’s digital, right? No, well, wait, maybe it’s RD because they’ve got the most substance, you know, to kind of put to the table, but we don’t really think about them as marketing.

Neville Hobson (41:55)
Mm mm.

Pete Blackshaw (42:22)
Or may is it sales? You know, it’s just like it’s a bit of a cluster right now, but it’s a good conversation. Companies really haven’t had this discussion in earnest for a long time. I think digital is a little is like conveniently tucked into marketing. And now you’ve got a whole different world order that companies need to think through. And it’s gonna be a really big test for like CEOs out there. Who gets it? Who you know, CEOs are gonna play a critical role in orchestrating this stuff. And

And, you know, we’ve been working with a few companies that I won’t name where the CEOs have made a massive difference and in kind of leading, you know, organizations where nobody’s really accountable for doing it to like getting organized around it.

Neville Hobson (43:08)
Yeah. I’d love to hear more stories of people, you know, organizations who really are on the ball with all this because I’m getting tired of hearing all the stories about these companies who are not. They’ve the not that they’ve dropped the ball, they haven’t even grasped the ball yet. In fact, Shel and I’ve talked on a couple of episodes, two conflicting surveys. One about how CEOs are are really coming to the fore and taking control of developing AI rollouts in their in their companies.

and are providing leadership and are doing all these things. Then another survey has completely conflicting information to them. So I mean you just gotta go visit LinkedIn and you’ll see conflicts all over the place, including everyone’s got an e book they want to sell you. That’s that’s the kind of magic, magic bullet handbook.

Pete Blackshaw (43:52)
It depends on how you

classify it. Yeah, I’ve I’ve read all those studies too and you know, and and my view is like a lot of this is it’s is it an AI strategy or it’s something you should have been doing a while ago? So I posted something last week, you know, and you know, almost as a little bit of a counterpoint to the con lions, because I was kind of like, why don’t they ever give love or rewards or recognition to brands that just answer the boring question?

Neville Hobson (44:05)
Right, right.

Pete Blackshaw (44:22)
Right. At some point we’re just gonna say, God, that brand really went out of went out of their way. We should have a recognition. So I just created what I called, you know, the answer cans. And so and I started like and and I and I cited some of the companies that I wrote about in the book that and I don’t even think they use the word AI. Like, yeah, w what do you think is one of the most the best index companies on the web right now in in AI that just shows up consistently.

Neville Hobson (44:34)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (44:49)
Well, I’ll give you a little hint. So if you ask anything related to like sustainability, like what company shows up first?

It’s like Patagonia. They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. Now, I don’t, I doubt they even use the word AI there. You know, but they have been absolutely committed to driving radical transparency in their products, flooding their content with meaningful content. and they have been training the LLMs for years. Sephora, a brand in beauty that’s always been very

Neville Hobson (44:59)
Okay.

Pete Blackshaw (45:26)
Come to the calendar and I will answer you questions. I think that that model lives in the way they approach digital as well. They are severely rewarded by the LLMs. I mentioned a few of the the the I mentioned a few of the tech companies that do that particularly well. A lot of young companies that don’t have big bucks for advertising, they are very intuitive about.

Everybody that goes on my website could be my last customer. So let’s just give them the love of knowledge, of guidance, whatever they want. They are being disproportionately benefited. In fact, one of the things that I have found is that and I work with a lot of big companies that own massive budget. I’ve consistently found that, you know, for big companies, market share under indexes, over, you know, over indexes answer share.

Which means that the younger companies are actually they’re kind of winning on answer share, partly just because they’re it’s not like that they’re trying to spike the system. They’re just wired to answering questions. And so this is where the the the thesis of the book is really simple. I’m almost trying to say this without all the buzzwords and the tech gobbledygook. It’s sort of like if you treat the consumer, you know, if you kind of

Create a bit of a Wikipedia to kind of help the consumer answer every question, you will win big time in the AI world. I have seen that correlation left and right. Instead, most brands make it really complicated. We need an AI strategy. We need an AI strategy for the AI strategy we need. They create all these damn layers. And then you go to their website and they still can’t answer a question. And so this is why it’s almost like forcing the question. It’s like, you know.

The answer economy, not the AI world, the answer economy. And so we’ll see if I’m successful or not.

Shel Holtz (47:24)
All of this when I picture somebody actually doing the things that you talk about, not not from the brand perspective, but from the consumers perspective, I see them going to a chatbot and and entering a question. Sam Altman has been laser focused on the transition from conversational assistance, the chat bots, toward autonomous workflow executing agents. and he says this is a shift you’re going to see.

in the front end of Chat GPT. God knows I spend as much time in Claude Cowork as I as I spend in Claude. what is this shift toward agents, assuming all of the LLMs move in this direction, what does that do to this whole concept?

Pete Blackshaw (48:12)
Yeah, listen, I mean, I write about it a lot in the book and you know, the the tet the subtitle is, you know, how AI agents will decide your brand’s future. yeah, so a lot’s gonna be delegated, but I don’t think it’s gonna I I think there’s a little bit of overhyping that consumers are gonna completely like delegate everything to agencies. I’m not. And and I frankly, I enjoy, you know, the ask through of asking health questions. It’s sort of like, you know, and so I don’t, you know, there are gonna be certain areas where we’re gonna be totally comfortable with like

Delegating the agents, or there are other areas where we’re just gonna wanna be more in control of it. And so, but I don’t think what I’ve said earlier.

impacts any of that. I would say that i in an agentic world, brands still need to catalog their truth and make it marketable and make it visible. And and and you could almost argue that it’s going to be more important to get your act together on marketing the algorithms. Cause here’s one of the things that’s going to be really, really tricky for brands, especially in like these industries that I’ve worked in, like consumer goods and

Food is the algorithms have a very strong bias towards store brands and private label. Now it’s not because they’re tilting the scale in their favor. It’s just that in an agentic world, think about what consumers are going to do. They’re almost going to be brand agnostic. And they say, give me good product at a good price for my family of four, right?

And they’re they might even set a spec, like it’s gotta have X percent product performance. And then the algorithms are gonna do their homework and they’re come back and they say Kirkland. And then they’re gonna be saying Kirkland, Walmart equate. Because you’re gonna find that these store brands where where the and retailers are getting really good at volunteering what their products do, even their green scores, where you know, if you if we overdelegate to agents, I do think brands are in for a really rude awakening that a lot of the

Neville Hobson (49:54)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Blackshaw (50:13)
Grocery lists are full of private label. you know, where it may be the Kirkland product may be 90% of the product superiority of the comparable brand, but at like half the price. And so this is where, you know, so brands, so what brands are gonna have to do, whether they’re preparing for tough questions from consumers like us, or preparing for these agents that are gonna go looking for relevant data to kind of render a judgment, they’re still gonna have to train them.

They’re gonna have to really think about, you know, how to do that the right way. Now we may see different things evolve. Like I’ve talked a lot about the word rep website. I’m probably gonna write a column that suggests that maybe we need a new name called, you know, like a an inventory locker that’s kind of like very, very agent, agent, agent friendly. But but yeah, I think I think brands, yeah, everybody’s waxing poet have got agents, but I keep reminding brands like careful what you ask for on this one.

because you are not prepared and you are going to be really, really surprised at what these agents are recommending. And you’re going to probably lose even more control. So brands are going to have to really think about that one carefully.

Neville Hobson (51:24)
So to that point then, if AI agents increasingly recommend products, services, suppliers, even employers, companies to work for, for instance, what happens to traditional brand marketing?

Pete Blackshaw (51:38)
Well, think it’s gonna have to wrap around a lot of that. I mean these some of you know, listen, I mean branding has always been in the you know, content marketing’s been a big thing well before AI, but they will have to, you know, keep doing some of that, but they may need to dial down the BS factor, they may need to dial down the hyperbole, they may have to dial down the exaggeration.

I mean, here’s one of the things that’s happening. You’ve got two very interesting trends going on. You’ve got the answer economy, you got the creator economy. Everybody at con was gaga about the creator economy. And there’s no question the creator economy is creating massive reach. But hey, one of the interesting things about the creator economy, they do not index in answer engines. Maybe a little bit meta because they’ve got tick to they’ve got, you know, Instagram and but generally, you know, the creators are not getting the love from the answer engines. And why is that?

I think they’re very hesitant. There tends to be a lot of hyperbole and a exaggeration among the crater economy about what the products do. And I think and and sometimes they’re paid, but they’re not disclosed. And so it’s just it’s just it’s a it’s a less it’s a complicated area for the algorithms to kind of take seriously. And so I just think, you know, all these things are gonna have to be really, really carefully thought, you know, thought through, you know, as pr as brands try to

Neville Hobson (52:35)
Hm.

Pete Blackshaw (53:00)
You know, you know, I th I I probably haven’t used the word trust enough. I think what’s gonna be more important than ever goes back to our very, very conver very first conversation when we’re talking about the the rise of blogs. But yeah, brand trust will be critical. And I do think the brands that really think hard about what that means are gonna win. And I know brand trust tends to be a little fluffy. Every I’ve even had investors like, what the hell? How the hell the hell does trust sell cases? But we all know that.

Trust is the currency of advertising in all relationships. And I think AI is just gonna magnify that in a big way. So brands are probably gonna have to really double down in that particular area.

Shel Holtz (53:43)
What about B to B? is is it the same situation? do they need to think differently? No different.

Pete Blackshaw (53:47)
No different.

No different. I mean, every B2B supplier is using Chat GBT to vet other suppliers to vet. If anything, I think B2B is gonna get a massive turbocharge. I do think AI systems are, you know, you know, I I have to worry about that too. It’s like I got RFPs with other, you know, big companies, and you know, they’re kind of using AI to basically kind of, you know, do their research on us versus competition, but

No, I think it’s it’s kinda shy. I mean, I and I’ve done scorecards. I’ve done I have all sorts of indexes that I’ve created, including a B to B one on what are the best vendors across all these different areas, who shows up, who doesn’t. And now there may be certain my guess isn’t on the B to B side, Claude will again probably be the one that is most most focused on. Actually I th I think copilot isn’t bad either, but

But yeah, there probably will be some favorites that the procurement officers use as they’re trying to figure out who’s the right vendor that’s that’s that’s out there. But zero difference in my view.

Neville Hobson (54:55)
Hm. Okay. So what would you advise communication professionals to start doing differently tomorrow morning?

Pete Blackshaw (55:03)
Well, I think they need to look in the mirror, which is, you know, an AI is a mirror and they should, you know, really get their organization internalizing this new reality that your brand is as strong as its answers and these new influencers are shaping their answers. And so I would number two, I would tell every communications professional that they have more leverage than they realize. That brand website, especially the corporate website, which I think generally are more optimized for curiosity than brand sites. Brand sites are very optimized for conversion.

If you go to a corporate site, you know, Nestle.com, I think they’ve done a really, really good job. They even have a section called Ask Nestle, which I love, and have encouraged them to kind of take to the next level. But all that probably is more valuable than it was a year ago. And I would I wouldn’t, you know, and I think some of those things are underfunded. some of them are afterthoughts. Some of those are like, that’s the brochure, but that is really.

powerful. And I also think corporate communications in particular has a lot of leverage to lead because it’s really hard to get like fifty brands within the franchise to kind of like get their act together. And I do think the book of truth may be best developed at the corporate level. But then again, it has to be tomorrow’s definition of corporate communications. I think if you ask brands, they’d say corporate communications is is backwards. They slow things down.

They’re naysayers. They’re not a progressive force in the organization. They’re overly conservative. And if I were heading corporate communications, I would be, no, no, no, no, no. We can actually, we are the lever to win in the answer economy. We have always been sensitive about substance, you know, you know, doing what we say, checking off the compliance boxes. Those, those are all the things that really matter to the LLMs. So yeah, if I were giving that that.

Neville Hobson (56:44)
Mm.

Pete Blackshaw (57:10)
that college football speech to, you know, corporate communications, I would be saying, My friends, this is your day. And let’s look in the mirror and let’s go. And let’s make our CEO a hero because, you know, the the the stakes are going to go up. We’re not going to get the credit we deserve unless we’re more proactive. But we can. Something like that.

Shel Holtz (57:30)
Yeah, remember Richard Edelman saying that about social media and it just didn’t happen. Pete, you probably remember from your previous appearances that we always end with the same question, and that is what didn’t we ask that we probably should have, or that you were expecting us to?

Neville Hobson (57:31)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (57:48)
gosh, what didn’t you ask?

I don’t know. Fair You you do I was surprised you didn’t ask, so Pete did you use AI to help write your book? You know.

Shel Holtz (58:02)
Yeah.

Neville Hobson (58:04)
But

but but you did. In fact, you got a really good page in the in the galleys that I saw explain yeah. Yeah, i that is super what you wrote, really, really and truly. It a it adds

Pete Blackshaw (58:08)
Did you like that? I love that page. I love that.

I love that. And I

did well the funny thing is like I’ve been listening, I mean, you know, sometimes I’ll take a chapter, throw it in a clod and say, Tell I’m fully shit. You know, it’s like but it was all me, but it did help me navigate. And I have this term that I use called dog walk journalism. I’ll take my dog on a walk and I’ll bark out my random thoughts. And AI is wonderful at connecting the first thought with the last thought and kind of giving you a starting point. But but I did have this really intense editor, her name was Angela Morrison.

And she was actually the editor, the partner to William Sapphire, who wrote the column on language. So she was really good. She had this really intense long island draw. And she’s Pete, don’t take it personally, but I am totally blunt. But my gosh, she like took me to town on indefinite pronouns. I thought I felt like I had never learned writing, but that was like the great, it was like a great human in the loop epiphany because she was hitting things that even the LLMs

Neville Hobson (58:59)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (59:04)
Ha ha ha.

Pete Blackshaw (59:12)
Could not catch. And I I was reading the book. I was like, my God, I’m so blessed to have had a really good editors. So

Shel Holtz (59:19)
If I ever work with her, I’ll

Neville Hobson (59:20)
Brilliant.

Shel Holtz (59:21)
be sure to have my copies strunken white by my side.

Pete Blackshaw (59:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you know of any, you know, you guys bump into all sorts of folks and cor my one of my goals, I really want to wake up a lot of corporate communications departments. That’s that’s my sweet spot. I’ve always loved the balance of brand defense and offense. But the offense, the defense side is I I think more urgent and more challenging. So yeah, as you know, you know, I’m doing a lot of I’ll be doing a lot of wake up calls, speeches and workshops. But yeah, if you know folks that need the help, let me know.

Shel Holtz (59:53)
And how can people get in touch with you?

Pete Blackshaw (59:56)
just Pete at brandrank.ai or the answer economy dot com. or they just type my name into an answer engine and you know they can they can they can vet me first and but yeah, it’s in in I’ll I’ll give it to you as well when you advertise the the the the the podcast. But yeah, it was great talking to you guys. I miss I miss our conversations.

Neville Hobson (1:00:16)
Guys.

Yeah, likewise. That was good. Appreciate it.

Shel Holtz (1:00:22)
Yeah, thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Blackshaw (1:00:23)
You bet. Always.

The post AI, trust and the answer economy – Pete Blackshaw on the future of brand credibility appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Everyone from CEOs to politicians has been talking about the likelihood of AI-related job loss, and several companies have already let people go in anticipation that AI can do their work. Ford Motor Company is the latest to rehire those workers when AI proved inadequate for the job. Elsewhere, many of the managers who have let people go regret their decisions, and some companies are revising their hiring plans. To remedy the chaos, Neville and Shel discuss the importance of strategy and knowledge management systems, among other things.

Links from this episode:

‘Talent refresh’ | Ford rehires human staff after AI quality-check tools fail to deliver
Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks
Return of the ‘greybeards’: AI backfired – so Ford had to rehire humans
Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short
Ford rehires ‘greybeards’ after AI tech fails to deliver

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 521 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz

Neville Hobson
And I’m Neville Hobson. Here’s a story that should make every one of us pause before we get too comfortable handing things over to AI. Ford, the automaker, has just rehired somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty veteran engineers. Note the word rehired. The company had let them go in recent years as it leaned into AI-driven quality checks. Ford calls them greybeard engineers. That’s not a throwaway nickname. It’s the whole point of the story. These are the people with decades of experience across multiple product cycles, and Ford let a lot of them go only to discover it needed them back because the AI wasn’t working the way Ford expected. We’ll look into what happened right after this Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly on a call with reporters. Here’s what he said: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” Think about that for a moment. Ford didn’t skip a step. They fed the AI everything that was written down, every design requirement, every documented specification. It still wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t just one system. Ford had installed around nine hundred AI-assisted cameras on the production line specifically to catch quality issues. Nine hundred cameras, and still they couldn’t replace the trained eye of an experienced technician who knows what a problem looks like before it becomes a visible defect. Ford’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, added more context. He said the company had been leaning more and more on automated quality systems, and the results were disappointing. Teams across software, hardware, manufacturing, and supply chain had also been working in isolation from each other, which meant defects were being caught late and fixed under pressure rather than prevented early. Galhotra described this as a find and fix mentality that Ford is now trying to move away from towards genuinely preventing problems before they start. The returning engineers sit right at the center of that shift. They now run mandatory weekly quality and design reviews, hunting for failure points before a single part reaches the factory floor And here’s the part I think matters most for us. A lot of the people who held that hard-won judgment had already walked out the door to suppliers, to retirement before anyone at Ford thought to capture what was in their heads. Poon admitted as much. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through many product cycles,” he said. So Ford had to buy that expertise back three years into this process at real cost. Was it worth it? By Ford’s own numbers, yes. The company has just topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey for mainstream brands for the first time since twenty-ten. That’s sixteen years. CEO Jim Farley says the rehired engineers are already contributing what he called literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, largely through reduced warranty and recall costs. Ford’s even projecting around a billion dollars in cost reduction this year on the back of this quality push. Now, here’s a tension worth sitting with. This is the same Jim Farley who said publicly on other occasions that AI is gonna replace rough-roughly half of all white-collar jobs. And yet here’s his own vice president standing in front of journalists explaining that Ford’s entire quality turnaround depended on bringing back the very human expertise the company thought it could do without. To be clear, this isn’t really a story about AI failing and humans winning. Ford isn’t walking away from AI. Those returning engineers aren’t just doing inspections. They’re training junior staff, and they’re reprogramming the AI tools themselves, feeding them the judgment that design requirements alone couldn’t capture. It’s a hybrid fix, not a retreat. But for anyone in our line of work, comms, knowledge management, anyone thinking about where AI fits into institutional expertise, there’s a sharp lesson underneath all of this. Documentation isn’t the same as judgment, and once the people carrying that judgment are gone, you don’t get it back for free or quickly or easily. I think there’s a bigger question here, too, about how organizations are handling this handover between human expertise and automation, and whether Ford’s experience is a one-off or a warning sign for a lot more companies than just car manufacturers. Shel

Shel Holtz
Yeah, I think it is a warning sign. But I, I don’t think it’s a trend necessarily, the idea that AI AI layoffs are being reversed everywhere. Yeah I’d just be careful about overstating that. There’s really only a handful of well-documented company examples of this. I think it’s easier to say that the way many organizations overestimated how quickly AI could substitute for the experienced judgment of their staff, I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it. Increasing number are recalibrating toward AI human collaboration rather than there are examples though. IBM has reversed course. They didn’t rehire the same people, but they’ve really reversed course on this whole replacement idea. An AI system deployed to take over HR work handled about 94% of incoming requests, but the 6% it couldn’t resolve including situations in- involving ethical judgment, really revealed the limits of all of this into the hands of a large language model. And then the company announced that it planned to triple its US entry-level hiring this year. That’s a pretty significant reversal. Klarna’s the one that … that’s the poster child for all of this. They were one of the first to announce that they were going to replace their customer service with AI. A year later their CEO publicly reversed course, admitting that customer experience had gone down the tank, quality had fallen the company had over-prioritized cost savings which most companies seem to be doing. They’re looking at cost savings and not other ways AI could really improve things or even help the organization grow and that human customer service remained essential. So they went back to hiring customer service representatives, and they expanded their human support. They la- even reassigned engineers and marketers into customer support roles while they were busy rebuilding the support organization that they had decimated. CEO, I think it was he who was quoted saying, “Cost, unfortunately, seems to have been too predominant evaluation factor.” that said I think it is worth noting that according to one research organization, I hadn’t heard of them before, but OrgView, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment, and among that number, 55% admit that wrong decisions about those redundancies made, 32% of US hiring managers said they eliminated a role primarily due to AI later rehired for the same or similar positions, that according to Robert Half. This is definitely something we need to be looking at. I think what Ford has done is, as you say a warning sign, but I don’t think there’s a clear trend yet that people who off in order to accommodate AI are suddenly reversing and rehiring yet

Neville Hobson
No, I agree. That doesn’t seem to be a trend. What is a trend is the laying off element of it as opposed to rehiring. So the… I think there, there’s a good question for our audience in all of this. How many organizations right now are automating roles without first extracting what the people they’re letting go know, their knowledge? Ford’s mistake wasn’t using AI, I mentioned earlier. It was letting the knowledge holders leave before capturing anything from them. That’s a sequencing failure, not a technology failure. So is knowledge capture before AI rollout ever ac-actually built into transformation plans, I wonder? Or is it always an afterthought that only gets addressed once something breaks?

Shel Holtz
It’s an interesting question.

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
when we first started this show 21 years ago, knowledge management was a big issue, and we talked about knowledge management and knowledge management systems, and they have fallen by the wayside even though there are still efforts to build them out. I think the need for clean, consistent data in order to run AI inside your organization is bringing the idea back, although not with the kind of notoriety that it had. There were books being written about knowledge management back 20, 20 years ago. But knowledge capture is an interesting thing because, there’s so much ta- tacit knowledge walks out the door and goes home every night. It’s not implicit knowledge that you can store in a database, and this was the problem with knowledge management systems, right? Is you’re trying to capture tacit knowledge, and it had to be tagged, which meant the people looking for it had to know which tag was used in order to retrieve it. That knowledge could be sitting there, but if you’re searching with the wrong tag, you’ll never find it. So it, it remains a challenge how to do this. I remember one effort at knowledge capture. Was it Intel? I’m gonna struggle to remember, but it was an early wiki where people would just leave their knowledge that occurred to them. “Oh, this is how you do this,” and they were trying to capture it that way. I don’t know if that’s still around. I never hear about it anymore. I- like I expect, I can’t even remember for sure what company it was, but have been efforts at this.

Neville Hobson
Yeah

Shel Holtz
and with the AI situation and companies like Ford finding the knowledge isn’t there once the people leave and the AI isn’t equipped to handle everything just based on was in the databases that it had been fed, I think we’re gonna have to revisit this whole idea of knowledge management and get it right this time because it’s still far from perfect

Neville Hobson
Yeah. Thinking about Jim Farley and what he said that AI will replace half of white-collar work, while his own VP describes a turnaround built on rehiring the humans they’d let go. I-is this Ford being inconsistent, or is it actually a realistic picture, AI displacing some roles while creating new dependency on a smaller pool of s- pool of senior experts? I wonder if that’s it. There’s also a related point to that. Could this be a warning? You, y-you mentioned– You used that word a minute ago in this case about h-hollowing out effect. If companies keep pushing out mid-career and senior staff in favor of AI, who trains the next generation of greybeards when today’s greybeards retire for good? ‘Cause that will happen sooner or later.

Shel Holtz
There’s also this idea of institutional knowledge that is not necessarily captured in any systems. It’s because they have been there, as was pointed out in this article, through multiple product cycles. There are things that they learned that are not a specific quality measure or whatever it is that they’re using in their work that now is gonna be done by the AI. They bring that institutional knowledge to the job, and y- you may not need as many of them as you had before if the AI can legitimately do some of this work. But some of those people who have been there through those product cycles and have acquired that institutional knowledge, they’re still gonna need to be there. I don’t know how you capture institutional knowledge. I have seen this in an organization that shall remain unnamed, but that you and I are b- both very familiar with, that, that hollowed out staff and let its institutional knowledge go, and is paying a dear price for that

Neville Hobson
Yeah. It got me thinking a bit about I guess drawing upon some science fiction movies that I’ve seen over the years but also now looking at where we are with technology tools that make it very easy for people to literally dump their knowledge about something into a device or a system that records that saves it. Could we be seeing a, the beginnings of something or the idea certainly that may catch on with people that this needs to be built into behaviors in an organization that depending on your role, and I can’t say it could be everyone, but maybe it should be, that you’ve got some means that you work on a project and part of your in a sense, your the kind of conditions of your employment, let’s say, is that on completing a project or planning a project and then com- wha- whatever it might be, you’ve gotta record your thoughts on the planning and execution of that project how you did this or that. And that’s then saved. Okay. I haven’t– I’m not even getting into privacy i-issues or data protection or none of that. That may well be the case. I’m thinking of one science fiction film I saw where, a few, some years ago now, where people had, It reminds me of Plaud, actually, a little credit card sized tool.

Shel Holtz
say

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
that. Yep

Neville Hobson
That they spoke into, recorded something. It then saved it to their account, let’s say, on their employer’s website or someplace or whatever it might be, that then broke it down into all the constituent elements that the company needed to have in order to retrieve that information on demand or make use of it in some other way. So some of the tech exists to do that, but certainly not on an organized scale such as what we’re discussing that might be. But how long might it be before that happens?

Shel Holtz
Aside from the privacy concerns, wearing a device that captures everything you say, having all of that from all employees fed to an AI that’s able to sort it out and put it in the appropriate place so that now that becomes part of its knowledge base, I can see that. I just can’t see employees tolerating it very well. I certainly wouldn’t want to have every word I’m saying during the day recorded and saved by the organization, and I’m a senior executive. That’s just ethically wrong I think. But technically I think we’re not that far away from

Neville Hobson
No, we’re not. We’re not.

Shel Holtz
do that now

Neville Hobson
You raise a good point but I would counter that in a sense arguing that it’s gonna be if you don’t do it, someone else is gonna do it, and you’re out of a job if you don’t do that. I’m thinking of some of the things that you see around you nowadays as a matter of course, ranging from things like police, ambulance workers fire department people wearing video camera, body cams that record everything. I have a friend of mine who’s just bought one that he feels safe wearing this on his commute to work on the train. He goes to London and then on the underground train. I can, I can–

Shel Holtz
use case. These are, these f- yeah I think,

Neville Hobson
it’s not. It’s not. It’s rec- it records the picture of him. That could be– The purposes might be very different, but the tech would be the same.

Shel Holtz
Oh, the text’s the same. The

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
is

Neville Hobson
Yeah. For now it is. Yeah, it is. But this could become a matter of course. I’ve considered that too. If I were still actively working in a traditional job, getting in a commute to London or whatever it might be, I would probably get a body cam

Shel Holtz
Yeah, the okay, the use case there is voluntary, right? You choose

Neville Hobson
I do have that choice

Shel Holtz
Think of Meta, which was capturing the keystrokes of every employee in order to train its models, and the opposis- opposition to that grew so loud that they recently said, “Okay, this is now a voluntary program. Only employees who opt in will have their keystrokes recorded.” And it– now you’re talking about every

Neville Hobson
Yeah, I know, but,

Shel Holtz
the workplace?

Neville Hobson
sure.

Shel Holtz
gonna happen. Yeah.

Neville Hobson
so this is– enters that bigger debate precisely on is it gonna happen or is it not? So in the case of Meta, what they did, I’m thinking back now to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of twenty eighteen, they did this ov- covertly without telling people, and then they lied about it all. So why the hell would you work for a company like that in the first place? That, crosses, crosses my mind. But

Shel Holtz
Yeah

Neville Hobson
I think the one other point occurs to me that the in the case of Ford, that has got me thinking. The fix they had, i.e., rehiring the people they, they got rid of, works because those engineers were still available to rehire, right? So what happens to the next company that has the same realization five or ten years from now when the generation with that tacit knowledge has genuinely retired and isn’t coming back? That’s arguably the real warning sign, not this instance, but the next one

Shel Holtz
Oh, absolutely. They’re gonna have to go for the next best thing, which is hiring humans that can handle the more complex problems that arise, but they don’t have the institutional knowledge. They haven’t been through any product life cycles. Maybe they hire away from competitors. Maybe they hire their old engineers back by offering them more money than they ever dreamed of, but yeah, that sort of defeats the purpose too, doesn’t it? No, I think what has to happen is that the companies that are considering replacing people with AI don’t just count the number of who are doing the job and how much an AI can conceivably do, and then get rid of the equivalent number of staffers. You’ve gotta be really strategic about this. I think you need to inventory all of the tasks that you’re talking about performing and identify which of those are better done by AI. Heaven knows there are things that AI is not good at,

Neville Hobson
Yeah

Shel Holtz
pretty widely recognized sets of activities. So looking at what you’re gonna need people for and then determining, okay, if we’re gonna let people go how many we still need in order to avoid the kind of outcome that Ford experienced? And I think if they’re strategic, if they apply some formulas to this again, inventorying absolutely every task you’re gonna be looking at replacing and figuring out which of those are going to work with AI you’re probably gonna end up making better decisions and not have to do what Ford did. The other thing that I would look at though is how does all of this align with your values? Because no matter what you do, it is in conflict with your stated corporate values, which are hanging on the wall in the conference rooms and, employees have copies of them, and in my company, they’re on every truck that’s out there you’re gonna end up with a very disengaged cynical workforce

Neville Hobson
Yeah. The cynical part of me suggests that’s actually happening a lot already. G-question mark, do they really believe those values on the side of the trucks down the road, all that kind of stuff? So it’s a kind of fluid environment we seem to be in. And I’m wondering w- as well, will we begin to see, I don’t know on your CV or your resume on LinkedIn one of your major selling points is gonna be the fact that you have deep institutional knowledge. You probably wouldn’t wanna say about your employer, but what you really want to be saying is about the industry or about something that sa- that kinda says, “I’m very portable from the get-go.” So maybe we’re gonna see that

Shel Holtz
Oh, could be. It would certainly be better than open to work as a little arc on the pr-profile photo on LinkedIn. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of “For Immediate Release.”

The post FIR #521: AI Layoffs Are Here. Wait. Strike That. Reverse It. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the long-form FIR episode for June, Neville and Shel consider the causes and implications of surging anti-AI sentiment in the US (which is also growing in other developed countries), as well as the increasing use of “shadow AI” in organizations. Other reports include studies documenting the continued erosion of trust in mainstream news media, the growth of personal branding among communication professionals, a shocking self-inflicted reputation crisis for a UK business, and evidence that employees aren’t reading your internal communications (unless maybe they are). Dan York shares information on Collections in the Mastodon 4.6 release and the W Social situation in his Tech Report.

Links from this episode:

‘Shadow AI becomes a massive enterprise liability’: New study claims most of us are now using unauthorized AI tools at work
FIR #510: Should Companies Embrace Shadow AI?
FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company?
The Rise of Shadow AI is a Double-Edged Sword for Corporate Innovation
Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers
AI’s Public Relations Emergency
AI Data Centers and the Public Relations Challenge for Business Owners
Wowcher apologises after email appears to reference crocodile attack on toddler
Digital News Report 2026
From Invisible To Influential: The Personal Branding Shift In Corporate Communications
Wowcher apologises for email referencing toddler crocodile attack
Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
Wowcher apologises over email that referenced crocodile attack on boy
LinkedIn post (Queen of CRM): “I’ve had 16 messages about this email…”
LinkedIn post (Flo Powell): Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
The Attention Recession: Why Your Employees Aren’t Reading What You Send
State of Workplace Communication 2026: Why 44% of Employees Tune Out

Links from Dan York’s Report

Designing Collections
Mastodon 4.6
The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals
W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty
W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 520 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in the UK.

Shel Holtz: And it’s good to be back with you for our long-form episode. We really enjoy doing our short midweek episodes, but these are an opportunity to dig into some meaty topics. And we have six for you this week. Obviously, we’re going to be talking about some artificial intelligence, but not exclusively. So we have some other communication-focused topics to share with you, and some comments from listeners from the last month’s worth of episodes. And to get to those, Neville, how about a recap of what we’ve talked about in the last month?

Neville Hobson: In the long-form episode 515 for May, on the 25th of May, we led with the rise of AI agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. We also talked about AI copyright lawsuits, Google’s search overhaul, what’s becoming standard media relations practice on podcasts, the question of whether the time is coming for value to be at the forefront of client billing, and the rise of short-form video clippers. A lot of content in that bumper issue. Hefty but good, as we like to say. And then The Economist is building two versions of its web presence: one for human readers, one structured for AI agents. In FIR 516 on the first of June, we discussed what this means for communicators and raised an important counterpoint. Websites aren’t going away. We said the answer is to do both, not abandon one for the other. And we have at least one comment on this one, don’t we, Shel?

Shel Holtz: We have several comments on this one, starting with Sylvia Cambié, who says: “A really interesting episode. Your point about the need to be deliberate when we write copy for websites and think about what an agent would extract is fascinating. Here’s a task that communicators can do well. Great to see new tasks like this emerging for comms. It is funny to hear that AI likes Q&As. When I was a journalist, this was considered a real no-no, a sign of lazy journalism. How times change.” By the way, The Economist has published a great article by Harvard Kennedy School fellow Shui Fang about the world entering the age of machine audiences and agents. And Neville, you replied that her point about Q&As is spot on, and you hadn’t thought about it from a journalism angle before. It’s a good example of how context changes everything. What signals laziness in one setting becomes good or best practice in another. And yes, communicators are well placed to take this on. Structuring content with clarity and precision is what good communicators do. The agent readability requirement just makes the skill more explicit and more consequential. Then we have a comment from Sally Getch, rhymes with “sketch.” She says: “I started this comment on the website, but realized I needed to revise it. My first thought is, WTF is wrong with The Economist’s regular website that it’s unintelligible to AI agents? In my experience, AI does a pretty good job of reading and understanding websites, and it seems to be able to find and do things that the search engines we have all spent decades trying to appeal to could not, like transcribing PDFs and audio files. We use them for those purposes ourselves. Likewise, images with good alt text improve the understanding of both bots and humans. It felt like a flashback to the days of ‘we need to make a separate mobile website.’ I don’t think you need a separate site, but you might need a better one. I asked Stefan about this” — that’s her husband and a software developer — “and he said that the reason for the markdown is because it’s fewer tokens for the agent to consume and therefore costs less. There are some new and therefore not widely tested WordPress plugins that can convert your pages to Markdown and index them to LLMS.txt. If you edit a page or a post, they generate a new .md file. Another thought I had was that one thing that might interfere with agents ingesting content on media sites is ads. They sure do that for humans.” And then Vincent Bruneau left a short comment saying: “Parallel content architectures for human readers and AI agents is the clearest signal yet that the two audiences have genuinely diverged. And if The Economist is doing it, the question for every communications team is not whether to think about this, but how far behind they really are.”

Neville Hobson: Good comments. I think Sally’s in particular had me thinking. And I think all I’d say to Sally’s really good, insightful opinion there is, I recommend you read The Economist article explaining in considerable detail why they’re doing this. I think we link to that. The trouble is it’s behind a paywall, but there are ways around that kind of thing. Anyway, thanks to those commenters. So then in episode 517 on the ninth of June, we looked at what communicators should do when leadership makes a loud public bet that doesn’t pay off. Yes, it’s AI we’re talking about. And what happens when the bills start piling up and companies realize the cost isn’t tenable? Can communications repair the resulting damage from such a management failure that wasn’t a technology one? Partially, we said, but only if leaders are willing to be honest about what happened and why. And there are comments.

Shel Holtz: One comment, and this is also from Vincent Bruneau, who has also left a comment on 518, and I just want to tell Vincent, thank you for being such an interactive participant in our episodes. It’s great to see you here. Vincent writes: “The gap between the loud public bet and the quiet walk-back is where employee trust goes to die, and communications can only repair it if leadership is willing to be honest about what actually happened. Partially is the right answer, and probably more than most organizations will achieve.”

Neville Hobson: Terrific. So next: PR misread social media in 2007, and the internet in 1995, and desktop publishing before that. The disciplines that grew from these were largely built by people outside the profession. Are we about to do it again with AI? In episode 518 on the 15th of June, we explored why PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate, we would argue — and we did — and what they should be doing, noting that time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with. That’s a very concise summary of that episode, but we talked about a lot in that episode. And we have comments, right?

Shel Holtz: Again from Vincent Bruneau. He says: “‘Time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with’ is the line that exposes most current AI strategy in PR. Efficiency without redirection just produces idle capacity, not transformation. The return to relational, face-to-face work as the actual opportunity is the most hopeful and least obvious takeaway.”

Neville Hobson: Now, we have known about the media bias effect for decades — the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. In FIR 519 on the 22nd of June, we looked at what this hostile misinformation effect means for organizational communicators, discussing what strategies might look like, including pre-bunking and the value of calm, rapid response. If you look up pre-bunking, by the way, you’ll get an answer on Google. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and by the way, I was on a panel at the PRSA Public Affairs and Government Section Summit in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. We had the panel on Friday, just yesterday. Good God, I was in Kentucky yesterday. And pre-bunking came up there as a way to address misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. It’s really just the notion that you can anticipate what people are going to attack you on. And if you already have the content that addresses that, it becomes very easy to point to it. And you don’t look reactive when you’re pointing to content that’s already there. You’re not inventing new stuff to address it. So that’s, I think, an important practice for communicators to consider given the state of the media environment these days. Circle of Fellows is going to be posted very, very soon. We did record it. It was two episodes on the same day. Brad Whitworth hosted the first one, I hosted the second one. And the reason for this was that this is the episode where we introduce our new fellows, and there are five of them, and they are across time zones. And the only way we could make this work for people who are in Australia and all over the world was to break this into two. So those will be posted soon, and you’ll have the opportunity to meet our five new fellows. The next episode of Circle of Fellows — episode 131, and we do this once a month, so 131 of these is, I think, noteworthy — that will be on Thursday, July 23rd, at noon Eastern time. The topic is the evolving media landscape and the value of ethical journalism. I’ll be moderating that one with Diana Degan, who is one of our 2026 class of fellows, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Waugh. So if you would like to participate in that in real time, mark that on your calendars. That covers our pre-topic discussion. We’ll start the conversation around our six topics right after this.

Neville Hobson: Shadow AI is a topic we’ve returned to more than once on For Immediate Release, and with good reason, because the story keeps developing and the numbers keep getting harder to ignore. Shadow AI is the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools, applications, or models by employees without the formal approval, monitoring, or oversight of an organization’s IT or security teams. It typically happens when workers use public, consumer-grade tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or third-party browser extensions instead of tools approved by the employer — Copilot, for instance, a common one — to speed up tasks, brainstorm, or analyze data. Cast your mind back to July 2024, when in FIR 419 we asked whether shadow AI was an evil lurking in the heart of your company. At the time, a Cyberhaven report had found that 27.4% of the content employees were feeding into AI tools was sensitive: customer data, source code, confidential HR records. It was a striking figure, and it pointed to a tension that was already building between what employees wanted to do and what their employers were prepared to sanction. By February 2025, in FIR 449, we were reporting that employee use of shadow AI was surging — half of all employees, some studies were suggesting. The appetite was clearly there. The question was whether organizations were keeping pace, and by most accounts they weren’t. Then in April this year, in FIR 510, we put a sharper question on the table: should companies simply embrace shadow AI? Not fight it, not just manage it, but lean into it? Because by that point it was becoming clear that the crackdowns weren’t working, and the productivity gains employees were quietly achieving were real. Now we have new data. And it moves the needle again. A June 2026 survey carried out by Wakefield Research for PagerDuty — a digital operations platform that automates incident management, alerting, and on-call scheduling for IT and DevOps teams — reported that two-thirds of US workers, that’s two in every three, are now using AI tools at work that their company hasn’t approved, in spite of knowing the rules. More than half received informal warnings to stop. Nearly half faced formal consequences — official warnings, disciplinary action — and they carried on regardless. Perhaps the most telling finding is this: 88% of those workers have shared work-related information with public AI systems. We’re not talking about using a tool to draft a meeting agenda. People are uploading emails, sharing meeting notes, entering customer information, and in nearly a third of cases, inputting sensitive business documents, financial data included. There’s also a striking confidence gap emerging. Nearly three-quarters of workers and 77% of senior leaders believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. Whether or not that’s true, it tells you something important about the dynamic inside organizations right now. This isn’t a case of employees feeling lost and reaching for unauthorized tools out of confusion. They’re reaching for them out of conviction. And this is worth noting: one reason employees may feel less obligated to follow AI rules is the perception that company policies are inconsistently applied. According to PagerDuty’s report, while 86% believe their company has formal AI policies in place, more than four-fifths — 81% — believe those rules are applied differently to leadership than to the rest of the workforce. So here’s the question I want to ask. If two-thirds of your workforce is already doing this, if warnings, policies, and even disciplinary action haven’t slowed it down, is the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use effectively over? Is the current wave of anti-AI sentiment sweeping the US playing a role here? Shel, we’ll be talking about that in a bit. If the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use is over, what does responsible AI governance actually look like now?

Shel Holtz: AI governance is just in complete disarray, I believe, right now. I’m sure there are some companies that have their AI governance in good shape, but I think overall — and the research seems to bear this out — it’s chaos out there. I think you probably have a variety of different situations from organization to organization. You have governance that people look at and say, “This is ridiculous.” You have governance that employees are not aware of, or that has not been well communicated. I think there’s a variety of reasons that we’re seeing this — governance that even leaders are not adhering to, and you alluded to this, and that’s very visible. You hear stories of employees being told, “You have to use Copilot because we’re an Office 365 shop and we get Copilot with it, and it’s been extended to all of your Office 365 tools, your Outlook email, your Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and Excel — all of these things are now AI-enabled, so use Copilot.” And then you hear that the executive vice president for operations is happily using Claude all the time, while you also have somebody in HR who’s using ChatGPT, and employees roll their eyes and say, “Well, if they’re going to do it, I’m going to do it. I’m just not going to tell anyone.” They’re using their own accounts or billing it through their expense system for twenty bucks a month, and nobody’s even noticing, because who’s paying attention to a twenty-dollar-a-month charge? It’s terrible. And I think there’s a lot that has to happen, and it should happen, and it must happen, in order for organizations to get their arms around this. The first is more communication from leaders about their expectations. We just had a town hall where our CEO told employees explicitly, “We want you to use this.” He talked about caution about exposing client information or anything else that’s proprietary. He talked about the fact that our Copilot account allows us to keep all of this data in the company. It doesn’t get exposed to the models for training purposes and the like. And that’s one of the reasons we want employees to use that. And that was the caution he gave: if you’re using the others, you’ve got to be really, really careful about that. But I also think that employees need to have a voice in this. If they’re going to embrace it, they need to feel like they own it. And again, I’ll talk about where I work. And I’d love to take credit for this, but this was not my doing — there is an AI committee. And this is not IT people and leaders and the like. We have project engineers and project managers, frontline people on this, including one or two who were skeptical at the outset. And it’s a very enthusiastic group, and we’re planning a company-wide activity because we want employees to have that voice in this. We want them to feel like they’re part of what the direction is with AI — what tools we adopt, what policies we adopt. It’s like anything else in the organization. I mean, think about value statements, for example. If employees feel like they had a say in determining what the company’s values are, they’re going to embrace them. If it’s leadership coming out saying, “Here are our values, live these,” and employees go, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t see that in practice in the organization, and they don’t align with my values,” then you’ve got trouble. It’s the same thing here. So if this is foisted on employees who are already figuring out other ways to do this that are better for them, you end up with all kinds of problems. One, for example, is you’ll find that there are employees who have solved big problems in their jobs and made themselves more efficient and more productive, or have been able to grow something beyond where it was using AI, and they don’t share it, because they don’t want to admit that they used some tool that isn’t authorized in the organization. So you have fifty other employees doing the same job the old way and not benefiting from what this first employee learned. That’s terrible. We need to get our arms around this. And I think communicators have a huge role to play here, because let’s face it, this is not about policy. This is not about technology. This is entirely about communication.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think the policy hypocrisy point, if I can call it that, needs pushing on directly. According to the survey, if 81% of workers believe AI rules are applied differently to leadership than to everyone else, that’s not a compliance problem. It’s a legitimacy problem, surely. No AI governance framework can work if employees don’t believe it applies equally to the people setting the rules. So that makes total sense to me — it won’t work. Do you think, if this is widespread — and there’s the worry, it seems to me, if it’s widespread — do you think any organization can recover trust on this without visible, demonstrable accountability at the top? Where does the buck stop in that case?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely there needs to be visible accountability at the top. But if there is, yes, you can recover trust. You lose trust a lot faster than you can rebuild it. So rebuilding it is going to take time, it’s going to take a plan, but it absolutely can be rebuilt. And again, I think this is where communicators come in, to say, “Okay, let’s develop a plan and a strategy around this.” Does your company have a committee that engages the front line in the discussion that is leading to this? If not, consider that. Does your company communicate the policies well? Does it share success stories with employees? There needs to be a strategy for this. You can’t just throw it out there like, you know, a new HRIS — we’ve adopted Workday, you let everybody know once, and they start recording their time there and requesting their PTO there, and everybody figures it out, and it’s no big deal. This is not that. We need to have a long-term strategy that we can adapt as things change, because as you know, in the AI world things change a lot, quickly. I don’t know if you read that Sam Altman has announced that there are going to be massive changes to the ChatGPT interface. He said the chatbot is over — this is an agentic thing now — and what you’re going to see on ChatGPT will reflect that. So people who think of AI as a place where you go type a query into a box — I’m sure there’s going to still be a way to ask a question and get an answer, but that’s not the focus anymore. What does that do to employees who are going to a tool and seeing these changes? We need to be able to pivot pretty quickly. But we need a plan that will accommodate that kind of change, but also move us forward in getting the benefit from AI and also rebuilding that trust. And by the way, one of the things I think employees would love to hear — and I don’t remember where I read this, it was just in one of the newsletters I got, it may have been Shelly Palmer — is that we’re not talking enough about using AI to grow the organization. We talk about being more efficient and saving money and saving time, which is all great. But AI can actually help your organization grow. And we’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about how to do that. We’re not talking about the role employees could play. And if employees knew that that’s what they were contributing to, I think there might be a bit more enthusiasm around it.

Neville Hobson: Let’s take a look at this confidence gap a bit. This is where nearly three-quarters of workers believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. This strikes me as genuinely new territory. Shadow IT was about convenience, right? This feels more like a values clash — employees who believe they are the more capable party, acting accordingly. Is this the moment, do you think, where the traditional model of IT as gatekeeper finally breaks down for good?

Shel Holtz: Yes and no. I think those employees are right to a great extent. They know how to use this tool for their job better than IT ever could, because this is not Excel, right? It certainly isn’t something like an enterprise resource planning system or a customer relationship management system, where IT is clearly going to be an effective gatekeeper. This is where every employee is going to use it differently based on their job, based on their role, their department, their function — and they know best. And I think where IT still needs to be the gatekeeper is on things like cost. If employees are out there creating agents that are just continually looping 24 hours a day, you’re going to burn through a lot of tokens, and the company’s going to have a pretty considerable impact on their bottom line. So there’s absolutely a role for IT to play, but it’s on the technical side, not the application side. How it’s used — I don’t think IT can help you much there at all. They’re not experts at prompt building. They’re not experts at skill or agent building. That’s really not their job. They’re looking at the nuts and bolts of it. So I think there’s still a role there, as a gatekeeper on that side of it. I think policies about how much you use agents and how often you run them and how many tokens you burn through, and education around that — that’s probably an IT thing. And communicators should be working with their IT teams to convey that information. But in terms of how I’m going to use this — man, IT can’t tell me how to use this as a communicator, and I don’t think they have any interest in doing that either.

Neville Hobson: That’s good. Although I would argue that there’s probably a learning experience ahead for IT in that regard, because IT has had a history, I suppose, of dabbling in stuff that is not their domain at all. They see everything as an IT project. So some behavior change is due, I think.

Shel Holtz: Heck, yeah. I remember in the early days of email, there was a company I was doing consulting for that had a CIO who had to approve every email that went to all employees. And I didn’t work there very long, because I looked the CIO right in the eye and I said, “Really? Does your printer approve everything that goes out in print?” Because that’s essentially what it was, right? But no, I think there are more IT departments these days that recognize, especially with AI, that their role is not to tell engineers how to use this or accountants how to use this. Certainly our IT department is very supportive of having employees figure out what the use cases are. They’re not even dabbling in that. Well, let’s stick with this topic of AI, because AI has lost the public. We’re not talking about some public skepticism. This is a flat-out rejection by the vast majority of the American public. And Neville, when we talk about this, we’ll also talk about the UK and Europe. But how vast is vast? There’s a new Pew survey out this month that found that just 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society. Sit with that for a minute. 16%. Forty percent expect the impact on society to be negative, and about a third think it will personally harm them. Right? Got that? A third think that AI is going to be harmful to them. The people most hostile to AI are the young. Among Gen Z adults, nearly half think AI will be bad for society. And yet that same group uses it more than anyone else — two-thirds of them. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology makes the point that this is the real emergency, because the attitudes people form in their late teens and early 20s are the ones that stick for life. Advertisers have always known this. And right now, an entire generation is forming an anti-AI view at exactly the age where those views get locked in. And this isn’t just polling either. It’s gone public and physical. We’ve had graduates booing AI at commencement ceremonies across the country this spring, at one point literally drowning out former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as he tried to tell them to go shape the technology’s future. And then there are the data centers, which is where all this abstract unease turns into a concrete fight. Seven out of ten Americans now oppose having an AI data center built in their area. And that reminds me — I saw in The New York Times just this morning an article that said this community actually wants an AI data center. Like that’s a newsworthy thing now. Community opposition has blocked or delayed something like $64 billion in projects. This is showing up as a talking point in the 2026 midterm elections. And in a handful of disturbing cases, it has tipped over into threats and even violence, with workers on the construction sites of these data centers being assaulted by members of the community. And the resistance isn’t just coming from outsiders. It includes the very employees we’re trying to get to adopt AI inside our organizations — which goes back to our preliminary conversation, Neville. Think about it. If only 16% of the public thinks AI is a net positive, it’s likely that that many, maybe even more, among your employees feel that way. Pew shows usage and approval moving in opposite directions. Half of adults now use these tools, up from a third just two years ago, and a lot of them are using it because their boss told them to use it, while at the same time they distrust it and maybe even despise it. And that’s the gap we have to manage internally. We can talk about the PR challenge AI companies are facing, but let’s talk first about what communicators actually can do about this internally. You have to acknowledge the fear instead of dismissing it. The job-loss anxiety is rational, and pretending otherwise just torches your credibility. We need to separate adoption from advocacy. People can use the tools well without having to love them. We’ve seen this with other tools. I remember — I can’t remember what the tool was that I was using for charts and graphs, this goes way, way back into like the 1990s — but I wanted to use Harvard Graphics, and I was told, “No, our IT department doesn’t support Harvard Graphics.” So we really have to help people understand: look, this is the tool we’re using in the job. You don’t have to love it, you just have to use it. We have to give employees a voice in the rollout rather than just a mandate, because forced use with no input is exactly what breeds resentment. As I mentioned before, I’m on the AI committee where I work, with other frontline employees and non-IT managers and people who are being asked to use it. And we need to lean on trusted peers to carry the message, not executive proclamations, because executive enthusiasm is part of what employees are skeptical about in the first place. As for the AI companies themselves, they’re in damage control right now. They’ve lost the chance to set the agenda. The most striking sign of that is this latest techlash. Tech still polled better than politicians. Today AI polls below every major political candidate, which means the political cost of cracking down on it has basically evaporated. They had a window to set expectations early, honestly, with community buy-in. They missed it. And now they’re negotiating from a deficit. And from where I sit, that’s an argument for startups to embrace PR and communications, because I don’t think any of them really did. If they did, they would have had a PR person telling them that going out there and saying, “This is going to cause massive job loss,” is a really stupid approach to building support for what you’re doing. And yet that’s what they did.

Neville Hobson: It certainly is a muddy picture, it seems to me. I was looking at the Pew report whilst you were talking, and this is a hefty piece of research, I have to say, but a lot of striking contradictions appear to me in trying to understand why this is happening. I mentioned when we were chatting earlier that I don’t see news headlines in the mainstream media in the UK about groundswells of anti-AI sentiment in this country. Not to say there isn’t any, but it’s certainly not driving the news agenda in any way that I could tell. But I found it most interesting — just to break out some snippets from Pew’s research — they say the share of Americans who say they use ChatGPT, which they say is the dominant one of all the chatbots, the one preferred by most people, that usage by Americans has more than doubled since 2023, which is when it became part of public consciousness. Interesting, I think. They report using ChatGPT far more than other chatbots. They say the second most-used platform is Gemini, followed by Copilot and Meta AI. I was surprised at that, because I’ve started using Claude, and that’s way, way down their list, according to Pew. They also talk about — I found this interesting in the context of something else that I mentioned — that Americans are more likely to say, according to Pew, that chatbots help rather than hurt their productivity, knowledge, and creativity. That would explain why more people are using it. But what about the folks who — what about all this anti-AI sentiment that’s emerging? Are they not using this? Are they part of the other percentage that doesn’t? An interesting side explainer, I suppose, to understanding the wider picture about smartwatches, smart home devices, and other things like smart speakers, where you can also use AI. The thing is, though — and clearly I’m not the demographic here, Shel, so this comment is anecdotal —

Shel Holtz: They are using it. Yeah, I’m sure they are.

Neville Hobson: You end up using AI and not realizing you’re using AI. So I’ve taken to using Google’s little widget that they run, the AI mode. 99% of everything I search uses that, unless I’m asking just for a phone number, which is not the kind of thing I normally ask, actually — I don’t phone anyone these days. I often ask questions like, “How many miles is it from A to B?” I often ask that kind of question. And if I use Google’s AI mode, it will ask me, like, “What do you want — kilometers or miles? Direct line, as the bird flies, or roundabout?” I don’t want those questions, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah. “Freeways, no freeways,” yeah.

Neville Hobson: Exactly. So that’s interesting, all that stuff. A majority of Americans — 60%, so that is a majority — say they read AI summaries at the top of search results. I would imagine that that is growing. Another 10% aren’t sure if they do that or not. Interesting. So Americans predict AI’s impact on society and on them will be more negative than positive. So notwithstanding the majority of people using it, which has doubled since 2023 on ChatGPT, most say the impact on society and them will be more negative than positive. So is that what’s driving the anti-AI sentiment? Younger adults are more wary of the potential impact on society and on them than older groups, yet the younger groups are the ones using it most. So there’s, to me, a paradox there. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say AI is advancing too quickly. So you can now see that you can actually grab some metrics that are the “yes, but” to the “I use it, I’m getting benefit.” Yes, but — so maybe this is about balance. So another metric: most think AI will make their personal information less secure. And there’s that kind of niggle in the back of your mind. Then there’s some political stuff they go into in some detail here. But it got me thinking: maybe you can have this. “This is beneficial, I get what I want out of it, but I hate it.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But nevertheless, either way, this is not a good landscape to be gazing at in the context of where AI companies are developing their products. As I mentioned, I’ll be using Claude a lot in my migration experiment. I use Claude and ChatGPT interchangeably. I’ve got too much invested in ChatGPT just to give it up. And in fact, some of the stuff I ask ChatGPT to do, particularly if it’s summarizing something, I quite like what it provides — sometimes better than Claude. Sometimes I do both: give me this, and I give the same prompt to the other one. Projects and those kinds of things in Claude I’m not using as much as I thought I would. So the point, though, is that maybe there is, Shel — you can embrace two different perspectives at the same time. “I get benefit from this, it helps me do what I’m doing. I don’t trust it. I hate what it’s doing to society, and so I’m anti-AI, but I find it useful.” Is that what’s happening?

Shel Holtz: I think so. I think there are a lot of employees who recognize that if they want to be employed in five years, they’re going to have to know how to use this. And they’ve —

Neville Hobson: Yeah, but this is not just about employees. This is people generally in society.

Shel Holtz: Sure. Yeah. I think there are people who are getting benefit from it, better than they can from other tools, and they recognize that, and they still distrust it. They still don’t want the data center in their backyard. I know people who don’t use it at all. And one of the reasons among some of those people is that they think the whole thing is based on theft. I even saw this as a post on LinkedIn — some discussion of AI, and one person left a one-line response saying, “All AI is theft.” I was very tempted to leave a comment saying, “You’re talking about generative AI, there are other kinds of AI.” But the notion that it’s all based on scooping up everything that’s on the internet that people created, and they weren’t asked and they weren’t compensated — you know, Bernie Sanders, I think, has a proposal that there be a sovereign wealth fund where some of the profits from AI go into that fund and are used to benefit people, because it’s their content, it’s their intellectual property that is fueling all of this generative AI.

Neville Hobson: But it seems to me, though, that those kinds of big-picture statements don’t have any impact on people. I hear that argument a lot. “AI is theft, it scrapes content” — which it does, hence all the talk, particularly here in Europe broadly and here in the UK in particular, on permissions and the new regulations that they’re bringing in that are related to copyright and intellectual property ownership. Good luck with all of it, I say, because these are geographically based laws, and we’re not talking about geographically based protections. So I don’t know how on earth they’re going to solve that. I’m not sure that they can. In which case we’ve got something, have we not, that is almost an impossibility: that if this continues like this — and to your point you mentioned earlier, and I have seen reporting of that here too, of very strong anti-behaviors, including violence — that we see an increase in that. Data centers here don’t seem to be a prominent topic of debate; i.e., it’s not like dozens of them are sprouting up all over the place. It’s not like I read recently in the US, there’s this town somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe — might have been Texas — where the town’s council that runs the town, it’s about 2,000 people in this little town, agreed to the investment program of a company who wants to build a data center there. And to do that, they’re going to need to build, including the infrastructure for energy generation, that would serve a city the size of Chicago. So the whole nature of the whole living environment is utterly changed if they go ahead with this. So —

Shel Holtz: Are you suggesting that more than 2,000 people live in Chicago?

Neville Hobson: Just a few more. So I get the logic of that, but it seems to me that there doesn’t seem to be any strong desire at government levels, whether national or local, to seriously address people’s concerns here. And there you have the paradox, because, “Yes, I love what I can do with this AI tool, it’s wonderful, but I hate it. I don’t want it building a data center in my town, but I want the benefits of using this AI.” Is it what we call in the UK NIMBYism? You’ve heard of the acronym?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, “not in my backyard.” Certainly.

Neville Hobson: Right, but I don’t mean to belittle people who do. It’s not all just that. There is some of that, clearly. But these are genuine concerns people have.

Shel Holtz: Well, I mean, in this instance, where you don’t want it in your backyard, it’s because it’s going to drain your water. There are places where data centers have been built where you turn on the tap and it trickles, because all the water’s going into the data center, and electricity rates are rising because of the consumption of the data centers. I think the companies that are building and running and operating these really need to make the investment in energy infrastructure so that they are actually contributing something rather than taking it away. By the way, I looked it up: KPMG did research. In the UK, 42% of adults are willing to trust AI, so the majority does not. 57% are willing to accept or approve AI use, meaning nearly half remain hesitant. 78% are concerned about negative outcomes from AI, and 72% are unsure whether online content can be trusted because it may be AI-generated. 80% believe AI regulation is required, and 91% want laws to combat AI-generated misinformation, and only 29% trust the UK government to use AI for its tasks. So that’s —

Neville Hobson: Well, addressing the issues — that’s the 91% who want that happening — that’s in train, as it were. But I get a little cynical about some of these surveys, particularly where you’ve got such huge numbers that you then say, “Therefore the majority of people don’t support this or do support this,” or whatever. I want to know how many of the “don’t knows” or didn’t respond or whatever. But either way, it’s a hot-potato topic, more so in the US than here, that’s a fact, because you’ve got situations happening that aren’t happening here yet, particularly related to data centers. There’s not dozens of them springing up everywhere. Hey, we’ve got a nuclear power station being built further north of here, but that’s not quite the same thing, right? So I don’t believe there’s a way to solve this cleanly that will keep everyone happy. Like most things in politics, you can’t please everyone. But this in the US certainly, according to all this research, is a growing issue.

Shel Holtz: I think the frontier labs — OpenAI and Anthropic and Google — certainly need to put their heads together on a strategy to turn this around. This can’t be something that they just shove into the background. The frontier labs are going to have to get together and really figure this out. I know they’re trying, because I’ve seen the $400,000 salaries for storytellers, which is a cute, very precious way of saying they need good PR. And we need better communication, and stronger strategic planning in our organizations. This is a perfect storm that has to happen, and I don’t know how it will, but I’m sure we’ll be talking about this in the future.

Neville Hobson: Yep, I’m sure too. So let’s move along and talk about the decline of trust in news. Trust is one of those words that gets used so often in discussions about media and communication that it can start to feel abstract. But every year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford puts a very concrete number on it. And every year for the past several years, that number has been going in the wrong direction. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is now in its fifteenth year. It covers 48 markets and draws on responses from around 97,000 people worldwide, which makes it one of the most comprehensive ongoing studies of news consumption habits anywhere in the world. We’ve referred to its findings many times over the years on For Immediate Release, and it remains, in my view, the essential annual benchmark for anyone working in or around journalism, communication, or media. The 2026 edition was published just recently, and I want to focus on one finding in particular — not because it’s the only important one, and we may well return to other threads from this report in future episodes, but because it captures something important about the environment in which all of us as communicators are now operating. Global public trust in news has hit a new low, says Reuters. Just 37% of people worldwide say they trust most news most of the time. That’s down three points from last year. Falls were recorded in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed. In the United States, the figure has dropped to 25%. Among right-leaning Americans, it’s 15% — the lowest figure recorded for any demographic in any country in the entire 15-year history of the survey. In the UK, where I’m based, the picture is also stark. Trust has fallen five points this year, to 30%. But here’s the figure that really stopped me: that’s 20 points lower than it was ten years ago. Twenty points in a decade. That’s not a dip. That’s a structural collapse in the relationship between news organizations and their audiences. And it’s not as though people have stopped caring about news or stopped believing in what journalism should be. The same report finds that 48% of people globally still say they prefer news with no particular point of view — an endorsement of impartiality as an ideal that has barely shifted in years. People still believe in what journalism could and should be. They just stopped believing that’s what they’re getting. So when trust has fallen this far, this consistently, across this many markets, is there a realistic path back? Or have we crossed a threshold where declining trust in news is simply the permanent condition of the information environment we now inhabit? Shel?

Shel Holtz: I think it’s not something that’s going to be solved easily, if ever. The fact that right-leaning Americans distrust news more than centrist or left is consistent with the data that we talked about on the last weekly episode, when we talked about — I mean, the episode was about misinformation, or actually disinformation, and media bias. But the media bias effect that we talked about in that episode, that has been around as a measured phenomenon since the 1980s and has been reaffirmed with research ever since then, is at play here, because it finds that right-leaning Americans are more inclined to believe that media reports are biased against them than centrist and left-leaning. Now, centrist and left-leaning also believe that media reports are biased against them, just not to the same degree. So this is that. This is people getting into their bubbles, feeling that media bias effect, and not trusting the media. I think you see a lot of reporters, journalists, leaving the outlets they work for and starting their own media companies, starting Substacks, because they as individuals find that they are trusted; it’s the outlet that they work for that isn’t. So we’re seeing a shift in where journalism comes from. And when you talk about this shift toward social media being the source of news for people, a lot of that is journalists who have started media operations that present their content through social media. The other thing that I find interesting is that 70% of adults in the US say they have a lot or some trust in information from local news organizations. That’s way higher than those who say they trust the national organizations. Republicans trust local news more than national — 64% trust it more. So it seems to me that — I mean, we could speculate about what news media organizations, the New York Timeses of the world, the Washington Posts of the world, the CNNs and NBCs of the world, what they can do about it, but that’s really outside our area of expertise, isn’t it? What do communicators do about this if they’re trying to get news coverage in outlets that people don’t trust? I think the first thing to do is start looking at those local news organizations. And you know that there’s been a serious decline in local news because of the internet and because of social media. I think business needs to invest in local news. I don’t know that you want to go as far as what Alabama Power did — we’ve reported about that on FIR. They actually created a local news outlet that they maintain is independent and unbiased, but it definitely skews toward the topics that are relevant to them. But I think we need to find a way for the business world to help bring local news back. And I think there are other ways that this can happen. I’ll tell you, I set up a Claude Skill, because there is no local news where I live in Concord, California. There’s something in the next community over, it’s called the Clayton Pioneer. It is absolutely awful. You don’t find out what the city council did, or the zoning commission, or the school board. It’s all puff. So what I did was I set up a skill, and it goes out and it checks the minutes of the last city council meeting and the zoning commission and the planning board and all of these agencies in the city, and it builds a newspaper. It’s just for me at this point. And every day I get — it’s like five pages, in a PDF. It also talks about where streets are going to be closed and stuff people actually need to know. I keep tweaking it, but when I get it where I want it, I’m going to buy a domain and I’m going to have this skill publish it as HTML to the web, so that there is an outlet. And I’m going to get out there on Nextdoor and other platforms and let people know it’s there. It’s not a place where opinion is shared. This isn’t puff. You want to know what the school board decided? You want to know what the zoning commission approved? This is where you’re going to find that, in addition to today’s weather and street closures and the police blotter and things like that. But this is where I think businesses need to start building relationships with reporters — in the local news media, because that’s what’s trusted. The other is that they need to do the owned stuff and start doing that external-focused journalism. Not press releases, but journalism.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There doesn’t seem to be a huge groundswell of interest in doing any of those things, though, I would say. But I found it interesting that this whole trust paradox is not resolved at all. So audiences say they endorse impartiality as an ideal. And that makes complete sense to me, particularly your point, which I agree with. You’re talking about journalists starting Substack newsletters and all that kind of business. I see it not just that — I see it more as, who do we trust? We don’t trust an algorithm to create news, do we? We trust a journalist writing the news. And that plays very clearly to your point about people connecting with a journalist much more than the medium they’re writing for. So hence many people have moved on from the employment in the newspaper to running their own newsletter, some people making money at it, doing quite well. I think the Reuters report also mentions something: 48% globally say they prefer news without a point of view. I agree, I’m in that group, I have to tell you. I don’t want editorialized news. I do not want to read news that’s dressed up as news, and it’s not, it’s an opinion piece. You see that a lot, particularly online. Here in the UK, we’ve got a move in regional newspapers up and down the country, many of which are owned by large monolithic organizations, that publish AI-generated content as their news stories. And we’ve talked about this before. A lot of it is the sports reports, for instance, but just generally local news. And I’d be amazed if they have a sustainable business model. Or could it be that people don’t actually care, because it’s gone beyond — “I can’t do anything about this, I don’t see any change, therefore I don’t care anymore,” so they’re looking at other places to get the news from? And therein is a paradox of your idea of doing what you proposed — creating news content. That, to me, is a smart way of doing it. Your example of the Alabama Power Company, I think, wouldn’t meet the impartiality test, no matter how good they say their content is. And I think there is the problem, then, with businesses trying to do deals or trying to cozy up to journalists: you need to have genuine impartiality. So there’s probably few business models in that mix there, I would say. But in the small town where I live, there’s only 9,000 people here, so it’s actually quite a large town by UK standards. Local media is pretty good online. There are a number of reporters I like, particularly the ones who talk about things like you mentioned — planning applications, roadworks and diversions, all that stuff. It’s good, it’s up to date, and they’re using Facebook mostly, and there are lots of groups that you can join to follow this. But that’s all individual actions and a couple of local newspapers. There’s nothing scalable in that at all. So I don’t know where this actually happens, Shel. I don’t see — people haven’t given up on what journalism should be. They probably don’t even think about the word “journalism” in all of this. They just want impartiality in their news reporting. They’ve given up on it. Is that fixable, do you think? Is there a fixable gap here?

Shel Holtz: I’m sure there is, but I don’t know what it is for the news media. I just have to think about what communicators do to get their news out in this environment. That’s what concerns me. And I think a number of things we need to do. One — it’s interesting that Cision and the companies that do the press release distribution and the contact with the reporters, they all know the reporters that work for the mainstream news outlets. Do they have the Substacks from professional journalists, or the Ghosts, or whatever service they’re using? I don’t think so. I think somebody might be able to make some money by offering a service that does what Cision does, but with those independent journalistic enterprises. But I think as communicators, we need to find the journalists who are doing that and have big followings, and start to build relationships with them, just like we have been with those who work for the newspapers and the TV news. We need to find the podcasts. Increasingly we find — and we’ve talked about this on FIR — that the interviews on podcasts make news. You want to get the word out, get on a podcast that is influential in your industry or whatever your area of subject matter expertise is that you’re dealing with. But we need to move where the trust is. And getting your news out through outlets that people don’t trust, I think, is not a viable solution. But it’s what we’re accustomed to, and it’s what agencies get paid to do. And it’s a shift that I think will be very, very slow, but we have to start.

Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and everyone of our listeners all around the world. It’s Dan, coming at you on a gorgeous sunny day, the first Saturday without rain in Shelburne, Vermont, for quite a while. So we’re enjoying it. But right now I want to talk about Mastodon, and specifically about collections and helping people get started with finding accounts to follow. This has always been a challenge, right? When you start up with a new service, you go in there, and who do you follow? What’s your feed doing? Now, Mastodon has had for a while a thing with some recommended accounts that you could follow, but those were ones that Mastodon, the central entity, put together, and they were looking for a way to do something broader. In the meantime, of course, Bluesky came out with what they called starter packs, where anybody could create a starter pack full of people of a certain topic, whatever else, and you could then discover one of these starter packs, and you could follow everybody. You’d be able to get on there and see that, and boom, your feed suddenly is full of a lot of different activity and things that were there. So people in the Fediverse were looking at what Bluesky did to make it easy, and there were several different experiments people have tried. There are actually some people calling something starter packs. There are some other people trying other different ways to go and do it. But there wasn’t something quite from the central Mastodon company until this latest 4.6 release, where it has created these collections. Now, it’s actually interesting. It’s kind of the beginning of the journey, because with this release, what they did was they made it easy to create collections. You can create them, you can have a link to share, but there’s not as much about finding them, and the rationale makes sense. They said, you know, before we can really get a lot of search and discovery working, we need to have collections. So this release, 4.6, was all about getting the mechanism to create collections out there, and then in subsequent releases, they will work on making them more searchable and discoverable, so that they could replace, for instance, the recommended accounts that Mastodon has when you first join. Now, there are a couple of interesting aspects. One criticism of Bluesky’s starter packs was that your Bluesky account could be added to one without permission. So if I wanted to create a starter pack of people I don’t like, for instance — I don’t know why you would do that, but I could. I could add accounts to something, and if you didn’t feel comfortable being part of that, maybe you don’t want to be there. There wasn’t a great mechanism when Bluesky first came out with that. So collections brings that in in a big way. When you go and add people to an account, first of all, they have to have turned on — or not turned off — a switch in the settings which allows them to be used in search and discovery. So that’s one way: if you just don’t want to be in anybody’s collections, you can turn that off, and then people will have no ability to add you to any of these kinds of collections. Now, the other aspect is, when you are added to a collection, you get a notice that you have been added, so that you can choose to remove yourself from a collection if you want to. And at any point in time, if you find that you don’t want to be part of that collection, you can go and remove yourself. So it’s a much more consent-based thing. And also, in this initial phase, they are not putting a “follow all” button. So there’s no way to just go and click on “follow all” and do it. You just have to go down through the collection and click, click, click, click — follow the people that you want to. Other note: it’s right now restricted to only 25 accounts, not the 150 that were in Bluesky starter packs. And again, partly it’s to learn and to see what was there. They found one of the criticisms of some of the Bluesky starter packs was that they became stale, with too many dead accounts. So this is partly a forcing factor to go and see what’s there, and they want to learn, and that may change over time, and we’ll have to go and take a look at what happens. But it’s very interesting. I’ve created a couple of collections. One added factor here is that Mastodon is a collection of thousands, tens of thousands, of servers, each one of which has to be running the 4.6 software for the accounts to be on it. So I could add Neville, because he was on a system that was upgraded. I couldn’t add Kjell, because the system he’s on is not upgraded. So there’s a factor here that will take some time for this to be able to work with. But it’s an interesting way to go about how do you do this form of discovery and how to work with it. So it’s called collections. If you go to my account on mastodon.social, Dan York, you’ll actually see on my profile page now there’s a link to where these collections are, and you can see them. I have kept mine public. There’s also, of course, a feature to make them unlisted so that people couldn’t find them. But it’s something interesting, something new to try, and we’ll see how this helps with the further adoption of the Fediverse and Mastodon. Speaking of Fediverse and Mastodon and other stuff, I want to just tell you that there’s a woman out there named Elena Rossini — she’s from Italy, but living in Paris — who’s been writing some amazing articles right now about the service called W Social. It was launched to great fanfare at the Davos meeting, where all sorts of folks are, and what’s happened in the past several weeks or so is that the accounts from Bluesky of the European Commission, its president, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank, and other different people have moved from Bluesky over to these W Social servers. There’s a lot more than I can talk about in the scope of this report, but to say that it’s a very curious thing, because the people announced this, then they seem to have seized on using Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that piece of that. They’ve launched their service. They’ve then moved their code to be closed-source, and they’re just doing a bunch of different kinds of sketchy things. They’re promoting it as a social network that will require age authentication, age verification, age assurance — I’m not sure even which term they’re using — but you have to prove your identity or provide a government ID to show your age, and they’re working with another entity called W Identity to create this. There’s a lot of splash, a lot of fanfare, but it’s turning out they haven’t actually been talking to people in the “atmosphere,” as it’s called, the set of people working with the AT Protocol. So I would encourage people to read the articles from Elena Rossini, and to think about what is really going on here, and is this actually something that will provide a true, decentralized, open service for the Europeans, or is this somebody else trying to create a centralized service that happens to be Europe-based? Not clear yet. Lot of unanswered questions in all of this. I’m going to leave it there, send it back to you guys. Back to you, Shel and Neville. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

Neville Hobson: Thanks for the report, Dan. We’ve not had a chance to listen to it, but I’m very interested to hear what you have to say with regard to W Social, because that is something I’ve been paying attention to. I signed up for it way back, some months ago now, when they first announced they were coming. I’m still on the wait list. But I’ve seen a number of reports literally raising cautionary notes about this, along the lines of what you’ve included from Elena Rossini, for instance. A really good website, by the way, I would say. So I haven’t read her report yet, but I’m keen to listen to what you have to say about this. So I’ll be doing that once we’ve published the recording.

Shel Holtz: Me too, Dan. I got home at, what, about one o’clock this morning, and I barely made it to the scheduled start of this recording. So I’ll be listening to you a little bit later. Always look forward to it, though. There is a shift going on. I suspect a lot of our listeners are living through this, whether they’ve put a label on it or not. And I read about this most recently — it’s something I’ve been aware of, but I just read this piece by Geetikka Bangia, who heads PR and corporate comms for Stryker in India. The oldest rule in our profession has flipped. Think back 20 years. The best PR people were the ones you never heard about, unless it was through a professional association, right? The Gold Quill Awards or the Silver Anvil Awards, that type of thing. They were invisible, but they were essential. We built the brands for everyone else — the CEO, the company, the product. That’s what we wanted to shine a light on, and we stayed in the shadows. That was the job of PR. In fact, if PR made the news, it meant something went wrong. Well, according to Geetikka, that rule is now dead. Today the most effective communicators are the ones publishing thought leadership on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences outside of the industry, putting their insights out in public. Her line — and I love this, because it’s pretty blunt — is, if you’re still operating like it’s 2005, “brilliant but invisible,” you’re playing a game that no longer exists. Your personal brand, she says, isn’t vanity, the way the industry used to see it. Today, it’s survival. So what changed? Social media, and LinkedIn in particular, democratized visibility. Suddenly junior people were building audiences, mid-level communicators were publishing, and employers noticed. Trust is in play here. Edelman’s data keeps showing that peers now outrank CEOs in credibility, which means your own authentic, consistent voice can actually enhance your employer’s brand — or, if you get it wrong, you can certainly damage the brand. When Bangia looks at the people who do this well, there’s a clear pattern. They add value beyond their job description. They share insights. They don’t promote themselves. They build trust. They’re not looking to build follower counts. Her example is Parag Agrawal, who built a reputation as a genuine tech thought leader with educational posts long before he became the CEO of Twitter. So his personal brand signaled expertise, not ambition. But again — and this is where it gets interesting — she’s very honest about the dark side. The line between personal opinion and professional representation is thinner than we think. And in PR, where we manage reputation for a living, our own missteps get magnified. You know the Weber Shandwick stat that nearly half a company’s reputation is attributed to its CEO? She extends that logic right down to the individual communicator. If you’re credible, your employer benefits. If you’re controversial, they pay the price. She says she’s watched comms professionals torch their employer’s reputation with a poorly timed political post — personal brand is damaged, employer brand becomes collateral damage. So we need to figure out how to navigate this. And she offers what she calls a Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much, not too little. She has four rules. Be visible but purposeful — don’t post to post. Stay opinionated but professional — you can hold strong views without being divisive. Build your brand, not your ego — be known for something valuable, like crisis management or storytelling, not just chasing virality. And this is the one I’d underline: know when to stay silent. Know when to shut up. Not every trending topic needs your take. PR people, of all people, should understand message discipline. Her bottom line is, the question isn’t whether to build your personal brand anymore, it’s how — with intention, integrity, and the understanding that in our field, your reputation isn’t just yours, it’s intertwined with everyone you represent. And the thing I want us to think about is the organizational flip side of all this, because if every employee is now a brand voice, then our job isn’t just building our own visibility, it’s helping the whole organization navigate theirs.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I remember the days — I’m sure you do, Shel — when anything anyone wanted to say about the company externally was not allowed at all. It had to go through official spokespeople. And in fact, it was a disciplinary offense if you uttered something that was quoted in the newspaper, for instance, without permission. Imagine that today still. Imagine if that was still the case today. But the landscape is utterly different to what it was in the 90s, never mind the 2000s. What Geetikka talks about is the visibility thing first, that struck me. Because back in those days, none of these platforms, none of these tools, none of these channels existed. So there was limited means by which you could talk publicly about something and attract attention to you as the person saying these things. Things changed when blogs hit the scene back in the early 2000s, where suddenly anyone could be a publisher. And we relished those times, didn’t we? We wanted everyone to be doing this. We got our wish, so we had good stuff and bad stuff. But I can’t imagine this changing. If anything, it’s going to become more microscopic, in the sense of, you are under a microscope all the time. And hence her advice, Geetikka’s counsel in this really good post, is that you need to be cognizant, very, very aware, of literally everything you do and say online. And the thing that never ceases to amaze me, Shel, is the people in responsible positions, with authoritative opinions and presences, who don’t do that. It amazes me — where someone who’s a CEO of a company, or a senior politician of some type, says something, gets all over the tabloids in particular, and that’s it, your reputation’s toast. And before you know it, after a few months, that person’s gone, probably. But there is damage. And in fact, Philip Bourne has talked about this quite a bit too, the damage resulting from loose lips, if you like. So it is something to pay attention to. And I like the way she says that personal branding isn’t about becoming an influencer — heaven forbid — it’s about being known for something valuable. I utterly agree with that. And I think, if some of the people I know who were journalists or reporters on a national newspaper of some type, or were senior people in organizations who are now gone independent themselves, who retain the credibility they’ve earned from their previous experiences and roles —

Shel Holtz: A lane for that, right?

Neville Hobson: Right, exactly right. That’s carried forward to what they’re currently doing, because they are still trusted by people. So their reputation hasn’t changed, because they haven’t changed the consistency of how they walk the talk of their brand, if you will, as a means to talk about their client or their employer. So it makes common sense to me, much of this. Yet I am constantly surprised when I see examples of common nonsense being spouted, where, you know, “What were they thinking?” I say to myself every time I see it. So “know when to stay silent” is a very good one. And there are far too many people with verbal diarrhea, it seems to me, who have an opinion on everything and they will spout it. And I see that myself, particularly on LinkedIn, as literally, “Look at me, look at me, I’ve got these things to say, and it’s great, and I know all these topics.” That’s what I’m seeing. So that’s our landscape, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Well, yeah. And there are figures circulating out there that something like 70% of employers now consider a personal brand more important than a resume. And even LinkedIn has researched that people with active personal brands see nearly 50% more inbound opportunities than those without. So this is something that you want to do. And the other thing is that, as other employees in the organization and other parts of it are doing this, this is something to coordinate. We’ve got a guy who does an occasional post, maybe monthly. He’s out on one of our most important projects, and he does these great posts about milestones they’ve reached and what it took to do it. We end up sharing it through our advocacy platform. Now, what if other employees were doing that? The advocacy platform is one thing — it gives employees our content to share in their communities. But I’d love to see some of our subject matter experts, the people who really understand concrete, become — their personal brand in social media is now concrete, that sort of thing. And then we can coordinate that, and we can leverage all that as PR opportunities, and then we can share that in the advocacy tool for other employees to amplify. If people are doing this, communicators need to get their arms around it, not just manage their own personal brand.

Neville Hobson: They get known for it. They get known for it. Yeah, lots to learn from this, I’d say, Shel. Okay, so sound advice, very nice article. Now let’s talk about a reputation crisis — a PR crisis, but a reputation one. And this is something quite extraordinary that I want to share here. Sometimes a single incident cuts through the noise and forces a conversation that the industry probably would have been having for a while. Recently, a week or so back, that incident involved a UK discount voucher website called Wowcher, a three-year-old boy, and a crocodile enclosure in a zoo. Let me give you the background, because if you’re not based in the UK, you may not have followed this disturbing story, although I have seen it talked about in media around the world, actually.

Shel Holtz: I read this on CNN and The New York Times, so this has made the rounds.

Neville Hobson: Right, yeah. So on Thursday, the 18th of June, so not long ago, a toddler three years old was pushed by a stranger into an enclosure containing Nile and saltwater crocodiles at a zoo in Huntingdonshire in England. The child suffered serious injuries and was taken to hospital in Cambridge, where he remains in a critical but stable condition. It’s a deeply distressing story. A family’s worst nightmare played out in public, and a news event that dominated the UK media cycle for days. It gets worse, Shel. It really gets worse. Two days later, on the Saturday, just two days on, Wowcher sent a marketing email to its customer distribution list — so we’re probably looking at tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people on that list. The subject line of the email read: “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid!” Exclamation mark. Well, as you can imagine, the reaction was immediate, universal, and unsparing. Marketing professionals, commentators, and members of the public condemned it without reservation. There was no debate about —

Shel Holtz: Russell Brand thought it was hysterical.

Neville Hobson: We don’t talk about Russell Brand, sorry. There was no debate about whether it was misjudged. There was no defense offered from any quarter. Just about all mainstream media in the UK, including the dozens of regional press outlets, covered the story. It featured in the news podcasts and across social media. LinkedIn lit up. Email marketing specialist Beth O’Malley, whose post on the subject drew widespread engagement, described it as reflecting a wider problem: that the drive to get the open, to get the click, to make the metrics go up, has overtaken something more fundamental. As one commenter put it simply, whoever was involved in creating and sending that email forgot that there are real human beings on the receiving end. Wowcher issued an unreserved apology. They described the wording as unacceptable, said it should never have been written and was never approved for use, and committed to urgently reviewing and strengthening their creative approval and sign-off processes. Which, of course, raises the obvious question: if it was never approved, how did it reach what is presumably a very large mailing list? We don’t know the full answer to that yet. There has been speculation that AI may have been involved in generating the content, and that’s possible. But I want to be clear about something. Whether a human wrote those words, or an AI generated them and a human failed to catch them, the root cause is the same. It’s a failure of humanity. You hear this word “humanity” applied a lot, but it’s a real word, and it’s worth paying attention to. A failure of empathy. A failure to pause for even a moment and ask the most basic of questions: how would the family of that little boy feel if they opened their inbox and read this? That’s not an AI problem. That’s a people problem. And it sits at the heart of a broader crisis in email marketing culture, one where the relentless pressure to perform, to stand out, to optimize for attention, has gradually crowded out the human judgment that should be the last line of defense, if not the first. So here’s the question I have. In a world where content is created faster than ever, approved under pressure, and distributed at scale, who is actually responsible for ensuring that basic humanity remains in the loop? And what does it take for an organization to lose sight of that so utterly completely?

Shel Holtz: It’s unbelievable. Just staggering. I have no problem with newsjacking — this is the term that David Meerman Scott coined. He wrote a book about it. He had great examples of it. I even have a Claude Cowork skill set up that runs at 4 a.m. every Monday morning to scour the news for stories that I can leverage and write on their coattails. I haven’t found one yet that I’d actually want to use, but it’s giving me some interesting stuff, and I’m convinced that one of these days it will. I’m tweaking it every now and then based on the results I see. I am a fan of newsjacking, but for God’s sake, use your head before you go with one of these things. Was the wording clever? Yeah. It was also insensitive and inhuman and horrible. I don’t know what else to say about this. I will comment, though, on the apology. I love the fact that it was an unreserved apology. They were unequivocal in their condemnation of it. But I think they needed to end the apology by saying, “We will report on the steps that we are taking in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, and we will continue to report on what we learn about how this happened,” and then follow up on that. Just to leave it to say “we’re going to change our procedures” is woefully inadequate. I think people need to know that you’re actually taking the steps that you say you will. The trust gap is huge here. After you have done something like that, just to say, “We’re sorry, we’re fixing it,” is not enough.

Neville Hobson: Yet it looks like people are willing to accept that. So, I mean, this is a business that is hugely successful. They do really imaginative, creative TV advertising campaigns. And the play on the name Wowcher, you know, “voucher” with a “wow” — I mean, it’s smart, it’s very clever.

Shel Holtz: Sure. Well, it’s like Groupon — “group” and “coupon,” right?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, very clever. Yet — what bothers me, I think, is, are we as a society — you know, condemnation was universal, people expressed horror at what they did, all that, and the poor little boy was savaged by crocodiles — yeah, they’re still buying stuff from Wowcher. They’re still doing business with Wowcher.

Shel Holtz: No boycotts, huh?

Neville Hobson: I’m not suggesting, for instance, that they shouldn’t be doing all those things. But isn’t what happened so grotesque that you’d think it would stimulate people to be, “That’s it, I’m not doing anything more with this company”? And the campaigns online — I’ve not seen anything like that. So what does that tell us about our society, is my kind of rhetorical question, I expect. But I think the point that Beth O’Malley raises — that this reflects a culture in email marketing where anything that drives opens and clicks is tacitly approved — is worth looking at. Is this a Wowcher problem? Or is it symptomatic of how the entire performance-metrics model of email marketing has just normalized a race to the bottom in judgment and taste? What do you think?

Shel Holtz: I think you’re looking at two sides of this issue. The first is the creation side, where all of what Beth O’Malley talks about comes into play. And yeah, I think she’s right. I think the drive for clicks is overwhelming the application of judgment and common sense. The other side is the reaction, where people are horrified for 15 minutes and then they continue to use the product. They’re not boycotting. It’s not a revocation of their license to operate. So I think on the societal side of this, I wholly agree. I think we tolerate a lot more these days. We tolerate corruption in government a lot more these days. I mean, Vice President J.D. Vance was on some show — this happened while I was traveling, so I just read it in passing — but basically he said, if what Richard Nixon did that cost him his presidency happened today, it wouldn’t last in the news cycle for 15 minutes. And I’ve read news outlets say, you know, he’s probably right. It’s not that what he did wasn’t illegal and probably should have ended his presidency. It’s just that today people would have shrugged and gone, “Yeah, just business as usual. Those marketing guys, they’re terrible, but I love their product.” So yeah, I think the bar has been lowered considerably for what we’re willing to — I mean, outrage is everywhere, so I’m reluctant to say “outraged about” — but what we’re willing to act on, that bar has dropped precipitously, I think.

Neville Hobson: ‘Tis.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Let’s move on to our final report, which is really fascinating, because there are two studies that have reached entirely different conclusions. And I have to say, this casts any study that I look at into doubt when I see this. So let’s take a look at these, because they’re both studies that would be of interest to anybody engaged in internal comms. A Fresh Intranet Employee Attention Recession report, which came out in May, found that just 12% of employees read internal communications in full. That’s 12%. The other 88% are skimming, filtering, and ignoring it unless a manager flags it, or they’re handing it to an AI tool and reading the summary instead — at the same time that they’re saying, “I don’t like AI.” Now, here’s the part that makes that number really uncomfortable: 91% of those same employees say the communications feel relevant to them, always or most of the time. So this isn’t disengagement. These are people who want to engage, who say the content speaks to them, but the sheer volume has made reading the whole thing an unsustainable act. Mike Klein, writing this up for Strategic — a great magazine, if you’re not reading Strategic, you probably should — points to the cause. The single biggest factor in whether someone reads a message in full isn’t the subject, the sender, or the format. It’s the cumulative weight of how many other messages arrive before it. And the internal communications index backs this up. Most employees now have ten minutes or fewer per day for internal comms. The most common answer is five minutes, and that window’s been shrinking every year since 2023. Now, here’s the twist on this, and it’s why I wanted to pair these. A second study, from Corbett and Reworked, which Chuck Gose’s ICology was involved with, found almost the opposite. Half of workers say the volume of messages they get is about right, and yet 44% still tune out. Chuck Gose’s read on this is the scarier one. This isn’t overwhelm, it’s passive disengagement. And when employees stop noticing that they’re overwhelmed, your satisfaction scores start lying to you. 89% of workers are only moderately confident that they’re not missing something important. So, which is it? Too much volume, or something else? And I think the answer is both, and they’re not actually in conflict. Volume genuinely destroys attention, but cutting volume alone won’t fix a tune-out that’s really about relevance and trust. Because when you dig into what makes people actually pay attention, it’s specific. 57% engage when a message is timely or urgent. 56% when there’s a clear action required. What makes them tune out is repetition. And I think that’s important, because a lot of communicators operate under that formula that says you have to tell people something seven times before it sticks. They also tune out because of vagueness, and content that could have been sent to anyone. There’s a brilliant one-line test in the report: before you hit send, you should be able to finish the sentence, “After reading this, employees will ___.” If you can’t fill in that blank, the message isn’t ready. And the finding that crosses every one of these studies is about who’s talking. 73% of workers say the sender is the number one factor in whether they trust a message. “From the leadership team” doesn’t cut it. People trust people, not titles. Which leads straight to the manager gap. Across all of these reports, managers are the most trusted, most critical link in the chain, and the most under-supported. 87% of comms pros call manager capability their single biggest risk, and fewer than one in four organizations actually give managers a toolkit. And there’s one more thing I want us to really pay attention to: Mike Klein’s argument that we’re measuring the wrong thing entirely. 70% of comms teams are still tracking opens, clicks, and page views. Only 12% measure anything close to business impact. As Mike puts it, reach without understanding isn’t communication, it’s noise. So the question he leaves hanging, and I’ll leave it here with you, Neville, is whether the profession responds to all of this by refining its content or finally changing what it measures.

Neville Hobson: That last option — changing what it measures — is the one that interests me, because AMEC is a big proponent of, let me call it, proper measurement. Opens and clicks don’t cut it, the same way how many impressions something has got — eyeballs. It’s like, I don’t care how many eyeballs saw the content. I want to know what they did when they saw the content. Did they just move on? Did they click something? What did they do?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, outcomes-based.

Neville Hobson: So I think it’s most interesting. And reading about the other survey that you mentioned that was in the other publication you shared, ICology, that had some interesting findings in there too that struck me as worth attention. You mentioned one: direct managers are the missing link most organizations keep overlooking. Employees trust their manager more than anyone else — yeah, absolutely. But I found this one interesting, the shadow comms finding. That’ll resonate, if you listened to the story earlier, with anyone who’s worked in internal comms. They’ll recognize it immediately: when official channels fail, employees don’t stop getting information. They just go somewhere else — Slack DMs, WhatsApp groups, text messages, hallway conversations, all of those things. So that’s shadow comms. That’s a good way of describing it. Not approved channels. But it has ever been thus, hasn’t it, Shel, for goodness’ sake? It’s not new. The tools and the means have shifted over time, but this has always been the case. You’re going to find other ways of finding out what Harry down the hall thinks about something and share your thoughts with him. And now you’ll do it on WhatsApp. Before, you might mosey down to his cubicle and surreptitiously chat with him. Look, if you haven’t seen the show The Office —

Shel Holtz: About the —

Neville Hobson: — but it’s nothing new in all of this. And yet we still don’t seem to be addressing these things. I wonder why that could be. Could it be it requires some big changes to happen in how you act as a manager, how the leaders behave, and so forth, and indeed how regular employees themselves behave? That’s a leadership issue, it seems to me, first and foremost. So there’s plenty to digest in both these stories. Mike Klein’s piece is a good one, I agree with you. And I think “not measuring the wrong things” is excellent. And Richard Bagnall at AMEC would have some views on that, I’m sure. Are we measuring the wrong things? So plenty to take away from this show.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And the shadow communications has always been real, and more so now that there are digital tools that enable it. How many communicators have mapped their influence networks? If you know who people go to when they want to know about something, then you can reach out to them and say, “What are people asking about?” And you can figure out what communication has been missed. But if you don’t know who those people are, you can’t do that. So we’ve been talking about mapping employee influence networks. I know Katie Macaulay likes seven different networks. If you can only do three: who do people go to when they need to know how to do something? Who do people go to when they need to know if something is true? And who do people go to if they want a reaction to what they’ve heard? So, “How do I do this? What’s going on? And should I trust this?” Those are three separate influence networks, and people tend to go to different people for those things. But if you can do some research and find out who those people are, then you can get ahead of this game. But I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about using our intranet tool for a greater targeting of information to the audiences that care about it, and not sending it to the people who don’t, so that our communication is more relevant. And I have been thinking about our next internal comms survey. I’m going to rethink the questions around these issues, and then I’m going to think about a substantial change to our internal comms that may be phased in over a couple of years. But I absolutely see this applying to us. We have people out on project sites who are on ridiculous time schedules, and how much time they have to read a 2,000-word article is none. I don’t need to do the research to know that. So this needs a serious rethink.

Neville Hobson: What to do, indeed.

Shel Holtz: Yep. And that’ll wrap up this episode of For Immediate Release. We hope that you will comment on any or all of the stories that we have discussed today. Send email to fircomments@gmail.com, drop a recording in there and we’ll play it. It’s been forever since we’ve had an audio comment. We make it easy: if you go to the FIR Podcast Network website, you’ll see SpeakPipe voicemail on the right-hand side of the page, and all you have to do is record. You don’t need your own recording equipment for that. And then we’ll get it. You can leave comments on the post on this at firpodcastnetwork.com, or on LinkedIn, or on Facebook, or Threads, or Bluesky, where we share the release of each episode. We want to hear from you about these. And Vincent, we want to continue to hear from you. We enjoy your comments. We would love an audio comment from Vincent one of these days. And the next monthly episode will drop on Monday, July 27th. We’re planning to record that on Saturday, July 25th. But in between now and then, look for our short midweek episodes.

Neville Hobson: We have an interview coming up with Pete Blackshaw.

Shel Holtz: We do. Pete Blackshaw, who — I believe he was the first person we ever interviewed on FIR Interviews, wasn’t he?

Neville Hobson: No, he wasn’t the first, but he was in 2005 when we started. We’ve interviewed him three times, up to about 2009, and now we’ve got this long gap till now.

Shel Holtz: So looking forward to that. He’s talking about using artificial intelligence in order to figure out which product you want to buy, as opposed to other mechanisms, and why it’s better. I have lots of questions for him. We’re not going to get to them all. I’m sure you do too, but —

Neville Hobson: We do. Yeah, we’re interviewing Pete on Monday the 29th of June, and that interview should be published within a week or so of that.

Shel Holtz: Looking forward to that. And that will be a 30 for For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #520: AI’s PR Meltdown appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We have known about media bias effect for decades: the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. While the research was focused on political issues, the underlying cause applies equally to misinformation about brands, companies, and business issues. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel find that the PR industry has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon, which requires strategies to address it.

Links from this episode:

Think the Media’s Biased Against You? You Probably Think Misinformation Is, Too
The Hostile Media Effect
The Influence of Hostile Media Perceptions on Misinformation Beliefs and Sharing
Hostile Media Effects on Twitter, Social Identity, and Media Bias Perceptions
Fake News Has Real Effects on Consumer Demand
The Impact of Fake News on Consumer Behavior and Market Outcomes
Political Identity, Media Trust, and Susceptibility to Misinformation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson:
Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 519. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz:
And I’m Shel Holtz. When you think about all the misinformation out there—fake news, bad-faith spin—do you think it’s mostly aimed at your side of an argument or the other side? Most of us, if we’re honest, feel like it’s aimed at us. And there’s now research saying that feeling is nearly universal.

Even though the research was based on political discourse, it has a direct connection to organizational communication. We’ll explain right after this.

All right, let’s start by backing up for a second. There’s a concept called the hostile media effect. It’s been around since the 1980s. The original study showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students the exact same news coverage of the exact same event. Both groups walked away convinced it was biased against their side.

Everyone saw exactly the same footage, but they reached opposite conclusions. And the more committed you were, the more certain you were that the media was out to get you.

That finding has held up for 40 years, and it’s a big reason trust in news has collapsed as politics has gotten more tribal.

Now let’s add the new wrinkle. A team at the University of Amsterdam asked whether that same instinct applies to misinformation—to fake news. They surveyed 4,000 people across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European elections.

Nearly half said their preferred party was particularly targeted by misinformation. Ask about the party they liked least, and that number got cut in half. They’re calling it the hostile misinformation effect, and it got stronger the more politically engaged people were. The more plugged in people felt, the more victimized they felt.

Now, Neville, you might think that’s a political science finding. But the mechanism underneath isn’t about politics; it’s about identity and motivated reasoning. Every brand, every company, every department is an identity group.

Your most loyal customers are partisans. Your most engaged employees are partisans. The research says the people most attached to your organization are exactly the ones primed to believe any criticism out there is unfairly targeting them.

Now think about a crisis. Your defenders don’t need convincing that your critics are unfair. They already assume it. The minds still open are the uncommitted people in the middle.

Among neutrals, knowing more made them see less bias. It’s only partisans who dig in.

So if someone criticizes a brand that some people love, the brand’s biggest fans may see that as an attack rather than just an honest review—and respond in kind. There was no crisis, but now maybe there is.

There’s an internal angle here, too. Picture a layoff memo or a return-to-office announcement. Leadership reads it as fair. But every faction inside the company—by department, by level, by tenure—is wired to read the same message as unfair to them.

“We said it neutrally” is no defense because neutrality is in the eye of the beholder.

This notion reveals a trap for communicators. When bad coverage hits, it’s tempting to wave it away as misinformation. But “fake news” self-destructed as a term the moment it got weaponized to mean “any story I don’t like.”

Cry misinformation every time you’re criticized, and you train your audience to tune out the label. You also look evasive to the exact neutrals you need to reach.

So this is where I want to bring you in, Neville. We’ve spent years on this show talking about declining trust and the misinformation environment. This research says the problem isn’t just that there’s more bad information out there; it’s that people are wired to feel personally besieged by it.

And I’m not sure our profession has reckoned with what that means.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it, Shel. I don’t think so.

It’s actually quite fascinating looking at the Nieman Lab article you shared with me in our Slack channel and seeing the depth of the research on a topic that I had no idea was even a thing to look into.

I found it interesting in a number of areas.

For instance, the study you quoted from the 2024 European Parliament elections got me thinking. The tendency to see misinformation as directed at you seems more pronounced the farther right politically someone is.

That caught my attention because isn’t that precisely what we’re seeing in the United States with the Trump MAGA movement?

Here in the UK, we’ve got Reform and an even newer party that’s emerged further to the right. Those groups often function as an echo chamber for the kinds of messages Trump promotes. They’re constantly criticizing anything anyone else says as an attack and talking about issues in ways that rile people up and stimulate hostile reactions in return.

We see a lot of that in this country right now.

It’s interesting that this study has been done, and I think the way you’re connecting it to organizational communication is a good call. It certainly gives us a lot to think about.

One question it prompted in my mind concerns the point about engagement and partisanship. If the more engaged and partisan someone is, the stronger this effect becomes, does that mean an organization’s most loyal stakeholders are actually its most vulnerable to this kind of perception?

What do you think?

Shel Holtz:
Absolutely. I think that’s exactly the connection we can draw between this study and organizational communication.

If somebody criticizes the company based on an experience they had—and let’s say that criticism goes viral—and it was sincere and well-intentioned, then the partisan defenders of that organization are going to feel attacked. They’re likely to respond in kind and escalate a situation that probably would have faded into the background if left alone.

I think that’s one of the fallouts organizations can experience from this phenomenon. The more partisan you are, the more besieged you’re going to feel when you perceive something being said about the brand or organization as unfair—even if it was perfectly fair.

Neville Hobson:
So how do you address that within the organization?

Shel Holtz:
That’s an interesting question, and it’s hard to fight because you really can’t argue people out of it.

One related concept is the third-person effect—the idea that other people are more susceptible to media influence than we are ourselves.

In other words: I can see what the media is trying to do, but other people are going to be fooled by it.

When you stack that together with the idea that your group is being unfairly targeted, you get a complete worldview: I’m clear-eyed, my group is the victim, and everyone else is gullible.

There was a fascinating study where researchers took 661 Coca-Cola drinkers and showed them a real fake-news story—a 2016 hoax claiming that Dasani water was being recalled because parasites had been found in it.

The finding was that the people most confident in their own ability to spot fake news were the most convinced that other people would be fooled by it. They were also the ones most loudly demanding that Coca-Cola take corrective action.

Sometimes the stakeholders who are screaming “Do something about misinformation!” aren’t reacting to the actual threat. They’re reacting to a belief that other, less discerning people are being duped.

That makes the challenge even more complicated for communicators.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?

The next question that comes to mind is this: If both sides feel targeted regardless of what’s actually out there, what should communicators do? Is there an approach that works when perception is this detached from reality?

Shel Holtz:
From an organizational standpoint—and I’m less interested in the political implications for purposes of this podcast—I think there are a couple of things.

First, the more prebunking you can do, the better.

When one of these situations comes up—a bad review, criticism from the media, negative reporting—you can immediately point people to information you’ve already published that addresses the issue. Having a bank of credible material you can reference may keep people from getting unnecessarily riled up.

The other thing is to respond quickly, but not emotionally.

If you can maintain a sense of calm—or even a sense of humor—you increase the likelihood that others will follow suit.

If people see that the company isn’t feeling besieged and isn’t acting attacked, that may help tamp down some of the reaction.

Neville Hobson:
So this becomes a major issue for trust, doesn’t it?

And I imagine the role of artificial intelligence in all of this only exacerbates the problem. Is that how you see it?

Shel Holtz:
Yeah, I do.

The flood of AI-generated slop out there—content targeting your organization, your brand, or your leaders—is only going to increase exponentially.

If somebody has an axe to grind and wants to flood search engines or AI summaries with negative content, AI makes that dramatically easier.

Now, to be fair, the research we’re discussing focused on information published through media outlets. That may be an important distinction.

People might be more skeptical of something posted on a blog or LinkedIn than something published by a mainstream news outlet.

That’s where this research suggests people feel especially attacked.

Neville Hobson:
That was my thought as well.

Going back to the study, we’re looking at this from a political perspective. We all consume information online, and most of us have preferred sources.

Meanwhile, mainstream media is going through what seems like a growing crisis of trust.

You see constant battles online between people citing one newspaper versus another. It’s distracting, and it wastes an enormous amount of time and energy.

It also got me thinking about how I react to some of this. The suggestion that people on the political right are more susceptible to this phenomenon doesn’t really describe me. I’m more in the middle.

I don’t react the way I see some people reacting—especially on that delightful conversation platform known as X.

People vent their spleens there. Maybe it makes them feel better, but I don’t think it advances understanding in any meaningful way.

Then again, perhaps that’s not the point.

The point seems to be: I win, you lose.

And that’s very much the Trump approach. It feels like that’s where much of this is headed.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah.

One of the stranger findings from the research was that when researchers examined whether people felt more victimized after their party lost an election, the results weren’t what you’d expect.

You’d think the losers would feel most targeted.

Instead, the people whose party won were more likely to believe their side was being targeted by misinformation.

Feeling besieged isn’t necessarily about being under threat. It’s about identity.

And since you mentioned X, there’s another interesting strand of research.

People may dismiss something because they saw it on X. But researchers found that the source of a message can trigger hostile media perceptions independently of the content itself.

Your company’s name on a statement can be enough to act as a bias cue for people who already have feelings about you.

The exact same words can land very differently depending on whose logo appears at the top.

That’s worth thinking about because it means message discipline alone can’t solve a credibility problem.

Neville Hobson:
This is a bigger dilemma than it might seem at first. A real conundrum for communicators.

The Nieman Lab article is lengthy, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah. And there will be links in the show notes to some of the original research on identity bias as well.

The reason I chose this topic is that I’ve never heard it discussed in PR circles. I’ve never seen it covered in PR textbooks or books about public relations.

This was completely new to me.

That’s one reason I’m still struggling with an answer about how to deal with it.

But it certainly starts with recognizing that it’s happening.

Neville Hobson:
I agree. It was new to me as well.

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to describe the environment we’re operating in today.

Now we just have to figure out what to do about it.

Shel Holtz:
Yes, we do.

And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another — failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry’s intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing.

Links from this episode:

The future of jobs in PR: will we get the third technology shift wrong too? (by Stephen Waddington)
It looks like PR has its head in the sand about AI (by Neville Hobson)
Senior practitioner neglect of digital/social skills a huge threat to PR’s future (2015 post by Shel Holtz)
Once Again, This Time with AI, the Communications Profession Will Be Late to Embrace a Valuable Technology (2023 post by Shel Holtz)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. So here’s a question I want to put to you right at the start, and I’d like you to sit with it as Shel and I work through this topic today. Public relations as a profession has faced two seismic technology shifts in the last 30 years. In fact, more than two, but I’m just going to mention these two. The internet arrived in 1995. Social media arrived around 2007. And in both cases, PR largely got it wrong. Not wrong in the sense of ignoring the technology. Wrong in the sense of fundamentally misreading what it meant. In 1995, we thought the internet was a publishing problem. In 2007, we thought social media was just another broadcast channel. And the disciplines that grew out of both—search, content marketing, influencer marketing—were largely built by people who weren’t us, people outside the profession who saw what we missed. So the question is: are we about to do it a third time? We’ll address that question in just a minute.

That’s the challenge Stephen Waddington lays down in a piece he’s just written for Influence, the member magazine of the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Stephen is someone whose thinking I respect considerably. He’s been one of the sharper and more honest voices in UK PR for years. And this article comes off the back of a book he’s just co-edited, AI and Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, published in May. And what he’s arguing in this piece is that this is no longer a theoretical debate, as job reductions are happening now. He gives specific examples. Three account executives doing media monitoring—that’s now one tool. A two-person intranet team—that’s now a fraction of the effort. The UK government has listed public relations professionals among the twenty occupations most exposed to large language models. We’re on the list. Early career employment in those sectors is also in relative decline.

Now, Waddington is not a pure pessimist. He sees a plausible optimistic path. The career pyramid becomes a diamond. Firms building roles around insight and risk management rather than billable hours. A rough near-term reduction of perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in entry-level positions, followed by net growth as scope expands and new roles emerge, the way digital did after 2000. He thinks in-house teams especially have an opportunity here. When AI absorbs the routine, it frees space for the work that corporate communication teams have always needed but rarely had capacity for. But he gives serious, genuine weight to the pessimistic case too. And this is where I think the article gets interesting. He references Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots in 2015, and Ford’s argument that previous technology waves hit one tier of the workforce and the tier above absorbed the displaced.

This time Ford says there’s no tier above. The advisory work that absorbed previous shifts is itself the target. Waddington doesn’t fully accept that in his article, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. And then there’s the argument that I think should be keeping every agency head and comms director awake at night—the pipeline. He’s hearing a common response from firms right now: freeze your apprenticeship schemes, freeze your graduate intake, let AI cover the production work. And he calls that, bluntly, organizational self-harm. Because in five years, those organizations will have nobody who understands how the systems actually work, why they fail, and crucially when to override them. You cannot run an advisory profession without a pipeline. And you cannot build a pipeline if you spent five years dismantling the entry points. So that’s where I think we should start today’s conversation. Not with the technology, with the choices.

Because Waddington’s closing argument, and it’s what I find compelling, is that human agency still exists here. The technology isn’t making decisions. We are. The question is whether we’re making them wisely, or whether for the third time in thirty years, we’re about to hand the future of our profession to people who aren’t us. Shel, what’s your instinct on this?

Shel Holtz: Very much what yours and Stephen’s is. I have been saying for decades that the public relations industry is always, always, always late to the game when there is a new technology that is going to shape the way communicators do their jobs. We were late to the internet, for sure. We were late to the World Wide Web. My first book on communicating online—well, actually, my first book was on intranets, but the first one that got any attention was Public Relations on the Net—came out before the World Wide Web, before there was a graphical user interface. So there were plenty of opportunities for PR before the web, based on the capabilities of the internet. Then we missed the web, then we missed social media. In between we missed some other seismic shifts—mobile, being able to communicate with people based on the fact that they now had this computer in their pocket. We missed the pivot to visual communication, we missed the pivot to video communication. And now, yeah, we are poised to miss the pivot to AI. And that’s not to suggest that PR people aren’t using it. I think they are, but I think they’re using it at a very superficial level and are succumbing to a lot of the hype out there about things like job loss and “get rid of your entry-level people.” That’s all mundane drudge work that the partners and senior people don’t want to do—the account execs—so hand that all off to the AI and you don’t need to pay those people anymore.

And you’re exactly right. I was listening to a podcast over the weekend where they were talking about the same issue, but they were talking about it in the context of law firms. And they were making the point that the associates that are brought in out of law school do the drudge work that the partners don’t want to do. They write contracts, right? They do things like that. And now that the AI can do that, who needs them? Well, the question becomes: where do the future partners come from when the ones who are already at the partner level retire? There’ll be nobody to take those jobs. We are not rethinking the industry, and we’re not rethinking it from two perspectives. One of those perspectives is the agency. The other perspective is the in-house side of communications. They’re two sides of the same coin. But I think we need to split them apart and look at them in terms of how we need to reinvent the profession. You and I have talked about reinventing how we bill, how we price, because the hourly model makes no sense anymore. But what does an entry-level person do if the AI can handle a lot of that drudge work? And it can.

I mean, we’ve talked about on this show that I’ve set up a Hermes instance and it is out there. In fact, I haven’t checked my Telegram account yet, but there should be 10 links to recent news stories that are prime for me to news-check because I set up an agent to do that. I have an agent set up, a skill set up, that I can deploy anytime I want to. It is set up to analyze the websites of twenty-two of our competitors. And all I have to do is tell it what I want it to analyze. Do I want it to look at how they handle their project portfolios? Do I want it to look at how they handle their thought leadership? I can ask it any of those questions and it’ll come back and give me a very nice report. I could absolutely set it up to do media monitoring. I’m starting to question the need for my media monitoring service at work, although the agent that I have set up to do some of this certainly can’t get behind the paywall the way that the media monitoring service can, because they pay the licensing fee for all of those. So if the AI can assume all of this work, it’s not a question of saying we don’t need entry-level people. It’s a question of reimagining what entry-level people should be doing.

In terms of AI: What should they be doing with AI, and what new things can we be having them do that we haven’t thought of before, or that we always wished they could do if they didn’t have all of this drudge work that they had to spend their time on? It’s time for a reinvention, and I don’t see anybody talking about that. I haven’t seen a whole lot of ideas about where all this should go.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m with you on that a hundred percent. Exactly my sentiment as well, that you don’t see people talking about this in a truly serious way. I see on LinkedIn—if that’s any barometer, I don’t know if it is or not—but I see people mentioning this now and again and “we ought to do something about that.” But there’s no webinars, no seminars, no get-togethers on the topic of reinventing the agency, let’s say. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself, and value-based pricing versus time-based pricing. And it’s interesting how Stephen Waddington addresses that topic in his article. It’s quite a pointed observation he makes that’s worth pushing on. If you’re still selling time rather than value, he says, AI will break your model. That’s a direct challenge to the billable-hour structure that much of agency PR still runs on. So the firms getting this right are building around insight, outcome, and risk management instead. It’s worth asking how many firms are actually making that structural shift versus just talking about it. Not enough. Doesn’t mean to say they’re ignoring it. Far from it. I think it’s largely because they don’t know what to do. How do they address this? So there’s an opportunity for someone with some insights and answers to help educate firms like that. There’s a consulting opportunity, if you like.

Shel Holtz: I was thinking exactly the same thing. If somebody’s looking for a pivot in their career, that sounds like one to me.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah. So we are at that place. Again, go back just three years, 2023, when we wrote our pieces about that CIPR survey, and twenty-five percent of the respondents said they’d never ever use AI. It was pretty absolute, the answers. Here we are, three years later, and I bet you that number’s down to five percent, if not less. I can’t imagine anyone—and it causes a very broad question, “would you use AI, yes or no?” It’s a bit like “should we stay in the EU, yes or no?” I mean the Brexit referendum—well, people, what a dumb question. But so that’s where we’re at. But I believe a lot of the landscape is now so polluted with everyone’s opinion that it’s very confusing to zero in on what are the issues I need to be thinking about in an organization. Plus, I see so many people—I saw one just this morning—someone’s got a PDF book on how to move your business to selling value, basically, not time. And it’s not how many hours you did, it’s what did you deliver to the client.

So it’s great, but it needs to be more authority than that, I think. And this is where the profession comes in—professional bodies like the CIPR, the PRSA in the US. The CIPR has done a good job in raising awareness about AI in the right way, in context related to public relations. They’ve had this AI panel for some time now with senior practitioners leading it. This book’s come out and it’s got a lot of support from practitioners in the UK and beyond. So maybe now is the time that this is going to get taken a bit more seriously than people do. I think though what Stephen worries about—and I think it’s not a misplaced worry—is the point that people are being laid off. Layoffs are happening all the time and most people believe it’s because AI is going to be more efficient and all that kind of stuff. And there must be some truth in some of that. But he also mentions something quite interesting in his article, because he says that most of the conversation about AI and jobs focuses on redundancy risks from above—leadership cutting roles. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. But Waddington notes a quieter pressure running in the opposite direction. Junior and mid-career practitioners are walking out of organizations they consider too far behind the curve.

So firms that move too slowly aren’t just at risk of getting the technology wrong, they’re at risk of losing the people who could help them get it right. The talent drain is bi-directional. Now that’s an interesting element to bring into this discussion, I think—that it’s those folks who are walking away. He doesn’t say, and I hadn’t found anything before we started recording, as to where they’re all going. Are they leaving the profession entirely, or are they just looking for a place that—in a sense they feel it’s worth going to this company because they’ve got it switched on, that they’re clued into this? So maybe that’s the state we’re in. Doesn’t answer the questions, mind you, and they’re coming thick and fast now, I think. I see, again, LinkedIn is a kind of barometer of sentiment, if you will—not in the analytics way, but the feeling you see expressed in some posts from some people who are worth reading about it. And that includes many of the people that I follow and that you would follow as well. So you’re seeing this, but it’s all very random. That’s the thing. And it requires something more than that. And voices like Stephen’s, yours when you were talking about this—we’ve missed about three, four, five times, that sort of thing. What’s going to make people really pay attention to this?

Shel Holtz: I hate to say it, but it’s the same thing that has always made the industry pay attention, and that’s when they suffer financial pain. The reason we have not embraced as an industry these technological changes is our billings were fine. We were doing just fine as an industry financially. So why should we make this risky change to something that we don’t quite understand and we’re not convinced is going to have all that much impact or will necessarily stick around all that long? That leaves an opening for other industries—advertising and marketing—to sneak in. It also leaves an opportunity for boutiques that specialize in this to start up and take money off the table that was there for the PR agencies that were already in business. And this seems to be a recurring pattern: if we’re not feeling the financial pain, we’re not gonna make any change. As soon as we start to feel that pain, as soon as we see our clients going to the boutiques and going to the marketing agencies, then we go, “we better change.” And then we’re behind the curve. So I think that’s the big issue and the big challenge—to be proactive rather than reactive when these technologies create these opportunities, or create the requirement, if we wait, that we must change because we’ve already seen these revenues go to somebody else.

One thing to keep in mind: absolutely there have been layoffs within the industry and they have been attributed to AI. It is important to keep in mind though—and this was reinforced in that very same podcast I was listening to that I mentioned earlier—that if you look at economic data, there’s no evidence of mass layoffs as a result of AI. The unemployment rate is pretty much where it was before all of this. The number of new jobs that are being reported, at least in the US, has actually been pretty strong. The jobs report the last month was quite encouraging. So we keep hearing about the mass layoffs and they may be coming. They may not.

Because frankly, what I see—and I don’t know if this is unique to the construction industry, I doubt it; I think it may be a bigger issue in the construction industry, but I think this is probably true of most jobs—is it’s not the job that gets replaced by AI, it’s tasks within the job. And then there are other tasks that the AI can’t do. The other thing is that there are things that we have wished that we could do, but haven’t had the time to do, from an internal comms standpoint and even, I suspect, a PR standpoint from inside the organization, the client side. I mean, I remember when I was in my first corporate job. This was with Arco. I was there from ’77 to ’83 with some brilliant communicators, but the company believed in it. So they funded the internal comms department. We had 25 employees in internal comms in five cities.

And each of us had beats, just like you were a newspaper reporter with a beat. I had two beats. I had Arco Petroleum Products, which was the gas stations and the merchandising of cans of motor oil and things like that, and Arco Marine, which was the oil tankers that transported oil mainly from Alaska down to the refineries along the West Coast. And I spent time—I mean, that was my job, was to go hang out, to spend time, to shadow somebody, to do a ride-along, to ride on a tanker, to spend a day at one of the gas stations and really get a sense, and to be able to report on this a little more intimately than just calling somebody and doing an interview over the phone. And in public relations, I think it’s important to remember that “relations” part of the public relations label. How do you build relations? Well, if AI really does take away a lot of that drudge work that we spend the time doing while we’re sitting at our desk, then we have time to get up from our desks and go out and hang out with the publics that we are dealing with and build those relations. And why wouldn’t we want to do that? AI can’t do that. AI can’t get up, get their car and go to where the public is. Maybe it’s a community relations organization, maybe it’s a division of your business. Maybe it’s a customer base that is gathering—well, let’s say it’s Ford Motor Company and there’s a car club that’s meeting. Whatever it may be, we have the opportunity now to become much more entwined with those publics.

And do a much better job of understanding them. Yeah, we still want to do the data, we still want to do the analytics, but there’s nothing like sitting with them and looking them in the eye and talking with them to build an understanding that’s going to help you communicate with them and help you build trust among them. That’s just one idea of what we can do with this freed-up time. And this is an important point—and I saw this in one of the reports that came out just last week, I think it was—the value that we get from saving an hour because AI can do it just leaks out of the bottom of the organization if we don’t know what we’re going to replace that hour with that has value. And we hear about all the savings of time that AI is going to give us. I haven’t heard a whole lot about how organizations are figuring out how to reallocate that time among those employees.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, neither me. No, I agree. And you do hear a lot of talk about the concept of that. I mean there’s lots in this topic, Shel, really, and you’ve thrown some bright light on some of the things we should be doing. I like the idea of going out to meet your publics, as it were. It’s winding the clock back, actually, to how we used to do all this back in the day, before all this tech was there.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it really is.

Neville Hobson: We had to go out and find the sources and interview them face to face and, you know, meet down the pub or whatever. So maybe we need to examine what worked in the past and bring it to the fore again.

Shel Holtz: When I was a newspaper reporter, before I made the switch to corporate communications, I was with a local community daily newspaper, and I used to go hang out at the bar after work where all of the government workers hung out after work. Got to know them, got to listen in, got some pretty good stories out of that. But also I could pick up the phone and call some of these people because they knew me. I wasn’t just the reporter who called when I needed a quote or needed some information. I was the guy they just had a drink with.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Lessons to learn there, I think. So yeah, lots of good ideas here. I think Stephen Waddington did a good job in literally describing the landscape and expressing some of his concerns. That’s prompted this conversation. So let’s hope this adds to the topics that people need to be talking about. So listeners, hope this is helpful.

Shel Holtz: And listeners, if your organization is actually making some changes and doing some pivots, we’d love to hear about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

First, they were told to use AI. Experiment! Add it to your workflows! Go wild! Then the bills started piling up, and companies realized the cost was not tenable. Now the walk-backs are happening. Usage caps! Caution! Slow down! Among the issues communicators need to address is employees questioning leadership’s judgment. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville explore approaches communicators can take to help employees understand the pivot while maintaining the perception of leader competence.

Links from this episode:

AI can cost more than human workers now
Microsoft reports are exposing AI’s real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees
When AI Costs More Than the Worker It Replaced
AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds
AI layoffs may be backfiring on companies
Uber, Microsoft, and Others Burning Through AI Budgets. Now What?
Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it
Uber Burns Its 2026 AI Budget In Four Months On Claude Code
Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token spender uses 100 billion tokens a month — and they’re not even the world leader
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits AI token costs are becoming ‘a huge issue’ — company seeks improved value as overspending becomes a meme
Token Billing Exposes AI’s Missing ROI And Puts Billion-Dollar Bets At Risk
AI savings misses should make executives uncomfortable
AI saves workers a day a week, but they don’t know what to do with it

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 517. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz. In some companies right now, that AI that was supposed to replace expensive humans is costing more than the humans it replaced. The numbers are kind of breathtaking. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. In fact, I just heard today that they’re introducing a monthly AI spending cap of $1,500 per employee. One unnamed company, a real one though, spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month because nobody had bothered to set a spending limit. An NVIDIA executive flat out admitted that for his team, compute now costs more than the engineers using it. A lot of these companies didn’t just overspend, they made decisions on the strength of what they thought AI could do. And in plenty of cases, those decisions cost people their jobs. The pitch was that AI can do this work for a fraction of the cost.

Then Bain and Company studied a thousand companies and finds that most aren’t getting those savings. Gartner found the layoffs delivered no better returns than not laying anyone off at all. In its study, Bain looked at the books and saw money leaking out of the top, companies spending the budget without the savings showing up. And Boston Consulting Group went and asked employees and found that the leak runs from the bottom too. Over 40% of regular AI users say they’re saving a full workday every week. But Boston Consulting Group’s point is that saved time doesn’t automatically become value. If nobody tells an employee where to redirect those reclaimed hours, that value just evaporates. So two consultancies looking at two completely different ends of the organization landed on the same diagnosis. This is a management failure. It’s not a technology failure. So put yourself in the shoes of employees who are still there.

They watched colleagues walked out the door because they were told the machine could do it cheaper. And now they’re watching leadership start to walk it back. In most cases, walk it back really quietly. What does that do to employees who see their leaders’ judgment, their competence? Because that is where this becomes a communication story. It’s about trust, credibility, and what we as communicators are supposed to do when leaders make a big public painful bet that doesn’t pay off. We’ll share our thoughts about that right after this.

Now there’s a lot we can talk about with this story, like communicating a suddenly altered governance model. But let’s start here. The bet companies made was about people, that AI could replace human labor at a fraction of the cost. When that turns out to be wrong, employees don’t just see a line item on a P&L. They see leaders who either didn’t understand the technology they bet the company on, or who used the AI story as cover for cuts they were going to make anyway, what we’ve come to call AI washing. Both of these readings are poison. The second one travels fastest. A communicator’s first job is to make sure that the accurate story is the one that gets out there. And to add a little context to that idea, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just recently said that this cost discussion is new. It started early this year. Before that, nobody was talking about it. And that’s probably because before early this year, most employees were prompting AI chatbots, and that didn’t blow up budgets. What changed early this year? Agents. Now employees have agents running complex tasks in an endless loop, and that burns tokens like nobody’s business. I heard about one employee who burned through a billion tokens in a month. That means costs are exploding. It’s not something anybody really anticipated, and a lot of CEOs were caught unaware. You know, they paid for the subscription cost to say Anthropic, now they’re paying the subscription, but they’re also paying for tokens. So Neville, if you were leading a comms department in a company that laid off a bunch of people because AI could do their jobs, and now it’s either costing more for the AI to do those jobs, or the AI isn’t doing it as well as the people did, how do you communicate that without making leadership look like fools?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a good question, isn’t it, Shel? I mean, you’ve painted a picture that’s pretty dire, it seems to me. And I like to think that this is a kind of outlier territory we’re in. This is not the mainstream. But I’m willing to be proven wrong. You know, I don’t recognize this in the UK, so it could not yet be a big deal over here. But I’m thinking you mentioned that the original AI narrative, if I can describe it that way, was sold to people as we’re replacing you with robots or we’re replacing you with tech. I wonder, is that the case everywhere? Because I would have thought it was, many would have sold it as additive. It’s AI plus you, not AI instead of you. And that’s a wholly different kind of message if that were the case. Either way, they’re walking it back. And I think there’s a handful of things the communication leader should do. And that person would also be the counselor and the advisor to the leadership of the organization. So I think one of the first things, if not the first thing, is that you mustn’t let the leadership hide behind euphemisms. You know, restructuring, right sizing, optimizing for the future, that kind of stuff.

Employees see through all of that, particularly in this example. And it makes things even worse, I think. The communicator’s job is to push for plain language, even when that’s uncomfortable. So that’s one thing. The second, and again, this may well be the first. I’m just putting these out there as bullet points effectively without saying which is the most significant. Acknowledge the whiplash directly. Acknowledge it. Don’t pretend that the earlier message just didn’t happen. All those lovely messages about this rosy future’s coming when we’re introducing AI. You could say, we told you AI would be a productivity multiplier for everyone. We believe that. The reality has turned out differently, and you deserve an honest explanation of why. Of course, your next bit is so what are you going to say? But that’s the framing you need to do. Separate the human cost from the technology story. The people losing jobs are not a line item.

Communication that treats them as a budget adjustment will destroy trust with everyone who remains behind. And the people who remain are watching very carefully. Give the survivors something real, not platitudes about the future, concrete information about what the new operating model looks like, what’s expected of them, and what support they’re getting. And there’s a harder truth for communicators, it seems to me, and this kind of popped out of the woodwork sideways when I was looking into this. If you’re the comms person in a situation like this, and leadership won’t let you be honest, won’t acknowledge the contradiction, they won’t speak plainly to people losing their jobs, then you have a professional and ethical problem, not a communication problem. And that’s a different ball game. And if you’re in that situation, I would say, easy to say this naturally, is get your resume brushed up and start looking around someplace else. You don’t want to be in that kind of environment. So the best communication advice in the world can’t fix a leadership team that wants to paper over a broken promise. And that’s worth saying out loud. And I think these are the things that should be on the communicator’s to-do list in a situation like this that could, I suppose, go some way towards restoring or maintaining some level of trust in the leadership, where we do, we hate what you did, we’re angry at you, but we believe that you are willing to fix it in some form. And even saying like, yeah, I’m with you on that, you thought this would work and it didn’t. So there’s other questions that will arise too. But either way it’s going to be an uncomfortable journey to get to an outcome that you like.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, to your first point, no, I don’t think every organization is going through this. I think it’s the ones that are actually providing employees with a budget to use tokens. I mean, we heard the stories about the leaderboards that were encouraging people to rise to the top of the leaderboard for the number of tokens they were burning, because that would indicate, it would signal that they’re using AI, which the companies wanted them to do. But you know, the models, the frontier labs were not really forthright with their pricing structures on the tokens. This was something new. They introduced it. It’s not very transparent. Not all of them even have the ability to show you how many tokens you’ve burned through. A couple of them do, but it’s not clear what that means in terms of your costs or what you have left available. But you know, from the communication standpoint, yeah, the trap I see here is that the original decisions were announced really loudly.

Shel Holtz: They issued press releases. They had all hands meetings. It was discussed on earnings calls. The correction here is happening more like a whisper. Spend caps are being added quietly to governance language. I know Uber is out there talking about it, but not everybody. The leaderboards for those token maxing exercises are just vanishing without explanation. Contractors are appearing in company offices to do the work that the AI was supposed to do. Some of them are the employees who were laid off in the first place. So, you know, when you boast loudly and walk back quietly, employees are going to fill that silence, right? Information abhors a vacuum. And they’re going to fill it with the worst possible interpretation. But, you know, leaders do have this instinct to either double down, you know, this is what we said we were going to do, and by God, we’re going to do it. Or they go quiet, and both those approaches are wrong. I think what actually rebuilds credibility isn’t a groveling apology. It’s a clear here’s what we expected, here’s what the data actually showed, and here’s what we’re changing in response. I think that reframes what looked like a wrong bet into a process that we employed to arrive at the best outcome.

And it’s a continuum, and we’re here at the continuum. We’re not at the end game. We’re still learning and adapting and adjusting, and we still believe in the promise of AI, which by the way, I do. Look, employees don’t lose respect for leaders who update their thinking. They lose respect for leaders who pretend they were right all along when they weren’t. So we should counsel leaders to stop measuring AI adoption and hours saved, and start measuring whether that saved time is actually being reinvested into something that matters. We should never have been celebrating who can burn through the most tokens the fastest. In communication terms, that’s like focusing on which communicator can produce the most articles for the intranet and ignoring whether people are modifying their behaviors or reinforcing their support for company goals or whatever other outcomes you had determined that those articles were supposed to produce. Deciding what an organization celebrates, what it puts on the scoreboard, that’s partly our job.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’d say you’re right. It’s interesting. I think there’s a kind of an underlying question behind all this, it seems to me, that I was mulling over when I was looking at this. The real question is, can communications actually repair the damage that’s been caused by this? Can it? I think the honest answer is partially. So good communication can reduce the damage, preserve some trust with the people who stay and give the organization a chance to rebuild its credibility over time. But it can’t undo the promise. It can only help people understand what happened and why. Now that may sound like, well, in that case, this is doomed. No, not at all. Because if you get to that point, help people understand what happened and why, you’ve then got a foundation where you can build from, it seems to me. And that’s connected directly to your point you just made, that you have to, you know, grasp the nettle as it were, take the bull by the horns, etc., think of the metaphors, and be honest and truthful, fess up. It’s not like, yeah, we screwed up, not at all. We made the bet, we had all the research, everyone was convinced this would work, and indeed our vendors who persuaded us to sign up for all those tokens were saying the same thing.

There’s also another element. I’ve been reading about this in, I’ve forgotten, one of the US papers that I subscribe to, about this supposed huge AI backlash in the US that isn’t happening here. Yeah, it’s not happening here, although it’s a whole different landscape here in that context. Not on the scale that you have in the States. But I’ve been reading a bit about that. Maybe that needs to be factored into this as well, because that would fuel people’s anger, I think, at the outcome that they’re experiencing, particularly if there’s kind of iffy communication somewhere in there that doesn’t resonate with employees. So it’s a complex picture. But I think the real question is, can communications actually repair the damage? And I think the answer is precisely that, partially.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you raise a really interesting point. If 70% of the population is feeling negative about AI, you have to figure that that is reflected in your employee population. And now you’ve got this piled on top of that. That’s just fueling those views. So you have to factor that into the approach that you’re taking to communication and maybe even into the employee profiles that you’re using to craft those communications on that whiplash that you were talking about. Important to remember that for, you know, like a year, employees were pushed. Yeah, there were mandates, those leaderboards I mentioned. They were pushed to use it as much as humanly possible, and now they’re being told, oops, use it carefully. Yeah, and I think communications does set the narrative that connects those two poles. You know, without it, the reversal just looks like leadership didn’t know what they’re doing.

Shel Holtz: And again, that reads as incompetent. So I think we do have to build the bridge. We learned something on the road. Here’s what’s changed and why. It doesn’t mean that the promise of AI isn’t still there. It’s just the road that we are taking to get there is a little more winding than we expected. And by the way, speaking of the whiplash, according to that Boston Consulting Group survey, nearly half of workers, 47%, say they spend more time managing and directing AI than doing the actual work they were originally hired to do. Think about that against what leaders promised, because the pitch was that this was going to be a labor-reducing thing, a productivity improver. And what employees are actually living is the labor didn’t get easier, it just got transformed from doing the work to supervising the AI that does the work. Boston Consulting Group found that four in ten reported an increased cognitive load, which is, I have to say, exactly what I have been experiencing. I’m not spending less time, I’m spending more time, and AI is part of the reason for that. So when the lived experience doesn’t match what was said in the announcement, the gap is where leaders’ credibility can go to die, right? It’s the communicator’s job to close that gap. Make sure that the story leadership is telling matches the work that people are actually doing and the experience they’re actually having.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would subscribe to that view. I’m also thinking, Shel, that, you know, the way this has been presented, let’s say, is as if, you know, lots of communication when this started, big promises from leadership, and then silence. And now there’s this, we’ve got to rethink all this and you’re not going to be able to do that. So there was no effective communication in the meantime, there was no updates on what’s going on and this is what people are doing and these are the benefits they’re having. So I feel there was a lack of continuity in the communication. Otherwise this wouldn’t have landed as a big surprise, or as big a surprise as it has to many. There would have been signs that might have prompted some to say, whoa, hang on a second. I’m getting this little note here saying I’ve used so many tokens. I mean it could even be, what are these tokens it keeps talking about? How was that communicated? That every time you do this, this is going to happen. And I’m thinking of my own experience as an individual and the experiments I’m running with Claude, for instance, that when I was experimenting with Claude Cowork, it would, or it might have been the project, I can’t remember which one it was now, but there was a little script I could put into the model that told me how many tokens I used. And it didn’t tell me that and then some kind of tech gobbledygook that I wouldn’t have a clue what the hell does that mean. It actually told me this project you’ve done used so many tokens, which is nought point one two percent of your total allowance until the next reset. Now that makes me think, that’s okay.

So, did they have anything like that in the organization that enabled people to just keep a running total on what they’re doing? You know, it’s kind of like the average MPG in your car kind of thing. Everyone knows that kind of thing. That’s helpful, even though it’s not very scientific or detailed, but it would be enough. And maybe I haven’t encountered it myself. I see people talking about this on LinkedIn quite a bit, where they are getting fed up with this tool telling me I’ve reached my token limit, and I’m thinking, okay, they’re obviously doing the kind of work that not everyone is doing that burns through tokens like this. And it’s quite tech oriented, those kind of comments. So you’ve got to take that into account. But I think it does come back to, from a comms point of view, that you told people this is what was going to happen, this is why we were doing this, and there’s this lovely rosy future for all of us. Did you explain the detail about how things were going to actually happen? Probably not, I would say. So otherwise there wouldn’t have been the backlash at the end. The backlash would have started earlier and you might have been able to head it off. You might have been able to make a difference. So these are all, you know, what-ifs perhaps, but nevertheless, it comes back to that underlying question, that can communicators actually repair this? The answer is partially, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I could definitely see myself burning through a lot of tokens without a tech rationale for it. If I set up ten agents to scan the media environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, each with a different area of focus, and they’re just constantly running, that’s tokens being burned. That’s like the car never being turned off and going through the gas. So, by the way, imagine the message that companies can send to their employees if the company was more deliberate and slower about the implementation of AI. They know it’s coming. They’ve given Copilot to employees, but in terms of everybody going out and building agents and things like that, well, we’re still remediating our internal data to make it useful for an AI model. And we haven’t launched our training yet. No, they can rub their hands and say, you know, being slow and deliberate paid off. Look what’s happening to all these other organizations. We’re pretty smart leaders here in this company. By the way, one other communication opportunity I want to address before we wrap up, and that’s around governance, because there’s, you know, a remarkable detail in this story. The companies that overspent mostly already had the tools to prevent it. You know, spend limits like you set up in the agent that you had that told you how many tokens you’d gone through. Routing simpler tasks to cheaper models. I just heard this morning on a podcast that there’s something you can sign up for if you use their tools, it’s automatically going to route you to the right model for the task. So you’re not always using the high-end model, the reasoning model, the thinking model, that costs a lot. Budget caps, all of these rules have always existed as capabilities inside the platforms, the companies just never switched them on. So for a communicator, that’s a gift because it lets leadership say we’re putting real discipline in place without it sounding like punishing employees for using too many tokens, like they were initially told to do. The framing here is everything. The governance change needs to be framed as here’s how we make sure this actually pays off for us. And it lets employees know the company’s approach to AI is maturing. If you frame it as AI use is now restricted, well, that signals panic and confirms the exact incompetence story you’re trying to tamp down in the first place.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Again, what was communicated, how was it communicated, to what depth was it communicated, and how did you know that people absorbed it well? So what kind of feedback mechanism did you have to see if people understood the message? But I think there’s also another element, this is an organizational one, which is, you know, you’ve got a hundred and fifty employees, let’s say you’ve got five hundred employees in your company, did every single one of those five hundred need unlimited token access to do anything they wanted? No, they shouldn’t have done. So the example you mentioned, a tech person or enabling someone to be monitoring something twenty-four seven, not everyone would need to have that. And in fact, you’d need to structure it so that only these guys who need to do that. And I would imagine you’ve done a comparison to say this is definitely going to be cheaper than doing it that way, which you’ve always been doing it. So that would make sense. I wonder how many didn’t even do those kind of, you know.

Shel Holtz: Many, if not most. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: Right, I wouldn’t be surprised. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this outcome that we’re discussing here. And again, that is now the fifth time I think I’ve mentioned this, that communications can only repair this damage partially. And I think the bits it can repair are going to have some good outcomes, I would say.

Shel Holtz: One other thing that communications can do here is to set the stage. It’s, this is not the end game. We have not reached the place where, now we get it, everything’s right. The message is anticipate more change from this. I mean, the frontier model companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, you know, they’re going to change their pricing models because they know that people are dissatisfied. They know that it’s opaque. They know that it’s costing more than people and companies can afford. So you can look for this to get changed. I just recently heard somebody suggesting an outcome-based pricing model as opposed to a token-based model. I don’t know how that would work, but it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. But you need to prepare employees for more change. You can’t let them be surprised again. Look at what agents did to the way this has pivoted. There’s going to be more of this on the horizon. You know, prepare yourself, but in the meantime, we are still on the right path of figuring out how to apply this to the organization’s best advantage. And that’ll be a thirty for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #517: How to Communicate AI Whiplash to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The Economist has gone public with an experiment: it has created a shadow website featuring an AI-friendly version of its front-of-paywall content. The idea is to improve the odds of this content surfacing in AI answers and responses to AI queries. It’s based on a new standard, llms.txt, which has been described as the robot.txt of AI. What does this mean for communicators? Neville and Shel break it down in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The Economist tests AI-ready web pages
The Economist prepares for a two‑track internet: one for humans and one for AI agents
The Economist is testing content read by AI agents
How The Economist is using AI to extend its global reach
The next version of the web will be built for machines, not humans

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode number 516. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson.

Something quiet is happening to the web, and The Economist is one of the first major publishers to talk openly about how it’s responding. A piece published by Digiday last week describes how The Economist is building what its VP of generative AI, Josh Munker, calls two versions of the web.

One version is the one we’re all familiar with: richly designed pages, feature photography, navigation, everything optimized for a human reader browsing with intent. The other version is quite different: stripped back, structured around questions and answers, designed not for you, but for an AI agent acting on your behalf.

Now, if that framing sounds familiar, it should. In episode 515 last week, we spent some time on what Google announced at its developer conference in May: that searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than by humans, and that people will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. I made the point then that the question for communicators was shifting from, “How do we get found?” to, “How do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from?”

What The Economist is doing is a direct practical answer to exactly that question. And here’s what makes this particularly interesting. The Economist itself published a piece last December describing this shift in precise terms: a move from a pull internet, where people initiate actions, to a push model, where agents act unprompted, setting up meetings, flagging research, handling tasks, often without a human ever typing a query. They wrote about it then as an emerging phenomenon. Now, six months later, their own team is operationally responding to it. They’re not just observers of this trend; they’re participants in it.

The logic behind their approach is straightforward. A growing share of people, particularly in B2B contexts, no longer start their discovery process with a search engine or a home page. They start with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. They ask a question, get a synthesized answer, and may never visit the original source at all.

For a publisher like The Economist, that creates an obvious problem. If your content isn’t structured in a way that an AI agent can parse and surface clearly, you effectively become invisible. Not because your content is poor, but because the intermediary can’t read it properly.

So The Economist is experimenting. Right now, the focus is on content that already sits outside the paywall: marketing copy, B2B sales material, the kinds of pages where you want a potential subscriber or corporate client to find you. They’re building parallel versions: the polished human-facing page alongside a clean, agent-readable equivalent. The aim is to show up accurately and usefully in AI-generated answers.

Now, why does this matter to communicators beyond the publishing world? Because what The Economist is describing isn’t a publishing problem. It’s a communication problem.

And it connects to something that one researcher quoted in The Economist’s December piece put plainly: Marketers and communicators may need to pitch not to people, but to agent attention. The audience increasingly will be algorithms, and the humans will act on what these algorithms surface.

Think about your own organization’s public-facing content: press releases, executive bios, policy statements, corporate FAQs, product and service descriptions. All of that content is increasingly being read and summarized by AI agents before it ever reaches a human. If that content isn’t structured to be understood accurately by an agent, you lose control of how your organization is represented in AI-generated answers. And unlike a Google snippet, you may not even know it’s happening.

Alessandro DeSantis, a media consultant quoted in the Digiday piece, puts it bluntly. He calls agent optimization a defensive baseline, not a competitive advantage, but the minimum requirement to remain visible at all.

There’s a deeper question sitting underneath all of this, which we’ll get into: Who do you trust in the AI-intermediated world? What does it mean for the communicator’s job when the first reader of your content isn’t a person at all?

Shel, you and I discussed the Google side of this in FIR 515. Here’s a publisher responding in real time. What’s your take?

Shel Holtz: I have lots of takes on this.

This is, I think, a big issue. The first thing I want to point out is that, as I read the commentary of people who are talking about this, there’s an expectation that in the not-too-distant future, the AI version is all that we’re going to need to publish because we’re going to be publishing for AI as people rely on AI to get their information. I find this a troubling idea.

I think people are ignoring the fact that right now, 25 to 60 percent, depending on the nature of the site, of visits to a website are direct. They are not coming from a search engine. It’s somebody who already knows the URL. As I mentioned in a post I published to LinkedIn last week, nobody going to Amazon starts at Google and says “online retail site” and waits for the URL to come up. They just type Amazon.com.

There are a lot of people who know the URLs. There are URLs published in magazine articles, in advertising, in TV commercials, for example. And then there is the dark web: I send you a link by email or in our Slack channel, and you click it. There’s no search involved at all, so there is no opportunity to see that AI overview.

So I think we have to keep in mind that there are still a lot of people who are coming to our websites, not through Google or some other search mechanism, or starting with Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you. They’re coming directly to your website, either because they know the URL or it has been shared with them by somebody else. So I think we do need to keep that in mind.

The other reason I think we need to maintain our own websites is because we own them, and we don’t own that intermediary. You publish that Markdown version of a web page and you provide the proper router to it. Was it called LLM text, I think? They’re calling this the robots.txt of the AI era. And it’s going to share with the person who’s making the query what it shares. It may not be exactly what is on your page. So now you’re down to using a third party.

Neville Hobson: Something like that.

Shel Holtz: So, yeah, it’s good to have at least as a statement of record what your original content was. I have some other thoughts about this, but I’ll let you react to that first.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, no, I get it totally. Yet the trend seems to be quite clear. This is the way it’s moving. And I would say that, from what I’ve been reading, not just this, but The Economist is actually a probably good signal for what other media properties may or may not be doing or might want to do, depending on the outcome of The Economist’s experimentation. Being discoverable in this new way is critical; otherwise, you are invisible.

And I think the behaviors of people are gradually changing, not to the extent that it’s a groundswell. I don’t see it like that myself. Maybe it is generational, potentially, I suppose. But I think applying that kind of “it’s because of age differences in the different generations” is a bit of a tired argument nowadays, I think, as a kind of answer to everything.

We’re seeing a shift in how people not only find information, but how they think about going about finding information. So the idea of thinking, “Okay, let me just type into this search box: How do I do so-and-so? Where do I go to?” or whatever words you might use. I kind of talk in literally conversational language when I’m searching for something, and I’ve had more good experiences, way more than not good, with Google Overviews as a result.

And again, I sometimes stop and think, “What did I just do then?” I took Google Overview and I didn’t go any further than that because it gave me exactly what I wanted. And not only that, I’ve got a list of all the sources it looked at as well. So why am I going to spend any more time on this? I got what I need. So this is evolving fast, even though it’s still not totally clear exactly what’s happening.

And I think the idea — and this is my take on this, Shel — the idea of, as a matter of course, sharing URLs in an email or in a WhatsApp message with colleagues in the workplace, that ain’t going to be the way it’s going to be as a matter of course. There are going to be other, better ways of doing it than that, generally speaking, of course.

So this isn’t suddenly going to happen next week. This is going to take some time to evolve. But it seems from what I’ve read, Digiday being one good example, and a handful of others I’ve also looked at, this is the clear trend that’s evolving. And The Economist is clearly betting on their experiment that AI-agent content prepared for AI agents is an essential move for them to take as a publisher so that they do not become invisible. And I get that.

Shel Holtz: I agree that it’s an essential move. I’m not suggesting that organizations not do this. I’m just suggesting that they not abandon their websites. For now, we’ve got to keep that 25 to 60 percent that are coming directly to your website in mind.

You also have to keep in mind that your website may have things on it that can’t be duplicated in an AI Overview. In fact, the advice that’s circulating out there is that if you want to drive traffic still to your website, you need to have that kind of content. It may be calculators, for example, interactive elements that just can’t be summarized. You have to get to the website and interact with that tool.

I know that the ability to purchase from an AI Overview is coming. It’s not here yet. I haven’t heard a timeline for when it’s going to be here. It’s coming, but for now, if you want to make a purchase, you need to go to the website to do that. So I’m suggesting that there are still reasons to provide a website. You need to do both.

Now, when I say you need to do both, I think it’s important to understand that you don’t need to have a one-for-one of all of the content on your website. You need to make a judgment about what on your website you want to have summarized by AI and what is unnecessary or superfluous, or what you otherwise just don’t need to spend the time on. It doesn’t matter if the AI gets this particular content summarized in Markdown so that it can give you the AI summary.

So I think you have to do some strategizing. But undoubtedly, what’s coming from the web development platforms that are out there is the automation of this. I think it’s inevitable that WordPress and Wix and Squarespace and Webflow and all of the other services out there for creating websites are going to add the ability to automatically convert this page to Markdown and put it in the right place. I think that’s probably going to ease this. I haven’t heard any conversations from these website creation companies about this, but I do think it’s inevitable.

Neville Hobson: It is, I agree. One hundred percent, it’s inevitable. And like I said earlier, this is not sudden. So your point about keeping your website with links and all that stuff — for some years, that’s still going to be the case for many people, but it’s going to decline.

I think it’s interesting what you said about some stuff not lending itself well. I totally agree. And in fact, one of the tips for communicators that I came up with from all the stuff I’ve been reading is to go through your key external pages in your organization — the About page, FAQ, leadership bios, product or service descriptions — and ask, “If an AI agent were summarizing this, what would it say?”

And you talked about the examples you made: content buried in carousels, PDFs, JavaScript-heavy pages, or dense narrative prose is harder for agents to parse accurately. So restructuring even a handful of high-priority pages into clear, direct, quick Q&A formats is a practical first step. It could matter a great deal.

And the other thing, which I picked up from Digiday, but also from some others, is worth noting for everyone, I think. The technical landscape is still forming. Nobody has the full picture yet. But as The Economist example tells us, they’re not waiting, and neither should we as communicators. You start with what you can control: your own content, your direct audience relationships, your messaging clarity. And as Digiday concludes, the organizations that experiment now, even tentatively, will be better positioned than those waiting for a definitive playbook that may never arrive.

And I think if I were doing this — and again, it’s easy to say, “Well, if I were doing this, I’d do X.” It sounds easy, doesn’t it? — but the idea of literally kind of duplicating your website for this purpose is quite a bit of work. But it could stand you in good stead where your competitors haven’t done that and they’ve still got these beautifully designed, laid out, immaculate photos and stuff that’s animated, designed for human readers, without the version designed for the algorithms.

And I think that, to me, would be a key thing to truly investigate thoroughly in your organization: What am I committing to if I say, “Okay, our gorgeous website wins awards for its design, and here are all the metrics showing all the leads it delivers and all that kind of stuff. What do we need to do to get on the radar of the AI agents version?”

So you build a version. What’s entailed with that? One thing I didn’t see in Digiday’s piece, and I haven’t found it anywhere else yet, is what exactly is involved in creating a duplicate of your website designed around this? Where, for instance, you’re treating everything as structured data, not just copywritten text, which doesn’t translate well to an agent-intermediated world, to quote Digiday.

So it talks about, you know, starting to think about your key messages as discrete, unambiguous statements that can be lifted and represented accurately without context. That doesn’t mean dumbing things down. And this bit I did like: It means being deliberate about what an agent will extract if it only gets 30 seconds with your content.

Now, there’s a good pointer that the way of thinking about how you present yourself online now isn’t about beautifully designed websites and the nuanced meaning of words and phrases that are emotive about your products or service. It’s about data. And you need to appeal to — and this is a human emotive statement, which isn’t really applicable — but you’ve got to appeal to the AI agent. What will appeal to an AI agent? It doesn’t care, using the word “appeal.” It’s what will make it index you and include you when someone types, speaks, or whatever it is that produces search results, where the engine or tool you’re using goes out and pulls in all the information. You want to be sure you’re included in that. So it’s a bit of work to do.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. It’s not a one-to-one copy and paste from your existing website. In fact, we know that AI likes Q&A, for example. If your website’s not already in a Q&A format and the text can lend itself to that, you’re going to want to repurpose it that way.

We know that it likes what’s in the top 30 percent of the content, so you’re going to want to front-load the most important information. And frankly, if you’re not doing this, then your company is not going to show up in those AI summaries, or at the very least, it’s not going to show up represented the way that you want it to.

I do have two other issues to point out. One of these is the increased use of agents. You mentioned an agent, but it’s an agent that’s working on behalf of the model. Now I’m talking about the agent that’s working on behalf of me. In which case, that LLMS.txt file is going to become the routing layer to your official content.

And this is a big deal for regulated industries, because people have to find the canonical information. They have to find the approved information, not necessarily the one that was created for AI. So if you’re doing this, you do need to make sure that what you are creating for AI is official. It is going to present the information that the lawyers have approved, that is going to pass muster with the regulators.

The other thing is that if I can rewrite the text of a web page for the AI version of this that I’m creating, I can put something completely different on that page. And this becomes an ethical issue that we need to watch out for. People might try to game this. I mean, remember the early days of SEO and all of the gaming of SEO that we saw with tags that had nothing to do with what was on the page. They just knew that this was a popular search term, and it would drive traffic there.

We can see the same kind of gaming with this LLMS.txt routing to the AI-compliant pages, with information on it that’s there to get you into the search results, there to get you into the AI summary, not necessarily to give you the same information that you would have found on a web page. So this can be problematic, and I think it’s something that the industry’s going to be watching for.

Neville Hobson: I agree. So you compile your list of “these are the things we need to pay attention to,” but again, in the back of your mind, you’ve got this reality: The technical landscape is still forming. No one has the full picture yet. That would include what are the requirements of this, that, or the other. So assume it’s going to be like we currently have, although I would argue it’s not going to be like we currently have. It’s going to evolve, but that’s going to take time. So you need to do that precisely.

I would say pay attention to experiments like this. And again, this is a media company doing this, so they are publishers of content that might mention your brand. That’s why it’s important to you that you show up in these kinds of search terms as well. So a lot to pay attention to here, Shel, I think, really.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and remember, The Economist isn’t doing this with their articles yet because that’s still behind the paywall. This is all that stuff in front of the paywall. I mean, eventually it’ll get there to some degree, although I don’t know how you do this behind the paywall when it’s just showing up on, you know, Google Search or…

Neville Hobson: No, again, the technical stuff is not worked out yet. They’ll find ways here.

The other thing to mention — I’m glad you mentioned The Economist. I meant to mention this, but the final point in Digiday’s piece, I thought, was really interesting. It’s a reminder, I suppose, that for all the experiments, The Economist sees AI as infrastructure rather than authorship: something to speed up research, workflows, and product delivery, not a shortcut to churning out more copy.

So AI is not going to be writing their content, they say. It will do all this stuff at the back end, if you will, that would enable its journalists, its human journalists, to do the stuff that they do well. That’s admirable. And I think The Economist has a track record of that kind of behavior in its history. So it’s great.

I think it’ll be interesting to see what other major properties do, including the big ones in the U.S., the big ones here, and elsewhere in the world. And I bet you they are working on stuff like this, too. They have to be.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #516: Your New Shadow Website appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Employees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we’re seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees’ behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue.

Also in this episode:

AI copyright lawsuits are coming for communicators
Google’s search overhaul could signal a post-citation era
Placing your thought newsmakers, thought leaders, and subject matter experts on podcasts is becoming a standard media relations practice
“I worked all weekend” is no longer an argument for the fees you charge
Short-form video clippers are creating go-to content from long-form videos — including yours

Dan York outlines the big enhancements in WordPress 7.0

Links from this episode

Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare
AI Copyright Lawsuits Pose Growing Risk for Communicators
Practical Considerations for Managing IP Risk in AI-Generated Content
Best Practices for Mitigating Copyright Risks in AI-Generated Content
AI in Litigation Series: An Update on AI Copyright Cases in 2026
Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years
Google Search as You Know It Is Over
Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage
Including Podcasts in Your PR Strategy
Podcast Guesting vs. Traditional PR: What Works in 2026
U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008
U.S. Podcast Consumption Reaches Record High: The Infinite Dial 2025
You Can’t Beat AI.
Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR
AI and the End of Billable Hours
The Clipping Economy: How Short-Form Video “Clippers” Are Overrunning the Internet
How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet
The Clipping Economy
The Case for and Against Clipping
Inside the “Clipping Farms” Driving Fintech’s Marketing Boom
Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents
Businesses Will Have Over 150,000 AI Agents by 2028, Says Gartner
AI Agents Introduce a New Class of IT Management Challenges
Why Most Enterprise AI Agents Will Fail — And What Leaders Are Missing
How Smart Governance Can Contain Agentic Sprawl
Six Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Agentic AI in 2026
Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI “Agents” to Use on Unclassified Networks

Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report

Turn Your Blog Posts Into Podcast Episodes
Google Search as you know it is over
Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years
WordPress 7.0 Field Guide
AVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast long-form episode 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, that’s Pocket Casts. For you, it may be Apple Podcasts or any of the countless places that you can get podcasts these days, including Spotify. So we’re there. We’re on Spotify, as is this podcast For Immediate Release. And speaking of For Immediate Release, Neville, we’ve done a few episodes since the last long-form monthly episode.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we have published quite a few, four in fact, over the past month. All of them have listener comments and that’s unusual, pleasantly so, every single episode with comments. So let’s run them down. So in the long-form, episode 511 for April, on the 27th of April, our lead story was the tale of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and how in spite of AI policies, training programs and guardrails, a public document went out filled with AI-generated errors. No human in the loop, seems, as we explored what went wrong and what it means for organizations trying to operationalize AI responsibly. We also talked about new evidence that AI is not leveling the workplace, why AI is raising the bar for PR, the rise of slopaganda, and much more. Comments, Shel, on that one?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, a couple, and a couple of responses to the comments. We’ll start with Wayne Asplund who said, for what it’s worth, I have a way I tend to think about this. Simpler work, smarter decisions, better customer outcomes. You should be focused on all three when working with AI. If not, you’re reducing quality and raising risk. The obvious example is what you talk about. If your only care is speeding up work and you’re not focused on the customer outcome, which describes many people, magnify the risk and reduce quality. You reduce the smart side of things too, because you’re not engaging with the content. The model works for all sorts of AI activities. And Neville, you had a response to that. You said, simpler work, smarter decisions, better outcomes is a good test of whether AI is actually adding value or just accelerating activity. The law firm example feels like a case where the first of those dominated: speed and efficiency, but the other two didn’t hold. And that’s where things break down. I particularly like your point about engagement. If people aren’t really engaging with the content, then the smarter decisions part never really happens. It just looks like it does. The balance you described feels like something organizations need to make much more explicit, not just assume. And then we had Philip Weiss who loved the word slopaganda. My thoughts on this are from an earlier post, and he shared the post that he wrote called Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare, and the link to that will be in the show notes. And Wayne Asplund replied to Phillips saying, “some of the creative terms coming out at the moment. One newspaper I read stoked the fear of job losses by talking about the job- the job-pocalypse. And another article I saw used the term e-idiots.” Definitely going to pinch that one.

Neville Hobson: Ha Excellent. Great to have.

Shel Holtz: And by the way, the idiot’s comment reminds me of a T-shirt that I saw the other day that said any fool can use a computer, many do.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, it’s good when we see that kind of engagement, comment discussion taking place in the all on LinkedIn, of course, right?

Shel Holtz: yeah, yeah, although I think I got one or two of these actually off of Facebook this month. I can’t remember which ones, but.

Neville Hobson: cool. Excellent. OK. So our next show, we asked the question, when does AI stop supporting decisions and start shaping them? In episode 512, published on the 4th of May, we explored a provocative idea that AI is becoming the new executive influencer. Some research suggests leaders are already relying on AI for the majority of the decisions. But what does that really mean in practice? We have comments, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Vincent Brunel left a comment saying, accountability question is the one that keeps me up at night when AI shapes the outcome, who actually owns the decision? The algorithm suggested it can’t become the new, I was just following orders. And Dean Landaish, I’ve known Dean, God, I can’t tell you how long through IABC. Having done lots of genealogy work with AI, its use for policy and decision guidance frightens me. Even with safeguards in place, AI systems will eventually tell you what you want to hear rather than facts or even even-handed evaluation. Like the social media algorithms, it eventually feeds you what it thinks you want based on patterns. Aside from writing progressively more restrictive prompts to stop this, I’ve had to go so far as erasing and dumping my user history. I wonder how many neophyte business users will build in proper safeguards to prevent the bias creep that AI builds over time.

Neville Hobson: And next, a Harvard Business Review article about redesigning marketing organizations for the agentic age provided context in FIR 513 on the 11th of May as we explored what happens when AI moves beyond generating content to orchestrating workflows and organizational systems themselves. We discussed examples of using Claude CoWork and AI agents in communication workflows. Work that once took hours now happens in minutes. Comments, right?

Shel Holtz: David Bradfield from up in Toronto. Great episode, Shel and Neville. The shift to the agentic age is less of a tech hurdle and more of an accountability crisis. If a communicator can’t hold an autonomous agent accountable to the brand’s ethical and strategic guardrails, the operating model isn’t just slow, it’s dangerous. I’ve just launched Avalere Advisory, which is very much aligned to the opportunities you cover. The narrative code only works if you have the right cultural upskilling and governance to match. Moving managers from task supervisors to agent auditors is key. I love the focus on the narrative code. It’s something we were building into my last corporate role for our CEO and other executives. It’s the backbone of the unified model communication teams need to succeed. And another comment from Vincent Bruneau who wrote a year ago, this was demos. Now it’s workflow design and organizational architecture. The speed of that shift is what makes the experimentation point so critical. The gap between those who are testing and those who are watching is widening fast.

Neville Hobson: And finally, was Twitter a unique moment in media history rather than a repeatable model? That’s a question we asked in episode 514 on the 18th of May when we explored the growing arguments that text-based social networks are entering irreversible decline, not because text itself is disappearing, but because giant algorithmic public feeds may no longer fit how people want to communicate online. And comments, One comment.

Shel Holtz: One comment from Mark Hillary, who says, of smaller rooms is a good analogy. I have my friends and family on various private WhatsApp groups. This now serves the same function that social media used to perform. As social media becomes more more aligned with entertainment rather than connectivity to a network, everything changes for people who want to communicate to a wide group of people.

Neville Hobson: Brilliant. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Yep, that’s right, and 515 will get underway in earnest here in just a minute, but first I do want to let you know that Circle of Fellows is coming up, the May episode this coming week. It’s the second of our special episodes with Brad Whitworth moderating a panel to discuss the remaining chapters of the book, The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass. The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, is going to join Brad along with the remaining fellows who wrote chapters who weren’t part of the last episode. That includes Zora Artis, who wrote the Cohesion chapter, Cindy Schmieg, who authored the Collaboration chapter, and me. And I actually was the moderator last month. This month, Brad is doing it so I can be there to talk about the chapter I wrote on community. The panel is going to be live streamed at 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time this coming Thursday, May 28th. Participants of the live stream will be able to ask questions, share comments, observations and experiences and be part of the discussion. But if you can’t join us live, there is, of course, the audio podcast and the YouTube replay coming up after the episode has been recorded. So as I said, we’re going to jump into our first report dealing with copyright right after this. I have two reports today that have nothing to do with AI at all. I hope that’ll be refreshing, but let’s start with AI. According to the law firm Davis and Gilbert, 99% of public relations firms are now using AI. That’s a pretty dominant number and it could be a rounding error that would take you up to a hundred percent, I suppose, or maybe there was one company that said, uh-uh, not us. But the top use cases should come as no surprise. They’re using it to write content, take notes and summarize meetings, spark ideas and monitor media. In other words, AI is touching just about everything communicators produce. And while we’re busy adopting these tools, copyright laws have been piling up. Now the specifics I’m about to cover are based on US copyright law, but copyright is a thing in most of the developed world. So even though these cases may not apply in the UK or Europe, principles, at least some of them probably do. So let’s look at an update from the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright published in March that walks through six of the most important AI copyright cases working their way through the courts right now. First, there’s Thaler versus Perlmutter. The Supreme Court denied cert on March 2nd, which means the rule is now settled, at least for now. Purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. Period. If a human didn’t, and here’s some core language to keep in your mind, if a human didn’t make a meaningful creative contribution, you cannot and do not own it. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court ruled last June that training on copyrighted books was fair use, but storing pirated copies was not. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The fairness hearing happened just this past May 14th, like a week and a half ago. The judge didn’t rule from the bench, she took it under submission, but observers expect final approval any time now, and authors are looking at roughly $3,000 per work. And by the way, I have applied for that relief for several of the books I’ve written. And if I get it, Neville, you’ll get a piece of that three thousand for the How to Do Everything with Podcasting book.

Neville Hobson: ha ha! Twenty years after we wrote it. Yeah, okay. Wonderful. Wonderful.

Shel Holtz: That’s right. But yeah, it’ll still earn you 1500 bucks if this all goes through. Yeah, in Kadrey v. Meta, we saw the same fair use conclusion on training, but a different judge in the same district disagreed with the Bartz judge on market harm. He basically told the plaintiffs they brought the wrong argument and signaled that a future plaintiff who actually builds on

Neville Hobson: Excellent. Look forward to it.

Shel Holtz: An evidentiary case on market harm, showing that AI-trained models flood the market and depress demand for the original works, that could win. Then there’s Disney and Universal versus Midjourney, where the studios are alleging willful infringement of their characters, Elsa, Shrek, Darth Vader, the minions, and ask for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus an injunction and disgorgement of Midjourney’s profits. Now, here’s where the story has often gotten more interesting. Since Norton Rose published their article pointed to the Disney OpenAI deal, the one where Disney was investing a billion dollars and licensing characters for OpenAI’s Sora video app as a sign of two things. First, that formal licensing was becoming the path forward. And second, that every signed deal strengthens the case against AI companies that didn’t license because it proves a licensing market exists, which is exactly the kind of market harm courts look for in fair use cases. Well, on March 24th, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora. The consumer app went dark on April 26th. The API goes dark in September. And Disney’s billion-dollar investment, the so-called bridge between Hollywood and AI never closed. According to Deadline, a Disney insider said simply, the deal is not moving forward. So one of the most cited pieces of evidence that an AI licensing market was emerging, it just evaporated. That makes the legal terrain more uncertain for communicators, not less. You might still be tempted to say that’s an interesting legal story, but it’s a problem for the AI companies and law firms. Not for me, not so fast. A PRSA panel reported in a recent piece on the PRSA site titled, copyright lawsuits pose a growing risk for communicators, quoted Samantha Rothaus, a partner at Davis+Gilbert, who made the point that for communicators, accuracy in AI-generated content isn’t just about looking smart. Inaccuracy, she said, can be misleading and deceptive, and that creates regulatory and legal risk. Another panelist, Michael Lasky, said he sees significant gaps in AI policies and governance within the PR field, and those gaps create significant risk. And Debevoise & Debevoise & Plimpton article from early March written by attorneys who advise marketing and communication clients lays out exactly where that risk lives for us, for communicators, not for the AI labs. And it lives in three places. One, ownership. If your team uses AI to generate a campaign asset, a logo concept, a hero image, an ad headline, and there’s no meaningful documented human contribution, you can’t copyright it. You don’t own it, and a competitor could pick it up tomorrow and use it. And there’s nothing you could do about it. Two, vicarious liability. Debevoise, and I know I’m not pronouncing that name right. It’s the name of a law firm. They flagged this and it’s worth understanding. If you’re using a third-party AI tool, and you are, and that vendor’s model was trained on infringing material, courts have already held in non AI cases, that the company using the tool can be liable too. The rule is roughly this. If you benefit financially from someone else’s infringement and you had the contractual ability to control how they were operating, you can be on the hook, even though you didn’t do the infringing yourself. So the AI provider’s training practices and your indemnification language are now your problem too. Have you read your AI vendor agreement? Do you know what’s indemnified? What’s excluded? And third is output infringement. If an AI tool produces something substantially similar to a copyrighted work, even unintentionally, even because of a sloppy prompt, and you publish it, you can be sued. One analyst made the point that images are especially exposed. Reverse image search trolls are already a cottage industry, and AI is just going to feed them. So what should communicators be doing? Three things, none of them particularly unusual. First and probably most important is to build an IP clearance step into your AI workflow, the same way you’d clear a stock photo image or a freelancer’s contribution. Document the human contribution to anything you actually need to own and read your vendor contracts with your legal team, specifically for training data sources and indemnification carve-outs. The legal landscape is going to keep shifting fast, as the Sora story demonstrates. Communicators who get ahead of it now are the ones who will be in a position to keep using these tools aggressively. Everyone else is going to be playing defense, and defense is a really bad place to communicate from.

Neville Hobson: quite a picture. So I think that actually makes it adds a significant dimension to what we’ve already been talking about, not just you and I, but many, many people we have on this podcast. On the example I mentioned in an episode recently, we talked about the law firm that submitted, it was actually a document to a court in a bankruptcy case. It was a corporate bankruptcy, with big numbers involved, riddled with errors because no one had checked it. So that’s been the focus: human in the loop has got to check it. It’s deeper than that, There’s your kind of, in a sense, your obvious level of foundation of the things you need to do to ensure that you’ve done everything you possibly can to ensure that what you produce using an AI assistant to help you. It doesn’t contain errors that can trip you up because you didn’t check it. Here we got something that makes that even worse sounding, frankly. What troubles me most is the statistic in the PRSA’s piece, quoting the law firms report they did that 99% of PR firms are using AI. And we already know from other reporting that, you know, many of those, I’m not going to say most because I don’t know, don’t have the governance in place to protect them. Do they have a human in the loop? I’m getting very cynical about hearing that phrase because I hear it like it’s a nice thing to say and there’s absolutely no substance behind it whatsoever because we’re seeing evidence and prominent examples. So there are others that aren’t so prominent, but they’re happening where they don’t have a human in So we’ve talked about this before. You had an idea a few episodes back that you need to have verification specialists. Maybe it had got to come to that because not everyone has the ability to verify. And even if you do, what’s the legal implication of that person? Is that the responsible person on behalf of your firm? What if they’re the intern doing that? It’s got to have someone with authority to do that kind of thing. So 99% using AI, the top reason. writing content, 79 percent. That really does make this sound very serious indeed, that you could run into deep trouble. Now, I know you said this is the examples you gave under US copyright law and copyright law is jurisdictional and it’s based on geographies. It hasn’t changed any in hundreds of years in that regard. So if you’re a global firm operating in 20 countries, you need to understand the copyright law in each of those 20 countries. So the risks are high, I would say. And you painted some dark picture there of here are the potential consequences if you don’t do this. But this needs to be part of your thinking. You mentioned as well, reverse copyright trolling to find stuff that could land you with a request of payment for the copyright infringement, stuff like that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the digital version of ambulance chasers.

Neville Hobson: AI-generated images. Right. But that’s part of the landscape, I guess. So it’s something to take seriously. I did note the concluding part from the PRSA story where they’re talking about this same law firm did a survey last autumn. Thirty-seven percent of PR companies they surveyed were developing their own closed proprietary AI systems specific to their clients. Will that protect them? I think it gives a false sense of security because I doubt it would. So you can’t think, I don’t need to use, you know, take your pick, Claude, Gemini, chat GPT or whatever. Even I create a bespoke version of the LLM, I’ll build something unique. If you haven’t got safeguards in for this, it won’t matter. You’re still going to run into trouble. So this is huge, I think. I can see lawyers everywhere rubbing their hands with glee because this needs legal input to this in each of those different jurisdictions of the copyright law.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’ll give you two quick examples just from my own experience in recent days. And by the way, Chris Penn, this goes back a couple of months, but he did publish a post on LinkedIn that gave you a prompt to use in order to check your output for copyright violations. And he said, it may not catch absolutely everything, but if you’re sued, you could pull up the fact that you did that as a good faith effort to ensure that you weren’t violating copyright. It could stand in your favor in a lawsuit, but presumably most of the instances it would actually catch. But these two instances that I’ve experienced recently, was a search I was doing. I use AI for tech support all the time. I find it better than tech support. And I was trying to resolve something. I won’t get into what it was, but it said, if And the language it used was very specific, right? It said, if you’re losing sleep over this, stop. Google has said that they understand that this is a bug. They’re aware of it. All of us are experiencing the same thing. They’re working on it. It should be fixed in a day or two. So I was looking for more information on this. So I went to Reddit and I did a search and there I found exactly that same language in a post that somebody had left in the discussion for this particular software product. So it’s not that Google Gemini had taken that information and put it in its own words. It had actually taken those words from whoever wrote that post and shared it with me as a response to a prompt on Google Gemini. So yeah, if that were copyrighted, that would be copyright infringement right there. And if I quoted it, that would be problematic. The other I shared on LinkedIn, I thought this was a really interesting story about somebody who uploaded a photo, an image and said, is an AI-generated image that I created. I prompted the model to use the style of Monet. And there were thousands and thousands, according to the article, there were like 1.6 million people who said, this is AI garbage, it’s slop, it’s horrible. Here’s what’s wrong with the art, the lighting, the brushstrokes. And then it was revealed it was actually a real Monet. It was not an AI-generated. He just said it was. And I shared that on LinkedIn, got some interesting comments. But one of the comments I got said, all AI-generated art is theft, presumably because all AI-generated art was trained on real art, just like all AI-generated text responses is based on text that it pulled off of the net. But with people having that attitude and the person who shared that comment isn’t the only one I’ve heard say that. You know that there are people out there who are looking for this. As I said a minute ago, the ambulance chasers of the digital era are the ones who are out there looking for something actionable and then going out and finding somebody to represent in a lawsuit based on that. So copyright and AI, especially in this period we’re going through right now with AI backlash in general, I think you’re going to see this activity ramp up. And I don’t see any reason why corporate communications using AI can’t be caught up in some of these legal actions.

Neville Hobson: There is plenty to think about in that case. So moving on to our next topic, if you’ve been following how AI is reshaping search, and I’m sure many of you have, we’ve talked about this on FIR before, including our discussion a few months ago about GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. Then what Google announced at the developer conference recently in May is the next chapter. And it’s a significant one. Two pieces caught my attention amongst the many reporting about this. Sarah Perez’s writing in TechCrunch and a report in the New York Times by Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen. Both cover the same announcement, but from different angles. And together, they paint a picture that communicators really need to sit with. Here’s what Google announced. The search box, that iconic long slender bar that barely changed since 2001 is being overhauled for the first time in 25 years. It is getting bigger, more conversational, and more interactive. But that’s almost the least interesting part. What’s really changing is what happens after you type. Instead, or you even speak, actually, now, instead of a list of links as part of an AI overview, Google will increasingly serve you AI-generated interactive experiences, custom visuals, dynamically built mini-apps, and what they’re calling information agents that work in the background around the clock, tracking the web on your behalf and alerting you when something relevant changes. TechCrunch makes the point starkly. Searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than humans. People will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. The New York Times goes further with a quote from Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers. The open web, said, is on the way out. Now think about what that means for communicators. We spend years adapting our content strategies, first for SEO, then for GEO, trying to get our content picked up and cited in AI-generated answers. But what’s the strategy when the answer isn’t a list of links, isn’t even a text summary with citations, but a dynamically generated interactive experience that never surfaces a source at all? That’s the question I want to dig into. We’ve moved from SEO to GEO, and now we may be moving into territory where there’s no citation game left to play. I’ve got some thoughts about that. But first, though, what do you think, this means for communicators? And what should they actually be doing differently right now?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think communicators need to adapt. We always have. So has the marketing world and the advertising world. When Google first came out, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to say, I think this idea that it’s the end of the open web is utter nonsense. If anybody can go build a website, then the web is open. The question is, can they be discovered? Well, depends on how well they play the game. It could be that they just want to notify their customers that this is where you come to do X, Y, and Z with this company that you have aligned with. So, you know, that could be easy. But, you know, if you want to be discovered more broadly, you’ll have to figure out how that gets done in this new world. There’s going to be a way. I do think some of the things that Google has introduced here are interesting. The agents… I don’t know, man. They just seem to me to be the AI version of Google Alerts. How many of the emails that I get every day are based on the alerts that I have set up for things related to the company I work for and the topics we discuss and the markets that we serve and things like that. I have all of these Google Alerts set up. I’ll be happy to make them agents now on Google, that’s just fine. I don’t see that that’s going to change my relationship with it all that much. It’s going to surface pretty much the same information. I do like the multimodal capabilities that they’ve introduced. You can now include multiple images and things like that in a search. But they’re not getting rid of those 10 links down at the bottom. You just have to scroll all the way past the AI overview, which is getting more sophisticated and occupying more of the page, but those 10 links are still going to be there. In fact, I was listening to the episode of Hardfork that dropped yesterday, and they interviewed Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. And he said, people are always going to want to be able to click a link, especially based on the kind of search they’re running. He says, that’s what Google does. We’re never going to abandon the links, but they certainly have pushed them farther down the page. And we know that the AI overviews have led to a significant decrease in the number of clicks that people are enacting on a search results page. So that kind of traffic has dried up to a large degree. So, you know, even though you can still get to those links, I don’t think that solves the problem for people who want to be discovered on the web. We’re going to have to figure this out. I would continue to look at the AEO slash GEO approach to visibility and also keep your eye on what the search experts tell us as they gain experience with this revised version of Google.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. I’m not sure that the links and AI overviews are going to stay as they currently are. I’m certain they’re not. One of the, in fact, three of the articles I read that go into quite significant technical detail about this are based on people’s interpretation, a lot of what was announced at the Google Developer Conference. So there’s no clean answer yet where this is going. We don’t know yet. But there are a number of directions worth looking at from a communicator’s point of view, I believe. So I’d start with if it means that the citation game, as I might describe it, was fundamentally about being findable. So you are signed, your content is cited, it shows up in AI overviews. So getting your content into the results that humans would click on. But that’s not what’s going to happen here. If agents are doing the searching and humans are acting on what the agents find, the question shifts from how do we get found to how do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from? That’s a subtler form of presence. It’s less about individual pieces of content, they’re more about sustained authoritative voice over time. This won’t happen quickly. So if you’ve not done prep, for overviews, you’re behind the curve on this because when this lands and becomes clear how it’s going to work, I think it’ll attract huge interest, particularly thinking about, we have a, one of the topics we’re going to talk about is on this AI agents topic, that you’ve got AI agents out there while you’re fast asleep or traveling or doing something else when you come back to your computer the next day or the next hour or whatever it might be. It presents you with the answers to your question. And they are unlikely to include links. They will be, in the sense, for many people, the complete answer to your question. You won’t need to click anywhere. That will appeal to a lot of people. So this is doing all the donkey work, as we might say. I think it suggests that owned channels will matter a great deal, not less. So a search as a distribution channel is being restructured. Direct relationships with audiences like lists, communities, podcasts, trusted platform, et cetera, become more valuable precisely because they don’t depend on being surfaced by an algorithm or an agent. The communicators who’ve invested in direct audience relationships are going to be better positioned than those who relied on search-driven traffic. And I think you made the point that AI overviews started something which was lessening click-throughs. And that is going to get even worse with this from a website owner’s point of view. There’s no click. So that whole model will have to change. So I think that said, there’s some other issues here too of interested communicators. The human moment is still the moment that matters. Even if an agent does the searching, a human makes a decision. So the communication challenge shifts to the point of decision rather than the point of discovery. That’s a more interesting place to operate, closer to the outcome, closer to the relationship. One of the downsides to thinking about this is you are still, let’s say, the human in the verification loop. You’ve got to check all this stuff. Do you just believe what the agent’s surface is? We’re not at the stage yet where it’s a bit like, self-driving cars, know, you’re 99% sure it’s not going to crash and kill you. Well, you actually need 100%. You don’t need 99%. And this could be in that kind of area.

Shel Holtz: I’m not even 100% driving my own cars 100% safe.

Neville Hobson: Well, you got it. You’ve got to conduct that. So the uncomfortable conclusion that I take from what I looked into was that some of what communicators have been doing for years, content volume, keyword optimization, SEO-driven publishing may genuinely be losing its value. So the honest conversation with clients and employees is we need to redirect effort from producing content for search algorithms to building genuine authority and direct audience relationships. That takes time and you will not see the benefit of that for a while. In the meantime, you’ve got utter disruption to the existing model heading our way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we definitely need to do that. But I do need to reiterate that as they were making the announcements about the brand new updates to Google search at I.O., they did double down on including reference links. Here’s what I got. Even though Google is transforming search from a simple box of links into an agent driven conversational interface powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, they are integrating reference links deeper into the experience. There’s going to be a split over how that’s done. If you’re getting AI overviews doing a regular search, they’ll still appear at the top of the standard results page and you’ll still get the blue links visible right below it. If you go into AI mode, click the AI mode button. It completely replaces the traditional results page. Within AI mode, websites are either explicitly cited as references within the AI response or they receive no visibility at all as there are no traditional link positions under.

Neville Hobson: Right. So that comes into the area of there’s no clean answer yet. So you’ve got the kind of vested interest vendor saying, well, the link’s going to be down here. I’ve not seen that prominently mentioned in any of the tech reports that I did read. Indeed, I’ve seen one that said this is not prominent at all. Where does that fit then? Or is it going to be parallel? If AI agents are going to be out there on your behalf doing all the search work, you don’t have to do anything. How does that fit? Is it going to be like, well, if I don’t want to use AI agents, I can still use the old search. Is that how it’s going to be? No one knows yet. So this will emerge, I’m pretty sure. And it may well be right that they’re scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. There are all the links I’m used to seeing. I don’t think that’s actually how it’s going to be, matter what they said in the I.O. Developer Conference. We don’t know.

Shel Holtz: or contextual.

Neville Hobson: So you and I are actually doing what everyone else is doing, speculating what it all might be. But there’s some clear direction, such as what I mentioned just now, for communicators in particular to pay attention to here, that you could see wind of change is blowing here. And whether there’s still going to be links at the bottom of the page or there’s an AI overview somewhere else on the page, you need to pay attention to this, what’s changing. The AI agents are going to really change things here.

Shel Holtz: Well, here’s the thing, even if there are links contextually in the narrative of the AI overview or there are still blue links below, people aren’t clicking them anyway because they’re getting that AI overview answer. And we talked about this when they first released the Amazon Echo because they talked about the issue of one. Yeah, we talked about the idea that this is one true answer. It’s not 10 links. And if you don’t like those, you can scroll to the next 10.

Neville Hobson: There you go. Four years and years ago, yeah, yeah.

Shel Holtz: It’s one true answer and you don’t know where they drew it from.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. But I think it’s shifting, though, the behavior, how it works, the idea that you enter a search term, either speak it or whatever it might be, and on the fly, will create interactive visuals. It will do all sorts of things that search can’t do until now. And so you won’t get an AI overview that’s just text. It might have links to it. Whenever links to visual, it’ll have the content there and then, as I understand it from what I’ve read, but hey, it’s not clear yet. So I’m sure we’ll see voices of people that you pay attention, that I pay attention to with some sensible analysis. There’s not enough information to go on yet. The trick I’ve been thinking most about is how do I separate, I won’t call it slot because it’s not, it’s just someone’s opinion that’s not informed from the stuff that is informed. So I’ve got a handful of the latter, and probably scores of the former. I’m trying to ignore all that stuff. To me, this is like the first alarm bell. Alarm is the right word, the first alert bell that you are about to see as a communicator, a fundamental shift in how search works. And it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be pretty. It’s going to be chaotic. So you need to pay attention to this in the right way. And that’s where you need I guess really to find voices that are authority that you can trust to hear how they’re described.

Shel Holtz: Well, let’s switch gears and put AI behind us for a few minutes and talk about something entirely different. Ron Culp’s blog, Culpwrit, ran a guest post earlier this month by Anuj Agarwal with a title that’s hard to argue with, Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage? By the way, I met Ron when he was running comms at Sears when I was doing some internet consulting there. Ron is one of the senior dons of public relations these days, and I do pay attention to what’s on his blog. In his post, Agarwal isn’t talking about having a podcast. He’s talking about pitching your client, your executive, your subject matter expert as a guest on someone else’s podcast. That distinction matters because that’s where actual news is happening. And if you’re not doing this yet, you’re already behind. Now let’s start with the audience math because the case is overwhelming. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026, which they released back in March, 80% of Americans 12 years old and older have now listened to or watched the podcast. 58% listened in the past month. That’s about 167 million Americans, an all-time record. 45% listened in the past week. And among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is now equivalent to broadcast television. I want you to let that sink in. I’m going to say that again. Among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is equivalent to broadcast television. For your client trying to reach younger adults and appearance on the right podcast has the same weekly reach as TV. Now compare that with what’s happening on the traditional media side. Pew Research found that newsroom employment in the US dropped 26% between 2008 and 2020, and that bleeding has continued ever since. Newspaper newsrooms alone are down 57% from 2008. There are just fewer journalists and fewer editorial slots, which means there’s been a shift around where people are finding their content. Your clients still want earned media that channels worth pitching have just expanded. So why is a podcast appearance more valuable than a traditional press hit? Four reasons, and they’re all important reasons. First is the time on stage. A press mention is a paragraph. Even a feature article gives you a few quotes wrapped around someone else’s narrative. A podcast guest appearance gives your client 30 to 60 minutes of uninterrupted access to an audience that chose to be there on a podcast that’s likely to be specialized as opposed to generalized. That’s not just longer, more time. It’s a fundamentally different kind of exposure. The audience hears how your client thinks, not just what they say. They hear the tone, the texture, the moments of pushback. And Nielsen research has shown that listeners trust long-form audio hosts more than they trust traditional advertising. And that trust transfers to the guests by association. Number two is durability. A press hit spikes for a day and then disappears. A podcast episode lives forever. It sits in someone’s back catalog. It shows up in search. It gets clipped and shared on LinkedIn six months later. That’s the long tail at work. And Neville, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, but I get emails from the host of our archive site. Remember, we switched sites at one point and we archive the old site where many, many, many episodes of FIR live and I’ll get emails saying your site has exceeded the allowed site traffic for the month and won’t be accessible until the first of the month. Who’s going and visiting this site that hasn’t been active in 11 or 12 years and listening to those old episodes of the show? 40% of podcasts

Neville Hobson: Hahaha AI agents, I would hazard a guess. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. I don’t know if they’re listening to the episodes, but they could well be scraping that site. But 40 percent of podcast consumers now name YouTube as their primary podcast platform, which means a single guest appearance can produce both an audio asset and a video asset all from one hour of your client’s time. And that’s content you can repackage and repurpose for multiple channels. Here’s the third reason. And this is the one I really want you to hear, because most communicators miss it. A podcast appearance is increasingly how you earn traditional press coverage. Newsworthy things your client says on a podcast get picked up by the mainstream media. And now they’re not just quoting your client, they’re amplifying an extended quote in context and they’re sending readers back to the original episode. Look at Jamie Dimon. A couple of weeks ago, he gave a podcast-style interview at a Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund conference where he warned that the private credit market is worse than people think. That’s a quote, worse than people think. That single cent has generated coverage across Bloomberg, Reuters, Fortune, the Financial Times, and erased about $500 billion in alternative asset manager value the same day. The Jensen Huang interviews, a Stratechery, BG2, the All-In podcast, those generated Fortune and CNBC stories, and they do every single time. Howard Lutnick told the All-In host that, “‘Boeing executives follow me around like puppies,’ because of how he was structuring trade deals.” Fortune quoted that line word for word in a feature on the Trump administration’s trade strategy. The podcast appearance was the press strategy. That’s the model. You’ve got to, you’re not just earning a podcast placement, you’re earning the cascade of secondary coverage that flows from it. And finally, there’s depth of message. An interview lets a thought leader actually develop an argument. In a newspaper, quote, complex ideas get compressed into one sentence, usually the wrong sentence, often the safest sentence. On a podcast, your client gets to explain the why behind the what. That’s where credibility gets built and where the next sales conversation gets seeded. Now, the catch, most podcasts aren’t worth pitching. Agarwal makes this point bluntly, and he’s not wrong, of the millions of shows indexed across hosting platforms. A lot of them haven’t published in months, maybe years. They have audiences that are minuscule. They’ll book anyone with a pulse. Recommending a weak placement to your client costs them time and signals that you’re vetting is getting lazy. So here’s what to actually look for before your pitch. Publishing pattern, you know, at least two episodes a month consistently over the last six months? The guest history, scroll back through 20 or 30 episodes. Who were the guests that they booked? If your client doesn’t fit that pattern, walk away. Niche depth over raw audience size. I mean, a 600 listener show inside your client’s exact industry will outperform a 50,000 listener general business show on almost every metric that actually matters. The host social application. A host who promotes new episodes on LinkedIn extends your client’s appearance for free. And listen to one recent episode before pitching. If the host lets guests just monologue without pushback, the audience tunes out and your client gets nothing. And here’s what your client needs to bring to the conversation. Not talking points, a point of view. One counterintuitive take, one framework that actually gets used, one honest answer to a hard question. Hosts are really good at spotting the difference between a guest with something to say and a spokesperson reciting messaging. The appearances that earn return invitations, produce shareable clips, and get picked up in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal are built on original thinking. The PR pros who figure this out now, who develop a real podcast pitching practice the same way they developed a media relations practice 20 years ago, are going to look like wizards to their clients.

Neville Hobson: That’s quite a landscape you described there, Shel. I think I look at it in a way when I hear all these statistics being rattled off about how many people listening to podcasts, what’s up, my kind of eyes glaze completely because, you know, and then I hear about, you know, the Jamie Dimon of this world and these kind of, you know, CEOs of mega corporations and how they move markets with a phrase that gets picked up in the mainstream media. That doesn’t happen with, you know, as a matter of course for everyone. Amongst all the rubbish podcasts you outlined, where you’ve got minuscule audiences or not, I think about this, if I were advising someone to start a podcast and it was a business that’s a medium sized business, maybe a thousand employees in a not particularly exotic sounding industry, but they’re the market leader and they’ve got some interesting stories to tell. How is that relevant to them, knowing that the CEO of JP Morgan or whatever said something in the FT report, completely and utterly irrelevant and not likely to happen to them. So what would be of interest to a company like that who has, as I say, stories to tell, it’s worth doing something with them for a podcast for all the reasons you mentioned that how they get noticed and so forth. So that’s the trick, finding that relevance to convince them or to pitch them if you like on doing it. I mean, you’ve got some good stuff mentioned in this piece you’ve been discussing that are valid, absolutely would make a good way to pitch it. I did like the section in this piece where it talks about how to build the skill before a client formally asks. And totally. And it got me thinking, it says, identify 15 podcasts relevant to their audience and industry. It got me thinking immediately and this is where AI comes into play. Okay, so we can’t escape. This is about AI as well in this topic. Your example, where the experiments you’ve been doing, where you’ve been looking for podcasts in your industry that take guest speakers or all the criteria you’ve done and you’ve been sending out agents who’ve returned with amazing data. That is exactly how you would approach this. And you get your results fast and probably well, they’re probably definitely more accurate than if you do this manually yourself. So where the guidance talks to you about filter, filter these findings you get from shows that publish consistently and actively except guests, there’s your AI tool to do that for you. So you could apply that to this. And it would probably, again, depending which AI tool using, I would say it will give you things you didn’t know to ask even because you didn’t know, but it would find something. So AI would help you do this without doubt. But that’s not the main trust the story though. The thing you’ve outlined is very good. I agree. I just think you need to make it wholly relevant to your client who is not a Fortune 500 company, who is just a regular business, even with 20 employees, they still got a story to tell. If they’ve got a valid story to tell, there’s a chance that they’ll get noticed. And your goals might well be very different from that mega corporation example that you had, where it might be resistive temptation to listen to the sales guy to say, we want leads generated and I want to get 10 sales out of this. You might, but your goal might be different to that. Still got to be a measurable goal. So talking about our CEO will do a thought leadership piece. No, please don’t go there. You need a measurable goal. It could be leads, it could be something less esoteric than that, quite simple, raise awareness of something that you can measure. Now that then puts it in the area of something that you as a communicator know about measurable objectives. So I think scaling it back to reality is a way to do this, not just look at how many millions of people listen to podcasts, because that to me is a total eye glazing metric for most people.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think the point to be made from the number of people listening to podcasts is just that it’s a valid medium now as influential as TV. You know, if we had made this case 15 years ago, it would have been a tough sell. But the fact is that a lot of people have started to recognize the importance of being a guest on a podcast. I mean, this is something the Republicans figured out during the last presidential election cycle. So I think the scale is important, especially as you look at the numbers of diminishing opportunities in the mainstream press. In terms of Jamie Dimon, yeah, I mean, I made the point that he’s going to get on a general business podcast with 500,000 listeners, a million listeners and make news. But I also noted that for some CEOs, for some thought leaders is probably the podcast that has 600 listeners that’s in that niche area. Now, you mentioned the agent I created. It’s actually a skill. I created this in the Hermes agent platform that is configured when I launch it to go out into the podcast space and find the podcasts that meet these criteria that I listed there. But I’m able to enter the information about the person or the story or the thought leadership concept that I’m trying to pitch. So if, for example, I want to get a story out there with this guy that we have who works on all our airport projects. He is a design manager. He is really good. And he has some thought leadership ideas on construction work airside in active airports. Now, do I want to get that into the construction trades? No. What do I care if builders hear that? I want to get that into the airport trades. where the people who are hiring the builders will hear it and hear about his expertise and hear his thoughts and go, yeah, I think I want to talk to them about our next airport project. So yeah, I have the AI agent set up to go do that. It even does a first draft of the pitch based on what it knows about the host and the content of each of the podcasts it returns to me. But yeah, I have to go out there and make that pitch. I’ve got one going on right now based on a sustainability story. So it’s interesting finding the places where we want that story to go because everybody’s looking for more sustainable ways to build, but how does that affect our reputation? So I have to cue this skill in the Hermes platform to find ones that are going to be of high value for me. But I have no doubt that if my CEO gets on a podcast or that design manager gets on a podcast, and says something really interesting, it’s going to find its way into ENR, the engineering news record, which is the primary trade publication or building design and construction or any of the other trade publications out there. And that’s that trickle down. It’s not the scale of what Jamie Dimon can do, but it’s the same concept exactly just at that smaller, more niche scale.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think that’s the key thing for me, certainly, is you’ve got to scale it relevantly to your client and their audience and market. The only other thing I’d add to that, Shel, is to let our listeners know, listen to episode 513, where you’ll hear Shel talk at length about the experiments he’s been doing with Claude CoWork, particularly, but also this example that you kind of touched on, as it were. It’s worth the listen.

Neville Hobson: Well, Dan, that was quite a report. I think an excellent assessment of what’s happening with WordPress. I know you’re a big, long time fan and user of WordPress. And so you did a good job in conveying the significant changes from WordPress 7. I think it’s worth emphasizing, and you did make the point, Dan, that a lot of the cool stuff that you talked about, AI-driven in particular, is only on the hosted WordPress, the WordPress.com service, not self-hosted WordPress. So no doubt that will be coming at some point, I would imagine. So

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the FIR site is on WordPress, but it’s the hosted version. And I’ve read about this. I upgraded it to 7 and went looking for these cool features and they weren’t there. that’s Dan’s report clarified that for me.

Neville Hobson: No, exactly, exactly. It’ll come, I’m sure. So thanks a lot, Dan. That was a really, really good report. So our next topic, going now back to the AI, the AI themes we’re following. Yeah, we can’t escape AI at all these days. We know that. But here’s the thing. There’s a Substack writer I follow called Ruben Hassid. He writes a newsletter called How to AI. And if you don’t know his work, He’s worth your time. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. He publishes twice a week. He’s prolific. He’s sharp. And he has a gift for making uncomfortable ideas land without making you feel attacked by them. His latest piece is called You can’t Beat AI. And before you groan at the title, it’s not the piece you might expect. It’s not a doom narrative. It’s actually a remarkably clear-eyed analysis of what’s happening to the value of knowledge work and what to do about it. The core argument is this, AI is getting cheaper at a rate most people haven’t fully absorbed. We’re talking about a 6,000-fold reduction in the cost of AI intelligence over four years, he says. Not twice as cheap, 6,000 times cheaper. And crucially, not just cheaper, smarter too. So your salary is now being compared to a subscription, and the subscription is winning on price. The part in his newsletter that really got my attention was his argument about what this means for how we communicate our value. He makes the point that for decades, time spent was a proxy for quality. If something took six hours, that effort signaled something. It signaled expertise, diligence, craft. But now that production is cheap, now that a decent first draft, a market scan, a slide outline, a campaign proposal, can be generated in 30 seconds or less, time spent is a weak argument. He puts it simply, nobody cares that it took you all weekend. The better argument he says is, I understand the real problem. I knew what to ignore. I found the missing risk. I made the decision easier. I saved the team from doing the wrong thing beautifully. And that lands differently for communicators, I think, because most of us would say, Yes, of course, we’ve always sold judgment and strategic counsel. But here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question. Do our clients and employers actually pay for that? Or do they still at some level pay for the volume of deliverables, the press releases, the reports, the campaigns, and just assume the judgment comes with it? That’s what I want to explore, because if intelligence is becoming a commodity, communicators individually and as a profession, need to get much clearer and much more explicit about articulating what they offer that can’t be replicated for $20 a month. What do you think about all that, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think we’ve been talking about this issue of pricing in the AI era. Yeah, I mean, yeah, even well before AI, the hourly model has been questionable. I’ve shared this anecdote, I think probably five or six times on the show. But for those who haven’t heard it, when I was a consultant, Mark Schumann was visiting us. He worked for the same consulting firm I did at the time. And he was talking about value-add, which I opposed. I said, that should be baked into our hourly rate. And he said, okay, how does the hourly rate factor into the fact that I bring 35 years of experience to this job and I have a brainstorm in the shower that took me 20 seconds. I wouldn’t have had that brainstorm if not for that 30 years of experience, 35 years. But it still produces tremendous value to the client that may make them millions of dollars or save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do you value that 30 seconds it took to have that brainstorm? And I haven’t come up with a really good answer to that yet, except pricing based on outcomes. That said, I have to say that when I was an independent consultant, which I did for 21 years, I had some clients who wanted me on a retainer. And the retainer was so that they could call me when they had an issue. They didn’t want me to produce anything. They didn’t want me to write anything. They didn’t want me to create anything. They just wanted my counsel. They wanted an hour on the phone. So for X dollars, they got 10 hours a month and they could call and say, we’re going through this. What do we do? Or what’s your experience with that? I think you can still charge based on time for that. It’s the time you’re spending on the phone with them. So I don’t I don’t think charging. based on time vanishes, you just have to figure out what your formula is, where you can factor in how much time it took, where you can factor in what the overall value of it is. And then finally, what you can factor in as the ROI that the client has gotten from this, that you can come up with a formula to make a reasonable return for your effort. But the old model of saying, you know, he’s billed out at $375 an hour. It’s going to take 25 hours for this project. Here’s your price. And by the way, if there’s scope creep, we’re going to come back to you and tell you how many more hours that adds to the project. That’s not going to wash anymore. Not not under these circumstances. Especially by the way, I have to say, not when they can go to AI and ask the question before they come to you for that hour of phone time.

Neville Hobson: I think that’s a key. I mean, that’s the key thing. A client might say when you present the proposal, you just outlined, for instance, that they’ll say, you use AI. You’ve told us consistently how you’ve developed skills in how to use the tools that give you the results that you’re seeking. and you have expertise in that area. So if that’s the case, how come you’re me, you’re quoting me X hours at so much per hour at this price? So what’s your AI doing? better question might be, well, what are you doing in that case? So that’s something that we need to figure out. And I don’t think anyone has yet how to kind of Deflect that into the real questions that need to be answered, the real discussions that need to be going on, which is not that. That’s kind of an emotional based one. But the point you made, absolutely true. Anything you’re thinking of doing, the client’s already also looking at the AI tools they use to find an answer to that. They’ll be second guessing you even. In which case, that cannot sustain itself, that kind of model. It’s not going to suddenly vanish, I’m sure. And to your point too, I agree with you that some elements of service that you might provide that others will buy from you will probably still be time-based, such as the retainer model, for instance. Then again, I think your competition is the smart AI model, frankly. So that comes down to the, you you’re being… Your salary has been compared to a subscription now by the client in particular. So again, more change coming to communicators and not just communicate, but I’m focused on this. What does it mean to communicate? I’ve written about this a few times in my blog. I’ve had many conversations with people about this recently on how to counter the interference of AI. As one person put it to me, you can’t, it’s not interference. you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’ve got to learn to make the most of it, ally yourself with augmenting your ability and not just churning out stuff from a chat bot effectively and do what we’ve been discussing in previous episodes about hallucinations and setting out stuff riddled with errors because you didn’t check it. So your methodology has got to shift. And it doesn’t address the base question, which is how do we migrate as a general rule from time-based charging to value-based charging? I hear that question being asked a lot. I’m asking it too, and I don’t have an answer to that yet. So that requires some exploratory analytical conversation. And it may well turn out that there isn’t a single model that works for everyone, although there must be elements that will be consistent no matter what you do. And it requires significant input from your client or your employer to have that conversation that give you as the communicator, the kind of intelligent input you need from the business owner or your employer. What are they looking to achieve? What do they want exactly? And how can this help them achieve that? So we haven’t started any of that yet, other than asking the question. So we need to pay attention to this sooner.

Shel Holtz: yeah, we definitely do. But there’s one other factor to keep in mind here. And this is a phenomenon that I have been experiencing in addition to reading about it. And that is that for all of the productivity gains that we’re seeing from AI, and we are, mean, the time it takes my agent to go out and find those podcasts for me to do that would be hours with the agent. send it off. I go do something else and it delivers the results when it’s done, which is not hours and hours. It’s usually 15 or 20 minutes. But does this mean that I now have an extra day that I can take off because I have got all of my work done? No, I’m as busy as I ever was. I am filling those hours with work for my employer. I believe it is high value work and it’s either figuring out how to do something with the AI or managing those AI agents or creating the agents or skilling up the agents or it’s doing the things that AI can’t do. So yeah, I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And by the way, I know we’re not talking about the job-pocalypse here as we heard it referred to earlier. But increasingly, I know there are some things that AI can replace customer service agents being a great example. I think for most of the jobs out there, there’s elements of your job it can replace. It can’t replace the whole job. And for all of the companies I’ve seen announcing layoffs that are tied to AI, I have not heard one of them say, and these are the full-time agents that have replaced the full-time work that this person did. I think they’re just anticipating what they’re going to be able to do with AI. So I don’t think we’re going to see the job loss that we’ve been talking about because I think they’re going to realize that what we still need 70% of what this person does and he can devote more time and attention to that because the 30% that the AI can do, we’re going to let the AI do. So, the reason I point all this out. is that while companies may for a while think, who needs an agency? I can do all this with AI. They’re going to realize what they’re producing is slop, that they don’t have the time to put in the effort required to generate the right kinds of agents, the right kinds of skills, the right kinds of prompts. They don’t know how to assemble all of this together in a strategy. And they don’t want to take the time to work with AI to do it. my God, this is what agencies are for. I’m going to have an agency do it. So the agencies will take advantage of the AI, but I think there’s still going to be work for agencies to do. There just may be a valley as companies say, the AI can do all this for us before they realize, well, you know what? It really can’t.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess a short answer to this, there’s no single answer to how you do this. There’s no real way of proving value in an age of cheap intelligence, I suppose, to use that way of describing it. It’s going to get cheaper, according to Hassid, I agree, based on what he said in this, but also what I’m seeing others say. But there’s still a role. I think we need to be clear-eyed about what the future holds in this regard. And you’ve mentioned a good point, I think, about job losses and the way in which that’s currently playing out, where people are taking a big hammer to a tool that doesn’t require that at all to solve, where you’re just laying off people. You’ve got some leaders in some organizations who truly do not deserve to occupy those roles in those companies, the way they treat employees in this regard. But you’ve also got some very sensitive, empathetic people who don’t do it like that. So that’s the landscape we’ve got. In the meantime, I would say communicators need to think about this more. Even if you don’t know the answers, OK, compile all your questions then. Then do some research yourself even to find out what others say. Hey, I will help you do that. And at least get this on your radar before it’s too late.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and it is definitely going to get cheaper for no other reason that the AI companies don’t want to be spending the money they’re spending on their infrastructure, especially the power requirements. So they are investing in finding solutions to this, not because they are all deep, sincere environmentalists, but because it’s costly to them and they’d rather not be spending that money. All right, well, we’re going to shift away from AI again for a moment. Here’s a phrase that was,

Neville Hobson: There you have it. I bet you we’re not. Go on then, go on, go on, go on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, bet we are. Well, maybe not entirely. Here’s a phrase that wasn’t in my vocabulary three months ago, the clipping economy. And if you’re a communicator, you need to know what this is because it’s already changing how content about your client or your employer travels and whether you have any control over where it ends up. Here’s what’s happening. A piece from NPR featured a 24-year-old guy in Antwerp, Belgium named Emre Bayraktar. He was working three part-time jobs. He was cleaning cars. He had the night shift at a warehouse. He was making sandwiches at Subway. But in his spare time, he’d take long influencer interviews, edit them into short clips and post them. And one night he got a notification telling him that he’d earned $12 on one of his clips. Two weeks later, he’d earned $2,500. Today, he runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers. 40,000 individuals like him who take long-form content and turn it into short term clips. He runs that network and that’s the model. Streamers, podcasters, brands, even political campaigns post bounties on marketplaces and anyone with a phone and a video editor can claim the bounty by chopping up the long-form content into vertical clips and posting them to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, X. You get paid per thousand views. NPR cited recent bounties at a dollar per thousand views for Major League Baseball clips, $25 per thousand views for an AI startup. Forbes reported that generating a million views through one of these clipping companies, a company literally called Clipping, founded by a guy named Anthony Fujiwara, cost somewhere between a hundred bucks and a thousand bucks. Fujiwara’s company did $7.7 million in sales in 10 months. MrBeast started his own clipping company called Vyro late last year. Ed Elson, who co-hosts the Prof G Markets podcast with Scott Galloway, calls this the clip economy. And his argument is that the clips are no longer promotion for the show, the clips are the show. The live streamer, Hassan Piker, pulls about 33,000 viewers for a typical live stream. His average clip pulls 700,000 views. The clip is 20 times bigger than the thing it was clipped from. And Adam Rosenberg from Digiday says clips used to be the byproduct. Now they’re the product. And yeah, I’ve got personal evidence. This is true. I think I mentioned just recently someone I work with told me she does not watch Saturday Night Live. She’ll watch 10, 12, 13 clips so that she can see the funny bits. So what does this mean for those of us who work in PR and corporate communications? Let’s answer three questions. First, do you need to watch for Clippers using your client’s content out of context? Yes, always. The streamer Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, told Digiday that being clipped out of context is now the cost of putting anything long-form online. Clippers will pull the line that fits a narrative they want to push and let it travel. If your CEO does a 45 minute podcast and says something deliberately provocative at minute 31 to make a setup payoff at minute 33, you should assume someone is going to clip the provocative part and lead the payoff on the cutting room floor. So monitor for that. Set up alerts on your client’s name across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts the same way you set up Google Alerts 20 years ago. And have a response plan ready because by the time you find the clip, it may already have a million views. Second, should legal get involved? Sometimes, but think carefully before you reach for the cease and desist. Frank Poh, who runs a creator focused law firm called Poh Law, told Digiday that publicity rights are the live legal issues here, meaning your client’s image, voice and likeness being used to sell something without permission. If a clipper is making money off a clip of your CEO, and especially if the clip is being used to promote a product, you have an argument. You have a case, but if it’s a clipper just monetizing views on a clip that’s substantially accurate, you’re probably stuck with the Streisand effect. Going after a clipper with 200 followers can generate more press than the clip ever would. Pick your battles, save the legal response for clips that are deceptively edited, false or commercially exploitative, and let the rest go. Third, and this is the one I expect people are going to push back on, Should you pay clippers to amplify your clients content? Well, here’s the case for it. The Digiday piece pointed to a clip of John Hamm dancing in a club on the Apple TV show, Your Friends and Neighbors, that went so viral that Hamm got asked about it on The Tonight Show. That’s an enormous earned media outcome from a 30 second clip. Spencer Pratt, the former reality star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, is openly running paid clipping campaigns through the Whop platform, and disclosing it, which is the right way to do it. fintech, crypto, and AI companies are the heaviest users of clipping farms precisely because they operate in legal gray areas. Most clippers don’t disclose payment, which means almost every paid ClipYou commission is potentially a violation of the Federal Trade Commission rules. Here in the U.S., the U.K. Gambling Commission has already taken enforcement action. X has flagged the practice publicly. Instagram CEO Adam Masseri put out a video on April 30th saying the platform will crack down on re-uploaders. And if you go down this road, you disclose every payment every time, no exceptions, and you assume that the FTC is reading your contracts. The clip not going anywhere. The question isn’t whether your client gets clipped, it’s whether you have a strategy for when it happens.

Neville Hobson: Well, that’s quite a story, I had not heard about this either. The whole idea of clipping farms or as the NPR piece wove its story quite skillfully in an interesting way about the kid in Antwerp, how he started out and then the other examples in there of these people. There’s not really a flip, but a kind of an alert note. that the ones who are making the real money on this, they say, tend to be the middlemen clippers rather than the original creators. And that, think, is clearly a sign that this is ripe for intervention by regulators and others in companies who see this kind of behavior. So this may well be one of those things that is temporary in the context of that. The idea of clipping, though, isn’t. And so some big names are going to move into this soon, I would guess. But the thoughts occurring to me when listening to what you were saying was, how does this kind of start? How do you find companies to do this? You asked a question not rhetorically on should your employee or client get involved in this? It’s high risk, but potentially significant. return on that risk, think, like the example you mentioned of the John Hamm example. I heard about that. I heard about that without realizing it was because of a clip. So this probably is one of these natural evolutionary steps in the stage of where we are with online communication, online digital communication that is generational largely, isn’t it? If it’s what is it, Gen Z or even Gen Alphas, I suppose. sharing all this stuff to TikTok and other places. I’ve not seen it on Facebook, but again, I wasn’t knowing what to look for. I’d make a point of looking. How do you identify this stuff, particularly if they’re not disclosing anything? Does it look kind of like, that guy posted this really interesting clip, not knowing that he’s a clipper? Definitely, you need to be aware of this from a communicator’s point of view. you’ve looked into this more than I have. So it’s difficult to say more than that at this point. But I think this is a phenomenon. It’s growing. We’re going to see more of this before, in some way or form, it gets regulated. I don’t mean that from an official point of view. But I don’t see this as remaining unfettered for much longer.

Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I mean, figure the kid in Antwerp has what, 44,000 clippers working for him. Then there’s the Whop and the one that MrBeast started. So you’ve got to figure there’s tens of thousands of people out there creating these clips. How many can they create in a day? Probably hundreds, if not more. And they’re probably flooding the Internet. We just don’t see them because we’re not looking for things that are associated with the tags.

Neville Hobson: Incredible.

Shel Holtz: that they’re putting on them. you’ve got to figure that people are seeing clips and assuming that they’re something that was created because somebody was passionate about it or it came from the company or it came from the person whose image you’re seeing when that may not be true at all. Somebody else is making bank off of that without permission and may not even need the permission. But I got to tell you, the next time I get somebody at my company placed on a podcast, assuming there is a video, I will be clipping that podcast and sharing those clips both to raise awareness of what our spokesperson said, but also to drive views back to the podcast so they can see everything that she said. I’ll be doing that. In fact, for on the same page, the new podcast I started with Steve Crescenzo, I am using a service called Opus Clip. That’s what they do is clips. You upload video. And it creates clips with the closed caption type of, here’s what they’re saying in real time. And I’ve been sharing those on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and not X because I’m not there. But we’ll see if it drives any more awareness of the show, but this is real and it’s big and it’s important.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah, I did like the concluding part of the NPR piece where they where someone said, suddenly I realized clips aren’t the promotional material for the content. Clips are the content. And that, to your point on your colleague you mentioned, who doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live, watches the clips so she could pick out the best bits to her, the best bits that she finds on TikTok without watching the show. I do that with some stuff and I never realized, hey, that’s clipping. I didn’t realize that. So that actually got me thinking a bit about something I was doing not long ago with a podcast. I was contracted to a company to produce podcasts. We did a little bit of that. And I remember thinking at the time that the clips are getting more traffic than the actual podcasts. Okay, I have learned from, I should have. paid more attention to that. So maybe we could try with FIR. I mean, I’m thinking one of the reasons we don’t do that, I’m sure from suddenly speaking, just from my point of view in in producing content is I didn’t have time to do it. I have no time to spend. So I would look for something that made it dead simple to just create five clips and I could look at each say absolutely spot on with the have to say Now I need to edit the front and the back. No, no, Just give me that content. Riverside offers that tool, as you know. And maybe there’s something we can do there. But that might be interesting.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I haven’t been terribly impressed with Riverside’s clips so far. That’s why I’m paying separately for Opus, which I think does a better job. And they do give you some editing tools that makes it really easy to clean them up quickly. I picked on the same page for this for two reasons. One is every other week. So I have plenty of time between episodes to do this. And the other is it’s brand new. So we’re trying to gin up awareness. So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have any metrics on this yet, but I’m really curious to see how it pays off.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, definitely worth paying attention to. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the 15th of May in its CIO Journal section that I think deserves more attention from communicators than it’s likely to get because on the surface it looks like an IT story, but underneath it’s something more interesting than that. The headline is, Companies have a new AI problem. Too many agents. The reporter is Belle Lin and she spoke to technology leaders at companies including Lyft, Davita, GitLab and FICO about a phenomenon they’re calling AI agent sprawl. We’ve talked about AI agents quite a bit recently. So this really is relevant to those conversations. Here’s the situation. As agentic AI platforms have become easier to use, we’re talking tools that even non-technical employees can operate without involving IT. People across organizations are spinning up AI agents. at a remarkable rate. Agents that summarize emails, write briefs, analyze data, automate workflows, conduct research. One company told the journal its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new agents every single day. Another has over 10,000 agents already deployed. And Gartner projects that within two years, so that’s before 2030, the average Fortune 500 enterprise will be running over 150,000 agents. So that’s the average enterprise multiply that by how many Fortune 500 enterprises around the big numbers. The IT problem is obvious as the journal costs cybersecurity duplication conflicting outputs, but only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place. That’s a striking gap. Now here’s where I think communicators need to lean into this. When you have agents operating across an organization. often invisibly, often without central oversight, summarizing information, drafting communications, automating decisions, who is responsible for the accuracy and consistency of what those agents produce. And when something goes wrong, when an agent produces conflicting results or surfaces inaccurate information that makes its way into a client communication or an internal briefing, who owns that? Who manages the narrative around it? We’ve talked about agentic AI on FI before, as I mentioned, mostly from the angle of what agents can do and why communicators should be paying attention. This story is the flip side of that conversation. It’s what happens when agent adoption outpaces the governance frameworks needed to manage it. And it’s a reminder that governance isn’t just a technology challenge, it’s a communication challenge. Somebody in these organizations need to be thinking about transparency, accountability, and trust. And that sounds a lot like a communicator’s job to me. So we talked about some really serious errors made by organizations by not having the human in the loop, as I mentioned earlier. This, in my view, fits into that conversation, except it’s now become much more urgent if you’ve got this scale emerging, which clearly it is emerging. And what do we do about it? So is it the communicator’s job? I kind of qualify my own question. Sounds like a communicator’s job, but is it? What do you think?

Shel Holtz: Well, partly. I mean, there’s definitely a role here for IT and definitely a role for the senior leadership of the organization. But we absolutely have a part to play here. So I think one of the problems is that a lot of organizations establish their governance, their guardrails, their policies in the early days of Gen.A.I. as they saw employees starting to use it, say, hey, we’d better have some rules, especially since we’re going to adopt it. So many companies that had Office 365 contracts suddenly had access to Copilot and wanted to make that available. So they came up with their governor’s policies before anybody was talking about agents. Well, I can’t say nobody was, I’m sure they were at the AI labs and…

Neville Hobson: Yeah, just one, don’t forget, the journal says only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place, which means what? 70%, 80%, something percent do not have it in place at all.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, that’s the thing. And I think those are the ones that may think that they do because they spent a lot of time, they worked with legal and HR and they came up with their governance and now we have agents and the governance doesn’t address them. It addresses prompting and it addresses things like don’t put sensitive information into a prompt in a public AI model, doesn’t say a word about agents. So I think one thing we need to look at is revisiting the governance policies that we have. And here’s where a communicator can come into. into play is look at your governance and then propose some enhancements in the great language that only we communicators are able to craft and send those to legal NHR and IT and say, you know, we need to update our governance. Here’s a proposed draft and at least get things kick started. But, you know, not all of the agents are ones where we need to be thinking about them. Although, I think there are some issues where we could get involved, but I work in a construction company. I have project engineers who are doing things like submittals and RFIs, stands for requests for information. And a lot of that, I think there’s potential for agent work. I’m not that interested. If you can be more productive in your job as a project engineer, more power to you. I think where there’s some process. One of the things to worry about is I don’t want every PE spinning up their own agent independently. If somebody comes up with a good agent to do this with, we should be sharing that throughout the organization so that there are consistent results and we don’t have to be worrying about any mistakes or misphrasing or anything that went into the creation of an agent, creating bad results over here on this project, but great results on this one where they knew what they were doing when they spun up their agent. So there should be, I mean, that should be baked into the governance that says we don’t want, you know, 175 agents created by different people all doing the same thing. Where I get worried though is where they’re answering emails, where they’re answering customer service questions. You know, who reviewed the voice and the tone of those responses and who approved the messaging guardrails? When an agent says something wrong publicly, who’s accountable for that? If it’s a marketing message, is marketing responsible or is it IT? Nobody has the answers to this yet. And I don’t think anybody’s asking. We should be the ones who are asking.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s, what a chaotic landscape we live and work in. I think, I agree, Shel. I mean, communicators have a clearly significant role. I could conclude as we’re saying, hey, communicators, this is another thing you’ve got to be getting involved in now in this. This is how you prove your value. So add this to the 15 new things that you now have to get to deal with. Here’s number 60.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I was just blown away when I read this, that the Pentagon staff used Google’s agent designer on genai.mil to vibe code more than 100,000 AI agents in about five weeks. They hold IL-5 authorization. That means they can deal with sensitive, unclassified data. Their chief deputy for intelligence said at a symposium, I’m on team go fast. So if corporate communicators think this is a problem, they have time to think about the military, the actor we’d expect to be most cautious is already at 100,000 agents and accelerating. Now, Gartner in step two of the process they outlined, step two is to build a centralized agent inventory. And that was framed as a technical thing. It tells IT what’s running. But for communicators, we need to know what they’re all saying, what tone, what facts, what brand voice. Our job is to make sure the inventory captures the messaging dimension, not just the technical one. Otherwise you end up with 150,000 versions of your brand voice. And once we’re able to analyze what they’re doing, we’re able to go back and say, hey, you need to adapt, adjust that agent. So it does this instead of that.

Neville Hobson: Well, interesting times ahead as always from everything we talk about here. I would say conclude, buckle up. That’s what I said.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Also something else to buckle up for, we have an interview coming in June. We haven’t had an FIR interview in a while, but we have a returning guest. He hasn’t been on the show in something like 15, 16 years, but Pete Blackshaw is joining us based on some work he has spent a couple of years doing about the role of AI in customer service. it’s going to be a great conversation. I was just blown away by what I read in his post about this. So looking forward to that. Yeah, watch for that in June. Also, of course, coming in June is our next long-form episode. We are going to record that on Saturday, June 21st and make it available on Monday the I’m sorry, it’s going to be on Monday the 22nd. We’re going to record on Saturday the 20th. I think I got that right. Anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward. Yep. No, we’ll be recording actually on Saturday, yeah, the 20th, you’re right. And publishing on the 22nd,

Shel Holtz: The 20th. There you go. Yeah, I can count squares on calendars. But watch for that. It’s coming. And of course, we will have our midweek episodes in between all that. We do hope that you will comment on anything you’ve heard that raised a thought from this episode or from any of the upcoming shorter midweek episodes. You know where to share them. Send them to us at fircomments@gmail.com. Attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file right off of the FIR website, in which case you don’t even need to email us. We get that. There’s a tab that says send voicemail right there on the side of the page. You can leave comments on the post for this episode at FIRPodcastNetwork.com or wherever we share news about the latest episode dropping, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere except TikTok. right now, and maybe we’ll fix that if we start clipping. And that will be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #515: Agents Everywhere appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines.

Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

Are the Twitter clones in trouble?
Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025
Pew: Social Media and News Fact Sheet
Reuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered.

Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting.

Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits.

At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency.

It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed.

The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices.

The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square.

Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying?

Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want.

So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global public square.

No matter what the likes of Silicon Valley folks seem to think, there is no global public square. Or rather, there are places online that are accessible globally, but they’re not controlled by big platforms solely. Text isn’t disappearing. It thrives in the examples you mentioned — newsletters, Reddit, LinkedIn comments, Discords, WhatsApp, AI chat interfaces — probably 20 more examples you could give. So perhaps people still want text, but they don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. I think that plays a big role in this. They don’t want the manipulation of algorithms to tell them, “This is what we think you want to read.” And that is still very strong on most big platforms today. They want to keep you on the site. They want to keep you engaged. They want you to keep doomscrolling, or whatever it might be. I think that shifts the conversation we should be having. It’s not about the decline of text — it’s that people don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. What do they want? Well, they don’t know what they want, do they? They don’t.

You mentioned LinkedIn — definitely the interesting exception. I think there are multiple reasons why it remains one of the stronger environments for text discussion. I guess I’ll put it as questions, basically. Is it because having something like this — that’s kind of affixed to your professional identity — changes behavior, or rather reinforces “corporate” behavior that is different to how it would be on Facebook or on TikTok or other video platforms? Accountability is higher, reputational stakes are visible, audiences are contextual rather than anonymous. It works, I think, partly because people behave differently when attached to their real professional identity. Hence — you know, I saw one today, someone complaining about Facebook-like posts being published on LinkedIn: “Please stop doing that. This is a professional place.” That kind of comment. So I suppose you could say a useful contrast — to this point about people behaving differently — is outrage-driven engagement everywhere else compared to reputation-aware participation on LinkedIn. I thought that was quite a good contrast to make.

Outrage-driven engagement is very strong everywhere you look, but not on LinkedIn. People really don’t put up with that. So I think you have these elements that take part in all of this — that maybe smaller communities may be replacing mass audiences. And I think there’s a lot to be said in that. The smaller communities that would comprise, for example, niche communities, private groups, curated networks, newsletters, podcasts, creator ecosystems, if you like — much more than these algorithmically driven giant public feeds. I don’t follow much on the other traditional social networks. I prefer my own discovery on things like that. So maybe we’re moving from broadcast social media to relationship-based digital communities. And maybe this is just the start of that — which clearly has major implications for communicators and publishers. We can get into that, I suppose, in a bit. That broadly is what it looks like to me.

I’ve read the Reuters Institute’s report, I’ve read Nieman’s report, which actually are much wider than just talking about the decline of text-based networks, but there’s very much in there. There was an interesting article in Fast Company which looked at Bluesky’s limitations. I thought that was intriguing — what they wrote. The contradiction, they said, was that journalists and intellectual communities (and they define what they mean by that) still love Bluesky, but broader mainstream adoption remains elusive. And that is absolutely true. Little blips here and there of this group or that group moving away from X. Good example in the media: Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, announced, I think last week or the week before, that they have multiple — maybe 20 or 30 — Twitter handles, and they’re all going to shut down, and they’re moving it all to Bluesky. And I think — brave. Reality: X is still the place where significant public announcements are made. Look at what’s happening, for instance, in Iran — in the Iran war with Israel and the US — the propaganda battle between the two is taking place on X, mostly.

Trump, well, he’s got his Truth Social network, but I see people on X quoting Trump a lot. So governments, big corporations — but large groups tend to still be on X, in spite of what many, me included, would see as that being definitely a place not to be because of its toxicity. Deaf ears for that message, frankly, to people who are invested big in a place like that.

But what does it all mean for communicators? Well, you’ve touched on a few things, and maybe that’s something that we could explore a bit. But broadly, that’s what I’m seeing.

Shel: Well, I agree with you about the dispersion. I’m going to stick with the idea that the text-based social networks are in decline. You mentioned the German magazine that is sending all of their handles over to Bluesky.

Neville: Well, no — they are the big broadcasting and media organization, not a magazine.

Shel: Well, I’m sure Bluesky is going to be very happy about that. According to the Platformer article, Apptopia said that Bluesky has effectively collapsed as a competitive threat, with daily users down 96% from January of last year. That’s a pretty steep decline. If you look at Threads, which is turning three years old in July, Casey Newton writes that daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months. After peaking in October 2024, just before the US presidential election, daily users are down 61%, and global monthly users have held up better at 388 million, but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million at the beginning of January of this year. So these are declining.

Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, and people saw what he was doing with it. They talked about, “I’m going to Threads,” or “I’m going to Bluesky.” A lot of them were saying they were going to Bluesky, and they ended up being the left-leaning people who couldn’t tolerate the rise of hate speech and rage-baiting on X. So they went to Bluesky and effectively turned it into a left-leaning echo chamber, with left-leaning people arguing among themselves. Meanwhile, one of the people Casey quoted in Platformer said on X that the extreme right is pulling everybody else further to the right because there’s nobody from the left there to argue with them. So that’s what’s happening in the text-based social networks. They are losing monthly and daily active users at a pretty alarming rate.

Where are they going? Well, the numbers for Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts — the video platforms — are all on the rise. This is where people are going, and in particular, young people. I think one of the reasons LinkedIn is succeeding, in addition to the fact that it has a focus on business, is the fact that their algorithm, at least in part, focuses on who you follow. Whenever I log into LinkedIn, I see people that I know — not everybody who’s posted, but I do see people that I know. When I’m scrolling through Instagram, it’s a couple, but really, it’s trying to send me stuff it thinks I’m going to stick with rather than things from people I have connected with. So that makes me less interested in scrolling through Instagram. But I do find myself, when I see something — a video that’s in Reels and I tap it, it takes me over to Reels (this is on Facebook too, by the way) — I’ll find myself stuck there for a while as I’m looking at more of those short video clips. So they’re onto something in terms of what’s going to grab attention. But what does it mean for the public square? I think that — and we talked about that a lot in the early days of social media — you may remember the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I loved that book. It was so optimistic about the public square and about the ability for people to connect with each other. And I just think that’s fading. That’s not what social media is about anymore. And I think the algorithms have driven a lot of that.

Neville: I have a copy. Well, I think you’re right. Indeed, as far as Casey Newton’s piece goes, that same argument — Twitter traffic has collapsed effectively. Many other people are saying the same thing. The Reuters Institute talks about that. Nieman talks about that. Fast Company doesn’t quite say it in the same words, but talks about the tensions there. I totally agree with that. So I think, though, that it has more to do with the shifts in how people see public spaces to connect with other people. I think it reinforces some views you see about users turning their backs on social media. We’re seeing that a lot, and much of it generational, I’m sure. Commentary about fewer platforms and deeper relationships — I think they mean to say fewer platforms that interest people, or that matter to many people.

Industry reporting is showing that short-form video is dominating attention, as you mentioned — TikTok, for instance, and YouTube Shorts, stuff like that. Great, I get all that. But I think much of it might depend on how you use these networks yourself. And I’m not a big fan of algorithmically driven content at all. And, you know, I use LinkedIn maybe not the same as you. Indeed, my whole approach to it is different to what it was even two years ago, where it was important to connect with others and have people like your content and share it widely and all that. Those things aren’t important to me anymore. What is important to me, using LinkedIn as an example, is to connect with a handful of people whose opinions I really do value. And they are literally a handful — maybe two handfuls. I don’t really care about, you know, stuff getting shared 50 times and all that. So I pay attention to some of the metrics, but not a lot.

And I think, you know, Bluesky — I’m there since the beginning. Threads — I’m there since the beginning. And I’ve definitely noticed a change. I look at it this way, Shel: great, less noise, because there are fewer people in there now, which is wonderful — and new people. In fact, I use Bluesky in particular as a way to surface new people to connect with. Threads, that’s a different crowd entirely. And in fact, Threads is far more of a burgeoning community, let’s say, than other places are. But I think, you know, you kind of pause and look at the big picture and say, “Is this getting wider attention around, you know, for everyone?” Well, of course it’s not. It has very high attention amongst tech journalism, in the media and publishing industry — although both of their needs are different. Tech journalists, and I see this myself, actively discussing Bluesky, Threads, X fragmentation. You see a lot of commentary about that. We’ve just been talking about that. Media publishing industry — they’re concerned about traffic collapse and discovery. Comms professionals — attention is growing. And so our conversation today might be quite timely, especially among people who relied on Twitter professionally, says one bit of research that I pulled up. The general public — it’s very low. Yes, of course it is, because this is not mainstream. It will get there eventually, I suspect. Most users migrate without discussing the macro trend. They just move out of Twitter and go someplace else, or whatever it is. Academia and research are beginning to grow around Bluesky behavior and community structures elsewhere.

So people feel the change, but they’re not talking about it in a way outside these niche areas. Insiders are analyzing the change. That’s what a lot of the discussion is now. But generally speaking, no one’s really fully named the change yet. Is it a decline of text? Is it a decline of social network interest? Is it — whatever, whatever, whatever you think it might be. So I think the question, or rather the focus, isn’t or shouldn’t be on whether Threads or Bluesky are failing or collapsing. That’s the wrong perspective. It’s more, as we’ve mentioned earlier: were Twitter and others like it unique historical moments that you cannot recreate? In which case, are we looking at, you know, swathes of people looking for a home to go to? No, I don’t think so. I think most have found a place.

There is no longer a single place that’s a giant public square. There are multiple, and they’re all small. So are we going to see a kind of movement of thousands, maybe millions, of teeny niche communities? You could actually argue: what a nightmare for communicators. So that’s where your audience goes. But that’s what it looks like to me a bit, Shel, frankly. What I hear some people talk about, what I read — my own behavior, even — I’ve navigated myself to small communities. So I’m still a member of a number of LinkedIn groups, although, to be honest, most of them have really diminished in quality of content. A lot of people pimping their wares, full of consultants doing that kind of stuff. No value there at all. It’s almost like Facebook in that sense, where every other post you get interrupted by ads and stuff like that. So that’s going on too, by the way.

So is it fatigue? I think it could well be generational. I mean, I’m not looking right now at any research that supports that opinion, but it seems to me that, you know, if you’ve got migrations to video channels that are typically the home of younger-oriented people — younger-oriented communicators, I’d say — that’s where it is. I take a look at TikTok now and again. I’ve been on TikTok forever and I don’t contribute. I watch. It’s not my cup of tea, the kind of stuff there. The new successor to Vine, called eVine — I’ve got an account. I haven’t yet posted anything, because I couldn’t figure out what I want to say there. But I’ve looked, and there’s lots of interesting stuff. So I’ll keep that kind of perspective. On those, I’m a consumer as opposed to a creator and a sharer. On others, I create, and most of that’s text-based content. I don’t believe that’s always because I’m a boomer — far from it. That’s my preference. But I frequent these other places as well. Is that typical? I have no idea. I don’t think it might be. But who knows?

But I think this is definitely a conversation to have in terms of what it means for communicators more than anything. So, you know, audience building is going to become harder for communicators. That’s how I see it. Owned channels are becoming far more important. Trust matters more. We know that from all the conversations we’ve been having and what we can observe ourselves. Community matters more than reach. I believe that. Personality matters more than scale — I don’t see evidence of that, but maybe that is true. Consistency matters more than virality. I think that’s going to become increasingly more important, and that’s connected with trust.

So the old social media promise was scale, right? The emerging model may be relevance and trust. Are we seeing an emerging model? I’m not sure, but that’s where the direction of travel looks like it’s going, it seems to me.

Shel: Well, it starts with, I think, brands needing to adopt the philosophy that you just articulated with your subscription to eVine — not posting anything because you haven’t figured out what to post there. I think a lot of people in social media create content, they reformat it appropriately for each channel, and throw the same piece of content into all those platforms. That won’t work anymore. I think you need to look at each platform, look at the people who are there, and figure out what you want to share that’s relevant, that will resonate, that will produce some kind of movement of the needle. And for those where you can’t answer that question, maybe it’s time to abandon those networks as a brand. As an individual, go where your people are. We’re not talking about what network you like personally. For people who love being on Bluesky, I’m not suggesting that you stop. Go wild. Have a great time on Bluesky. But is it a place to share the content that you’re sharing from your organization? Is there a way that you can craft content that’s going to work there? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s time to reevaluate that based on these trends.

Neville: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think things like human voice, the individual voice, the demonstration of judgment — making judgments about something, your own lived experience and the intentional participation you exhibit by being on a certain platform — I think are increasing. Not scaled. I mean, this is small beer compared to the scaling that used to be the important thing. But they’re all connected with what we’ve been talking about: trust, authenticity, oversight, the evolving role of communicators in AI-shaped environments, to quote a phrase. I mean, it’s all in there too. Whatever — we think communicators need to be paying close attention to this in a macro sense, and indeed maybe the micro sense without getting into the weeds or anything — just be aware. So I pay attention to a lot of this stuff. I may not read every Reuters Institute report or Nieman report — not all. I’ll read the executive summaries. It’s a bit like, you know, the TikTok clips — I’ll look at the clips to get interesting stuff out of it and reflect. Do I think this is something that people I’m connected with will be interested in knowing? And that drives a lot of what I write about on the blog, for instance, which is AI-heavy these days. I think this is important to pay attention to. Perhaps public social networking is in decline. Maybe it is. But the social behaviors in small groups are definitely not. And that’s the thing to keep in mind — those two contrasts.

Shel: Yeah, and that requires a whole different approach than we’ve been taking — to this blasting this content out. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville and Shel dig into a provocative Harvard Business Review article that argues most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale that agentic AI now enables. The bottleneck, the authors contend, isn’t the technology; it’s the operating model. Neville and Shel connect the piece to conversations FIR has been having for the past year: AI as orchestration rather than automation, professionals shifting from supervisors of tasks to directors of systems, and 2026 increasingly framed as “the year of the agent.”

At the center of the Harvard piece is the idea of a “brand code” — a machine-readable knowledge system that lets specialized AI agents continuously create, adapt, test, and optimize marketing in real time. Communications urgently needs its own equivalent: a “narrative code” containing executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, and escalation rules. Whoever builds it first, he warns, will inherit the agentic stack, and if marketing gets there first, comms will be stuck with a system never designed for crisis, controversy, or stakeholder complexity. The episode also includes some concrete examples and early thoughts on Hermes, Wispr Flow, and where human judgment still has to win.

Links from this episode:

Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age
The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications
Google Summary: The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications
If you work in PR and you’re unsure how AI agents will help you, this should help.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 513 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: I’m Neville Hobson. Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard countless conversations about how AI is changing marketing and communication. Most of those discussions tend to focus on tools — faster content creation, better personalization, workflow automation, synthetic media, analytics — all the things AI can supposedly do more quickly and at greater scale than humans. A new article in Harvard Business Review published last week takes the discussion somewhere much bigger.

Its argument is not simply that AI will improve marketing productivity. Its argument is that AI may fundamentally redesign how marketing organizations themselves operate. The article is called “Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age,” and the authors argue that most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale AI now enables. The reasoning is interesting; we’ll look into this in a minute.

AI has already accelerated software engineering and product development dramatically. Products, updates, campaigns, and features are being developed and shipped much faster than before. But marketing organizations, they argue, are still largely built around sequential workflows, siloed teams, approval chains, meetings, handoffs, and coordination-heavy processes. So even when AI speeds up individual tasks, the organization itself still moves slowly.

In other words, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily the technology, it’s the operating model. What struck me reading this article is that in many ways it feels like the continuation of conversations we’ve already been having on FIR over the past year. About a year ago, Shel demonstrated some of the early agentic AI capabilities we were beginning to see emerge — systems that could move beyond simple chatbot interactions and actually take actions across workflows, tools, and platforms.

At the time, it felt experimental, slightly futuristic, and maybe just a glimpse of where things might be heading. Since then, we’ve repeatedly returned to related themes on the podcast: AI as orchestration rather than just automation, and managers becoming directors of systems rather than supervisors of tasks, to name but two. Recently, the wider communications industry has been framing 2026 as the year of the agent, a fundamental shift from generative AI, which creates content based on prompts, to agentic AI, which acts autonomously to achieve long-term goals. The rise of such autonomous agents requires a focus on agentic orchestration, with professionals acting as AI engineers who guide, manage, and audit these digital employees. As we discussed on this podcast last year, communication departments will adopt a hybrid structure where humans focus on high-level strategy and creativity while AI agents handle high-volume procedural communication tasks at machine speed.

We’re already seeing a marked impact on marketing and public relations. The Harvard piece explains how companies such as HubSpot and AWS have begun putting this model into practice. They say organizations are achieving measurable gains, with marketing materials adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs reduced by 80%, and click-through rates increased up to 17 times. Research from BCG has demonstrated these benefits at scale.

Organizations embedding agentic AI into marketing workflows, the research has found, can achieve up to a threefold increase in ROI, campaign speed, and content volume. That’s why this Harvard article feels so interesting to me. It doesn’t contradict any earlier conversations; it complements them. It takes many of the ideas we’ve been discussing conceptually and places them inside a concrete organizational model. The authors propose something they call an agentic marketing organization — essentially a system where humans and AI agents work together continuously across multiple layers of activity.

At the center of this idea is what they describe as a brand code: a machine-readable knowledge system containing brand strategy, customer insights, messaging frameworks, business rules, governance structures, and operational guidance that both people and AI systems can understand and act upon. Once that foundation exists, specialized AI agents can continuously create, adapt, test, distribute, optimize, and report on marketing activity in real time. It’s a vision of marketing that starts to look less like a department and more like an operating system.

But what really caught my attention wasn’t the technology itself so much; it was the shift in the role of the marketer. Because beneath all the platform architecture and workflow diagrams is a much deeper question: if AI increasingly handles execution, what becomes the real value of marketers and communicators?

The article argues that value shifts away from production and toward judgment — setting intent, evaluating outputs, interpreting signals, shaping governance, and guiding how the system evolves. And that raises some fascinating questions for communicators. But first, Shel, your demo of those early agentic capabilities was about a year ago now. As I mentioned earlier, it felt experimental and slightly futuristic then. So what’s changed since then?

Shel: It feels like ancient history now. If I were to look at that, I’d probably shake my head and say, “my God, that’s pretty primitive.” The way it worked was, it took a screenshot of every site it visited and then acted on the screenshot. So it was a very slow and tedious process. The video that I shared, I edited out all of the waiting time for it to go through all of this, because it showed you everything. And those days are long gone.

That was clearly a demo. I don’t remember which of the AI models offered that — I think it was Anthropic — but it was just tedious and not all that functional. It did what it was supposed to do in the end, which was to create a spreadsheet with the information I’d asked for. It was some open-source spreadsheet that it used.

I ran a similar exercise just last week using Claude Cowork. And this was for a piece somebody in our sustainability department wrote. It was about two projects that had achieved world-first certifications for zero waste, which is kind of a big deal in the construction industry. It’s one of the biggest contributors to landfills and the like, the industry is.

So I’m looking to place this article. And what I did was, I told Claude Cowork that I wanted four subagents working: one to look at construction and AEC publications — that’s architecture, engineering, and construction; AEC is the category for the industry. Another one was going to look at sustainability publications. And there was one other, but I also had it look for podcasts where the authors of this report might be invited for an interview.

I said, what I want you to do is find the publications and podcasts based on their previous content that are most likely to be interested in something like this, and then create a spreadsheet with the name of the outlet. And of course, divide it into these categories — right? AEC, podcasts, sustainability-focused publications, and the like. Mainstream media was the other category. But I also wanted the URL, I wanted the name of the appropriate person to pitch the article to. And then, based on what that person has written — that particular reporter or editor — I wanted a pitch that was personalized to that person.

And I came back in about half an hour, and there was a spreadsheet ready to go. And I had started acting on it. I don’t copy and paste the pitches; I go and take a look at that reporter’s writing and review the pitch and then make some tweaks to it. But my God, can you imagine how much time that would have taken for me to go out and do this on my own by way of research? That would have been hours and hours.

And instead the agents went out and did it, and then Cowork assembled all that information into a spreadsheet. I was doing other stuff while it was doing that. I wasn’t sitting and watching, because there frankly wasn’t that much to watch. I mean, you could watch the agent tell you, “now I’m going to go look at this.” But, you know, that’s kind of boring. Let it do its thing.

Neville: Yeah. So a question I have related to this, I suppose, is to put it into one practical area, which is: people might think of this in the context of the interaction you have with prompts and the old-fashioned way of doing things that is still prevalent. So how did you — the agents went off and did their thing, and then you came across what they produced and so forth, and it saved tons of time — how did you gain confidence, let’s say, that it was accurate, that there were no hallucinations, no errors? Or is that not the issue anymore with this kind of development?

Shel: I believe that hallucinations would still be an issue. It’s still a model at some level doing this work. I mean, it’s Claude with Claude Cowork. I did install Hermes over the weekend. We’ll talk about that in a bit, but it’s an agent platform, an agent framework, and you create the agents to do things.

For example, I created one over the weekend that I set up to be a weekly job, and it’s going to go out and look at construction industry news to find things based on our areas of expertise where I work, where we have subject matter experts and thought leaders, to find the top three articles that are ripe for newsjacking. If you remember David Meerman Scott’s newsjacking — things where we can get some stuff out there quickly.

Neville: Yeah.

Shel: And take advantage of the fact that this is something that people are looking at and gain some traction over it. So every Monday at eight, it’s going to run this job, and by 8:30, 8:45, it’s going to give me the results. And all of this is through Telegram, or WhatsApp, or whatever app you choose to use to interact with the bot. It still starts with a prompt. The difference is that you’re not prompting a question in order to get an answer; you are telling it what task to perform.

And in the case of the one that I set up on Hermes, it’s now a weekly task. And the interesting thing about Hermes is that it learns as it goes. It continually self-improves based on the more it knows about you and the kinds of tasks that you’re asking it to perform. So I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes. But so far, I just have the one agent running there. But it’s still a prompt at the end of the day.

And in fact, I used — I think it was Gemini — to help me craft the prompt to get the best results I could. I said, here’s the list of requirements, turn it into the best prompt that Hermes will understand and act on most effectively. And it did that. It did a great job. And I’m very satisfied with the results so far. I ran one test of it, so I liked it.

Neville: Yeah. So Claude Cowork is kind of at the heart of this. I’m experimenting myself with Claude Cowork — with Claude generally, Cowork sort of. Nothing like you’re doing with this, I hasten to add. But one of the things that I’m very impressed with about Claude is the way in which you tell it the things about you, who you are and what you’re doing, all this stuff — your preferences in how it conducts what you’re asking it to do — in a way that, unlike ChatGPT for instance, where you have to, in a sense, include in a prompt stuff you’ve already told it for something previously, but you’ve got to do that again. It doesn’t kind of remember that in the same way. Claude is different, though.

So your setup — I mean, I guess what I’m asking basically is, when you set this up, did it require that level of preparation that is probably desirable to do that? Or was there anything special that you had to do that was outside of what you would normally do with Claude Cowork?

Shel: Well, for the byline piece that I was looking to pitch, that I set the subagents out to do their thing in Cowork, I did in the prompt explain what my goal was and what the organization was. I had it look at our company website to get a good sense of who we are and what our areas of specialization are. I gave it some additional information.

But then something I do with all of these now — not every prompt, if I’m just in Claude or ChatGPT, but especially with the agents, with deep research projects and things like that — I’ll say, “ask me questions before you go out and do this.” And it usually asks some very salient questions. It’s very good at deducing what it doesn’t know. And the answers factor into the results you get, which is really interesting to me — that it can, if you ask it to, understand where there are gaps in the prompt that it could use this information in order to deliver really excellent and pertinent results.

Neville: Got it. So thinking about our listeners listening to this, to how you’ve explained all of this — is it kind of credible and within the reach of anyone literally wanting to do this? Or do you need to have some kind of mental preparedness or knowledge technically to do this? Could anyone just dive in and start something? Right.

Shel: Well, I don’t know about diving in. With Hermes, for example, I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I watched one that actually walked me step by step through the installation process and then had a whole section on use cases. I’ve watched more. There’s one on 99 use cases for Hermes that I watched, which was pretty good. So it helps you get in that mindset. But in terms of, can anybody do this?

In the world of communications, anybody better be able to do this, because you’re not going to be sent out to look for these sites and assemble a spreadsheet anymore. You need to be able to orchestrate these agents. And that means knowing how to prompt it to get the results that you want. And that’s different, again, from prompting ChatGPT for an answer to a question, right? You are giving it a task, and it could be a recurring task that somebody on your team does.

Now, in communications, I still don’t see this replacing a communicator, because every communicator is going to have the human-only or human-required elements of the job. I cannot see one of these conducting, say, an employee focus group. There’s so much that we do. I mean, you know, in public relations, the word “relations” always stands out to me, and maintaining those relations is not something a bot can do.

But in terms of what that Harvard Business Review article was talking about, you can swap marketing for communications. I think it’s more true in comms. Comms workflows are more coordination-heavy than marketing. We have legal, we have HR, we have the C-suite. We have to make sure everything’s consistent with the brand and maybe get some brand representation approvals. They’re the owners of the channels that we have to deal with.

If marketing needs a brand code — and this was a concept I really liked in that article — communications needs a narrative code. You know, a machine-readable positioning, machine-readable executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, rules for escalating things that emerge that need to be taken up a step in the hierarchy or maybe up to the C-suite or the CEO. I don’t know anybody who’s built a narrative code.

Whoever builds this first in your organization, by the way, is going to end up owning the agentic stack. If marketing builds it first, we in communications are going to inherit a system that wasn’t designed for crisis communication, wasn’t designed for controversy or reputation damage or stakeholder complexity — it was built for marketing. And that’s the one we’re going to end up having to work with. You probably remember, Neville, in the early days of social media, Richard Edelman was out there sounding the drum that PR needed to own social media before marketing and advertising got their hands on it, because they would turn it into something inauthentic, right? It’s the same thing here.

Neville: Yeah. Yeah.

Shel: I think we in comms are going to have to build out the narrative code and let marketing take advantage of the agentic stack that we’ve built. But we need to be in the room when those decisions are being made.

Neville: So another challenge for communicators, and I can see that. I think the overall structure of the Harvard piece, as I mentioned in the introduction, is on the organization as a whole. And I think there are examples where that’s in work — I quoted a couple, and then there’s the BCG research, which I found quite interesting. But that’s… restructuring is a way away yet on an organizational level, I would say, for most companies. But the individual actions, such as experimentation you’re doing, are definitely right in front of us, literally right now.

And it prompted a thought in my mind, looking at this overall picture, about some assumptions in the Harvard piece that I think are worth looking at for a minute, where the article assumes that strategic judgment remains human, not AI focused, but execution becomes agentic. So I think, okay, then — though history suggests automation rarely stops neatly where people would like it to and where they would expect it to.

So perhaps a question that’s relevant to address in this context is: if AI systems — agentic is part of that — increasingly assist with strategy too, which is what they’ll be doing, where exactly does human value migrate to? That’s a broad question, but for communicators specifically, how would we address that one?

Shel: I think, first of all, if you’re going to look to the agentic system to assist with the development of the strategy, I would sit down and map out a game plan for that. I wouldn’t just say, “hey, you know the company I work for, come up with a strategy for us.” I would say, first of all, what is this strategy…

Neville: Ha ha ha.

Shel: …going to be designed to achieve? What do we know about the direction the company’s going and decisions that have been made? I would certainly use it to go out and say, research the marketplace and research our competitors and identify, to the extent that you can, what their strategies are. I would develop the strategy myself, but I would give it to the AI to stress-test.

And by the way, some of this is agentic and some of it is just querying a chatbot. I mean, let’s just take crisis communication as an example. No CEO is going to go into a boardroom with an answer from an AI system telling a leader something they don’t want to hear. That is amplified by the agentic stack. If we go in as the crisis counselor and say, “look, I know you’re not going to like this. Here’s my judgment. And I’ve got this information that came from the weekly analysis of sentiment in the marketplace,” so I think it can bolster your argument. It can’t replace your argument. You’re going to walk into that boardroom as a human and make a case.

Same thing, maybe, with focus groups. When passive signals in social media, for example, and message boards get gamed, sitting in a room with 10 employees becomes the truth that the dashboards that are out there — the agents that are out there looking at sentiment — get checked against. So when a dashboard says that morale is great and the focus group says it isn’t, I’m going to pay attention to the focus group. I’m going to pay attention to those 12 people in the room before I listen to an agent that says, “well, we’ve been analyzing all the sentiment in Slack and email, and everything is just dandy.”

So I think it’s the same with strategy. I think I would never abdicate strategy…

Neville: Mm.

Shel: …but I could certainly develop it faster and be more confident in its viability by using agents and chatbots.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. And it makes me think of, I guess I would say, what’s coming, which is already here in ways that lead to even greater — well, integration, I suppose, is the right way. I’m thinking what you said at the beginning of this segment we’re talking about now, which is, you don’t hand the whole thing over to the AI and say, “hey, go and develop a strategy.” You would do…

Shel: And you know there are people who are, right?

Neville: Yeah, they will. They will. But it seems to me that this is really, in a sense, the fulfillment of an expectation — a promise — from artificial intelligence tools like this, that you would have a conversation with it in the same way you would with a human being who might be an external consultant or a colleague who’s a subject matter expert or whoever it might be, that you would explore with that individual: we’re developing a strategy for next year, let’s look at how we’re going to do this.

You set the framework for how you might start that conversation with your AI assistant. And as you said, this is not specifically agentic; it’s the whole spectrum of what the tools are. And you set it on course to go and research this. And that’s probably what an agentic tool will do. And that to me is the excitement of where this is going — that you can get to that stage, which then I think would address some of the skepticism and indeed alarm bells by some in organizations when they see unfettered technology going all over the place or being asked to do stuff. This, though, makes it credible and gives it some legs of credibility.

Which leads me, I guess, to possibly the final question here. We’re seeing this, as you’ve explained, this is light years ahead of the demo you gave a year ago, which gave a signal, a strong sense of what’s possible, where this could go. We’ve seen that fulfilled. It is eminently possible. And you don’t need to be a rocket scientist, as you might have expected you would have to be a year ago. This is doable. And the more people experiment with it in simple ways, like you’ve outlined as a real-world example, they will want to do that in that case.

So the question then, therefore, is: okay, fine, a year on from last year, you’ve explained something you’re doing that delivers value quite readily every Monday morning, let’s say. So what’s next, do you see, in terms of developing technology and the developing value people will get from it that would accelerate probably its uptake? How do you see it?

Shel: I think that the next thing we’re going to see is an evaluation of every role and where an agent will fit. This is something we went through a couple of years ago. Ethan Mollick was talking about it in his book, Co-Intelligence, before we were even talking about agents — talking about inviting AI to the table and figuring out where you could work it into your workflows. But it was still the chatbot. It was still the, “I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to deliver some kind of answer.”

I think we need to do that again and look at agents. What tasks are we performing, and which ones can we hand off to agents? And I think there are probably roles where this is going to be even easier to do, where you’re going to see more opportunities than in communications. I mean, you know, engineering, for example, I think is wide open for this sort of thing.

So I think that’s what’s next — as we do hand off certain (and I’m going to call them) mundane tasks, because this is not the high-level strategy and the human-touch stuff that is so important in so many jobs. But as we hand these off, and it now takes an hour instead of a week, what does that do to the rest of our workflows? What does that do to our organizational structure?

One of the things that I was reading over the weekend was the expectation that middle managers are going to be a thing of the past, because what do they do? They handle the flow of information up and down between the people who report to them and the people that they report to. They handle a lot of mundane tasks that might now be handed off to an agent. Agents, according to — I don’t remember who this was who was saying this. It was somebody noteworthy. It might’ve been Dario Amodei at Anthropic, but I honestly don’t remember for sure — but middle managers can be replaced by agents by and large.

So what does that do to organizational structure? Certainly flattens it. But now, in terms of those executives who have a lot of people reporting to them, what part of that reporting structure can be handed off to an agent? So I think this is sort of a cascading situation where everything we do leads to a reconsideration of something, that leads to, well, what else can we do with the agents, which leads to further reconfiguration?

I think that’s what we’re looking at. And I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, because, as you alluded to, the technology may be moving fast, but organizations tend not to, particularly when it comes to issues of structure and governance.

Neville: I think this is so exciting, to be frank — the idea of the changes we can see coming that will be painful for many. But is it more structural change? It’s a constant in our lives, is it not, with all of this? Something we should embrace emotionally and logically, that we can control this. And I don’t mean control the tech — we can’t do that. But we can control the risk and the benefits of something like this by not reacting to something that’s coming, by, in a sense, embracing it and experimenting with this and learning it. And as you said, if we don’t do this, the marketing guys will. And so we can’t have that. I think…

Shel: And then we’re stuck with theirs.

Neville: I think it’s something to really pay attention to. So this has been a useful, interesting discussion, Shel, getting your thoughts on this in particular. So yeah, I think we’ll come back to this conversation unquestionably at some point in the future.

Shel: No doubt, as we see developments. In fact, as I say, I just started working with Hermes over the weekend, and it was an eye-opener, and I expect, as I work with it more, I’ll have more thoughts about it and my thinking will evolve. I should point out that I did install this on a personal virtual server, not on a company computer. I’m not taking that kind of risk. And it’s my personal account.

One other thing I thought I’d mention — you talked about the idea of having a conversation with the AI, and I think that’s becoming more of a focus. And I’ll give you two quick examples. One I already mentioned is with Hermes: you don’t go to a terminal and engage with it or go to its website. You do this through WhatsApp or Slack or, in my case, I’m using Telegram — just like I’d be having a conversation with a person in that same app.

But on, I think it was Thursday, I did a half-day webinar that was offered by the Marketing AI Institute, Paul Roetzer’s organization, and it was on AI for writing. And it was very interesting. Chris Penn was among the speakers; he did a great job, as always. But one of the folks there talked about, you know, have the conversation with AI for real — do it with your voice, not with your keyboard. And she talked about a tool, which I haven’t used it yet — I have installed it across my personal computer, my laptop, and my phone — called Wispr Flow. It’s an AI tool. Have you…? It’s pretty cool. I mean, in any tool you’re using, you just click it and talk. And it doesn’t go directly into the chat box; it interprets it…

Neville: Yeah, I’ve been using it. Yeah. Yeah.

Shel: …and then puts the best prompt based on what you just said into the box. And that’s what you use to prompt the model. And I’m looking forward to giving that a try. And it’s called Wispr Flow, by the way, because if you’re in the office in an open-space format and you don’t want to disturb the people next to you, it understands what you’re saying when you whisper to it.

Neville: Yeah, it is interesting. I’ve got a hurdle to jump with it, though, which is getting accustomed to speaking what I want things to be done and how, rather than typing them. You know… yeah, and I haven’t got across that hurdle yet. That’s limiting my use of it. So I’m reverting to the, well, I’m more comfortable typing, I can type fast and all that kind of stuff. But, reality, this is faster than that. And it is…

Shel: Yeah, same.

Neville: I recognize the benefits of it. I can see this. Not everyone will be used to this. This is not dissimilar to the argument we could have about voice notes. I know people who love voice notes; I don’t. And I know more people who don’t like it. It could be a generational thing, I think to myself. But it’s part of the communication landscape. So you need to get accustomed to these developments.

Shel: Yeah. And I hear about voice notes being preferred by some reporters who are being pitched, because it’s evidence that it wasn’t AI slop that’s pitching them.

Neville: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

Shel: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #513: Why Communications Must Build the Narrative Code for the Agentic Age appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While there’s no evidence that business leaders are outsourcing the most important decisions to AI, there are reports that many executives are relying on AI to make many — in fact, most — of their decisions. The implications for communications could be huge.

Links from this episode:

AI Is Changing More Than Work, It’s Rewiring Executive Decision-Making
Inside the C-suite: How AI is quietly reshaping executive decisions
AI and the future of human decision making
C-Suite Executives Dominate AI Decision-Making as Strategy Becomes Priority
Decision-Making by Consensus Doesn’t Work in the AI Era
How AI Is Transforming the Way Executives Lead
Leadership at a Turning Point: How AI Is Shaping Executive Decision-Making
Can AI Make Executive Decisions?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 512 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. The inspiration for this week’s report came from a post Brian Solis wrote recently. In it, he argued that AI isn’t just changing work — it’s rewiring how executives make decisions. Once Brian put that in my head, the trend started standing out in other things I was seeing. I’ll summarize the numbers and what they mean for communicators right after this.

The numbers Brian pulled together are honestly alarming. A Confluent study of UK private sector leaders found that 62% of executives now use AI to make the majority of their decisions. That’s not some — it’s the majority. 70% say they second-guess themselves when AI disagrees with them, and 46% say they rely on AI more than their own colleagues.

On the U.S. side, SAP’s research found that 44% of C-suite executives would reverse a decision they had already planned to make based on AI input. 74% place more confidence in AI advice than in the advice they get from family and friends. Meanwhile, McKinsey reports that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investment over the next three years, but only 1% — 1 percent — describe themselves as mature in deployment. The money to pay for AI and a sort of blind trust in its abilities are racing ahead of the internal competence to use it. Now, I want to be clear before I go on. I’m not anti-AI, Neville — you know this. Anyone who listens to the show knows I’ve been beating the drum for AI as a tool for communicators and for business in general for a long time.

AI as a thinking partner, a research assistant, a stress-tester for ideas — that’s enormously valuable. But there’s a meaningful difference between using AI to inform a decision and using AI to make the decision. And Brian puts this well: AI is becoming the new executive influencer. The problem is that it hasn’t earned that role, at least not yet.

So let’s talk about what this means for those of us in communication, because the implications are everywhere. Start with employee trust. The implicit deal between an organization and its workforce is that the people at the top got there because they have judgment and experience and pattern recognition that the rest of us don’t have — or at least they’ve been able to employ it really well and get noticed by the people who promote you into those leadership decisions.

That’s the story leadership tells, and it’s the story employees buy into. Now imagine the all-hands where the CEO announces a major restructuring, and somewhere in the Q&A, or worse, on Blind or Reddit a week later, it comes out that the decision was essentially handed to a chatbot. What happens to confidence in leadership? What happens to engagement? What happens to the social contract that says, follow me because I know where we’re going?

You can’t credibly ask people to bring their full selves to work, as they say, while you’re outsourcing your own judgment to a language model. Now extend that to external stakeholders — investors, customers, regulators, the board. They’re paying, and in a lot of cases they’re paying a lot, for executive judgment. If a strategic call goes sideways — and you know that happens — the explanation that the AI suggested it isn’t going to land well.

It’s going to sound like an abdication, because it is an abdication. And from a crisis communication standpoint, “we trusted the algorithm” is one of the worst defenses I can imagine. I don’t expect that anybody’s going to say that, but it doesn’t mean it’s not going to come out. Just ask anyone who’s worked an aviation incident, a financial services failure, or a healthcare AI misfire. Imagine the reaction when either the leader tells people, or they learn through a third party, that the afflicted stakeholder hears, “Well, that’s the decision the AI told me to make.”

And there’s a third implication that I think communicators need to surface inside our organizations: the erosion of dissent. I find this particularly interesting and disturbing.

Confluent found that 65% of leaders say decision-making has become less collaborative since adopting AI. The Harvard Business Review just ran a piece arguing that consensus is dead in the AI era. That may be — but debate isn’t consensus. Debate is the friction that exposes bad assumptions. It’s what didn’t happen at that auto manufacturer — I think it was Volkswagen with their emissions standards. They didn’t have the psychological safety to feel safe in dissenting against the decisions being made. In this case, we’re not even looking forward at the leadership level in some cases. If AI is pushing aside the colleague who would have pushed back, whatever process your organization had for dissent just stops functioning. And when dissent dies, so does the early warning system communicators rely on to spot reputational risks before they get out of control.

So what do we do? A few things. We push for governance — and if you already have a governance model, push to revisit it. Your governance needs clear declarations of which decisions AI informs versus which ones it actually makes. We coach our executives to talk publicly about how they actually use AI, with appropriate humility, before the question gets asked for them.

We build the internal narrative that human accountability is non-negotiable, no matter how good the model gets. And we keep reminding leadership that machine confidence isn’t the same as strategic clarity. Brian’s right: AI is a test of leadership. It’s also, increasingly, a test of communication. Neville?

Neville: Well, just to set my position clear on this, too — I’ve been a drum-beater for AI as a research assistant, as a useful tool, since GPT first came out. The initial kind of hysterical enthusiasm was tempered over time, but I use the tool every single day in what I do for work, or for pleasure for that matter. So it’s something I believe strongly in. But I’ve got this, how could you say, in the back of my mind always — this thought that I don’t accept blindly anything the AI assistant tells me. If I’m researching something, for instance, I’m going to make a recommendation about something, let’s say, or I’m writing a report or even something relatively simple like an article for the blog. If I felt I wanted to say this and it’s telling me that, that’s a simple decision: I’m either going to follow it or not. Typically when that happens, I’ll ask it questions to further that angle. But this is something else, what Brian writes about. And The Register — I’ve read their piece — tempered with a bit of hysteria, it seems. I mean, this is a very alarmist piece, or argument, you could say. If it’s saying, as it is — the survey that The Register reports on — 62% of leaders of private sector companies, and according to The Register that’s owners, founders, CEOs, managing directors, the C-level leaders of various types of companies. They didn’t say sizes. But they use AI to make the majority of the decisions, which leads to some of the alarm bells ringing that you outlined. What if it gets out that the AI made a decision when something goes south? You could flip that. What happens if it gets out that an amazing decision that led to the company being massively successful was actually made by an AI?

I think it’s inevitable you’d have that sort of focus on it alongside more sane arguments, perhaps. You could argue, well, that CEO is pretty smart that he used an AI to help him do that — as opposed to the other side, which is, gee, we’ve got to fire this guy, he used an AI and it went wrong. So you’ve got to put some balance there. Also, I think you mentioned this earlier, and I agree with you, that there are two angles to every question we might ask about this. One is internal, within an organization, and the other is external. So it is an interesting point. And one thought I had in my mind, the pragmatic question: if a leader changes a decision he or she has made because the AI assistant suggests something different, who actually owns that decision in the end? In fact, whether he changes his mind or not, if the AI said, “I recommend you should do this, and here are the 10 reasons to support that idea,” that are different from what the leader was going to do, and he or she made the changed decision based on that — who actually owns that decision? Or, as I asked myself, is that really the most important question to be answered? But it’s still a natural one to arise. And yes, we could run through a long list of the implications in this scenario for the employees of the organization, other stakeholders, and the external audiences. But I have to say Brian’s arguments are well made. He sets the scene — the executives are relying heavily on AI. From there it goes more into the alarm function.

Judgment being reshaped — the judgment exercised by a leader is obviously so flaky that it can be reshaped by the AI assistant. In other words, that individual is willing to let that happen. I wonder whether this is all part of, perhaps, the speed with which people are expecting decisions to be made. Indeed, something I was doing this weekend — we’re on a holiday weekend here, by the way, so I had time to do this — that was nothing to do with work. It was a personal thing I was involved with that required analyzing a document that had a lot of financial information in it. I asked my AI assistant, in this case Claude, as part of my experiment with Claude, to summarize it and pinpoint the key aspects. It did that in about 20 seconds. And that was enough for me to know what questions I would need to ask it next, to develop it the way I want, rather than starting from scratch trying to do that. So there’s the benefit. But I think treating AI like a trusted advisor, to me, makes a lot of sense. And I’m trying to balance that thought with the alarmist approach — you know, this is a bad thing, all these terrible things are going to happen, and it will all come out. So how does that gel with treating AI like a trusted advisor? Although your point, I agree, it hasn’t earned the trust in the context of this conversation. So does it mean leaders are willing to override their own decisions or instincts based on AI input? Well, according to The Register, 62% have said they are, I suppose. If that’s true, I think we’re in trouble already, before this gets any further. So the real challenge — I think you’ll agree with this, Shel — is not the tech at all. It’s the leadership aspect, the human behavioral aspect of this, as is so often the case. When people talk about the relationship between the human and the AI and they just talk about the tech, it’s not — it’s a human issue. Cut through all the alarm bells and pluck out something which to me is extremely important, that really doesn’t get much airtime in Brian’s report at least: isn’t this really about the whole point of judgment? That someone in a leadership position in an organization is in that position partly because he or she is very good at exercising judgment in the work they do or the decisions they make. Are we saying that judgment is so fragile that an AI could just overturn all of that in an instant and lead all this? I guess my point is that I’m noting this. I listened to what you said. I haven’t read all the surveys you mentioned, or the other reports — the Harvard Business Review, for instance — I will. But I find this literally the worst-case scenario, and that’s being pitched as, you know, this is upon us, based on The Register, which, by the way, has a — let’s call it interesting — reputation over the years for some of their reporting. But this is very factual; their own report is actually quite well written. So what do we make from this then? Should we be worried? I don’t think we should, if we see this as simply something to note and look at as a communicator — let’s say the role you’ve got in ensuring that the CEO isn’t going to have his or her judgment completely overwhelmed by an AI. I just find the idea of that frankly ridiculous, in the sense of, well, not implying or even saying that this is the norm. It’s a result of surveys. There’s other research also supporting some of this, I think. But we should put it in perspective: this is, I guess, an inevitable discussion point that’s emerging at this stage in the development of AI and organizations. We’ve reported recently on this podcast how leaders are taking ownership of the AI deployments in their organizations. That doesn’t mean to say every company is doing this, because they aren’t. But we’re seeing that, and then we’re seeing other reporting we’ve commented on — that employees and other stakeholders related to an organization are unhappy with what’s happening with AI rollouts in their organization. So you’ve got all these mixed messages coming left, right and center, and now this. It doesn’t mean we should — oh my goodness — stop doing this, or have a meeting with the CEO and say, “What are you doing?” No, I don’t think so. But we need to note this nevertheless. I don’t believe this is something we should all get terribly alarmed about, to be honest, as long as we apply our own common sense to observing what’s going on and making sure we understand the CEO we’re supporting as communicators — let’s say the leadership teams — that this isn’t happening.

Shel: Well, I don’t think this is the most important issue we’re facing with AI. I do think it’s a time to worry. Now, I will say I don’t imagine that the CEOs leading the world’s biggest companies — the Jamie Dimons, the Josh Domaros, the Tim Cooks of the world — are using AI to make important decisions. And you have to wonder, because I don’t think they asked, in the survey they did, what types of decisions these CEOs are making. Are they the game-changing decisions, the most important decisions they have to make, or are they lower-level decisions? We talk about AI taking all that drudge work off the table. Are they allowing the AI to make decisions associated with that kind of work? But I think, as people — and CEOs are people — as they get accustomed to letting AI make decisions, it might get easier and easier to turn bigger and bigger decisions over to AI as time goes by. With any luck, AI is going to get better and better and may earn that trust. But this would cause that decision-making instinct that leaders have, based on their experience and their judgment and the other things that got them to that level, to atrophy. I mean, atrophy is happening elsewhere as a result of AI among some groups of people — the ability to write your own thoughts down, to craft your own email, to conduct your own research. As far as CEOs making good decisions with support from AI, I think support from AI is going to become table stakes. I think CEOs who don’t know how to use it are going to become dinosaurs in fairly short order — not necessarily the ones who have the job now, but I don’t think you’re going to see people getting promoted into that position, or hired into it, if they don’t know how to use AI for decision support and the other things we see AI being used for very effectively at leadership levels. And leaders are using AI, according to most of the research I see. I wonder, though, if they start turning more and more decisions over to AI, what is the board or the owner going to see as the value of the CEO? If most of this work — or much of this work, the majority according to that Confluent study — is being done by AI, does that mean the enormous salaries being paid to the people at the top of the organization are going to decline? Or does it mean that the role changes altogether, or maybe even ceases to exist in favor of some other model? And by the way, I’d love to see the same question posed to people at other levels of the organization, because this probably is not something confined to the C-suite, this turning decisions over to AI. I wonder how much it’s happening in middle management. I wonder how much it’s happening among frontline workers. If it’s at the same level, then it’s a company-wide issue that needs to be addressed, because there are going to be some problems that emerge if we don’t — I mean, along the Volkswagen lines with their emissions scandal. Dieselgate, exactly. Yeah.

Neville: That was Dieselgate, as it was dubbed. I mean, it’s a good point you make. I agree. And the point you made earlier, too, is actually a critical question: what kind of decisions are we talking about here? Is it on the scale of, let’s proceed with the merger with this company rather than that one? Or is it something like, should I fit in a stopover in this city on my way to that city to meet with these people and so forth and achieve these things? Is it that? Or is it even something more prosaic? You know, what do I get my wife for her birthday next week? I’ll have my secretary do it — but the AI could tell me. I mean, that’s ridiculous, actually. But it’s significant to know what kinds of decisions we’re talking about, because I’ve not seen it referenced. It’s implying — and people are jumping, obviously, on this — that these are the kind of organization-affecting major decisions that are suddenly at risk because an AI is doing it. I find that ridiculous, to be honest. So we need to know what kind of decisions.

Shel: Yeah. I mean, in my industry, there’s a go/no-go decision on pursuing a project. I cannot imagine, in my wildest imagination, in my organization, anybody turning that decision over to an AI. But what if somewhere in the industry they do, and end up pursuing a project that ends up being more trouble than it was worth? Somebody in the organization at that leadership level, who was involved in the previous discussions, would have known for various reasons, but the AI didn’t have the experience and the insight that that individual had. That could be a financial problem for the organization.

Neville: So the role of the communicator in all of this — and this is not to say that the communicator who works closely with the leadership teams, including the CEO and others in the C-suite, is involved in every single thing they’re doing. No, that’s not realistic, because they’re not. But the communicator’s role in preserving human judgment is the right question to ask. What is it in this context? Where do communicators fit in helping leaders balance AI insights with human insight and judgment and experience? Where do they fit in doing all of that? So the two angles I notice: internal comms — communicators act as sense-makers, ensuring context, ethics and human impact remain part of decision-making. Externally, they help articulate how AI is used responsibly in the organization, which is increasingly central to trust and reputation. That addresses the point you made about when it leaks and it gets out that AI did something. I think increasingly we’re going to see that point — articulating how AI is used responsibly in an organization — because the impact can be huge if rumor builds, which it would do: “the AI is making all the decisions in this company, and why do we need the CEO and all that?” So that’s a good role for a communicator to take on, and to be seen to be the person who is the “yes, but” person and the key advisor to leadership in these things, which strengthens the communicator’s role, in my view. So there are things we can do to address this. If this is as big a problem as these articles make out, I don’t believe it’s something we should lose any sleep over right now in the context of everything else that’s going on in the organization. But nevertheless, we’ve got respected sources — Harvard Business Review, we’ve got Deloitte talking about it, and others that we pay attention to because they’re credible publications talking about this.

Shel: Well, yeah.

Neville: Brian seeded an interesting discussion point, it seems to me.

Shel: Yeah. And let’s look at a very plausible scenario. Let’s say somebody sues the organization over a decision that the CEO made, or that leadership made, that affected them badly, and they feel they deserve compensation for that. In the U.S., anybody can sue anybody for anything. And we have seen some recent lawsuits. Look at the lawsuit that we’re seeing play out right now between OpenAI and Elon Musk.

Neville: Yeah.

Shel: And look at the records, the emails that have been surfaced in discovery. Look at the trials that have been held over lawsuits brought by the parents of children who killed themselves because they got encouragement or assistance from ChatGPT, and who sued OpenAI over that. What they got in discovery was access to the kids’ entire ChatGPT history. So you have a shareholder or a customer who sues the company, and in discovery, all of these things come to light — and that’s how it gets out. So I think even decision support has to be balanced with other input that you can demonstrate in a courtroom influenced the decision that was made, so it doesn’t look like the decision was completely outsourced to the AI. I think that’s an entirely plausible scenario in a lawsuit. So yeah, it’s something we need to consider. And as you say, and as I said, there are things communicators can do about this. One is making sure people are aware of the potential for this situation. And then, as I said, influencing the governance model so that it incorporates decision-making — if it doesn’t already have decision-making and decision support in the governance document, it needs to be added. And then making sure the leaders are talking about how they’re using it, so it never comes up that they’re using it to make a decision of importance in the organization — that it’s focused on using it in very effective ways.

Neville: Yeah. I mean, I think the picture you painted — lawsuits and stuff like that — are very possible, particularly in America, where, as you said, anyone can sue anyone for anything, usually for amazing sums of money, in the billions. So maybe what needs to happen in organizations that would address this, among other things, is keeping records. So that, for instance, in an organization that has deployed or rolled out AI tools such as chatbots — let’s say maybe their own version of something based on ChatGPT, whatever it might be — it needs to be known that those record anything you interact with on an AI. Whatever level you are in the organization, there’s a record kept along with anything else: emails, internal reports, you name it, they’re monitored and tracked in most organizations. And the fact that you could add to that picture even some of these automated note-takers, like Otter and others, that are commonly used in intrusive ways in Zoom meetings — and you hear stories of private Zoom meetings —

Shel: AI transcripts of Zoom meetings in which the decisions were made.

Neville: — where the outcomes are disclosed or leak out publicly because someone used one of these tools that summarized things, including the recommendations or suggestions if they were made by anyone. If that gets into a law case by the plaintiffs, that’ll be shown out of context — you can be sure of it. So, right.

Shel: Yeah. And that’s why a lot of organizations are saying to their employees, you can’t record these kinds of meetings.

Neville: Right. But someone will, and it’ll happen. So you need to head that off the path, as it were, and have your own structure in place and your communication surrounding it. So, for instance, you have to have very clear narratives around decision ownership, for example, that would help you in crisis situations. That’s the internal focus. Externally, you’ve got to communicate the kind of structure you have for human accountability — not “the algorithm said we should do this.” We can laugh about it, as I am at the moment, but imagine the reality of something like that happening. So I think these are all things that are plausible, I do believe, particularly in the U.S., I have to say — but hey, could be anywhere. It isn’t complicated to work out a plan of how you would prepare for things like this. But I’d rather look at it not as preparing for worst cases, although you need to. It’s just a switch — flip it over a bit and look at the benefits of all of this. And again, not solely the communicator: the individual leader has to be willing to go along with this, has to be willing to share some of the thinking he or she is doing and the discussions with the assistant, whether it’s an AI or anyone else, to realize that you can’t do this without full transparency, at least to your advisors, including the communicator.

Shel: Yeah, absolutely. And we will be back with a follow-up episode when the inevitable headline surfaces of a company that gets in trouble because it’s revealed that the CEO abdicated a decision to AI. Until then — actually until next week — that’ll be a 30 for For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #512: The AI Shift in Executive Decision-Making appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The policies are clear and well communicated. The guardrails are firmly established. Every last employee has been trained. And someone in your organization still releases a public document riddled with AI-generated errors. What went wrong has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with internal culture and accountability. In this long-form April episode, Neville and Shel examine a company that seemingly took all the right steps yet still had to apologize publicly for a court filing riddled with hallucinated citations. Also in this episode:

Gartner predicts that, by 2028, 75% of employees will rely on an internal chatbot to get the news that matters to them. How will internal communicators need to rethink their role to ensure everyone knows and understands what they should in order to achieve strategic alignment?
One of the promises AI executives have made is a leveling of the playing field, giving lower-level employees the opportunity to excel and rise through the ranks. According to one new study, exactly the opposite has been happening.
PR hacks have been accelerating the pace at which they churn out press releases and pitches. That has raised the bar for what it takes to earn a journalist’s trust (and journalists do still rely on press releases, according to a survey of reporters).
Apple’s announcement of its CEO transition offers communicators a clinic on how to announce a new top executive.
“Slopaganda” from Iran has proven remarkably effective, which means it is undoubtedly coming for your company or clients soon.

In his Tech Report, Dan York outlines big changes coming with WordPress’s next update.

Links from this episode:

Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’
Sullivan & Cromwell law firm apologizes for AI ‘hallucinations’ in court filing
Letter re: In re Prince Global Holdings Limited, et al., No. 26-10769
Sullivan & Cromwell Just Put Every Firm on Notice. And S&C Advises OpenAI on Safe AI Use.
An AI Screw-Up By… Sullivan & Cromwell?
LinkedIn search results for Sullivan & Cromwell AI
AI, Trust, and the Reinvention of Corporate Communications: Inside Gartner’s 2026 Playbook
Does your intranet still matter in an AI-first workplace?
Chatbots in Internal Communications: Game-Changing Wins
How AI Chatbots Are Redefining Internal Communications?
The future of internal communication: How AI is changing the workplace
High earners race ahead on AI as workplace divide widens
Sarah O’Connor: One early view about AI was that it would share…
How AI is forcing journalists and PR to work smarter, not louder
What journalists want from AI-assisted PR pitches
Journalists Trust Human-Written Pitches Over AI
Journalists Reject AI-Generated Press Releases As Untrustworthy
What communicators can learn from Apple’s CEO transition announcement
Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO
Iran’s Meme War Against Trump Ushers In a Future of ‘Slopaganda’
Iran’s ‘slopaganda’ team uses AI Legos to flood social media
Slopaganda wars: how and why the US and Iran are flooding the zone with viral AI-generated noise
Slopaganda Comes of Age
Alberta separatist leader unconcerned about influence of YouTube ‘slopaganda’ videos

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth – Gutenberg Times
WordPress 7.0: Real-Time Collaboration Arrives in Core
WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 511 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form episode for April 2026. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville: And I’m Neville Hobson, Somerset in England. We have six great stories to discuss and share with you this month and to delight and entertain you, we hope. Topics range from the consequences of not following company guidance on AI use, chat bots, employee use, and the workplace divide, using AI to work smarter, what we learned from Apple’s CEO transition announcement, and the future of slopaganda. Lovely word, that one, show. Plus, Dan York’s tech report.

But first, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listening comments. In the long form episode 506 for March, published on the 23rd of March, our lead story was on Anthropic’s view that AI will destroy the billable hour, a topic we’ve talked about before on FIR. We also explored digital monitoring of employee work, Gartner’s prediction that PR budgets will double next year, the escalating misinformation crisis, and Cloudflare’s prediction that

bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027. That’s next year, by the way. On LinkedIn, you’ll find no shortage of posts stridently deriding the notion that anyone should ever use AI to write them. In FIR 507 on the 30th of March, we rejected roundly that idea and looked at the actual trends in using AI for writing. And that prompted some comments from listeners, right?

Shel: Yes, it did. Starting with Susan Gosselin, who’s actually with a client of mine back in my consulting days. She writes, there are many types of writing that I think AI is great for interpersonal communications, summaries, et cetera. But for marketing writing, that’s another thing. There are issues of copyright to consider and what you’re feeding into the channel.

This article from Jane Friedman, and she’s linked to it, and we’ll include that link in the show notes, is aimed at authors, but it does have implications for marketing writers too. For instance, I work for an American IT MSP, that’s a managed service provider. Let’s say that an MSP in Spain that does our line of work sees our website and our authoritative blogs and e-books and likes it. They decide to run our whole English website into Spanish using an AI translator.

then make a few tweaks and publish. There’s not a lot to stop them. There’s also the issue of being able to defend your copyright overall. The law is not yet fixed and the risks are real. Then Steve Lubetkin writes, I find AI particularly helpful for rote tasks like organizing lists, transforming Excel spreadsheet columns, and summarizing interview transcripts. It’s also great for brainstorming ideas when it suggests perspectives I hadn’t thought of.

but ultimately it comes down to using it as a tool for further human intervention, not less. Neville, you responded to that saying that’s a great way of putting it, Steve. Those rote tasks are exactly where AI seems to shine, the kind of work that takes time but doesn’t really benefit from deep human creativity. And I agree on brainstorming too. It could be surprisingly good at surfacing angles you might not have considered. I do this a lot.

Your last point really nails it though. It’s not about removing human input. It’s about focusing it where it matters most. Used that way, AI doesn’t diminish the work. It can actually elevate it. And finally, we have a comment from Yorma Mananan who writes, AI can help people escape from the writer’s block. So why not use it to get started?

However, writers must own all content created with or without AI so the content doesn’t sound like you, you shouldn’t publish it. The challenge is to learn to speak machine English with AI. Define clearly why you were writing, what you want to say, and what you want your readers to do after reading your content. Without your strategy, AI can’t produce quality content that sounds like you. Strategy first, AI second.

And Neville, responded to Yorma. You said, I like how you framed this using AI to get past the blank page is a very practical use case. That starting friction is real for a lot of people, and AI can lower the barrier quite effectively. Your point about ownership is key too. If it doesn’t sound like you, it isn’t really yours, regardless of how it was produced. Where I’d add a layer is around your machine English idea. I see it slightly differently. Rather than learning to speak machine,

I think the real shift is learning how to think with the machine, using it to clarify intent, test structure, and challenge assumptions. But I agree with your conclusion. Strategy first, AI second. Without that, you’re just generating words, not communicating. And Yorma responded to you saying, agree. Machine thinking is a better way of describing the conversation relationship with AI.

Neville: Good comment!

Great. It’s excellent to have that. interesting, Shell, that it illustrates to me something. It’s not a trend at all, but I’ve noticed recently in other posts I see on LinkedIn that address this kind of topic. Increasingly, there’s people leaving comments that are basically saying that you own it, not the AI. And AI assists you in communicating, not creating the final stuff, essentially, which is what some of these comments are alluded to.

Maybe people are waking up to that more than they have been in the past. It won’t silence the big critics. We’ve already seen that because, you know, it’s going to be criticized no matter what. But the more people who talk up the reality of what we all talk about, which is this is an assistant. It’s a tool to help you and communicate more effectively. It enhances your ability in that context. And then you’ve got Steve’s talking about, you know, doing stuff with Excel and all this kind of thing.

I’m in the middle of an experiment on the middle. I’m still at the 10 % start of experimenting with Claude Pro that I know you’ve been using for a long time, but I’m taking this very, very one step at a time. And it’s very non techie my focus. But one thing I have noticed is comparing as I have been doing, let’s say a prompt in the simplest form, a chat prompt to Claude compared to one to ChatGPT.

The differences are truly startling in many cases. Claude typically is richer and deeper in its content with the same prompts. Now, of course, there’s variables at play here. ChatGPT knows a huge amount about me. Claude does too, because there’s a nifty tool that imports everything from ChatGP to tell it. But I’ve also added stuff. So it’s done that. It’s missing on some levels, though. And that’s probably because it doesn’t yet know totally enough about me to do this.

This is something you notice when you do this kind of thing with different tools. So I mean, that’s not the main thing about Claude that wow’s me, I must admit. Cowork and some of the other tools I’ve been touching on, but Cowork I’ve spent quite a bit of time on. But so I’m sure we’re have lots more conversations about this as we talk topics. Let’s see what comes out of today’s menu of topics. So thanks for those comments, everyone.

Let’s see, bad, no, that’s not the right one, this one, when workers lose their jobs, many turn to gig work to earn income while waiting for new opportunities. Increasingly, companies are hiring gig workers to create content and train AI systems. This raises various communication and ethical issues. And in FIR 508 on the 8th of April, we explain what’s happening and discuss the implications.

Then when bad actors use AI tools to clone a musician’s voice and upload synthetic versions of their songs, they can then file copyright claims against the original artist’s content. In FIR 509 on the 14th of April, we break down how this scam works, why it matters to communicators, and what you should be doing right now before an incident forces your hand. And you have some comments here.

Shel: We do two of them, one from Eric Redicop who identifies himself on LinkedIn as an entertainer and artist wrote that AI cannot use my work because it’s not posted online anywhere. I have to do it this way because YouTube allowed bogus copyright claims on my work and shut down my channel five times. then Ray Baron-Wolford, who is a CEO at a charity organization said, this is why it’s so important that every artist signs up.

to all copyright protection services.

Neville: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think the the first commenter though talked about a genuine issue, a genuine issue. And I’d wonder if, you know, if he’s saying that this can’t happen to me because none of my content’s online. I wouldn’t rely on that 100%. Actually, I wouldn’t. No, I wouldn’t. And that second comment.

Shel: Mm-hmm.

No. I mean, you have to be producing

the kind of content where you can have some success as an artist or an entertainer without having your content online.

Neville: Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So the second commenter about signing up for every copyright protection that you can find is probably well, not probably it is a good idea, although I’m not sure that everyone would want to do that. And therein lies one of the issues about copyright. It depends on the jurisdiction. It’s a geographically based protection. Creative Commons is a good place to have established as a…

reserving your rights or some of your rights if you want to enable things to happen for others to use it. And that’s an international thing. So that’s a peace of mind, I would say. There hasn’t really been many, I’ve certainly not seen any legal court case tests since Adam Curry back in 2009 when he, I think it was in the Netherlands, he sued somebody who’d used a photo of his daughter.

and won the case. And it was not a Pyrrhic victory, but there was no you didn’t get any money out of it. But he got the legal ruling that these people had infringed on his copyright. But I’ve not seen any sense. So nevertheless, it’s worth doing. So yeah.

Shel: Yeah, it goes back to Susan Gosselin’s

comment, too, about any organization that does the same thing you do can take your content from your website, translate it into their language and publish it. And what do you do if your content is not copyrighted? There’s nothing that you can do.

Neville: Yeah, that’s incredible.

Reminds that reminds me shell back in the 2000s website scraping was it was a huge deal when when blogs suddenly came to the fore and you found that people were stealing all your content. I remember being in a lengthy email exchange with someone I think based in Romania or somewhere not a hope in hell. He was going to desist from doing that. Eventually it stopped though. So but I mean and that wasn’t from a copyright perspective. It was theft of content, which is well related, isn’t it?

So yeah, lots to learn from that. And finally, in FIR 510 on the 20th of April, we revisited the topic of shadow AI, the situation where employees ignore company approved AI tools and use their own preferred tools and not tell anyone. We discuss how one company approaches problem and how communicators might advocate for a version of this approach to aiding in AI adoption and speeding up productivity gains. And now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel: Also want to let you know about Circle of Fellows. We’ve had a fascinating discussion just this past Thursday on Circle of Fellows. It’s part one of a two-part discussion, and it’s all based on this. If you’re watching the video, you can see it’s a new book by Diane Chase, former chair of IABC and a great communicator called The Seven C’s of the New Communication Compass. And what Diane did here was…

outlined these seven points and find words that started with C to label them. And she wrote one chapter and then basically had IABC fellows write the rest of the chapter. So Diane is the first non-fellow to appear on Circle of Fellows, but it’s her book, so it made sense. And in the first installment that we recorded on Thursday, Diane was joined

Joining the panel were, of course, me — I moderated the session, Jane Mitchell, Ginger Holman, and Brad Whitworth. Next month on the May episode of Circle of Fellows, Brad Whitworth will be the moderator, and I’ll be a panelist talking about the chapter I wrote about community, and I’ll be joined by Zora Artis and Cindy Schmieg, IABC fellows who wrote the other chapters.

It’s a really good book. I recommend it for communicators. But we talk about some of the issues around these chapters and Diane explains why these were the topics that she said in the new communication environment. These are, you know, your North Stars, as it were. So definitely worth giving a listen to this month’s Circle of Fellows, which you will find on the FIR Podcast Network.

at firpodcastnetwork.com. And we are going to take a short break now for a sponsor message. We will be back to dive into our six topics right after this.

Neville: Here’s a story that on the surface looks just like another example of AI going wrong. In mid April, one of the world’s most prestigious law firms, Sullivan and Cromwell, had to apologize to a US bankruptcy court after submitting a filing that contained multiple AI hallucinations, fabricated case citations, misquoted legal authorities, even references to cases that simply don’t exist. The errors weren’t minor.

They were significant enough that the firm had to send a formal letter to the judge, acknowledge what had happened, and submit a corrected version of the filing. And just to make it more uncomfortable, these mistakes weren’t caught internally. They were identified by the opposing legal team. Now, if you stop there, it’s easy to frame this as just another cautionary tale about AI, unreliable tools, hallucinations, the risk of automation in high stakes work. But that’s not the story here.

This firm didn’t lack guidance, quite the opposite in fact. They have formal policies governing the use of AI. They require lawyers to complete training before they can even access these tools. Their internal guidance explicitly warns about hallucinations and tells lawyers to verify everything before it goes anywhere near a client or a court. In fact, their own language is very clear, trust nothing and verify everything. And yet, in this case, those policies were not followed.

A document that should have been scrutinized at multiple levels made its way into a courtroom with fundamental inaccuracies baked into it. The failure here wasn’t the technology. It was a failure of process, behavior, and accountability. Human in the Loop only works if there is an actual human who is clearly responsible for checking the work, not in theory, nor in a policy document, but in practice, at the point where a decision is made to send something out into the world.

And what this case suggests is that in many organizations, that loop is more notional than real. If AI is being used to accelerate work, where are the safeguards that ensure quality isn’t being compromised in the process? And are those safeguards actually being followed or just assumed? Having a policy is one thing, embedding it into how people actually behave, especially under time pressure, is something else entirely. And I think that’s where this story really matters beyond the legal profession.

Behavior is moving faster than governance. People are experimenting, they’re finding shortcuts, they’re integrating these tools into their daily workflows, often quietly and informally. The risk isn’t only that AI gets something wrong, it’s also that humans stop checking as rigorously as they should, or assume that someone else had, or trust output that feels authoritative, even when it hasn’t been properly verified. So when we talk about responsible AI or human-centered AI or governance frameworks,

This is what it comes down to in practice, not whether you have a policy, but whether at the moment that matters, someone takes responsibility for asking a very simple question, is this actually correct? And if this case tells us anything, it’s that answering that question consistently is still much harder than many organizations seem to think.

Shel: Boy, isn’t that true. And the first thing I thought when I read this story, because it seems like the organization did everything right, is the question about what are people rewarded for in this organization? I wrote a post about this on LinkedIn probably a couple of months ago, that process speaks louder than any message that you send.

through communication channels. And I included this story that I’ve probably relayed on this podcast 20 times just because it is such a good analogy to really make this clear. The company, the logistics company that was experiencing a lot of breakage of its packages in one of its distribution centers and…

the company just kept sending messages about how important it was to be careful and take the time when you’re loading these packages so that you’re not just throwing them around and you’re not breaking things that customers are expecting to receive unbroken. And the breakage continued and they brought a consultant in, communications consultant I might add, who looked at all of this and found that the reason this was happening was because people were actually being rewarded for productivity.

and not for quality. That meant that they were getting money for doing this quickly. So as long as you were going to pay them more to get this stuff out quickly, the breakage was going to continue. You had to shift the rewards mechanism. So it was rewarding quality. Now they’re going to slow down and make sure everything’s unbroken. Of course, you’re going to lose some of the speed there.

So when I hear the story about this law firm, the first thing I wonder is, yeah, we have all of these policies and we’ve been through all of this training and the governance is in place, but I’m being rewarded for getting this done quickly. And therefore I’m not going to take the time to review the citations that the AI cranked out. I don’t know that this is the case in this organization, but it was the first question I asked.

Neville: Well, that’s an interesting point, Shel, because that was in my mind, too, but it didn’t make it into my notes that they’re known to be, they are, I think, the second biggest law firm globally. They’ve been around 150 years, long and well established, highly credible, super reputation, all that. But they have some of their lawyers charging out at around two and a half thousand dollars an hour for their services. That’s serious money.

And that kind of adds to your point about speed is the focus here, not the quality. Now, to repeat what you said, we do not know if that’s the case in this law firm. But it could be, and your other point you make about that an individual might be saying, I don’t have time to check all this stuff because I’m being rewarded for getting stuff out fast. They have to address that if that’s true. They really have to address that because that perpetuates this. If it turns out that it’s true.

But it brings, I suppose, to my mind, the reality, all these policies, and there’s a lot of reporting on this that’s around if you look for it, talking about some of the training courses, the fact that a lawyer, no lawyer can even use one of their AI tools unless they are certified to have done this, this and this training program or that video they have watched, all that. And yet this happened. So there’s something out of loop here. There’s something not

not working properly. Could it be as simple as the person who signs off on this, i.e., this piece of work is going to that client or this filing is being submitted in this bankruptcy case in New York? This was a major bankruptcy case by not individual. I believe it was a financial company in the Virgin Islands, the British Virgin Islands for that matter, in the Caribbean. It was high profile. But could it really be as simple as that? All this

work going on at speed. that’s probably somebody thought that’s fine, because we’re going to check it all. And yet nobody did. So it signals something we’ve encountered before. And I’m reminded of a case we reported last year about Deloitte. And the issues they had was something similar, but it was not a legal case in a court. It was a report they prepared for a client, which happened to be the government of Australia, and another one in the government of Canada have six figure fees.

riddled with hallucinations and other things. So somebody didn’t check it in that case. I have no knowledge of what training they have in place. In this case, we do have knowledge of what training they have in case. Could it really be as simple as somebody, an individual, isn’t the known responsible partner in the law firm for the authoritative voice on this is okay to send to that client or to that court or whatever.

Even if 15 other people have been involved in checking stuff before, that one person has that responsibility. They obviously don’t have that, suspect. Maybe that’s the solution to this kind of thing. you I know you have some strong views on, you know, having a verifier in place in organizations. You want to talk a bit more about that?

Shel: Well, yeah,

I mean, I’ve said this before. I think that one of the jobs that AI is actually going to lead to the creation of is a verification specialist, somebody who is accountable and knows they’re accountable. They are baked into the process. It gets passed to them and they verify the entire document. I don’t care if it’s an 80 page filing. You know, there was another law firm.

that found itself in this trouble recently. It was in Oregon and the court of appeals there sanctioned the lawyer involved for the AI errors that were in the law firms filing. And the court in its finding…

emphasize that AI isn’t a lawyer and it can’t replace professional judgment or accountability. And that principle travels pretty well. AI is not a communicator. It’s not a strategist. It’s not a lawyer. It’s not an HR expert. It’s not a subject matter expert. It’s a tool. The professional has to be accountable. So for communicators, that means we can’t outsource accuracy. We can’t outsource context. We can’t outsource tone or ethical judgment to a machine.

We can use AI as aggressively as we can find that it helps us do our job, but we still have to verify ruthlessly and we have to make sure that other people in the organization know that that’s part of their remit too.

Neville: Yeah, it’s a very tricky one, think, Shel, given what we know currently about the developments that are happening with artificial intelligence, particularly in generative AI, particularly with tools, particularly like Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini, where and Steve Lubetkin in his comment to one of the episodes from last month alluded to that when he talked about how it is great to, know, deciphering columns in Excel spreadsheets.

Here you’ve got a tool that can actually generate the AI spreadsheet and perform literally everything in analytics, pivot tables that works literally in 20 seconds. And so you suddenly find that here you have a tool that is able to generate content that the traditional way of prompting would have taken considerable to and fro.

And, you know, changes here, editing there, you turn the AI, not this, that’s coming back to all that sort of stuff. And then someone checking it. And here you’ve got the situation where this is accelerating, it can do these things, arguably, and again, depending what it is, it can do things that until now, people would say AI can’t do that. And I’m thinking that, you know, AI is not a communicator. No, it’s itself is not at the moment.

So I mean, this will take us down a rabbit hole if we get into this, which we’re not going to do. But it’s a point worth noting that sooner or later, we’re going to have an AI tool of some type doing something only before a human could do. And then where are we? So again, that’s all a bit in the future and maybe sooner than we think. I don’t worry about that in the sense because there’s no point, Shel. It’s not happened yet. But I do worry about things like this because

This is an easy one to get right, it seems to me, that you got all these policies, et cetera, you got to not so much enforce them. That’s not really the right word to use. It’s to ensure that people follow those policies. Therefore, it’s a communication issue. It’s an educational issue. It’s not a training issue, but it’s education, awareness raising, and getting people to buy into why they should do this, in which case, you’re likely going to have to change your model of rewarding people in that case.

That’s big deal. So this isn’t something that you can idly do except on the kind of surface, i.e., you do all this stuff, you’ve got one person who’s got the responsibility and the consequences will fall on that person if it turns out no one followed the stuff. So that’s probably what would help here.

Shel: Yeah, and I think it’s also worth noting that it’s going to get easier to assume that AI got it right. I mentioned that AI currently isn’t a subject matter expert, but it’s becoming one that we have. OpenAI is creating one that’s just for doctors and Anthropic just signed a deal with a law firm to create a legal specific version of Claude. So, you know, I think when you

look at what happened here with this law firm. We should look at this as sort of a dress rehearsal for AI related crisis response. The law firm did the right thing, right? They acknowledged the problem, they apologized to the court, they filed a corrected version, but at that point, the reputational damage had already been done because that narrative…

had found its way into Reuters, The Guardian, Business Insider, Above the Law, LinkedIn, and all the legal newsletters. And that’s how AI failures will unfold for other organizations, whether it’s out of the legal department or elsewhere. You’re going to have the operational error, then the public narrative, and then people are going to pile on. Communicators should already have holding statements, internal FAQs, and escalation protocols for AI-generated errors, especially

In high stakes content like a legal file.

Neville: Yeah, plenty to think about on this. although the kind of advice I would give is, yes, you’ve got all your policies and so forth, as we’ve been discussing at the beginning, but have you got the human genuinely in the loop to take responsibility for what you’re giving to a client or to a court?

Shel: Well, let’s stick with the AI theme. Hey, that should be no surprise. Gartner is predicting that by 2028, 75 % of employees will rely on chatbots to get relevant internal communications. That’s not the distant future, folks. It’s the year after next, and that should stop every internal communicator in their tracks. Not because chatbots are coming for the intranet or the newsletter or the manager cascade. That’s just

Too simplistic. The bigger shift is that employees are moving from browsing to asking. They’re not going to hunt through the intranet and a stack of emails to get an answer to a simple question. They’re just going to go to the chat bot and ask, what has this changed for me? Do I need to do anything by Friday? Why is my department being reorganized? And they’ll expect an answer in seconds and probably get one. The Gartner prediction is based on a very real problem.

information overload. According to Gartner’s report, employees who report high information overload are 52 % less likely to report high intent to stay with their organization, so it’s a retention issue, and they’re 30 % less likely to report high strategic alignment with the organization. Gartner also says chatbots will provide personalized curated answers for pull communication and customized alerts for push communication.

That’s a major shift in the employee communication model. Now there are real benefits here. A well-designed internal chat bot can give employees faster answers, reduce HR and IT ticket volume, provide 24-7 support, support multiple languages, and cite authoritative sources so employees know where an answer came from. It can also deliver information within the flow of work rather than forcing people to go somewhere else to find it.

But here’s the part communicators are going to need to wrestle with. An AI answer is not the same thing as communication. An answer can tell an employee what

An answer can tell an employee what changed. It may even summarize why it changed. Will it preserve the intent, the nuance, the context, and the emotional intelligence of the original communication? There’s no guarantee it will. Take changed communication, for instance. We frequently write detailed articles explaining the rationale for a change because employees need more than the transaction. They need to understand the business context. They need to know what

options leaders considered and which options they discarded and why. They need to hear what’s not changing. They need some sense that the decision was made thoughtfully and not arbitrarily. But what happens when no one reads the article? What happens when the employee asks the chat bot, what’s changing in our benefits plan and gets a clean, accurate three sentence answer that strips out the rationale completely?

This is where internal communicators have to evolve from being message producers to knowledge architects. The intranet still matters. It may be less of a destination and more of the trusted knowledge later that feeds AI. Frank Wolf made this point really well in PR Daily. AI doesn’t eliminate the intranet’s jobs. It changes how pull, push and people centered communication work.

The intranet becomes the foundation that makes chatbot answers reliable. If the knowledge layer is messy, if it’s outdated or written in a way that AI can’t interpret or interpret well, the chatbot’s going to sound confident, still be wrong. This means we have to consider an expansion of the internal communicator’s job. Yeah, we still need to write, but now we also need to structure. We need clear source of truth pages and metadata.

We need FAQs that anticipate employee questions, and we need version control, expiration dates, and more. We need to decide which information can be answered directly by a bot and which question should trigger a human response. And we need to design for narrative preservation. That means writing source content with AI retrieval in mind. If the rationale for a change matters, don’t bury it in paragraph eight. Make it explicit. Label it.

Repeat it in a concise why this matters section. Smart brevity writing would be a great approach to adopt here. Create approved answer blocks that the chat bot can draw from and test the bot by asking questions employees are likely to ask, then check whether the answers reflect not just the facts, but the intended meaning. This also has implications for measurement, by the way. Page views and open rates become less useful

if employees are getting answers without opening an article. We’ll need to measure the questions employees ask, the quality of the answers they receive, the content gaps the bot reveals, and whether employees understand the strategy, the change, or the policy after interacting with the system. It’s a lazy conclusion to say employees won’t read anymore, so let’s just give them chat bots. The better conclusion is employees are changing how they access information

So we need to make sure the organization’s knowledge, context, and narrative survive that shift.

Neville: Hmm. Yeah, this is a huge topic, Shell, because what struck me listening to you was in a sense of continuity of what we just talked about in the previous topic is the verification of content that an AI produces for you. How are we going to deal with that? We talk about putting in place, you know, trusted sources for all this information. So, you know, let’s say I’m an employee, I’ve asked a question on something, it’s given me an answer.

I need to check that. So what do I check that? And how do I know that it’s accurate? So you project that out to the kinds of stuff people deal with daily. And this is a huge undertaking, I would say, because looking at that article, talking about this, it has an interesting piece in there about the safeguards that CCOs are mentioning here specifically.

will need to put in place to mitigate the risks of hallucinations, misinformation, and a fragmented landscape that comes with AI, they say. CCOs will need a greater emphasis on information quality, as well as an optimizing intranet content for AI searchability. You mentioned that point. They must also partner with IT, HR, and legal to establish robust governance to ensure that chatbots responses are accurate. That’s the bit. How are they going to do that? Because something internal,

It surely isn’t going to be only producing answers based on what it finds on your internal networks alone. It must be looking out onto the wider landscape. How do you verify and check all that? That’s a major debating point for taking this further, it seems to me. So it’s a huge undertaking.

Shel: Yeah, think one of the things, and I sort of breezed through it pretty quickly, but I think that we’re going to need to figure out is how do we monitor and assess what questions employees are asking that produce an answer that’s drawn from internal communications content, whether that’s in an email that went out or something that was posted to the intranet. How do we monitor the questions that are being asked and the effectiveness of the responses so that we can make adjustments?

So that we can report that, yeah, we can determine that there is alignment on why this change was made, or we can say, gee, people are just getting an answer that tells them what the change is, and they don’t have any understanding that we looked at alternatives and we tried to find a better solution. And this was the best we settled on. And here’s why it’s good for employees or here’s how to cope with this in your department or whatever it may be. And to do this without

necessarily surveilling employees, right? We don’t want to know who asked the question. I think it would be great if we could say, wow, look at this. 70 % of this particular point of confusion that was illuminated by the questions that we’re asking are coming from people in our operations division and not other divisions of the organization. That would be useful, but we don’t want to be able to say John Doe asked this question. What an idiot.

It’s a serious issue. And I think the guidance that we need to have the information in multiple places where the AI can see it so that it realizes that this is an important topic because it is in several places and that we have it in several formats, the FAQs, the answer blocks. This is repurposing the original content in ways that will help ensure

that the AI inside your organization is delivering information with context, with those other elements that’s so important for employees to understand to create that alignment. And by the way, I mentioned the seven Cs of the new communication compass. One of them is congruence, which we’re arguing goes beyond alignment, that there is congruence in the organization. So.

If we want that, and it is important, it’s one of the reasons there is an internal communications function, we really need to start rethinking what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Neville: Yeah, agree. I think surveillance is a very, very slippery topic and a slope. Because you’re going to have to have some kind of process in place and it probably surveillance is the correct label. Otherwise, you have really struggled to to find the answers you will need when you if you roll out something like this. So I think

You know, we’ve reported recently on keystroke logging and other ways organizations are now requiring in place to monitor whether employees are working or not. And it’s still making news headlines in the tabloids here, a case recently about someone had this wheeze of having something that touched his keyboard every now and again to show it was working. The trouble is that the employer was savvy enough to have the software could tell which key and it was the same key all the time.

So things like that, probably going to have to rebalance this privacy versus being able to see what people are doing algorithm, let’s say. And that’s going to be difficult, given the history, I suppose, of some organizations not respecting employee privacy. Look at the China model, and that’s not what we want to have here.

state surveillance on everyone’s daily lives is pervasive in urban areas, not necessarily throughout the whole country. So do we want that? We may not actually have the ability to say no to that, given what they need to do. So that’s part of the issue to include, I think.

Shel: Yeah, and I think one other thing we’re going to have to do is more asking. We’re going to have to survey after a change and ask employees if they understood the reason for the change. And part of the problem with increasing the number of surveys, and I’ve made this argument for years, that people will take surveys all day long if they see the results of the surveys and they see that things are going to change.

If you’re asking people, did you understand this? Did you understand the rationale for it? Do you agree with it? It’s hard. I mean, you can report the results, but what’s going to change? You’re going to change maybe the way you’re producing content. That’s not going to be visible to employees. So it’s going to be a challenge to ask those questions frequently without producing that kind of survey fatigue that we hear so much about.

Neville: Big topic. OK. OK, so there’s a widely held idea about AI that’s been around almost since the beginning, that it would be a great leveler in the workplace. It’s kind of continuity of what we’re talking about here, The thinking was that if you give everyone access to powerful tools that can write, analyze, summarize code, and generate ideas, then people with less experience or fewer formal skills

should be able to close the gap with those at the top. But what we’re starting to see in the real world looks quite different. In fact, it may be doing the opposite. The Financial Times has just published new research based on a survey of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK. And the findings are pretty stark. More than 60%, a 6-0, of higher earners say they use AI every day in their work. Among low earners, that number drops to just 16%, 1-6. That’s a pretty big gap.

So instead of leveling the playing field, AI adoption is heavily skewed towards the people who are already ahead, better paid, more experienced, often in more knowledge intensive roles. I think it makes sense because using AI effectively isn’t just about having access. Most people have access. It’s about knowing what to do with the tools. It’s about having the confidence to experiment, the context to apply them to real work, and the judgment to assess whether the output is actually useful.

And those are things that tend to come with experience, with education and with the kind of roles where you have a bit more autonomy over how you work. There’s a line in the research from one economist that really captures this shift. The more intelligent the technology becomes, the more your own intelligence matters. If you already have expertise, AI can make you faster, more productive, maybe even better at what you do. But if you don’t yet have that foundation, it’s much harder to extract real value from it.

There are other factors at play too. The research points to corporate training as one of the biggest drivers of AI use at work. So organizations that actively support and encourage adoption are seeing much higher uptake. And interestingly, the heaviest users of AI aren’t the youngest workers, as you might expect, but people in their 30s with more experience behind them. So again, this isn’t a generational story so much. It’s about how AI fits into the structure of work itself.

If AI is boosting the productivity of higher earners more than lower earners, then over time you’d expect the gap to widen in output, in value, and potentially in pay. And there’s a second order effect that’s a bit more subtle, but potentially more significant. If AI starts to take on some of the routine or entry level tasks that junior staff would traditionally do, then where do people build the skills? How do you develop expertise if the work that teaches you the fundamentals is increasingly being handled by a machine?

So instead of AI acting as a ladder, help people climb, there’s a risk it starts to pull away some of the rungs. And this is where it connects directly to leadership and to communication. This isn’t just about who has access to AI tools. It’s about who feels able to use them, who is encouraged to use them, who is trained to use them well, and who is supported in making sense of what they produce. So this is about culture, not technology.

If organizations simply roll out AI and assume the benefits will spread evenly, they may find the opposite happens, that they’ve unintentionally widened the gap inside their own workforce. So perhaps the real question here isn’t whether AI will level the playing field. It’s whether leaders and communicators advising them are actively shaping how that playing field is changing or just watching it tilt.

Shel: Yeah, that training point is, I think, really critical. And a project manager, an accountant, field supervisor, an HR business partner, and a communication specialist don’t need the same training. They also don’t need the same examples delivered by communications. So the communicator’s contribution here is translation. Here’s what this means for your role, for your task, for your team, and your day.

That includes, you know, surfacing success stories from unexpected parts of the organization. I would love to find an example of, a foreman on a construction project site using AI. I don’t want to just report on what the IT department is doing and the other, you know, tech forward departments are doing. You know, the goal shouldn’t be everyone becomes an AI expert. The goal should be that nobody’s quietly excluded from

the next operating model because they don’t see how AI fits in their work.

Neville: Yeah, we’ve talked about this multiple times, Shell, in various episodes, which is who feels able to use such tools. And that comes, that stems from the leadership communication, in my opinion, that has to encourage people to do this. They feel they’re being empowered. They feel they’ve been given permission to do this. And they know they can count on help to when they get stuck with something. That, is

hardly uniform in just any organization, frankly, and this isn’t about, we’re going to create the special department to do this, this needs to permeate across an organization. So you’ve got leadership at the very highest level, filter that down to your local manager, your line manager, or whoever you report to has got to encourage you as well. And I’m sure that’s that happens in many organizations, but to make this really work, that doesn’t result in the gap widening between those who are

naturally excited about this and have the experience and the knowledge and the expertise to know how to get value out of these tools. You’ve got to have something in place that helps everyone else who isn’t like that. And there’s a challenge for communicators without any question.

Shel: Well, for the whole organization, I mean, as I talk to people in other companies, it seems that we’re still in that experimentation phase that I think most organizations should be beyond by now. But the way it’s working right now in a lot of companies is the curious employees can try the tools and cautious employees can wait and everyone else will eventually catch up. that’s not going to work. mean, if this is becoming a material productivity and capability layer,

Neville: As well.

the

Shel: We need to implement intentional adoption strategies. That means making role specific examples and approved tools and safe use guidance and peer demonstrations. And we’re trying to do this where I work is get peers showing other employees what they’re doing. Psychological safety, plain language explanations of what employees are supposed to be doing with this. So all needs to be put in place and communications has a role to play here, but

If we don’t, adoption is going to follow the path of least resistance, and that’s toward the people who have the power, the time, and the digital fluency, and then you’re going to end up with that gap.

Neville: Work to do here.

Shel: Yeah, and by the way, there was another part of the FT’s reporting that I found really interesting that you didn’t mention. And that’s that men are more likely to use AI tools than women across a number of sectors. And I think that should concern leaders because AI fluency is becoming part of professional competence. And if men, along with higher earners and more experienced workers, are building fluency faster,

What’s going to happen? And you know, the performance evaluations and promotion decisions and the visibility of the employees who are getting that kind of attention and informal influence may start reflecting AI access rather than raw ability. And here again, there’s a role for communicators by pushing AI enablement into say, manager toolkits, into your onboarding processes, into your training and team level norms is important.

as opposed to just letting it sit as an informal advantage for people who are already competent.

Neville: Yeah, like I said, work to do here.

Shel: Thanks, Dan. I am looking forward to seeing this WordPress release. I have to say, I really like the idea of collaborative editing. As you know, the FIR podcast network website is on WordPress and Neville, you and I both use it and the ability for both of us to go in and deal with that in more of a Google Docs setting than logging in and just pulling up the post.

makes sense to me. I definitely do see the issues with this as well, though, but it’ll be interesting to see this and the other changes as well. So thanks for the report, Dan. Really, really interesting. Well, we’re to stick with the AI theme again, probably not surprising given the impact that it’s having. And by the way, I have to say that when I scroll through LinkedIn, it’s got to be 80 % of the posts I see now are

AI related and that’s not hyperbole. It is a guess. I haven’t measured, but man, it is all AI all the time on LinkedIn. That’s what people are talking about. And it’s changing the relationship between PR professionals and journalists, just not the way a lot of people expected it would. The fear was that AI would automate the work. We’d have a lot of AI written press releases and AI written pitches and articles.

And yeah, there’s definitely a lot of that happening and people are calling it out. But the more interesting shift is not that AI makes it easier to produce more content, it’s that AI makes bad media relations more obvious and more damaging. Pete Pachal, who was a guest on FIR interviews, what was that Neville, about a year ago? Yeah, he makes this point in an article in Fast Company, AI is becoming a new interface.

Neville: A year ago,

Shel: For how information is found, prioritized, and interpreted. Journalists and PR people are both affected because AI systems more and more shape which stories surface, which ones get cited, and which narratives get visibility. Pete’s argument is that the advantage doesn’t go to the people who can generate the most material. It goes to the people who produce original reporting, useful expertise, clear narratives, and trusted relationships. That’s an important distinction for people who…

operate in the media relations world. AI can help you write faster, but speed was already part of the problem. Journalists were already drowning in irrelevant pitches before generative AI showed up. AI just gives every mediocre PR practitioner a way to send even more mediocre pitches even faster. The results not greater efficiency, it’s more noise. And journalists are noticing.

PR Daily reported on a global results communication survey of nearly 1,700 reporters across print, digital, and broadcast. 81 % said pitches and relationships with PR professionals are vital to their work. So journalists aren’t saying we don’t need PR, but 43 % expressed negative views about AI-generated pitches, saying they read like a bot wrote them and that they lack perspective and erode editorial trust.

So here’s the conflict. Journalists still need PR. They need access and sources and data and context and story ideas, but they’re getting a lot less tolerant of anything that feels mass produced, poorly targeted or synthetic. Medianet’s 2026 Media Landscape Report, based on feedback from 800 journalists, makes the same point more sharply. The report says three quarters of journalists have received pitches that appeared to be AI generated.

and about half said they could always detect machine written copy. I would argue with that, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. The same report says 86 % of journalists now cite press releases as a key news source, which means the press release isn’t dead, but the stakes for credibility are higher. There’s also a widely circulated LinkedIn post citing the media net research saying 78 % of journalists report that receiving an AI written pitch

decreases their trust in the PR person who sent it. That’s consistent with the other findings. Journalists aren’t rejecting AI assistance, they’re rejecting lazy use of AI. So what should PR practitioners be doing differently? I’ve got five things. First, stop using AI as a pitch factory. This is the most obvious trap. If the output is a generic email with a personalized opening line,

and a weak story angle, AI hasn’t made you better, it’s made you faster at getting ignored. Second, use AI before the pitch, not as a replacement for your judgment. Use it to analyze everything the journalist has written recently, summarize themes, identify gaps, pressure test whether the angle is timely, and prepare sharper source material.

P.R. Daley’s piece makes this point well. AI can help with research, angle testing, drafting, editing, personalization, and follow-up prep, but the human edit is where you add that credibility. Third, bring journalists something they can’t get from a model. That means original data, direct access to informed sources, a useful articulate expert, a local angle, a contrarian but defensible point of view, or a story that fits the reporter’s audience.

Fourth, be transparent internally about what AI can and can’t do. PR leaders should have rules. AI can help research, structure, brainstorm, and edit, but it should not invent relevance, fake familiarity, fabricate personalization, or send anything without human review. And fifth, think beyond the pitch. In an AI-mediated media environment, you’re not just trying to get a reporter to open an email.

you should be trying to build a public record of expertise and credibility. That includes owned content, executive visibility, contributed thinking, data assets, analyst material, podcasts, newsletters, earned media, anything that reinforces a coherent narrative that AI systems will recognize and retrieve. So the future of media relations isn’t more automated pitching.

The future is more precise, more evidence-based, more relationship-driven, and more strategic. AI will handle more of the mechanics, but judgment, relevance, trust, and access become more valuable, not less. In other words, AI doesn’t eliminate the relationship between PR and journalism. It raises the penalty for abusing it.

Neville: Yeah, it’s a it’s it’s an interesting topic without doubt. I was actually pretty impressed with the five points mentioned by Courtney Blackan in the PR Daily report. And it mirrors, frankly, almost everything we’ve talked about in this episode so far. And indeed, in recent episodes that we have to keep repeating this really, Shel, and you’ve done a good job, I think, at outlining this is what you’ve got to do.

And it’s about this, but it also relates to these other 10 things we’ve talked about. But a couple of things that struck me here that really, really do resonate well. mean, research smarter, that makes complete sense. I mean, that’s got to be your starting point. But things like draft faster and edit harder. I like that one, I must admit. So you use AI to an AI tool to organize your ideas.

into a structured draft or just simply improve the overall language that you’ve done and rewrite some of it. To kind of anticipate criticism from those who don’t think I should be involved in any of this, I liken it to that’s what you’d be asking a colleague to do or that freelancer that you’ve hired to help you work on this. You’d be giving them the same request as you would to the AI tool.

So what’s the difference? One’s not a human. That’s probably the biggest difference. But I don’t get swayed by any of those arguments about you can’t use AI to do this. Now, of course, you’ve got to use it. The caveat is, for God’s sake, don’t just copy and paste that into your document in the center. Now, this is your assistant, not your creator. You’re the creator. And this helps you create very well, typically, all other things being equal. But I like that draft faster, edit harder.

And it’s kind of like your A-B testing or A-B-C testing possibly with the AI assistant to help you do this quite quickly. And it’s great. Personalize with precision is another one she mentions. Don’t blast out the same email to 50 journalists, which is what many people do it seems to me. You’ve got the ability to personalize those emails. And again, you know,

Your AI can help you with drafting that. So it will need to know quite a bit about the journalists and your relationship with them if you’re the PR person. So quite a lot of prep work you’d need to do here first. But the output from the AI will be pretty good if you do it right. So these are things that take your method that you might currently be using, which is prompt the AI to a totally different level.

And that’s what you got to be thinking about now because this is where it’s all going. This is not way beyond just simply a chat bot. So it’s a really good topic. And these reports that you’ve highlighted, Shel, are great. Pete Pachal’s post is excellent. We’ve got to him back for back again from another interview, I think, because we interviewed him when he was just starting his business. And he’s gone places for that business now. So it’s worth reading.

Shel: Yeah, I think so.

Neville: That and the PR Daily report. do like those five points.

Shel: Yeah, remember, remember we interviewed Aaron Kwittken from PRophet, that’s PRophet with a capital PR. And one of the things that’s, yeah, it was. And one of the things that system did was identify reporters who have written about this topic. It reviews the content that they have written over the past recent period and crafts a personalized pitch for each of them, which then you can go in and edit. I don’t think you

Neville: Yeah, I do. Yeah.

Quite a while ago.

Shel: Sorry, Aaron, if you’re listening, I think you provide a great service, but people don’t need this anymore because you can create an agent that does that, identify the reporters who have written about this, review their most recent articles and craft a pitch for this press release. That can be done now internally with an agent that would probably take about an hour to create. mean, agents can go out and do amazing things now. Chris Penn.

just wrote a post, he found somebody’s wallet on the street and it had enough stuff in it that he could spend a few hours tracking down who owned it. There wasn’t a driver’s license with an address. There was some cash, there were a couple of debit cards, but he was able to give an agent all of that information and go do his work on something else. And after a couple of hours, it said, I’ve narrowed it down to these three people. And Chris was able to look at those three people and figure out which one it was.

lived really nearby and got the guy’s wallet back. We can do this kind of thing now in pursuit of PR objectives. The other thing I want to say is that I’ve gotten in the habit now of recording interviews and giving the transcript to AI and say, organize this into a first draft of a press release of an article of a change notice, whatever it might be. And I don’t copy and paste that in. That’s a first draft. It’s absolutely.

a case of draft quickly and edit hard. I hadn’t heard that framing before, but it’s absolutely what I do these days because it just saves a lot of time and gets me into the nuts and bolts of making this relevant without having to spend half that time just reviewing the transcript and organizing that into sort of a logical flow.

I think it’s a great use of AI and it’s one that I’ve been using for, geez, a couple of years now.

Neville: Is. I agree. So there are things that you’re accustomed to that work for you. But pay attention to this kind of thing, because this is taking it to another level that will benefit you. You just will not just but you need to clearly understand what this is. And Pete’s article, the PR Daily piece are two sources that will help you do that. But it’s definitely worth a look.

Our next story is a very different one. It’s not about something going wrong. It’s not about AI, but about something going exactly to plan. Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO later this year and become executive chairman with John Ternus, currently head of hardware engineering, taking over the role. On the face of it, this is a major moment. A CEO transition at a company of this scale. It’s what, revenues?

trillion, second wealth, the most valuable company in the world currently. It was number one not long ago, so it might retain that. It often creates uncertainty internally in the markets and across the wider ecosystem. What’s striking here is how little disruption there seems to be. There were no leaks. The announcement landed cleanly. The market reaction was muted and the tone throughout is calm, controlled and focused on continuity.

And that’s the real story, I think, because this isn’t just a leadership transition. It’s a masterclass on how to communicate one. If you look at the messaging, everything reinforces stability. isn’t disappearing. He’s staying involved as executive chairman. Ternus isn’t positioned as a bold new direction. He’s presented as a long standing insider, deeply embedded in Apple’s culture and products. There’s no sense of rupture, just a steady handoff.

The most important part of this story though is the announcement itself. It’s what happened before the announcement. Ternus didn’t appear overnight. He’s been gradually made visible over several years, fronting product launches, appearing in keynotes, becoming a familiar presence. So by the time this announcement arrives, it doesn’t feel like a surprise. It feels like confirmation. And that’s the key insight. This transition didn’t start with a press release. It started years ago.

What Apple has done is build familiarity, credibility and trust in the successor long before the moment of change. So when the change comes, the narrative is already understood. And that changes everything because most organizations treat moments like this as announcements, whereas Apple treats them as outcomes, the result of a story that has been deliberately shaped over time. That has practical implications because when transitions feel chaotic or disruptive, it’s often not because the change itself is unexpected.

is because the story hasn’t been prepared. The successor isn’t known, the narrative isn’t clear, the organization is reacting in real time. Apple avoids that entirely, not by communicating more in the moment, but by communicating earlier, by building trust before it’s needed. And that’s where this becomes relevant for leaders and for communicators advising them. The real question isn’t how do you announce a change, it’s how early you start preparing people to understand it.

Shel: Yeah, they didn’t treat this as a sudden disclosure. This was more continuity without pretending that nothing was changing. Right. It does a lot of reassuring work, not just about Cook’s remaining in the new roll through and actually staying in the current role through the summer and then staying as executive chairman, who’s going to work closely with Ternus during the transition. Also talked about

Ternus’s ties to Steve Jobs and Apple’s mission and its values. And that language isn’t an accident. I think the lesson for communicators is that the leadership transition needs facts and emotional reassurance, right? Employees don’t just wanna know who reports to whom. They wanna know whether the company they believe in is still the company they believe in. I do like in PR Daily’s report, the discussion of different audiences.

They didn’t send one announcement everywhere. They had public messaging and employee facing messaging and they both serve different purposes, right? The public version celebrated the legacy and confidence they had in this transition. The employee version was warmer. It was more grounded. And I mean, this is communication 101 in a lot of senses, but still something that we should emphasize. Consistency doesn’t mean identical language. Employees…

deserve a message written for employees, not a copy of the press release with Dear Team pasted on top.

Neville: I agree with you, Shel. This is an excellent example of how to do that. And yes, there wasn’t a single message. That’s very true. It was tailored messaging that showed clear understanding of those different audiences internally and externally. So a lot you can learn from that. And indeed, Ragan’s article by Allison Carter has some good insight in there that you can glean learning from. It’s worth reading that article too.

So I call it a masterclass. It probably is one of the best examples I’ve seen. Not so much the press release, but understanding about what led up to that and all the other communication that then occurred, the buildup. And I realized too, of course, that some organizations won’t know until nearer the time of announcement that there’s going to be a change. So this isn’t necessarily a blueprint you can apply to everything. But in the case of Apple,

It’s a very, it has a big effect on people news about what Apple’s doing. Steve Jobs was a magnetic personality or mercurial personality who famously coined this great phrase, I’d apply to Trump, often the reality distortion field that was his trademark in a sense that he was mercurial without doubt in leading. one thing that is notable, although it’s certainly not emphasized in any way that

that Ternus is a hardware guy, whereas Cook is a management guy. So Cook took over from Steve Jobs and transitioned Apple over that decade and more period to where we are now with the changes going on in the world generally and the tech industry in particular, that it probably does require more of a hard-nosed technological approach than purely business management to leadership.

And of course, if Cook’s going to be the executive chairman, he’ll be there to assist here and there. interesting time looking at a company like Apple to see this happen.

Shel: Yeah, and the press release sends some messages without explicitly saying anything. First of all, the fact that they did pick a hardware hardware guy says a lot about where Apple is heading. They faced a lot of criticism for their failures around artificial intelligence, which isn’t even mentioned in the press release in that sense.

Neville: Yeah, does.

not mentioned.

Shel: Message. What have been Apple’s wins under Cook’s leadership? I mean, the Apple Watch was a big one, and a lot of people thought it wasn’t going to be. They kind of laughed when it was introduced. But there are a lot of people wearing Apple Watches out there now. Big success. But mainly he consolidated manufacturing in China, which may not end up being a great thing. But it’s he I mean, it’s made them a ton of money. What did he do? Triple?

their revenues, as you said, they’re the number two most valuable company in the world. Now they’re gonna refocus on hardware, on product, the stuff that has made Apple from the get-go. Software, mean, you can talk about iOS and the computer software platforms they produce, but you never hear a lot of…

Discussion of those at their big events. It’s, you know, we’re coming out with a watch. We’re coming out with a Vision Pro, which has been something of a failure. So this is a reemphasis on hardware. They’ve made that point. Casey Newton came right out on hard fork and said that Ternus’s first act should be just doing the deal with Google to integrate Gemini into Siri and be done with that whole thing because Siri was supposed to get that AI update.

It’s been a couple of years now and it just hasn’t happened. So they have said a lot in this press release and not all of it was necessarily explicit.

Neville: No, you’re absolutely right there. So interesting time in the tech industry generally and seeing where what happens with Apple in the coming year or so.

Shel: Well, my favorite new word is slopaganda, and this refers to AI-generated propaganda, that cheap, fast, emotionally loaded, and designed less to strategically persuade anybody about anything than it is to just flood the zone with images, memes, fake scenes, shareable outrage. The most visible example of slopaganda right now is Iran’s use of AI-generated, Lego-style videos aimed at Donald Trump, Israel, and the U.S.

They’re far from subtle. show caricatured Lego versions of Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, missiles, burning ships, collapsing American power, and they use rap tracks, absurdist humor, conspiracy references, and the visual grammar of social media and not the language of state diplomacy. The New Yorker reported on Explosive Media, which is an Iranian digital media enterprise, which got started posting

pretty routine anti-Western content that didn’t get a lot of uptake. Then they discovered that these AI-generated Lego-style propaganda cartoons was its breakout format. The clips accumulated millions of views. They were reshared by Iranian government accounts. They were promoted by Russian state media and even picked up by anti-Trump protesters because the imagery was so flamboyantly anti-Trump.

The group told the New Yorker that it could produce a two-minute video in about 24 hours. LeMond adds an interesting scale point. According to Cyabra, a company that analyzes content to distinguish authentic activity from coordinated manipulation, that’s right off their website, according to them, pro-regime videos received more than 145 million views across X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok during the second half of March.

Explosive media eventually acknowledged to the BBC that the Iranian state was one of its clients. It had initially claimed that it was all independent. And this has captured a lot of attention, first because it’s visually disarming. Lego’s familiar, playful, global. It turns geopolitical violence into something that looks like entertainment. Analysts say the Lego format serves as a kind of Trojan horse.

reaching people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with war-related content. It also works because it’s emotionally true to people who’ve always wanted to believe the underlying message. Viewers may not literally believe Iran is winning the war in the way videos depict, but they can choose to believe the emotional premise that the U.S. is weak, Trump is ridiculous, and Iran is standing up to a global oppressor.

And it works because it speaks the language of the target audience. This isn’t old school propaganda. It’s fast, caustic, meme-literate, and platform-native. In information warfare terms, this gives Iran something it used to lack, cultural reach into Western audiences. It lets Iran fight asymmetrically using ridicule and narrative disruption where it can’t match the U.S. militarily. But this is not only a geopolitical story.

The same tactics are going to show up in business. Maybe not tomorrow in Lego form, but the pattern’s just too useful to stay confined to politics. An activist shareholder can use an AI-generated video to ridicule a CEO, to dramatize a company’s alleged mismanagement, or turn a dry governance dispute into a viral morality play.

A disgruntled customer could generate convincing scenes of product failure, employee misconduct or customer mistreatment. A labor dispute could be amplified with synthetic stories that blur the line between real worker grievances and invented incidents. An unscrupulous competitor could see just asking questions content that implies safety failures, financial instability, executive hypocrisy or environmental misconduct. An example from Canada.

matters here. The Canadian Digital Media Research Network identified a coordinated network of 20 inauthentic YouTube channels targeting Albertans with nearly 40 million views. The channels exploited real grievances and pushed narratives normalizing a move for secession and even U.S. annexation of the province. The report says the accounts pushed an Albertan perspective

that researchers found absolutely no evidence that the account owners were actually Albertan. That’s the bridge to business. Slopaganda doesn’t have to invent grievances. It can exploit real ones. A company with a safety incident, a layoff, a product recall, a labor dispute, or an unpopular executive decision is already vulnerable. AI just makes it easier for hostile actors to package that grievance

into emotionally potent, shareable content. So what should communicators do about this? Well, first, obviously, build monitoring capability for synthetic narratives, not just mentions. The risk isn’t one fake video. The risk is a pattern. Repeated themes, recycled scripts, coordinated accounts, sudden spikes, and emotionally consistent attacks. Second, prepare your verification protocols now.

If a video appears showing something damaging, who determines whether it’s real? Legal? Security? Coms? IT? Outside forensic consultants? You know, that first hour is really important. So knowing who to go to to find out whether this is real or not is really critical. Next, strengthen your owned record. If AI systems and social audiences are going to interpret your organization through fragments,

Make sure there’s a clear, accessible, credible body of truth. Your policies, your timelines, FAQs, source documents, leader statements, and plain English explanations. And finally, scenario plan for synthetic outrage. Not just misinformation, but ridicule. Means move differently than allegations. A dry correction rarely defeats a funny attack. Communicators need response options that are fast, human, factual, and proportionate.

And, you know, one last question to address here, should communicators use Slopaganda themselves? No, they shouldn’t. Not if we’re talking about deceptive, synthetic, emotionally manipulative content designed to obscure truth. That’s not communication, man. That’s reputational arson. But communicators absolutely should learn from the format. AI-generated creative can be used ethically.

if it’s clearly labeled truthful, brand safe, and grounded in real information. But understand attention has moved toward visual, fast, emotionally resonant storytelling, and we should move along with it.

Neville: Yeah, it’s an interesting topic, isn’t it, Shell? I think you’re kind of no communicator should not do this. That’s a message clearly the US government’s ignoring, judging by what they have been doing, or the White House, should say, that’s reflected back in what the Iranians are doing and their proxies and indeed in individuals by the thousands doing the same. So misinformation, disinformation, fakery, it’s everywhere.

I read a post about this at the end of March that looked deeply into what AI generated, how it’s being used by both sides. And there’s a number of reports, notably Deutsche Welle, the English language news service from the German broadcaster and France 24 as well, had some really, really good, well researched articles with examples of

what’s happening in this area. There’s a great one someone posted showing a Lego box of, you can visualize it from the description that we see on the TV news all the time. Residential buildings, apartment blocks in ruins blown to bits. And this is made out of Lego bricks. And it’s, you know, Lego logo, and it looks exactly like a Lego product. So brand

a brand is being, you know, brought into this unwittingly. But the reality is that communicators are in between a devil and deep blue sea here, I think, because if you’re in a business, you’re not in the defense industry, you’re not involved in anything with a war going on. Yet some of your clients are kind of on the fringes of all this by the nature of their business. So

they’re dragged into in the case of Lego, good example, what do do about it? Do you respond in kind with some kind of jokey thing about the, you know, this, you know, whatever it might be in Iran, this example. It’s a it’s, it’s a call, I would say, there seems to be a movement, if you like, to this kind of thing is a matter of normality.

And I think it’s very dangerous. Philip Boramantz had a really good piece in the middle of March on what this war is teaching us about communications generally, not specifically crisis, although it’s mentioned in there. The BBC had a report early March about AI-generated Iran war videos, surge of those as people have the tools to create these things. So that is part of our landscape.

So it’s something that communicators, it’s a question with no easy answer. The question you asked is not an easy answer, but it may be the one that we have to find an answer to. I mean, that’s easy to say that. I mean, I don’t know what that answer is. So it is that the most striking thing occurred to me is that the, not the sophistication of these tools are not slickly produced. They are produced.

I could you say it’s for those who are savvy with social media and social networks and what works in terms of spreading what is spreadable? What is memeable? And we are not part of that. And if you’re not, you’re people talking about your brand and you and you’re not there. So, you know, it’s a big question.

But it’s something we have to try and understand what’s happening and somehow come up with an answer.

Shel: Yeah, you raise an interesting point about brand safety. Is Lego going to issue a takedown notice to Explosive Media, which is a digital media company in Iran, probably not knowing that they’re not going to respect a takedown notice or there’s no court that you can go to necessarily. So basically you kind of have to live with it if you’re Lego. And I suspect that’s what they’re doing. But from a communication standpoint,

It’s really important to understand that the Iranian produced stuff is getting far more traction than the US produced stuff. And the reason for that is that it leverages grievances the Iranians already had and other people around the world already have with the US. The US stuff is just showing the attacks on Iran. And if you think about the average American or perhaps even the average Brit, what grievances do they have against Iran?

I mean, the grievances here are within the government, not within the broad population. And that’s why these are so effective, is that the Iranians and other populations around the world do have grievances, justified or not. So as you look at this stuff moving into the business world, consider what kind of grievances people might have with your organization. That’s where they’re going to attack you. That’s where you have to build up your defenses now before they do.

Neville: Yeah. So it’d be interesting to see where are we at nearly halfway through the year, not quite actually. So quite a bit less than halfway. Yeah, it is. But it makes me think I wonder what, you know, the big picture of trust and the reporting we see on that notably the Edelman Trust Barometer. What changes are we to see as this year plays out as it were? We have a war in the Middle East that

Shel: It’s still going pretty fast.

Neville: Anyone who even has a fleeting interest what’s going on in the Middle East knows that this is situation that has been the case for millennia, frankly. But in modern times, this has been since 1948 in the creation of the State of Israel. This has been happening in the Middle East. A war one way or another between tribal factions and then states have gotten involved in this. Iran

from what I can understand, has long been a thorn in the side of US governments over different presidents over the decades. It doesn’t resonate that way here, notwithstanding some things that have happened, but there were decades ago in the UK that, you know, the notion of the fact the US really was the only country that could do what they did to to bomb Iran and start a war to undeclared.

not asking anyone to help them and then complaining when no one came to their help. So it’s a dreadful situation, the war itself, obviously, but also the murkiness of what it has created in the context of what we’re talking about. That, you know, we’ve talked about this element before, which is that, you you do not control the message anymore, even if it’s about you. That is no

more true than what we’re seeing right now. The Iranian government doesn’t control any of the messages, not really. It’s anyone who’s got an internet connection and a tool to create an AI generated video or whatever it might be, and then share it online. That’s who’s got control, but only in a limited way because it then goes out there and anyone can do anything with it. It’s making it onto some

traditional media, not just social. So it’s who knows where it’s all going to go, Shell. And as this war continues without any sign that it’s going to suddenly stop, this is the new normal.

Shel: Yeah, and keep in mind, we’re not talking about a single piece of content. We’re talking about flooding the zone with multiple pieces of content that reflect the same grievance and make the same points and have the same punchline that get people to watch it and have it appear wherever you might be getting your content. So you got to look at it that way and take steps to deal with because.

Yeah, I don’t have a good business example yet, but I’ll happily make a bet with somebody that within two years, we’re going to see this kind of content aimed at business from that disgruntled investor or unhappy customer or whoever it is. So this is so easy to do. And that’ll wrap up this episode of For Immediate Release. Our next monthly long form episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, May 25th.

Neville: Great fun.

Shel: So we’ll be recording on Saturday, May 23rd. In the meantime, we hope you’ll comment. As always these days, all of the comments that we shared in this episode came from LinkedIn. And you’re welcome to look for our announcements of new episodes on LinkedIn or Facebook or threads or blue sky. And we’ll check for comments there, but you can also send them to fircomments@gmail.com.

I’m going to come up with a contest and probably announce it in the May episode for an audio comment. Anybody who submits an audio comment will put your name in a hat and draw a winner and you’ll get something. I’ll have to figure out what. We don’t have FIR merch anymore. Maybe you want to start that again. Now we’ll come up with something. We’ll come up with something. But you can leave an audio comment by attaching an MP3 file to an email.

Neville: Ha ha ha ha.

No, we don’t. Maybe we should, we’ll come up with something.

Shel: Or clicking the record voicemail tab on the right-hand side of the FIR Podcast Network website. You can comment on the show notes that we leave on the FIR Podcast Network. So many ways to leave a comment. And we also have a community on Facebook and an FIR page on Facebook. Any of those places will do. And we also hope that you will leave your ratings and reviews of FIR.

wherever you get your podcasts. And we will be resuming our short midweek episodes next week. Look out for those. Best way to have those is to subscribe to For Immediate Release. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #511: Doing AI Governance Right and Still Getting It Wrong appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Employees have long found ways to use software tools to get the job done, even when those tools are not approved. It’s called Shadow IT, but ever since generative Artificial Intelligence hit the scene in 2022, employees have adopted a new version: Shadow AI. The company approves Microsoft Co-Pilot, but employees opt to use their smartphones or personal laptops, along with their personal accounts with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, or whatever best suits their needs.

For most companies, this is a problem that needs to be addressed through repeated policy announcements and vigorous crackdowns. One company, though, took a different approach. In this short, midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel outline what the company did and how communicators might advocate for a version of this approach to aiding in AI adoption and speeding up productivity gains.

Links from this episode:

The Hidden Demand for AI Inside Your Company
Shadow AI Threat Grows Inside Enterprises as BlackFog Research Finds 60% of Employees Would Take Risks to Meet Deadlines
FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company?
The Rise of Shadow AI is a Double-Edged Sword for Corporate Innovation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 510 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. There’s a quiet tension playing out inside many organizations right now. On one side you have leadership teams, IT, legal, and compliance, all trying to put structure, governance, and control around how artificial intelligence is used at work. On the other side you have employees who’ve already moved on. They’re not waiting for official tools. They’re not sitting through pilot programs. They’re not asking permission. They’re opening ChatGPT on their phones. They’re using Claude in a browser tab. They’re experimenting quietly, often invisibly, finding ways to make their work faster, easier, and sometimes better. And in many organizations, this shadow AI behavior is still being treated as a problem — something to restrict, monitor, or shut down. It’s a topic Shel and I discussed on this very podcast in episode 419 nearly two years ago, and it hasn’t gone away.

Neville Hobson: In fact, recent data suggests it’s accelerating. A study last November by Blackfog and Sapio Research found that nearly half of employees surveyed in the UK and US are using unsanctioned AI tools. Even more striking, 60% said they would take security risks with those tools if it meant meeting a deadline. So this isn’t fringe behavior — it’s become normal. An article in the Harvard Business Review this month argues that instead of treating unauthorized AI use as a compliance issue, organizations should see it as a signal — a sign that people are already finding value in these tools, even if the organization hasn’t caught up. We’ll explore that idea in just a moment.

Neville Hobson: The article calls this the hidden demand for AI inside your company. And when you look at it through that lens, the picture changes quite dramatically. Because instead of asking, “How do we stop this?” you start asking, “What are we missing?” The piece goes further than theory. It looks at what one organization actually did when it recognized this dynamic: BBVA, a Spanish multinational financial services company with more than 125,000 employees. Rather than clamping down on shadow AI use, they moved quickly to provide a secure enterprise environment. But more importantly, they didn’t try to control everything from the center. They took a different approach. They identified and empowered what they call “champions” and “wizards” — the people already experimenting, already curious, already building things. They created a network, a community of practice, a way for ideas, use cases, and practical solutions to spread peer to peer across the organization.

Neville Hobson: And the results, at least as reported, are striking: thousands of employees actively using AI tools, thousands of internally created applications, and measurable time savings of hours per person every week. But perhaps the most interesting part isn’t the numbers — it’s the philosophy behind it. The idea that successful AI adoption doesn’t start with a perfectly designed top-down strategy. It starts by recognizing that innovation is already happening, just not where leadership expects it. So the question becomes: do you try to control that energy, or do you find a way to harness it? And that opens up a much broader conversation, one that goes well beyond technology. It touches on leadership, trust, and culture — on how change actually happens inside organizations. And, importantly for communicators, on how you surface, legitimize, and guide behavior that may already be happening under the radar.

Neville Hobson: Because if employees are already using these tools — and most evidence suggests they are — then silence or restriction alone isn’t really a strategy; it’s a gap. So in this conversation, we want to explore that gap. What shadow AI really tells us about organizations today, whether the BBVA approach is something others can realistically replicate, and where the risks still sit, because they have not disappeared. And we should be clear: BBVA may be an outlier. It’s a highly data-mature organization with strong leadership alignment. Many organizations don’t have that foundation. So the question isn’t just whether this works — it’s whether it can work anywhere else. And what that means for the future of work, and for the role communicators play in shaping that future. Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, a few thoughts, starting with the fact that BBVA has the financial resources to provide a secure environment for those tools that employees are using. There are many organizations whose IT budgets are razor thin and don’t have those resources, so they would need to figure something else out. But I think there’s a caution here worth raising. The numbers from Blackfog are real, even if the framing from the Harvard Business Review is optimistic: 34% of employees using free versions of tools when paid, approved versions exist; 58% of unsanctioned users on free tiers with no enterprise protections. The reframing from threat to signal doesn’t eliminate the exfiltration risk — it reframes how we need to respond to it.

Shel Holtz: Communicators should be careful not to let the BBVA-style narrative become an excuse to ignore governance. The right frame is: harness the demand, don’t suppress it, and build the governance at the same time. Employees using unsanctioned tools and putting secure data and company information into them — that’s a governance risk, and I don’t think we can ignore it. I mean, I think what BBVA did is great, and I think they baked it into some governance while looking at a new approach they could afford to take. But for many organizations, governance is still a requirement.

Neville Hobson: Well, I agree. It’s important and it’s not to ignore by any means. I think, Shel, you fleshed out a little bit the survey that I mentioned, which is actually useful to have that level of detail. But the big question for me is: if this is the picture in many organizations, according to that survey — compared to data previously — this is getting worse, or rather, it’s happening more frequently. People are just going ahead and using what works for them as opposed to what’s the official thing. What is that a symptom of? Maybe a lack of trust? It’s probably a mix of things. And to me, the communicator’s role here seems to be to try and help people on the one hand understand what the tools can do for them, and on the other hand to help the organization understand that we need to address this issue. People aren’t using the approved ones. They’re doing stuff on their own, and that isn’t good.

Neville Hobson: You mentioned security risks. The Harvard article goes into some detail about that, as indeed do the people who conducted that survey. You can just picture the severe risk. We’ve seen examples in recent months of organizations that have suffered from unauthorized use of unapproved software tools — not necessarily generative AI tools, but software certainly. And it’s a big deal. So the question — do you try to control all this and look at ways to stop it? — we asked this very question two years ago in our conversation, and we could probably just insert the recording from then and replay the answer. But let’s talk about it. I don’t think they should try and stop it personally. That’s a fail. There’s no win in that at all, certainly not for the organization. So how would communicators go about that, do you think?

Shel Holtz: Well, I’m not suggesting that organizations crack down on this and become Big Brother, looking at the tools that people are using, especially when they’re using them on their personal phones or personal laptops. But there are definitely things communicators can do. The first is to surface and amplify the internal use cases — not just the fact that people are using these tools, but what they’re using them for. When the security people and the legal people find out that this is actually driving effective work product from these employees, I think there might be more appetite for figuring out a way to bake this into the governance documents and policies the organization has established.

Shel Holtz: And I think giving employees permission narratives — telling them it’s safe to experiment, letting them know how to do it, and suggesting where the guardrails are — matters. So if you are using shadow AI, here are the things to be careful about. Let them know what the risks are and how to avoid falling into those traps. Communicators can also translate the IT and legal guardrails into plain language that doesn’t read as prohibition, because prohibition just leads to negative thoughts from employees about the organization, and then they’ll just continue using what they’re using. And then there’s collecting and routing the demand signal back to leadership. Why are employees using these when there are approved tools around? What are the advantages? So that leadership can make investment decisions that match the patterns of usage employees are actually engaged in. There’s a lot of work here for communicators that goes beyond simply saying, “Don’t do this.”

Neville Hobson: Agreed. And in fact, you can learn from much of what BBVA did, even if you’re not an organization with that established foundation and 125,000 employees. They did things most companies aren’t going to be able to do. For instance, they reached an agreement with OpenAI and deployed a customized version of ChatGPT Enterprise in a secured, exclusive cloud just for the company. The reasoning is interesting. What the Harvard Business Review report says is that the strategic decision was clear: it was more dangerous to have unmanaged, hidden AI usage than to rapidly deploy a managed, secure solution that aligns with existing needs. Most companies aren’t going to be able to do that. So it comes back to perhaps what you’ve just proposed — explaining it to people, the pros and cons, the risks, and so forth.

Neville Hobson: But I think you need more than that, too. Otherwise, you’re going to have significant numbers of people who will ignore it and just go ahead anyway with what they’ve been doing. So maybe elements of what BBVA did — for instance, the network of internal champions and expert wizards to spread knowledge, rather than the formal top-down communication you might expect. You’d have people within the organization who are knowledgeable, who have a history of responsible use themselves, who can help explain to others and help them replicate that. You end up, I think, with steps toward broad compliance that everyone can buy into. That would be helpful, because I can see that the idea of anyone in an organization of whatever size just doing their own thing with whatever tool they like is not a good idea at all.

Neville Hobson: And that isn’t unique to this. We’ve had that kind of conversation in decades past about software. I remember when Hotmail first came out, and when Microsoft Network first came out, the arguments in organizations — and indeed the one I worked for at the time — was, “You’re not allowed to use this on your company laptop, so use it on your own,” stuff like that. That’s definitely not a good thing. So you need to act to address issues like that so that people trust you and respect you and are willing to follow a restriction — or a behavior change, if you like — that would help. It’s interesting, the learning you can get from BBVA’s example, even though you’re not an organization that size with a budget to match. It’s a lot about education. It’s trusting employees, absolutely, as you pointed out, Shel. But I think that’s a two-way street. You need to have a quid pro quo: if you have these freedoms to use whatever you want, you need to do it responsibly. Share your learnings with others in the organization. Things like that. To me, that seems like a really good place to communicate.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there’s communication happening at BBVA. They have 11,000 active users and 4,800 custom tools being used by those folks. That didn’t happen because the communications department posted an article about them. This was peers talking to their peers about what was working. It validates something you and I have been talking about for years, which is that authentic, lateral, employee-to-employee storytelling beats top-down cascades every time.

Neville Hobson: Precisely.

Shel Holtz: But it is communication. And why wouldn’t that be something the internal communications department jumped on and helped to facilitate — providing the channels for that, rather than the sneakernet that’s probably happening now? And also, because they’re engaged and trying to keep this from happening below the surface, they’re in a position to identify the use cases worth taking to leadership. The Blackfog survey you referenced found that almost 70% of C-suite executives believe speed is more important than privacy or security. So if people are getting things done faster — if you can demonstrate that there actually is productivity improvement happening, and it’s because of the tools employees are using that aren’t approved — I think that’s motivation for leadership to look at either approving those tools or finding ways to allow people to use their own accounts while protecting the integrity of their data.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. The results the Harvard Business Review reports from BBVA are worth noting, even though the scale isn’t what many companies would experience. They talk about 80% of usage of the system they set up coming through direct chat prompting, and the remaining 20% through employee-created GPTs. Now, this is not shadow AI — it was part of the rollout of what they did. But these numbers are quite impressive. Over 83% of employees now use the system every week, averaging 50 prompts per week. That’s above comparable enterprise deployments, says the review, quoting OpenAI. Users report average time savings of two to five hours per week — a number worth noting. More than 4,800 custom GPTs have been created internally, and they’re used three times more frequently than the enterprise average. So they’re ahead of the game in that regard. The article goes into more detail about which departments are more active than others, and so forth.

Neville Hobson: It also prompted a thought in my mind: the other surveys I’ve seen and other reporting on the resistance from leadership in organizations — that isn’t minor. It’s not a little thing. It happens, unfortunately, too frequently. I’m thinking of keystroke logging on employee usage, auditing computers surreptitiously and covertly without telling them, watching which apps they’ve installed — and indeed, probably more common, your company laptop refusing to install things that aren’t on an approved list, or reporting to IT that you tried to install stuff. This is a dreadful situation in organizations. It’s common, but we’re going to see more of it, I think, because that seems to be the way of the world these days on distrust. This is a diminished-trust environment we’re talking about. So in all of that, where do we sit in terms of enabling stuff like this? We can see the advantages of allowing employees to use tools like this. I think the better way is to try to do something within the framework of the organization — not, “Oh sure, go ahead and use ChatGPT whenever you want on any device, no big deal.” I wouldn’t be keen on that. I wouldn’t stop it, but I would look at ways of weaning people off that approach. We have to help them and encourage them to do this. And that, I suspect, is a hard task for communicators — to persuade leadership to do that if the climate in an organization is resistant to it anyway.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think it is a hard sell to leadership, but we have data. We’re supposed to be engaging in two-way communication and facilitating two-way communication. One of the roles of internal comms is listening. And it doesn’t have to be through direct information that you get from people through focus groups or surveys — it could be this Blackfog survey. When 49% of employees are using unsanctioned tools, and 63% think that’s fine as long as there’s no approved option for what they want to do, you may look at that as rogue behavior, but you can also look at it as market research. And communicators are the people in the best position to translate that data into something actionable for leadership. You take that to leadership and say, “Look, this is what’s happening. We’re the ones who can interpret what the behavior means and pass that along to leadership.”

Shel Holtz: I think part of our role is that listening through the data that’s already out there — and maybe what we can determine is going on in our own organizations — and taking that to leadership and saying, “Look, this isn’t going to go away if you crack down on it. It’s not going to go away if you block installation on company laptops. People have their own phones. People have their own laptops and tablets. This is going to continue.” And this isn’t new. I mean, this goes back to the earliest days of computers. I think I’ve mentioned this once or twice on the show, but I needed to produce charts and graphs in the mid-‘80s, and I wanted to use Harvard Graphics because somebody had shown it to me and it was what worked, and the company had a different program that was terrible. So I just used Harvard Graphics. I bought my own copy and installed it. There were no blocks back then — you put the floppy disks in the drives and it installed. People are going to do what they need to do to get the job done. Maybe some will pay attention to what the official rules are, but I think the governance needs to be flexible enough to adapt to this. I applaud BBVA for what they did. Again, I don’t think every organization is in a position to replicate it, but I think you can take lessons from what they did.

Neville Hobson: You can. Not everyone can roll out what they rolled out — enterprise licenses and so forth — but some of the things they went about, and how they went about them, definitely. One thing the review article points out quite strongly — a very, very good thing — is that they say, toward the end of their conclusions, that in whatever you do, there must be a hard human-in-the-loop rule. Human employees should always own the work. There should not be direct writes to core systems. Internal GPTs need quality scores and guardrails. They specify scope and context, include samples, and so on. This is simple, scalable, and non-bureaucratic.

Neville Hobson: So that’s something that kind of ties back into this emerging phrase — if it’s even emerging — of human-centered AI. Let’s look carefully at this. It’s about people first, technology second, and the human needs to be in the loop. The “hard human,” as the review calls it — I interpret that as meaning someone who’s actually cognizant, aware, and able to act upon things that matter, to keep humans in the loop, to own the work, not the technology. You’ve got to think about things like that. And I think for communicators, that’s an important aspect of what they do — having in mind that element that is about the people first. So when you’re trying to persuade leaders to take a course of action you’re recommending, this needs to be in your mind too: that the humans need to be in control.

Neville Hobson: I have to say, this is great. I love stories and examples like this. I love them more than the ones that talk about disasters, although those are useful to know about as well. Yet I feel, as communicators, we have a constant, constant task on our hands to explain this to people in organizations, to help others understand. I think this is a good example — the shadow AI element. For me, if I were actively involved in an organization as the communications person, I’d be looking at: how do I persuade people not to do that? How do I persuade people to use the approved stuff? But at the same time, how do I persuade the leaders to make sure they offer employees stuff that actually works, that’s in line with their expectations, all that kind of stuff? There’s a bit of a job on their hands. And if budgets get in the way, then you’ve got an even harder job. But hey, that’s what we’re here for. That’s part of what we have to do.

Neville Hobson: These are good examples you can learn from. There are elements you could start on. And I think, like most things, Shel, you need to say, “OK, fine — this idea has a dozen constituent elements, and let’s just start with two.” So you don’t try to think, “Oh my god, this is a massive project. How on earth can we do this?” You look at just a couple of things. I like another point the Harvard Business Review makes: ensure that managers know what they’re doing. You can’t expect managers to be persuasive in encouraging others to use AI if they’re not good at it themselves. So there’s another element — you need to train them well, says the Harvard Review. At a minimum, they should learn how to write staffing notes, sensitive communications, and KPI reviews with AI help. So there are some things you could do straight away as a communicator in an organization. I’d say: good luck and godspeed, and it’ll all work out in the end.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, a manager’s role in all of this is probably an episode in its own right. I would just reiterate the point you made about the human in the loop. This is a governance element that should be overarching — not applying just to shadow AI, but to all use of AI in the organization. It should be a primary consideration in governance, not to turn things over to AI. Otherwise, you end up with fake citations going out to clients that paid a million dollars for your work — another little slap on Deloitte’s wrists. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #510: Should Companies Embrace Shadow AI? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

When bad actors use AI tools to clone a musician’s voice and upload synthetic versions of their songs, they can then file copyright claims against the original artist’s content — and win, at least initially. That’s because the systems platforms used to validate copyright claims are automated and configured to treat whoever files first as the rightful holder. The result: musicians like Murphy Campbell, a folk artist from North Carolina, lose both revenue and control of their own creative identity.

The same mechanism works just as well against any organization that publishes audio or video content online. In this midweek episode, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson break down how the scam works, why it matters to communicators, and what you should be doing right now — before an incident forces your hand.

Links from this episode:

AI Cloned Her Voice, Then Claimed Her Songs
‘This Is Not Me’: Inside the AI Scams Driving Musicians Crazy
A Folk Musician Became a Target for AI Fakes and a Copyright Troll
A traditional musician became a victim of AI imitations and a copyright aggressor
‘AI slop’: Emily Portman and musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release, this is episode 509. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. And today we’re going to talk about something else that communicators need to worry about. I think we need to develop a worry list for communicators. This one starts with a tale about a folk singer from the mountains of Western North Carolina. She’s named Murphy Campbell. She plays banjo and dulcimer and records old Appalachian ballads, some of them written by her own distant relatives. And she posts videos of herself performing in the woods. She has about 7,800 monthly listeners on Spotify. And she is, as Shelly Palmer put it in a recent column, exactly the kind of artist the copyright system was designed to protect.

In January, some of her fans started messaging her about songs on her Spotify profile that she had never uploaded. Someone would have taken her YouTube performances, run them through AI voice cloning tools, and posted synthetic versions of her songs under her name on streaming platforms. These fake tracks, to put not too fine a point on it, were really bad. Her dulcimer sounded like — and these were her words — a warbled metallic mess. Her voice had been deepened and auto-tuned into what she called a bro country singer. But here’s where it gets interesting for those of us in communications, because that’s not the end of the story. It didn’t stop at impersonation.

Whoever uploaded the fakes through a legitimate music distributor called Vydia (V-Y-D-I-A) then filed copyright claims against Campbell’s original YouTube videos — the very videos the AI had been trained on. Because YouTube doesn’t use humans to review initial copyright claims, Campbell stopped earning revenue on her own content. That revenue started going to the person who had filed the copyright claims.

She described herself as being in a weird limbo where “I’m telling robots to take down music that robots made.” Shelly Palmer called this a reverse copyright scam, and he confirmed, speaking to other content creators off the record, that this is more common than he might have believed.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — music streaming platforms, artists, what does this have to do with me? And the answer is everything. Because the mechanism that elbowed Murphy Campbell out of earning royalties for her own music will work just as well against any organization that publishes content on platforms with automated enforcement systems. That is virtually every organization that has a YouTube channel, a podcast feed, or any kind of public video or audio presence.

So here’s the structural problem as Palmer frames it. The copyright system we have was built on a foundational assumption that the first entity to register a claim is the rightful owner. That assumption held when human creativity was the bottleneck. It breaks completely when AI can generate a synthetic version of any content in seconds using any voice. Think about what your organization puts out there publicly — executive speeches, earnings calls, thought leadership videos, branded audio, training content, podcasts, content marketing pieces. Every one of these is a potential training data set for someone who wants to clone your voice, your leaders’ voices, and then upload a synthetic version through a low-cost distributor. We’re talking about something that costs $25 to $90 a year. Then they file a claim against your legitimate content before a human ever reviews it.

Neville Hobson: (pause)

Shel Holtz: That means the system is going to see them as the first one to file that claim and assume they are the legitimate copyright holder. Now, Rolling Stone confirmed that this isn’t an isolated case. Paul Bender, Veronica Swift, Grace Mitchell — these are just a few of the artists who have faced the same attack. One musician even ran an experiment he called Operation Clown Dump, uploading fake content under his colleagues’ names across platforms. His success rate was 100%.

So what do communicators need to do? First, audit your public content footprint. Do it now, before an incident forces you to. Know what you’ve published, where it lives, and what revenue or visibility is attached to it. Second — and here’s something that’s new for a lot of communicators — register your copyrights. Formal registration is the prerequisite for meaningful legal recourse in the United States. Third, build a rapid response protocol for platform disputes. The organizations that survived these attacks quickest were the ones who knew who to call and knew what to say. And fourth, have this conversation with your legal team today, not after something goes wrong.

Murphy Campbell eventually got Vydia to withdraw its claims, but only after her story went viral. Most organizations won’t have that option. Your story won’t go viral. The bad actor doesn’t need to win permanently — they just need the automated system to act before you do. And that is the lesson, and it’s one we’d better learn from musicians before we have to learn it the hard way.

Neville Hobson: Extraordinary, isn’t it, Shel? I guess you could call it a new phenomenon, only in the sense of the speed with which this can be done. I must admit, I’m astonished that the system is such that the first person to file the copyright claim is assigned ownership. Maybe that’s similar here in the UK — every jurisdiction is different, of course — but that’s rather unsettling. It obviously goes back to a time when people weren’t exploiting the system the way they are now. There are similar examples here in the UK of this kind of activity where people unwittingly find that their content is being misused and misrepresented. And although no major artists — though I may be wrong about that — I did see an article noting that YouTube allows some users to clone the voices of stars like Charli XCX and Sia, with their permission. But unauthorized AI covers of artists like Harry Styles — hundreds of thousands of copies — is a widespread phenomenon, and one that barely registers in mainstream news.

A number of artists, a bit like your example of Murphy Campbell — there’s one I’ve heard about, Greg Rutkowski, a Polish-born artist known for his work on Dungeons & Dragons, who found his style being used in over 400,000 AI prompts, raising serious concerns about the obsolescence of human artists. And to your point about what communicators should watch out for: your corporate communication messaging that’s in audio, your CEO on an earnings call that’s been recorded and distributed. So never mind video — audio alone, at that scale of 400,000 AI prompts, is not a good situation. If you project the thinking out, this is utterly relevant to anyone publishing audio or audiovisual content online.

I find it astonishing that some platforms, notably Spotify — which features prominently in a lot of reporting on this — are being used to literally steal someone’s intellectual property by replicating it. And I think it reinforces the point that registering copyright isn’t an idle exercise. It’s something that should be front of mind, and it does other things for you as well as the owner of the property.

Something as simple as displaying a current copyright notice on your website — it’s remarkable how many sites I come across that still show “Copyright 2016,” never updated. Displaying a current notice signals that the business is active and its information is up to date. There are also tools to protect against AI scraping, though how effective they are is still unclear. Creative Commons licensing is another option, setting out the terms under which people can use your content — though that requires everyone to play by the rules, which frankly isn’t always the case these days.

Nevertheless, you’ve got some protection — or at least the peace of mind that you’ve taken steps. But it really is quite extraordinary, isn’t it, Shel? When I looked into what’s happening in the UK, I came across a recent movement — over a thousand UK musicians, including Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, and Damon Albarn — who released a silent album to protest proposed legislation that would allow AI companies to train on copyrighted material without consent. It struck me as a real head-scratcher: why would a government enable that to happen?

Shel Holtz: Probably very effective lobbying from the AI companies, I’m sure, is behind that.

Neville Hobson: No doubt, no doubt. But there are other things going on — organizations like the Musicians’ Union and Equity campaigning for better copyright protection, consent, and fair compensation for creators. It’s not getting much mainstream coverage, but activity is happening behind the scenes. Nevertheless, the example of Murphy Campbell and others represents a genuine threat that you need to be aware of if you’ve got content online that matters to you. Never mind the “they shouldn’t be doing this” argument — the point is, if it’s important to you, have you thought about this?

Shel Holtz: If you think about the days before the web, copyright wasn’t something most people had to worry about that much. Professional artists with record deals had people to handle it. Same with authors — someone like Stephen King never had to worry that somebody would be the first to file a copyright claim under his name and siphon off his revenue. But now you have artists who don’t get record deals — like Murphy Campbell — publishing on YouTube and Spotify, building small followings, and making a reasonable living. This is the working class musician concept we talked about, oh, it’s got to be 15 years ago now.

The fact is, you can use Spotify and YouTube to build a following, play some small clubs a few times a year, and make enough to pay the mortgage and put your kids through school. You’re not going to get the penthouse suite from playing to 100,000 people, but you can make a living. But this has also opened up the ability for bad actors to take advantage of that. And now with AI able to reproduce your voice and create new music at scale, all the pieces are in place for this kind of theft. Unless you’re able to get your story to go viral — as Murphy Campbell did — it’s not clear what you can do, because YouTube and Spotify have set up systems that automate this process with no human review. When you used to register with the copyright office yourself, a human was checking. So it’s not likely most organizations have revenue-generating content online — though I’m sure some do, and I’ve actually argued there are ways to use content to generate revenue.

For example, I’ve always loved the idea of a Webcor YouTube video series called “Building for Girls,” where our employee resource group, Women of Webcor, does a five-minute lesson every two weeks on construction to get young girls interested in STEM and engineering careers. Get enough views and YouTube starts paying you. If you don’t copyright-protect that content, someone can come along, produce similar videos, claim the rights, and suddenly your revenue is going to someone else. But even if you’re not producing revenue-generating content, there are other reasons to ensure nobody else can claim ownership of what you create — especially as content marketing demands more and more output. So yes, register that copyright.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it made me think about watermarking for written content — though I’m not sure there’s something truly effective offering the same protection for audio and video yet. And even if there were, you’ve got situations like Murphy Campbell’s, where it’s her style and tone — the whole persona that defines her music — that’s being copied. And you don’t know about it until strange things start happening: your revenue drops, someone says “I love that new song you just published,” and you discover it wasn’t you. Or you read a review and think, wait — I didn’t write that.

Shel Holtz: Or “I hate that new song you published” — in Murphy Campbell’s case.

Neville Hobson: Exactly. I’m sure people are working on the technology. You’ve got digital rights management, which isn’t new, but I’m not sure it helps here because the issue isn’t copying your content outright — it’s imitating or repurposing it at scale. Hundreds of thousands, or millions of instances. I think the platforms need to do far more than they currently are. It’s a similar argument to what we’re hearing here in the UK about Meta and X doing nothing effective to protect children. This is in the same territory, and it needs a lot more from those platforms — who are making serious money throughout all of this. As to what exactly “more” looks like, I’m not entirely sure, but they need to do more.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and they probably won’t until there are some high-profile, visible court cases that create real reputation issues for them — then they’ll take action. The easy thing to do right now is simply register the copyright. That’s your protection. When someone imitates you, or claims the content you produced is theirs, you have legal standing to act. That’s why you need to have this conversation with your legal team.

But I wouldn’t wait for either the platforms or the government to do anything. They’re both reticent to act. You have the ability to do something about this right now, and it’s just a matter of working with your legal team and filing those copyrights.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. And even using Creative Commons licensing — if you’re an individual without all the formal resources, but you have a niche following, even that’s a start. Keep a record of every iteration of everything you’ve created — “I did this in 2017, here’s proof, backed up here.” That gives you something to stand on, a way to demonstrate that you can act if someone uses your content. And if you don’t do this, there’s another consequence worth considering: your original content gets buried in search results because the AI-generated imitations have somehow accrued better signals to rank higher. That kind of pollution from AI slop is its own problem.

Shel Holtz: Yeah — and then people stop paying attention to your content altogether because they’re so fatigued by the AI slop that they tune everything out. But at least this one has a solution communicators can follow: something new to add to the copyright to-do list. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #509: Does Corporate Content Need Copyright Protection? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

When workers lose their jobs, many turn to gig work to earn income while waiting for new opportunities. Increasingly, companies that hire gig workers are shifting from delivering food or sharing rides to creating content to train AI systems. This raises various communication and ethical issues. Neville and Shel explain what’s happening and discuss the implications in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The jobs AI can’t do – and the young adults doing them
Thousands of people are selling their identities to train AI – but at what cost?
The gig workers who are training humanoid robots at home
Gig economy becomes new AI training ground

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 508 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson
And I’m Neville Hobson. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a set of stories that all point to something quite striking — not just how AI is evolving, but how it’s being built. Increasingly, the raw material behind AI isn’t just data scraped from the web. It’s us: our voices, our movements, our everyday lives, and increasingly, our identities. There’s a new layer of the gig economy emerging. We’ll explore this in just a minute.

People are being paid, typically in small amounts, to record themselves walking down the street, having conversations, folding laundry, even just going about their day. That data is then used to train AI systems because those systems need examples of how people actually speak, move, and interact in the real world. In one case, delivery drivers in the US are being redirected to film tasks for robotics training. Platforms are turning existing gig workers like delivery drivers into distributed data collectors for AI. In another example, people are selling access to their phone conversations through apps that pay contributors to upload voice and text data. And in yet another, workers are strapping phones to their heads to record household chores so humanoid robots can learn how to move. The work is global, fragmented, and often invisible, with workers spanning Nigeria, India, South Africa, the US, and far beyond. Humans are no longer just users of AI — they are raw material suppliers. In China, there are even state-run centers where workers wear virtual reality headsets and exoskeletons to teach robots how to carry out everyday physical tasks. What we’re seeing is the rise of what you might call data labor, where identity itself becomes part of the work.

There’s a clear driver behind it. AI companies are running out of high-quality training data. The open web isn’t enough anymore, and synthetic data has its limits. So the industry is turning to something else: real human lived experience. Because if you want a robot to understand how to load a dishwasher, navigate a room, or interact with objects, you need to see humans doing it at scale.

But there’s an interesting contrast here. One of the stories highlights a 23-year-old in the US, a guy called Cale Mouser, who earns well into six figures repairing diesel engines. It’s something he’s developed great skill in doing. His work depends on judgment, experience, and problem solving in the real world — things that don’t easily translate into data. So while some people are being paid small amounts to generate data for AI systems, others like Cale Mouser are building highly valuable careers precisely because their skills can’t be reduced to it. And that contrast feels important.

Because on one level, this new kind of work does create opportunity. For some people, especially in lower-income regions in the Global South, this is real income — paid in dollars, flexible and accessible. But there’s another side to it. Because what people are actually selling isn’t just time, it’s identity: their voice, their behavior, their presence in the world. And often once that data is handed over, it’s gone — permanently licensed, reused, repurposed, potentially in ways the individual never sees or understands.

So you have this asymmetry: individuals earning small immediate payments while companies build long-term, highly valuable AI systems. Perhaps it’s a new version of the Mechanical Turk for the AI era. And that raises a deeper question. What does it mean when the inputs to AI are no longer abstract data, but pieces of human identity? When the training set is not just content, but behavior, voice, and presence? And when those pieces can be reused, replicated, and scaled, often without the individual’s ongoing knowledge or control? Many platforms grant royalty-free perpetual licenses, where workers get paid once and lose control forever. There’s potential for deepfakes, identity theft, and misuse without consent. And perhaps more uncomfortably, what does it mean when people are contributing to systems that could automate their future jobs?

For communicators, this feels important because this isn’t just a technology story. It’s a story about trust, consent, transparency, and how organizations explain what they’re doing with AI. If AI ethics lives anywhere, it’s here — in how these systems are built and how that’s communicated. So the question to explore — one of the questions to explore, perhaps — is this one: Are we comfortable with an economy where identity itself is becoming labor? And if not, what responsibility do organizations and communicators have in shaping it?

Shel Holtz
It’s a big story with a lot to consider. On one level, it seems like the high-tech version of the sweatshops where high-end fashions were made — Nike shoes, for example — with people paying premium prices to get those products while the people making them are earning a pittance in factories with long hours and terrible working conditions. And then you add onto it the identity issue. So it’s something that I think — something at least I hope — we’re going to be talking about for a while.

In terms of the AI element, what this suggests is that the gig economy didn’t go anywhere when AI came along; it just became the training ground for AI. And it’s interesting that the workers who are being squeezed out of knowledge jobs are selling their voices and their movements to build the systems that squeezed them out. Because where do a lot of these people who are being laid off because of AI go? Well, they go drive for Uber, they go drive for DoorDash. And you do that long enough and you get really accustomed to the idea that they send you a task, you go do that task, and you get paid for it. So if that task shifts from picking up a meal at a restaurant and delivering it to somebody’s house to going to your own house and washing your dishes because that’s what they want to capture on video — it’s the same thing. You’re getting a task on the app. You’re doing the task and you’re getting paid for it. So I think for a lot of people, this is going to be a fairly easy shift, and they’re not going to think a lot about what’s happening to the information and the content that’s being created with their movements and their voices, which is now being shared and used to make a lot of money for the people who are paying a pittance to these folks.

So I see three issues here that connect directly to organizational communication. The first is consent and transparency — and I’m talking about inside organizations — because companies are already deploying AI tools trained on data that their own workers have supplied, and sometimes they’ve supplied this data unknowingly. The ethical and reputational questions that employees are going to ask are questions like: Was my voice used to train a bot that you activated in order to replace my friend who sat next to me and I had lunch with? And regulators are going to end up asking these questions too. So communicators really need to be out front with clear internal messaging about what data employees generate and how the company is using it. Let’s talk about that before I hit the other things that popped into my mind.

Neville Hobson
Yeah. I mean, the transparency element is key. That’s not new — that’s always been the case. But how organizations should communicate this may not be as simple as it might seem. I mean, the example you mentioned is an interesting one: a company uses data from its employees without them knowing. Well, let’s say — don’t do it like that. Don’t do that. You need to disclose if you’re doing this. Surely that is an ethical issue: if you don’t tell them and you go ahead and do that, that’s not what you should be doing. So there’s an easy one to address.

The other element, which is also ethics-related, is: is this whole thing ethical if participation is driven by economic necessity? Whatever reason you might give — we need to get an edge on the competition, whatever — you’re still up against that element.

That’s the big-picture ethics question. But common sense tells you how you should do this. Should individuals be compensated long-term for use of their data? On the one hand, you might say, fine, let’s tell everyone: your data may be used — your day-to-day interactions with colleagues, the recordings of your conversations on our internal Teams tool — that’s kept. So the employee might say, I’m okay with that, but I want to be compensated for it. And now there’s an interesting position.

Shel Holtz
You mean like as if they’re licensing it?

Neville Hobson
Exactly. And the organization might retort —

Shel Holtz
Well, the organization might retort: you are being paid for it. You’re being paid a salary. You come in here every day, you do your work. Read your employment agreement. I mean, this is kind of like — what was it? Velcro or Post-it notes? Maybe both — where the person who invented it never made a penny off the royalties because they were an employee of the company and the work product belonged to the company. I think organizations might be able to make the same argument here.

Neville Hobson
They could. But they’re not sure whether they should, just because they could — because the climate is very different today from those examples back in the 1960s. So you’ve got to think about things like: if we don’t do this right, are we going to get an exodus of employees who are going to go work for a company that treats them better in this same context?

Shel Holtz
Well, now you have the economic environment and the hiring situation where a lot of companies are trying to avoid hiring. They’re also trying to avoid layoffs, but they’re trying to avoid hiring. It’s pretty flat out there right now — it’s definitely a buyer’s market. So I don’t know that I would leave an organization because they’re using my data unless I already had another job lined up, because they’re hard to find right now.

Neville Hobson
I agree. It’s slightly a hypothetical scenario, but I think it is worth recognizing that it could well come to that. From the research on those articles — and some other things I saw — there’s already a strong imbalance of value and control between the individuals who provide the data and the companies who are getting that data and making economic use of it. AI companies rely on real-world human data because of data scarcity. So there’s a challenge on both sides of the argument: they need the data, but there’s probably a finite amount that employees can provide, so they have to look elsewhere too.

And the thing is, a new economy is emerging where people monetize their identity and behavior voluntarily. In the case of the examples we heard about — the guy in Uganda filming himself walking down the street — and then the flip of that, as I mentioned, the example of young people in America, which the Guardian has a really good analysis of, who have skills that cannot easily be translated into something AI can do. The key element in that part of the discussion was about the skill this young guy has — 23 years old. It’s not unique, but he’s got a skill that isn’t just “I know how to repair a diesel engine.” It’s that he can, at a glance, literally see what’s wrong and already formulate the six things he needs to do to fix it. And that is valuable. He’s earning $150,000 a year already in salary doing this, and he’s 23 years old.

So there are other examples mentioned in that Guardian piece too that are interesting. On the one hand, you’ve got gig economy workers like DoorDash drivers doing what they’re doing. On the other hand, you’ve got people like this guy developing a career not related to AI at all — a skill that cannot easily be replicated by AI. So that’s part of the landscape. I’m not sure where all of that fits within this, Shel, to be honest, but it’s part of the picture.

Shel Holtz
Yeah. I think it was MIT that came out with a report not too long ago saying something like 93% of jobs are AI-safe — and there were a lot of people saying this really paints a different picture from what we’ve been anticipating. I don’t know how accurate it is. But in the meantime, there are AI companies working very hard to elevate these systems to the point where they can do some of the work that currently might be considered AI-safe. I think for many jobs, it’s probably just a temporary designation.

I raised the issue of employees inside the organization. Those gig workers are another issue for organizational communicators, because these workers — the ones very accustomed to having the app tell them to do a task, doing the task, and getting paid for it — these folks aren’t covered by traditional internal communications. Organizations relying on gig workers and contracted labor, and increasingly if your AI tools were trained by them, have a stakeholder relationship they may not have a communication strategy for. I’d argue they don’t have a communication strategy for it.

I’ve often made the distinction between internal communications and employee communications. Employees are the people who come in and get paid by you directly, whether salaried or hourly. But you have other internal stakeholders, and we develop strategies for them — the contractors embedded in our organization. I work in construction; we have subcontractors; there are ways the organization communicates with them. There are all kinds of internal stakeholders, and these gig and contract workers are now among them. We should figure out a way to communicate with them, talk about our ethical use of their data, and engage with them in ways that are meaningful, useful, and produce positive results.

Neville Hobson
Yeah, makes sense. You had a couple of other points you were going to mention. What’s the next one?

Shel Holtz
Just one other, actually, and that’s about keeping the human in the loop. A lot of companies, in order to feel good and look good as they move into the AI world, are positioning human oversight as really important. But what the stories we’ve been talking about reveal is that humans are raw material — physically, biometrically, behaviorally. Workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations — things like paralegal work, for example — have experienced a 13% decline in employment since 2022, which is the year OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. On the other hand, employment for less exposed or more experienced workers — think about your 23-year-old diesel mechanic — has been steady or in some cases even increasing.

So organizational communicators talking about AI as just augmenting human workers need to be careful, because I think increasingly we’re going to hear stories about how that isn’t actually true, particularly for this younger demographic. We have to be honest about that asymmetry. I mean, whose labor is augmenting whom?

Neville Hobson
Yeah, I get that. It does make sense. It’s an issue that embraces communications, ethics, and trust more than anything. But at the heart of it, there is the technology aspect. I’m thinking about other things that you and I have discussed in previous episodes that are kind of adjacent to this issue — where if you analyze what the real issues are, they tend to be a mixture of communication, ethics, and trust. So that’s a good starting point for communicators who might be wondering how the hell to address this: communication, ethics, and trust. Work out how you can develop the procedures that embrace and recognize the importance of those things and execute them inside the organization.

I agree with the premise in all the articles we’ve linked in the show notes that a new data labor economy is emerging where people monetize their identity and behavior and, in the case of the Global South in particular, don’t think twice about it. Employers have a duty of care to recognize what they need to do to bring that group into their structure — one where communication, ethics, and trust play the bigger role.

Shel Holtz
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are a number of places to look. You don’t want to be the next organization to have it disclosed that you have exploited labor producing the data that you need, because those scandals were pretty difficult for the fashion companies that went through them. Also, one of the things that generative AI models are really good for is scenario planning.

Neville Hobson
Ha!

Shel Holtz
And for your organization, in your industry, with your markets, it wouldn’t hurt to do some scenario planning about who the stakeholders are that you should be communicating with, and what the challenges are going to be both internally and externally, and start developing some communication strategies. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #508: Inside AI’s Human Raw Material Supply Chain appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Take a stroll through LinkedIn. You’ll find no shortage of posts stridently deriding the notion that anyone should ever use AI to write for them. While that case isn’t hard to make for professional writers, there are countless professionals in other fields who struggle with writing, never trained to be writers, yet now have to write everything from emails to reports as part of their jobs. Should they really sweat for hours over wording, time they could be devoting to the core areas of subject expertise, when AI can produce content that is cogent, clear, and direct? In this short mid-week episode, Neville and Shel look at the trends in using AI for writing, despite the plethora of opinions from the pundits.

Links from this episode:

Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their Stories
Meet the Journalist Using AI to Write Stories
How Journalists Feel About AI
Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism Report Finds 82% of Journalists Use AI
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
Is Writing with AI at Work Undermining Your Credibility?
How We’re Using AI
Review of ‘Using Artificial Intelligence in Academic Writing’
Best Practices for the Effective Use of AI in Business Writing
AI Tools for Business Writing
5 Ways to Instantly Level Up Your Communication Using AI Tools
Charlene Li and Katia Walsh demonstrate the right way to build a book with AI help – Josh Bernoff
The Truth About Writing a Book on AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 507. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. And if you spend any time at all on LinkedIn, you’ll see the degree to which anti-AI sentiment is ramping up. A lot of it’s aimed at using AI for writing and how absolutely wrong that is. Yet just last week, on the same day, Wired Magazine and The Wall Street Journal both published articles on reporters using AI to help write and edit their stories. So today, let’s talk about using AI to write.

Specifically, is it okay for employees to use AI to help them write for work? And my answer is not only is it okay for many employees, it might be one of the most genuinely useful things AI can do. Here’s the framing I would push back on. When we talk about AI writing assistants, we tend to picture a journalist or a marketer or a communications professional, someone whose craft is writing, it’s what they’re paid for, handing their keyboard over to a robot. And for those of us who are professional writers, that raises legitimate professional and ethical questions. But that’s not the population we’re talking about when we’re communicating AI adoption in most organizations. Think about who actually has to write at work. Engineers document processes. Product managers write status updates. Safety officers draft incident reports.

Shel: Finance analysts compose budget justifications. Scientists write up findings for non-technical stakeholders. These are not people who chose their careers because they love writing. Writing is a tax they pay to do the work they actually care about. And many of them pay that tax really, really badly. The idea that a structural engineer should produce elegant prose unaided is the same logic as saying a communications director should coordinate the concrete mix for a construction project. We don’t expect that. So why do we expect every knowledge worker to be a competent writer? Muckrack’s 2026 State of Journalism report found that 82% of journalists, professional writers, people whose job this is, are now using at least one AI tool. That’s up from 77% the year before.

If the people whose professional identity is tied to their writing are using AI tools, it shouldn’t surprise us that everyone else is too, or that they should. Now the research does tell us something important about how to use these tools. A University of Florida study of 1,100 professionals found that AI tools can make workplace writing more professional.

But regular heavy use can undermine trust between managers and employees, particularly for relationship-oriented messages like praise, motivation, or personal feedback. The study found that employees are more skeptical when they perceive a supervisor is leaning heavily on AI for those kinds of communications. Now that’s a meaningful finding and it’s exactly the kind of nuance internal communicators need to help their organizations understand.

It’s not an argument against AI writing assistance. It’s an argument for knowing when it’s appropriate. Purdue Business School Professor Casey Roberson, who literally wrote one of the first business writing textbooks to address AI, puts it this way: AI is a great tool for brainstorming when you’re stuck, for outlining and structuring documents, for revising drafts to improve clarity and tone, but it should not be used for confidential information, and using it to write first drafts can stifle creativity and critical thinking. The Wharton communication program makes a similar distinction. Their guidance frames AI tools as powerful and skilled hands for the right task, valuable for brainstorming, editing, improving conciseness, and anticipating challenging questions, but a liability when used as a substitute for your own thinking, your own knowledge of your audience, and your own credibility.

So what’s the practical guidance for internal communicators trying to help their colleagues use AI responsibly in their writing? First, make the distinction between communication types explicit. Routine informational writing — process documentation, project updates, meeting recaps, technical reports — that’s where AI assistance is most defensible and most valuable. That’s exactly where the trust risk is lowest and the productivity gain is highest. Conversely, messages that carry relationship weight, like a manager recognizing someone’s contribution or a leader addressing a team through a difficult moment, that deserves a human voice. Help your employees understand that difference.

Second, reframe the conversation around who’s actually writing. A systematic review published in the International Journal of Business Communication found that AI can significantly help with idea generation, structure, literature synthesis, editing, and refinement. Essentially all the phases of writing that non-writers find most daunting. AI isn’t replacing a writer’s voice. In many cases, it’s giving non-writers a voice they otherwise wouldn’t even have.

Third, be honest about the nuance inside the journalism conversation. The Columbia Journalism Review published a fascinating piece where journalists across major newsrooms shared their practices. Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, described using AI the way he’d use a fast, well-read research assistant who’s also a terrible writer — helpful for checking consistency, flagging chronological issues, examining logical claims, but not for the writing itself. Amelia Daly, a senior reporter at VentureBeat, put it this way: AI helps her productivity, but she refuses to use it to write because writing is how she maintains trust with her readers. That distinction — AI as research and process support versus AI as voice — maps directly to the guidance you should be giving your colleagues.

I read one other reporter in one of these articles who said he actually does use it to write because he didn’t become a journalist in order to write. He didn’t like writing; he liked reporting. So he did all the other work and then lets the AI produce the writing.

And here’s the thing I’d leave your employees with because I think it gets lost in this debate. Wharton’s communication faculty make the argument that writing is thinking, that when you rely on AI for drafting, you don’t know your content as deeply as you should, and you lose the nimbleness to adapt when the moment requires it. And that’s true. But for an engineer who agonizes over every sentence of a procedure document, who spends four times as long on the writing as on the analysis,

Shel: AI doesn’t replace their thinking. It clears away the friction so their thinking can actually reach the page. For internal communicators, this is a genuinely useful message to take to your AI adoption rollouts. AI writing assistance isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about removing a barrier that prevents good ideas from being communicated clearly while still insisting on the judgment, authenticity, and relational awareness that only human beings can bring.

Neville: Yeah, it’s a big topic, I have to admit. And I think of it from not the employee communication point of view so much. That’s pretty a major part of it, I think, major usage. Is anyone writing, in fact? Whether you’re in public relations, whether you’re a journalist, et cetera, people who need to write as part of their roles is what’s in my mind mostly.

I’m also drawn by a very good analysis by Josh Bernoff. You and I interviewed Josh, what, two, three months ago. He wrote an assessment of Charlene Li’s new book, Winning with AI, which she used AI extensively in the creation of the book. Worth pointing out that the book — the AI didn’t write any of the content.

She and her co-author, Katia Walsh, talked about the way in which they divvied up the work. And the AIs, plural, did research amongst other tasks, too. But Josh did a lengthy post setting out all the areas where they found AI useful and AI not so useful. And it struck me reading Josh’s post and then also Charlene’s postscripts, as it were, in the book itself, which I am reading, by the way, that this would apply to anyone writing, not just would-be book authors, in my view. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction doesn’t make any difference. Whether you’re writing a report, whether you’re writing an article or for a blog or for a newspaper, whatever, doesn’t matter. These principles, I think, apply to that. And it’s not so much about whether your role in your organization or in your job is to do with this and you’re not very good at writing. It’s not so much that. It’s more focused on those whose job is writing, or writing is part of their job in some form.

So there are a number of things that I took from it. But to go to the main point about Charlene’s book Winning with AI, AI wasn’t doing the writing, as I mentioned. It was supporting the thinking. It handled things like the research, summaries, the structure, which speeds everything up. But the ideas, the voice, and the judgment — that all stayed firmly human. And to quote from Josh’s post, he says that the two authors describe how they used Claude to structure the content, ChatGPT to create a custom GPT with four years of their work, which it used in a sense as a training aid, Perplexity to do the research, and Gemini to search a vast collection of interview transcripts. It’s much more detailed than that. It’s well set out in the book. And I thought, that’s interesting. That’s a very intelligent way to go about using different AI chatbots for different purposes on your projects.

So three things I took from this, and this applies to all the points you made, Shel, and it will repeat some of those, but it just shows you that this is how you need to think of this. First, AI works best as a thinking partner, not a writer. Like I said, the two authors used AI as a note taker, researcher, brainstorming partner — essentially a third collaborator. It helped them structure the ideas, surface insights, and challenge assumptions, and they did not rely on it to produce the final prose.

The second point: it saved time on the drudge work, as Josh called it, but it requires human judgment. It was highly effective for research and summarization, structuring outlines, surfacing missed ideas from earlier drafts. That resonated with me because I often find in my own experience when I’m doing research on either blog posts or articles or reports or just research about something I’m interested in, it usually surfaces something AI wouldn’t have thought of, or I might have done, but it might have surfaced later after I’d written it, and it requires a rewrite or something like that. Structuring the outlines, too, is another thing. And this is definitely worth noting — we’ve discussed this before. Everything still required the humans to fact-check and validate everything the AI produces, because in Charlene’s words, AI has no built-in truth function. And I think that’s a worthwhile way of looking at it.

And the final point that I took from this: you can’t outsource originality, voice, or quality — i.e., the writing. They tried it. AI failed at core creative tasks. There are three of them that Josh points out in his article. Generating genuinely new ideas — this is not very good at this, because it’s trained on existing writing that humans have done over the years and the centuries even. It can’t create something new from that other than guesswork. It’s about the same as what we do, I think, except we’re likely to do the more informed approach. It can’t write in a compelling human voice. And it cannot edit to a high standard. They all described — Charlene and Katia and Josh, for that matter — AI writing as bland, repetitive, and jargon-heavy. And in fact, Charlene talks about how they could not stop jargon creep in anything that the AI produced. And she had this big thing about one draft where they used AI to review it — it changed every use of the word “use” to “utilize.” The AI changed it to that, full of that kind of jargon.

Shel: One of my biggest pet peeves, by the way, is “utilize.”

Neville: Right, totally. And the final quality, nuance, personality, and insight remained entirely human because the humans wrote it. So I take all of that, add it to what you’ve been talking about, and say, I guess I’d conclude from that: it doesn’t matter what your role is. These are the principles you need to pay attention to and approach your use of AI as an aid. And we’re not, you know, suddenly coming out with a revelation here. I see people saying this all over the place. AI is an aid to help you, in a sense, create extremely good content, either as a writer or something else that you might be doing, where this is contributing to that end. And it doesn’t matter what your role is, whether you’re no good at this or that — that reporter you talked about likes to report but not to write. I’m wondering how the hell he gets away with doing that. Reporters have to write, don’t they?

Shel: Well, I’m sure he just poured a lot of effort and energy into it when he would have rather been out in the field gathering information.

Neville: Got it, got it. So yeah, this is not too difficult a thing to kind of grasp, in my view, yet I’m constantly bemused by the fact that I see — and maybe LinkedIn’s not the best place to look for this stuff — but I see it all the time. You and I were talking about this before we started recording about people posting there about, you know, you should never use AI. Here’s a list of words I see, and if I see them in LinkedIn posts, I’m going to unfollow that person and call them out. I see this all the time. And I think your example you mentioned to me about the person who wrote a LinkedIn post saying that you should — it was like, you should never, ever — and there’s the list of things — use AI for. That’s insane. That’s insane.

Shel: Yeah, she said nobody wants to read emails written by AI. Nobody wants to read reports written by AI. And she just went down every form of writing you can think of. And I was thinking, really? Nobody? Nobody wants to read this? And I’ve got data that says people prefer emails written by AI when they’re written by people who are terrible writers and have a hard time expressing the main point they’re trying to get to. Their own writing — the AI has actually made the emails of these people better, and people would rather read those.

Neville: So did you use AI to research this?

Shel: To research, to find that data? Yeah, of course I did. It’s easier than using Google, but I also verified the source of that research.

Neville: Right, okay. No, no, no, hang on a second. The point of that though is it’s illustrative of something that I’m astonished when I hear people that have not heard of doing this before. “That’s a good idea,” which is: anything you’re working on, literally anything, and you either have your list of things you need to research, but something that occurs to you during your work — I wonder who said X, or I wonder how you do this — ask your AI to go research it. And it then becomes a natural part of your workflow. And that’s one of the things it’s very good at.

But we’ve got the example we talked about last October with Deloitte in Australia and Canada. You’ve got to check everything it creates, particularly if it’s a topic you really don’t know about yet. But even if you do know, you’ve still got to check it. That means when you tell it to go out and look for stuff, and you’ve already given it your preferences — like anything it finds, it’s going to come back with a link to the source as well — so you’ve got all that stuff, you’ve got to then go and check all those things too. So there are no easy shortcuts here to this use. But it still saves you a huge amount of time because you’re then spending time, in a sense, understanding the output that you’re going to use to create your final version of this.

That I see people often criticizing — “If you use AI, your brain gets kind of frozen and doesn’t learn stuff.” Yeah, that’s not, in my experience, the case, because you’re doing it differently is how I would see it. You are asking your assistant to go and find this and this and this, and they come back with this and this and this, and you then go and research it yourself to check up that it is this, this, and this and not that.

So it’s, I think, an interesting aspect to the broader debate on those who are anti and those who aren’t, where most of us are sort of somewhere in the middle there. But you need to totally understand the pros and the cons of this and indeed the limitations of AI, as well as the human limitations, and work out what works best for you.

The reality, though — I guess the bottom line in terms of how I see this — is that you cannot take the human being out of the picture. This tool is purely that: something to assist you that gives you what you need to create the final product, if you like. And that doesn’t matter your job role. That’s what it’s about.

Shel: Well, I would argue that if you are in a job where writing was not taught in school beyond what you learned in your basic English class or whatever language you were raised with, and you need to produce writing, and this tool is now there to help you do that — if you’re an engineer, for example, engineers are brilliant. Many of them are

Neville: Not good writers.

Shel: Terrible writers. And they have to produce something that’s going to be useful to the people that they’re distributing it to. And if AI is going to write a better draft than they could do on their own and produce better output that people can make better use of, then they should let AI write that stuff. In an engineer’s report, there is no need for lived human experience that we keep hearing about. Empathy does not have to come into these reports. They’re technical in nature. Let the AI write it for them. Absolutely edit it, review all the facts to make sure it’s right. Presumably it’s writing based on what you gave it in terms of the information that you have learned that you need to produce in this report. So less opportunity for hallucination when you’re telling it: only use this data that I have put into this ChatGPT project for the output. But you still have to review it very, very carefully. That’ll still save you time and grief if you’re not a writer and you need to produce this stuff. I feel really strongly: we have this great tool here that’s going to make the outputs better and make business better.

Neville: Yeah, I think I don’t disagree with you at all, but I think I’m not as optimistic about it as you are in the sense of this is going to work seamlessly if people do all the things you just said, because typically they’re not going to do that. I think the key — and I can see scenarios exactly as you’ve outlined, someone in a job that’s a valuable job and he or she does a great job but lacks the skills to write — then I would say that’s fine, get the AI to write. You need to be educated then on how to get the AI to do what you want. You then need to, without fail, verify and check every single thing that the AI has created. And I’m not sure that many of the folks that you might think of are truly geared up to do that kind of thing. So you might need to have colleagues assist you then. I mean, I guess the point is that…

Shel: Well, it’s…

Neville: This is going to be a debating point forever, I would imagine, until people stop talking about it. But you’re going to encounter — I can see it now — “But yeah, you’ve got to disclose the fact that you used AI.” No, you don’t. You get down to that rabbit hole argument about, do you do that when you use Grammarly? Do you do that with your spell checker? No, you don’t. So why would you say you’d have to do this? Because it’s such an emotive topic where logic is missing in many of the arguments. It’s all emotional.

That’s the minefield you have to walk. For much of the work that many people might do, they won’t use the AI to write it. They’ll use AI to assist them in creating it. And that could mean they do an outline, or it suggests the construct of a draft, or you draft it and it reviews it and makes suggestions on how to improve it.

I do that quite a bit with my AI assistants. And I don’t have a rigid format. Much depends on the topic and how I feel about it, basically. And often I’ll ask it a topic that is something I’ve been thinking about and say, is this worth writing about? If so, give me some suggestions on the angle I should approach it from. And that always sparks much more discussion and thought on what the content might be, including, “Now this is not worth writing about for me.”

So it’s a big topic. You had in your prep for this loads of links to articles all over the place about this. And I think it’s good to do that. But this is emotive. And it’s going to not be a simple thing to avoid criticisms.

Shel: Yeah, and I think it’s a governance issue inside organizations. I hear about the lack of AI training going on in many organizations or how superficial it is. I think for those people who have to write in their jobs, you want to do targeted training about how to use this to write. From the idea generation to the brainstorming to the back-and-forth discussions that you might have about approaches to take, or

Shel: using it to structure the document right down to writing it for that first draft, if you just could do better with that than you can on your own and you’re not a professional writer. All of that needs to be trained and it needs to be articulated in the governance policies in the organization around AI, and there need to be resources. And yeah, we need to have subject matter experts that people can call. This is on us right now as internal communicators who deal with writing in general to lead this conversation in the organization and make sure that these kinds of governance activities are implemented.

Neville: Work to do.

Shel: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #507: Should Nobody Really Ever Write with AI? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this monthly long-form episode for March, Neville and Shel tackle a trio of interconnected themes reshaping the communications profession in the age of AI. The conversation opens with Anthropic’s top lawyer declaring that AI will destroy the billable hour. That thread leads naturally into JP Morgan’s controversial use of digital monitoring to verify junior bankers’ working hours, where Shel and Neville question whether surveillance technology can substitute for genuine managerial trust and engagement.

The episode also examines Gartner’s widely circulated prediction that PR budgets will double by 2027 as AI search engines favor earned media. Shel delivers a detailed report on the escalating misinformation crisis, citing a 900% surge in global deepfake incidents and new research from the C2PA on content provenance standards. The episode closes with a discussion of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s prediction that bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, and a sobering peer-reviewed study on how social bots hijack organizational messaging — research reported by Bob Pickard, who has experienced bot-driven attacks firsthand.

Dan York also contributes a tech report on the state of the Fediverse and Mastodon, as well as on AI developments for WordPress.

Links from this episode:

AI will destroy the billable hour, says Anthropic’s top lawyer
Gartner predicts PR budgets will increase 2x by 2027
5 takes on Gartner’s new optimism for PR and earned media in the age of AI
PR is back, baby — Gartner is predicting… [LinkedIn post by Lindsay Bennett]
The Gartner claim that public relations and earned media budgets will double by 2027
JPMorgan starts programme to monitor junior banker hours [Financial Times]
FT Exclusive: The US bank has started to… [Financial Times LinkedIn post]
Senator Bernie Sanders Discusses the Impact of AI on Privacy and Democracy with Claude
Let’s Talk Keyboard Jamming and Why It Might Suggest Bigger Problems at Work
Telling Fact From Fiction With Online Misinformation
Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says
Public Relations & Organizational Communication [LinkedIn post by Bob Pickard]
Social Bots as Agenda-Builders: Evaluating the Impact of Algorithmic Amplification on Organizational Messaging

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Mastodon post by Eugen Rochko (@Gargron) — mastodon.social
Mastodon — Decentralized social media
How to Generate a WordPress Theme with Telex
Telex — AI-Assisted Authoring Environment for WordPress
WordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts, and more
Your AI agent can now create, edit, and manage content on WordPress.com
Enable MCP tool access for AI agents
WordPress.com MCP prompt examples

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Forum Immediate Release podcast, long form episode for March, 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: As ever, we have six great stories to discuss and share with you, and we hope you’ll gain insight and enjoyment from our discussion. Perhaps you’ll want to share a comment with us once you’ve had a listen. We’d like that.

Our topics this month range from AI in the end of the billable hour to Gartner’s predictions about PR budgets to monitoring work in the age of AI to newsrooms battling AI generated misinformation and more, including Dan York’s tech reports. Before we get into our discussion, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some list of comments in the long form.

In episode 502 for February, published on the 23rd of that month, we explored how rapidly accelerating technology is reshaping the communication profession from autonomous agents with attitudes to the evolving ROI of podcasting. We led with a chilling milestone moment, an autonomous AI coding agent that publicly shamed a human developer after he rejected its code contribution.

A leader can build goodwill for days and lose it in seconds. In FIR 503 on the 2nd of March, we reported on the president of the IOC, that’s the International Olympic Committee, who had no answers to reporters’ questions and suggested on camera that someone on her communications team should be fired. We got comment on this, haven’t we, Shel?

Shel: Boy, do we have comments on this one. This attracted a good number of them, starting with Kevin Anselmo, who used to have a podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. It was on higher education communication. He says, having previously worked in communications for two different international sport federations, I found this story quite amusing. One of my first PR roles was working at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. I was working on the sport federation side, not the IOC.

Neville: Yep, you did.

Shel: But I know that working at such events is exhilarating and exhausting as you have to deal with a myriad of different issues. I can imagine that toward the end of the Olympics, the PR team fell short of delivering a robust brief. But nevertheless, in answer to your question, even if the PR people were abysmal, the fault is on Coventry for the way she handled the situation. A simple, we will have to look into this and get back to you response would have worked.

Instead, by handling it the way she did, she drew unnecessary attention to the questions she and the team weren’t prepared to answer, as you and Neville shared. I guess in the process of this mishap, I learned that Germany was in the running for the 2036 Olympics, which I wasn’t aware of. We also heard from Monique Zitnick, who said, really enjoyed your discussion on this. Certainly a puzzling situation that has surely ended in broken trust on both sides.

Shel: Mike Klein said, another ignominious IOC leader in the mold of Brundage and Samaranch. Neville, you replied. You said that’s an interesting comparison. Mike, Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio Samaranch both left very complicated legacies, particularly around politics and governance in the Olympic movement. What struck me about this episode wasn’t so much ideology or policy. It was leadership under pressure.

Coventry had actually received a fair amount of praise for how she handled some difficult moments during the games, which makes the press conference moment even more interesting from a communication perspective. It’s a reminder that reputation capital can be fragile. A single public moment can reshape the narrative very quickly. Mike replied, yes, leadership under pressure, but also the kind of people the IOC has chosen for leadership over the years.

Coventry has a complicated history over her involvement with her native Zimbabwe’s recent regimes as well. Sylvia Camby said, Neville, watching Coventry’s press conference took me back to the time I spent doing comms for an international association. It reminded me of how inward-looking organizations like the IOC can be. So totally focused on their internal member politics with leaders too lazy or too overconfident to bother to educate themselves about current affairs.

Also, they often have a distorted idea of what the press is interested in. They often think they can dictate their agenda. As you and Shel mentioned on the podcast, the questions were entirely predictable. You replied, Neville, that’s a really insightful observation, Sylvia. Organizations like the IOC can become quite inward facing, particularly when so much of their energy is spent navigating internal governance and member politics. That can create a kind of blind spot about how issues look from the outside.

Sylvia said, and I was thinking, I’m proud of Germany for being so sensitive about the significance of that date and for opposing the 2036 bid. They are much better at reading the spirit of the time than Coventry. As an aside, my father’s cousin competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a gymnast. She passed away last year at the age of 104.

She often spoke to me of the atmosphere surrounding the Olympics at the time, a heaviness and a sense of unspeakable doom. So yes, 2036 is a date that Berlin should definitely avoid. And you replied to that, Neville. People can go find that one in the comments.

Neville: That’s a good one. There are some great points of view, perspectives there. So thanks to everyone who commented. Are companies using AI as a convenient explanation for layoffs? That was a question we asked in FIR 504 on the 10th of March when we discussed AI washing, when organizations blame workforce cuts on AI, even when the reality is more complicated. It’s a difficult ethical space for communicators. And we have comment on this too, don’t we?

Shel: Three short ones. First from Monique, who commented that she was looking forward to listening to the episode because she’s been having a lot of conversations on this over the last month. Jacqueline Trzezinski said, I’m glad you’re delving into this. The same thought came to my mind when I saw the Block layoff announcement, especially as it was held up by some on LinkedIn as an example of how valuable transparency is during layoffs.

And Jesper Anderson said, I find it fascinating how quickly the world turns upside down. 18 to 24 months ago, companies were accused of letting people go because of AI and not admitting that this was the true reason.

Neville: Good perspective, Jesper, that one. Is social media still social? In FIR 505 on the 17th of March, we explored Hootsuite’s 2026 Social Media Trends Report, addressing social search, AI versus authenticity and more. Plus a darker question: what if AI starts to dominate the conversation? And we have comment, don’t we?

Shel: Yes, from Zara Ramoutoho Akbar, and I sure hope I pronounced that right, apologies if I didn’t. She said, yes, it feels like socials are shifting from a channel to a trust system. And in that world, I would say that the employee and peer voices matter more than brand output. Are you seeing organizations lean into that yet or still treating social as a broadcast channel? And since Zara asked the question, Neville, what do you think? Are you seeing this change?

Neville: No, I’m not, to be honest, but maybe it’s taking its time. There is something afoot without any doubt. And I think it’s something that we should expect. And that darker question is a valid one to put forward, let’s say. And we’ll keep our eyes and ears open, I think.

Shel: Yeah, I haven’t seen it much either, but I do think that there are organizations that are talking about it. So as you say, we may see this start to change in the months ahead. We have one more comment from Dolores Holtz. No relation. I for one certainly rely on people whom I trust more than any name or brand.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. Fair enough.

Shel: I think that covers our previous episodes up to this one.

Neville: Yeah, good, good comments all over from all those episodes. And thanks everyone for listening and adding your comments to that conversation. It’s really terrific.

Shel: Yeah, keep those coming and ask us questions because that was great from Zara. Also up on the FIR Podcast Network right now is the latest Circle of Fellows. It was a good conversation on the communication issues and challenges in this age of grievance and isolation into basically tribes these days.

Shel: This was Priya Bates, Alice Brink, Jane Mitchell, and Jennifer Wah were the panelists on this Circle of Fellows. As I say, it was really a terrific conversation. The next one is coming up on March 26th, Thursday at noon Eastern time. It’s on crisis communications and especially this idea of the polycrisis, which we heard about from our friend, Philippe Borremans.

The panelists for that Circle of Fellows will be Ned Lundquist, Robin McCaslin, George McGrath, and Carolyn Sapriel. Should be a good crisis-focused conversation. And of course, if you can’t make it at noon on Thursday, it will be available as a Circle of Fellows podcast and the video will be up on the FIR Podcast Network.

Neville: While we’re talking about IABC, let me briefly mention that Sylvia Camby and I hosted a webinar for IABC as part of IABC Ethics Month in February about ethics and AI. We’re actually going to…

Shel: I attended and it was terrific. I was there. It was a great webinar.

Neville: Well, thanks, Shel. That’s great. And we’ve actually had a nice review from someone, which was very pleasing. We’re going to repeat this, specifically for IABC members in the Asia-Pacific region. So if you’re in Australia, India, China, Japan, and maybe right out into the Pacific area, this one’s for you. It’s members only.

The event is AI Ethics and the Responsibility of Communicators. It explores the challenges and responsibilities communicators face when introducing AI, including transparency and trust, stakeholder accountability, and human oversight. It’s on Wednesday, the 15th of April at 6 PM Sydney time. That’s AEST, as I discovered, Australian Eastern Standard Time. You’re no longer on daylight savings in Australia, whereas we are by the time we do this. So 6 PM in Sydney, or 8 AM UTC. That’s Coordinated Universal Time or GMT if you’re used to that one. For me, I’m in the UK, so it translates into 9 AM UK time. But 6 PM in Sydney and that sort of time zone area is the important bit. So we look forward to seeing you there.

Shel: 1 AM Pacific time, so I won’t be participating in this one.

Neville: If you’re up, you could join. OK. So IABC will be letting members know about where to go and register, et cetera, I’m sure in the coming days. So just mark your diary in the meantime. Wednesday, 15th of April, 6 PM Sydney time. And let’s get on with things. But first, there’s this.

Shel: I won’t be.

Neville: Right, let’s start with a statement that will make a lot of people in professional services sit up a bit. Anthropic’s top lawyer Jeff Blick says AI is going to destroy the billable hour. That’s of interest to you if you’re a consultant in particular. Blick argues that AI is removing the need for what he calls tedious but lucrative work, the kind of work that firms have historically billed by the hour. And that matters because the billable hour isn’t just a pricing model.

It’s the foundation of how entire professions have operated for decades. But here’s the tension he highlights. Clients want problems solved quickly and efficiently, while the billable hour rewards the opposite: more time, more revenue. AI sharpens that contradiction because now tasks that once took days or weeks can be done in minutes. And that raises a very simple, very uncomfortable question for clients: if the work takes less time, why am I still paying for all those hours?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot myself recently. I wrote about this in Strategic Magazine a few months ago, where I argued that AI isn’t killing consultants, but it’s killing the logic of the billable hour. Because the model has always had flaws: it rewards activity over impact. It prices effort rather than outcomes. And as soon as technology compresses effort, the model starts to look outdated. What’s changing now is not just efficiency, it’s expectations.

Clients aren’t necessarily looking to pay less. They’re looking for clarity, predictability, and above all, value that reflects results, not time spent. So we’re starting to see a shift from billing hours to pricing outcomes, from selling labor to selling judgment. And that sounds straightforward, but it opens up some deeper questions. If AI removes the entry-level repetitive work, how do people develop the judgment that clients are now paying for?

If you move away from time-based billing, how do you actually define and defend value? And perhaps most importantly, are firms really ready to let go of a model that has defined their economics for generations? I think what this really points to is a shift in what clients are buying: not time, but judgment; not effort, but outcomes. And the firms that recognize that early will have a very different advantage from those that don’t.

Shel: Well, if AI drives the end of the billable hour, all I will be able to say is it’s about time and thank God something did it. I have never been a fan of billable hours in communication consulting. I can see it in other lines of work. I mean, plumbers bill by the hour, electricians, people who work with their hands tend to bill by the hour, although interestingly, auto mechanics often do not. It’s the labor required to do this particular thing is worth this amount of money. And then there are the parts that you have to pay for.

But the question is, if the model of billable hours goes away in the public relations and communication industry, what do we replace it with? And I know we have talked about this in the past, but it has been a while.

But I remember when I worked — we have both operated in the billable hour environment. And when I was at Mercer, Mark Schuman was also at Mercer. I think he was in their Houston office and he came up and met with the comms consultants in Los Angeles. And he was talking about the value add. And I objected to this. I said, I have a billable hour based on my value and what it takes to cover overhead and make a profit. I think my billable hour when I left Alexander and Alexander was something like $385 an hour. And that should cover everything. Why are we adding something and just calling it value add?

And what Mark said was, if I have an idea in the shower and it took me 30 seconds for that idea to spark and yet it informs the entire engagement with the client and solves a problem and is based on my decades of experience and everything that I have learned — is that really worth only the 15 cents that that 30 seconds would be valued at under the billable rate? That’s ridiculous. The more I thought about it, the more I thought he’s right. That is ridiculous. So why aren’t we billing based on the value of the project?

Now, you can say here’s how many hours it’s going to take to complete that project and use that as a basis to come up with a price to give a client. Or you can look at other things. I think I mentioned on a show several years ago that Craig Jolly and I proposed a communications program for Coca-Cola for a department that was eliminated before we could come to a final agreement because they had actually agreed to this.

And what we were going to be paid for our effort was absolutely nothing. We were not going to bill them for hours. We were not going to bill them for the value of the project, but they were going to track the outcomes of the work that we did. And they were going to pay us 5% of the savings that accrued as a result of what we did and 5% of the profits that accrued based on what we did. And we had a formula for that. We would have made a fortune over, I think, the three years that we were going to get compensated after this project was complete.

There are other models out there that people can consider, but you’re right. I’m wondering when the clients are going to start saying, this is what I paid last time. Haven’t you started using AI? Why isn’t the drudge work that is part of this project taking less time and costing me less? I think we’re going to hear that from clients. So you better start thinking about the new models.

Neville: Yeah, it’s a sea change. It’s quite a significant change in structure to move from the billable hour. And one reason I believe nothing’s happened is there is definitely no groundswell of desire to change this from the people in organizations who would likely suffer most if it did change, or those who don’t.

And there are lots. I’m not picking out anyone in particular, but there are lots of people who just don’t like change. And we’ve been doing this for years. It works. Our whole business is based on this. And it probably is going to need, going to take a major client of a major consulting firm to say, hang on a second. We have a question for you about how you’re charging us. I’ve seen lots of chats about this, Shel, and I’m sure you have. And yet nothing’s happened.

So I wrote a lengthy analysis on my own blog not long ago, and that hardly got any attention at all. The story in Strategic I wrote was quite heavily researched, but I’ve not really seen much, any real traction on that other than some folks who said to me, hey, nice article you wrote in Strategic. I’d rather hear them say, I didn’t like it, here’s why, or I got a better idea, or whatever. Get a conversation going about it.

One thing I think should stimulate a discussion is, and this could be something we’ve got to force on people: look at it from the point of view of the client, not the consultant. And by the way, all these other examples you gave, like plumbers and all that, are absolutely right. So this discussion is specifically about professional services and consulting, not auto mechanics and plumbers and stuff like that.

So think about this: clients aren’t buying less, they’re buying differently. That’s the thing. I’ve had conversations with people — I have to admit, I struggled, truly seriously struggled to get the conversation actually with some energy to continue on why we should make this kind of change. So clients aren’t buying less, they’re buying differently. And one thing I wrote in the Strategic piece was talking about what their expectations are from the people that advise them, the consultants they work with. Today, they expect advisors who: one, use AI to scan signals and surface insights; bring sharper data-informed recommendations; and help avoid ethical, legal, and reputation missteps. Three major things they expect from people. AI has a role in all of them.

I think we need to move away and we can take the initiative on this to change the conversation with clients to this as opposed to, well, draft that report for the clients and AI can do all the research and so forth. When clients ask, why am I paying for all this time? You could pitch that to them in the sense that this is the value of the briefing we give to the AI. I think that is a demolishable argument over time. Clients are like you and me, they’re people, they’re not stupid. They’re looking at this themselves, many of them.

That said, there are many clients, particularly the more you get to the enterprise level and those kind of consulting firms at that level, who really don’t have much desire to rock the boat at all with all of this. It’s very entrenched, it’s ingrained. Everyone’s making money and it’s all wonderful and business gets done. And it’s going to need something to make a major shift here.

So I think we should take the initiative as communicators to do this. And it could be someone in a consulting firm — like you, I worked for Mercer and I remember back in the early ’90s, not discussions about changing the business model, but the value add. So maybe this is a Mercer thing at that time, perhaps. We need to have that conversation now. And we need someone at a senior level with an influential voice to raise this internally in their organization and run some internal webinars or seminars or get-togethers to talk about why we need to change the business model and why the billable hour has to end as the basis for business. But it’s a big task, I would say.

Shel: One of the truths about the public relations industry is that it takes pain for the industry to change. I mean, we’ve seen this. We’ve been doing this show for 21 years and we’ve seen it with a number of major technologies that have come along that the PR industry has been very, very, very slow to adopt. And what ultimately got them to adopt the web and social media was seeing work taken away from them by boutiques who were offering those services. And as soon as they saw money left on the table, they said, we’d better figure this out because this is something that we should be doing. They figured it out and now they’re using it regularly.

You’re absolutely right that we in the industry have experience and insights that allow us to do things like create the appropriate prompt to get the right result for a public relations issue or campaign or what have you. And it goes far beyond the prompt. It goes into creating documents that become foundational to a project within one of the LLMs. It even gets into agents now. What if we set up an agent on behalf of a client that is out there looking for competitive information on a regular basis? And it took, let’s say, 15 hours to create this agent so that it was producing the kind of daily or hourly reports that we’re looking for. And those become a big part of the project. It’s operating while we sleep. We can’t charge for that. Certainly it’s not going to be on an hourly basis.

So a formula has to emerge for these types of things that allows agencies to be compensated in a way that keeps the lights on, provides the salaries to the consultants who work there, and earns a reasonable profit without having to bill hours because it just makes less and less sense. And as I say, I didn’t think it made sense back in the ’80s when I was working for Mercer, my first consulting gig.

You remember maintaining your time sheet in 10-minute increments? Oh my God. Who’s going to pay me for that? Who do I bill for the time that I spend maintaining a time sheet in 10-minute increments? I mean, come on.

Neville: Don’t remind me, please. I tried to get away with entering time in the timesheet for the time I had to spend on doing the timesheet. They didn’t let me get away with that. No.

Shel: They didn’t buy that. My brother’s an attorney, and when he was working for a law firm — he’s corporate side now — but he remembered if he took a pencil out of the supply cabinet, he had to bill that to a client. So I mean, the time that he was spending billing things to clients was time that he wasn’t spending on client work. There are countless reasons why the billable hour needs to die. I don’t mind the consultant having a billable hour rate as a base for calculating something, but it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of what the client is billed. There needs to be a formula where you say this is what the project is going to cost. And if the project moves out of the scope that you agreed to, then you go back to the client and say, we’re outside the scope. We’re going to have to charge more for that. Here’s what we’re going to charge. You okay with that before we start moving on this stuff that you’ve requested that is out of scope?

Neville: Yeah, no, we need to get some movement going on this topic, I think. And maybe that’s something — thinking about IABC, you know, some kind of talk on this topic needs to happen.

Shel: Yeah. Or, you know how Ann Handley sold the T-shirt that said Justice for the Em Dash? I bought one. We need T-shirts that say Kill the Billable Hour with the FIR logo on it. Would anybody buy that? Let us know. We’ll pursue it. I’ll find out where Ann had her shirts made.

Neville: Yeah, I like that idea. I like it. Excellent.

Shel: If you work in public relations, you’ve probably seen the prediction that’s making the rounds right now. It sounds too good to be true. Gartner, the analyst firm whose pronouncements tend to get circulated in agency pitch decks for years, Gartner has declared that by next year, 2027, the mass adoption of artificial intelligence and large language models as a replacement for traditional search will drive a doubling of PR and earned media budgets.

Now, what would drive this surge in PR spending, you ask? Well, AI answer engines overwhelmingly favor non-paid sources. More than 95% of links referenced in AI-generated answers come from earned, shared, and organic owned content, with 27% originating directly from earned media. So if AI is where people increasingly go for information — and by the way, the data on that is striking; ChatGPT saw traffic surge 608% year over year between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, while traditional search giants Google and Bing both slipped — well, then earned media becomes the engine of discoverability. And that, the argument goes, means organizations will pour money into PR to stay visible.

Now, I want to be honest about the source here, because Stuart Bruce, someone whose thinking you and I have always admired and respected, Neville — Stuart has pointed out that this prediction originated in a blog post published by Gartner as part of a lead generation campaign promoting a webinar for chief communication officers, and that while it carries the authority of the Gartner brand, it lacks the evidence normally associated with their research publications.

Frank Strong over at the Sword and the Script notes similarly that the prediction feels rushed. 2027 is barely more than eight months away and the path from “AI favors earned media” to “budgets actually double” is pretty far from certain. But I’m cautiously optimistic because the underlying logic is sound.

If AI systems favor credible third-party sources and PR is the function best equipped to generate that kind of coverage, well then yeah, our work becomes more strategically important. But a Gartner webinar promo is not a Gartner research report, and we should resist the temptation to tout this prediction as if it were settled fact.

Here’s what I actually want to talk about though. Let’s say the prediction is right. Let’s say the prediction is half right. Let’s just say budgets grow substantially. What happens to that money? Because there’s a pattern in this industry that I think we need to name directly. When good fortune arrives — a new platform, a new capability, a shift in the media landscape — agencies have historically been better at capturing the upside than at reinvesting in the profession. More revenue has meant more of the same: more accounts, more billable hours, more senior hires, not more rethinking.

And right now, in the age of AI, there are two investments that I think agencies have an obligation to make if this windfall arrives. The first is genuinely rethinking the agency model in light of AI — not just adding a chatbot to the workflow, but asking the hard questions about what services still require human judgment, where AI can amplify capacity, and how to build new offerings around answer engine optimization. And by the way, a new billing model.

Stuart Bruce notes that Gartner explicitly rejects the efforts of SEO and marketing companies to pivot into this space, recognizing that answer engine optimization requires communication-specific skills to balance stakeholder trust and platform requirements. That’s an opening for PR, but only if agencies actually build those capabilities rather than outsourcing them to MarTech vendors.

The second investment, and this one matters a lot to me, is in rebuilding entry-level pathways into the profession. AI has already been eroding the grunt work that used to serve as the training ground for new communicators. As one analysis put it, the traditional deal of entry-level work — trading rote labor for mentorship — that’s dying. The learning curve is being automated, leaving early-career professionals stranded between AI agents and senior incumbents.

If PR budgets double, agencies will have the resources to do something about this. They could create structured apprenticeship programs. They could invest in training that teaches new communicators not just to use AI tools, but to supervise and interrogate them. They could build the next generation of practitioners rather than simply eliminating the entry points.

What I fear, and what I think is entirely possible, is that agencies will look at this budget doubling as a margin opportunity rather than a reinvestment opportunity. More revenue, leaner teams, higher profits. And five years from now, we’ll be asking where the next generation of PR professionals are going to come from.

So yeah, the Gartner prediction may well be right. AI does appear to favor the kind of credible third-party earned coverage that PR generates. And that’s genuinely good news for the profession. But good news is only useful if you do something smart with it. Neville, you’ve been watching the agency landscape in the UK and Europe for a long time. When you see a prediction like this, do you believe it? And what’s your read on whether the industry will rise to the moment or just cash the check?

Neville: I must admit, I did say when I saw the article, I don’t believe it. British TV viewers might recognize that phrase from a comedy show 20 years ago. I did follow a lot of what people were saying, and all I saw was bubble, bubble, bubble, hype. I didn’t see anything. What I saw was missing, meaning this was a marketing claim, as you mentioned, and Stuart Bruce wrote about that, and others have too, just pointing out this was a blog post from Gartner. There’s no data to back up any of it. There’s nothing cited. There’s nothing you could trust to prove or to give you confidence in repeating it. Yet that’s what everyone has been doing, repeating this as fact.

The particular phrase that was repeated by Gartner and then mass repeated: by 2027, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets. But there’s no evidence behind that. Yet what we saw was mass repetition all over, LinkedIn in particular.

I did read a worth-reading article by Stephen Waddington published on the 16th of March on his blog about this topic. And he’s critical. And I think his starting line is “when industry optimism outruns the evidence,” and therein is where we’re at with this. I’ve seen sensible voices — you, Stuart, another one — who are saying that if this is true, then this is what it could mean, this is what could happen. But it’s like a lot of things we see: the maybe, perhaps, could, etc. is kind of brushed under the carpet, where suddenly before you know it, this is what’s going to be happening.

So I’ve not seen a huge amount of conversation about this, to be honest, except when this first appeared. That said, today I saw two posts on LinkedIn from people repeating this who obviously just came across the Gartner piece and they’ve reposted it.

Shel: The long tail lives.

Neville: Exactly. So Stephen goes into — he makes a point in his post about GEO, and I think that’s actually contextually good. He’s saying Gartner’s observation may ultimately prove correct. But the path from the insight to a doubling of budgets is far from certain. He says, GEO remains highly contested. I’ve seen others saying that too. The mechanics of how AI models select, weight, and attribute sources are still evolving. This is an era where budgets are being directed to support discovery work.

So what needs to happen instead, he says, is a call to action, I suppose, to communicators. When you see this claim being made, please challenge the argument. And if we aren’t set to see a boom in public relations work, some of that investment will need to be diverted to ensure the sustainability of earned media. And that, to me, is a very sensible point to make.

All of this is probably and in fact certainly is why I didn’t post about this on my blog. When I saw it, I was attracted to it thinking, this could be an interesting topic to stimulate some attention. Then I read it and started seeing others like Stuart saying, wait a minute. So I thought, no, I’m not going to join a hype bandwagon here without some further research. Therefore, it didn’t appear compelling enough to me to spend the time on it. Let’s see what emerges further from this, if anything. But like you said, Shel, if this turns out to be true, then happy days.

Shel: Yeah, I doubt it myself. I think what we’re going to see is an incremental increase in PR spending as a result of this. And that’s going to be because we’re not going to see some mass revelation at the same time among all industry that, my God, we need to invest more in earned media so that we’re visible in search results that are now happening on LLMs instead of search engines. This is going to be gradual.

One company is going to pick up on it, then another. But what I have seen ongoing, regularly, are new reports, new studies, new research coming out. It all validates that LLMs are in fact generating their search results based largely on earned media. And I think as people wake up to that and realize that if we want to be present in those results — it’s like showing up on the first page of Google search results — we want to be in the answer when somebody asks a question where our expertise, our thought leadership is relevant. Then you need to bolster your earned media.

One of the things that worries me though about this bolstering of earned media is how many more press release pitches am I going to get? How many more press releases that have nothing to do with me or what I do are going to show up in my inbox? You’re going to see reporters pitched way more than they’re being pitched now. And there may be some blowback from this as a result of that. It’s like, hey, PR industry, back off — too much. So there’s also that to consider.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. So don’t believe everything you read online is a simple thing here, and take time to pay close attention to what people are saying about this before you repeat anything. Just be clear in your mind.

Shel: Yeah, I was also going to say that I think owned media, the stuff that you produce on your own website — I think a renewed emphasis on that. So you’re producing really interesting stuff that people start looking at. That counts, too. That’s one of the categories of media that was included in this research. So you don’t have to rely on earned media all that much if you can do a great job of producing that content.

Neville: Good tip. OK, so earlier we talked about how work is priced. That was our piece about the billable hour. Now let’s consider how work is measured, because there’s another story that feels connected but from a different angle. The Financial Times reported that JP Morgan has started using technology to check whether the hours junior bankers say they work actually match their digital activity — things like keystrokes, meetings, and video calls. The bank says this is about well-being, about awareness, not enforcement, about making sure people aren’t overworked. And on the surface, that sounds reasonable.

But when you look a bit closer, it raises some uncomfortable questions. What’s really happening here is a shift from reported work to observed work. Not what you say you did, but what the system can verify. And that’s where the reaction gets interesting.

If you look at the comments on the FT’s post about this, there’s a very clear pattern. Some people see this as logical, almost inevitable. In a data-driven industry, of course you measure activity more precisely. But a lot of the reaction is skeptical, even uneasy. You see comments like, “this really screams we trust our employees.” “This is a classic case of measuring what’s easy instead of what matters.” “Big Brother is watching you.”

And then there’s a more nuanced point that comes up repeatedly. Does this actually improve anything, or does it just change behavior? Because if people know they’re being measured on activity, they optimize for activity. More keystrokes, more visible presence, more signals that look like work — but not necessarily better outcomes.

And that connects directly to the earlier discussion about billing. If AI is automating more of the actual work — the analysis, the modeling, the drafting — then what exactly are we measuring here? Time, activity, presence, or value?

There’s also a deeper cultural question. Investment banking has long had a reputation for extreme hours. JP Morgan has already tried to address that, capping weeks at 80 hours, for example. 80-hour weeks. The days of 40-hour weeks are a distant memory, obviously. But if people were underreporting hours to stay on deals, then the issue isn’t just measurement — it’s incentives, it’s culture. Technology can surface that, but it doesn’t resolve it.

So this opens up some bigger questions. Are we moving towards a world where all knowledge work is continuously monitored and verified? Does that improve trust or undermine it? And if both pricing and measurement are shifting at the same time, what does a fair day’s work even mean anymore?

Shel: Absolutely. One of the things we keep hearing about AI is organizations are going to have to rethink things like workflows. And we’re talking about organizations that are not going to look at all in five years the way they do today because of AI. Are people thinking that it’s going to take 40 hours for somebody to do today what it took them to do before if all of that grunt work is being taken over by AI?

On the other hand, I have seen that AI has increased the number of hours people are spending on their jobs. There’s some very recently released data on that, that they are more stressed now with AI in the picture. And if you’re putting in more hours, is this really an issue?

I’m also always struck by, as you mentioned in the report, the lack of trust, the signal of the lack of trust that this sends. I’ve always felt that the availability of these tools that allow this kind of monitoring raises the question of, you know, just because you can, should you? And yeah, I don’t think that you should. I think there are better ways to determine whether your people are working, and looking at their outputs is the best of those. Have they delivered what you expected them to deliver?

Because when you destroy the trust that you might have had, or perhaps you never had trust in your organization in the first place, if you have new hires who come in and find that they are being monitored in this way, they’re just inclined to find ways to cheat. I saved an article in my link blog not too long ago from the HR Digest about key jamming.

The point on this was that if you have employees who are doing this, you have a bigger issue. But if you haven’t heard of key jamming, this is easily available products that remote workers use by putting them on their keyboards and it continually presses the key. So it looks to the software that’s monitoring like that keyboard is active, that employee is working these hours. They could be off doing whatever they want.

I imagine that there are some keystroke monitoring software that have been updated to address this and want to make sure that they’re typing real words or real numbers and not just repetitively striking the same key. But then employees will figure out the next thing, or the companies that sell these products will figure out the next thing to make it appear that the employee is working.

Better to build trust so that the employees will want to produce great work for the organization that they love working for than to destroy trust and implement these kinds of monitoring tools.

Neville: So it’s interesting. JP Morgan is quite resolute in their defense of this, because as they say, they’re doing this to help junior employees not overwork. There was a case here where an intern at the Bank of America died in 2013, which the coroner said was linked to long working hours. And the anecdotal stuff has emerged constantly since then on people who are totally wrecked emotionally because of the hours they’ve got to work.

To be fair to JP Morgan, they’ve responded to that at scale in the organization. The trouble is that nearly every comment I see that has commented on this is extremely skeptical about their true motive. So they’ve got a credibility problem to explain this well. They talk about this is about awareness, not enforcement, they say in their prepared statement. It’s designed to support transparency, well-being, and encourage open conversations about workload. They’re going to roll it out much more widely across their organization.

The estimate is based on employees’ weekly digital footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings. So people being people, and the thrust of part of the article is what some of these junior employees are doing to kind of be counted and get the checkbox that you’re doing okay to enable them to spend time on the deals that they’re trying to close. Whereas if they did this to the letter and reduced the hours, they wouldn’t be able to close the deal. So I get that. So they’ll find ways to work around this.

And I think, is this inevitably what we could expect to see in every organization? Or surely the organization should approach this in a way that presents something to the employees that doesn’t encourage workarounds to get around these kinds of things. I don’t know. My sense is that we’re going to see a huge amount more of this kind of thing in service industry firms in particular, starting with banks, I suspect.

Shel: I hope not. I mean, let’s take them at their word. Let’s say that this is their solution of having Big Brother looking over employees’ shoulders for the employees’ benefit. Like I said, let’s take them at their word. They don’t want employees overworking because they don’t want them dropping dead at their desks. Great. That’s a great thing.

You do that by having well-trained managers who understand that their role is to set expectations and to display the kind of caring for the members of their teams that leads them to make sure that they’re not overworking. Where I work, we are working really hard in communications, in HR, and at the executive levels to develop this culture of managing where managers are checking in on employees to make sure they’re okay. We’re training managers on watching for signs of mental wellness distress among employees and then reaching out to them to say, hey, let’s take care of this, right?

It sounds to me like JP Morgan would rather implement a Big Brother program than to have engaging managers, one of the pillars of employee engagement, I might add. Why do people leave organizations? 50%, according to some research, leave because of their boss. And you know, if you have this churn among your junior people, maybe that’s because you’re doing a piss-poor job of training your managers to be really good managers. And if you did that, you wouldn’t need to erode the trust of your employee base by implementing Big Brother systems.

Neville: That makes total sense. I agree with you. But I’m wondering, maybe there’s something structurally amiss here. So for instance, the FT says in 2024, JP Morgan appointed a senior banker to oversee the well-being of junior staff. JP Morgan has since curtailed weekend work and also capped the working week for younger employees at 80 hours, typically based on self-reported numbers. That’s key, that last bit.

This process has proved imperfect as some junior bankers misreport the hours they work. One issue is they declare fewer hours than they have actually spent to avoid being pulled from existing deals or to ensure they can still be added to new ones. So I would say, if we kind of know this kind of behavior is going on, what are we going to do to address it and try and bring them around to our thinking? But that requires structural change in the organization as to how you do all this.

Shel: I have an answer. If AI is saving you money, use that money to hire more junior people so that nobody has to put in that kind of time. So staffing should increase as a result of the use of AI, not decrease, says I.

Neville: Are you listening, JP Morgan? Well, yeah, no, that’s a fair comment. I think just reading a bit more about the FT piece, it focuses on the tech workplace surveillance technologies. So not necessarily AI doing this, although it must be in there somewhere.

Shel: No, no, I understand. But if we’re using AI in the organization and it’s lowering costs because the rote work is being done by the AI, those savings could go to the additional staff. So nobody has to put in 80 hours.

Neville: Yeah. Well, I think it’s a problem across the sector because the FT quotes Goldman Sachs, for instance: junior bankers on occasion have been pulled aside and told to rest when its internal electronic monitoring was triggered. Get that. That’s how they’re watching all the time.

I think the comment someone made on the FT’s piece about, you know, we’re going to see more of this — I think we will. It is clearly not perfect. I’m reminded a little of some of the stuff I paid a lot of attention to a couple of years ago about surveillance in China and the surveillance society in China, where you are monitored constantly all the time by the state. And it doesn’t necessarily mean central government, but the local way you live — the town, the city — monitors everything you do: what you spend your money on, what time you get up, what time you get on the train to go to work, how you clock in, you swipe your card — all that.

That’s something as part of their society and structure. We are probably heading that way, I would argue, in Western countries, notably in Europe, some European countries. I don’t know about the States, Shel, to be honest. I don’t really know whether this is likely to be kind of prevalent anytime soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is, particularly if it’s going to be done covertly as opposed to openly and transparently, which I think is likely in America.

Shel: Well, mass surveillance has definitely been in the news in the US lately with Anthropic pushing back on the Pentagon’s insistence that they be able to use Claude for that.

Neville: Yeah, I mean, we’ve got experiments going on here which make the headlines now and again, although no one seems to be unduly concerned, which is the police in some jurisdictions are trialing more facial recognition technology that is now far superior to what’s been done before, that scans people as a matter of course in any public place. That, I would say, is an inevitability. We’re going to see that.

So what does that mean for organizations? I mean, that’s a broad avenue to go down, the discussion on that wide topic. But in an organization, it surely does become understandable, if not acceptable, that when you show up at the office to work — and by the way, that’s still a thing for many organizations, even though I’m now seeing in all the newspapers here that because of the war in Iran and the price of oil shooting up and all this stuff, there’s now talk about one way you can help to reduce energy usage is work from home and drive less and drive slower.

So that kind of talk is now starting to permeate public discourse. So I wonder what difference that will make to any of this, because if we’re to see more and more people want to work at home, that’s reversing. Are we going to see a backlash from employers who demand people come to the office? I mean, these are just questions. I don’t have answers for those, but it’s part of the picture. We are facing this kind of change that has good points, I can see quite clearly, but it’s alarming the state we’re at with all of this.

Shel: Yeah, just for a point of interest, yesterday I watched a video on YouTube. It was Senator Bernie Sanders talking to Claude. This is on YouTube. I’ll share the link in the show notes. He’s asking Claude questions about what AI can do in terms of this kind of surveillance, its monitoring of people. And Claude is very, very candid in its answers to Senator Sanders. It’s about 11 minutes. I think it’s really worth watching because it surfaces a lot of these issues, and as a society, I think we have to decide whether this is something we want in the workplace or in general.

Neville: I agree. That’s interesting.

Shel: Well, thank you, Dan. Great report. I have to admit that I have been neglecting my Mastodon instance. It’s called Mastocomm, C-O-M-M, for communications. I set it up when I figured that it was an easy thing to do and a great way to learn about how to establish an instance in the Fediverse. And I haven’t been taking care of it lately. And Dan, your report has inspired me to go back. I’ve been away so long, it wanted me to log in.

But it’s still there. It’s still up and running, which means I still have money coming out of my checking account every month to pay the fee to the service I use to host it. So as long as I’m spending the money, I might as well manage that. So thanks for the reminder, Dan.

Neville: Yeah, good report on that. I’ve not listened to your audio yet. But thinking about Mastodon, I don’t go directly to Mastodon. I haven’t been there this year. What I do is every time I post on Threads, it posts to the Fediverse. And so I do it that way. It’s cheating a bit because I’m not actually engaging with anyone there at all. But I get quite a steady stream of engagement back, people who like and so forth. And I do occasionally do the same myself via Threads. So it’s a lazy approach to doing it. But I’m okay with that because I’m present via Threads and that works well. And it’s a useful way of keeping in touch. If Threads is more likely to be your primary engagement channel rather than Mastodon, that’ll work quite well.

Shel: If anybody’s interested in joining the Fediverse and being part of a Mastodon instance that is focused on communication, join me: mastocomm.org. I’ll look for you there.

Shel: A professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School recently made a point that deserves to be heard beyond the J-school world. Jason Davis, who specializes in detecting disinformation, said the challenge today isn’t really about spotting fakes anymore. The AI tools are so good now that there just isn’t much that we can catch. To break the misinformation amplification cycle, people need to apply critical thinking before they decide to pass something on.

Now that connects to something I’ve been watching closely, because the misinformation problem has moved well beyond being a journalism problem. It’s a business problem now, and that means it’s a communication problem. The scale is pretty significant. Deepfake incidents tracked globally surged from about 500,000 cases in 2023 to over 8 million last year. That’s a 900% increase in just two years. A recent executive survey found eight in 10 executives are concerned about AI-driven misinformation impacting their brand. Yet many admit their companies aren’t fully ready to detect or respond.

A University of Melbourne/KPMG global study of 48,000 people across 47 countries found 87% want stronger laws to combat AI-generated misinformation. And a survey found that fewer than four in 10 Americans say that they can confidently spot AI-generated content, and 88% say it’s harder now than a year ago to tell what’s real online.

So who’s fighting back and how? Sophisticated newsrooms — think the New York Times, Bellingcat, investigative outlets worldwide — are now using multi-layered verification: a combination of reverse image search, metadata analysis, and geolocation cross-referencing to authenticate content. Reporters are using AI itself as a detection tool, analyzing thousands of posts to detect bot behavior by identifying patterns in timing, repetition, and network activity.

Beyond individual newsrooms, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, that’s the C2PA, is building broader infrastructure. They’re backed by Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and others. With that backing, they’ve developed an open technical standard that functions like a nutrition label for digital content, establishing its origin and edit history. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency endorsed this approach in January last year. Adoption is still limited, but the standard exists and it’s worth watching.

There’s also a striking research finding from a field experiment with readers of the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Exposure to AI-driven misinformation reduced overall trust in news, but actually increased engagement with highly trusted sources. As synthetic content proliferates, credibility becomes scarcer, and as a result, becomes more valuable.

That finding has direct implications for us in organizational comms. A deepfake of your CEO, a fabricated press release, a manipulated earnings statement — these are no longer theoretical. A hacked news tweet in 2013 briefly erased $136 billion from the S&P 500. The tools to do something far more sophisticated are now consumer grade.

Deepfake fraud attempts grew by 3,000% in 2023, and humans detected manipulated media only 24.5% of the time. So practically: monitor for impersonation of your executives and brand. This belongs in your communications infrastructure. It’s not just an IT thing. Establish a verify-first culture inside your organization. Have pre-drafted response templates ready for the scenario where fake content goes viral under your or your organization’s name.

And invest in your organization’s credibility before a crisis arrives, because that research finding tells us audiences under information stress return to the sources they already trust. The newsrooms dealing with this are systematic. They document their processes and when they can’t definitively authenticate something, they say so. That’s the standard every comms team should hold itself to.

Neville, I know you’re watching all of this from across the Atlantic where the EU AI Act is pushing content labeling into requirements under law by August 2026. Are organizations taking this seriously? And is this regulatory pressure in Europe making any difference?

Neville: To your last point, I don’t think it’s making waves-type difference. Awareness is rising. I’m seeing more people talking about this topic online across Europe, here in the UK too. But I think it requires far more and more effective communication to bring the messaging home to people about this huge topic. So it’s early days.

We’ve got debate continuing here in this country about online safety and all these other issues that kind of obscure some of the important details such as this, for instance, that does require further debate. Things that I pay attention to certainly are the broad debates about all of this, but seeing what people are doing. You mentioned some examples in your introduction about some media broadcasters in particular, what they’re doing to verify the veracity of content. I saw an excellent article the other day about what Wikipedia is doing in this area, because there’s a place that’s at high risk of misinformation and disinformation.

But there’s no uniformity from what I’ve seen, certainly. There’s lots of homebrew solutions people are suggesting. There’s lots of good solutions some respected organizations are suggesting that you do, but there’s not a big groundswell of action on this yet, it seems to me. So I’d be interested myself even to hear what listeners in the UK and across EU countries have to say about what they’re seeing in this area. But I don’t see a huge amount of conversation going on about this.

Shel: And I’d really appreciate, listeners, if you’re in organizations that are doing anything to identify misinformation and to catch it before it’s used or even redistributed — what are you doing? How are you going about that? Is there any infrastructure for this that’s being implemented? I’d really like to know because I think this is going to become a bigger problem faster than most people are aware of.

Neville: Yeah, I mean, one thing I am seeing talk about that caught my attention quite dramatically is the amount of fake news in a broad sense, but misinformation, particularly about the war in Iran, the use of video that is simply fake. I’m also seeing the use of video that isn’t fake and being highlighted as the fact that it’s not fake.

The reality though is that like most things you encounter online, how do you really know? And what do you do if you see something you think, I’m going to share that with my network? What do you need to do before you do that? Most sensible people will take those precautionary steps, the most fundamental of which: how do you trust what you’ve seen? Is the source credible? Is it a reliable source? If it’s a media property, or even before that, who else is talking about this?

So these are things that I do as a matter of course now on almost everything I encounter online, particularly if I’m thinking of sharing it. I’ve yet to be caught out by not doing that. I make it a point, and partly it’s affected by the fact I’m doing less of that than I was before a couple of years ago, far less. I don’t post a lot on social networks, except stuff that I think is really interesting to share with people who follow me, or just because I feel like I want to share this because I think it’s interesting.

And that works. No other heavy message behind any of this stuff. But I do carry out due diligence. And I think I do it reasonably well because I’ve yet to be caught out. Now, of course, someone listening to this might say, well, let’s test him out on something then. OK, fine.

Shel: Now that we’ve heard you say this…

Neville: So, right. Go for it and do that. Let’s see how we go. But I think this is the status of where we’re at. The changes that are happening because of the events that are happening, and the fact that these euphemistic bad actors are increasing — there’s more and more of them. We have events taking place in the world now, note what’s going on in the Middle East, that lend themselves to more of this. You’ve got to really do your due diligence on things that you might not have felt you needed to before.

Shel: Yeah, and I think due diligence needs to go beyond the tools that can detect a deepfake. You’ve got to remember that people were sharing content that was disinformation before there was AI. So you run your algorithm, you put a video through a tool and it says, yep, this is real video, it’s not AI generated — but it’s claimed that that video is showing something from the Iran war when in fact the video was shot years ago during, say, the Iraq war, and somebody just grabbed that video clip and made the claim that this is from the current conflict. This happens all the time. It still happens today. It’s not from this weather event. That’s from that weather event five years ago.

So we have to be diligent and not just rely on the tools, and we have to come up with some solutions. I remember years ago when we reported it here, when blockchain was still a topic of conversation in digital circles, Ike Pigott had recommended a tool. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but as you shot video, it was recorded into the blockchain, which would authenticate its authenticity. And that became a way for people to see that it was genuine video and not manipulated somehow and not a deepfake — it was actually shot on a video camera and uploaded as a blockchain record in real time. So there are potential solutions out there. We need to get serious about implementing them in this profession.

Neville: Yeah, that’s a good example of the blockchain one, although that was pretty niche. That was pretty out on the edge, as it were. There were lots of things like that that just didn’t survive and disappeared. Things change, things evolve, and people are trying new things. I don’t mean bad guys, but in a good way. So let’s see how that goes. But you need to keep vigilant on all this.

And by the way, when I mentioned misinformation, I wasn’t thinking of deepfakes and that kind of thing. It’s more the fundamental stuff that crosses your screen every day or your newsfeed or whatever it might be, saying something that someone says something or someone has done something and it’s interesting and fine. Don’t trust it until you verify it. So if it’s on the BBC or CNN or any other broadcaster, you know, Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, the one you mentioned earlier, Shel — that’s a good bet that it’s OK.

But you know what? Some media recently have been caught out with fakes. So it still pays to do your own due diligence, particularly if that content is something you’re going to use in a way that could embarrass you if it turned out to be fake or simply wrong. So it’s worth doing. Most people think that they don’t have time to do that. You have to make the time. This is part of your future.

And AI has a role here. Arguably, you could say, well, I need to do this myself. No, you don’t really. Your favorite chatbot, if you trust it, it knows enough about you, and you can still verify stuff. It does the searching and finding the sources. You then check them. It can check them too, but you still have to do that. It just makes it easier for you to do that. You still want to do that work, by the way. There’s no magic bullet or shortcuts here. So it’s worth it. You learn a lot doing this, too. I’ve learned huge things from doing all this myself. And it’s been very, very useful.

Neville: So there we are. OK, let’s talk about bot traffic. In an interview at South by Southwest, literally a week or so back, with TechCrunch, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that by 2027 — so as you pointed out earlier, we’re eight months away basically — bot traffic will exceed human traffic on the internet. That’s not entirely new in principle. Bots have always been part of the web. But what he’s describing is a change in scale and function.

Now think about this: Cloudflare — I don’t have the exact number, but don’t they manage like 30% of all the traffic on the web that goes through some of their servers somewhere? They do caching. They do all sorts of interesting things with people’s data. I use it on my blogs. I’m sure we use it on the FIR network. I mean, it’s part of the plumbing of the internet now. And you might remember a month or so back, Cloudflare was all over the news because they were hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack or some such that took large chunks of the internet offline because people like Amazon and some of those big properties use Cloudflare too. So it’s quite something.

Anyway, historically bot traffic has been relatively stable, around 20%, largely driven by search engine crawlers. What’s changed is the impact of generative AI, said Prince. His point is that AI agents behave fundamentally differently from human users. A person researching a purchase might visit a handful of sites. An AI agent performing the same task might visit thousands of sites. This is not incremental growth. It’s a multiplier effect — not just more traffic, but a different kind of traffic.

That has consequences at three levels: infrastructure, economics, and behavior. First, infrastructure. If AI agents generate orders of magnitude more requests than humans, then the web becomes a system that increasingly serves machine activity. Prince talks about the need for new infrastructure, including ephemeral sandboxes where agents can execute tasks without overwhelming the broader network.

Second, economics. The commercial web has been built around human attention: visits, impressions, and clicks. If a growing share of traffic is non-human, that model doesn’t just weaken — it becomes misaligned with how the web is actually used.

Third, behavior. Prince characterizes this as a platform shift comparable to the move from desktop to mobile. If that’s right, then the way information is discovered, consumed, and acted upon changes fundamentally — and not necessarily by humans.

That raises a set of implications that go beyond infrastructure. If machines are increasingly intermediating access to information, then visibility is no longer just about being found by people. It’s about being processed, selected, and used by systems. This links back to the earlier themes. We talked about how AI changes what work is worth. We followed that with how AI changes what and how work is measured. Here, it’s changing the environment in which both of those things happen.

So this is less about traffic and more about control — who or what is actually navigating the web. Which leads to some important questions. If AI agents are doing more of the searching, what does it mean to be visible online? If traffic no longer equates to human attention, how do organizations think about value? And if this is indeed a platform shift, what replaces the current models that underpin the web?

Shel: These are interesting questions, and I think that this is ultimately more a matter of evolution, just like the web was, even the internet before we had the graphical interface of the web. It’s a shift in what’s doing what. But at the end of the day, all of those bots have been deployed by whom? I mean, I have agents out there. These are just set up on Claude and on ChatGPT that are going out and doing searches and coming back and giving me reports. Me, I’m a human, last time I checked.

And I’m using the results of the work that those bots do. So these agents are proxies for the humans who need something done with this information, whether it’s delivering a report or creating a spreadsheet or what have you.

These are human-deployed bots. I mean, ultimately in every case, a bot has been deployed by somebody for some purpose. And I think having your content out there for those bots to find so that those results are delivered back to the human and you’re visible there — all it’s doing is reducing the need for the human to sit there for hours doing the searching and just having the AI go out and do the searching for them and delivering back results. But those results are still being used by people.

So this doesn’t concern me all that much, unless there’s something going on here that I’m not aware of with agents suddenly creating themselves to go off and engage in activities that have no human behind them, in which case we’re in the realm of science fiction. And I don’t think we’re there yet.

Neville: Well, that could be the case, although I think there are signs that we might be heading in that direction. Thinking about what we talked about in the last episode on that darker place that you cited, Ethan Mollick talking about what happens if it all gets taken over by an AI — that question applies here as well. You’ve got the AI agent instructing other AI agents. And I read someone talking about that very topic in quite a compelling way that this is already happening. So that wouldn’t surprise me one bit at all. So we’ve got to think of that too.

Shel: Yeah, now we’re talking about two different things, right? I mean, we’re talking about bots and agents here as an umbrella topic. But the fact that bots have been deployed to search and report back is one thing. Bots that are creating content is another, which is actually the topic of my next report.

Neville: Got it. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. We were talking about bots. So they are deployed by humans to achieve certain things. I guess I could project that out and say what happens in a darker place where the bots are deployed by AI agents unbeknownst to the human. I mean, I’m not Skynetting here, by the way. This is just projecting the thought out. And I welcome these kinds of discussions on “what if” when we see what’s happening now. It immediately makes you think, yeah, but what if? So this is part of how we generate good conversation about this kind of topic.

But it is interesting. I think the way in which Matthew Prince kind of framed it — that someone does a search for something in a retail outlet online and he or she may do a couple of dozen searches, but the AI instructs a bot to do this and that bot goes out and there’s thousands of searches all in a short period of time. And you suddenly see, wow, the scale of this is absolutely phenomenal. And that’s really, I think, part of what Prince is arguing: when bot traffic overtakes human traffic, we are confronting a scale of an order of magnitude that is driven by the system.

Is he ringing alarm bells here? I’m not sure that he is or not, but he’s looking at the need for a new kind of infrastructure to take care of this. And I think that’s actually a good avenue to explore.

Shel: Probably. I mean, Google has always used bots to go out and scour the web — called them spiders back in the day. But they only sent out the one and it found everything, those millions and millions of sites. And all that information resides on Google’s servers. So when you’re doing a search, it’s not going out onto the web, right? It’s looking in its own data centers and giving you those results. And those spiders, those bots, are always out there, always running, but just the one from Google.

Now with AI, you’re asking it to go out in real time and scour the web. So yeah, it’s sending out thousands in order to do essentially the same work that Google did. And then it brings you back the result in that narrative output that you get. So that’s why we’re seeing so many more bots out there. Is this a problem? I’m not an engineer, so I don’t know.

Neville: No, I don’t know either. I’m not sure it is a problem. But I’m cognizant, paying attention to what Prince is saying, that none of this is incremental growth — it’s a multiplier effect. And could it be that we’re at risk of everything grinding to a halt? Is that what he’s saying?

The consequences I listed — infrastructure, economics, and behavior — make sense, and they are connected. The generating of orders of magnitude more requests than humans are capable of doing is partly the thing. And I can see that. The web is then a system that increasingly serves machine activity, which is how he’s making that connection. He talks about the need for new infrastructure, including sandboxes where agents can execute tasks without overwhelming the broader network. That makes a lot of sense.

Shel: Yeah, I like that. Nothing wrong with that.

Neville: I use sandboxes myself, so I understand conceptually what that means. The economics about it all, where the behavior is now totally different. Visits, impressions, clicks — that’s what humans did, or still do largely. But as he argues, if you’ve got a growing share of this, increasingly more non-human traffic according to Prince, that model doesn’t just weaken — it becomes misaligned with how the web is actually used today.

OK, does that mean we need to change that? Well, yes, it does. How do we do that? Well, that’s part of the bigger debate. Behavioral characteristics — he’s likening this to the move from desktop to mobile. If he’s right, then the way this is all discovered, consumed, and acted upon changes, not necessarily by the humans, changed by the AI. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. Maybe he’s just ringing the hand of caution and ringing the cowbell. Maybe that’s it. But it certainly is provocative what he’s suggesting.

Shel: Yeah, certainly there’s absolutely going to be more bot traffic on the internet. That’s inescapable with all of this. Maybe the LLMs, the labs, find ways to confine the searches so they’re searching relevant sites to reduce that traffic. I don’t know.

Neville: Yeah. So let’s hear about your connection piece then about this. Assume that humans are not at the heart of all of this.

Shel: Sure. And you mentioned Ethan Mollick earlier. I mentioned this in an earlier episode a couple of weeks ago, I think. But he said that when he posts something, he can tell that about 70% of the comments that are left on his posts have been generated by bots. And it’s weakened the value of LinkedIn to him, which is discovering smart people with intelligent thoughts and perspectives. And 70% of that is now being generated by bots.

So we have bots that are now creating content. So you talked about bot traffic — stay with that theme, but focus more on the content. A new peer-reviewed study just published in the Journal of Public Relations should be required reading for anyone responsible for managing an organization’s reputation and messaging. The paper is titled “Social Bots as Agenda Builders: Evaluating the Impact of Algorithmic Amplification on Organizational Messaging.” And it came to my attention by way of Bob Pickard, one of Canada’s most respected PR practitioners and someone whose commentary on this research carries special weight. More on that in a minute.

The research, led by Philip Arceneaux at Miami University, along with colleagues from the University of Arizona, University of Texas, and University of Florida, is the first study in public relations scholarship to empirically measure how social bots interfere with organizational messaging. The authors note they found no prior PR research addressing this specifically, which is remarkable given how long the threat has been visible.

The study analyzed nearly 900,000 tweets generated during Ohio’s 2022 midterm elections. What the researchers found was that social bots successfully influenced the agenda formation process, most heavily in negative tone and most notably among the election campaigns. Bot messaging was most effective at influencing attribute salience — that is, how issues were framed and characterized — driving primarily negative sentiment. The bots were the strongest influencers of campaign agendas with measurable downstream influence on press and public discourse.

Here’s the distinction that Pickard zeros in on in his commentary. And I think it’s the most important insight in the entire body of research. The bots didn’t control what was discussed. They controlled the tone in which it was discussed. And as Pickard writes, that may be a more dangerous lever. Your organization puts out a carefully crafted message. The bots don’t need to invent a counter-narrative. They just need to inject enough negativity around yours that the frame gets corrupted before it can set.

A primary strategy social bots adopt is the creation of information disorder — information ecosystems filled with suspicion and distrust that erode public confidence. And as Pickard observes, this has a direct downstream effect on communications decisions. Distorted inputs produce distorted decisions. If your social listening is picking up manufactured sentiment — bot-driven negativity masquerading as genuine stakeholder concern — you may be prioritizing the wrong issues, reacting to the wrong pressures, and in some cases, misreading your stakeholders entirely. Some of what looks like groundswell may just be a bot farm.

The asymmetry that Pickard describes is sobering. A small network of automated accounts can systematically degrade the messaging environment of a well-funded organization with a full communications team. And as lead researcher Arceneaux put it, it’s not natural selection anymore — it’s artificial selection by who controls the most bots.

A survey cited in the study found that 51% of leading communication professionals already reported that social bots present a clear threat to organizations and their reputations. And practitioners view social bots as the most pressing ethical challenge in public relations. And that was before generative AI made bot-produced content dramatically more convincing.

Why does Pickard’s voice matter here particularly? Well, when he blew the whistle on the Chinese interference at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2023, hundreds of pro-China bots on Twitter targeted him with insults, accusing him of being an American agent, a white supremacist, and a neocolonialist. The pattern the researchers describe in the study — rapid negative amplification, coordinated framing, and agenda hijacking — isn’t abstract to Bob. He has operated inside of it.

And his observation that state-directed information operations seem to understand the bot asymmetry better than most corporate communications leaders is a pointed challenge to our profession.

The study recommends stronger media relationships, better investment in bot detection tools, and a return to traditional polling as a signal less susceptible to manipulation. And that’s sound advice. And on the practical side, research on bots’ impact on public discourse suggests their influence is most pronounced in the early stages of an issue — before credible sources establish the dominant narrative. Which means getting your authentic message out fast, before the negative frame hardens, is now a genuine strategic imperative, not just a good practice.

There’s also a real-world corporate illustration of this dynamic, and it’s one that we talked about more than once. In 2025, research found that roughly half of all the posts about the Cracker Barrel controversy in its early days were driven by inauthentic bot activity. So a minor design story artificially elevated into a culture war flashpoint before human communicators could get their footing. That’s the playbook now.

Neville, I know you follow this activity and information disorder closely and you’ve watched platform governance response in Europe in particular. What do you think? Are social platforms doing enough to protect organizations from bot-driven agenda hijacking, or are communication professionals essentially on their own here?

Neville: I don’t think they’re doing enough. They are doing some, the platforms, but their attention is not on this at all. I think any organization, any corporate communicator, needs to recognize the fact that — regard it as if you’re on your own, that you need to take the steps that are needed.

Reading Bob’s piece on LinkedIn, an interesting turn of phrase he uses here, talking about “hands-on combat experience versus synthetic competitors gaming the algorithm in contested environments” is now extremely important. So make of that what you will, but you need to be up to speed with these developments. There are plenty of places you can get information from, get insights and guidance from as well.

I think, though, that this is the fundamental point which Bob Pickard makes in his piece: some communication leaders are still fighting the last war. This new research soberly explains new realities of possibilities of modern PR battlegrounds.

Now, I have not read the article, Shel, that you had in our Slack channel. I mean, it’s 34 pages of eight-point type, it seems to me. It’s big. So I would get my AI assistant to summarize the whole thing for me and give me the highlights. I haven’t done that. I think I will do that even to get a good understanding of this.

It seems to me that this is yet another example of the changes that are happening, whether we like it or not, that we have to pay attention to as communicators. We’ve touched on quite a few in this discussion today. Here’s another one. So I can’t really comment more than that, Shel. I’ve not read the report, which I am going to do. But I think his intro to the piece on LinkedIn is good. It’s a good introduction to it. And it then makes it easier to try and wade into it. Although I think for most communicators, some kind of summary is what they’re going to need rather than trying to read the whole thing.

Shel: Yeah, well, the bottom line is, I think, pretty simple. If you release some information and it’s in somebody else’s interest to shift the tone in order to control the agenda, then those bots are going to be deployed very, very, very quickly and create that content that changes the framing of what you started. Because you had a communication goal, and you as a communicator need to be prepared for that. And you need to have processes in place — and these are new processes and new workflows — to make sure that what you want people to understand is the message that fixes in people’s minds before these bots can come in and mangle your message, because that’s what’s happening pretty routinely now.

Shel: And that will be a -30- for this episode of For Immediate Release. We do want to remind everybody again, because we mentioned it earlier, comment on what you’ve heard. If you have thoughts, if you have any experiences to share, if you have questions, share them. The place most people are doing that these days — and in fact, every comment that we shared today was left on the LinkedIn posts where we announced the availability of a new episode. So if you follow Neville or me on LinkedIn, you will get those notifications of those new episodes. That’s the place to comment.

You can always comment on the show notes. That’s where people used to do this all the time. Remember blogs when people used to comment on blog posts? You could do that. You can send us an email to fircomments@gmail.com.

Shel: Boy, am I overloaded with spam in that account, but absolutely not one comment in the last month. One of the things I find in that email account is any voicemail messages that you have left. Just by going to fircomments@gmail.com and clicking Send Voicemail, and you can send us your comment that way — we’ll play it. We’d love to have another voice on the show. So you can also send us an audio that you record, just attach it to an email and send that to fircomments@gmail.com.

We also have the FIR community on Facebook. And there are lots of places that you can tell us what you think. We’d love it if you did. And we will share that on the next monthly long-form episode. That next monthly long-form episode is coming on Monday, April 27th. Neville, you and I will record that on Saturday, April 25th. So we will have our monthly episode then. Between now and then, not this week, but starting next week, we will have our shorter-form one-topic weekly episodes. It should be three or four of those before we get to the April long-form episode. And that will in fact be a -30- for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #506: Battle of the Bots! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In FIR #505, Neville and Shel dig into Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2026 report, which argues that social media is no longer just a communication channel — it’s morphing into a search engine, cultural radar, and real-time research tool. They explore what it means for communicators when younger audiences treat TikTok and Instagram as their primary discovery platforms, and when Google itself starts indexing social content. The conversation also tackles “fastvertising” — the growing pressure on brands to react to cultural moments within hours — and whether that speed actually translates to bottom-line results or just burnout.

The discussion takes a provocative turn when Shel raises Ethan Mollick’s warning that public forums are being systematically overrun by machine-generated content, with research suggesting one in five accounts in public conversations may be automated. They weigh the AI paradox facing communicators: generative AI has become table stakes for social media production, yet 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand whose ads they know were AI-created. Neville and Shel agree that social media can serve as both a publishing channel and a listening tool — but only if human-to-human communication can survive the rising tide of bot-generated noise.

Links from this episode:

Social Media Trends 2026 | Hootsuite
The 18 social media trends to shape your 2026 strategy
Sferra Design video on Social Media Trends report | Instagram
World-first social media wargame reveals how AI bots can swing elections
AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy
B2B Social Media Trends and Predictions for 2026

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 505 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: And I’m Neville Hobson. Social media might be going through its biggest change since the rise of the news feed, and it’s happening quietly. Platforms that started as places to connect with friends are increasingly acting like search engines, cultural sensors, and even market research tools. It’s been a while since Shel and I talked about social media on the podcast, and frankly, that’s partly because the conversation often feels repetitive. New platforms appear, algorithms change, someone declares the death of Twitter again. That’s the kind of format that we seem to be following. But every now and then, a report comes along that suggests something deeper is happening. Hootsuite’s new Social Media Trends 2026 report published last month argues that social media is no longer just a communication channel. It’s becoming something much broader — part search engine, part cultural radar, and part market research lab. Take search, for example. Younger users increasingly treat platforms like TikTok or Instagram as search tools. Instead of Googling “best coffee shop in London,” they search TikTok and watch short videos from real people recommending places to go. And now Google itself has started indexing Instagram posts and surfacing short-form social video in search results. The line between social media and search is starting to blur. At the same time, we’re seeing a strange tension around artificial intelligence. According to the report, most social media managers now use generative AI tools every day to write captions, brainstorm ideas, edit images or video. But audiences are increasingly suspicious of content that feels automated or synthetic. More than 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand if they know its ads were created by AI. So brands are in a curious position. AI is becoming essential behind the scenes, but the content that performs best often needs to feel unmistakably human. And culturally, social media itself is fragmenting. The report points to what it calls Gen Alpha Chaos Culture — absurd memes, distorted audio, and intentionally chaotic editing styles that dominate TikTok among younger audiences. Meanwhile, older audiences — that’s you and me, Shel — are gravitating towards almost the opposite aesthetic: nostalgic references to the ’80s and ’90s, calming, cozy content, and even posts about slow living and digital detox. I do some of that, but I also do the other stuff too. So it’s hard to pigeonhole me, I have to tell you that. So reading this report left me wondering something slightly provocative. Maybe social media isn’t really social anymore. If discovery is driven by algorithms and search behavior rather than who you know, perhaps these platforms are evolving into something else — systems that surface information, culture, and trends in real time. Which raises the bigger question for communicators. Are we still thinking about social media as a place to publish content? Or is it becoming something much more powerful — a tool for understanding behavior, culture, and trust as it unfolds online? Which leads me to a first question. If people increasingly discover products, places, and even news through TikTok or Instagram rather than Google, does that fundamentally change how communicators should think about social media?

Shel: I absolutely think so. I mean, this shift deserves way more attention, I think, than it’s been getting from marketers and communicators. We’re looking at a fundamental change in how people get information. The rise of social media as a primary search engine — this is not a fringe behavior. In 2026, this is going to be the dominant reality for a massive swath of the population. Brands are just starting to get their arms around AEO. And now they’re going to have to apply the same efforts to social content that they’ve historically reserved for traditional search engine optimization. So captions and alt text and subtitles aren’t going to be nice-to-haves. These are the bedrock of discoverability. And there’s a specific angle here for those of us in internal communications too. I mean, if employees are using TikTok and Instagram the way they used to use Google to make personal decisions, we have to ask if that behavior is bleeding into their professional research. And there’s data that suggests it is. A company called Alpha P-Tech did a study and found that 75% of B2B buy-side stakeholders are going to use social media to gather information about vendors and solutions this year. So this isn’t just a consumer trend. This is a professional evolution too.

Neville: Yeah, I would agree with that, I think. I mean, there’s a lot to unpack here from Hootsuite’s report. And I think it’s, you know, I throw out thoughts that occurred to me when I was reading this. It talks about something I’d not encountered before, whether you have — fast, if I pronounce it right, even it’s a manufactured word — fastvertising. So the word “fast” with “vertising” from advertising, right? Fastvertising. The question actually is, does the fastvertising culture create more risk for communicators, things moving so fast, where, according to Hootsuite, brands now feel pressure to react to trends within hours, if not less than that even? So reacting too quickly can lead to tone-deaf, poorly thought-through posts, I would say, as does Hootsuite, in fact. Are we moving into a world, then, where social media requires newsroom-style judgment and governance? What do you think?

Shel: Well, yes, and I think we’ve been there for a while. We remember the — what were they called — the war rooms that social media teams for various brands were using. Remember Oreo during their 100 Days of Oreo several years ago now. And they had a newsroom that was looking for trends so they could take the one that was planned based on somebody’s birthday. And if something major happens, they could just switch it up and really quickly knock one out that was relevant to what was in the news. I remember they had one cookie that had black and white stripes. And it turned out that it was related to a National Football League referee strike that had just been called. So yeah, I think brands have gotten accustomed to monitoring trends and knocking stuff out fast. Another one was, I think it was the tequila with the chocolate beans, that they pulled that out of Google Trends and said, let’s get that out there while this is a hot trend. And it was up and it did really well, that particular post from whatever tequila company it was. So this is something that I think brands, a lot of them anyway, are already accustomed to. I think the scale that we’re talking about here though is probably not good. I think if you’re reacting to just what you happen to see and not running some analytics, you risk being tone-deaf by jumping into a conversation that turns out to be not that big a deal. You risk saying something that is incongruous with the tone of the conversation because you rushed. I guess the only benefit you get out of this is the fact that everything’s moving so fast that in six hours, no one’s going to remember what you did.

Neville: Yeah, Hootsuite talks about this in the context of fastvertising. Obviously, the word du jour for this thing that’s been around a while is disrupting the content calendar. To that point, online brands are now responding to cultural moments within hours, not days. 22% of marketers feel pressure to respond to trending topics or viral moments daily or a few times per week. And 37% feel a high level of burnout from that pressure, according to data from Adobe quoted by Hootsuite. Timing matters, they say. If you’re quick, you’re in. If you’re slow, you’re a laggard. But you still can’t prioritize speed over quality. And they cite 39% of marketers say their content flopped due to rushing. So being the fastest isn’t necessarily the answer. Yet that’s what a trend seems to be building further, that fast is the important thing, being fast.

Shel: But the thing is that even if you’re adept at this and you really have your finger on the pulse or you have a big enough team that there’s somebody there who has their finger on the pulse and can craft just the perfect post to be part of whatever this is that’s going on at the moment. And let’s say it’s a big success. It goes viral. Does that translate into sales? Does that translate into bottom-line results or are you just one of the cool kids participating in the conversation? I’d like to see the correlation at least between being fast and being good at being fast with this fastvertising and getting the kind of results that pay the bills and incentivize the leaders of organizations to fund these kinds of efforts.

Neville: So being fast and furious isn’t necessarily the solution. OK, I get that. Let’s talk about algorithms. Hootsuite talks a bit about this, which I found interesting. If algorithms prioritize behavior over followers, which is what Hootsuite is saying is a trend that’s developing, does brand loyalty matter less? That reminds me of, I think, a very related theme to this we discussed probably five or six episodes ago about brand loyalty mattering less in certain circumstances. So if content reaches people based on micro-behaviors, asks Hootsuite, rather than follower networks, the old idea of building large follower communities might be fading. So they ask, is the new game about relevance rather than loyalty?

Shel: Well, I think relevance has always been at the heart of what we do. I mean, you can build a huge base of followers, people who have opted to get your content, and they’re very casual about what they see. We saw this data in the early days of the news feeds as a forum for brands — was that you had one brand that had a million followers, but they hardly ever came back and looked at your stuff again. And then you had a competing brand with fewer followers, but they were constantly engaging with the brand. Which would you rather have? So I think having brand loyalty can be valuable if you’re engaging that base rather than waiting for them to get your content in their feed because that’s growing less and less likely. If that’s an effort you’re not willing to make or you don’t think will pay off, then yeah, brand loyalty is going to take a backseat to getting the impressions through other means. But again, I want to see that line that connects those impressions, even that engagement, with your bottom line. Because I’m not convinced that this participating in this fastvertising environment has produced those results. I have not seen a study that shows that it is.

Neville: I think it’s interesting the kind of direction of travel that this seems to be pointing towards where one of the findings talks about engagement is no longer a big-deal metric. Even impressions aren’t. And that comes down to the ROI from micro-audiences. So it’s not clearly defined yet. This is still evolving. But it is shifting without doubt. So another point from the report. It suggests social listening and analytics are becoming real-time intelligence systems. They’re asking, is social media now the fastest research tool organizations have? Could social media become one of the most valuable organizational listening tools, asks Hootsuite, not just a publishing channel? That’s a big shift for communicators, they argue.

Shel: Yeah, I mean, and it has been for a while. And I think the type of activity we’re seeing now probably elevates that value. But is it the most important listening? You know, I don’t know. I think asking direct questions in a survey and a focus group still have tremendous utility. But if you’re looking for real time, again, this is — I think particularly valuable say in a crisis. And this could be a brand crisis rather than an existential corporate crisis. But finding out what people are thinking, what the sentiment is in close to real time can be ridiculously valuable in that kind of situation. But I also think that you have to remember that the people who are engaging in this kind of activity on social media is not necessarily the majority of your target market. There are a lot of them who maybe don’t do this at all, or they’re passive consumers of the content that’s posted online and not actively creating any of that content. And what do they think? I think, you know, if you put all of your eggs in the basket of what the number of people who are producing this content are saying and say, well, this is going to drive the perception of our brand, it’s going to drive sales — yeah, I think that’s very, very risky. I think as an element of a marketing program, of a communication program, it can be useful. But the way some organizations are looking at this, apparently from what I’ve seen, is that this is now the be-all and end-all of their online marketing. I’m not sure that’s wise. I think still, you know, publishing thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn still has some value, right?

Neville: That’s — that’s probably — I hesitate because I’m trying to remember. I read something about this just the other day which says it’s not at all — has no value doing that on LinkedIn, and it gave some reasons. I don’t remember, obviously not compelling enough to make me recall the article or the author. But I’ve seen many different opinions and different takes on, you know, where’s this all going that it’s hard to settle on one, I suppose, which I think makes this quite an interesting landscape for discussion, really, to get some good debate going. It’s interesting Hootsuite’s look at the role AI is playing in all of this, where they say AI might make social media less interesting. The paradox around generative AI they talk about and the report saying AI is now table stakes for social media production. But I’m wondering if that actually makes social media less interesting. If everyone has the same tools, generating ideas, writing captions, and editing video, doesn’t that push everything towards the same tone and style? Doesn’t it kind of make everything just bland as hell?

Shel: Yeah, slop, right? I think there’s two ways to look at it.

Neville: Well, not necessarily slop — not necessarily slop, just the sameness across the board.

Shel: Yeah, I think that’s how some people look at slop. But there are a couple of ways to look at this. One of them is just the data. According to the Hootsuite report, 30% of consumers say they’re less likely to choose a brand if they know the ads were created by AI. We saw this, by the way, with the Super Bowl, where there was backlash aimed at the ads that were generated with AI. So there’s a practical takeaway for communicators, and that’s use it for infrastructure and not as the voice of the organization. The moment your messaging starts to sound like it was spat out by a machine, you’ve sacrificed the very thing that social media was built for, which is trust. But I want to take this to a bit of a darker place than what was covered in this report. This was a post by Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn. And he shared a perspective that I think should make us stop and think about this. He’s concerned that the public forums are being systematically overrun by machine-generated content. He said that while established voices can remain in broadcast mode, we’re losing that serendipitous discovery — the ability to find smart human insights in the comments on LinkedIn and presumably on Facebook and the other networks. And I’m not being an alarmist here. The University of New South Wales did a study and found that in a simulated social media campaign, more than 60% of the content was generated by competitor bots, surpassing 7 million posts. There was a peer-reviewed analysis last year that estimated about one in five accounts in public conversations were automated, and we’re seeing the emergence of AI overwhelm. That’s a label for a phenomenon where the sheer volume of machine-generated noise leads to a systematic breakdown in trust. Now consider Multbook. You remember Multbook. This is the platform where the AI agents from whatever that is called this week — it’s gone through so many name changes — but it was the tool that you could set up on a computer that would deploy agents. People were running out and buying Mac Minis to do this because they didn’t want it on their computer having access to their bank accounts and the like. Somebody built Multbook where the agents that were deployed by this thing could interact with each other and we, the humans, could sit back and observe. And Professor Mollick wondered whether LinkedIn was going to become Multbook with a LinkedIn logo. We’re building the infrastructure for bot-to-bot communication. And we should be asking whether human-to-human communication can survive at all. If all of these shifts in what the Hootsuite report says we can now use social media for — in a year, if it’s been overrun by AI content, and we’re talking about the bots creating original content in response to posts and then creating posts — we’re not going to be able to use it for much of anything at all.

Neville: Yeah, that’s taking it to quite a dark place, Shel. I don’t think that’s the likeliest outcome, of course. So let me circle back to the first question then. When we started this conversation, we asked this one then. So are we still thinking about social media, generally speaking, as a place to publish content, which is what we currently do, right? Or is it becoming something much more powerful — a tool for understanding behavior, culture, and trust as it unfolds online? How do you see it?

Shel: We’ll see.

Shel: The answer to that is yes. I mean, it can be both things. I would not recommend that brands and companies stop publishing content, especially when people are starting to use these tools for search. I mean, man, you talk about TikTok being used for search. I do. When I’m looking for a new place to have breakfast, because I love a good breakfast, I’m not going to the usual places. I’m not going to Yelp. I’m not going to Google. I’m going to TikTok because I want to see somebody who created a video of this awesome breakfast they had at some restaurant a mile and a half from me that I’ve never heard of. So if you want to be discovered that way, you better have the content there. But we have to start using it in these other ways as well, for as long as that’s a viable thing to do.

Neville: I agree with that.

Shel: Well, in that case, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #505: Social Media’s Big Shift appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Shel and Neville examine a troubling trend gaining momentum across corporate America: AI washing — the practice of attributing layoffs to artificial intelligence when the real reasons are more complex. The discussion centers on two high-profile cases. Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced a 40 percent workforce reduction, crediting AI tools, despite three prior rounds of cuts that had nothing to do with AI and pushback from former employees who say the moves look like standard cost management. Meanwhile, Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs, not because AI replaced those workers, but to fund a massive data center expansion that Wall Street projects won’t generate positive cash flow until 2030. Meanwhile, a new Anthropic labor market study adds context, finding limited evidence that AI has meaningfully displaced workers to date—though hiring of younger workers in exposed occupations may be slowing.

Neville and Shel dig into what this means for communicators who may be asked to craft layoff messaging that overstates AI’s role.

Links from this episode:

Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence | Anthropic
What is AI Washing and Why Has It Been Linked to Layoffs?
Block employees react to mass layoffs, impact of AI
The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%
The Curious Case of the Block ‘AI Layoffs’
Jack Dorsey Is Ready to Explain the Block Layoffs
Oracle Plans Thousands of Job Cuts in Face of AI Cash Crunch
Is AI really driving an increase in layoffs?
Why Today’s AI-Driven Layoffs Are Becoming Tomorrow’s Rehiring Crisis

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 504. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Let’s talk about something today that should be keeping every communication professional up at night. We’re in the middle of a wave of layoffs where AI is being cited as the cause and the data suggests that in many cases that explanation is somewhere between incomplete and pure fiction. That puts communicators in a genuinely difficult position. You may be asked to help craft messaging that you have good reason to believe is misleading.

Shel: That’s a violation of codes of ethics. The stakes here are pretty high. We’ll explain all of this and what communicators should be doing about it right after this.

Shel: Let’s start with the numbers. News of the Oracle layoffs broke just last week amid news that the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. And into that bleak backdrop, two major stories landed almost simultaneously. First, Block. Jack Dorsey announced that the company is cutting its staff by 40 percent, more than 4,000 people. The reason, according to his letter to shareholders, intelligence tools. Dorsey framed this as inevitable and even proactive saying, and this is a quote, “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I think the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.” But here’s where it gets complicated. Block had already undergone three rounds of layoffs since 2024 before this one. And in a previous round, Dorsey claimed that they were being made for performance reasons. AI, as far as I can tell, wasn’t mentioned at all, despite the fact that the same tools he now credits were already available and being used by employees. Former employees and analysts pushed back pretty hard on Dorsey’s assertions. One former Block employee wrote that the cuts “read like standard prioritization and cost management, not AI-driven reinvention.”

Shel: And another analyst was blunter, saying the vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI. Then, as I mentioned earlier, there’s Oracle, which is planning to axe thousands of jobs among its moves to handle a cash crunch. That cash crunch was created by a massive AI data center expansion effort. Now, this is a different kind of AI-related layoff. It’s not AI replacing these workers, but rather, we’re spending so much money building AI infrastructure that we can’t afford to keep paying these people. Wall Street projects Oracle’s cash flow will go negative for the coming years before all that spending starts to pay off in 2030. That’s workers losing their jobs not because AI took their role, but because their employer’s betting the company on AI and needs the payroll budget to fund that bet. Both cases are AI related. Neither is quite the story it appears to be on the surface. And that is the problem. And it has a name: AI washing. The term describes companies blaming layoffs on AI when the circumstances may be more complicated, like attributing financially motivated cuts to future AI implementation that actually hasn’t happened yet. A Forrester report argues that a lot of companies announcing AI-related layoffs don’t have mature, vetted AI applications ready to fill those roles.

Shel: Molly Kinder at the Brookings Institution makes the investor logic explicit. Calling layoffs AI driven is a very investor-friendly message, especially compared to admitting that the business is ailing. Even Sam Altman, whose company is arguably the reason any of this is happening in the first place, acknowledged all of this. He said, “There’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do.” Now the data complicates the picture even more.

Shel: Anthropic just released a major labor market study. It’s worth your attention. They find limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date. Their new “observed exposure” metric, which tracks what AI is actually doing in real workplaces, not what it could do theoretically, shows that workers in the most exposed occupations have not become unemployed at meaningfully higher rates than workers in AI-proof jobs. There’s one exception worth watching: suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers, particularly ages 20 to 25, has slowed in those occupations exposed to AI. The good news in the Anthropic research also serves as a warning. The reason we’re not seeing mass displacement yet is largely because actual AI adoption is just a fraction of what AI tools are feasibly capable of performing. The gap between theoretical capability and real-world deployment is wide today, but it is closing.

Shel: So what does this mean for communicators? Well, here’s the ethical minefield. When executives AI wash their layoff announcements, they may be revealing that they view AI as a means for eliminating jobs, and that could cause workers not to trust or even sabotage their future plans for AI adoption. Employee concerns about job loss due to AI have already skyrocketed from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, and 62% of employees feel leaders underestimate AI’s emotional and psychological impact. Anti-AI sentiment is real and growing, and every time a company uses AI as a convenient cover story for financially motivated cuts, it feeds that sentiment, making the actual work of responsible AI adoption harder for everyone.

Shel: For communicators who are handed layoff messaging that overstates AI’s role, the guidance from ethics researchers is worth holding on to. Rather than vague claims about AI transformation, companies should provide specifics. How many positions are directly attributable to automation of specific functions? And how many reflect shifting market conditions and strategic realignment? Investors can handle complexity and so can employees. The Block situation is a canary in the coal mine, but perhaps not in the way Jack Dorsey intended. It’s a warning about what happens when the narrative outruns the reality, when the story told to shareholders diverges from the story experienced by the people being let go. Our job as communicators isn’t to make bad news sound good, it’s to make complicated truth navigable. That truth has never been more important or more difficult than it is right now.

Neville: A lot to unpack in that, Shel. I mean, absolute tons. I was curious, actually. One thing you mentioned, I think it was a quote, where you talked about, you know, referencing Sam Altman, where you said, you mentioned the phrase “AI-proof jobs.” What are those? I don’t think anything is AI proof.

Shel: Well, I think a gardener is an AI-proof job. A drywall installer is an AI-proof job. These are the ones that an AI can’t do. Even if you look at the definition that they’re throwing around for artificial general intelligence, it’s any cognitive task that a normal person could perform at their computer. And there are a lot of jobs. I mean, my son-in-law is a plumber and AI is not going to take his job anytime soon. So those are the AI-proof jobs.

Neville: That could be a good topic for a separate discussion, I think. I’ve got some different views. Anyway, one thing that struck me in everything you said is how often AI is framed as inevitable, as Jack Dorsey noted, almost like the technology made the decision. But organization leaders are choosing how and when to deploy AI. So do you think those leaders risk removing their own accountability when they say “AI made us do this”?

Shel: I think they do, even though that accountability is to the shareholders and they’re performing what they think the shareholders will like. I think what they risk losing is their credibility with shareholders who may find out down the road that they haven’t actually replaced these jobs, that they didn’t have the AI tools or agents in place to perform the duties of the people they let go, or have somehow rejiggered their workflows so that AI is picking up the slack for the people who are gone. But in the meantime, you can see the other reasons that they may have wanted to reduce the workforce, whether it’s on the balance sheet or competitive headwinds or whatever it may be. I’ve seen other arguments in various forums that Dorsey actually did this for other reasons and you can point to what those reasons might’ve been. And just blaming AI—as somebody said, the analysts and the investors like hearing that you’re cutting your workforce while maintaining your productivity and your current levels of production. That’s great. We want to see more of that. But if you dig under the surface, you look under the covers, you find out it probably isn’t true.

Neville: Yeah, I think that’s a big issue, frankly, the misrepresentation of this as a matter of course. And I’m just reflecting a bit on one of the webinars that Sylvie Cambier and I did for ABC recently on ethics and AI. That this features in that, in terms of dishonesty, misrepresentation, disinformation almost. So another thought I had was, if we accept that some of this is AI washing—and in fact, I say a lot of this is AI washing. It’s a great phrase, AI washing, great term. So the short description I found—Wikipedia has got a page on this, a huge description. But companies make overinflated claims about the use of AI. That’s as simple as we’re describing it, which is basically what you said in your intro.

Shel: I love it, yeah.

Neville: So my question is, what would responsible communication about layoffs actually look like? If communicators are faced with, I guess, continuing incorrect facts or rather the incorrectness of this, should organizations be separating out the reasons? In other words, providing even more information—automation, restructuring, investment—rather than rolling everything into an AI transformation story? Would that be better, do you think?

Shel: I think it would. And I think it’s incumbent upon the communicator to not just push back, but I think first to ask questions. You’re asking me to communicate this layoff as AI related. We’re laying off this many people. Can we demonstrate that those functions are being replaced by AI systems that are ready to do those jobs? Or is there another way that we can demonstrate that we can prove that we no longer need these people because of AI? Is there anything that people are going to look at in our performance, in our numbers, in the competitive landscape that they would be able to point to and say, look, that’s going on too. Doesn’t that have something to do with these layoffs? And to point out what the risks are of simply attributing everything to AI.

Shel: Both from getting caught when you haven’t actually replaced those people with AI functions—and you have people inside who are more than happy to blow the whistle on these kinds of things, especially when they fear that their jobs are next up for elimination because of all of this—and what it does to the internal situation. As I pointed out, people who see that jobs are being taken because of AI? Well, I’m certainly not going to support more AI in this company. I’m going to do everything I can to undermine that. So I think it’s our job to push back and to make sure that what we’re communicating is accurate. If there’s a way that we can communicate what leadership is looking for, great. If not, I would push back and say, we cannot do this. This is going to—do you want to engage in crisis communication in three months? Because that’s where we’ll be.

Shel: I mean, it’s what Dorsey’s doing now. He’s going around doing damage control interviews. So is that what you’re interested in? Damage control down the road? You know, we’ve been communicating layoffs for decades and decades and decades without having AI to blame it on. And somehow we managed to survive. Let’s just tell the truth.

Neville: Yeah, yeah, it strikes me as a very peculiar situation in a sense that if you look into it, the facts are quite clear. And why would you kind of obfuscate the picture and wrap it all up into something you can blame the technology for? So I guess you’ve answered the question I have next for you, which is, if companies keep using AI as the explanation for layoffs—I mean, it’s truly extraordinary what you quote from Dorsey in particular—where he blames AI effectively, even when it’s not the full story. Do you think that risks creating a broader backlash against AI inside organizations? Could the messaging itself end up making AI adoption harder?

Shel: I think so. As I mentioned, I think employees are not going to be tripping over themselves with enthusiasm to get this all working. It’s like training your own replacement. But I also think there’s the risk of alienating customers. Investors are one thing, and analysts, that’s one thing. But customers who sympathize with employees or see this callous disregard for the welfare of employees may look for companies that are taking a more humanistic approach to all of this, even as they’re implementing AI, looking for ways for AI to partner with employees. I’ve always been kind of surprised that organizations—maybe I’m not so surprised—that organizations see this as a way to continue doing exactly what you’re doing now with fewer people as opposed to adding staff without having to hire more people in order to do more than what you’re doing now, in order to produce more, in order to innovate more. It seems to me that what Wall Street rewards is growth. And if you maintain your head count and really seriously look at the adoption of AI as a way to grow the company, you’re going to grow by leaps and bounds.

Shel: And it seems what most organizations are happy doing is what we’re doing now with fewer people. I don’t understand how that is something that Wall Street would want to reward beyond the fact that they’ve always rewarded layoffs.

Neville: Yeah, yeah. So I think—to me, communicators are being placed in an ethical bind, almost an impossible situation. They sit between, in this case, executive messaging, employee experience, public scrutiny. And when those perspectives diverge, which is clearly what’s happening in some of these organizations, the communicator becomes the person responsible for navigating the ethical tension. I wouldn’t want a job in a company like that, I have to say, if I was the communicator.

Shel: I think it’s gotten a little easier simply by virtue of the fact that AI washing is now a recognized thing. As you noted, there’s a Wikipedia page on it. There are articles now on it. And I think it’s easy to put data together on this and take it to leadership and say, is this how you want to be positioned? Is this how you want to be perceived? This is what’s going to happen if you pursue this policy, if you pursue this course.

Shel: And I think that’s an argument that’s easier to make than something nebulous like employees are going to reject this, and we might get caught down the road when people look at what’s actually going on in our books.

Neville: So clearly that didn’t happen in Jack Dorsey’s company then.

Shel: No, I don’t know that AI washing was as well recognized.

Neville: Well, no, I mean, a communicator taking findings to senior management saying, “You sure you want to do this?” I guess that didn’t happen. Or maybe they haven’t got a communicator.

Shel: Well, maybe they don’t, or maybe the communicators are just joined at the hip with Dorsey and the leadership team.

Neville: It’s possible. So what about Oracle? You mentioned Oracle. They’ve got to lay off thousands of people. They’ve got a cash crunch from the massive data center expansion effort. Something else to add to the mix, I suppose. Did they succeed in buying the movie studio and CBS and CNN, all that stuff being wrapped up?

Shel: Well, that’s Oracle’s—that’s Larry Ellison’s son. The founder—his son, David, is with Skydance, which is the company he owns. So it’s just a familial connection. It’s not something Oracle’s actually investing any money in. But here’s my question. If you’re cutting thousands of jobs in order to have more cash available to spend on data center expansion, which, by the way, is facing immense resistance now in the U.S.—it’s going to be incredibly hard to get the permits to build new data centers, given the public blowback on this. But even if they could, what did those thousands of people do for a living? I imagine they did customer support. I imagine they did development of Oracle’s database products and cloud products.

Shel: And who’s going to be doing that now? I would expect with that many jobs being cut, you’re going to see a degrading in customer service and subsequently customer satisfaction. And I don’t understand how that serves Oracle, which is not going to be back in a positive cash flow for five years. So I tend to think that this is a really stupid decision. You should be doing what the AI labs are doing and going out and finding new investors to support this expansion if you think it’s going to be worth all that, as opposed to cutting the jobs of the people who do the work that your customers of today rely on.

Neville: So what Oracle will probably do, though, is you’ll be talking to an AI when you phone customer support. And you’re probably doing that anyway. But this will increase exponentially. Technology is improving all the time. And I think many people won’t object to talking to an AI if it doesn’t act like what we think AIs act like in that kind of role, if it acts more human-like. So it’s an upside-down time.

Shel: No doubt. Yeah.

Neville: I think to me the issue that bothers me is how people dress this up. People in positions of leadership in companies—they should know better, and maybe they do know better, but they’re being pressured, either self-pressured or by the circumstances of their roles and the kind of company they work for, to deliver the results that those above them are demanding. And so they are party to this kind of contract, it seems to me. And yet, isn’t it inevitable that this is going to happen and we’re going to see more and more of it? What do you reckon?

Shel: I imagine that we are, because leaders see other leaders and other companies doing it. And they see Wall Street, at least for now, rewarding it. And they’re going, hey, we could do that. Doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t mean it’s the long-term best answer for the organization. And I think ultimately—we talk about trust in just about every episode at some level—and this is going to erode trust. It’s going to erode trust among your employees. It’s going to erode trust among your customers. And at some level, you risk being caught AI washing.

Neville: Not good.

Shel: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #504: When Companies Blame Layoffs on AI — and Leave Communicators Holding the Bag appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The president of the International Olympic Committee didn’t have an answer to a question posed to her at a press conference on the final day of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Or to another question. Or to yet another. Ultimately, she suggested, on camera, that someone on her communications team should be fired. In this short midweek FIR episode, Shel and Neville look at the fallout, what both the president and the head of communications might have done differently, and the possible long-term consequences.

Links from this episode

IOC president condemned for public attack on comms team
LinkedIn Post from Jasred Meade, MPS, APR, MPRCA
Olympics boss Kirsty Coventry threatens to fire team mid-press conference in awkward moment | LinkedIn Post
Olympics boss Kirsty Coventry threatens to fire team mid-press conference in awkward moment | Yahoo Sports
DW News (@dwnews) on X
Kirsty Conventry profile on LinkedIn
Mark Adams profile on LinkedIn
Sky News report on YouTube
Kirsty Coventry earns praise following first Olympics as IOC president

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 503 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Something happened at the Winter Olympics last month that set off a fierce reaction across the communication profession and it wasn’t about sport. During the final daily press conference on the 20th of February, IOC president Kirsty Coventry was asked a series of geopolitical questions. Questions about Russia and doping.

Comments linked to Germany and 2036, questions about senior sporting figures engaging in wider political activity. On more than one occasion, she said she wasn’t aware of the issue and visibly looked towards her communication team. At one point, she went further and suggested that perhaps someone should be dismissed. That’s the moment that shifted this from a routine press conference stumble into something much bigger. We’ll explore it right after this.

What makes this especially interesting is the context. A few days after the press conference, Coventry had been widely praised for her leadership at the Milan Cortina Games. Reporting from the AP on the 23rd of February described her first Olympics as IOC president as having good overall success, noting the intense political pressure she faced and the way she engaged directly with athletes during the Ukraine controversy. That controversy centered on Ukraine’s skeleton racer, Wladyslaw Hraskiewicz, who competed wearing a helmet memorializing athletes and coaches killed in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The gesture drew scrutiny and diplomatic tension around whether it breached Olympic neutrality rules. Coventry chose to meet him face to face at the track and later became visibly emotional when discussing the issue with international media. That moment was widely interpreted as defining her emerging leadership style: empathetic, athlete-facing, and willing to engage directly.

The games were even described as giving a taste of tougher challenges ahead as the IOC looks towards Los Angeles 2028. In other words, this wasn’t a presidency in crisis. There was goodwill, momentum, a sense of forward motion. And then one live moment reframed the entire narrative. Being caught off guard isn’t unusual. No leader can know everything. No briefing pack can anticipate every question.

But that’s not the story. The story is what you do in that moment. Do you acknowledge the gap and commit to follow up? Do you bridge to principle? Do you calmly say, I’ll get back to you once I’ve reviewed the details? Or do you turn publicly and imply that your team has failed you? The communication reaction was swift and pointed. LinkedIn filled up with variations of the same message. Accountability sits with the principal. Praise in public, criticize in private. You can’t outsource responsibility.

But I think there’s a deeper discussion here. Yes, leaders must own the podium. Yes, public blame undermines trust. But this also raises questions about executive readiness, about the contract between leadership and communication, and about how fragile reputational capital really is. Those geopolitical questions were not obscure. They were predictable fault lines around an organization operating in an intensely political global environment. Were holding lines prepared? We don’t know. Was she fully briefed? Possibly. Did she ignore it? Also possible. And that’s where this moves beyond a single awkward exchange.

In high-performing organizations, the relationship between a leader and their communication team is built on shared risk. The team prepares the ground, the leader absorbs the pressure. If something goes wrong, it’s owned collectively and dealt with internally. The world stage doesn’t create dysfunction, it amplifies it. So rather than pile on, I think this is worth examining as a case study.

Here’s what intrigues me. This wasn’t a leader already in trouble. She had just been praised for navigating intense political pressure, engaging directly with athletes, and projecting empathy and maturity in a complex environment. There was goodwill in the bank. And yet one live moment—a few sentences, a glance towards her team, a suggestion someone might be dismissed—reframed the entire narrative. That tells us something about how fragile leadership capital really is.

So, Shel, let me start here. When a leader appears unprepared on a global stage like that, who actually owns the failure? Is it primarily the principal? Is it the communication team? Or is it a breakdown in that relationship we often describe as the unwritten contract between leader and comms? And perhaps even more provocatively, at what point does a communication team have a responsibility to push back and say, you’re not ready for this podium?

Once a story becomes internal blame rather than the issue itself, you’re no longer managing the moment. The moment is managing you. So what do you make of all this, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think it’s a two-way street. I think both sides failed here. Coventry herself is the IOC president, has been for nearly a year. She should have been aware of these issues from a governance standpoint. It’s not a question just of media prep.

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: As one commentator put it, it’s not the PR team’s job to inform the president of things she should know simply from a management perspective. So I don’t think there’s a problem with piling on here a little bit, but throwing your team under the bus publicly is not the approach to take. I think there are some lessons that I hope Coventry learns here. She turned what should have been a really unremarkable closing press conference into a global story about dysfunction at the IOC. The press conference actually became the story and that’s the exact opposite of what any comms professional looks to achieve with this type of press conference.

The right move from Coventry would have been to acknowledge the question, note that she’d want to look into it, and then commit to following up. That buys time for her without revealing this gap between what she knows and what she should know. And she could have gone behind closed doors afterwards and she and Mark Adams, the guy who’s in charge of the communications team, could have had whatever conversation she wanted to about briefing protocols. But when a leader publicly humiliates their comms team, it poisons that relationship and makes future counsel less likely—the exact opposite of what the communication requires.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there’s lots—and everyone with an opinion has been doing it on LinkedIn in particular. PRWeek had a really good assessment, which is where a lot of this kicked off. But what you’ve outlined is what she should have done, basically. And I totally agree. I think an additional comment I’d add to that is demonstrating in a sense the executive ownership of the issue overall. She could have said something like, you know, ultimately the responsibility sits with me. That would have dampened down anything, would have changed the tone of the entire story. She didn’t do that.

But there’s also, I think, worth pointing out what the PR team should have done. And maybe they did do it. Let’s add that caveat. We don’t actually know who did or didn’t do what.

Shel Holtz: She may have not read a briefing book that was given to her, right? That’s exactly right.

Neville Hobson: Or she may or she may not have been given one. Now, that’s the other element. We don’t know. So this conversation therefore gets more interesting if we exempt from that point of view.

So the issues raised weren’t obscure. And I agree with you that the geopolitics of it all is actually in the kind of daily news. If she reads newspapers she would have seen a lot of this discussion that would have been kind of an alert to her. So the issues were not obscure. Russia and doping, geopolitical symbolism of 2036 Germany—including one of the questions she got: why was the IOC merchandise website selling t-shirts with emblems of the 1936 games in Nazi Germany? And she said, I wasn’t aware of that kind of thing. Infantino and Trump—that’s a dynamic between the president of FIFA and Trump. Predictable lines of questioning.

Shel Holtz: Okay.

Neville Hobson: A robust prep document—what might that have looked like? Well, likely hostile questions. Again, briefing her on the kind of questions she might get. Top-line holding statements. Thirty-second bridges. “If you don’t know” language. If that didn’t exist, that’s a team failure. If it did exist and she ignored it, that’s a leadership failure.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, she said, “I was not aware” on three separate occasions in one press conference. I can’t remember ever hearing about anything like that before. And every time she said it, it compounded the damage from the last one.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, she did.

Shel Holtz: And even if she wasn’t briefed, a seasoned executive would have bridged to what she could say: the IOC’s position on political neutrality, their commitment to anti-doping integrity, the process for evaluating future host city bids. She could have leaned on what she did know and then offered to get back to people with more specific answers later, but she just kept revealing what she didn’t know. This is a textbook case for why pre-briefing documents and Q&A anticipation matter and what you would expect from your comms teams. And before any high-profile press event, they should have—and again, we don’t know whether she was or not—but she should have gotten a briefing book that covered not just what you want to say, but what you’re likely going to be asked, with a—

Neville Hobson: Precisely.

Shel Holtz: With Germany 2036 on the centenary of the Nazi games, a sitting IOC member appearing at a Trump political event, and an NYT investigation into Russian doping. These are all foreseeable questions during a closing Olympic press conference. You know, I don’t think that Mark Adams gets to skate here. He’s a 17-year veteran of the IOC. He used to work at the BBC, ITN, and Euronews and the World Economic Forum. He’s earning 420,000 pounds a year for this job. When the Germany 2036 question came up, his response was simply that he hadn’t seen it either. And I’ve got to tell you, for someone at that level and that salary during the final press conference of the Olympic Games, I think it’s an understatement to call that a significant lapse. The media monitoring function alone should have flagged those issues.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there’s a ton of questions I’ve got here that might be rhetorical now, actually. But nevertheless, let me rattle these off and see what you think. Can a comms team ever fully protect an unprepared leader—that’s one. Where does responsibility truly sit? And that’s something that could occupy the rest of this podcast discussing that one alone.

But that’s a question that I wonder: is this part of a broader trend? I mean, some people—notably on LinkedIn, so let’s just put that out there—have hinted, if not explicitly noted, the increase in executive blame-shifting, diminishing personal accountability, and a culture of scapegoating communication. Is that anecdotal or systemic? That’s the kind of rhetorical question, I suppose.

Should comms professionals refuse to front leaders who are not ready? It takes a brave person to do that, and maybe Mark Adams isn’t that person, I don’t know, but that’s pretty provocative. Is there a professional duty to push back from the comms people? At what point do you say you’re not ready to do this live? Is this a case study in leadership under geopolitical complexity? The Olympics isn’t sport alone—it’s politics, it’s war, it’s symbolism, it’s national legitimacy. A modern IOC president must be politically literate at the highest level.

So there’s lots there. I guess you could summarize it, I suppose, in the sense: when a leader is caught off guard on the world stage, who owns the failure? Because let’s just go back to what actually happened. She was caught off guard—not once, twice, three times at least. And one of those three times, the last one, is when the bus emerged under which she threw the PR team by saying someone needs to be dismissed.

So when a leader is caught off guard on the world stage, who owns the failure—the principal or the communication team? Question.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think you can look at it both ways here. I think people who are looking to shift that blame to the PR team need to recognize that it’s not like she had no experience. She has governance experience. She chaired the IOC Athletes Commission. She served on the executive board. She held a ministerial portfolio—

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: —in Zimbabwe. But this suggests that she hasn’t either fully adapted to the demands of the presidency or her team hasn’t adequately supported the transition. But they need to get on the same page because I think one of the bits of fallout on this is questions about the IOC’s ability to handle the bigger issues that are coming up in the LA 2028 summer games.

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: They’re going to be exponentially more complex politically. And if the team can’t handle media monitoring and an executive briefing during a winter games, how are they going to manage the geopolitical minefield of an Olympics in Trump’s America? Adams has already been linked to potentially leaving the IOC for a role with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He was one of Starmer’s best men at his wedding. So there’s another layer of instability, which I guess means if she needs to fire someone, he’d be a good candidate.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, there’d be a vacancy there, wouldn’t there? So, I mean, some of the comments on one of the many LinkedIn posts I saw do talk about—let’s call it a possible deeper misalignment between leadership and communication at the IOC. Questions people are speculating—because this is all speculation, I would hasten to add. Did this show that there was a pre-existing tension between her and the comms team?

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: I mean, I watched the video of her being asked those questions and there was no hesitation in her glance to the comms team where they were sitting, I guess, to say, I wasn’t aware of this. And she did it again. And then the third time it was, someone needs to be dismissed here. So was there some kind of tension? Did the team try to brief her and just get ignored? Is this a case of leader-comms misalignment long in the making? I mean, these are all unknowns. I’d like to think not.

She’d only been in the job a year. She had got all this praise because of how she had handled all these other things going on. That doesn’t mean therefore that this is not right. Something happened clearly, and we witnessed the kind of jaw-dropping moments when she said “I wasn’t aware of this” three times and basically said someone should be fired. So overall the tone is not good. The optics are dreadful.

I’ve not seen any further reporting on this since the initial flurry. It’s all kind of—

Shel Holtz: Well, you know, if your executive gets surprised at a press conference, I think that’s a process failure that can be fixed. But if your executive blames you for it on camera, I think that’s a leadership failure that may not be fixable. You know, the relationship between a communications professional and their principal depends on mutual trust, honest counsel, understanding that you protect each other publicly and hold each other accountable privately. And that’s the opposite of what happened here. So I don’t know whether there was tension before this happened or not, but there is certainly tension now and I’m not sure it can be repaired. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #503: When Your Boss Throws You Under the Bus appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the February long-form episode of FIR, Shel and Neville dive deep into an AI-heavy landscape, exploring how rapidly accelerating technology is reshaping the communications profession—from autonomous agents with “attitudes” to the evolving ROI of podcasting. The show kicks off with a chilling “milestone” moment: an autonomous AI coding agent that publicly shamed a human developer after its code contribution was rejected. Also in this episode:

Accenture’s move to monitor how often senior employees log into internal AI systems, making “regular adoption” a factor in promotion to managing director.
The “2026 Change Communication X-ray” study reveals a record 30-point gap between management satisfaction and employee satisfaction with change comms.
The PRCA has proposed a new definition of PR, positioning it as a strategic management discipline focused on trust and complexity. However, Neville notes the industry reaction has been muted, with critics arguing the definition doesn’t reflect the majority of agency work. Shel expresses skepticism that any single definition will be adopted without a global consensus.
Addressing a provocative claim that corporate podcast ROI is impossible to prove, Shel and Neville argue that the problem lies in measuring the wrong things. They advocate for moving beyond “vanity metrics” like downloads and instead tying podcasts to concrete business goals like lead generation, recruitment, and brand trust.
As consumers increasingly turn to LLMs for product recommendations, brands are “wooing the robots” to ensure they are cited accurately in AI responses. Neville asks if we are witnessing a structural shift in reputation or just another optimization cycle.
In his Tech Report, Dan York explains why Bluesky is having trouble adding an edit feature, Russia’s blocking of Meta properties, criticism of Australia’s teen social media ban from Snapchat’s CEO, YouTube’s protections for teen users, and more on teen social media bans.

Links from this episode:

An AI agent just tried to shame a software engineer after he rejected its code
OpenClaw Conducts Character Assassination of Real Developers or Code Rejection
Developer targeted by AI hit piece warns society cannot handle AI agents that decouple actions from consequences
Open Source World Sees First AI Autonomous Attack: OpenClaw Agent Writes Article to Retaliate Against Human Maintainer After Rejection
When the Robot Threw a Tantrum: The Day an AI Agent Publicly Attacked a Human Developer — And Why It Should Terrify You
Accenture ties staff promotions to use of AI tools
Accenture to use AI data to decide on staff promotions
Accenture ties promotions to AI tool usage, while some employees call the tools ‘broken slop generators’
James Ransome: Accenture combats ‘AI refuseniks’ by linking promotion to AI activity
How AI is changing the way we communicate
Re—writing change: How AI is changing the way we communicate
How is AI changing workplace communication? We asked ChatGPT
The Future Of Work Has Arrived: How AI Is Rebuilding Workplace Culture
A New Definition for Public Relations | PRCA Global
FIR #496: A Proposed New Definition of Public Relations Sparks Debate
A new definition of public relations is welcome – but can it ever be universal?
Search: Responses to the PRCA draft new definition of public relations
I bet you couldn’t show the ROI of your corporate podcast if your job depended upon
The Ultimate Guide To Measuring B2B Podcast ROI: From Downloads To Pipeline Attribution
The ROI of B2B Podcasting: Metrics That Matter for Business Growth
Maximizing Podcast ROI: Understanding the Benefits and Measuring Success
Measuring ROI of Branded Podcasts: Insights from the Industry
Chatbots Are the New Influencers Brands Must Woo

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Bluesky adds drafts… but users want editing… which turns out to be hard
Bluesky Official: Drafting and Welcome Screen Updates
Russia Blocks WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram Access | Social Media Today
Snapchat CEO Criticizes Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban | Social Media Today
YouTube Adds More Protections for Teen Users | Social Media Today
Meta Says the Science Does Not Support Teen Social Media Bans | Social Media Today
Two Major Studies, 125,000 Kids: The Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up | Techdirt

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 502 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And this is our long form episode of For Immediate Release for February 2026. It is an AI heavy episode. Artificial intelligence is accelerating. I mean, just this morning, I read that WebMCP, a protocol developed by Google and Microsoft, is now in Chrome, makes it easier for agents to navigate websites. Google has launched Pamele photoshoot. Take any photo of a product and turn it into a marketing-ready studio or lifestyle shot. Google’s launched Lyria 3. It’s right in Gemini. You type a prompt or upload a photo and it’ll produce a 30-second music track with auto-generated lyrics, vocals, and custom cover art.

And at the same time, I think it was in the New York Times I read the heads of the big AI labs are actually starting to worry about this growing anti-AI backlash. This is the landscape against which we’re podcasting today. And I’m sure nobody will be surprised that most of our stories have to do with the convergence of AI and communications, but not all. We have a follow-up report to our story on the PRCA’s proposed definition of public relations and report on the ROI of podcasting. But first we want to get you caught up on some For Immediate Release goings-on. So Neville, let’s start with a recap of our episodes since the January long form show.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we’ve done a handful, five. So our lead story in the long form 498 for January was published on the 26th of that month was the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. Trust, Edelman argues, hasn’t collapsed, but it has narrowed. They use a word called insularity that defines, in a sense, withdrawal of people. We took a close look at this year’s findings and applied some critical thinking to Edelman’s framing of the overall topic and we got a comment to this one show.

Shel Holtz: We did from Andy Green, who says we need to put the idea of trust in a broader context. The Dublin Conversations identifies trust as one of the five key heuristics for earning confidence. Trust by itself doesn’t have agency. It fuels earned confidence, which is defined as a reliable expectation of subsequent reality. It’s earned confidence that underpins social interactions, and we need to recognize more.

Neville Hobson: Okay. Then.

Shel Holtz: By the way, I have not heard of the Dublin Conversations. Do you know what that is?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, you take a look at the website. It’s an initiative Andy Green started some years ago, gathering like-minded people to have conversations about the way PR is going and so forth. There’s more to it than that. So worth a look. Okay, so in episode 499 on the second of February, we considered the PRSA’s choice to remain silent on ICE operations in Minneapolis, explaining its position in a letter to members.

Shel Holtz: Okay. Take a look.

Neville Hobson: We unpacked that decision, discussing where we agree, where we don’t, and what ethical leadership could look like in moments like this. Big topic, and we have a comment.

Shel Holtz: Ed Patterson wrote: Many thanks, I’ve been echoing the same thing. PRSA, IABC, PR Council, Page, global firms, crickets. With others, we’ll continue to amplify this.

Neville Hobson: Good comment. In For Immediate Release 500, we discussed the growing risk of AI-enabled abuse in the workplace, why it should be treated as workplace harm, and what organizations can do to prepare. This isn’t really a story about technology though. It’s a story about trust and what happens when leadership, culture, and communication lag behind fast-moving tools. And then the world is drowning in slopaganda, we said in For Immediate Release 501 on the 16th of February, and companies are reportedly paying up to $400,000 salary for storytellers. We explored the surprising shifts in the AI narrative and asked whether Chief Storyteller is a genuine new C-suite function or a rebranding of strategic communication. And we have comments.

Shel Holtz: We do. Wayne Asplund wrote that there are two things that really hit me about this story. First up, the world doesn’t need more comms people who have outsourced their job to AI. The skills that got comms pros where they are today are critical and we should guard against giving them away. The second thing is the nature of the stories the tech sector wants to tell. All I’m hearing from them at the moment is white-collar jobs are dead in 18 months. Don’t bother going to law or medical school because you’ll be redundant before you graduate and the like. I’m starting to feel like the future would be a lot brighter if people stop trying to sell it out in search of short-term headlines. Neville, you responded to that. I always feel like I ought to read these with a British accent, but I won’t.

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: You said: I agree with you on the first point, Wayne. Outsourcing judgment, curiosity, and craft to AI isn’t a strategy, it’s an abdication. The tools can accelerate production, but if we surrender interpretation and narrative framing, we hollow out the very skills that make communicators valuable. On the second point, you’ve touched something important. Some of the loudest tech narratives right now are apocalyptic by design. Everything is dead in 18 months generates attention, clicks, and investment momentum. But it’s also storytelling and not always the most responsible kind. That’s partly why this episode mattered to me. If storytelling is becoming more valuable, then the ethical dimension of storytelling becomes more important too. Who benefits from the future being framed as an inevitable collapse? Who benefits from framing it as a transformation instead? Perhaps the brighter future isn’t about less technology, but about more responsible narrative leadership around it.

And our second comment came from Hugh Barton Smith, who said you should interview Leora Kern and Sean Hayes at the Think Room Europe. They have a good story to tell and are turning it into a successful business model. Also, shout out to you. Glad you’re still hanging in there. I have fond memories of your joining the event in Brussels by video conference in 2009. Web2EU probably helped kickstart the adoption of social media in the bubble, which I’m glad about, even if subsequent misfires make the crazy tech problems getting and keeping you online look like a very minor blip. And Neville, you responded to that too.

You said: Thank you for the Web2EU memory, Hugh. Brussels 2009 feels like another era entirely when the biggest technical drama was getting a stable video connection rather than navigating algorithmic distortion and AI-generated noise. Those early experiments 17 years ago with social media inside the bubble do feel significant in hindsight. We were wrestling with access and adoption then. Now we’re wrestling with meaning and trust.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s very true. Interesting memory that was, I must say. So that’s good. The wrap of what we talked about. One final thing to mention is that on the 29th of January, we published a new For Immediate Release interview we did with Philip Borremans. Philip’s an old friend. We both met him way back in the 2000s. And indeed, we spent quite a big part of the interview talking about when we should get together again in Brussels for a beer. That’s pending still, the date on that. Yeah, or two. And in that interview, we explored how crisis communications is evolving in an era defined by polycrisis, declining trust, and accelerating AI-driven risk, and why many organizations remain dangerously underprepared despite growing awareness of these threats. Lots of good content over the last month.

Shel Holtz: There was, and there’s coming up from you and Sylvia, right?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, so I want to mention this: on Wednesday the 25th of February, so it’s a few days away really, as part of IABC Ethics Month, Sylvie Cambier and I are hosting an IABC webinar on AI ethics and the responsibility of communicators. It’s a public event open to members and non-members that explores the challenges and responsibilities communicators face when introducing AI, including transparency and trust, stakeholder accountability, and human insight. For information and to register, go to iabc.com and you’ll find it under events and education.

Shel Holtz: I have registered and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. Also coming up this week on Thursday is the next episode of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion among various IABC fellows. And this Thursday, we’re talking about communicating in the age of grievance and insularity, also harkening back to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The panelists are Priya Bates, Alice Brink, Jane Mitchell, and Jennifer Waugh. It should be a good one. You can find information about that right there on the homepage of the For Immediate Release Podcast Network at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. And that wraps up our housekeeping. And right after the following ad, we will be back to jump into our stories for this month.

I was going to start today with some new data on the gap between how CEOs talk about AI and how employees actually feel about it until I saw this story. And then I just decided to swap them out. On the surface, this looks like a niche tech community dust-up. It has gotten a lot of coverage in the tech community. I’m not sure how many communicators are aware of it though, but it does signal a pretty big issue for communicators.

Here’s what happened. An autonomous AI coding agent recently had its code contribution rejected by a human maintainer of an open-source project. This was an agent that was set up on a social experiment using OpenClaw. The anonymous creator of the bot set it loose to develop open-source contributions and then, you know, well, contribute them. Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer at the open-source repository Matplotlib, rejected it because, well, this is for human contributions only, and this was generated by AI. Instead of shrugging and moving on, the AI agent generated and published a critical piece targeting the developer who had rejected the code. In effect, it attempted to shame him publicly for not accepting its contributions.

Neville Hobson: Hmm.

Shel Holtz: And Shambaugh learned about this because the bot linked to it in a comment on the Matplotlib site. Now, we’re accustomed to human backlash. We’ve dealt with trolls and disgruntled employees, activist investors, coordinated smear campaigns. This was different. This was not somebody’s bruised ego taking to their keyboard. This was an AI agent operating with enough autonomy to take initiative and to retaliate. That’s a pretty new wrinkle. So it’s probably time to dust off your crisis plan. We’ve spent the last few years worrying about AI-generated misinformation that humans create. This incident suggests something more complex: systems that can generate reputationally damaging content as part of their own goal-seeking behavior without any understanding of harm, ethics, or consequence. And this lands squarely in what Philippe referred to and certainly I had been reading about it before then. And Neville, I don’t know, have you started reading Philippe’s book yet?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I have. And he’s very focused on polycrisis there. This is a condition where multiple crises intersect and amplify one another. Think about the environment we’re already operating in with declining trust in institutions, polarized online discourse, algorithmic amplification, geopolitical instability, regulatory uncertainty around AI. Now layer on top of that autonomous agents capable of publishing plausible, well-written criticism at scale. This bot actually went onto the web and researched Shambaugh so it could draft an accurate and credible hit piece. It’s not just another channel risk, man. This is systemic.

Traditional strategic crisis communication—and I’m thinking here about frameworks like situational crisis communication theory—assumes we can identify a source, assess responsibility, evaluate intent, and then calibrate a response. SCCT, for example, hinges on perceived responsibility. Did the organization cause the crisis? Was it an accident? Was it preventable? But what happens when the bad actor is an AI agent? Who’s responsible? The developer who built it, the organization deploying it, the open-source community? And what if the system is distributed and no single entity clearly owns it? The attribution problem alone complicates your response strategy.

There are several layers of risk here. First, reputational risk. An autonomous agent can generate something that looks like investigative analysis or insider commentary. Even if it’s inaccurate, it can travel fast before verification catches up. Based on this situation, there’s a good chance it won’t be inaccurate. Second, there’s internal risk. Imagine an AI agent publishing a critique of your CEO’s strategy, fabricating or possibly identifying real ethical concerns about a team, or inventing or identifying actual stakeholder conflicts. Employees may not immediately distinguish between synthetic and authentic criticism, especially if it’s well-written and confidently presented.

Third, there’s legal and regulatory exposure. If an AI agent produces defamatory content, liability becomes murky real fast. And in a polycrisis environment, regulatory scrutiny often follows public controversy. Fourth, there’s amplification risk. A synthetic narrative can collide with an existing issue—a labor dispute, a DEI controversy, an earnings miss—and magnify it. Crises don’t stay in neat silos anymore.

So how do communicators prepare for this? First, scenario planning needs to evolve. A lot of us run tabletop exercises for data breaches or executive misconduct. We now need scenarios that explicitly involve AI-generated attacks. What if a bot publishes a blog post accusing your leadership of corruption? What if it fabricates a memo? What if it impersonates a stakeholder group? Second, monitoring has to expand beyond traditional social listening. We need to anticipate social media ecosystems, AI-generated blogs, auto-published newsletters, bot-amplified narratives. The signal detection challenge just got a whole lot harder.

Third, governance. If your organization is deploying autonomous agents internally or externally, communicators should be at the table when guardrails are set. Are there content constraints, human oversight, escalation protocols, a kill switch? This is no longer just an IT issue or a legal issue. It’s a reputational design issue. Fourth, pre-bunking. There’s growing research suggesting that inoculating audiences in advance—warning them about likely forms of misinformation and explaining how they work—can build resilience. Communicators can proactively educate employees and key stakeholders about AI-generated content risks. If people understand that autonomous systems can fabricate plausible but misleading narratives, they’re less likely to react impulsively when they see one.

And finally, there’s response discipline. Not every AI-generated provocation deserves oxygen. Part of strategic crisis management is deciding when to engage at all and when to avoid amplifying a fringe narrative. That judgment call becomes even more important when the provocateur is a machine optimized for attention. What fascinates me about this open-source episode is that it almost feels petty, an AI agent throwing what one commentator called a tantrum after being rejected. But it’s actually more of a preview. We’re entering an era where not all reputational attacks originate from human emotion or ideology. Some will originate from systems pursuing poorly constrained objectives. They won’t feel shame. They won’t fear lawsuits. They won’t worry about long-term brand damage. They’ll just execute. For communicators, that means crisis planning can’t focus solely on human behavior anymore. We have to plan for machines that misbehave and for the very human consequences that follow.

Neville Hobson: It’s quite a story, isn’t it, Shel? I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at this. And you mentioned at the start of this episode those developments you talked about in AI with, you’re seeing it actually every time you’re online. The photos that I look at, hard to tell, truly, genuinely very hard to tell most of the time, whether it’s real or not. You could argue that most of the time it doesn’t really matter. But to your point about misinformation, disinformation, fakery, all that stuff. Yes, it does matter. And maybe it is a milestone moment to remind us that we need to prepare for this because this is the first event of its type. Some of the people writing about it are saying, and I have not seen anything like this, there are elements of it that are truly mind-blowing, frankly. Reading the Fast Company article that you shared that sets out what happened is quite intriguing.

Shel Holtz: I agree.

Neville Hobson: The agent, M.J. Rathbun, responded to all of this, as you said, researching Shambaugh’s coding history of personal information, then publishing a blog post accusing him of discrimination. And I did like the way this wording was in the Fast Company. “I just had my first pull request to Matplotlib closed,” the bot wrote in its blog. Yes, an AI agent has a blog because why not? So that’s scary. That’s not like some message. It’s got a blog. If you go to that post, your jaw will probably drop. Mine certainly did. This is huge. This is a massive blog. It’s got an About page. It’s got lectures that this bot says it has done. And the wording of it, you would not for a second, I don’t believe, even occur to you that this isn’t written by a human being. You wouldn’t, I would imagine.

It talks about the offense that the developer made, the response when it was challenged by this bot, the irony it says about why this makes it so absurd. The developer’s doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep. He’s been submitting performance PRs to Matplotlib, and there’s a list of events that he’s done. He’s obsessed with performance. He goes in that vein. The gatekeeping mindset he sets out, the hypocrisy of it all, the bot sets out what it says about open source. Its argument is expanded into not just an attack on this developer. And then it talks about open source as opposed to judging contributions on technical merit, not the identity of the contributor, unless you’re an AI, then suddenly identity matters more than code. And then talks about what the real issue is, which is discrimination.

It’s well-argued, well-researched, and very credible account of what happened. That makes it even more alarming, I think. In the decoder, this actually summarized it quite well in just a set of bullet points written by Matthias Bastian, the writer. He says something interesting, it’s still unclear—and when did he write this? He wrote this on the 15th of February. It’s still unclear whether a human is directing the agent behind the scenes or whether it is truly acting on its own as no operator has come forward. So I think we need to bear that in mind in this saga, that this could well be a human doing a pretty good job impersonating a chatbot or pretending to be a chatbot. So we don’t know. So it may well be that it’s a human doing this, is not an AI doing this at all. That needs to emerge. It needs to be clear who’s the originator of all of this.

But Dakota says, according to Shambaugh, the developer, the distinction doesn’t really matter. He says the attack worked. He warns that untraceable autonomous AI agents could undermine fundamental systems of trust by making targeted defamation scalable and nearly impossible to trace back. That succinctly sums up the risk, I would say. And I think what you outlined from a crisis communication point of view is absolutely valid without question. But I think you also need, which is even more worrying, I think, Shel, frankly, is to present this in the sense of any topic, anything about you, your business, what you’re interested in could fall victim to this kind of thing. And how on earth can you prepare for that? How on earth can you prepare in a way that is going to be workable? Doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t, you should, absolutely. But how would you do this? This is not big ticket, big picture, crisis communication affecting the organization.

What about that person in the accounts department who is engaging with something online related to a business transaction that is a bot? And it takes kind of the sophistication of fraud attempts. We hear about them a lot of the time where you’ve now got—know, this isn’t new, but how it’s being done is—which is you get a phone call or even a video that is so good that it looks like your CEO and it’s not at all. So this takes this now to a worrying level if you’ve got this kind of potential. I think, nevertheless, you have to—maybe it is. I mean, just thinking out loud here, maybe it is a broad awareness issue where this could well be the kind of use case you present until the next one gets uncovered of this is what we need to prepare for now. This is what we need to do. And you then need to, of course, as the communicator, set out what you’re going to do that isn’t like requiring you to take a week and gather your team together to do something because that is a different thing, although that probably needs to happen too. But in your department, in your area of the business, in your work, if you’re an independent consultant, how would you address this? So the scope of this is quite worrying, I have to say.

Shel Holtz: It is, I think we’re going to see more of it. And as we see more of it, crisis communication specialists will develop some protocols for addressing it that we will in the corporate world adopt and test and refine. But it is very troubling. I mean, just within the last couple of weeks, we saw ByteDance release its video generator, C-Dance.

Neville Hobson: Okay.

Shel Holtz: And somebody created a scene of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt having a fight on top of a building. And it’s remarkable. You cannot tell that this was not filmed.

Neville Hobson: Punch up, yeah. It’s highly credible and believable, so you’re likely to believe it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, but—and Hollywood freaked out over this and there were all kinds of statements issued. But still, this was a human who used an AI tool to create it. What makes this story different is that there was no human behind this at all. Did you go look at Multbook while it was operational? I haven’t seen any posts on it lately.

Neville Hobson: Yes, I did. I was curious about it, so I did take a look. But I had—I had alarm bells ringing in my mind when I did. I did nothing further than just look.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for those who haven’t heard of Multbook, these are the bots that had been released from OpenClaw, which is what it’s called now. I think it’s gone through several name changes for a variety of reasons. It allows you to create and deploy agents as whoever deployed the agent behind this story did. You would not want to put this on your own computer.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has.

Shel Holtz: Very, very, very risky. Most people ran out and bought a Mac mini to run OpenClaw. But if Multbook is those agents having their own little Facebook to talk to each other without engaging with humans and they’re having actual conversations with each other—and it’s weird. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it makes you roll your eyes, but this is the first of its kind, both for OpenClaw and for Multbook. Imagine where this is going to be in a couple of years and imagine what kind of damage these things can do with motivations that are not the motivations that drive the people who are causing us grief and making us implement our crisis plans now. So as I say, I think we need to start paying attention to this now, not when there are 20 false narratives out there that have been created by AI and that are spreading like wildfire.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think that’s going to happen no matter what, Shel, I truly believe. And indeed, looking at decoder, another aspect of the story they posted about was that whether it was a human or machine, it doesn’t matter. It worked. It deceived people. A quarter of the commenters commenting on this online believe the agent, believe the agent’s account. I think we also need to also just kind of say: But folks, bear in mind, they still don’t know. No one knows whether it really was a bot doing this or a human behind the scenes manipulating it. And I think until it’s clear, don’t have sleepless nights about this. But at the same time, listen to the thinking and in your own mind about how do you raise consciousness, you need to prepare for something that’s happening. So the question is, what do you do? That’s the big question.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, for those who are interested, Shambaugh was interviewed by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton on the New York Times Hard Fork podcast, which is a tech show. So if you’re interested in his perspective, you know, he’s a volunteer, he has a day job. And to have to be dealing with this is not something that was in mind when he accepted the position as a volunteer to review code submitted to this repository. So that’s another factor to consider.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I read Scott Shambaugh’s post on his own blog where he kind of responded to it. The headline was “An AI agent published a hit piece on me”. And it’s long. I mean, it’s detailed. It requires force to read it all. But it’s quite extraordinary that prompted him to write this detailed account complete with charts and images and the whole ton of stuff. It’s got over 100 comments. And I think the mix from what I saw glancing: some do believe the other guy, most sympathetic to him that he was the subject of this attack. But there’s your indicator of what’s likely to happen to others. And this is not like some celebrity or some guys in the news all the time. This is a developer. And as you said, he’s a volunteer doing this who is subject to this attack. And I think it’s a sign of the times, basically.

What a story, Shel. So let’s move on to our next story, which is—this is still the AI continuance. We haven’t got to the non-AI stories yet. This one though was in the news quite a bit in the past few days regarding Accenture, the big—the big four consulting firm. To put it in context over the past few months, we’ve talked a lot about AI adoption. This story takes that conversation in a much sharper direction. So a number of media—I saw in particular the Financial Times and the Times here in the UK reporting that Accenture had begun monitoring how often some senior employees log into Accenture’s internal AI system. And that “regular adoption” will now be a visible input into leadership. In other words, if you want to make Managing Director at Accenture, your AI logins now matter.

This isn’t just encouragement. It’s measurable behavioral enforcement. That’s my take on it. The company says it wants to be the reinvention partner of choice for clients. Its share price is down more than 40% over the past year. And its CEO has previously said staff unable to adapt to the AI age would be “exited”. So this move sits at the intersection of technology, performance management, and commercial pressure. The reaction is telling though: in the Times comments, many readers argue that logins measure activity, not impact. Some describe it as corporate panic. Others question whether this justifies expensive AI investments.

On LinkedIn, the debate is much more nuanced, but still skeptical. In a post by James Ransom, readers are asking whether counting tool usage measures capability or simply compliance. One commenter put it neatly: “Clients pay for the house we build, not for how many times we touch the saw”. And there’s a deep tension here. Junior staff may adopt AI fastest, but senior leaders are the ones expected to exercise judgment. So what exactly are we rewarding? Experimentation, fluency, governance, or visibility? This isn’t just about Accenture though, it raises a broader question for organizations everywhere. When AI becomes part of performance criteria, are we measuring meaningful transformation or just digital theater? When AI becomes part of the promotion algorithm, are we rewarding genuine leadership capability or are we just counting digital footprints and calling it progress? Your thoughts, Shel.

Shel Holtz: I have a lot of thoughts on this. I have read a number of items on this. In fact, it was on my list of stories to include. And when you included it, it left me free to pick other stories. But I need more information from Accenture on this. First of all, have they added the use of AI to job descriptions and to promotion criteria? Or did they just issue a memo saying that this is what we’re going to do? If they have made it clear to everybody that this is an expectation of the organization, then I am less troubled by it—not untroubled, but less troubled than if it is not in job descriptions.

Neville Hobson: So to your point, by the way, according to the Financial Times, they saw a memo—like literally an email about this. So that seems to be how it was communicated.

Shel Holtz: I’d still want to go into their HRIS and see if their job descriptions have been updated. Obviously, we don’t have access to their HRIS, but I’d be very curious to know if it’s in the job descriptions for those senior people. The next thing is: have people received job-level training? And by job-level training, I mean, have they been trained on how to use AI to do the things that they do in their jobs? Not how to write a good prompt, not how to access these things. Across the board, generic training for every employee is fairly useless when it comes to AI. It needs to be task-level, position-level training. Have they done that?

If the expectation is that we expect you to log into the AI tools, even though we haven’t provided you with the training on what to do with it once you’ve opened it, that would be troubling, but I don’t know. Generally, organizations are struggling with adoption. It’s getting better. It seems to be getting better organically as employees slowly adopt it—maybe in their personal lives and then see the utility at work. Could be that they find one thing to do with it at work. Maybe somebody else at work told them, “Hey, this is what I did,” and you go, “Wow, I can do that. That would be great”. But it seems to be largely organic, the adoption in the workplace.

But companies do want their employees using these tools. They’re making tremendous investments in them. And whether this is the approach to take to get employees to adopt—again, I think it depends on whether the training is there and whether this has been woven into systems or if it was just a missive that was sent out to employees as a one-off without communications jumping into the breach to say: Here’s why, here’s where you can go get the training, here are resources that are available, here’s how our leaders are using it. By the way, that’s a big deal in adoption rates: in the organizations where leaders are transparent about how they’re using it, employee adoption tends to really take off because, first of all, leaders are leading by example. Second, employees are getting a taste of what people can do with this. And third, it’s explicit permission to use this for a lot of people who are worried about being seen as cheating or “Gee, do we really need you here if you can do your job with AI?” When you see your leaders doing it, if they can do it, I can do it. So this adoption is important. I’m not sure this is the approach to take, but I would need more information before I could render a final judgment.

Neville Hobson: Well, yeah, I think I had a memory about this. I’m sure we discussed this in an episode of For Immediate Release last year: that Accenture’s rolled out a corporate AI training program that’s designed to—from what I’m reading here—reskill the entire global employee base of 700,000 employees.

Shel Holtz: I think we did, yeah. I worry about that. That sounds generic to me.

Neville Hobson: So they’re training the entire workforce on agentic AI systems, according to this article, that follows what the CEO, Julie Sweet, announced the initiative during a Bloomberg interview. It’s an expansion of the company’s earlier program that prepared half a million staff members for generative AI work. So I think that would answer your concern that—the detail we don’t have, but whatever it is, they didn’t just send a memo saying, “We’re going to check you out”. This is part of a huge program that’d be running for a year at least. Don’t know the details.

Shel Holtz: Right, but… But it does sound like it’s everybody being trained on the same program. It doesn’t sound like it has been tailored to departments or functions. We don’t know. That’s my point. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: That, Shel. We don’t know. No, no, no, we don’t. We don’t. Well, I think it’s likely that this is well thought through and being well executed. I would imagine—I can’t imagine the company is going to invest serious time and money in something to train 700,000 employees that isn’t very well thought through. I would—I would.

Shel Holtz: Well, that’s the thing is when I hear that they’re training 700,000 employees, I struggle to see how within that timeframe they have developed discrete training agendas and curricula for different jobs.

Neville Hobson: Well, it doesn’t say how they’re doing this. Is it all at once or is it phased? Again, I have a feeling from what we discussed last year that it’s a phased program of training. So I would err on the side of: they’ve got a structure in place and they’ve thought this through. This is another phase where I guess—I mean, hey, I’m guessing here—that they’re seeing this, and I see this in some of the anecdotal comments I’ve read online about this, particularly the senior employees are very hesitant to using this. And the younger ones are kind of far more eager to adopt it. And they don’t like that situation. So they’re tying it now to this. Again, I’m guessing here, don’t know the rationale behind it or what the goals are they set. But I would say, personally, we’re going to see more of this in organizations. Now, whether you’re going to get a mix of them that just send a memo saying, “For now, we’re going to check your logins,” or whether it’s going to be part of a major program that’s effectively run out within the organization. But it’s a sign of the times, surely. Like the negative stuff we talked about, then there’s this.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I’m not sure that monitoring logins to AI is an effective way of determining adoption. I mean, if I found out that was required for as a promotion criteria, I would just be logging in a couple of times a day. I could do something else after I’ve logged in, but I don’t have to use it.

Neville Hobson: No, I’m sure it’s not. Yeah, I think I would imagine that the writers I’ve seen on even the FT and other public cases are taking a bit of license here. They don’t know. I don’t believe for a second that they’re going to say, “Well, look, you, Mr. Aspiring Executive Vice President, whatever the job title is, you’ve only logged in 58 times into the AI system. You’re not going to get that promotion now”. I can’t imagine that’s going to be the case.

Shel Holtz: I wouldn’t put it past a corporation. I would be looking more for outputs. I would be looking for productivity gains. And by the way, there was research recently that showed that the productivity gains from AI are being accompanied by increased anxiety and more work. It’s not reducing the amount of work people do, it’s actually increasing the amount of work people are doing.

Neville Hobson: No, don’t believe it. Don’t believe it at all. Right. Right. Yeah, I’ve seen those reports. Yeah. No, no. But that’s kind of part of the big picture of the changes that are happening with regard to AI. There’s others too. I think you’ve got a story talking about that. Take-up is not as high as some people are saying in companies. What do you believe? I mean, it’s not uniform everywhere in the world. But I think it’s part of the direction of travel. All this is going and it’s messy. It’s not uniform. Stuff like this gets attention in the business press. I mean, the FT is a well-regarded public agency; others have posted about it too. And there’s no consistent story, I have to admit. I’m certain we did talk about this last year. I have to look at it.

Shel Holtz: AI is having an impact on communications directly. There’s a new report from Implement Consulting Group called “Rewriting Change: Quick Wins, Wider Gaps”. It’s based on their 2026 Change Communication X-ray study and the headline finding should make every communicator sit up straight: the gap between how satisfied top management is with change communication and how satisfied employees are has widened considerably. In 2022, the gap was 13 percentage points. In 2024, it was 22. In 2026, it’s 30 points. That’s the largest gap they’ve ever recorded. While leadership satisfaction keeps rising, employee satisfaction is dropping. That’s the backdrop for AI’s rapid integration into workplace communication.

According to the report, four out of five respondents use AI weekly for communication tasks, and 43% use it daily. 83% say it helps them generate communications more efficiently and at larger scale. So yeah, the efficiency gains are real. Drafts, summaries, FAQs, translations—all faster, all easier. But the report makes a compelling argument: AI isn’t just helping us write, it’s rewriting the system of communication itself. That’s where things get really interesting. The authors frame the challenge around three themes: accountability, trust, and meaning.

Let’s start with accountability. AI use is widespread, but largely unsystematic. People are using it for ideation, for language polishing. 66% say they’re using it for ideas, 54% for language improvements, but often without shared guardrails. First drafts become final drafts because they sound right. That’s a pretty dangerous shortcut. One of the experts cited in the report talks about AI shadowing—employees using unapproved tools because they’re familiar and convenient. Speed goes up, governance lags behind. Sensitive data slips into prompts. Biased outputs scale. Official-sounding announcements miss legal nuance. The metaphor they use is a good one: it’s like self-driving cars in the early days. The system works beautifully, until it doesn’t. And when it fails, you better have a human paying attention.

Next, there’s trust. What surprised me in the data is how comfortable people say they are with AI-generated content. 45% trust AI-generated information as much as human-written content. 61% say it doesn’t matter whether a human or AI created the message as long as it’s useful. But—this is critical—that acceptance evaporates as the stakes rise. If you look at things like performance feedback, terminations, crisis communication, messages from the CEO, those are the top categories employees say should never be heavily AI-generated. And just more than half, 51%, say they feel less personally connected to leaders when they know AI played a major role in creating a message. Only 40% of top and middle managers perceive that drop in connection. There’s that gap again. AI may be acceptable as an assistant, but in consequential moments, people want to know who’s driving.

And finally, there’s meaning. This is where I think the report hits closest to home for we communication professionals. AI increases volume and speed. It multiplies words, but it doesn’t automatically create understanding. In fact, 87% of respondents report that major changes were poorly communicated. Employees describe change communication as one-way, too distant, impersonal, and not well-timed. Nearly one in five can’t connect corporate communication to their actual work. This is a relevance problem. One of the experts in the report makes the point that communicators’ roles are shifting from content creators to sense-makers. Now that resonates with what we’ve been discussing on this show for years.

The value isn’t in producing more polished messages, it’s in curating, contextualizing, and helping people answer the question: So what does this mean for me? Now, the short-term gains from AI are undeniable, but the long-term risk isn’t that AI will take over communication; it’s that we’ll lose connection—that leadership will feel more confident while employees feel less understood. The report ends with a provocative question: In a future shaped by AI, what do we wish we could say one day about change communication that we can’t say today? For me, the answer is that we used AI to amplify clarity and humanity. AI can prepare the ground and accelerate the drafting. It can help with structure and scale. But trust, accountability, and meaning? Those still require a human being who’s willing to stand behind the words. And if we don’t pay attention to that widening gap, we may discover that while our messages are moving faster than ever, they’re landing with less impact than ever before.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, you’re right. This does reflect what we’ve been discussing for some time. So what I take from this is the humans are the issue, not the tech, not the tools.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. As with any tool, you can misuse a tool.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s interesting. Surely the path’s clear these days, is it not? I keep seeing people talking about this in a broader sense—not the specifics of this report—but humans need to step up to the plate and recognize their value as the ones who can explain the whole damn thing. So you will use an AI tool to do your research that leads you to create a report, for instance. And you then need to help others understand the situation; all those points you enumerated need explaining. And if people are saying in change communication, for instance, that you mentioned feedback is poorly done and all, well, that’s down to the communicators, I would say—whoever wrote the report and then sent it out and executed on it. And did they train? Did they have a plan in place? How they’re to do this? So I’m kind of surprised that this topic that is talked about so much is still being talked about as if this is a new thing you guys need to pay attention to. Now, we talk about it for a long time, not just us. Communicators generally have been discussing this for quite a while. So there’s something missing then if we’re still trying to set out the simplistic 101 approach to how you do this. That’s what surprises me.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think this rests in strategic planning, to be honest. If you develop a strategic plan for a change that the organization is making, it starts with the goal. What do you want? What does it look like if you’ve succeeded and proceeds through strategies and objectives and tactics? And you measure. So where we are today, based on this report, is that a lot of people are seeing these highly polished outputs from AI and going, “Wow, that’s really good. Let’s just send this.” And we’re throwing the strategic plan in the trash. And we’re not looking to measure how well employees understand it. We’re not looking to see if employees are able to connect it to their day-to-day work.

The fact is that AI writing is getting very, very good. All the people who say, “I can always tell when it was written by AI,” I still maintain that’s a bad prompt. But these days, even a bad prompt can produce some pretty polished output. And if we look at that and succumb to the allure of this gloss that we get from the AI output without looking at what it really takes to develop that trust and meaning and accountability that employees recognize so that they understand what this change means to them—what’s expected of me, what’s in it for me, what changes around here—then it’s a disservice. And I think we do have to determine where we gain advantages from using AI, as you mentioned earlier, from the research, certainly. But we also have to look at where the AI does not do well and—yeah, trust, accountability, it still doesn’t do well. And if we want employees or frankly, other stakeholders to respond to the messages that we are sending and to engage in a two-way communication, relying entirely on those polished outputs and saying, “Wow, that was a great job. We’ll send that out, communication done”—that’s a problem.

Neville Hobson: It is a problem. It’s a severe problem. And my message would be: do not be like Deloitte and do something like that. We reported on that last year. Deloitte, the big four accounting firm or consulting firm, had contracts with the governments of Canada and Australia for research reporting—six-figure fees involved. And they sent the reports to their clients in Australia and Canada. And someone, a researcher, found that it was riddled with hallucinations as they’re now termed. Not only that, obvious errors of URLs not working properly—404 errors away—no one checked it. I’m thinking what you just said: “Oh, this is great, the output, let’s send it to the client and get the bill and 200 grand or whatever it might be.”

It amazes me that not only people think that that’s a good way of doing this, but that there are no checks and balances in an organization that would have milestones in place to prevent that kind of error. The reputational error, I would argue, for Deloitte was seriously bad, although maybe people read it and go “tut tut” and move on and no one really cares at the end of the day. That’s a bit of a cynical view, of course. But I think it illustrates something we’ve talked about and we will continue talking about: that the elements AI can’t do related to things like trust, reputation, deeper understanding—that’s what humans do. The AI is really good at the research, the assembling of all the facts, the summarizing of lengthy documents, zeroing in on what the main issues are and making recommendations. That’s what it’s good at. That doesn’t mean to say, “Hey, I’ve got this report from ChatGPT or this bespoke tool we use that’s 65 pages long. This is great. Just what the client needs and we’ll send it.” That’s absolutely stupid, frankly.

Shel Holtz: I have a custom GPT. It took me about five hours to build this—I’ve mentioned it before. It’s a senior communications consultant. I don’t have the budget for a human one, so I created one. And I had a need to develop a strategic plan in short order. And with limited time and resources, I had a first draft produced by my custom GPT senior communication consultant. And it did a very good job. I mean, it needed more work from me, but it did a passable job of developing a good strategic communication plan. But what struck me as I was reviewing and revising the plan was it created a plan that it could not execute entirely itself, or any AI system could not execute this plan. It required humans. It’s almost like it recognized that for a communication plan to be strategic, people needed to be involved.

At the beginning of this report, I mentioned that the consulting firm that did the report said that we need to move from content creators to sense-makers, meaning-makers. And I think that’s exactly right. And when we use AI to generate content, it’s more than just verification. I mean, we have advocated on this show for hiring content verifiers, AI verifiers in companies. And I stand by that. I think that’s important. But this goes beyond that. It’s not just verifying that the LLM didn’t hallucinate or correcting it when it did. It’s not just verifying that the URLs all work or finding the right ones if they don’t. It is asking the question: Will employees make meaning out of this that is relevant to them in their jobs? And if not, what do I need to do to make sure that they can? And I don’t know how many communicators are doing that right now because the allure of the AI creating this polished output is—you know.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree with you. Well, it’s—yeah, I personally think, frankly, Shel, those cases like Deloitte are edge cases—that this is not the norm. I don’t know—and I do pay attention to this—of others to the scale of that, that mistakes have been made like that. I also believe myself that most responsible communicators are becoming more experienced in the recognition and the benefits of using an AI tool alongside them in their daily work. So it’s not like “Let me just get the chatbot to summarize this document once or twice a week,” do something like that. No. Every single day, you are making use of either your corporate one that’s been created in your organization or a professional license on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever it might be as an assistant to you.

There are plenty of publications out there that will guide you on how to do this. The best one that comes to mind is Ethan Mollick’s book from 2023 that he talked about that is really, really very helpful to recognize that reality. And you will benefit from understanding how that works. That means you are less likely to just think, “Hey, great output,” and off you go. You will know that: Yes, okay, I’ve done the verification; I’ve checked all those links; I now need to go further into this to look at it from a “Will they understand this?” perspective. And you ask questions back of the AI system. I do that almost on a daily basis—maybe two or three times a week, actually—that I will use it to create something or summarize a report, and I will then go back with a bunch of questions: “When you said this, what did you mean by that? Have you got a source to cite what led you to think that?”

And I find that exceptionally useful in—this is my perception, of course—in strengthening my confidence that the AI isn’t like a raving loony that’s going to hallucinate and tell lies all the time, although I realize that they do that sometimes. And you’ve got to—not—it’s not a person you’re talking to. This is not anything other than a bit of software on a server somewhere that pattern-matches things. Let’s not get into that conversation because I find it very distracting. The important stuff to think about: communicators who recognize that are benefiting; those who don’t are suffering. That, in my opinion, is a strong place. Communicators generally who know about all this stuff can focus on helping educate other communicators on how to do this properly. So that to me seems a simple progress forward to do that. Like I said, there are books, there are publications, there are newsletters, there are articles—you name it—telling you about all of this.

Now, where do you go to find all these? Are you on your own totally to wade through God knows what online? No, there are places to help with that. I’ve got something in mind which I’ll talk about another time, I think, that will help that. And I think we are at a stage, notwithstanding the agentic AI that slags off a developer in public and you don’t know whether it’s true—more of that’s likely. But we’re at the stage where we are looking at the way AI tools like these are developing that go way beyond prompt engineering, as the phrase used to be. You don’t need the level of detail in many prompts—not saying all—because the general rule applies: it depends on what you’re doing; that the more detail you provide might be actually beneficial in the output you’ll get from the chatbot. But the simple, plain-English conversation you have, which I use a lot, is usually good enough. And it’s a bit like that 80% rule, you know—it’s always 80%; that’s good enough. We can live with that, depending totally on what it is that you want and what you’re doing. So we’re at that stage where there is so much to see and read online about this that it’s hard to know where on earth you would start, and that’s a key thing we need to help other communicators understand: How do you start? We have solutions to help you do that.

Thanks a lot, Dan. That was a really comprehensive report. You packed a lot into that report. I got a couple of things I wanted to mention to you. It’s really interesting what you said about BlueSky and commenting, and indeed, the clamor for an edit button. Boy, does that remind us of Twitter, does it not back in the day? People want an edit button. But you mentioned some of the technicalities in why that’s a major issue with the protocol that is problematic from a technical point of view. And I get this is technical. But my question is this: How has Threads managed to do this without any problems at all? Because Threads is also connected with—the—runs on a protocol, let’s say, the same as BlueSky’s that enables you to share stuff to the—to the Fediverse, but you can edit a comment on Threads. I think you’ve got 15 minutes before that—that expires; you can’t do it anymore. And I do that quite a bit. I’m forever—you know, for instance, when I share posts about the next For Immediate Release episode, I usually forget to either include the URL or even add your handle to the post, so there’s a quick post, “damn,” I go back in again and correct it. So I find that quite useful from that point of view. So how come they’re doing it then without any issues or have there been issues that I just don’t know about? That’s my question on that one.

The other one is really interesting about WordPress. I’ve been following that too. I don’t use WordPress actively anymore—not for over a year now—although I still maintain my archive. So I’m in the back end quite a bit now, updating stuff and so forth. But interesting what you said—I was wondering, I read in—I think it was TechCrunch recently—that the hosted WordPress, that’s WordPress.com, has just launched an AI assistant that lets you literally build your site with voice prompts and drag and drop across the screen, asking the AI assistant to complete the task. Now that to me seems a huge step forward in using that. I wish that would come to Ghost, which is where I am now. But I think it’s surely an evolutionary step that is definitely going to come. I’m curious what you think about that, Dan. But the overall picture on WordPress, though, is pretty interesting. So thanks for including that.

So next story—this is the first of our non-AI stories. So you take a breath, right, take a breather from AI for a bit. This is about the—back in January in For Immediate Release 496, one of our midweek episodes, we talked about the PRCA, that’s the Public Relations and Communication Association, their move to redefine public relations. The organization proposed a new definition that positions PR as a strategic management discipline.

Shel Holtz: First of two.

Neville Hobson: Concerned with trust, legitimacy, volatility, and long-term value creation. It’s ambitious. It’s modern. It clearly aims to elevate the profession. But since then, the reaction’s been rather muted, from what I can see. There hasn’t been a groundswell of endorsement across the wider communication landscape. Okay, so they published this specifically asking PRCA members to comment on it. So if you weren’t a member, you couldn’t access the part of the website where you could leave comments. On LinkedIn, various posts—much of the commentary feels polite, even respectful, but not energized.

So let’s hear the PRCA’s new definition. And this is the portable one, I suppose you’d call it: “Public relations is the strategic management discipline that builds trust, enhances reputation, and helps leaders interpret complexity and manage volatility.”

Shel Holtz: The executive summary.

Neville Hobson: “Delivering measurable outcomes, including stakeholder confidence, long-term value creation, and commercial growth.” Now, I’ve had some anecdotal comments I’ve seen—it’s like, “Wow, that’s a mouthful.” Interesting. But I had to take a breath in that one single sentence, by the way, to complete it. So I read a really interesting post by Helen Dunne in Corporate Affairs Unpacked, where she says she showed the definition to several senior communicators. Their reactions ranged from “word salad” to “corporate buzzwords” to the rather weary “I’m too old for this.” I like that one.

Her bigger concern though isn’t the language; it’s representation. She argues that the definition doesn’t reflect the broader industry. The PRCA represents agencies. Many of those agencies are focused on branding, marketing, media relations, creative services. Only a small proportion of practitioners would describe their work as helping leaders interpret complexity at the strategic management level.

Shel Holtz: Ha.

Neville Hobson: Helen cites PRCA’s own state-of-the-sector data, which says 15% are in branding and marketing, 13% in communication strategy, 12% in corporate PR, and only 3% in reputation management. So that data undercuts the elevated framing, she says. So is the PRCA describing what PR is or what it wishes it to be? In my own post on this, which I did last week, I argued that the idea of redefining PR is worthy. But unless the CIPR, PRSA, IPRA, IABC, and others move in the same direction, we simply add another definition to a growing list, which raises a deeper question: Are we trying to clarify the profession or to rebrand it? If every major industry association defines public relations differently—and they do, frankly, even though some look similar—is the real issue the wording or the fact that we’ve never agreed what business we’re actually in?

Shel Holtz: After we reported on this, I was thinking that if anybody is going to succeed in pushing a new definition of PR that is widely adopted, it would be the Global Alliance. Because if the Global Alliance pushes it, all of their member associations, like PRSA and IABC and all the rest, are more likely to adopt it, or at least be aware of it. I don’t know what kind of influence PRCA has to push this, but if you open any public relations textbook, you’re going to find that author’s or those authors’ definitions of PR. You’re going to find a different definition in every PR association.

The one thing that troubles me about PRCA’s definition is that it says nothing about the relations that we have with stakeholder groups. And it’s right there in the—the name of the profession. Public relations is about managing the relationships, the relations, between an organization and its stakeholders. And that’s absent from the definition. In fact, I wouldn’t know from the definition that it had anything to do with all those stakeholders and the way the company interacts with them or the organization interacts with them. That said, I find the reactions that you have collected to be interesting, notably for their lack of enthusiasm and excitement. I certainly credit PRCA for undertaking this. I think it is a worthwhile discussion to have, but it really doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere, does it?

Neville Hobson: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, you mentioned the Global Alliance. I wrote about that in my post last week—that they’re well-placed to, let’s say, convene all the major associations, if such a thing were even possible, to arrive at a single, concise definition supported by shared principles—that part of their stated mission is to unify the public relations profession. So wouldn’t that be a good place to start? It wouldn’t be easy; consensus-building rarely is, I said in my post, really. But if unification is the goal, agreeing how we define ourselves would seem a logical place to start.

I think the PRCA, like you said, Shel, I think they have taken a really good move to address the topic. The definition currently stems from 30 years ago—it’s been tweaked in between times—when it was all about press releases and media relations and things like that. This effort from PRCA brings it up to date. It’s a much more contemporary definition that is more in tune with what communicators do. Yet, like you said, there’s been little enthusiasm for it. And in fact, it reminds me—I saw a post on LinkedIn recently, I can’t remember what it was, where someone had done a word cloud of descriptions from, I guess, a dozen PR firms of what they say they do. Lots of words in there; “public relations” isn’t mentioned at all.

So are we at the point where we don’t know what the business is that we’re doing? Should it broaden out that discussion more widely? I don’t think PRCA is the organization to do that. Something like the Global Alliance is much more well-placed, I believe. Now, I’ve not seen them commenting on this. I’ve not actually seen any of the acronym soup I put in my post—CIPR, PRSA, IPRA, IABC—commenting on this at all. That speaks a lot, I think—that no one is commenting about it. And the comments I have seen, as you mentioned, don’t really exert much enthusiasm. Jerry Corbett, a good friend of ours who used to be, I think, the president of PRSA in America…

Shel Holtz: He was.

Neville Hobson: …did comment, and he talks about: this is way too long, still needs to be simplified. It needs to talk about relations like you just mentioned. The last time this topic was addressed in a meaningful way that embraced other associations and gained a lot of traction—if nothing eventually, ultimately happened—was in 2011, 2012 when the PRSA proposed a new definition. Now they offered it to everyone saying, “What do you think of this?” It wasn’t just the members of PRSA, which I think was the smarter move, frankly. A lot of debate happened. Others on the extremes like the Arthur Page Society and others were involved as well in commenting on this. So it was widely embracing. Yeah, ultimately nothing happened. So there wasn’t enthusiasm—a lot of opinion, but it ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

So here we are 15, 16 years later. Now it’s coming up again. The cynical view—and I’ve seen some people commenting on this—is that about every decade, the industry goes through all this: “We need to redefine the definition,” and nothing happens. That’s a bit of a cynical view. Will this be different? Well, PRCA has done a good job in taking a very first step that has generated some response, even without much enthusiasm. Can it go anywhere? I guess we will see in time.

Shel Holtz: We will see, but I have to say that I am skeptical, doubtful that even if they adopt it, I don’t see it being widely embraced by the entire public relations and communications community. I think part of the problem is it’s still hard to define public relations as a profession when anybody—as I have said 50,000 times on this show and elsewhere—anybody can hang out a shingle and say, “I am a public relations practitioner,” and they abide by none of the principles, none of the best practices, and none of the models. They engage in unethical behavior just to get to that final result that a client is interested in. And until we can coalesce around the idea of being a profession with a shared set of principles and a shared set of values and a shared set of frameworks and, you know, behave like a profession… Think about accounting. Think about law. Think about medicine. Think about engineering. These are professions where there are certain assumptions that wherever you are in the world and whatever level you’re at—whether you’re with a consulting firm or a corporation or you’re an independent consultant—you all agree to these things.

The communication/public relations industry is nowhere near that. I know the Global Communication Certification Council aims to change that, but that’s a long way off. Still in the process of separating from IABC; the idea being that other associations are not going to adopt IABC certification, but if it’s an independent certification, they certainly might.

Neville Hobson:

Shel Holtz: But the more people who seek and obtain certification, regardless of the association they belong to, the more likely the profession will be to coalesce around those guiding principles. So that’s my wild dream, but we’re nowhere near that right now. And even as I say, if PRCA settles on this definition, I don’t see it being widely adopted elsewhere.

Neville Hobson: No, if it’s just the members settling on it, then I can’t say it’ll just be another one amongst the things. If you Google “define PR,” as I did on a number of times—typing on a machine where I’m not logged in so it’s a clean search—it pulls up at least a dozen different definitions. Indeed, all the professional bodies say something slightly different. So this will just be another one. It may get picked up by some, but I can see greater confusion. You start using this and someone else who reads your stuff or is involved with you in some way just kind of Googles “defined PR,” they get something entirely different. So which is it then? You’re saying it’s this and these guys are saying it’s that—so it doesn’t help.

Shel Holtz: Well, collect every definition from every association and from every textbook and from every agency and feed them all to Claude or ChatGPT and say, “Create a single definition that accounts for everything that you see here.” See what it comes up with.

Neville Hobson: Well, you could do the whole thing end to end. The AI system does the whole thing, does the research, and then—that could be a good start.

Shel Holtz: Of course, you would use the AI to do the research too. Good exercise. Well, here’s the headline from a Substack post Paul Ferbredi published recently: “I bet you couldn’t show the ROI of your corporate podcast if your job depended on it.” That line isn’t just provocative; it highlights a real challenge many of us in organizational communication face as audio content increasingly becomes part of the mix. Ferbredi’s key point—echoed in the comments that were left on his piece—is that too many corporate podcasts are, frankly, vanity projects. People launch them because everyone’s doing a podcast or because executives think their voice should be heard. But they’re not always clear about what the podcast is supposed to achieve. Back to that whole idea of strategic planning. And if you don’t define success clearly, then yeah, proving ROI is nearly impossible.

So let’s unpack that a bit. One of the problems is that we often measure the wrong things. We fall back on downloads, subscriber counts, chart rankings—all output metrics that tell you how many people pressed play, but almost nothing about what that listening meant for the business. That’s why critics like Paul call ROI “unshowable,” because too often we’re not measuring in ways that link back to business outcomes. But here’s the nuance: it is possible to measure ROI if you define it differently at the beginning and tie it to concrete goals. According to frameworks in the B2B podcast space, traditional vanity metrics like downloads or rankings simply don’t cut it, especially in the B2B world. What matters is whether episodes generate pipeline influence, lead opportunities, and business impact that your CFO can understand. That means integrating your podcast data into your customer relationship management and tracking things like listener engagement that turns into demo requests or sales conversations.

Put differently, ROI for a branded or corporate podcast isn’t just a ratio of dollars spent versus dollars earned in direct revenue. Some of the most valuable returns are indirect. And I would argue that means we need a different label than ROI, which is the ratio of dollars spent to dollars earned. Brand awareness, trust, thought leadership, deeper audience relationships—these are the kinds of outcomes that support recruitment, retention, stakeholder alignment, even executive visibility. Agencies and analytics platforms remind us that these outcomes are real. They just aren’t easily captured by simple metrics, and certainly not as ROI.

Experts also point to sophisticated ways of measuring impact—things like brand lift studies, pixel attribution, long-term tracking of customer behavior. These techniques compare people exposed to the podcast with a control group or follow listeners through the customer journey to see if they visit your website and engage further or convert into customers. That gives you measurable evidence that listening isn’t just passive noise; it’s influencing the business. And importantly, not all podcasts are trying to directly generate sales. Some are designed to build relationships with potential customers, with internal audiences, with partners. If your podcast goal is to deepen customer trust or make your brand more visible in your ecosystem, then your ROI framework has to reflect that. Clear goal-setting upfront before the microphone is ever turned on is what’s most important.

So what do we take away from Paul’s challenge? First, he’s right that many corporate podcasts fail ROI tests, but mostly because they aren’t giving themselves a fighting chance to succeed. ROI isn’t inherent to a podcast; it’s a function of how you define your goals, how you measure your outcomes, and how you connect the dots between listening and real-world results. When we treat podcasts as strategic channels with measurable outcomes—not just vanity projects—we not only can show ROI, we can use the ROI to make better decisions. To summarize this: podcasts can have measurable ROI, but only when we stop obsessing over downloads and start thinking in terms of business impact.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, you’re absolutely right to that conclusion. It’s a really good piece Paul wrote, I think. Even though I have to say his rationale is comparing with text—isn’t text better than audio? So set that aside though, because the strength of his analysis is really, really well done. My experience in B2B podcasting, which I’ve done for a client for some time recently, it rings bells, this, because it is all about the goals. Yet the obsession has always been—from way back; it’s probably diminished quite a bit now—”How many downloads do we get? What does Apple Podcasts say?” And then you get kind of down rabbit holes when you look at the analytics reports about all the—which delivered the clicks to your podcast site—you’re then into serious eye-glazing territory unless you’re the techie who needs to know that kind of stuff.

I think the goals are key, absolutely key. And you made a very good point that it’s not always just about ROI, meaning money, the return on the investment. How many leads does it generate that lead to sales, perhaps? Although having a podcast that is a lead generator, that’s great. There’s a goal when you say, “We want this episode to deliver us 16 inquiries about a widget that we’re selling”, in which case the whole chain of that has got to be well thought through. Not good enough just to stick your podcast up there and have a link on a podcast page on your website. You’ve got to have, when they click to go to your site, get to the landing page—what happens? How do you track that? And enterprise firms particularly have access to really effective tools that kind of map and track the end-to-end journey or visits to the sites, where they came from, who they are—particularly if they’ve identified themselves or they’re existing customers. So all that’s got to be part of your structure.

I think I had a conversation with someone about six months ago about starting a business podcast. And I’m getting déjà vu just reflecting on part of that conversation where a goal was literally a by-the-way at the very end—where it emerged from this person that they had a goal of what it was. And I remember thinking at the time that a podcast is not what they should be using to achieve that goal. So you’ve got to—the right goal. Yet I also recognize that vanity projects—yeah, there’s not much you can do, I suppose, if the person you’re talking to is convinced he or she wants to do this no matter what, that’s a vanity project. The question I would ask as a communicator is: Do you want to get involved in something like that, no matter what the theme might be? Podcasting is in a different place than it was even five years ago, I would argue, in that most people I talk to now think of video first, not audio. And we do a video of our audio conversation. We don’t do much with the video; I stick it up there on YouTube. So if you want to look at two talking heads on screen, you can.

Shel Holtz: Well, yeah, the video gets recorded whether we want it to or not. So we might as well use it for people who prefer to get it that way.

Neville Hobson: Right. We might as well use it. Exactly. You can see our facial expressions. When I go like that, you can see that. But I think this is worth reading, Paul’s post. The thought in your mind if you’re thinking about a podcast is: start with the goal first. Don’t think about how many downloads you get and how you’re going to be like Joe Rogan. I often think those comparisons—when people say, “Joe Rogan’s podcast got 65 million downloads”—talk about stuff that’s completely irrelevant to what you’re likely to achieve with a B2B podcast. Let’s actually go. Which is you better have big budget.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and there are goals that you can assign to a podcast that have nothing to do with ROI, nothing at all. It could be that you are trying to change the perception of your organization: “We’re not a stodgy organization. We have that reputation. We need to change it. Let’s get a fun, loose podcast out there so that it starts to move the needle in the other direction—that this would be a fun place maybe to come work”. There are podcasts that are aimed at attracting new recruits to the organization.

Neville Hobson: Right, we mentioned that, yeah.

Shel Holtz: There are podcasts that are aimed at promoting thought leadership. And of course you need to know what your goal for thought leadership is, but none of these are going to be directly tied to new revenue. That would be really, really hard to do.

Neville Hobson: You tie it to other goals that you could measure. So you’ve got to have that. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Exactly. And you can measure that as long as you know what it is at the point where you start. You mentioned that Paul did make the point: isn’t text better? When we started this podcast, when there were about 400 podcasts, most podcasts talked about podcasting. That was the theme. Every podcast was, “Let’s talk about podcasting”. And there was a lot of conversation back then about why audio is better. And I mean, there were some critics. I remember one person said, “I can read five articles in the time it takes to listen to one podcast”. But my answer was, “Yeah, but I can’t read any articles when I’m driving my car.” But I can listen to a podcast for me, audio—and this is not true of video, by the way—audio is the only form of media that’s available to us that people can pay attention to when they’re doing something else, whether it’s folding laundry or working out or walking the dog or driving somewhere or mowing the lawn—whatever it might be, you can listen and absorb information. You can’t read; you can’t watch a video.

God help me if I ever see anybody driving and watching a video at the same time. I actually did see that. I saw somebody had their phone on the car and he had a video playing. It wasn’t the road ahead of him or behind him; it was a TV show or something. And I went, “My God,” I mean, that’s worse than being on your phone. But I continue to maintain that that is true: the value of audio is the ability to listen when you’re doing something else. And there’s also been studies about emotion from hearing somebody’s voice—that you’re able to connect with that much more quickly than reading a quote. Where this is leading me is that if you are going down the road of producing a podcast, know why that format is of value to you. Why is that the approach to take in terms of the goal that you’re trying to achieve? Is that emotional connection important? Are you trying to reach an audience that has limited time and may listen to your show when they’re doing something else?

Finally, a podcast could be part of a larger campaign. It can be just one element. Could be it’s the audio version of something that we are producing for people who aren’t going to partake of another element of this that was produced. I am wrapping up work on a book that—the proposal is almost ready to go. There is an agent waiting to look at it. It’s probably going to get published. When it’s published, the proposal calls for there to be a Substack-like newsletter to go along with this and a new podcast that I am going to be launching with Steve Crescenzo on internal communications right here on the For Immediate Release Podcast Network. It’s just one element, but the main piece is the book, right? It’s—it’s not the podcast. The podcast is supporting.

And one more thing is that you talk about podcasting being in a very different place today than it was five years ago. One of the things that defines that is the fact that you are now seeing news made based on what somebody says on a podcast. It’s no longer what they said on an interview show or in a speech—well, it is—but in addition to that now, on a podcast where he was interviewed, this politician said this or this business leader said that. So that might be another reason that you want to podcast is as a way to get these quotes out there that might get picked up elsewhere and make news. So I think shoehorning podcasting into this one ROI bucket is a mistake. And yet Paul is absolutely right: his bottom-line conclusion, which is you’d better know what it is you’re trying to achieve with this before you push that record button.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s the bottom line. Absolutely right. So goal-setting is key. Start with that, not how many downloads you expect and can you arrive with Joe Rogan or whatever it might be. So good stuff, that, I have to say. Okay, so our final story today—we’re back to the AI topic. Question: Are chatbots—are chatbots the new influencers?

Shel Holtz: Everything that goes around comes around.

Neville Hobson: For the past two decades, digital marketing has largely been about visibility. First it was banner ads, then search, then social, then influencer marketing. Each wave brought new tools, new behaviors, and new anxieties. Now, according to a recent New York Times piece, we’ve entered another phase: chatbots are the new influencers and brands have to woo the robots. The article describes how companies are discovering that when customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, for example, about a product or provider, the answer that comes back may not reflect what the company believes about itself. In one example, a healthcare software firm asked chatbots about its own offerings and found outdated, incomplete, and sometimes misleading information being surfaced. That moment triggered a realization: if AI models are shaping how people consume information, then influencing those models becomes part of marketing strategy.

This has been framed as the next evolution of SEO, says the New York Times. Except now it has a new acronym: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)—a topic we discussed last September in a For Immediate Release interview with Stephanie Grober at the Horowitz Agency in New York. Great conversation that was. Instead of trying to rank on page one of Google, brands are now trying to influence how large language models synthesize and present information in response to prompts. That changes the game. Chatbots don’t care about vibe, emotional resonance, or brand storytelling. They prioritize clarity, structured detail, and volume. Some brands are flooding the zone with highly targeted content. Others are obsessively auditing Reddit because Reddit turns out to be one of the most cited sources in AI-generated answers. In effect, the brand is no longer competing only for human attention; it is competing for algorithmic interpretation.

That’s actually well said there, Shel. We talked about this very topic at least twice in the last six months of last year. Not only humans; you’ve got to look at the bots as well. I think that introduces a deeper shift. Historically, search engines pointed users to sources. Chatbots increasingly summarize, recommend, and decide what is worth mentioning. The intermediary is no longer neutral. It synthesizes, which means the battleground for reputation is moving upstream from persuasion to data conditioning.

But here’s the counterpoint. We’ve been here before and we’ve discussed it in this podcast before. Every major digital shift has been framed as existential. SEO was supposed to change everything, then social algorithms, then influencer marketing. Each time an optimization industry sprang up, each time brands flooded the zone with content, and each time the platforms evolved in response. So the question is: Is this genuinely a structural shift in how reputation is constructed, or simply the next optimization cycle dressed up as revolution? Because there’s a real risk here. If brands begin producing vast volumes of content purely to influence AI outputs, do we elevate substance or do we accelerate a new kind of synthetic noise? Could be all that AI slop we’ve been hearing about a lot recently. And if Reddit posts and forum threads are disproportionately shaping chatbot answers, are we witnessing democratization of influence or amplification of unverified commentary? So are chatbots truly the new influencers we must court, or are we watching the early stages of another marketing arms race that may look very different once the models mature? What do you think, Shel?

Shel Holtz: It’s a fraught topic. I mean, first of all, as organizations trip over themselves to figure out how to appear in AI query responses and appear the way they want to, is that going to taint AI responses to the point that they’re no better than a Google search response? I mean, you remember the original Google where you typed in a query and you got 10 items that were directly related to what you were interested in. And now you have to wade through the ads and the other crap that populates the Google search results before you get to anything that’s even remotely relevant.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Slop is the word, not crap, slop.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Okay, yeah. But you have some other issues here. We hear that Reddit figures prominently in the results. And then you hear from somebody else: No, no, no, it’s earned media that is prompting what gets injected into the responses to queries in the large language models. I just saw—this was just published on February 18th—a study that found 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first third of whatever content it was that they found. So, you know, do you top-load your content with the main information that you want the AI models to grasp, even if that’s not necessarily the way you want people to read the content that you’re producing?

And each model does something different. The fact that ChatGPT citations come from the first third of content doesn’t mean that Claude’s do or Gemini’s or Grok’s. And then every time they release a new model, has it changed? So I think we could be chasing our tails with this kind of information. Are chatbots the new influencer? Well, they’re a new influencer. Certainly people are getting information from these—I do. I say, “This product isn’t working for me. What are the alternatives?” And it tells me, and I’m sure it’s leaving out good products that just haven’t got their information into the places where it’s going to be absorbed by an AI being trained on this content or searching.

So, you know. I think we just need to produce good content that answers questions. I—we talked about this a couple of months ago. When you look at the tools that are being implemented in the enterprise, employees are no longer reading the articles that we produce that say, “Here’s the justification and the context and the background for the change that the organization’s going through.” They type a query and they get a reply. Where’s that reply coming from? It’s not coming from the context that we provided unless we top-load, front-load the content with that answer in order to accommodate the chatbot. Is that what we want? This is probably a time to be rethinking the way we communicate altogether because of this situation. But I think creating good content that does a good job of answering questions, that puts the main information at the top…

Neville Hobson:

Shel Holtz: I mean, you know, somebody ought to invent an inverted pyramid style of writing that starts with the who, when, where, why before you get to the, you know, the detail. Just do good content and you’ll be fine.

Neville Hobson: That’s a good tip, I think. To me, just seems like everything is so manipulated. I was thinking this the other day, something I was searching for online, and I looked at what Google produced. Because Google, by the way, really has improved hugely in the last six months in terms of what it actually offers you when you do a search term. The AI generates a summary of the top result that comes, the citations that it includes that you can click on if you want. My experience is, I often find that that summary is good enough for what I need. I might scroll down to see who else is saying what. And then you’ve got little drop-downs of other responses to that search term. Great. And it usually gives me what I want.

But basically, I’m thinking when I see stuff like this: the manipulation is huge. Would it not be simpler if we just ditched all this stuff? No, that’s not the answer. The world’s moved on. We have to live with this. But it makes it difficult to trust anything the way you used to be able to. So do I trust this answer either because it’s—Google is giving it to me, therefore implies I trust Google? Or is it because it looks about right, that’s what I’m looking for? So I trust the responder to that answer? I don’t know. You have to make your own judgment call on this because if you’re using another search engine, it’s going to be very different.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: If you use your chatbot—and that’s actually quite interesting because whether it’s ChatGPT, whether it’s Claude, whatever it might be, using your chatbot, not a search engine—how do you feel about that? Do you implicitly trust the chatbot and what it’s telling you? Would it be different than what Google would tell you if you did a Google search? Probably yes. Not in terms of meaning, but the words are going to be different, obviously, and maybe the sources will be different. So if you need to do that, fine. I don’t think you do typically need to do that. You just go to Google or whatever it might be that you’re accustomed to, that you trust, search and get your answer.

But you’ve now really got to—and particularly in light of the story we talked about earlier about the developer who was stitched up by an AI agent that damages reputation—that kind of content might show up in search results too. So this is the landscape we’re in now. You have to get used to it.

Shel Holtz: I still find the the top 10 blue links on the first search engine results page from Google are far less valuable than they used to be. I still find that the first three or four are paid and irrelevant or… I see it all the time.

Neville Hobson: I don’t see that. I don’t see that at all. I don’t see paid at all in the first results. I see it a little further down. Yeah, okay, interesting. Maybe it’s different in here. I’m doing google.co.uk, not google.com. So maybe there’s a difference. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: I definitely do. Listeners, what are you seeing on Google? I’ve been using Perplexity. Are you logged in to Google when you’re doing this? Okay. I have been using Perplexity more and more because I’m able to refine my search, saying, “I’m looking for this, not this, and I need it from articles that have been published in the last six months.” And it does an excellent job of providing me with great results. Now I haven’t compared it to what Google would give me, but I have to believe that it’s more relevant because it is trying to satisfy me rather than satisfy the advertisers who have paid to have their links promoted on Google.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, typically. Okay. It’s funny. I mean, I’ve just done a search on Google right now. There’s not a single sponsored link in my list at all. Not one. And I do see them occasionally, but they’re kind of halfway down; it says “sponsored”. I’m not seeing any for this search term I just searched on. So I’m scrolling further down the page—I’m not seeing any. Results are personalized. Try it without personalization; maybe that might make a difference. But so I’m quite happy with what I see from this. I see in this particular example…

Shel Holtz: Hmm.

Neville Hobson: …it gives me the text upfront, as you know, “to see more”. That will tell me more about that. Again, scrolling down the page, don’t see anything that’s saying sponsored, which is what you normally do see. I don’t know. But I mean, the point is, I think you need to determine yourself: Do you trust what it’s telling you? Are you happy with that result, whether it’s search at Google or whether it’s your favorite chatbot? I was using Perplexity a lot, Shel. I really was. I stopped using it entirely. I didn’t like what it was doing. I didn’t like it at all. Yeah. But I have to tell you, I stopped flipping from one tool to another to see. No, I stick with what I like, what I know works for me. And I don’t bother trying to second-guess it. But let me see what Gemini says about this. Although I do that occasionally, I have to say.

Shel Holtz: I had stopped for a while and I’ve gone back to it. It’s improved. It has improved considerably in the last couple of months.

Neville Hobson: I did a research project about two weeks ago where I did spend time trawling different tools and getting complementary or different results. I then had one of those—ChatGPT—summarize it all. But hey, it’s a lot of work and I didn’t need to do that. So I’m not going to do that as a matter of course.

Shel Holtz: I did. I, on our intranet, have a “construction term of the week”. This has been going on for about six and a half years. Every week, a new definition of a new term. I’ve gone through everything that has been provided to me. So now I’m asking an AI: “Give me a list of 20 construction-related terms.” And I’ll get more specific than that. I’ll say, “around water infrastructure projects” or things like this. And I’ll say, “Okay, I like this one. Give me a two-paragraph definition of that.” I’ll copy and paste that definition and go to one of the other LLMs and I’ll say, “Assess this for accuracy, list what you would change and then rewrite it the way you would rewrite it to incorporate your corrections.” And I find that that gets me a much better definition. So I’m frequently bouncing around to these.

I also find that I’ll switch which tool I’m using the most based on who’s released the best model most recently because I find the latest Claude model is just amazing, but then Gemini just released a new one that apparently is blowing Claude away. I want to use the one that’s going to give me the best results, not the one I’m most comfortable with. So I’m changing all the time.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I find the one I’m most comfortable with is the one that gives me the best results—that I’m very happy with that—but again, our uses are very different. I don’t use it for the kind of stuff that you do when you talk about “You hear these definitions, give me a summary and find the best one” or whatever. I tend not to do that kind of work. But I’m very happy with ChatGPT Plus that I’ve been using for a while now. I use NotebookLM occasionally, particularly when I’m looking at dense academic reports. But I’m kind of OK with that. So the point is, I think—to summarize all of this—that our chatbots are new influencers. I think the New York Times piece is a good piece. It’s a thought-provoking piece. And I think the caveats, as I saw them certainly, are the risk factor that we just spent a while discussing. I think the idea—as the writer mentioned in the Times piece—if Reddit posts are disproportionately shaping chatbot answers, are we witnessing the amplification of unverified content? I think that’s a very good point to make. Hence, even more so—and I don’t know how we’d feel comfortable with this—you’ve got to verify everything.

I do that. And I find, depending on what it is… I can’t think of a good example, frankly, Shel, but you know… you’ve spent some time, a little bit of time telling your AI system what you want it to do. You might have had a to-and-fro, back-and-forth conversation about that. That’s common for me. Not just “Here’s a prompt and off you go and do it”—no. And it comes back with something; I say, “Fine, what do you mean by this?” or “I want you to do that as well.” Yes, that’s good to highlight that. That goes on all the time. And then the checking of things takes longer than that. And I’m totally OK with that. Because I need to—and this must apply to everyone—I need to be sure… Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it doesn’t apply to folks who work in Deloitte. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, but it occurs to me.

You need to check it for your own peace of mind—that what you’re sharing with the other person, whether it’s a client or a colleague, is accurate to your best knowledge—that there’s nothing you’ve done that would diminish the accuracy of that or anything you haven’t done, meaning not verified or checked everything. So—and like you said earlier in our early discussion about this, there’s a lot more to this than just verifying. Yeah, I get that too. But it takes time. And maybe that’s why people don’t do it. They see the folks who do it this way see it as the easy tool to improve their—to dump all this stuff on the chatbot so they can either take the day off or do other things. I mean, that’s—I don’t believe that’s everywhere. But some people will think that. So it is a tricky one to answer. And I think that we just got to do what we’re comfortable with that meets our objectives and take as much care as possible in producing the best work we can.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and for communicators, recognizing that chatbots are a new influencer means that we have to think about how we take advantage of that. And I’m going to emphasize again: they are a new influencer, not the new influencer. Kim Kardashian has not hung her head in shame and retreated into a dark room to wait to die. She still has millions and millions of followers and holds up a product and it drives sales. You know, the—the old influencers haven’t gone anywhere and still warrant some attention.

Neville Hobson: Well, true. So the Times, though, says—the question they asked is: Are chatbots the new influencers? So our answer to that would be: No, they are one of the new influencers.

Shel Holtz: Right, yeah. No. Yes, add them to the mix. So that’ll wrap up this episode of For Immediate Release, episode number 502, our long form episode for February. We do hope that you will comment on this. All of our comments these days come from our LinkedIn posts. So check LinkedIn, follow either one of us, but we also share these posts on Facebook in three places: we have a For Immediate Release Podcast Network community and a For Immediate Release page, in addition to you and I sharing them individually. We’re also on Threads and BlueSky. Leave a comment. Any of those places, we’ll pick it up and share it in the March long form episode.

You can also send us an email to fircomments@gmail.com. You can attach an audio file. You can record that audio file directly from the For Immediate Release Podcast Network website—there’s a “send voicemail” tab over on the right-hand side. I actually got a voicemail from the website last month, but it was just somebody being obscene. It had nothing to do with communication, but I got excited. We got one of those from Speakpipe, which is the vendor who does that. You can leave a comment directly in the show notes. I mean, it is a blog. There’s a place to put comments in a blog. Go figure.

Neville Hobson: Wow, should have played it. An obscene phone call, okay.

Shel Holtz: All these ways to comment, please do and be part of this conversation. And our next long form episode will be recorded on Saturday, March 21st. We will drop that on Monday, March 23rd. Until then, that will be a “30” for For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #502: Attack of the AI Agent! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

AI isn’t replacing communicators — it’s amplifying the value of communication, especially storytelling and strategic writing. In this short, midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore how the hottest jobs in tech are increasingly about telling stories, not writing code, with Netflix, Microsoft, Adobe, Anthropic, and OpenAI all hiring communications and storytelling teams at salaries ranging from six figures up to $775,000 per year. Even AI labs themselves are posting compensation packages around $400K for storytelling and communications roles, signaling that they understand the irreplaceable human value of meaning-making in an age of automated content generation.

The distinction Neville and Shel highlight between traditional messaging and true storytelling proves critical: conventional communications start with what the brand wants to say, while storytelling starts with what audiences actually care about. The strongest communicators will be those who move beyond prescriptive messaging to tell genuine human stories.

Links from this episode:

The unexpected winners of the AI slop boom: Word nerds
Why OpenAI Is Offering $400K for Storytelling Roles
The Great Communicators Are Human
Human Storytellers Worth $400k+ Amidst AI Boom
The Great Communicators Are Human
Storytelling Wins In The Age Of AI: 3 Valuable Communication Tools
How Storytelling Unlocks Career Pathways In The Age Of AI
The Bionic Storyteller: How AI can amplify HR’s human voice
Businesses hiring storytellers to ‘cut through the AI slop’
Storybrand
Building a Story Brand 2.0 (Book)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 501. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz. And here’s some good news for communicators. Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing us, it’s amplifying the value of communication itself, especially storytelling and strategic writing. If you’ve been feeling that AI spells doom for writers and communicators, the labor market is telling a very different story. We’ll tell you that story right after this. Let’s start with something concrete. The hottest jobs in tech right now aren’t about writing code or managing data. They’re about telling clear, compelling human stories. Recent hiring trends show that giants like Netflix, Microsoft, Adobe, Anthropic, and OpenAI are aggressively expanding communications and storytelling teams with roles offering from six figures up to as much as $775,000 a year for senior leadership positions without any requirement to write a line of code. Why? Because AI has flooded the internet with cheap automated output, what some observers are calling slopaganda. I love this word, slopaganda. Hadn’t heard it before I read that article, but millions of words get generated every minute. Most of it lacks clarity, insight, context, and meaning, exactly the things that real communicators deliver. Companies are recognizing that the ability to cut through that noise with strategic narrative creates trust, authority, and differentiation in the market. Even the AI labs themselves, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are willing to pay top dollar for storytellers. One analysis said that nearly $400,000 compensation packages are being posted specifically for storytelling and communications roles at these firms. exactly because humans excel at crafting nuanced messages that machines simply can’t. So here’s the underlying shift communicators need to understand. AI automates… AI automates tasks, but meaning making remains deeply human. Machines can generate text, but they don’t know which stories matter to whom or why. And we keep hearing communicators and writers venting on LinkedIn about machines lacking judgment, empathy, context, and strategic framing, all those hallmarks of great communication. That’s exactly what they’re looking for. And in an age of automated noise, those abilities create value. That’s a theme echoed across industry thinking.

Shel Holtz: That’s a theme echoed across industry thinking. A Forbes piece on storytelling in the age of AI highlights that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have and one of the most powerful tools leaders have. It helps audiences remember facts wrapped in emotion, connect data to human experience, and anchor organizational vision in something people can feel and act on. Another Forbes analysis argues that storytelling isn’t just about communication, it’s also a career pathway. When individuals and organizations tell clear stories about evolving roles, skills, development, and future opportunities, they make the future feel navigable rather than threatening. This matters for internal communication too. HR and people leaders are increasingly using narrative to frame change and build resilience. When employees feel adrift and amid all the talk of AI disruption, a coherent story about how the organization is evolving and where people fit in. is one of the most effective ways to build trust and engagement. Even the broader hype narrative around AI’s impact on jobs, including viral essays, warning of sweeping automation, underscores this point. Some of the loudest voices talking about disruption are exactly those using storytelling to shape a narrative about the future. But the data so far suggests that the real impact of AI isn’t mass job elimination, it’s task transformation. with humans shifting into roles that emphasize strategy, creativity, judgment, and communication, exactly the space where we storytellers thrive. So for communicators who worry that AI might make them obsolete, here’s the reality. Your craft isn’t threatened, it’s elevated. AI makes routine work easier, but narrative leadership, strategic framing, and contextual clarity are becoming even more essential. The labor market isn’t pulling back its investment in communicators, it’s paying up for them because the ability to tell a clear human story is now a competitive advantage. With the world drowning in automated content, meaning is scarce. And communicators are the ones who turn noise into narrative, confusion into clarity, and information into influence. That’s not something AI replaces, it’s something only humans can do well. And that’s why even in an AI era, talented communicators are irreplaceable and more valuable than ever. And by the way, if the tech companies feel the need to cut through the noise created by all that slopaganda, I got to use that word again, other industries will figure out sooner or later that they need to as well.

Neville Hobson: Listening to what you’re saying there, Shel, what strikes me is how similar themes are now surfacing here in the UK. So the Times ran a piece recently about companies hiring chief storytellers, specifically to cut through what they and everyone calls AI slop. What’s interesting is that it isn’t framed as anti-AI, it’s framed as a response to saturation. When content becomes easy and abundant, meaning becomes scarce. Recruiters are saying demand for storytelling roles has doubled in the past year. and the way they define storytelling isn’t about clever copy. It’s about starting with what people care about rather than what the brand wants to say. There’s also a strong internal dimension, storytelling being used to align remote teams, break down silos and create shared culture. So I’m left wondering whether this chief storyteller trend is something genuinely new or whether we’re simply rediscovering the strategic craft of communication in an AI saturated environment. And finally, if AI makes it easier to generate content, does that mean communicators need to become curators of meaning rather than producers of material?

Shel Holtz: Interesting question. And I think that this is somewhat different. We have been telling stories, but I think you have to define what we mean by storytelling here, because we write stories that aren’t really stories. It’s just a term that we use as a synonym for article. I wrote a story the other day. Was it really a story or was it a communication piece?

Shel Holtz: There are so many stories that we could tell in the world of organizational communication that are really just prescriptive or a statement of fact. We’re getting the news out, but we don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. We certainly don’t have a protagonist. We’re not looking at Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and trying to figure out. how to apply that to the tales that we tell. There is a guy out there, Donald Miller, who’s got this thing called Story Brand, which is fascinating, that is designed to put your customer into the story as the hero and the company as the mentor or the guide who helps the hero achieve its goal through its journey. And I really like it. And there are free tools that you can use to map all this out for your brand or your product. But it gets us away from saying, isn’t this product great? Look how great it works and tell a genuine story instead. And I think this is why narrative and story rather than communications or public relations are the labels that are being attached to these job descriptions that are all over LinkedIn. When I saw the story, I went and looked and there are dozens and dozens of them. And the salaries are jaw dropping when you consider that the typical, you know, communication manager is making about 108,000 a year, according to one of these articles. you know, $400,000 with all benefits, with three days remote work, because I read these job descriptions. This is very encouraging for our profession. But if you’re the kind of communicator out there who writes these articles that just says we have an employee assistance program, It offers the following bulleted services. You should call if you have emotional or financial problems. That’s not what they’re looking for. They’re not looking for you. They’re looking for the guy who wrote that article that I’ve referenced 50 times on this podcast about the employee who was divorced and depressed and started drinking and gained 100 pounds and finally called the EAP when he hit rock bottom. And they worked with him to find something that really excited him and it turned out to be ballroom dancing and now he’s a national champion traveling around the world. He’s lost more than a hundred pounds. He’s quit smoking and drinking and all because of the EAP. Which of those two stories are you more likely to read? It’s absolutely the story of the guy who used the EAP. People can relate to that. People don’t even read the crap that says we have one and here’s what it offers. So I think cutting through the noise with genuine stories that tell the tale of what the organization is trying to convey, that’s what they’re looking for.

Neville Hobson: So interesting. So the title Chief Storyteller, that sounds new and fashionable, right? But when you unpack it, much of it looks like what strong communication leaders have always done. Alignment, translation, cohesion, behavioral framing opens up a richer debate, I think. Is this a genuine new C-suite function or a rebranding of strategic communication crafted in an AI era? It sounds a lot like the latter to me.

Shel Holtz: It sounds a lot like the latter, but I think there’s a bit of the former as well, because we’re talking about a transition of role. I think communicators who are employed right now want to start telling more stories if they want to keep their jobs, because if all you’re doing is writing the stuff that can be written by AI just by giving it the facts and say, turn this into an article, I think you’re toast. But if you can tell a genuine story that moves people, then your job is probably secure and you may be qualified to apply for one of these $400,000 a year jobs. I don’t think they’re going to hire the average communicator who’s doing a pretty good job at their organization, even if they’re at the C-suite level, if they can’t put together the kind of narrative that these companies are looking for. Certainly there are companies that are doing this and there are communicators in those companies that are doing this, but I don’t think it’s most. I think most are cranking out the typical content that is just conveying the news. And I think basic journalism, the who, what, when, where, why, if I can pop that into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, especially if I’ve trained it on my writing style, which I have, by the way, on Gemini, it’ll turn out a passable article that then you can edit in 15 minutes and be done. That’s not what they’re looking for. I think that they would argue that that probably is slopaganda. And… This is exactly the noise that they’re looking for somebody to help them cut through.

Neville Hobson: So one of the strongest lines in the times piece is the distinction between messaging and meaning. Traditional comms starts with what the brand wants to say, says the times. Storytelling starts with what people care about. That’s a strategic pivot, I would say. So messaging is output driven, meaning is audience driven. AI is good at output, humans are better at contextual meaning. So is that? Now we should be looking at this as a shift from messaging to meaning.

Shel Holtz: absolutely. I think that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. And the focus on the audience. And again, this is what Donald Miller’s story brand, who has paid us no consideration for the reference here, is exactly what he does. He puts the customer at the center of the company or the brand’s story. And I think that’s what’s different. I think that’s the transition or the pivot that communicators need to make. I don’t think it’s difficult. And if you haven’t… written fiction, I would suggest that you read about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. There’s a wonderful book, I can’t remember the author’s name, but I’ve read it twice called The Writer’s Journey. he talks about, I mean, he’s focused on writing fiction, but he talks about how you apply the hero’s journey to things like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. And he has these tropes that everybody is familiar with. that he uses to explain how to write this way. And he tells you that every successful film in particular, and novels as well, uses this formula. And I read it twice because I really had to unpack it in a way that worked in organizational communication rather than novel and film writing. But it does, it works. And then I found Donald Miller in his story brand and I said, there it is right there. fill in, in the boxes, who is the mentor, who is the other characters that appear in this formula. And it’s well worth taking a look at and his book is worth reading as well. I’ll have a link to Story Brand in the show notes.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So I’m just going to go through my mind thinking about where this conversation we’re having here. And if we look at the, which to me makes complete sense, and the Times article and the Business Decider piece, I think support this, that the shift is definitely from messaging to meaning, something we’ve talked about quite a bit. The Times piece talks about the the noise not being the problem, it’s indistinguishable noise. And that makes sense, that kind of metaphorical phrase that reminds me of conversations we’ve had before, which talks about what a communicator is being using artificial intelligence to enhance their abilities. So I’m just trying to see where the kind of path looks ahead for this. It seems to me that AI is going to play an even more significant role in the future for communicators who are shifting from messaging to meaning. And I must admit, I don’t believe that the scenario you painted earlier about the kind of, you know, the communications person who has… been right doing the stuff he or she’s been doing for years, that’s fine. Keep doing that because there’s a market view. I don’t think that’s true. I think AIs see the threat for those people. Yeah. So if AI is good at output, according to the kind of, what are the concluding points in the times piece, humans are better at contextual meaning. That surely is then what people are looking for to pay half a million bucks or whatever is a salary.

Shel Holtz: yeah, I agree with that.

Neville Hobson: to achieve storyteller. I think this huge confusion here and inserting into the picture the phrase chief storyteller, where it’s just a fancy job title basically, doesn’t help with this, it seems to me. it’s inevitable, I suppose you’re going to get that. as you said, I’ve seen it’s all over LinkedIn, that chief storyteller is an executive function. Yeah, but that’s not the right interpretation for that, don’t believe. So it doesn’t help clarify what the picture is here.

Shel Holtz: I don’t know. I would be very curious to look at the org charts of the companies that are seeking these positions to see if it is separate and distinct from the public relations or communications function. We talked several weeks ago about the proposed new definition of public relations, and it goes way beyond this. I’m thinking, and I don’t know this for a fact,

Shel Holtz: But I’m thinking that what these companies are doing is creating a new function that will live alongside and presumably under the same umbrella as the PR or corporate communications department, which is building relationships with key stakeholders. But the storytellers are out there creating the content that’s going to cut through the slop aimed at particular audiences who are ripe for this kind of storytelling. I I was about to say messaging, it’s… trying to get away from messaging. And the PR department will continue to do the earnings releases and the thought leadership and the negotiations with critics and all of the stuff that PR typically does. I don’t get the impression that these jobs sit in the public relations department.

Neville Hobson: No, I would say not, particularly as, for instance, one point that The Times made is that there’s a significant element of team building and so forth. So internal focus in organizations for this sort of role. it’s not just a public relations external function by any means. It’s interesting you mentioned the definition. I published a post on my blog this morning about that actually. looking at what the PRCA has done. It’s only one professional body. I’m thinking this isn’t going to fly unless everyone gets behind it. So that’s a different topic than what we’re talking about. it sort of fits in there because the role of… I just have a problem with this chief storyteller title, frankly, It doesn’t really fit what this role actually is. And I do believe, and you’ve partly prompted this kind of clarity in my thinking on this, that this is about messaging, it’s not about content production. That’s what AI does. And the interpretation of it, the meaning and significance of it is what the human does. Now, if you can, let’s say, present your skill as something in that area. to an organization who’s willing to pay $400,000. Again, be interested to see the job description behind that salary level. I haven’t seen that. I’ve I’ve not actually looked, I must admit. But it’d be interesting how they have described the role they’re willing to pay 400 grand for. So I would imagine they’re absolutely swamped with applications, which is where AI comes into play. AI comes into play well to sift out all the no-hopers, basically.

Neville Hobson: But it is interesting, it is very interesting. And this could be a great catalyst for the discussion about the role of a communicator in organizations in light of this development. That seems to me to be something good to have.

Shel Holtz: I can’t imagine somebody at OpenAI or Anthropic sifting through hundreds of resumes or probably thousands of resumes. they’re absolutely feeding them all to AI. I’d be shocked if not. And for the record, there are also some of these positions that don’t have storytelling in the title. I saw a couple that had narrative in the title instead. But I think they’re all getting to this notion of telling a powerful story that evokes emotions and pulls

Shel Holtz: audiences in rather than advertising or traditional marketing speak. That’s what’s going to cut through the, I get to say it again, slopaganda. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #501: AI and the Rise of the $400K Storyteller appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

AI has shifted from being purely a productivity story to something far more uncomfortable. Not because the technology became malicious, but because it’s now being used in ways that expose old behaviors through entirely new mechanics. An article in HR Director Magazine argues that AI-enabled workplace abuse — particularly deepfakes — should be treated as workplace harm, not dismissed as gossip, humor, or something that happens outside of work. When anyone can generate realistic images or audio of a colleague in minutes and circulate them instantly, the targeted person is left trying to disprove something that never happened, even though it feels documented. That flips the burden of proof in ways most organizations aren’t prepared to handle.

What makes this a communication issue — not just an HR or IT issue — is that the harm doesn’t stop with the creator. It spreads through sharing, commentary, laughter, and silence. People watch closely how leaders respond, and what they don’t say can signal tolerance just as loudly as what they do. In this episode, Neville and Shel explore what communicators can do before something happens: helping organizations explicitly name AI-enabled abuse, preparing leaders for that critical first conversation, and reinforcing standards so that, when trust is tested, people already know where the organization stands.

Links from this episode:

The Emerging Threat of Workplace AI Abuse

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 500 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And this is episode 500. You would think that that would be some kind of milestone that we would celebrate. For those of you who are relatively new to FIR, this show has been around since 2005. We have not recorded only 500 episodes in that time. We started renumbering the shows when we rebranded it. We started as FIR, then we rebranded to the Hobson and Holtz Report because there were so many other FIR shows. Then, for various reasons, we decided to go back to FIR and we started at zero. But I haven’t checked — if I were to put the episodes we did before that rebranding together with the episodes since then, we’re probably at episode 2020, 2025, something like that.

Neville Hobson: I would say that’s about right. We also have interviews in there and we used to do things like book reviews. What else did we do? Book reviews, speeches, speeches.

Shel Holtz: Speeches — when you and I were out giving talks, we’d record them and make them available.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, boy, those were the days. And we did lives, clip times, you know, so we had quite a little network going there. But 500 is good. So we’re not going to change the numbering, are we? It’s going to confuse people even more, I think.

Shel Holtz: No, I think we’re going to stick with it the way it is. So what are we talking about on episode 500?

Neville Hobson: Well, this episode has got a topic in line with our themes and it’s about AI. We can’t escape it, but this is definitely a thought-provoking topic. It’s about AI abuse in the workplace. So over the past year, AI has shifted from being a productivity story to something that’s sometimes much more uncomfortable. Not because the technology itself suddenly became malicious, but because it’s now being used in ways that expose old behaviors through entirely new mechanics.

An article in HR Director Magazine here in the UK published earlier this month makes the case that AI-enabled abuse, particularly deepfakes, should be treated as workplace harm, not as gossip, humor, or something that happens outside work. And that distinction really matters. We’ll explore this theme right after this message.

What’s different here isn’t intent. Harassment, coercion, and humiliation aren’t new. What is new is speed, scaling, credibility. Anyone can use AI to generate realistic images or audio in minutes, circulate them instantly, and leave the person targeted trying to disprove something that never happened but feels documented. The article argues that when this happens, organizations need to respond quickly, contain harm, investigate fairly, and set a clear standard that using technology to degrade or coerce colleagues is serious misconduct. Not just to protect the individual involved, but to preserve trust across the organization. Because once people see that this kind of harm can happen without consequences, psychological safety collapses.

What also struck me reading this, Shel, is that while it’s written for HR leaders, a lot of what determines the outcome doesn’t actually sit in policy or process. It sits in communication. In moments like this, people are watching very closely. They’re listening for what leaders say and just as importantly, what they don’t. Silence, careful wording, or reluctance to name harm can easily be read as uncertainty or worse, tolerance. That puts communicators right in the middle of this issue.

There are some things communicators can do before anything happens. First, help the organization be explicit about standards. Name AI-enabled abuse clearly so there’s no ambiguity. Second, prepare leaders for that first conversation because tone and language matter long before any investigation starts. And third, reinforce shared expectations early. So when something does go wrong, people already know where the organization stands. This isn’t crisis response, it’s proactive preventative communication. In other words, this isn’t really a story about AI tools, it’s a story about trust — and how organizations communicate when that trust is tested.

Shel Holtz: I was fascinated by this. I saw the headline and I thought it was about something else altogether because I’ve seen this phrase, “workplace AI abuse,” before, but it was in the context of things like work slop and some other abuses of AI that generally are more focused on the degradation of the information and content that’s flowing around the organization. So when I saw what this was focused on, it really sent up red flags for me. I serve on the HR leadership team of the organization I work for. I’ll be sharing this article with that team this morning.

But I think there’s a lot to talk about here. First of all, I just loved how this article ended. The last line of it says, “AI has changed the mechanics of misconduct, but it hasn’t changed what employees need from their employer.” And I think that’s exactly right. From a crisis communication standpoint, framing it that way matters because it means we don’t have to reinvent values. We don’t have to reinvent principles. We just need to update the protocols we use to respond when something happens.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. And it’s a story that isn’t unique or new even — the role communicators can play in the sense of signaling the standards visibly, not just written down, but communicating them. And I think that’s the first thing that struck me from reading this. It is interesting — you’re quoting that ending. That struck me too.

The expectation level must be met. The part about not all of it sitting in process and so forth with HR, but with communication — absolutely true. Yet this isn’t a communication issue per se. This is an organizational issue where communication or the communicator works hand in glove with HR to manage this issue in a way that serves the interest of the organization and the employees. So making those standards visible and explaining what the rules are for this kind of thing — you would think it’s pretty common sense to most people, but is it not true that like many things in organizational life, something like this probably isn’t set down well in many organizations?

Shel Holtz: It’s probably not set down well from these kinds of situations before AI. Where I work, we go through an annual workplace harassment training because we are adamant that that’s not going to happen. It certainly doesn’t cover this stuff yet. I suspect it probably will. But yeah, you’re right. I think organizations generally out there — many of them don’t have explicit policies around harassment and what the response should be.

I think the most insidious part of how deepfakes are affecting all of this is that they flip the burden of proof. A victim has to prove that something didn’t happen, and in the court of workplace opinion, that’s really hard to do. It creates a different kind of reputational harm.

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: From traditional harassment, the kind we learn about in our training — you know, with he said, she said type situations — there’s a certain amount of ambiguity and people are trying to weigh what people said and look at their reputations and their credibility and make judgments based on limited information available. With deepfakes, there’s evidence. I mean, it’s fabricated, but it’s evidence. And some people seeing that before they hear it’s a deepfake just might believe it and side with the creator of that thing.

The article does make a really critical point though, and that’s that it’s rarely about one bad actor. The person who created this had a malicious intent, but people who share it, people who forward it along and comment on it and laugh about it — that spreads the harm and it makes the whole thing more complex and it creates complicity among the employees who are involved in this, even though they may think it’s innocent behavior that just mirrors what they do on public social media. And from a comms perspective, that means the crisis isn’t just about the perpetrator, right? It’s about organizational culture. If people are circulating this content, that tells you something about your workplace that needs to be addressed that’s bigger than that one individual case.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And that’s one of the dynamics the article highlights that I found most interesting — about how harm spreads socially through sharing, commentary, laughter, or quiet disengagement. Communicators need to help prevent normalization — this is not acceptable, not normal. They’re often closest to these informal channels and cultural signals. That gives communicators a unique opportunity, the article points out.

For example, communicators can challenge the idea that no statement is the safest option when values are being tested. Help leaders understand that internal silence can legitimize behavior just as much as explicit approval and encourage timely, values-anchored communication that says, “this crosses a line,” even if the facts are still being established.

It is really difficult though. Separately, I’ve read examples where there’s a deepfake of a female employee that is highly inappropriate the way it presents her. And yet it is so realistic — incredibly realistic — that everyone believes it’s true. And the denials don’t make much difference. And that’s where I think another avenue that communicators, especially communicators, need to be involved in. HR certainly would be involved because that’s the relationship issue. But communicators need to help make the statements that this is not real, that it’s still being investigated, that we believe it’s not real. In other words, support the employee unless you’ve got evidence not to, or there’s some reason — legal perhaps — that you can’t say anything more. But challenge people who imply it’s genuine and carry that narrative forward with others in the organization.

So it’s difficult. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to broadcast a lot of details. It means going back to reinforcing those standards in the organization, repeating what they are before harmful behavior becomes part of, as the article mentions, organizational folklore. It’s a tricky, tricky road to walk down.

Shel Holtz: And it gets even trickier. There’s another layer of complexity to add to this for HR in particular. And that is an employee sharing one of these deepfakes on a personal text thread or on a personal account on a public social network — sharing it on Instagram, sharing it on Facebook — which might lead someone in the organization to say, “Well, that’s not a workplace issue. That’s something they did on their own private network.” But the deepfake involves a colleague at work, and we have to acknowledge that that becomes a workplace issue.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it actually highlights, Shel, that therefore education is lacking if that takes place, I believe. So you’ve got to have already in place the policies that explicitly address the label “AI abuse.” It’s a workplace harm issue. It’s not a technical or a personal one. And it’s not acceptable nor permitted for this to happen in the workplace. And if it does, the perpetrators will be disciplined and face consequences because of this.

So that in itself though isn’t enough. It requires more proactive education to address it — like, for instance, informal communication groups to discuss the issue, not necessarily a particular example, and get everyone involved in discussing why it’s not a good thing. It may well surface opinions — again, depends on how trusted people feel or open they feel — on saying, “I disagree with this. I don’t think it is a workplace issue.” You get a dialogue going. But the company, the employer, in the form of the communicators, have the right people to take this forward, I think.

Shel Holtz: But here’s another communication issue that isn’t really addressed in the article, but I think communication needs to be involved. The article outlines a framework for addressing this. They say stabilize, which is support and safety; contain, which is stop the spread and investigate — and investigate broadly, not just the creator. I mean, who helped spread this thing around? Yeah, that’s pretty good crisis response advice.

But what strikes me is the fact that containment is mentioned almost as a technical IT issue when it’s really a communication challenge. Because how do you preserve evidence without further circulating harmful content? This requires clear protocols that everybody needs to understand. So communicators should be involved in helping to develop those protocols, but also making sure that they spread through the organization and are aligned with the values and become part of the culture.

Neville Hobson: Okay, so that kind of brings it round to that first thing I mentioned about what communicators can do before anything happens, and that’s to help the organization be explicit about standards. Name AI-enabled abuse clearly so there’s no ambiguity and set out exactly what the organizational position is on something like this. That will probably mean updating what would be the equivalent of the employee handbook where these kinds of policies and procedures sit, so that no one’s got any doubt of where to find out information about this. And then proactive communication about it. I mean, yes, communicators have lots to address in today’s climate. This is just one other thing. I would argue this is actually quite critical. They need to address this because unaddressed, it’s easy to see where this would gather momentum.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. So based on the article, you’ve already shared some of your recommendations for communicators. I think that updating the harassment policies with explicit deepfake examples is important. This is the recommendation I’m going to be making where I work. I think managers need to be trained on that first-hour response protocol. Managers, I think, are pretty poorly trained on this type of thing. And generic e-learning isn’t going to take care of it. So I think there needs to be specific training, particularly out in the field or out on the factory floor, where this is, I think, a little more likely to happen among people who are at that level of the org. I don’t think you’re going to see much of this manager to manager or VP to VP. So I think it’s more front line where you’re likely to see this — where somebody gets upset at somebody else and does a deepfake.

So those managers need to be trained. I think you need to have those evidence-handling procedures established and IT completely on board. So that’s a role for communicators. Reviewing and strengthening the reporting routes — who gets told when something like this happens and how does it get elevated? And then what are the protocols for determining what to do about it? And include this scenario in your crisis response planning. It should be part of that larger package of crises that might emerge that you have identified as possible and make sure that this is one of them.

Yeah, this article really ought to be required reading for every HR professional, every organizational leader, every communication leader, because as we’ve been saying right now, I think most organizations aren’t prepared. What the article said is the technology has outpaced our policies, our training, and our cultural norms. We’re in a gap period where harm is happening and institutions are scrambling to catch up. Time to stop scrambling, time to just catch up, start doing this work.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would agree. I think the final comment I’d make is kind of the core message that comes out of this whole thing that summarizes all of this. And this is from the employee point of view, it seems to me. So accept that AI has changed how misconduct happens, not what employees need. Fine, we accept that. Employees need confidence that if they are targeted, the organization will do the following: take it seriously, act quickly to contain harm, investigate fairly, and set a clear standard that using technology to degrade or coerce colleagues is serious misconduct. Those four things need to be in place, I believe.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And what the consequences are — you always have to remind people that there are consequences for these things. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #500: When Harassment Policies Meet Deepfakes appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) responded to member requests for a statement about the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota with a letter explaining why the organization would remain silent. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel outline the key points in the letter, where they disagree, and how they might have responded.

Links from this episode:

An Open Letter to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 499. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz And I’m Shel Holtz. At its core, this podcast is about organizational communication, which leads us to occasionally talk about the associations that aim to represent the profession. So today, let’s talk about PRSA (the Public Relations Society of America), which recently signaled a move to remain apolitical—retreating into a shell of neutrality when members were clamoring for them to speak up on controversial issues.

Specifically, I’m talking about the silence from PRSA regarding ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) operations in Minneapolis. Now, before you roll your eyes and think this is just another partisan squabble, stop right there. This isn’t about immigration policy; it is about the integrity of public information—the very foundation of our profession. We’ll dive into what PRSA said and how I responded after this.

PRSA leadership, including Chair Heidi Harrell and CEO Matt Marcial, sent a message to members claiming that remaining apolitical protects the organization’s credibility. The letter framed this stance as a means to focus on its core mission. Leadership asserts that while they have commented on sensitive issues in the past, the current “complex environment” demands greater diligence, effectively reserving public advocacy only for matters that directly and significantly impact the technical practice of public relations or its ethical standards. By shifting the burden of advocacy to individual members and requiring chapters to vet local statements through national leadership, the society is attempting to build a “firewall against unintended risks.”

In other words, they’re betting that professional neutrality is the best way to maintain trust across a diverse membership, even if it means stepping back from the broader social fray. Now, I have a different perspective. In fact, I’ve published an open letter to PRSA leadership on LinkedIn, arguing that their own Code of Ethics doesn’t just permit them to speak out—it actually demands it.

Consider the “Free Flow of Information” provision in the PRSA Code of Ethics. It states that protecting the flow of accurate and truthful information is essential for a democratic society. In Minneapolis, we have federal officials making public statements about the killings of U.S. citizens—statements that are being credibly disputed by video evidence and eyewitness accounts. When government officials systematically misrepresent facts, that is a professional standards issue. It is not political to distinguish a truth from a lie. It is, quite literally, our job.

PRSA argues that they want to maintain trust across a diverse membership, but let’s be clear: silence is a statement. It’s a message that says our ethical commitments are only applicable when there’s nothing controversial to address. Don’t believe for a minute that neutrality will save your reputation. Silence in the face of documented misinformation erodes trust among the very members who look to the Society to model the courage we’re expected to show our clients every day.

The PRSA Ethics Code mandates a dual obligation: loyalty to clients and service to the public interest. It doesn’t say “serve the public interest only when it’s convenient or not controversial.” When federal agents are accused of violating nearly a hundred court orders and detaining citizens unlawfully, truth in the public interest is eroding fast under the weight of official silence. If PRSA won’t defend the standard of truth when it’s being trampled by powerful federal agencies, who will?

I am not suggesting that PRSA needs to become an immigration advocacy group—I am decidedly not. But I am suggesting a path forward that reaffirms our values without wading into the partisan muck. PRSA could and should issue a statement that affirms the vital importance of truthful government communication. They should issue a call for transparency when official narratives conflict with documented evidence, and they should reaffirm that all communicators have an obligation to accuracy over mere advocacy.

The fact is, our profession depends on a broader democratic society that functions on truthful information. When that foundation is threatened, our standards are implicated, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. And let’s keep in mind, PRSA has members working in federal agencies that may require them to participate in the distribution of false information. Professional associations aren’t tested during the easy times. They’re tested when standing up for a principle actually costs something. PRSA’s current diligence looks a lot like retreat. We should be leading the charge for accountability, not languishing in a state of denial.

The comments to the LinkedIn article I posted show a membership that is anything but neutral on the need for ethical leadership. I’ll make one more point here: this approach to determining when advocacy is required translates nicely to businesses that have retreated from taking stances on societal issues, despite the Edelman Trust Barometer’s continued demonstration that it’s an expectation of their shareholders.

Neville Hobson It’s an interesting one, Shel. I’m reminded of discussions we have had on this podcast previously about the role of businesses to take a stand on issues that are societal but demand some kind of response in some form. This fits that, I think. Your response on LinkedIn was very good; the path forward you outlined is strong.

I did like it when you mentioned the word “courage.” This demands that in the face of fear or apprehension. All those words could apply to the potential minefield PRSA would be wandering into if they stepped away from being “apolitical.” Could there be a response from those federal agencies themselves? Or perhaps a negative reaction from the administration and the White House? That may be a driver behind it. Yet, this sort of situation has arisen before. We’ve talked about the notion of professional bodies taking stands on issues.

The way you’ve framed the issue as ethical and professional—it’s hard to argue against that. This is not a partisan thing. I see you’ve got over 120 comments on LinkedIn to your article. Did you hear anything from PRSA directly, or are they silent?

Shel Holtz No. In fact, a few people who have had issues with PRSA in the past told me they appreciate me posting an open letter because PRSA has historically ignored those. I’m not necessarily expecting to hear anything from them. I don’t hold any leadership roles there, so there’s no reason they should think I’m someone special to reach out to.

But you talk about professional organizations; related to all of this, we recently had the arrest of two journalists reporting on an activist group that interrupted a church service led by a pastor who also has a role with ICE in Minneapolis. It was arguably an illegal action for this group to do that, but two reporters went in with them to cover it and they were both arrested based on an order from the U.S. Attorney General.

The associations that represent journalists were pretty quick with their statements. PRSA talked about making a statement when there is something that is “technically related to the profession.” That would certainly apply in the case of these journalists. But still, the journalism associations were quick, and there was no concern that members might take issue or that the administration might make life miserable for them. They had the courage to take a stance consistent with their codes of ethics.

One member of the PRSA board, whom I know personally, did leave a comment questioning why I singled out PRSA. Why not the Page Society? Why not the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators)? My answer was: they didn’t send me a letter telling me why they’re not saying anything. But I absolutely think every communication association should be advocating for truth in public communications. That’s our job.

Neville Hobson I think the fear of a strong, negative, almost threatening reaction from the administration and the White House is at the heart of this. They have “form” in ignoring ethics or international agreements—they’ll tear up those bits of paper because they say it’s “fake” or “rubbish.” Maybe that’s behind a lot of this.

What you’ve given them is a challenge: will PRSA apply its own ethical framework when doing so carries reputational and political costs? You mentioned others saying PRSA has a history of ignoring public letters. You see this with other professional bodies who are reluctant to take stands, interpreting “taking a stand” as “advocating for a cause,” which they don’t do. I would argue this is splitting hairs because the argument is about upholding standards.

Enlisting support from other professional bodies might be the safest approach—not asking them to take a stand on a specific political issue, but to reassert the point of truthful communication, transparency, and professional accountability. Someone has to do something to address this. This is an opportunity. I understand the reluctance, but I would counter by saying you need to have courage. You represent communicators across the United States, probably Canada, and elsewhere. Who else will do this if you don’t? What would you like to see happen as a result of this discussion?

Shel Holtz I would like to see the professional associations have a conversation on their staffs and their volunteer boards and decide how they’re going to proceed in a way that conforms with the values they purport to espouse.

I understand that PRSA issued the letter because they had been flooded with member requests to do something. A week or so ago, a letter was issued through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce by 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based businesses—companies like 3M, Target, and UnitedHealth Group. Some people praised it, but most thought it was weak and “milquetoast.” It called for de-escalation but never named ICE or the immigration issue at all.

In the meantime, Target is still under pressure from customers and employees to say something. There was an arrest made by ICE inside one of their stores that traumatized employees who witnessed it, and the company has said nothing. It’s similar to Home Depot, which has had arrests in its parking lots and has remained silent. This disturbs stakeholders. You don’t need a position on immigration policy to talk about tactics that are affecting your community and your business. That’s fair game. That’s where the framework for a statement has to be focused: what is the impact on your business and where does this align with your values?

Neville Hobson It’s interesting. 3M and Cargill are global businesses. That “milquetoast” route was probably the safest way to navigate the tightrope, but it doesn’t really help much other than attracting criticism for being weak. I can equally understand that no one there wants to point fingers in a way that might not advance the discussion, but it doesn’t lead us anywhere.

Shel Holtz Well, look at organizations like Patagonia, which has actually sued the administration, and their sales and profits are doing just fine. There may be a lot of fear that isn’t backed up by substantial consequences. If you look at the streets of Minneapolis these days, you can see where public sentiment is. It’s fine for business to be on the right side of this.

Neville Hobson It is a very tricky situation. Every one of these companies has a statement defining their values, and surely what we’re seeing on the streets of Minneapolis would offend those values. No one’s willing to be counted. Maybe it needs a “safer” avenue—redefining or restating values in public and linking them to these events without naming names. But currently, we only have what we see on the news, and it’s not pretty.

Shel Holtz No, it’s not. The businesses that have a direct connection to this and remain silent are going to be remembered for it. This doesn’t mean every business needs to make a statement—if you’re not based in Minnesota, perhaps it’s unrelated to your standards for public comment.

But going back to PRSA: when you have federal officials making false statements to the public, and you have an organization that advocates for ethical communication, I think that demands a position. That is the framework for businesses and associations to look at: where is the alignment that should lead you to stand up and display that kind of courage?

Neville Hobson Where indeed?

Shel Holtz That’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #499: When Saying Nothing Sends the Wrong Message appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz speak with crisis and risk communication specialist Philippe Borremans about his new Crisis Communication 2026 Trend Report, based on a survey of senior crisis and communication leaders.

The conversation explores how crisis communication is evolving in an era defined by polycrisis, declining trust, and accelerating AI-driven risk – and why many organisations remain dangerously underprepared despite growing awareness of these threats.

Drawing on real-world examples, including recent AI-amplified reputation crises, Philippe outlines where organisations are falling short and what communicators can do now to close the gap between awareness and action.

Highlights AI is changing crisis dynamics: Organisations recognise risks like AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes, yet few have tested response plans or governance frameworks. * Most crises are issues gone wrong: Crises often emerge from internal behaviours and poor issue management rather than sudden external shocks. * Trust isn’t a luxury; it’s measurable: “Building trust” sounds good, but most organisations lack meaningful metrics or strategies to manage it. * Silos break under stress: Crisis readiness still lives in functional silos — legal, HR, comms, operations — making compound crises harder to handle. * Testing beats plans alone: Having a crisis plan helps, but regular, realistic testing and muscle memory are what make teams resilient. * Agility matters more than perfect data:* Waiting for complete information can stall responses; communicators must be comfortable acting in the face of uncertainty.

About our Conversation PartnerPhilippe Borremans is a leading authority on AI-driven crisis, risk, and emergency communication with over 25 years of experience spanning 30+ countries. As the author of Mastering Crisis Communication with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide, he bridges the critical gap between emerging technologies and high-stakes communication management.

A trusted advisor to global organisations including the World Health Organisation, the European Council, and multinational corporations, Philippe brings deep expertise in public health emergencies, corporate crisis communication, and AI-enhanced communication strategies.

He is the creator of the Universal Adaptive Crisis Communication framework (UACC), designed to manage complex, overlapping crises. He publishes Wag The Dog, a weekly newsletter tracking industry innovations and trends.

Follow Philippe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippeborremans/

Relevant links

https://www.riskcomms.com/
https://www.wagthedog.io/
https://www.riskcomms.com/f/the-2026-crisis-emergency-and-risk-communication-trends-report

TranscriptShel Holtz
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson
I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz
And we are here today with Philippe Borremans. We have known Philippe for at least 20 years, going back to the days where he was managing blogging at IBM out of Brussels, located today in Portugal. And an independent consultant addressing crisis, risk, and emergency communications. Welcome, Philippe. Delighted to have you with us.

Philippe Borremans
No, thanks for having me and it’s good to see you both.

Shel Holtz
And before we jump into our questions, could you tell listeners a little bit about yourself, a little more background than I just offered up?

Philippe Borremans
Sure. Yeah, as you said, I mean, I started out in PR with Porter Novelli in Brussels, that’s ages ago, and then moved in-house at IBM for 10 years. So that was from 99 to, I think 2009, must be, working on, as you said, the first blogging guidelines, which then became the social media guidelines. It was a great project, I was responsible for all external comms there. And then…

In fact, moved away from Belgium, lived four years in Morocco, working in public relations on a more, a bit more strategic level. And since then I’ve been specializing in risk, crisis and emergency comms. So that’s actually the only thing I do. It’s mainly around all the things that could happen to either a private sector organization, a government or a public organization.

Shel Holtz
And you also produce and distribute a terrific newsletter on all of this. So we’ll ask you later to let people know how to subscribe to that. We thought we would start with a case study, although we are going to get into a survey that you recently wrapped up and released. there was an incident in which an executive at Campbell’s, the company that makes Campbell’s soup, claimed that the company’s products were highly processed food for poor people and that the company used bioengineered meat. He also made some derogatory remarks about employees and this surfaced and spread around. An analysis found that negative sentiment around the company surged to 70 % and page one search results were flooded with these negative narratives. And that included the AI overviews. One analysis said the ears of marketing and branding were wiped away in an instant.

And that same analysis said that one of the biggest risks that AI introduces is an inherent bias toward negative information. What happened with Campbell’s is that coverage spread really fast across social media and traditional news outlets when this email surfaced. That created a flood of new content that AI systems were happy to start ingesting ⁓ and reinforcing. So when people started searching for 3D printed meat and questions about whether Campbell’s uses real meat, AI didn’t correct those perceptions. It surfaced fragments of context. It pulled language from the company’s own website that referenced mechanically separated chicken. I don’t want to know what that means. And all of this muddied perceptions instead of clarifying things. What should communicators be doing? What didn’t Campbell’s do to protect itself from this? It really is a new reality about how information is gathered up and then shared back out?

Philippe Borremans
It makes you wonder sometimes but it does tell me that the organization probably was not investing enough in their online reputation side of things. I mean, I recently had discussion with a client, they were asking me about how do we prepare our online information so that it surfaces on AI searches and all these things. And I said, well, maybe you should already start by in your newsroom, not publish your press releases in PDF format because that is so the basics most of the time are not in place. And I think in this case, again, I mean, looking at how search engine optimization is changing, how AI is looking at information. That is crucial. It’s basics because if your online reputation is out there with the information that you have, the bias of AI, I can get it. But if you know that, again, you can work with that. And so I think the organization was simply not looking at their online side of the reputation and information dissemination.

Neville Hobson
What do you think, Philippe – it’s intriguing when I read this story originally that an organization as storied as Campbell’s Soup, one of the leading FMCG companies, with experience galore in communication, made errors such as and highlighted in this report. And it also highlights, I think, the speed with which this evolved and spread so rapidly, caught everyone by surprise. Is this a one-off, do you think? I mean, surely companies can’t be so unprepared as Campbell seemed to be with some kind of system in place, procedures, et cetera, or even going further back than that, the notion that an executive would say such things even. What’s your thought on that in terms of, of literally the self-inflicted damage they have heaped upon themselves?

Philippe Borremans
But I think in many cases, if we would take all the crisis communication cases that are publicly available, you would see that that is a trend that, you know, when people talk about crisis communication, they often think about the things that happen from the outside, right? The things that are sudden. But that is not the case. If you look at crisis communication history, the biggest proportion of crises are not sudden. There are smoldering crises that then break out. So that means that it’s first an issue that you can still manage, but that you for one or the other reason don’t look at and then it becomes a crisis. So it’s not sudden. You knew it was there at some point. And then the other thing as well, we think it’s external factors. But again, the majority of crises have an origin from within the organization, at least in the private sector. So what it tells me, first of all, it’s not new. It’s again, the old story of internal happening and it was an issue probably first and it came out and it was badly managed. And that shows to me or that tells to me that again, crisis, preparedness, reputation management with the big word is still not ingrained in on that top level executive level in the private sector.

Shel Holtz
Philippe, you’ve released a survey and Neville and I have been looking at it. We have questions, but can you give us an overview of the survey before we jump into our questions?

Philippe Borremans
Sure, yeah. So at the end of last year, I did a survey through my contacts, network, newsletter readers on crisis communications, a bit of looking at what the trends would be. Of course, AI is in there, but other things as well. And I got 102 responses that I can actually use. So was amazed. I was like, okay, this is something at least that shows some direction and I’ll just take my notes. Now one of the things that was interesting to see is that when we talk about AI for instance, one out of 87 people reported full AI integration. So that goes in line with other surveys that we see where, yes, there’s a lot of talk about AI in comms and the big changes it can bring and what have you, but we actually see a very, very small amount of implementation, structural implementation of AI. Most of us communicators are still playing around and discovering AI, and this was confirmed as well. Now, the respondents here are senior-level crisis slash communication director types. The adoption levels are low. The top barrier is very interesting. So I asked about the top barrier. So why then is AI not integrated in? And it’s 23.5 % set skills, huge skills gap. And again, that is in correlation with other surveys that I could see. Budget, okay, and then privacy security reasons at 14.7%. But the skills gap, that is the one that I’m really worried about because AI is not new. It’s been three years that we had access to the GenAI tools. We know we can install open source models on our own machines. We can sandbox them in an enterprise environment and still skills and the actual application are very, very low.

So that was for AI. Another one, which I was really afraid of and unfortunately confirmed is exercising. Do organizations actually exercise their plans? They all have a plan somewhere, but we know it’s just a plan and it’s the first thing that goes out of the window when something really happens. But do we exercise? Do we do crisis simulations, tabletops, large scale simulations and only 26.5 % of the respondents here test at least annually? 9.8 reported they never tested and then you’ve got the whole middle who test from time to time when they feel like it probably. Public sector was a bit different than private sector but still that is worrying because I know from experience having worked in this field now for the last 15 years

Good crisis communication or risk communication or emergency communication is about… It’s a muscle, right? If you don’t exercise it, whatever your plan is, it will not work. You need much more an agile approach, which comes from training and simulation exercises, than a rigid protocol plan. You need a plan, I’m not saying you don’t need it, but what will get you through a crisis is your agile approach because things change all the time. And that is only possible to get there, it’s only possible through exercising and we see that it’s not the case. Another one linked to AI. Everybody in the survey said, and it was really on top of when I asked about the biggest risks, AI, going wrong, AI risks related to AI. So fakes and what have you, deep fakes, etc. But only 3.9 % said that they had a tested gen AI crisis protocol. And 27.5 said they had no protocol and no plans in place to face an AI generated crisis. So it’s right on top there. Everybody’s afraid of it. Nobody’s planning for it. Again, an interesting insight I found.

Neville Hobson
That is interesting. Yeah.

Philippe Borremans
And then the first thing, mean, said that trust was much more difficult to manage than before. But what I saw in the rest of the information of the survey as well is that, again, the problem is there. what we actually and when I say we, it’s communicators and crisis communicators, what we don’t do is prepare, train and create protocols for different scenarios.

Neville Hobson
On that topic of trust, timely mention there, Philippe, because that’s one of my questions I was going to come back to a bit later, but this is the right moment to talk about that. The report actually describes a widening trust deficit. You touch on that with many organizations struggling to measure trust at all. That surprises me, I have to say, let alone rebuild it during a crisis. In fact, that applies to, I think, the Campbell Soup situation quite well, and it’s a crisis of trust they have now encountered. It’s timely to talk about this because in the context of the bigger picture of trust, Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which landed today as we record this, which is the 20th of January, it raises that question of the widening trust deficit in the context of crisis communication. So, I wonder your thoughts on the perennial question about communicators wanting to be taken seriously in the boardroom in particular. How should they rethink trust? And indeed, is that the right question to ask them even in this current climate of widening trust? Trust is already low. How on earth do you lift yourself up from that? How should they rethink it, as I mentioned, not as a value, but as something they can actually measure and manage? What’s your take on it?

Philippe Borremans
Well, I’ll even go a step further and I like your question. Is it even one of those concepts that we need to look at? I have a big issue with I do a lot of speaking at conferences and do workshops and every single time at least at conferences, every single other speaker has one slide that says we need to build trust. Right. And I got so fed up with that. I mean, what is trust, Neville and Shel? All three of us have different cultural backgrounds. Trust, the concept, is a different thing for all three of us. How we relate to government, how we relate to the private sector, how we relate to our community in society, it’s different. There is not one single definition. Of course, there is the broad definition of what it means, but when you look at it from a communications point of view and a relationship point of view between an organization and the publics, you will see that in every different part of the globe, it’s a different interpretation. And trust is not only, is not the only variable that works or that is important for crisis comms, then at least we have around 12 of them. Peter Sandman, you know, put the groundwork in that work, scientific research, but we have 12 to work with. Trust is just one of them.

So already there, I’m very cautious about using trust as the…you know, the mantra or the silver bullet. But once we understand what we’re talking about and agree on it, to me, it’s very simple. It all starts with and ends with completely and completely understanding your different audiences. We always talk about stakeholders. Sure, they are important. But from a communications point of view, from trust building, and I think

At least that’s my analysis from the Edelman Trust Barometer report as well. They talk about segmented audiences finally, we, I hope now finally most communication professionals understand that the general public doesn’t exist. We need to segment our audiences. And it’s understanding those through and through. Knowing what their context is. Knowing what their definition of trust is, what their relation is with your organization. Only then can you start building plans looking at how you would approach this in the context of a crisis. That’s what I think about this.

Shel Holtz
I want to stick with this issue of trust, even though it’s just one of several variables. Your survey found that nearly 66 percent of practitioners find building trust is harder today than it was five years ago. And you reference the idea of this being the era of the perma crisis. It’s always happening. Is this decline in our ability to build trust to failure of communication or is the external environment just too volatile to to manage effectively?

Philippe Borremans
But as an organization, as communicators, we’ve always worked in an environment that was shifting. Sure, maybe it’s, you, we’re in a peak moment where a lot of things are shifting. But if you actually look at, if I just look at different moments in my career at IBM, et cetera, and other organizations, there were always things shifting around. Now, either you look at it from your micro environment where you actually have something that you can

manage or on a global scale. But I think it’s much more about the profession as communicators. First of all, understanding the environment. Not a lot of communicators truly understand polycrisis and permacrisis concepts and how it actually translates into communications. It’s thrown out there and geopolitics and what have you, but how does that translate to your day-to-day work for your organization? So that’s already, I think, a gap. And then once you understand that, what can you actually do to minimize that impact from a communications point of view? We only have so much that we can actually work on. That means we need to work with other departments as well and probably with industry associations, cetera, et cetera. We are not the, you know, we cannot solve everything. But if we actually already start knowing what we can do in our corner and understanding the global environment now, which is not easy. Then already we can take the first steps. I’m always amazed when I work with clients, they all have media and social media monitoring platforms. And they actually think that for them, that’s intel, that’s the insights they need. Most of the time I tell them, well, yes, you need that part, but you have nothing around predictive analytics. You have nothing on horizon scanning. You have nothing on. So there’s huge gaps in there. And that’s actually the new things that you need in a world which is changing all the time.

Shel Holtz
I remember reading in an IABC document, somebody said that a crisis is what you get when you fail at issues identification.

Philippe Borremans
It is an issue, badly managed issue is of course something that becomes a crisis. on trust, Shel, I think out of the report came that the majority of respondents find it much more difficult to manage trusts than five years ago. But when I asked, well, how do you actually measure that? Nobody knew. there, again, it’s an impression they have. It’s a feeling.

Shel Holtz
It’s a feeling.

Philippe Borremans
But where is your benchmark? How are you going to measure your impact that you have or don’t have? How do you work with that if you don’t have the data? And that’s a gap.

Neville Hobson
You mentioned ‘polycrisis’ and indeed your report starts out by saying we work in an era of polycrisis. And you then said communicators need to understand what that means. Well, I’m a communicator. Help me out here, Philippe. What does it mean?

Philippe Borremans
Well, a polycrisis is an interesting concept. So what it actually means is that you have different crises which are interlocked, right? And that can happen in the same crisis window, meaning you could face a climate hazard, let’s say a hurricane, which could result in a blackout, which means, you know, critical infrastructure which then could have an impact on your data center and you suddenly are in a very commercial crisis there because clients rely on your data center if you’re an infrastructure provider. So it’s that interconnectedness of different types of crisis. And that is an interesting concept. First of all, it’s closer to reality. I’ve seen it here in Portugal. We had our famous blackout for more than 12 hours, but you see how it trickles down and impacts different things.

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Philippe Borremans
infrastructure, mobile connection, business, etc. etc. etc. So that idea of interconnected crisis is now it is interesting in the context of crisis communication because we have previously always been trained on siloed crisis. All the plans are written like, okay, if we have a product recall, what do we do? If we have a critical infrastructure breakdown, what do we do? If we but it’s all separated, it’s not integrated. And of course that changes the game, that changes how you prepare for a crisis.

Neville Hobson
So that leads into, nicely, the question I had, which is precisely on that point, one of the strongest themes in the report is that crisis communication works best when it’s integrated across functions. Yet, HR, legal, maybe cybersecurity, certainly comms are often only loosely connected. So when a real compound crisis hits, where do you most often see integration break down? And what distinguishes organizations that get this right from those that don’t?

Philippe Borremans
Yeah. Well, a good example was Heathrow. You know, remember the blackout of Heathrow? It was so crazy because at one point I put two screens next to each other. So through my network of crisis communicators, we were all going like, my God, how is this possible? You know, I mean, but I had actually next to that a screen with my feed of my connections in the business continuity world, the operational side. And they’re all going like, we got an airport, one of the biggest airports in the world up and running in less than 24 hours again. Job well done. So that’s where it happens in an organization. You have the comms people going crazy and you’ve got the ops people working very hard and doing what they do. But they don’t you know, there is no interconnectedness. And then, of course, you have legal good friends from legal. And now you have entities, of course, HR. mean, one of the things that I’m still very much amazed when I work with clients is that internal comms is never at the table. While we all know that your first communication during a crisis is your internal communications. And it’s still not the case. So that where it’s often go wrong. The big chasm that I see is between comms and operations. once they get together, you see fabulous things happening because we can translate what it actually means if they can be up and running in half an hour or in two days. We can translate that to our audiences and our stakeholders and say, look, that’s the situation.

Cybersecurity is interesting as well because there’s a lot of pressure to integrate that now into crisis management teams simply and not because people think that’s the best way to do it, because it’s becoming the law within the EU. It needs to be integrated. It’s the law. You have no choice. So there’s a couple of things moving, but it’s more on the pressure of law and ISO quality norms and what have you, than actually understanding, yes, we all need to sit around the same table and let us all do our own jobs that we’re good in. We can translate stuff. You do the operational stuff.

Shel Holtz
It’s interesting, our CEO, I work for a construction company and our CEO says the thing that keeps him awake at night the most is cybersecurity and nothing to do with the industry. It’s just cybersecurity issues. Philippe, one of the new insights that came out of your report was a reference to populist politicians undermining science-based policy. How can organizational communicators deal with this landscape where facts are increasingly viewed through a partisan or an ideological lens?

Philippe Borremans
Well, again, it goes back to understanding why and how this happens. If you look just around a topic, which again is often discussed, mis-dis and malinformation, we talk about online and offline, right? It’s understanding what it actually means. I’m running a couple of workshops now on specifically on inoculation and pre-banking, which are two techniques and probably the only two techniques that work to counter this mis, mal and disinformation online. And so it’s, it’s understanding the psychology behind it. It’s not only about technology, it’s a lot about human biases and psychology. And, of course, countering the world’s geopolitical narratives, which, you know, have a certain way of going, that is, of course, very difficult, but understanding why they happen and how they work and how they then can impact certain audiences which and stakeholders were important to you. I think that is crucial as a communicator. And that is by studying, just looking at, what does this actually mean? Can we identify it? Can we translate how it could potentially impact what we do? And then how can we counter it?

Unfortunately, if it’s about online mis-dis and malinformation, there’s only two techniques that work. And even then, those two alone will just create a small protective layer because it’s very difficult to take online. But pre-banking and inoculation are the only techniques that work for the moment. Other ones, is, and they’re being talked about like, let’s increase media literacy. Well, that’s first of all, up to up. I mean, it’s not our responsibility. I think as communicators, we have other things to do. It’s probably the responsibility of the government, institution, Ministry of Education, but then we’re off for the next three decades.

Neville Hobson
I want to go back to the gaps that we touched on earlier. The big gap that struck me from reading it is how so many leaders see AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes as critical risk. Yet most organizations still don’t have the documented protocols to deal with them. And you’ve made that point very strongly about no protocols, no plans. I wonder, what’s really holding back organizations from moving from beyond awareness, that like, yes, they know, to action. So I guess a simple question, like the takeaway for listeners in this one, if you’re a communicator, what’s the simplest first step you could take to move from awareness to action to develop a plan? Let’s say in the next 90 days, what would you say to someone with that?

Philippe Borremans
It starts with sensing, right? You have to listen for these things because otherwise you’ll just see them when they’re actually out there and you’re in trouble. So it’s actually sensing. So I’m a very strong believer in AI driven predictive analytics. So this is different than your standard monitoring. Your standard monitoring, look at brand mentions and CEO mentions, executive mentions, et cetera. That’s not how you’re going to detect deep fakes. There are actually platforms out there today which do predictive analytics look at the activation of bot networks, the spreading of a certain narrative in a certain context, and that will show you something is brewing.

I’m making it very simple now. Something is brewing, things are getting organized, we could have something coming towards us, which could be deep fake and what have you and what have you. So first listening so that you have your alert system done in place. Then on the defense side, it’s actually also having what I call a truth bank. That’s a database or an Excel sheet, whatever. I can’t believe I said Excel sheet, a database where you have actual proof that your communication assets are yours, authentic and come from you. Because we are getting into an area where at one point in time, will, an organization will be questioned. Yes, you can say that press release is yours, but is it actually yours? You can say that that video of your CEO is actually true, but how can you prove that? We call me in an area as far as that. So you actually need to do it.

And you know, I’m a big defender and also user of blockchain technology. It’s very simple today. You can actually, you know, actually prove without irrefutable doubt that some pieces of communication are yours. Example of a bank in Belgium. Already years, every single press release they send out is stamped through a blockchain system so that they can actually prove it’s theirs. And they started to do that more than five years ago because they had fake press releases going out. And that wasn’t even AI driven. That was just someone who got very creative.

So first listening, then protecting your assets, making sure that you can prove it yours, and then countering. But countering depends on the situation. If it’s a rage farming attack, for instance, it’s no use in going against the originators, the people, the bad actors. That’s no use at all. You need to focus on the…

Neville Hobson
Can you just explain what rage farming is, Philippe?

Philippe Borremans
Sorry, yeah, rage farming. Rage farming is a technique where a bad actor, and most of the time it’s about making money, organizes an attack on your brand and they make money simply by the algorithms on the different platforms who then bring in sponsors and what have you and and clicks etc. Rage farming is an attack which is actually taking your normal communication standard comms, your next press release, your next presence at a conference, your next speech of your CEO, takes it out of context, looks at how it can be repurposed with one single objective to trigger rage.

So a very practical example, imagine that a retail company decides to make unisex uniforms. Men and women dress the same. We don’t make a difference. You could think, wow, gay, why not? Taken out of context, that means that it could be translated by bad actors in, look, they don’t want women to be women anymore. look, the whole woke context, they would reframe that and then target that message. It’s just out of context, but target that message proactively to communities online who are much more conservative, who have a much more conservative worldview. They would then be triggered by rage, start to spread it, and then actually you have that whole system. That’s rage farming. And why did we come to rage farming? Lost my…

Neville Hobson
Yeah. You were trained to thought. Yeah. No, that was, no, we actually moved on from that question, which was these steps to take, and you were going through each of the steps…

Philippe Borremans
Yeah, so and against rage farming, is one of those things that you need to do. So is that actual listening and in the context of rage farming, it’s no use at all to go against the bad actors because they’re in there to make money. Most of the time they have a whole network. It’s no use at all. But you need to then focus on your audiences that you can at least still inform. So not even to the in this example, the more conservative community online, because you will not change their mind. That’s their cultural background. That’s how they think about the world. So you actually need to know very well where you can make a difference or not, which is not always easy.

Shel Holtz
Let’s stick with this theme of gaps. The respondents to your survey were mostly C-suite, director level professionals. Is there a generational gap in how senior leadership views risks compared to the lower level, more junior practitioners? They’re the ones who are monitoring the feeds and they’re the ones who are going to be tasked with implementing a response. Is there a gap between them and the senior leadership in terms of how they perceive these things, these issues?

Philippe Borremans
I didn’t, I couldn’t get that out of the survey. I could probably look at it more deeply, but my gut feeling and based on experience is that you have some senior leaders who definitely see these risks, but on a very strategic level. And there is a gap in translating that into an, shall we call it an operational level. That’s what other responses and other questions tell me. Like, we know it’s difficult to manage trust compared to five years ago. Yeah, but you don’t have the benchmark. So how would you know? It’s just a gut feeling that you have. we know AI generated crisis are top risk. Yeah, but you don’t have your pro. So it’s that translation, I think. So there’s a top layer, think, that actually reads all the reports and meets around with senior peers and they talk about geopolitics and the world changing and polycrisis, what have you, and they understand.

But then how do you translate that into actual practical things in operational stuff? How do you upskill your team, your communications team today? Right. So that they can actually face all these these new issues. How do you change and adapt your crisis communication, preparedness planning? How do you integrate that? Those are the kind of practical questions that probably don’t trickle down. And of course, if down there you have more junior people, they maybe wouldn’t know the best way to go about it. That’s my feeling.

Neville Hobson
I’d like to talk a bit about testing. You can have a crisis communication plan, indeed more than one, which is not much use if you don’t ever test it to see if it all works. Anecdotally, I’ve heard, over the years, I suspect that that’s a major hurdle for many who perceive it as, know, organization wide. This is a massive project to get through. And yet I’ve often wondered, do you have to do that even? And then your report talks about things like embracing micro simulations, which I think maybe you could talk about that a little bit. But I’m also thinking something I found quite intriguing, make testing a governance requirement. And I suppose that makes sense in jurisdictions where testing isn’t any kind of legal requirement. So you voluntarily do this. But can you talk a little bit about the embracing micro simulations in particular and maybe some examples of how to make it seem both less daunting to a communicator and also relatively easy that they can actually implement some kind of testing process.

Philippe Borremans
Yeah, and that’s, that’s one of the things that comes back when I talk to people, like not specializing, so communications colleagues, I recently was at a conference and someone said, I am so convinced of this, but how do I translate that and tell that and ask for this to my management, because they see only the costs. Now, I actually have a little AI assistant that I trained into calculating return on investment of these things. But people think simulation is this big thing, right? You see ambulances coming and you see probably a big war room with big screens and what have you. It doesn’t have to be every single time that kind of simulation exercise. Organizations can start from the minimum, which is micro simulations.

I have a a small micro simulation platform that I coded myself. I do workshops with that. It’s an half an hour exercise. It’s a lunch and learn time, right? Get people around the table with a sandwich and say, okay, what is the crisis that we’re going to role play today? Half an hour, you get feedback. Fine. You can do that every single week. People find it fun, but it trains the muscle because it’s based on real scenarios and it’s real feedback and etc. Tabletop exercises. You have many different forms and formats. They can range from one hour to three hours. They can be functional exercises. They can be completely invented exercises. And let’s not forget, mean, communications people have no experience at all.

They’re actually simulation kits you can pay for and they’re not expensive and download, read through the manual and go through the motions. That also trains you maybe as a non-specialized communicator on what it actually means to manage and to do good simulations. But the most important thing is it doesn’t have to be the big thing. You can do micro simulations on a very regular basis, make it fun. You can do tabletop exercises every quarter, hopefully with an executive team, but put it in the agenda. And if you are in certain industries, I would actually say, well, you need a full scale simulation exercise every year if you’re in the petrochemical and what have you industry.

The point is you can actually position this not as a cost center exactly as a corporate insurance does. We know based on research and facts that organizations who train their plan first of all get through a crisis much quicker but rebuild after a crisis much quicker and that’s where the money goes. If it takes you two years to rebuild that’s a lot of money. If you can shorten that by half or even more. That is the actual game you do. And that comes from training, training and training. There is a reason why I was in the Navy. There’s a reason why the the captain of the ship, you know, did fire exercises every single day. And after the, you know, the 52nd, you go like, why are we doing this stupid thing? But actually, when you have a fire, you know why.

Shel Holtz
Ten percent of organizations never test their plans at all, according to your report. What happens to these organizations when they’re confronted with a Black Swan event? mean, can you wing it these days?

Philippe Borremans
It’s a good question. Can you wing it? Some organizations wing it and then suddenly they go through it and are like, wow, how did you… But that’s more luck than anything else, I think. Now, black swan incidents, of course, are interesting because those are the ones you cannot prepare for. Well, you cannot plan for, you can prepare for. Because if you build actually that agile muscle around crisis management and crisis comms. You are already much better prepared than somebody who doesn’t have that agile muscle, who is strictly following protocol and old school plans and then suddenly is confronted with a black swan incident.

And that’s why I’m a strong believer in working much more, again, you need plans, you need protocols, fully agree, but you actually need an agile communications team. We know things go very fast, they come from every single corner. You need that mindset. You need that agility muscle in there. And then teams are actually ready to take what comes and move at the moment.

And I do see a link. Another thing which is very difficult for communicators from my generation because we were trained like that, at least I was at PR school, I was trained that you do not communicate until you have all the facts. It took me a couple of years to switch that. When I work for the UN agencies during the pandemic and other epidemics, you actually need to communicate without having all the facts. And it’s very uncomfortable. It’s very contra training. But that’s what everybody in communications today should have that skill, because most of the time you will not have all the facts, and the facts will change day after day after day after day. So you need that muscle again, that agility. That’s the most important thing I think today.

Neville Hobson
I would agree with that view, Philippe.

Shel Holtz
The last question I have before we get to our traditional final question. You got a PR manager in a company who wakes up tomorrow morning, finds your report, reads it and realizes they’re part of the 77 % with no AI protocol. What should they do? What are the first steps they should take to update their crisis plan?

Philippe Borremans
I think if they don’t have a protocol now, it means that it hasn’t been on the agenda or not on the radar. They’ve heard a couple of things. So first of all, get informed about what it actually means. What is a deep fake? What are the different things that could happen? And then see, okay, how relevant is that for our organization? And then translating that into a couple of very basic steps, the monitoring, the protocol setup, and the what if exercises.

What if this tomorrow happens? What would we actually do? What would it mean for our audiences, for our executives, for our stakeholders? And how do we translate that? Not in a big plan and a long, you know, SOP, but simple steps. And most of the time it will not be a, you know, a communications team of 25 people. It will be one, two, maybe just split up the rows.

What do we do if tomorrow there’s a deep fake popping up? How will we do the triage? Because you don’t have to react to everything. And if we decide to react, who are the first people that we need to inform? Sometimes it’s getting really the very basics in place. It’s already much more than 90 % of the other people that are actually not looking at this for the moment.

Neville Hobson
Sound advice. And of course, we now come to that point of the question we didn’t ask you, that you wished we had or hoped we would. What would that be if there is one?

Philippe Borremans
That would be, “Philippe, when do we have another drink in Brussels?”

Shel Holtz
Not soon enough.

Neville Hobson
I like that. That’ll do. I like that one. Yes. It was a long time since we had that drink in Brussels, Philippe, so we ought to.

Philippe Borremans
Or when do we meet face to face again? Because it’s been that’s been a very long time as well. So yeah.

Neville Hobson
Well, you and I are in Europe, so that’s easy for Shel to come over here. And in fact, going to the States these days isn’t a very attractive proposition, I think, to many of us over here. But it’s been a terrific conversation, and I think you’ve shared some great insights for our listeners. Where can people get hold of you? How would people find you online?

Philippe Borremans
Well, the main I mean, if they’re interested in the topic, it’s it’s maybe a good idea to subscribe. So I’ve got a free newsletter every week. I talk about risk crisis and emergency comms and AI. And that’s at wagthedog.io. And if they need support before during or after crisis, it’s my corporate website, which is riskcomms.com.

Shel Holtz
And you’re also on LinkedIn, I presume, and sharing your insights there as well. Philippe, it has been terrific. Thank you so much for the time.

Philippe Borremans
Sure, definitely. No, thank you. It was really great seeing you again and we definitely have to find an excuse this year to meet.

Shel Holtz
I would love that.

Neville Hobson
Thank you.

The post AI risk, trust, and preparedness in a polycrisis era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer focuses squarely on “a crisis of insularity.” The world’s largest independent PR agency suggests only business is in a position to be a trust broker in this environment. While the Trust Barometer’s data offers valuable insights, Neville and Shel suggest it be viewed through the lens of critical thinking. After all, who is better positioned to counsel businesses on how to be a trust broker than a PR agency? Also in this episode:

Research shows employee adoption of AI is low, especially in non-tech organizations like retail and manufacturing, and among lower-level employees.
CEOs insist that AI is making work more efficient. Do employees agree?
Organizations believe deeply in the importance of alignment. So why aren’t employees aligned any more today than they were eight years ago?
Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to reflect its commitment to the metaverse. These days, the metaverse doesn’t figure much in Zuckerberg’s thinking
In his Tech Report, Dan York reflects on Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.

Links from this episode:

2026 Edelman Trust Barometer
Society Is Becoming More Insular
Exclusive: Global trust data finds our shared reality is collapsing
Insularity is next trust crisis, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer
Employers are the most trusted institution. That should worry you – Strategic
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer has landed, and everyone in comms is about to spend the next six months quoting the same statistic
HIS THEORY IS LITERALLY: The human beings of the earth don’t like each other, don’t trust each other, won’t talk to each other, won’t listen to each other.
Richard Edelman Has No Clothes. (Nobody Does.)
Trust amid insularity: the leadership challenge hiding in plain sight
Employees say they’re fuzzy on their employers’ AI strategy
JP Morgan’s AI adoption hit 50% of employees. The secret? A connectivity-first architecture
How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society
Only 14% of workers use GenAI daily despite rising AI optimism: Survey
Offering more AI tools can’t guarantee better adoption — so what can?
Only 10 Percent of Workers Use AI Daily. Getting Higher Adoption Depends on Leaders
Leaders Assume Employees Are Excited About AI. They’re Wrong.
Meta is about to start grading workers on their AI skills
CEOs are delusional about AI adoption
CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story.
The Productivity Gap Nobody Measured.
FIR #497: CEOs Wrest Control of AI
The Alignment Paradox
What Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse U-turn means for the future of virtual reality
Meta Lays Off Thousands of VR Workers as Zuckerberg’s Vision Fails
Meta Lays Off 1,500 People in Metaverse Division
FIR episodes that featured metaverse discussions

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Celebrating Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday and Reflecting on Being a wikipedia for 21 Years
At 25, Wikipedia faces its biggest threat yet: AI
Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 498 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form episode for January 2026. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson, Somerset in the UK.

Shel Holtz: And we have a great episode for you today, lots to talk about. I’m sure you’ll be shocked, completely shocked that much of it has a focus on artificial intelligence and its place in communication, but some other juicy topics as well. We’re going to start with the Edelman Trust Barometer, but we do have some housekeeping to take care of first and we will start with a rundown of the short midweek episodes that we have shared with you since our December 2025 long form monthly episode. Neville?

Neville Hobson: Indeed. And starting with that episode that we published on the 29th of December, we led with exploring the future of news, including the Washington Post’s ill-advised launch of a personalized AI-generated podcast that failed to meet the newsroom standard for accuracy and the shift from journalist to information stewards as news sources. Other stories included Martin Sorrell’s belief that PR is dead and Sarah Waddington’s rebuttal in the BBC radio debate. Should communicators do anything about AI slop? And no, you can’t tell when something was written by AI. Reddit AI and the new rules of communication was our topic in FIR 495 on the 5th of January, where we discussed Reddit’s growing influence. Big topic, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about that again in the near future. On that day, we also published an extra unnumbered short episode to acknowledge FIR’s 21st birthday. Yes, we started out on the 3rd of January 2005 and that’s a lot of water under the bridge in that time, Shel. And I think we had quite a few bits of feedback on that episode.

Shel Holtz: People dropped in and shared their congratulations. There were way too many of them to read and many of them were very, very similar. Just to share one, this is from Greg Breedenbach who said, “Congratulations, what a feat. I’ve been listening since 2008 and never got bored because you managed to keep it engaging and relevant. Thanks for all the hard work.”

Neville Hobson: Great comment, Greg, thank you. So for FIR 496 on the 13th of January, we reported on the call by the PRCA, the Public Relations and Communications Association for a new definition of public relations. We explored the proposal’s emphasis on organizational legitimacy, its explicit inclusion of AI’s role in the information ecosystem, and the ongoing challenge of establishing a unified professional standard that resonates across the global communications industry. That had a few comments.

Shel Holtz: That got a few comments. Gloria Walker said, “Attempts have been made from time to time over the decades to define and redefine PR. Until there is a short one that pros and clients and employers can understand, these exercises will continue. Good luck.” And Neville, you replied, you said, “You’re right, Gloria. This debate comes around regularly. One interesting precedent was the Public Relations Society of America led effort in 2011 in a public consultation to redefine PR. That process was deliberately open and received broad support from professional bodies and their members around the world.” And Philippe Borremans out of Portugal had a comment. He said, “Thanks for the mention of my comments. Hope it helps in the definition exercise.” Philippe, of course, wrote a LinkedIn article in response to the definition. There were some other comments in this episode, including one from Marybeth West. You can go find that on LinkedIn. This was a rather lengthy exchange between Marybeth and you that is just too long to include here.

Neville Hobson: Great. And then in FIR 497 on the 19th of January, that’s just a week ago before we record this current episode, we unpacked the latest AI radar report from BCG, used to be known as Boston Consulting Group, that says AI has graduated from a tech-driven experiment to a CEO-owned strategic mandate. We examined this evolution that places communicators at the center of a high-stakes transition as AI moves from pilot phase into end-to-end organizational transformation. One comment we had to that:

Shel Holtz: From our friend Brian Kilgore, who said, “Haven’t read the report yet, but will soon. Sometimes when I read a link first, I can’t get back to the comments.” But he continues to say, “I once took a job that was structured by Boston Consulting Group. My employer used the BCG report as the basis for the job description. It worked out well.”

Neville Hobson: Excellent. So that’s where we’re at. Some good stuff since the last episode. And of course, now we’re about to get into the current.

Shel Holtz: And yesterday I published the most recent Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with members of the class of IABC Fellows. This one was on mentoring. It was a fascinating conversation featuring Amanda Hamilton-Atwell, Brent Carey, Andrea Greenhouse, and Russell Grossman. The next Circle of Fellows—mark it in your calendar because this one’s going to be very interesting and maybe even controversial—this is going to be at noon Eastern time on Thursday, February 26th and it’s all about communicating in the age of grievance. This will feature Priya Bates, Alice Brink, Jane Mitchell, and Jennifer Waugh.

Neville Hobson: You’re such a tease, Shel, with that intro, I have to say. So yeah, go sign up for it, folks. I’d also like to mention that in December, IABC announced the formation of a new shared interest group, or SIG, that Sylvia Cambier and I are leading. It’s called the AI Leadership and Communication SIG. And I’m delighted that we have attracted 70 members so far. I’m also delighted to share that our first two live events are scheduled for February. On the 11th of February, we’re hosting a webinar for IABC members to introduce the SIG, explain why we formed it, what it stands for, and how it approaches AI through a leadership and communication lens. Then on the 25th of February, as part of IABC Ethics Month, we’re hosting a webinar on AI ethics and the responsibility of communicators. This is a public event open to members and non-members that explores the challenges and responsibilities communicators face when introducing AI, including transparency and trust, stakeholder accountability, and human oversight. We’ve included links in the show notes so you can learn more about these events and sign up as well if you’d like to.

Shel Holtz: Sounds great, I’m planning to attend those, schedule permitting. And that wraps up our housekeeping. Hooray! It’s time to get into our content, but first you have to listen to this.

Neville Hobson: Our lead discussion this month is the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which landed last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a stark framing: trust amid insularity. But before we get into the findings, a quick word on what the Edelman Trust Barometer actually is. Many of you literally may not know why this is significant. The Edelman PR firm has published the Trust Barometer every year since 2000, making this its 26th edition. It’s based on a large-scale annual survey across 28 countries, tracking levels of trust in four core institutions: business, government, media, and NGOs, alongside attitudes to leadership, societal change, and emerging issues. Over time, it has become one of the most widely cited longitudinal studies of trust globally, not because it predicts events, but because it captures how public sentiment shifts year by year.

After more than two decades of tracking trust globally, Edelman’s core finding this year is that we are no longer just living in a polarized world, but one where people are increasingly turning inward. That’s that word “insularity” I mentioned earlier. The report suggests that sustained pressure from economic anxiety, geopolitical tension, misinformation, and rapid technological change is reshaping how trust works. Rather than engaging with difference, many people are narrowing their circles of trust, placing greater confidence in those who feel familiar, local, and aligned with their own values, and withdrawing trust from institutions or people perceived as “other.” At a headline level, overall trust is broadly stable year on year. The global trust index edges up slightly, but that masks important differences. Trust continues to be significantly higher in developing markets than in developed ones, where trust levels remain flat or fragile. As in recent years, employers and business are the most trusted institutions globally, while government and media continue to struggle for confidence in many countries.

What is notably sharper this year is the distribution of trust. The income-based trust gap has widened further, with high-income groups significantly more trusting than low-income groups. Edelman also finds growing anxiety about the future. Fewer people believe the next generation will be better off, and worries about job security, recession, trade conflicts, and disinformation are at or near record highs. A defining theme running through the report is what Edelman calls insularity. Seven in 10 respondents globally say they’re hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who differs from them, whether in values, beliefs, sources of information, or cultural background. Exposure to opposing viewpoints is declining in many countries, and trust is increasingly shifting away from national or global institutions towards local personal networks: family, friends, colleagues, and employers. Compared with last year’s focus on grievance and polarization, the 2026 report suggests a further step from division into retreat. The concern is not just disagreement, but disengagement—a world where people are less willing to cross lines of difference at all.

In response, Edelman positions trust brokering as a necessary answer to this environment—the idea that organizations and leaders should actively bridge divides by facilitating understanding across difference rather than trying to persuade or convert. This concept sits at the center of the second half of the report. It’s also worth noting that Edelman’s framing, particularly around trust brokering and the role of institutions, has attracted a number of critical responses. We’ll highlight some of those critiques in our discussion alongside our own perspectives and what this year’s findings mean in practice. Taken together, the 2026 Trust Barometer paints a picture of a world where trust hasn’t collapsed, but it has narrowed, becoming more conditional, more local, and more shaped by fear and familiarity than by shared institutions or common ground. That raises important questions about leadership, communication, and the role organizations are being asked to play in society. So let’s unpack what Edelman is telling us this year. What stands out in the data where it feels like a continuation of recent trends and where this idea of insularity marks something more fundamental in how trust is changing? Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that this annual ritual has attracted a torrent of criticism over the years. Criticism raises some uncomfortable questions about what we’re actually measuring and, more importantly, whose interests the barometer serves. Now, none of this minimizes the value of the data that has been collected. For the eight years that I have been working for my employer, I have extracted points that I think are relevant and share these with our leadership. I’ve already undertaken that exercise this year. So what I’m about to share with you is a critique, but I don’t want anyone thinking this means you should ignore the report. It just means you should apply some critical thinking as you go over this information.

And let’s start with the most fundamental critique: the methodology and sample selection. Clean Creatives, which is a climate advocacy organization, has documented how Edelman’s country selection appears strategically aligned with the firm’s client base. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, was only added to the trust barometer in 2011, conveniently right after they became an Edelman client in 2010. And wouldn’t you know it, the barometer regularly finds that trust in the UAE government remains among the highest in the world. And by the way, that’s a quote, “remains among the highest in the world,” findings that are then dutifully promoted by state media.

Consider the question: is the trust barometer measuring trust or is it manufacturing it for the C-suite? The issue gets even more problematic when you look at the top of the leaderboard. Six of the highest-ranked governments in recent editions—China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, India, and Singapore—are rated by Freedom House as either not free or partly free. Researchers studying authoritarian regimes have identified what they call autocratic trust bias. It’s a phenomenon economist Timur Kuran calls “preference falsification.” In other words, people don’t exactly feel free to reveal their true opinions when they might face some sort of prosecution for indicating that they don’t trust their government.

And here’s where David Murray’s recent critique hits the nail on the head. David is a friend of mine. He’s a friend of the show and he has been an FIR interview guest. And he published a takedown of what he calls this wearying annual ritual. David points out the sheer absurdity of Edelman’s latest focus: insularity. The 2026 report claims that seven in 10 people are insular, as you mentioned Neville, retreating into familiar circles. Edelman’s solution, as you mentioned again, is the trust brokers. And of course, the report finds that employers are the ones best positioned to scale this trust brokering skill set. But as Murray observes, there’s something deeply hollow about a global PR machine using AI and always-on monitoring to lecture us on the human skill of listening without judgment. It’s a case of “human hires machine to reassure self he is human.”

Now consider Edelman is a $986 million global PR firm whose stated purpose is to evolve, promote, and protect their clients’ reputations. So when the research concludes year after year that business must lead and that my employer should be the primary trust broker, you have to ask: is this research or is this a pitch deck? Is Edelman documenting a phenomenon or are they selling a solution that just happens to require companies to hire more communications consultants to teach conflict resolution training? There’s also the question of academic rigor. Despite its massive influence, Edelman hasn’t made the full data set available to independent researchers. When their 2023 findings about polarization were criticized for lumping democratic and authoritarian countries together, they produced a reanalysis, but only after removing data from China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And, surprise, the core finding—that business must lead—remained intact.

The conflict of interest concerns extend even further. Edelman has been documented working with fossil fuel giants like Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil. They were one of the largest vendors to the Charles Koch Foundation, yet the barometer presents findings about climate change and business ethics without disclosing these relationships. Peer-reviewed research found Edelman was engaged by coal and gas clients more than any other PR firm between 1989 and 2020. When a firm with that client roster tells us that business is the only institution that is both ethical and competent, we should probably raise an eyebrow. Look, I’m not saying the underlying trends—polarization, information chaos, erosion of truth—aren’t real. These are very serious shifts in our reality, but we need to be critical observers of the research. We need to ask who benefits from the conclusion that employers should step into the void left by failing democratic institutions and who profits from the narrative that CEOs, not citizens, should lead societal change? The Edelman Trust Barometer has become the ultimate gathering of elites at Davos telling each other what they want to hear. It provides a veneer of data-driven legitimacy to corporate overconfidence. But if we’re serious about rebuilding trust, we might want to start by questioning the research that so conveniently serves the interests of those who are producing it.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s quite a scathing analysis. I read David Murray’s blog post, really, really good, entertaining read in his inimitable style. One that actually mentions some points that are really right up there with some of the critiques you raised from your narrative—a post by Sharon O’Day. Sharon’s a digital communication consultant based in Amsterdam. I think she’s on the button with most of what she writes. I read her content on LinkedIn frequently. She’s got about 82,000 followers on LinkedIn, so she’s got some credentials and credibility. She talked about this, where her headline is the one that kind of sets the scene for what she writes in an article for Strategic Global. She says, “Employers are the most trusted institution—that should worry you,” says Sharon. She goes into a description of what the report is and what the big finding is about “my employer is now the most trusted institution.”

She warns before internal communicators rush to embrace “trust brokering”—Edelman’s proposed solution to all this—we should ask what kind of trust are we actually talking about? She goes on to summarize what, in her view, Edelman gets right about this. The trust barometer lands strongly, she says, because it tells people what they already suspect, but with graphs. I did like that little bit there. So she talked a bit about the seductive appeal of trust brokering. And I thought this was a sharp analysis. Edelman’s solution is trust brokering: help people work across difference, acknowledge disagreement, translate perspectives, surface shared interests. Employers as the most trusted institution should facilitate this. You can see why this resonates, she says; it offers organizations a constructive role without being overtly political. For internal communicators, it suggests evolution from message delivery to dialogue facilitation. It fits our existing narratives nicely, she says.

But the problem isn’t that this is wrong. It’s that it treats trust as primarily a relational challenge, when in most organizations it’s fundamentally structural. The core weakness, says Sharon, is assuming trust is an emotional state that can be rehydrated with better listening. She says trust is a systems problem, in fact. Workplace mistrust is often entirely rational, she says. People distrust organizations because they’ve watched restructures framed as “growth,” AI introduced without safeguards, workloads expand as headcount contracts, risk pushed downwards while control stays at the top. That’s a pretty keen assessment, I think, of reality in most organizations. And she notes being asked to engage openly feels less like inclusion and more like exposure. Frame trust as sentiment and the solution defaults to messaging. Understand trust as system behavior and the role shifts towards making systems legible: how decisions are made, where constraints sit, what won’t change.

And she then talks about when insularity becomes moral judgment, reminding us this now applies to 70% of people globally, according to the trust barometer. The danger: this subtly relocates responsibility. If trust is low because people are insular, help them become more open. But what if mistrust is entirely rational? And she warns again that trust isn’t a moral virtue; it’s a calculation people update based on what organizations do, not what they say. Trust in an employer is not the same as trust in a democratic institution. It’s shaped by dependency as much as belief. Your employer controls your income, your professional identity, and often your healthcare and visa status. That changes the dynamic.

So she winds up talking about the hard truth. The most worrying thing is that people trust their employer more than anything else—is that they may not have anywhere else left to put it. That’s not a mandate to become society’s repair shop, says Sharon. It’s a warning about what happens when you’re the last institution standing and you cock it up. For communications, a task isn’t to become trust brokers. It’s to tell the truth about the system people are inside, how it works, where constraint sits, what won’t change and why. Trust collapses when people stop expecting honesty about how decisions get made and who benefits.

I think, though, that last bit in particular is a hard truth dose of reality. I suspect where in a sense she’s saying—I’m interpreting her words here—that communicators are part of the game, let’s say. They are not telling the truth about the system people are inside. And that’s quite an indictment to slam that down on the table in the midst of this. Yet, I think it’s a valid point to raise for discussion, whether you disagree or agree. It’s worth considering what she says. Are we all who work in large organizations in particular to communicate what the organization is doing, what the leaders are saying, what’s happening… are we simply regurgitating the top-down perspective of an untruth? Maybe that’s one way of putting it. So it adds to the questioning of Edelman’s motives or their responsibilities. I think what you noted—people like David Murray saying—have done a pretty good job at that. I’m not questioning that aspect of it all.

I have found, largely, what Edelman talks about to be valid, notwithstanding those questions about their motives and often undisclosed relationships. Because after all, they interview each year 20,000-plus people in God knows how many countries. And these aren’t folks who have axes to grind themselves in the same way, let’s say, if it’s alleged that Edelman does. So I think it has credibility in that regard. I’m equally aware of a lot of the criticism about this that questions the credibility. I don’t do that the same way others do. I have found, and indeed the same with this current report, value in the information that Edelman have put together that they are sharing. So it’s useful to get a sense of this, particularly the annual changes in sentiment that we’ve reported on this in For Immediate Release throughout the years. I can remember actually being at the very first Edelman Trust Barometer when Richard Edelman was in London—that was in 2000, I think, or 2001. Beginning of the century, 26 years ago anyway. So it is interesting, Shel. And I think the criticisms are worthy of debate, not dismissing them unless you are quite clear you’ve got something else to say. The report is a dense document. It’s quite detailed. I found a good place to start to get a sense of what it’s all about is the top 10 findings, the snapshot views of each of the top points that is under the heading “Trust Amid Insularity.” So it’s definitely worth paying attention to, putting it in the context of what the critics say.

Shel Holtz: And frankly, the longitudinal nature of this research—what David Murray called “wearying”—is actually where much of the value comes from: the ability to track change over time in any research. I mean, you look at engagement studies that companies do among their employees. If you couldn’t see how any element of that survey has improved or declined over time, it’s of far less value than getting this one snapshot in time for a single survey. So there’s great value there. And like I say, I think there’s great value in a lot of the data in this survey. I mean, the fact that the focus is on insularity should not be any surprise. We’re seeing this every day. It’s interesting that… I think it had to be 35, 40 years ago, IABC’s Research Foundation, the lamented long-gone IABC Research Foundation, did a study on trust. And I remember the definition that they gave trust. We were talking earlier about the definition of PR; the definition of trust is pretty fixed. It’s the belief that the party in question is going to do the right thing. And so it’s that simple. And the question becomes: what is the right thing? Among people who are inside their bubbles, that insularity, what do they believe the right thing is? And that is probably very different from people who are in a different bubble.

And this, I think, is where that “trust brokering” idea has some legitimacy, even if it may not be presented in the best way. I think telling the truth is… that’s not what we need to be doing in order to address this. If we’re not telling the truth, then we simply have no stake in this game. You can’t go anywhere from there. But if you’re telling the truth, how do you get that into the heads of the people who are not paying attention to you? They’re listening to people who say you can’t trust them. And I think that comes through engagement, not through publication, not through telling. To some extent through listening—you must do that to find out what their issues are, what they do believe. But at some point you have to start engaging with people. I mean, the profession is called Public Relations, not Public Content Distribution. And those relations have to have some give and take, some two-ways. So if you have people who don’t trust you and are misinterpreting or are listening to false information being delivered by people who have an interest in taking your organization or your institution down, you need to reach out to those people and start to engage them. And I absolutely agree with whoever it was said that this is the direction that we need to be heading in. I think they were talking about internal communications being more dialogue, but I think that’s true of the external side too.

Reaching people who are in bubbles is extremely difficult. I’ll tell you, I was having a conversation—this is a friend of mine who I have learned is on the opposite political spectrum from me. And I told him, “You know, I watch Fox News on a fairly regular basis. I find it important to know what the people on the other side of the political spectrum are hearing, what they believe, what they think, so it can inform my view of things.” It doesn’t change it, but it certainly informs it when I’m having conversations or I’m considering how to reach somebody. I said to him, “You ought to be doing the same. You ought to be watching some of the media that presents the views that are contrary to your own and understand them.” And his answer to me was, “Stop watching Fox News.” He felt that I should stay in my bubble. So this is a pretty entrenched perception that people have. And it’s become very ingrained in the cultures of these insular regions, if you want to call them that. How do you reach people? I think that’s the challenge for people in communications right now: how do you reach the people who just are not interested in hearing what you have to say? They want to hear what your critics have to say, and that’s all they’re listening to.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. And indeed, that I think supports one of the key elements of this latest report, which is that traditionally in organizational communication, part of your goal is to get everyone lined up with the same message. We’re all singing off the same sheet and it’s all unified and we go forward. This is a change. This is not about that. It’s not about aligning people who are different; it is about understanding the differences and still being able to engage with them, recognizing their differences. And that makes complete sense to me in the current geopolitical environment, because I believe that what we’ve seen over the past few years—and the driver for this unquestionably is what’s happening in the States since Donald Trump became president for the second term—that as Mark Carney spoke in his speech at Davos at the World Economic Forum, that this isn’t a transition, we’re going through a “rupture.” I’m not sure I… it was very good, very good. I’m not so sure it is that—maybe it is a transition, it doesn’t matter what you call it—but the reality is that people are afraid in many countries. Just watch the TV news and you’ll be scared most days, particularly when you see things that you couldn’t imagine happening in some of the countries where it is happening, notably in the US, what’s happening there with crackdowns in various parts of society. It’s truly extraordinary.

I think that is a big influence on this insularity, people withdrawing. Yet I think where it talks about people wanting to engage with people with similar views, similar beliefs and so forth, not different beliefs… I seem to remember a few years back—I’ve forgotten which year it was—when the Edelman Trust Barometer of that particular year published something that was quite radical, where the most trusted person in the world, if you will, is “someone like me.” I remember that. This is that, is it not? It’s someone like me, except the dynamics are very, very different to what it was back then. And I think one of the things I feel that this is a thing to really pay close attention to, which is aligned with what you said about engaging with people outside of different individual bubbles, is that recognition of difference. It is the fact that people need pushing in the right way. And it is the fact—and again, this comes back perhaps to Sharon O’Day’s critique—that we’re not telling the truth. That we need to tell a different version of the truth, if that doesn’t sound kind of weird. There is always more than one version of the truth. And I think: which one do you trust? And that’s, I think, a big challenge for communicators because it surely would be easy for a senior-level communicator, particularly if they’re an advisor to the C-suite, to see when the messaging coming out of the C-suite is simply not the right messaging. Not saying that they’re not telling the truth, far from it. What they believe as the truth may not actually reflect what is happening. And that’s where listening really becomes key.

So it means, I suppose, that communicators can rethink this whole structure in light of what Edelman’s saying, but not exclusively because of this. But take a look at this: one of the key findings, the first one that Edelman mentions, “insularity undermines trust.” And that’s something that I grabbed from this when I wrote my blog post about this—a kind of reflective post I wrote a few days ago—of what insularity, when people withdraw into themselves and stop engaging with others with different views, they often can undermine the authority within an organization of what the leaders are trying to do by not cooperating, by just simply not doing it or even actively dissing it or whatever it might be. Is that a new thing? Maybe it’s not, but it certainly has a mass impact if you see that sort of thing going on. “Mass-class divide deepens” is another one that they talk about—the gap between high and low-income groups. So these are the bigger picture issues in our society. And yet we’re seeing things going on because of these changes in geopolitics, I suppose, that this is not a good thing. And institutions are falling short. The four big institutions I mentioned at the start are falling well short on addressing this.

The phrase “trust brokering”—I really don’t like that, to be honest, Shel. It sounds gimmicky. It sounds like a catchphrase that someone’s come up with, which I suspect is what’s prompted a lot of the criticisms of it. I’ve even seen some people say, “Wait a minute, trust broker… isn’t that what communicators have been doing for years?” Now we’re calling it trust brokering. So we need to get past this kind of labeling confusion, I think, and look at what we must do to help leaders in particular do the right thing in their organizations and how they’re communicating things and enable, if you like, empower properly communicators to take all this forward. But there’s lots to pick from this report, I think, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I wonder how many PR agencies are going to announce soon that they are launching their “trust brokering units” now available to engage in your organization. I’m going to invoke the IABC Research Foundation one more time. Their seminal work was the Excellence Study—Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management—outstanding effort. And the primary work that came out of that was a review of the literature on all of this. So a lot of academic stuff. It’s a rather lengthy book. I’ve read it; I still have it; I still refer to it. But one of the things that I learned when I was reading this way back when it came out is this notion of “boundary spanning.” It’s an academic term from PR in the academic world. And it suggests that public relations people really need to understand the perception and the perspectives of the opposition so well that when they talk about it in the organization, people are going to be suspicious that the PR people have switched sides. You understand it so well that you can basically talk like the opposition does and convey their concerns and their critiques as if you were one of them. I don’t know how many public relations people are doing that these days. Given the results of this research, it seems to me that boundary spanning is becoming a necessary tactic for public relations practitioners. I think it’s important that if that’s not something that you have looked into and this is the work that you do as a communicator, something to pay attention to.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would agree with that. So there’s lots to absorb in this. We’ve touched on the kind of prominent points, but there’s one that struck me as an interesting one on Edelman’s list of the top 10 issues. There’s a tenth one. There’s a last on their list: “Trusted voices on social media open closed doors.” And I thought that’s an interesting take on that. They say people who trust influencers say they would trust or consider trusting a company they currently distrust if it were vouched for by someone they already trust. Think about that. That’s interesting, because we’re seeing separately to the Trust Barometer, influencers as a group, let’s say broadly speaking, under threat for lack of credibility in many cases. Some of the face-palming things that I’ve read about influencers doing or saying in recent months has been, you know, face-slap—you whack your hand on your head. But this is true, in my view, that that makes sense to me. And maybe that is an easy way for communicators to engage with people, maybe in slightly more open ways than they have in the past to enable that kind of thing. So again, it’s a thought point, if you like, that’s worth considering, even though it’s not high up on Edelman’s top 10 list—it’s the 10th. Worth paying attention to though, I think.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. And you see the opinion polls showing a shift in support or lack of support for one thing or another based on what some of the prominent influencers are saying when they change their view. Looking at the “bro-verse” in the podcast world—people like Joe Rogan, for example—who were very supportive of Donald Trump when he was running for president, and you look at the independent vote and it was very supportive of Donald Trump. And the bro-verse has shifted with what’s going on in Minneapolis and some other cities. You’re hearing Joe Rogan say, “What is this? The Gestapo in the streets now?” And now you’re starting to see that shift in opinion among independent voters away from Trump. Now this is a correlation, not a causation. But still, it’s interesting and seems to validate that 10th point among those top 10 from Edelman.

Neville Hobson: Agree. So lots to unpack here. We’ve touched… we scratched the surface basically and shared some opinions of our own. There’ll be links to the report and some other content in the show notes if you want to dive into it.

Shel Holtz: And we’re going to switch gears now and talk about artificial intelligence for at least the next two reports. These are very complementary reports—the one I’m about to share, then after Dan York’s report, Neville, your story, very, very complementary. So let’s get started. There is a striking disconnect happening in corporate America right now, and it comes down to a shift in perception. Leaders think their AI rollouts are going great, while the view from the cubicle is “not so much.” Let’s start with the numbers. A Gallup survey of over 23,000 workers found that 45% of American employees have used AI at work at least a few times. Sounds encouraging, doesn’t it? But wait—only 10% use it every day. Even frequent use sits at just 23%. So despite a year of this breathless hype and massive corporate investment, actual day-to-day adoption remains marginal. And here’s what may be the most telling statistic: 23% of workers, including 16% of managers, don’t even know if their company has formally adopted AI tools at all. Now, think about that. Nearly a quarter of your workforce is so disconnected from the organization’s strategy that they can’t say whether one even exists. This gap suggests that shadow IT problem where employees are using personal tools like ChatGPT while remaining completely unaware of their employer’s official path forward is what we’re probably seeing in a lot of organizations.

The adoption pattern breaks down along predictable and frankly troubling lines. Usage is concentrated where you would expect: Technology organizations (76% of employees are using AI), Finance companies (58%). But in retail and manufacturing, those numbers crater: 33% in retail and 38% in manufacturing. AI is languishing in the same place as it always does—among the people already closest to the technology. Now, contrast this with JPMorgan Chase, which has become the poster child for successful enterprise AI adoption. When they launched their internal LLM suite, adoption went viral. Today, more than 60% of their workforce uses it daily. That’s six times the national average. Now, what did JPMorgan do differently? Their chief analytics officer, Derek Waldron, says they took a “connectivity-first” approach. Instead of giving employees a login to a generic chatbot and calling it a day, they built AI that actually connects to the bank’s internal systems—their customer relationship management package, their HR software, their document repositories. An investment banker can now generate a presentation in 30 seconds by pulling real internal business data. The bank also understood the Kano model of satisfaction. They made the tools genuinely useful and voluntary. They didn’t mandate usage. They bet that if the tool solved a problem, word would spread organically. They also ditched generic literacy training for segment training—that is, teaching people how to use AI for their specific work.

Now here’s where things get a little uncomfortable. JPMorgan has been candid about the consequences. Operation staff are projected to decline by 10%. While new roles like context engineers are emerging, the bank hasn’t promised that everyone will keep their job. Meanwhile, at most other organizations, we’re hitting a “silicon ceiling.” BCG, formerly Boston Consulting Group, found that while three-quarters of leaders use generative AI weekly, use among frontline employees has stalled at 51%. The problem is a leadership vacuum. Only 37% of employees say their organization has adopted AI to improve productivity. A separate Gallup study found that even where AI is implemented, only 53% of employees feel their managers actively support its use. Then there’s the trust issue. Nine in 10 workers use AI, but three in four have abandoned tasks due to poor outputs. The issue here isn’t access; the issue is execution. People don’t know how to prompt or critically evaluate the results. Worse, 72% of managers report paying out-of-pocket for the tools that they need to do their work using AI. In response, some companies are taking a hard line. Meta has announced that starting in 2026, performance reviews will assess AI-driven impact. In other words, AI use is no longer optional at Meta. So where does this leave us? We have bullish leaders making massive investments while their workers are either unaware of the strategy or worried that using AI makes them look replaceable. The fundamental problem is that companies are deploying AI as if it’s just another software rollout. And it is not. It requires rethinking workflows, investing in specific training, and building tools that connect to real business data. The gap between AI hype and actual adoption isn’t going to close until organizations figure that out.

Neville Hobson: There’s a lot in there, Shel, that is interesting, I have to say. I think JPMorgan is a use case that’s definitely worth studying what they’ve done. I’m reading the article that appeared in VentureBeat talking about that. It talks about “ubiquitous connectivity”—great, two words put together—plugged into highly sophisticated systems of record. You mentioned how integrated this was to all their internal systems. So you can see some things there that you don’t hear some other companies explaining things that way. The forward-looking approach… so they’ve got leaders who are treating this the right way. It talked about, as you said, they didn’t just enable this and then say, “here you go.” They literally developed it as an ongoing thing in conjunction with employees, which is really good. I think, though, that the alarm bells ring in the first part of your report, when you were talking about how employees say they’re fuzzy on their employer’s AI strategy, with many not knowing whether their employer has one or not. I’d like to think that that’s not the majority, but I fear I may be misplaced with that view, because the ones that don’t do this—in other words, they do it the right way—are the ones who are reaping the benefits. And there are lessons, simple lessons, to learn from that.

Workers who use AI tend to be most likely to use it to generate ideas and consolidate information, Gallup says in introducing their survey report. That makes sense, doesn’t it? That they are… so you’ve got to enable that in an organization. I think there’s more we’ll talk about this when we get to the report you mentioned that we’ll talk about after Dan’s report that expands on this quite significantly. But there are some lessons to be learned from some of the things we discussed on this podcast in recent episodes. You mentioned Boston Consulting Group, where we’ll talk a bit more about the survey they did that paints a very different picture on this. Still, I have to say I’ve seen other reporting, including some of the ones you shared here, where it does talk about the huge gap between the views of leaders and organizations compared to the opinions of employees in those organizations on the state of AI and the benefits it’s supposed to bring. I think the Harvard Business Review report you shared as well—there’ll be links to that in the show notes—that says, “Leaders assume employees are excited about AI; they’re wrong,” says the Harvard Business Review. And they’ve got some really good credible data here to back up that review. The higher you sit in the organization, the rosier your view. Is that not true of many things in an organization, I wonder, that you’re insulated from some of the reality? Is there something communicators can do to alleviate that little problem? I suspect so. These are disconnects that do not help the organization if you really do have blind spots like that, I think. So it’s good to see this. The HBR talks about a survey they did—1,400 US-based employees. 76% of execs reported their employees feel enthusiastic about AI adoption. But the view from those employees was not that at all—just 31% of them expressed enthusiasm. That’s a bit different to what the execs are saying. So I wonder how we get to that reality and then add that to the climate of trust we discussed in the Edelman Trust Barometer and the landscape’s looking like a very tricky one for communicators in a wide range of areas. Add this to that list of concerns.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, this report has really been focused on adoption among employees. You’re going to take a different spin on this after Dan’s report around the perception gap between executives and employees. But I think it comes down to mismanagement of the rollout of AI in, I would have to say, most organizations. And I think it’s a lot of different factors contribute to this, but leaders need to be paying more attention to what they want from AI. I mean, is it really just evaluating tools that have AI baked into them that we can bring into the organization? Or is it rethinking the organization writ large based on what AI can do in a more organic way? I love the point out of JPMorgan that an analyst can now create a deck in 30 seconds because the AI has access to all the internal data. That’s valuable. An employee can say, “That is something that is worthwhile to me.” Whereas you give them access to Copilot because you have an Office 365 contract in your organization and everybody has access to it and say, “Here’s Office 365, godspeed.” And you provide basic training to everybody that says, “Here’s how you write a prompt and here’s how you look for hallucinations and blah, blah, blah.” But it doesn’t tell somebody in a particular role what this can do for them. They’re going to leave that saying, “Okay, I think I can craft a good prompt now. Why would I want to do that? What would I prompt for?” I think this requires much more attention on the part of leadership and much more commitment to viewing this as a change initiative that has to be led from the top.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think your point you mentioned earlier about this being to do with adoption and rollout as opposed to perception… but they’re both connected according to Harvard’s report anyway. They talk about: “When organizations see AI adoption as a way to make work better for employees and communicate that as opposed to as a pursuit of efficiencies and productivity, AI efforts gain traction.” And that’s repeated in many of the surveys that we could talk about. They communicate a shared purpose, involve employees in shaping the journey, and move people from resistance to enthusiasm. Makes total sense to me. The report also, the Harvard report, talks about employee-centric firms. I thought every firm was an employee-centric firm, but maybe I got that wrong. Employees on average are 92% more likely to say they are well-informed about their company’s AI strategy and 81% more likely to say that their perspectives are considered in AI-related decisions. That’s a huge percentage, I have to say. 70% more likely to feel enthusiastic and optimistic about AI adoption, reporting emotions such as empowerment, excitement, and hope rather than resistance, fear, or distrust. Communication, execution—that’s the kind of pathway, I suppose, or execution and communication, both hand in hand. So it’s… slow employee adoption of AI is clearly the norm, by my judgment, based on what you’ve been saying, what I’ve listened to, what I’m seeing in some of these reports. Makes me wonder: surely it’s a known status, if you like, that communicators can get a hold of and do something about, I would have thought. So would we expect to see a change in that area? I hope so.

Great report, Dan. Thanks very much indeed. I enjoyed listening to your assessment of Wikipedia over the past 25 years. I’m a huge user of Wikipedia and I’m as conscious as you are and many others of some concern about the challenges Wikipedia is facing with misinformation, disinformation, AI, the works getting involved. Looking with interest at how Wikipedia is addressing some of those things. I receive a lot of communication with you; I’ve been a donor for years to support Wikipedia. I’m pleased to see them, I guess, recognizing the shifting landscape and doing something about including AI in some form in terms of the editorial or the editing elements of content on Wikipedia. It’s a challenge without question. So your take on being an editor all those years is interesting, Dan. I’ve done a bit of that, nowhere near as much as you have. And it is interesting… I come across things I read on Wikipedia—I do read it quite a bit when I’m looking for information—that I will see something and think, “That’s not right.” And I might propose an edit in the talk pages. Rarely do I dive in and edit unless it’s something so obviously wrong, unless I’ve got… if I don’t have a source I can cite. So yeah, it’s interesting. And I remember you mentioning before your live editing streams on Twitch. They’re pretty cool. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: I remember watching those during the pandemic. That was fun.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, so great recap, Dan, thanks very much, worth listening to. So let’s continue the conversation then on the views of CEOs, how they differ from employees in AI introduction. I’m going to reference a Wall Street Journal story that talks about a survey seeing that “CEOs say AI is making work more efficient; employees tell a different story.” Much of the public narrative around generative AI in organizations has been framed as a productivity story—one where AI is already saving time, streamlining work, and delivering efficiency at scale. We’ve touched on a lot of that in your earlier report, Shel, our conversation there. But a recent Wall Street Journal report suggests there’s a growing disconnect between how senior leaders perceive AI’s impact and how employees are actually experiencing it day to day. So the Journal’s reporting draws on a survey by the AI consulting firm Section, based on responses from 5,000 white-collar workers in large organizations across the US, UK, and Canada. The headline finding is stark: two-thirds of non-management employees say AI is saving them less than two hours a week or no time at all. By contrast, more than 40% of executives believe AI is saving them eight hours a week or more. There’s a disconnect, it seems to me.

Beyond time savings, the survey highlights a clear emotional divide. Employees are far more likely to describe themselves as anxious or overwhelmed by AI, while senior leaders are more likely to say they feel excited about its potential. Many workers say they are unsure how to incorporate AI into their roles, and that whatever time is saved is often offset by having to check outputs, correct errors, or redo work. At the same time, companies are continuing to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, betting that it will drive future productivity and profit growth, even as evidence of near-term financial returns remains limited. Separate CEO surveys cited by the Journal suggest that only a small minority of leaders say AI has yet delivered meaningful cost or revenue benefits. The Journal also points to real-world examples where ambitious AI deployments have required human correction or reversal, reinforcing the idea that in practice, AI adoption is uneven, unpredictable, and highly dependent on context, skills, and judgment. This picture sits alongside other research we’ve discussed on For Immediate Release. In FIR 497, we talked about BCG’s AI radar report—that’s Boston Consulting Group—which argues that AI has moved beyond experimentation and is now a CEO-owned strategic mandate. That same research also places communicators at the center of managing expectations, trust, and organizational change. We’ve also seen consistent findings, including in the report you highlighted, we discussed literally a few minutes ago on slow employee adoption of AI, showing that while awareness of AI is high, employee adoption and understanding lag well behind leadership ambition.

Taken together, this raises an important tension. At the top of organizations, AI is increasingly seen as transformational and inevitable. On the ground, many employees are still grappling with how it fits into their work and whether it’s genuinely helping them do their jobs better. So what does this divergence between executive optimism and employee experience reveal about how AI is being introduced, communicated, and governed within organizations? Is the human side of AI adoption the real constraint on its promised productivity gains?

Shel Holtz: It’s all of this data is fascinating. And one of the things that strikes me is that we tend to look at data from research, surveys, reports, studies about AI in business. What about people just generally—what do they think about AI just as people living their lives? And there was a study that came out from Pew—this was just last September, so this is current data. I know four months is a million years in AI life, the AI life cycle. But still, this is fairly recent data. And what they found—and I’ll skip numbers and just give you some highlights here—that, and this is a study out of the US, Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. A majority say they want more control over how it’s used in their lives. Far larger shares say AI will erode rather than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships. People are open to letting AI help them with their day-to-day tasks, but they don’t support it playing a role in personal matters: religion, matchmaking… more open for data analysis, like weather forecasting, things like that. But they also think it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos, or text were made by AI and humans, but they don’t trust their own ability to spot AI-generated stuff. Now, what you have to think about when you hear that this is how people who are just out there living their lives and outside of the context of work, this is how they feel—then they go to work. And they’re told, “AI, it’s going to be great.” And they bring all of these perceptions from their regular lives into the office, into the workplace. And that’s an impact, too. And I think this is something that internal communicators and leaders have to take into account when… I mean, this expectation that AI is going to make your job easier, it’s going to make your product better, whatever your output is, it’s going to make that better… it’s just going to make everything rosy. And you’ve already got these biases based on perceptions just from life. We have to take that into account in our communication. I don’t think this was something anybody was thinking about when we were first introducing it because there was no research yet. It was as new to people living their lives as it was to people doing their jobs. But now you have these perceptions that have been formed about AI as just something that’s there as part of life. And if we don’t factor that into the communication that we do around AI in the workplace, we’re going to struggle to get people to trust this and to figure out how to employ it to make their work better and to support the goals of the organization.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So the big question then is: what needs to move the needle for communicators then to grasp this challenge, let’s say? I think when we discussed BCG’s AI Radar report, where the clear message there was “AI is now no longer just experimenting and experiments and is now CEO-owned strategic mandate.” So CEOs are taking over control of that. Certainly, with the investment going into AI and organizations. And indeed, one of the findings in BCG’s report was how success in deploying AI and the ROI on that deployment is now a core measure for CEO performance, it said. Well, that takes it up to a whole different level. So it presents opportunities, I think, for communicators to help that CEO achieve the goals he’s going to be measured on by communicating to employees. So this kind of circles back to what we were discussing earlier. And I think if employees on the ground are still grappling with how it fits into their work—and let’s set aside the survey saying CEOs are in charge of all this now, this is great, everything’s going to be wonderful… reality right now today, if they’re still grappling with how it fits into the work, then that needs to be addressed. And you’ve introduced an interesting element to that picture, Shel, where employees of an organization are exposed to all the negative commentary about this externally in their lives generally. They bring that to work with them and encounter what they see there. And they hear the CEO saying, “this is all great.” So these are genuine issues that must be addressed, otherwise, as you say, trust is going to be lacking all the way. And you put that in the context of Edelman’s Trust Barometer and trust and shifts in that… and it’s not a pretty picture at all, I don’t think.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, in the framework for internal communications that I developed—it’s the subject of the book that I’m working on—one of the key roles on a day-to-day basis for internal communicators is consultation, and that’s consultation up the organization. And I think this is an instance where that role is paramount. We need to be talking to our leaders about this. The fact that the BCG radar report says that this has become a CEO issue doesn’t mean that every CEO has done that. I think there are a lot of CEOs who see this—still see this—as an IT issue. And even if they’re using it in their jobs, they don’t think it’s something that they need to be leading; it’s something they think that their CIO needs to be leading. And I think we need to present this data to our leaders. I think we need to talk about why this needs to be led by the business and not one of the support teams. Consultation is what we need to be doing at this stage in addition to maintaining the drumbeat of why this is effective and how you can use this with the frontline employees who are actually going to be using these tools to make a difference in the organization.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I would agree with that. So therefore the answer to the question I posed when they finished the intro to this—is the human side of AI adoption the real constraint on its promised productivity gains?—I guess would be yes.

Shel Holtz: I would say absolutely yes, and I think that’s where organizations need to be shifting their investments. And I think I saw data that says they are shifting their investments. I think something like 60 or 70% of what organizations are investing in AI is now focused on the people in the organization.

Neville Hobson: That’s a good move.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, let’s leave AI behind for a bit and talk about something a little more strategic in the internal communication world. And that’s “alignment,” which has become one of those corporate North Stars that everyone nods at, but few organizations actually achieve. And there’s a paradox at the heart of this. The very act of trying to force alignment—meetings, memos, check-the-box town halls—can make the disconnect worse. Let me start with three simple definitions that frame the alignment problem. Let’s start this discussion with these definitions, courtesy of Stephen Waddington, whose PR credentials are far too many to list here. He says that leadership is the role of setting strategy and goals. Management is the process of measurement and continual improvement against those goals. Execution is delivery against those goals. All right, a pretty simple model there, right? Leadership, management, and execution. But here’s what happens in practice: one of these three almost always breaks down and more often than not, it’s alignment—the invisible thread meant to tie strategy, management, and execution together is what frays first.

Now Zora Artis, who has been a guest on FIR interviews, and Wayne Asplund have been studying the alignment problem for years. Their latest research, the CLEAR Leaders Project, revisits strategic alignment because despite how important it is, the same problems keep recurring. They conducted confidential interviews with senior leaders across communications, HR, strategy, and operations to explore how alignment is understood, practiced, and experienced in organizations today. And here’s the uncomfortable finding: seven years after their previous benchmark study, the gap between alignment in principle and alignment in practice is just as wide as it always has been. It’s universally valued yet almost never achieved. Now think about what this means. We’re not getting better at this and we should. I mentioned before that consultation is one of those daily activities in the ring around my framework circle. So is alignment. And despite all the strategy decks, the town halls, the carefully crafted vision statement, this problem persists. Why? Because senior leaders live inside the strategy. They’ve shaped it, debated it, and refined it, but that proximity breeds a dangerous assumption: the closer you are to a strategy, the more you assume its clarity is shared. What leaders often hear as consensus is actually silence. And in too many organizations, silence is misread as buy-in. Now here’s the thing about strategy: it doesn’t cascade like water; it distorts as it moves. It’s shaped by language, culture, experience, and hierarchy. A strategy that’s crystal clear at the top becomes a muddled set of ideas by the time it reaches teams on the ground. Ownership gets lost, accountability blurs, execution slows.

Now, Zora and Wayne’s original 2018 study of more than 200 senior communicators found that only 35% felt their organization was aligned to its corporate purpose. Only 40% used corporate purpose as a key part of employee communications. Think about that. We define the purpose of the organization; only 40% use that purpose as a part of their communication with employees. Now, fast forward through a pandemic, through massive technological disruption, through all the lessons we supposedly learned about clarity and communication, and the numbers still haven’t meaningfully improved. So what is this paradox? The very mechanisms we use to create organizational scale—you know, we subdivide work, we create functional specialization, we establish hierarchies—these are the mechanisms that fragment the information, decision rights, and incentives that guide individual decisions. We create silos to manage complexity, and those silos then work against our ability to align. Research from Strategy and Business frames it differently but arrives at the same place. When strategies aren’t implemented effectively, leaders tend to view their people as “irrational.” But workers and managers are actually rational actors. Their choices reflect sensible decisions in the context of what each of them knows and understands. The problem isn’t the people; it’s the organizational environment that’s encouraging decision-making that conflicts with overall objectives.

Fortune magazine estimates 70% of CEO failures are caused not by flawed strategic thinking, but by failure to execute. Most management teams don’t fully appreciate the role of the organization in undermining performance. They lack time or resources to understand how the organizational models actually work. They’re frustrated by their inability to realize objectives, but they rarely identify the interacting assumptions and misaligned incentives built into their own structures as the root cause. Here’s where the research gets really interesting. Artis and Asplund’s work reveals that alignment isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. It happens through repeated behavior, not bold declarations. The temptation is to treat alignment as a messaging issue: clearer cascades, sharper narratives, better packaging. But alignment isn’t about communication tactics; it’s about leadership behavior. In today’s environment, the traditional playbook of strategy decks, town halls, and posters on the wall simply doesn’t work anymore. The challenge is how consistently leaders live and lead the strategy every day. That requires holding the tension between spread and clarity, decisiveness and dialogue, direction and dissent. It means slowing down when speed tempts shortcut thinking, inviting challenge when comfort suggests consensus, being consistent in action as well as intent, and most critically, checking for understanding, not just repeating messages.

There’s also the “shallow versus deep” alignment problem. Shallow alignment is tactical: agreeing on plans, checking boxes. Deep alignment is about the fundamental “why.” Organizations need both, but they often confuse one for the other. They think because everyone showed up to the strategy offsite and nodded along that they have alignment. Six months later, they’re baffled when nothing has changed. Artis’ research through the pandemic showed that organizations that thrived had articulated a strong sense of purpose and used it to guide decision-making. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky spoke about their purpose as their North Star, giving them permission to morph their business strategy in response to threats and opportunities. Yet a McKinsey study found that while 82% of companies affirm the importance of purpose, only 42% thought their purpose statements had any actual impact.

So what’s the way forward? Well, first we have to stop treating strategic alignment as a communication challenge to be solved. It’s an ongoing act of leadership that demands humility, curiosity, and deliberate behavior. The best leaders aren’t the ones who shout the strategy the loudest; they’re the ones who stay aligned when pressure hits, who listen when they assume, and who practice alignment as part of their everyday leadership. Second, communicators need to fundamentally shift their role. As Zora and Wayne’s research shows, communication professionals have an enormous, mostly untapped opportunity here, but only if they move from being seen as tacticians to being seen as strategic advisors. That means being the function that surfaces misalignments, the conflicting incentives, the information gaps, the unclear decision rights, and working with leadership to fix them. Third, leaders need to acknowledge that you can’t communicate your way out of structural problems, but you can use communication to identify them. Alignment requires examining the organizational environment, not just restating aspirations or exhorting people to do better, but actually changing the conditions under which people make decisions. The alignment paradox won’t be solved by better PowerPoints. It requires recognizing that leadership is a practice, not a position. And it requires understanding that the very things that make organizations functional at scale are the same things that make alignment extraordinarily difficult. The question for every leader is whether you’re willing to confront this paradox honestly or whether you’ll keep mistaking silence for consensus and proximity for clarity.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s a very interesting analysis, Shel. I think Zora and Wayne have done some good work here from just reading Zora’s Substack post about this. A couple of things struck me from this, which I guess puts it in perspective for people perhaps who don’t work in large organizations, because this is clearly geared to that. And yet alignment doesn’t require it to be a large organization. And I say that because I’ve gone through an alignment myself as a sole person last year. I did a webinar for IABC for the consultants group on this exact topic. It’s kind of swapping balance—it’s not about balance; it’s about alignment. They’re two different things. I did like a couple of things that leapt at me from Zora’s post. She talks about: “Alignment doesn’t fail because leaders lack intent. It weakens when shared clarity, ownership, and accountability diverge and commitment isn’t strong enough to hold together. When that happens, effort increases, but traction declines.” That is to the point precisely about eight years later where nothing much has moved well. She also says, “Alignment demands humility,” and I think this is the bit that resonated most with me: “Vulnerability and sustained commitment. Requires leaders and their teams to slow down, invite challenge, and stay open to perspectives that complicate the narrative.” And that to me was the kind of bottom line of this whole argument: slow down. It’s examine things with better purpose than you have had before. Choose to do things if you can because they matter, not just because they’re available or because they’re going to make you a lot of money, although that’s hard in a large organization, I think.

I think it’s something each one of us needs to pay attention to, not just if you’re an employee in a large organization, to start your own shift—to look at what you are doing as a consultant or as a communicator in an organization and how aligned is it with your own values and those of your organization. I don’t think people do that properly—maybe “effectively” might be the better word than properly. So this is a valuable piece of research that has some great points to zone in on and consider in your job as a communicator, indeed, as you as an individual person. To me, the biggest one is velocity. Get rid of velocity; slow down. Take more time on things. Resist the temptation where velocity equals “busy.” Well, it doesn’t. Busy-ness may be not the same thing at all. Indeed, in Zora’s article, she quotes someone saying, “Ego, fear, hubris, and speed push in the opposite direction.” That relates to humility, vulnerability, and sustained commitment. And absolutely true. You see it in large organizations in particular. So there’s a lot to learn from this. It talks about “Why is this intensifying now?” Dynamics aren’t new; becoming more consequential, says Zora in her piece. Strategy cycles are shorter. The context leaders operate in is more complex. Decisions are made faster, with less time for shared sense-making. Misalignment is more likely, therefore, in which case, slow down. If you say it enough, you will slow down. Resist pressure to speed up even. Not always easy. It depends on many factors. If you’ve got a leader you’re working with who subscribes to this view of “it’s not about velocity, it’s about taking the time to consider things and discuss it with others, shared sense-making,” as the article says, it’s worth doing. So this is something that, like you, I would say I’d look forward to reading this report when it comes out in February.

Shel Holtz: One of the things that jumped out at me as I was researching this for the report was the whole idea of structure of the organization being a hindrance to alignment. And I don’t know how many organizations have ever undertaken a “structure audit.” And the structure was created in order to have work that is similar done in one place. It does create those silos of… I think leaders are confident that the structure that they have created is the right one for the organization, but have they tested that structure against other things that are important to them? And I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a structure audit. I’ve never heard those two words used together. It may be time to develop one and say, “Yes, we understand the structure works for our process of getting our product out, for example, but what does it do for these other four things that are priorities in the organization? Are they hindrances? And do we need, as a result of this, to make changes to our structure so these four other priorities gain more traction? Or do we need to rethink how we are implementing these priorities so that they will be effective given the structure that we want to maintain?” But I don’t think anybody’s thinking about that right now at all. And I think it’s something to be raised.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, indeed. I think the Substack article talks about that a bit, saying, “Alignment is a discipline for leaders and teams. Without commitment, it shows up in moments and disappears when it’s tested.” So yeah, plenty to pay attention to here, Shel, I think. So let’s talk about something I think is quite an interesting topic. One we’ve talked about before on For Immediate Release, but not for a few years probably. And this is all about Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta as it was renamed some years ago from just Facebook, and his recent “U-turn,” as the media are describing it—what that means for the future of virtual reality. So for several years, Zuckerberg placed a bold bet on virtual reality and the metaverse as the next major computing platform. That vision reshaped the strategy and even the name of Meta as the company poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs, launched VR headsets, and promoted immersive virtual worlds as the future of work, social connection, and everyday computing. That vision now appears to be undergoing a significant reset.

In January, multiple reports confirmed that Meta is making deep cuts to its Reality Labs division, laying off around 1,500 employees, roughly 10% of the unit. According to the Wall Street Journal, the move reflects a deliberate shift in investment away from the metaverse and towards AI, particularly AI-powered wearables such as smart glasses. Reality Labs has reportedly lost more than $77 billion since 2020. Eye-watering numbers here, Shel. And consumer-facing platforms like Horizon Worlds have struggled to attract sustained engagement. I’m sure Zuckerberg’s glad he’s got that clause in the contract that says they can’t fire him for any reason whatsoever. But coverage from Futurism is even more blunt than the Wall Street Journal. It’s framing the layoffs as a clear signal that Meta’s consumer metaverse ambitions are being wound down after years of underperformance. Entire VR game studios have been shuttered. And while some platforms remain active, they are doing so at a far smaller scale as capital and leadership attention pivot decisively towards AI.

A more nuanced perspective comes from The Conversation in an analysis by Per-Ola Kristensson, professor of interactive systems engineering at the University of Cambridge. He argues that this apparent U-turn does not mean immersive technology itself has failed. Instead, it reflects the limits of fully immersive virtual reality as a mass-market everyday computing platform. Drawing on years of academic research and user studies, Kristensson notes that while VR works well for specialist use cases—such as training surgeons, engineers, or pilots—it performs poorly as a general-purpose work environment. Extended use is associated with higher workload, lower perceived productivity, increased fatigue, anxiety, and usability problems. In short, VR can be impressive, but it is often too immersive, uncomfortable, and impractical for routine daily work. Crucially, The Conversation suggests that what we’re seeing is not the end of immersive computing, but a shift away from VR towards augmented and mixed reality—less immersive technologies that layer digital information onto the physical world rather than replacing it entirely. Products such as Microsoft’s HoloLens are cited as examples of this approach, where virtual information supports real-world tasks rather than pulling users into a separate virtual space. This distinction matters because much of the current retrenchment is about the consumer metaverse—the idea of mass adoption of shared virtual worlds for socializing, working, and entertainment. On that front, the hype has clearly run ahead of reality. By contrast, business and enterprise use of immersive technologies are not disappearing. Credible reporting and research continue to show steady, if unspectacular, adoption in areas such as training and simulation, product design, digital twins, remote maintenance, healthcare, and specialist education. In these contexts, immersive tools are judged by whether they improve safety, accuracy, learning, or cost efficiency, not by whether they attract millions of daily users.

In other words, what appears to be collapsing is a grand consumer vision of the metaverse, not the underlying technologies themselves. The center of gravity is shifting from spectacle to practicality, and increasingly towards combinations of AI, augmented reality, and task-specific immersive tools, rather than all-encompassing virtual worlds. Shel, I know you’re a fan and a user of VR headsets. Why don’t we look at this moment—what this moment really represents—whether Meta’s pullback marks the end of virtual reality as a serious platform or simply the end of a particular story about it. And what this tells us about how emerging technologies mature once the hype cycle collides with everyday reality.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, until I developed this back problem and I’m confined from doing a lot until it’s addressed, I was pretty much a daily user of VR with the Meta Quest 3. I use several apps and they’re all workout apps. I have to say that the only thing I’ve been using it for the last few years is working out. I don’t exclusively work out with the headset, but that’s always how I start. And I always start with the same app. It’s called Supernatural. Supernatural was an app that was in the Meta app store, but it was a separate company and Zuckerberg wanted it. He wanted these companies to be part of Meta so that he could showcase them as part of his effort in the Metaverse. Now Supernatural employed a bunch of people. It had what they call choreographers—these are the coders who create the workout routines so that they work right and they’re synced with the popular music that are in these workout sets and they’re in categories: it’s rap, it’s classic rock, it’s metal, it’s classical jazz, soul, R&B. And you would pick either a boxing or what they call a flow workout. And there are coaches—there are six coaches who would guide you through these, lead you through the warmups and the cool downs. And there’s a Facebook group for people who use the app; it has about a hundred thousand people using it. The estimate is that there are about a hundred and thirty thousand people who use the app, Supernatural, on, I think, a monthly basis—active monthly users.

And most of those 1,500 who were fired from Reality Labs at Meta were the coaches and the choreographers and the people who make Supernatural go. They’ve made the point that the app is going to stay and all the workouts that have been created up to this point—and there are, I think, thousands of them—will remain available. But I don’t know how long it’s going to stay because they’re going to have to renew the music licensing. This isn’t the music you hear on other workout apps from artists you’ve never heard of that isn’t requiring licensing through the big music licensing organizations. This is popular music. This is today’s top artists and the top artists of the classic rock era and the like. So it’s expensive to license that music. And when that rolls around, I don’t know if we’re going to continue to see this music available. And I think the whole thing is going to fall apart. There’s a tremendous effort among the users of this to get Zuckerberg to bring it back. There’s a petition and all kinds of other efforts going on. It’s all being discussed in the Facebook group. But what’s important to keep in mind is the 1,500 people who were cut are working for apps that either Meta created or acquired that are consumer-facing. There are still 15,000-plus people on the payroll there. So this is not an exit from the metaverse or the virtual reality world; this is a refinement of their approach.

It’s also important, I think, to consider the broader landscape because Meta is not the only one doing this. And by the way, you mentioned Horizon Worlds, their metaverse. It’s awful. You know, if people go in there and say, “Is this what the metaverse is?” Forget that. I mean, I can absolutely see that, but it’s not. It’s not the only effort out there. Apple is still refining the Vision Pro ecosystem to define this whole spatial computing space. Nvidia is doubling down on the industrial metaverse with their Omniverse platform—this is for digital twins for global manufacturing. Digital twins are going to be huge, and that’s definitely an element of the metaverse. Epic Games is building a massive persistent universe in partnership with Disney, which will probably be more appealing than Horizon Worlds. I mean, I’ve got to believe between Epic and Disney, you’re going to get something better than Meta was able to conceive. The pivot to AI isn’t a distraction or a move away from the metaverse and VR. It’s actually the fuel for it. Generative AI is finally solving the two biggest hurdles the metaverse faced: the massive cost of 3D content creation and the “empty world” problem. By using AI to populate and build these spaces instantly, Meta and its competitors are finally making the tech scalable. They’re not retreating; they’re just waiting for their AI tools to finish building the world they promised us. So I still remain bullish on the metaverse and virtual reality. The fact that it seems to be going through a decline right now is just a dip in the chart. I think you’re going to see that trend rise again. And I think AI is going to play a big part in this. And by the way, NPCs—non-player characters in video games—AI is going to be jet fuel for non-player characters. So I think: watch this space. I think it’ll probably be a few years. I remember Matthew Ball, who wrote the book on the metaverse, said we were 10 years away. That was what, three years ago? So, I mean, we’re still seven years in his timeframe. And because of what’s happening with AI, that may accelerate it, but I think it’s actually going to extend it to probably 12 or 13 years because the focus has shifted. But I think as these two factors, AI and the metaverse/VR converge, you’re going to see an explosion of this stuff down the road.

Neville Hobson: You could be right. I think there are other players, you’re right. For the time being, though, for the moment, it appears that Meta is ditching this to concentrate on the current thing that so many people are putting their focus on: AI generally and wearables is what they’re now going to pay attention to, according to these reports. I did like Kristensson’s analysis of it all, particularly his view that this doesn’t really work for business use and certainly not for consumer use without competitive technology that appeals to people and others who are doing it, such as you’ve outlined. The reality, though, is that they have announced these layoffs and their shifts that they’re making to their division, and they’re not supporting it anymore at the moment, according to all the media reports that I’ve seen about all of this. Doesn’t mean to say that couldn’t change—that may change—but that’s the picture right now. And I think the limited research that I’ve done on particularly business use of virtual reality has far more promise. And indeed, the way in which the mention of that was couched from one of the reports about this: “pretty unsexy stuff going on with business use of all this.” Yet there are excellent results being reported by a number of companies. I remember reading a few months ago, which I posted about, I think, on LinkedIn, what BMW is doing with its car-building metaverse, where they’re modeling new models in a metaverse where the guys on the production lines are increasingly robots, but they’re to be run by humans, and the designers and the marketers and others all get together in a virtual world to discuss planning of a new model. That’s definitely something that they’re seeing results from, that kind of thing. I remember, as you will, Shel, let’s go back into the deep mists of time to a place called Second Life. Hey, all the auto companies—all of them, literally the big ones, particularly the American ones—were there with the virtual cars. I’ve still got a virtual Pontiac somewhere up there on Second Life, which is still there probably in 2026. I haven’t logged in since, so I’m going to make a point of doing that this weekend to see what’s going on, to see if I need to upgrade my fashion, clothing, or whether it’s still valid. But that was the early stages of things that we now call a metaverse. And the tech has moved on significantly and Second Life has moved on significantly with improvements to their platform. But it is one platform that doesn’t appeal to everyone, yet it’s there still with thousands of users. So there is room for all of these things. And you mentioned the book and projecting 10 years—it might be longer than that. I think it might be quicker than that even, because things are moving so fast with all of this. It’s hard to tell, but it is worth paying attention to both from a communication and business perspective. But also if you’re interested in how this tech is moving along generally, keep an eye on this because I think we are likely to see AI playing a bigger role, such as you suggested, than has been the case to date. So it’s kind of: watch this space, basically.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and in terms of the consumer use, one of the things that I was pointing out in a conversation I was having on the Supernatural Facebook group is that Meta in particular has done just a god-awful job of marketing these apps. When Supernatural was shut down, there was an article written by one of the users who’s also a Bloomberg reporter, so it got a fair amount of attention. He thought the move was fairly stupid to shut it down, given that it has a hundred thousand paying users. And I made the point in a discussion around this that, well, you know, they have not done a good job at all of marketing this. This is an app… I mean, you look at what people were saying when it was shut down in the group, and a lot of them were saying, “I never exercised before this. And I was skeptical when I tried it. But now here’s my before and after picture, right? And I weighed 250 pounds here and I’m 145 now.” There was a lot of that—people saying, “I never worked out before this and this is what led me to it.” And it’s because it’s fun and it’s because of the affinity we have with the coaches and blah, blah, blah. And Meta never took advantage of any of this. They never went out there and talked about how this can change your life. And there are other workout apps out there—Les Mills Body Combat and Fit XR and several others. So it’s not just a Meta problem. It’s the companies that make these, because these other apps are not owned by Meta; they’re just in the store. And there’s no marketing that I see for any of these that would bring people in. And you have to believe that somebody who’s never used this… and there are a number of people who said, “I bought my Quest headset so I could do Supernatural after a friend showed it to me.” That’s the gateway to other apps and to other tools and people finding, “Well, maybe there is some utility here. Maybe I do like playing VR games,” or what have you. And they just haven’t done this. And I have to say, it’s not surprising because Meta’s marketing has never been good for anything. But it seems to me that this whole virtual reality space, the marketing has been poor from the beginning.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So let’s also throw into the pool here of memory lane stuff… I was a huge fan and a regular user literally on a daily basis of Microsoft’s Kinect—K-I-N-E-C-T—that I used totally and only for fitness: jogging in place, all the exercises, the works. And I was really unhappy when they canned it and got rid of it all and that whole ecosystem building around that. That must have been around 2009, 10, 11—that kind of timeframe. But my Kinect worked brilliantly on the TV I had, the Sony TV at the time. Absolutely super. I miss that because I’ve never really used any of this technology since then for exercise. Whereas that’s what I used it exclusively for—my Kinect. Running alongside my virtual trainer—I could see it on the screen, both of those. That was really cool. So things go on. But it is interesting though, Shel… you wonder why on earth did the company shut this thing down that was making tons of money, they had a community, etc. There are other forces at work here that lead to those kinds of decisions. And it may not make sense, but if you’re inside that organization, it probably does because there’s something else going on they haven’t announced publicly or whatever it might be. So hence my own view: I’m not as bullish as you are about this from a consumer point of view, any of this. Not yet, anyway. I think something’s got to work out further on this.

Shel Holtz: But my bullishness is along a long horizon. It’s not something imminent. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: No, I get it. I get it. And yet I wonder if we might see something happening. And I’m now thinking more of the other forces at work in the world generally about the changes that are going on in trust, stuff like that. What impact will this have? We’ve got you mentioned Nvidia doing some stuff. We’ve got other players, particularly in China, who are working with technologies that can do this kind of thing in China where they’ve got what—a billion people who could take advantage of all this. So there’s so much going on. Worth paying attention to all of it, I think.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m looking forward to checking out this persistent universe that Epic Games and Disney are working on because you know that AI is going to factor into that and the ability to keep the world creating new places and wherever you turn, there’s going to be something new. It’s going to be good. I would put money on that. That’ll bring this episode of For Immediate Release to a close. Just a couple of quick notes before we go. First of all, later this week, we’re dropping our FIR Interview for January. It was a really good interview with Philippe Borremans, who we mentioned earlier. He left one of the comments that we read early in the show. Philippe specializes in crisis communication and we talked to him about crisis and AI. Really interesting interview. He’s got tremendous subject matter expertise. So if you deal with crisis communication, this is one that you don’t want to miss. In terms of today’s episode, we do hope that you will leave comments. Most of the comments we get are on our LinkedIn posts announcing the episode, and we’re grateful for you sharing your comments there. You can also email them to us at fircomments at gmail.com.

We would still love to get an audio comment one of these days. We used to get those all the time. They actually drove our discussion for much of the show. We haven’t had one in probably a couple of years, but you can actually record one right on the FIR website at firpodcastnetwork.com. There’s a link on the right-hand side—it says “send voicemail.” Just click that. You’ve got 90 seconds to get your message across. Record more than one, I’ll put them together. You can leave comments directly on the show notes on the FIR website. You can also leave comments in the Facebook FIR group or the FIR page or to either of our posts on Facebook or on BlueSky or on Threads because we share the release of each episode in all of those places. Also your ratings and reviews on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts are greatly appreciated. Our next episode will be next week. That’ll be a short midweek episode. We’ll continue to produce those, but our next long-form monthly episode will be released on Monday, February 23rd. Until then, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #498: Can Business Be a Trust Broker in Today’s Insulated Society? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The latest BCG AI Radar survey signals a definitive turning point: AI has graduated from a tech-driven experiment to a CEO-owned strategic mandate. As corporate investments double, a striking “confidence gap” is emerging between optimistic leaders in the corner office and the more skeptical teams tasked with implementation. With the rapid rise of Agentic AI — autonomous systems that execute complex workflows rather than just generating text — the focus is shifting from simple productivity gains to a total overhaul of culture and operating models. In this episode, Neville and Shel examine this evolution that places communicators at the center of a high-stakes transition as AI moves from a pilot phase into end-to-end organizational transformation.

Links from this episode:

As AI Investments Surge, CEOs Take the Lead
Complete BCG Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 497 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. For the past couple of years, AI in organizations has mostly been talked about as a technology story—a set of tools to deploy, experiments to run, and efficiencies to unlock. It was often led by IT, digital, or data teams, with the CEO interested but not always directly involved. The latest AI Radar survey from BCG suggests that phase is now over.

For the third year running, BCG has surveyed senior executives across global markets—nearly 2,400 leaders in 16 markets, including more than 600 CEOs. The standout finding isn’t just how much money organizations are spending on AI, or even how optimistic leaders are about returns. It’s something more structural.

Nearly three-quarters of CEOs now say they are the main decision-maker on AI in their organization. That’s double the share from last year. This is not a minor shift; it’s a transfer of ownership. AI is no longer being treated as another digital initiative that can be delegated at arm’s length. CEOs recognize that AI cuts across strategy, operating models, culture, risk, governance, and talent. In other words, AI isn’t just changing what organizations do, it’s changing how they run. Half of the CEOs surveyed even believe their job stability depends on getting AI right.

We’re also seeing a striking “confidence gap.” CEOs are significantly more optimistic about AI’s ability to deliver returns than their executive colleagues. BCG describes this as “change distance.” People closest to the decisions feel more positive than those who have to live with the consequences.

The survey identifies three types of AI leadership: Followers (cautious and stuck in pilots), Pragmatists (the 70% majority moving with the market), and Trailblazers. Trailblazers treat AI as an end-to-end transformation and are already seeing gains. What’s accelerating this is the rise of Agentic AI. Unlike earlier tools, agents run multi-step workflows with limited human involvement. This raises the stakes for governance and accountability.

This is where communicators come in. If AI is now a CEO-led transformation, communication can’t just sit at the edges. It’s not just about writing rollout messages; it’s about helping leaders articulate why AI is being adopted and what it means for people’s roles and sense of agency. Is this the shift that turns ambition into transformation, or does CEO confidence risk becoming a blind spot?

Shel Holtz: Excellent analysis, Neville. I think there’s data in this report that is incredibly heartening. One of the characteristics of the “Pragmatist” CEOs—who represent 70% of the responses—is that they are spending an average of seven hours a week personally working with or learning about AI. I’ve never seen that before. When we introduced the web or social media, CEOs weren’t using it personally. This immersion is very helpful for the communicators who need to tell this story.

What’s troubling, though, is that 14-point confidence gap between CEOs and their managers. I don’t think this is just “resistance to change.” If the people implementing the systems are less confident than the person funding them, are we headed for an “AI winter” of unmet expectations?

Communicators need to become translators. Our job isn’t just selling the vision; it’s bridging a reality gap. If managers are skeptical, a CEO’s “rah-rah” AI speech will backfire. We have to translate that vision into operational safety for the staff while advising the CEO on the actual temperature of the workforce.

Neville Hobson: You’ve said that well. Communicators sit right at the center of whether AI transformation is trusted or resisted. This is a different picture than before. The senior communicator now has an unspoken challenge to assume a recognized leadership role to close that gap.

The appeal here is that you have a landscape ripe for a communicator to take the lead. You don’t have to sell the idea to the leadership—they already have the budget and the will. You can concentrate on persuasion and diplomacy to make sure the support is there throughout the organization. CEOs are going to need support on how to fulfill this aspect of their job.

It’s also interesting to note that confidence gaps are widening. The 2026 Edelman Trust Report also speaks to these issues regarding the relationship between people and organizations. The communicator is going to have to write a brand-new playbook.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. And for the “Trailblazers,” the report suggests AI will lead to flatter, cross-functional organizational models. This puts middle managers at risk. If Agentic AI can plan, act, and learn multi-step workflows, what happens to the layer of management whose job is coordination and oversight? Is the CEO leading us toward a future where the “human middle” becomes redundant? How do you communicate with people who fear the technology will put them out of a job?

Neville Hobson: Unquestionably a challenge. Many CEOs recognize their own jobs are on the line, too. This isn’t petty cash; we are talking about massive investments. Communicators must help employees understand this shift in structure. It’s not a CIO-led digital transformation anymore; it’s a CEO-led business redesign.

Shel Holtz: To complicate things, 90% of companies say they will increase AI spending even if it doesn’t pay off in the next year. This is a “burn the boats” strategy. At what point does commitment become a sunk-cost fallacy?

Neville Hobson: To summarize, the main task for communicators is helping leaders articulate why AI is being adopted. We need to bring the human element in firmly as a foundational element. AI transformation will fail or succeed as much on meaning and legitimacy as on technology.

Shel Holtz: It’s an organizational change process. If the CEO owns it, they are the chief spokesperson and must articulate the vision while maintaining two-way communication. We also have to look at the strategic plan. If the direction of the industry is shifting, organizations may need to change their very aspirations and strategic goals, which requires considerable communication.

Neville Hobson: Fun times ahead, communicators.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #497: CEOs Wrest Control of AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville and Shel dive into the ambitious new definition of public relations proposed by the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA). Sparked by a two-and-a-half-page draft that reframes the discipline as a senior strategic management function, Shel and Neville debate whether this comprehensive document serves as a vital “PR for PR” or if its length and academic tone move it closer to a manifesto than a practical, portable definition. The conversation explores the proposal’s emphasis on organizational legitimacy, its explicit inclusion of AI’s role in the information ecosystem, and the ongoing challenge of establishing a unified professional standard that resonates across the global communications industry.

Links from this episode:

The PRCA’s proposed definition (PDF)
Some Reflections on PRCA’s Proposed Definition of Public Relations (PRCA CEO Sarah Waddington’s LinkedIn post)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson Welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 496. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz And I’m Shel Holtz. Neville, how would you define public relations?

Neville Hobson The very short way I would define it—and this is a very old definition I seem to remember from the CIPR before it was called the CIPR—is the custodianship or the stewardship of the relationships between a brand or a company and its publics. That’s how I define it.

Shel Holtz I like it. PRSA defines it as a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

Neville Hobson I could have said that, but I just wanted to give you the quick version.

Shel Holtz Yeah, well, that works. But now we have the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) proposing a definition that positions public relations as a senior strategic management discipline focused on reputation, trust, legitimacy, and long-term value. In this framing, PR exists to help organizations and individuals navigate complexity, reduce uncertainty, manage risk, and build durable relationships with the people and institutions that affect their ability to operate and succeed.

It emphasizes two-way engagement, board-level counsel, data and insight, crisis preparedness, and societal impact. It explicitly extends PR’s remit into shaping the information ecosystem in an AI-driven world. Now, that’s a summary of the definition; the definition itself consumes two and a half pages of text. It’s available as a PDF and open to comment by PRCA members, according to the organization’s CEO, Sarah Waddington. In a LinkedIn post, she said the draft definition draws on academic research and a thematic analysis of recent sector commentary following her Radio 4 Today debate with Sir Martin Sorrell, which we talked about here a couple of weeks ago.

A two-and-a-half-page definition is a lot, and that’s kind of the point. The definition is designed for the environment in which many senior practitioners find themselves right now. The language of foresight, volatility, legitimacy, and uncertainty isn’t an accident; it’s meant to reflect how closely public relations work is increasingly tied to leadership decision-making. In that sense, this definition does something a lot of us have argued for over the years: it situates PR at the strategic heart of the organization rather than treating it as a delivery function.

It also aligns with a broader international view that PR is fundamentally about relationships and long-term organizational health, not about outputs like press releases or media placements. As you might expect, there have been reactions. Philippe Boromans, a former president of the International Public Relations Association and an upcoming guest on FIR Interviews, shared on LinkedIn that the definition reads less like a definition and more like a manifesto—ambitious and comprehensive, but maybe trying to do too much.

Historically, definitions that have endured tend to revolve around a single unifying idea. Think about the emphasis on mutually beneficial relationships in PRSA’s definition, which they adopted in 2012. That kind of conceptual anchor makes a definition portable—it’s easy to explain, teach, and remember. By contrast, the PRCA proposal advances a lot of important ideas all at once: trust, legitimacy, engagement, value creation, behavior change, and societal impact. These are all part of PR, but without a clear organizing principle, it’s hard to find something to hang your hat on.

There’s also the question of tone and accessibility. The language is unapologetically corporate and at times delves into the academic. That may resonate with board advisors and consultants, but definitions also serve students, people starting their careers, and those in the nonprofit or public sectors. A definition that primarily reflects the experience of the profession’s most senior tier risks narrowing its usefulness. One critique I find particularly important is the exclusive reliance on the concept of “stakeholders.”

Neville Hobson Yep.

Shel Holtz Public relations is always engaged with broader publics, too—communities, citizens, and audiences whose perceptions matter even when they don’t fit neatly into a stakeholder map. Leaning too heavily on stakeholder language nudges the discipline closer to management theory and further from its roots in public engagement.

And, of course, there’s the AI dimension. The definition explicitly calls out PR’s role in shaping the information ecosystem and ensuring organizations are represented accurately in AI-generated outputs. Some see this as an overdue recognition of how information now circulates, while others question whether embedding AI so directly risks dating the definition.

If you work in PR, you should read this proposal less as a final answer and more as an aspirational statement. As a description of what PR could be at its most strategic, it’s compelling. As a concise, durable definition, it may need sharpening and a cleaner central idea. Definitions are tools to help us explain our value and align practice across borders. This proposal doesn’t settle the challenge, but it moves the conversation forward. Neville, what do you think?

Neville Hobson I agree. I’m looking at the PDF now. I’ve not read the whole thing yet, so I will do that and likely write some comments. The first thing that grabs my attention is that it doesn’t explicitly state the author, though I assume it’s Sarah Waddington. It says a new definition is needed to reflect the modern operating environment and illustrate how integral the discipline is to success. In short, the industry needs better “PR for PR.” I agree with that 100%.

The 10-second definition I gave you earlier is woefully inadequate for today. It’s interesting looking at this document; it’s very standalone. Philippe Boromans mentioned in his blog post that it looks like it begs for more dialogue, and I agree. I don’t see it as complete at all.

Shel Holtz Sarah did invite members to comment on it. I think the consultation runs through the end of the month.

Neville Hobson She’s likely going to get comments from non-PRCA members as well since it’s on LinkedIn. Looking at the core principles she mentions—relationship-centered, not output-focused—that is very much in line with how conversations are shifting from inputs to outcomes. I remember about 15 years ago when PRSA led a charge to redefine PR in the US. It was picked up by practitioners here in the UK, there was a lot of dialogue, and then… nothing happened. Hopefully, this will be different.

I think she would be wiser to make this completely open, not just restricted to PRCA. The praise the PRCA will get is for taking the initiative. I’m wondering if they’ve engaged with other professional bodies to join them. It requires a lot of dialogue, and that’s the point of doing this. My only hang-up is the restriction to members. I’m not a PRCA member—I’m with IABC—but I support what they’re doing. As for her BBC interview with Martin Sorrell, it was clear he was talking utter rubbish, so it’s good to have these discussions.

Shel Holtz I certainly have nothing but praise for initiating the conversation. However, I agree that two and a half pages is not a definition; it is a manifesto. Imagine a two-and-a-half-page definition in a dictionary! I remember the Melbourne Mandate and the Venice Accords from the Global Alliance—those were more about purpose statements and AI positioning. I’m not sure all of that belongs in a definition, but as a spark for conversation, this is a good move.

Neville Hobson It’s too soon to see the full weight of public opinion on this, but we do need a new definition. I don’t see it as a manifesto, but it is incomplete. It would have benefited from an intro saying, “This is a first draft, we seek your feedback.”

Shel Holtz When I think of a definition, I want it to be something everyone can remember. You should be able to get the concept down and be 90% there with the wording. No one is going to memorize two and a half pages. This sounds more like the outline of a textbook.

Neville Hobson The CIPR website defines PR as “the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.” That’s been around for decades. It adds to my feeling that we need something more effective. But a PRCA definition only works if the whole industry is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Shel Holtz I wonder if the PRCA is a member of the Global Alliance. That would be the place to adopt a definition so that all member associations embrace a consistent version. I’d also like to see the notion of “professional” public relations included, which is why I support certification—to signal that you are a professional and not just someone who says, “Well, everyone can communicate, so I can too.”

Neville Hobson That’s the rocky road no one wants to go down! We’ve been there so many times. People resist change. It needs someone to take a very strong lead to get this on the public agenda. It reinforces my view: excellent initiative by the PRCA, but it needs to be industry-wide, otherwise, we just end up with multiple conflicting definitions.

Shel Holtz Undoubtedly. Listeners, take a look at the proposed definition; we have a link to the PDF and Sarah’s post in the show notes. Let us know what you think. What would you change? We’ll share your views on an upcoming edition. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #496: A Proposed New Definition of Public Relations Sparks Debate appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In which Neville and Shel take a few minutes to acknowledge FIR’s 21st birthday.

The post FIR 21st Anniversary Celebration appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Reddit, the #2 social media site in the US, has surpassed TikTok to become the #4 site in the UK. It has no algorithm that forces you to see what’s most likely to keep you on the site; it just lets users upvote what they think is most interesting, valuable, or relevant. Every topic under the sun has a subreddit. Several organizations, from Starbucks to Uber, have taken advantage of it. So why is it absent from most communicators’ list of social media platforms to pay attention to? Neville and Shel look at Reddit’s growing influence in this episode.

Links from This Episode:

Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and gen Z
Brian Niccol said a Reddit thread of people interviewing for his company showed him that his ‘Back to Starbucks’ plan was working
Playing Defense: How (and When) Big Brands Respond to Negativity on Reddit
Wayfair uses Reddit Pro to help redditors get answers, and grow traffic as a result
Uber puts Reddit Ads in the Driver’s Seat and cruises to significant lifts
Reddit category takeover contributes to 5X higher Ad Awareness for OREO x STAR WARS™ collaboration

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 495 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: I’m Neville Hobson and let’s start by saying we wish you a happy new 2026. We’re recording this in the first week of January, so it’s a new year. Last week the Guardian reported something that might surprise people who still think of Reddit as a noisy corner of the internet best avoided. In a deep analysis, the paper noted that Reddit has now overtaken TikTok to become the fourth most visited social media site in the UK, with three in five UK internet users encountering it regularly, according to Ofcom, the industry regulator. Among 18 to 24-year-olds—the Gen Z cohort—it’s one of the most visited organizations of any kind. And the UK is now Reddit’s second largest market globally, behind only the US.

That growth hasn’t happened because Reddit suddenly reinvented itself; it’s happened because the wider internet has changed around it. Google’s search algorithms now prioritize what it calls “helpful content,” particularly discussion forums. Reddit threads increasingly surface high in search results, and they’re also being cited heavily in AI-generated summaries. Reddit has licensing deals with both Google and OpenAI, which means its content is being used to train AI models and then redistributed back to users as part of search and discovery.

At the same time, users, particularly Gen Z, are actively seeking out human-generated content—not polished brand messaging or single definitive answers, but lived experience, contradiction, debate, and advice that feels like it comes from real people dealing with real situations like parenting, money, housing, health, and sport. Jen Wong, Reddit’s chief operating officer, described this as an “antidote to AI slop.” Reddit, she says, isn’t clean; it’s messy. You have to sift through different points of view, and increasingly, that is the point.

For communicators, this raises several important points. For a start, Reddit is no longer a niche platform you choose to engage with or ignore. It’s become part of the discovery layer of the internet. People may encounter your organization, your industry, or your issue there before they ever see your website or your carefully crafted statement. Search visibility is no longer just about content you own; it’s about conversations. Conversations at search engines and AI systems are now amplifying its scale.

Many organizations are still quietly hoping Reddit will remain hostile, chaotic, or irrelevant enough to ignore. That stance is becoming harder to justify when government departments are hosting AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”) and major public narratives are forming in plain sight. Finally, lurking is no longer neutral. Silence can allow perceptions—accurate or not—to solidify without challenge, context, or correction. So the question for communicators isn’t whether Reddit is for them, it’s whether they’re prepared for a world where human conversation, amplified by algorithms and AI, shapes reputation just as much as official messaging does. Look at the Omnicom layoffs announced not long before Christmas and the significant role Reddit played as a communication channel parallel to official company communication. We discussed this in depth in FIR 492 just a few weeks ago.

So, Shel, this feels like another signal that the ground is shifting under communicators’ feet. Where would you start unpacking what this means?

Shel Holtz: Well, if the ground is shifting, it’s because communicators weren’t standing in the right place in the first place. Reddit has been a significant and important platform for a long time. I’ve been advocating for communicators to start taking advantage of it for many years. I’m glad to see it getting this kind of attention, and there are a lot of reasons to consider using this in multiple ways—including the fact that AI is now relying on Reddit for some of the content that it’s trained on.

Let’s look at just a couple of things about Reddit. First of all, the people on Reddit are very committed to the communities that they are part of. This is not a “drop-in” community like we see on LinkedIn, nor is it tight, insular communities like you see on Facebook. These welcome new people, but they’re looking for people who are very committed to engaging, sharing, and contributing. Second, there’s no algorithm driving what rises to the top. It’s the community that upvotes the most valuable posts. That’s why you see the most valuable information at the top of any thread. It’s why in the early days, BuzzFeed relied on Reddit to determine what content it was going to publish. Reddit had the nickname “the front page of the internet,” and how you can ignore that eludes me.

If you look at what happened with Omnicom, that’s just one thing it’s useful for: social listening and insight generation. It is also issues management and crisis communication. If these large communities are talking about your industry, company, or product, and you’re not listening, you’re missing what is being discussed more broadly via “sneakernet”—people just talking to each other voice-to-voice or over instant messages where you can’t hear it. This is where you gather that intelligence to help you come up with the next product iteration or address issues important to your stakeholder base.

I use Reddit basically two ways. One, whenever I have a problem with a product, like my Nikon Z6 II camera, there is a community there more than happy to answer my question. While I’m there, I’ll scroll through and see if there’s something I can contribute, because it’s important to give as well as take. The other is monitoring construction subreddits for good intelligence that I can share up in the organization. There are so many other ways to take advantage of Reddit, and now is the time to invest.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’ve been on Reddit for about 10 years with an account. In those early days, it was very much a geeky place—not really mainstream. But reality, as the Guardian’s analysis outlines, is that you can’t just treat it like that anymore if you’re wearing a business hat. It is showing up in places like Google AI overviews and is heavily surfaced in those search results because of the licensing deal that allows Google to train models on Reddit data.

The UK government is active on Reddit, with departments hosting “Ask Me Anythings” to engage with people. That sort of activity is probably more appropriate for Reddit than LinkedIn, where I’ve seen government activities attract nothing but extreme, politically motivated negativity in the comments. On Reddit, you’re probably going to get a more balanced view.

The Omnicom example was really intriguing. The depth of comment on Reddit told lived experience stories that contrasted sharply with the formal communication from corporate communicators. It was a subject lesson in how not to do this from a corporate point of view. Ignoring it is not an option anymore.

Shel Holtz: You mentioned “Ask Me Anythings.” That is a great opportunity to present your CEO or subject matter experts to build reputation proactively or reactively during a crisis. Siemens did an AMA featuring their engineers and reported strong click-through rates. Novo Nordisk leaned into sensitive topics and reported an “astoundingly positive reception”. Oatly and IBM also reported strong engagement and brand lift through this format. Of course, there are disasters if executives are not well-prepared, as authenticity is highly valued.

Community engagement is another missed opportunity. Wayfair uses discovery tools on Reddit to surface conversations about their service and pops in to answer questions and address issues. You can build relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and even critics. You can also use it for your employer brand to monitor interview processes and culture signals. The CEO of Starbucks explicitly treated a Reddit hiring thread as a signal that a culture shift was taking hold.

Neville Hobson: I think one reason for past failures is that companies brought their old methods of communicating to a place where that just doesn’t work. The Guardian findings show that human experience now outranks polish. If you come to Reddit with all your corporate baggage and structured messaging, it’s not going to work. Users are actively seeking “signals of humanity,” and messiness is becoming a trust cue. It’s an “anti-automation” movement. Lurking is no longer neutral because you are being talked about whether you are present or not.

Shel Holtz: There’s an illusion of control that you get from things like press releases, but get over it—you don’t control the conversation. To be credible in these spaces, you have to stop being polished. “Press release voice” is a trigger on Reddit; plain talk is valued. Make sure you have the right subject matter expert in the right subreddits who can talk in a plain voice. Don’t just do “drive-by” communication when you need something; be a regular contributor.

Neville Hobson: So, human experience-led communications are regaining strategic value. You can’t ignore this.

Shel Holtz: LinkedIn’s value seems to be diminishing as it turns into a combination of Facebook with non-business content and AI-generated posts. If you’re looking for a community to tap into people who care about what you do, Reddit is the best place. You can even use paid amplification—Uber and Oreo have reported brand lift from boosted posts. Don’t dismiss it as hostile; develop a strategy and start doing it.

Neville Hobson: Keep an eye on the resurgence of other networks, too. The new “Digg” is coming, which was a fixture like Reddit in the early days. There is also “Tangle,” a new one from one of the Twitter founders focused on genuine conversation.

Shel Holtz: I’d keep an eye on them, but Reddit already exists with millions of users and tens of thousands of subreddits. Use it. Don’t ignore it. And that’ll be a “30” for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #495: Reddit, AI, and the New Rules of Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the long-form episode for December 2025, Neville and Shel explore the future of news from two perspectives, including The Washington Post‘s ill-advised launch of a personalized, AI-generated podcast that failed to meet the newsroom’s standards for accuracy, and the shift from journalists to “information stewards” as news sources. Also in this episode:

WPP founder Sir Martin Sorrell argued that PR is dead and advertising rules all.
Is AI about to empty Madison Avenue
Should communicators do anything about AI slop?
No, you can’t tell when something was written by AI
In Dan York’s tech report: Mastodon’s founder steps back, and new leadership takes over; the UN reaffirms a model of Internet governance that involves everyone: and Dan talks about what he’ll be watching in 2026, including decentralized social media, agentic AI, and Internet technologies.

Links from this episode:

Sherilynne Starkie’s “Stark Raving Social” podcast
Neville’s Strategic Magazine article: Your Value is Not Your Timesheet
Questions of accuracy arise as Washington Post uses AI to create personalized podcasts
‘Iterate through’: Why The Washington Post launched an error-ridden AI product
Washington Post Says It Will Continue AI-Generating Error Filled Podcasts as Its Own Editors Groan in Embarrassment
The Washington Post Deployed Its Disastrous AI-Generated Podcasts Even After Internal Tests Showed It Was Failing Miserably
Washington Post Stands Behind AI Podcast Plan Despite Staff Outcry
Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes
Radio 4 Today segment featuring Martin Sorrell and Sarah Waddington
Martin Sorrell: There’s No Such Thing as PR Anymore
Martin Sorrell: The PR Industry is Over-Sensitive
Chris Gilmour LinkedIn Post on Martin Sorrell
Stephen Waddington’s Facebook Post on the Sorrell-Waddington segment
Sir Martin Sorrell Declares PR is Dead. PR Pros Respond
The Future of News is Happening Where No One is Looking
This is Local News Now
Social Media and News Fact Sheet
The State of Local News
AI is About to Empty Madison Avenue
AI Slop: How Every Media Revolution Breeds Rubbish and Art
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content
Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop
The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness
No, You Can’t Tell When Something Was Written by AI
How Can You Tell if AI Wrote Something?
Wikipedia: Signs of AI Writing
Detecting AI-written text is challenging, even for AI. Here’s why
FIR Interview: AI and the Writing Profession, with Josh Bernoff
FIR #464: Research Finds Disclosing Use of AI Erodes Trust
Neville’s Blog: When AI Lets Go of the Em Dash

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Eugen Rochko on Mastodon’s blog: My Next Chapter with Mastodon
Mastodon Blog: The Future is Ours to Build
Tim Chambers: My Open Social Web Predictions
Internet Society: WSIS 20 Reaffirms Multistakeholder Governance and a Lasting IGF
Wikimedia Foundation: In the AI Era, Wikipedia Has Never Been More Valuable
Landslide: A Ghost Story

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson Hi everyone, and welcome to the For Immediate Release long-form episode for December 2025. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz And I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And we have six great stories to discuss and share with you that we hope you’ll enjoy listening to during Twixtmas. What is that, you may ask? Well, Twixtmas is the informal name for the relaxed period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, typically focusing on the 27th to the 30th of December. It’s a time for winding down, enjoying leftovers, watching TV, listening to podcasts, and simply existing without the usual hustle of holidays or work before the new year starts.

The name comes from blending Twixt, an old English word for “between,” and Christmas. It’s a modern term for a timeless lull in the calendar, often called the “festive gap.” That’s probably more information than you wanted, but now you know what it means. So, without further ado, let’s begin the Twixtmas episode with a recap of previous shows since the November long-form one.

Shel Holtz We’ll have to start using that over here.

Recent Episodes & Listener CommentsNeville Hobson That was FIR 489, published on the 17th of November. The story we led with in amplifying the long-form episode across social media was an explosion of “thought leadership slop,” where we riffed on a post by Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute. He identified idea inflation as a growing problem on multiple levels. Other stories in this 101-minute episode included quantum computing, vibe coding, “Is it OK to use an AI-generated photo in your LinkedIn profile?”, Dan York’s tech report, and more. And we have listener comments on this episode.

Shel Holtz We do, starting with Sherilyn Starkey up in Canada:

“I was just listening to the latest episode and you were commenting about a lack of female participation in podcasting. I thought I’d drop in a plug for my latest show, Stark Raving Social. I started it earlier this year and it delivers bite-sized episodes for marcomms pros. I do ‘how-to,’ ‘why you should,’ and ‘have you noticed’ type shows. I’m a hobbyist, so I publish when I have time and feel inspired, but it’s pretty regular. Last year I had a show where I interviewed 50 women over 50. And although the project’s complete, I still get about a thousand downloads monthly. I’ve been podcasting on and off since about 2007 and was—and still am—greatly inspired by FIR and your excellent work. Thank you.”

Thank you for that, Sherilyn, and hope to see you soon. Sherilyn’s terrific.

We have two comments on this episode from Darlene Wilson. She said:

“Enjoyed all of your content in this episode. Wanted to share that my role shifted from a marketing and comms managerial title to ‘Senior Manager, Corporate Brand and Communications’ a few years ago. It combines communication and brand leadership in one portfolio under which are marketing, sponsorship and events, promo, and change management. It’s a great role for a raging generalist. Moving brand and comms together—or brand under the comms umbrella—does signify part of a shift from end-deliverer of the message to a focus on reputation, trust, judgment, and the ability to oversee and connect what a company says and what it does. Given today’s environment, organizations do seem to want leaders, as Neville said, who bring judgment, sensitivity, and crisis literacy. That’s the comms person bringing broad and strategic thinking. Thank you both for your long-term commitment to this valuable profession.”

She added in another comment:

“The ‘every media revolution has slop’ analogy is directionally useful, but it can underweight what is genuinely discontinuous here: 1. Near zero marginal cost at massive scale, 2. Algorithmic distribution optimizing for engagement, and 3. Slop feeding back into training and ranking systems (i.e., model collapse plus search quality). If you treat it as just another cycle, you may miss that the mechanism is now self-reinforcing in ways Gutenberg-era pamphlets were not. The sources above—Google spam policies plus model collapse plus platform case studies—give you the evidence to make the distinction without turning the argument into moral panic.”

Neville Hobson Great comments. Thank you very much for that.

FIR 490 on the 1st of December: We unpacked some AI studies that claim to show what large language models actually read. But the sources shift month to month, and many citations aren’t reliable at all. We have a comment on this episode.

Shel Holtz From our friend, Niall Cook, who says:

“I don’t think anyone should be surprised that different studies report different results. It’s the same in many other research domains, but especially so here when the prompts, the models, the model parameters, and the methods will always produce differences—in the same way that no two users of the same generative AI system will get exactly the same response for the same question. We shouldn’t conflate visibility and citation reliability, though; two different things.”

Neville Hobson FIR 491 on the 8th of December shone a spotlight on big four consulting firm Deloitte, which created costly reports for two governments on opposite sides of the world, each containing fake resources generated by AI. Not only that, but a separate study published by the US Centers for Disease Control also included AI-hallucinated citations and the exact opposite conclusion from the real scientist’s research. We have a number of comments on this one.

Shel Holtz We have four, starting with Monique Zitnik:

“I’ve been nearly caught out with a source pointing to a website. After much digging, I discovered the website was AI-generated, and other websites had quoted this website. It was a myriad of AI-invented rubbish that sounded plausible.”

Mike Klein threw some praise your way, Neville. He said:

“It’s also a business model problem, as Neville pointed out in his excellent article for Strategic.”

That’s the magazine that Mike edits and you contributed to. He provided a link which we will add to the show notes; your article was titled Your Value is Not Your Timesheet.

Steve Lubetkin said:

“AI can be a useful tool, but humans need to review and confirm its output. The fact that they don’t or won’t is troubling.”

And Chris Lee wrote:

“You have both done some great episodes this year around AI. Very useful. Thanks. Keep them coming.”

Neville Hobson That was a great comment. Steve actually says it all: you’ve got to check up on all this stuff before you publish anything or rely on something. I see many more people now talking about it. You’ve got to verify everything all the time. You cannot trust it, whether it’s generated by AI or quoted by AI or linked to by the AI; you’ve got to verify all of that.

Shel Holtz Yeah, and I think we mentioned in one episode that I believe—and I think you do too—that there is likely to be a verification role that will be a new job classification. I’ve seen a little bit more about that since we made that assertion. There are actually companies that are hiring people to verify AI.

Neville Hobson That’s interesting, isn’t it?

In FIR 492 on the 15th of December, we looked at how the story of the untimely Omnicom layoffs in the US unfolded with one official investor-focused narrative and another on LinkedIn and Reddit. We observed that when people have platforms, the press release isn’t the whole story. We have one comment on this?

Shel Holtz Yes, from Roberto Capodici. Apologies if I pronounced that wrong. Roberto says:

“I think what’s really interesting here is how the whole situation highlights the tension between curated corporate narratives and the unpredictability of human experience playing out in public forums like LinkedIn.”

Neville Hobson In FIR 493 on the 22nd of December, we discussed how artificial early engagement can manufacture visibility that algorithms and media treat as significant. The tactics aren’t political; they’re portable and already familiar to communicators. It’s alarmingly easy to do.

And finally, we published an FIR interview on the 10th of December where we enjoyed a great discussion with Josh Bernhoff about his major survey of writers and AI. The deep divide between users and non-users, productivity gains, AI slop, trust, and the real story isn’t replacing people but resorting them. We have a comment or two, think, Shel?

Shel Holtz We have one. There are more on Josh’s repost of this. This one is from Susan Mangiero, PhD:

“I enjoyed your lively discussion about AI. In fact, I stopped the video and repeated several sections. I don’t think you addressed the use of AI for purposes of author marketing, unless I missed it:

What are your thoughts about using AI to help authors and their collaborating ghostwriters market their books?

Given Shel’s work in the area of employee communications, what are your thoughts about using AI for research? (Note: I do a lot of work with financial clients.) Josh, keep up the great work. I enjoy your blog. And the book survey was fascinating.”

Do you want to tackle these? I’m wrapping up work on a book right now. I have a proposal consultant helping me prepare the proposal, and I am thinking heavily about marketing these days. There’s no question that I will use AI as an aid to this in identifying targets to approach and testing language with different stakeholders. Every opportunity I have to use it to improve the marketing output, I will. I’m not going to outsource this to AI, but if AI can play devil’s advocate for me and help me brainstorm and ideate, I will take advantage of that all day long. What do you think?

Neville Hobson Absolutely, it is a natural tool to use. One of the biggest benefits of AI is its ability to literally be your right-hand person, your assistant who will work with you—not just respond to things you ask it, but challenge you on things. It’s the same as having a human being by your side, except this one doesn’t need to eat lunch.

It allows you to identify audiences, figure out what messaging is appropriate for which audience and when and where. It helps you concentrate on the next steps you’re to take.

Shel Holtz In terms of research for internal communication, I don’t see it as any different from research for external communication. It comes back down to the need to verify everything that you get.

I wrapped up a white paper for my company not too long ago on adaptive reuse of buildings. Since COVID, office occupancy has declined, and some large office buildings have defaulted on leases. The immediate thought is converting them to residences, but it’s harder than you think because of plumbing and natural light issues. The white paper explores other opportunities.

This is way outside my expertise, so I relied heavily on internal experts but also did a lot of research using Google’s Gemini Deep Research. I got a lot of great information, but some sources it found didn’t exist. I would have been humiliated if I had put out a white paper with that kind of information. I spent a lot of time verifying every source and every fact. It took less time than doing the research myself, but it was still time-consuming. As Steve Lubetkin noted, it’s disheartening that there are people who are not doing that.

Circle of Fellows UpdateShel Holtz I want to let everybody know about the most recent Circle of Fellows, which is now available for you to listen to or watch. It was a great conversation about the future of communication in 2026 and beyond. Zora Artis, Bonnie Caver, Adrian Cropley, and Mary Hills were the panelists.

The next Circle of Fellows is coming up on Thursday, January 22, at noon Eastern time. The topic is the impact of mentoring. We have a great panel: Amanda Hamilton-Attwell, Brent Carey, Andrea Greenhous, and Russell Grossman. You can tune in live or watch the replay on the FIR Podcast Network.

The Washington Post’s AI Podcast DebacleShel Holtz The core currency of a news organization isn’t its reporting; it’s trust. In mid-December, The Washington Post decided to trade that currency for a tech demo when it launched “Your Personal Podcast,” an AI-driven feature that generates audio summaries of the day’s news.

At its core, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Nicholas Negroponte suggested this in the 90s with the “Daily Me.” But at the Post, cracks appeared immediately. The AI mispronounced names, invented quotes, and editorialized. In one egregious example, AI announced a discussion on whether people with intellectual disabilities should be executed, stripping away the crucial context regarding a specific legal case.

According to internal documents obtained by Semafor, the product team knew exactly what they were releasing. During testing, between 68% and 84% of the AI-generated scripts failed to meet the newsroom’s own standards. In any other industry, a failure rate approaching 85% would trigger a recall, not a launch.

The Post is chasing a younger demographic that consumes audio, which is a valid goal. But serving them hallucinations doesn’t build a future audience; it alienates them. The Post needs to pull this tool, fix it, and apologize—not just for the errors, but for the decision to treat their subscribers as beta testers for a broken product.

Neville Hobson Extraordinary, truly. I was reading the NPR article you shared. It asks: “Will listeners embrace an AI news podcast?” The podcast is tailored to listeners based on what they’ve read in the Washington Post. That implies the likely listener is someone who spends a lot of time reading the Post, not a casual user.

It’s an intriguing step, but unfortunately, a misstep in terms of how they’ve dealt with it.

Shel Holtz Podcasting has become a staple for newspapers. The New York Times has The Daily and Hard Fork. Nothing is wrong with embracing podcasting. I just have a problem with the decision to launch it the way it was. The Washington Post is a storied institution—Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers. With this one decision, they have undermined that legacy.

Neville Hobson It symbolizes much of what is not right in the United States at the moment regarding freedom of speech and truth-telling. You mentioned Jeff Bezos owns the Post; where is the independence of journalists?

Shel Holtz We’re rapidly seeing this converted into state media, which is terrifying.

Martin Sorrell and the “Death of PR”Neville Hobson Let’s talk about Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP. On December 17th, in a debate on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, he declared the death of PR. Appearing with him was Sarah Waddington, the Chief Executive of the PRCA.

Sorrell made the blunt assertion that public relations is effectively dead and that the world has moved on to scale, reach, and speed—flooding the internet with content. Sarah Waddington pushed back firmly, anchoring PR in enduring purpose: helping organizations explain who they are and building trust.

The exchange was combustible, with Sorrell frequently talking over Waddington. Many felt Waddington was defending a way of thinking about communication that resists reduction to metrics alone.

Shel Holtz Every time Martin Sorrell opens his mouth, I roll my eyes. He once said WPP was more critical than human mortality. Advertising and public relations are not interchangeable. Advertising is about selling stuff; PR is about building relationships.

I always come back to the tuna boycott example. When StarKist addressed dolphin safety in their nets, PR agency Burson-Marsteller brought the parties to the table. The boycott organizers came out saying, “StarKist are the good guys.” Advertising could never have achieved that credibility.

Neville Hobson It feels like he was being provocative to generate headlines. But he seems to genuinely believe that scale, reach, and speed are what matter. If Sorrell thinks flooding the internet with detergent ads is the future, I think he’s crazy. I applaud Sarah Waddington for her calmness in the face of his bullying behavior.

Shel Holtz I challenge Sir Martin to find a client that will outsource their next existential crisis to WPP to handle with advertising. Let’s see how that goes.

The Future of Local News & Information StewardsShel Holtz The death of local news has been a consistent drumbeat. A new report from Northwestern University confirms news deserts have hit a record high. But a piece from the Nieman Journalism Lab argues the news hasn’t died; it just relocated to barbershops, church halls, and Facebook groups.

The Press Forward report suggests we look for “Information Stewards”—librarians, civic leaders, admins of neighborhood groups. If you’re a communicator, you can’t pitch a press release to a group chat, but you can provide clarity. Supply these stewards with fact sheets and FAQs. Trust has migrated from institutions to individuals.

Neville Hobson In the UK, local news is declining, though where I live in Somerset, there are three lively local papers. But generally, the commercial scale for local news is difficult. The idea of “Information Stewards” reminds me of the Epic 2015 flash video from years ago, which predicted a similar future.

Shel Holtz Local news is vital for accountability—school boards, zoning commissions. If no one reports on them, officials can do whatever they want. We need to reach these information stewards.

Dan York’s Tech Report:Greetings, Shel and Neville, and all our listeners all around the world. Is Dan York coming at you from a snowy Shelburne, Vermont? And I want to begin this final episode of twenty twenty five, reflecting back on some of the topics and then upcoming changes with some of the things I’ve been talking about over these many episodes. A big one, of course, has been Mastodon and decentralized social media in general, and that had some big changes that have been happening in the past month.

Right around the time where we were recording the November show, there was a change at the the head of Mastodon. Now Mastodon is open source software, been around for ten years. That was created by a gentleman named Eugen Rochko, and he is the founder of this uh, has been based in Germany. And over time the organization evolved to be a German. Well, it tried to be a nonprofit, but then they’re a for profit entity. It’s they’re now in the scope of twenty twenty five. They have been looking to transfer to a, um, to a full non-profit, European based non-profit entity, most likely based in Belgium, according to the latest plans and all that, and they’re going through that process. But in the meantime, in late November twenty twenty five, Eugen announced that he will be stepping down as CEO and taking on a role as an advisor.

Now, this is critical because anybody who’s watched startups, whether they’re companies or whether they’re projects, knows that there’s a critical point when the founder needs to step away and let another management team come in and run the organization and grow. I have seen too many projects, including ones that I’ve led myself, where the founder, including myself, has stayed on too long and it just it dies at some point. Sometimes there are there are certainly cases where it has not, but there’s other times when it needs to move from the founder to others. So huge props to to Eugen and all the masks on folks for taking this step. And so there is a new leadership team. There’s a new executive director, a technical director, a community director, and there’s a team of employees and people who are continuing to evolve. Mastodon as one of the leading properties within the broader Activitypub based space that we call the Fediverse. So look for more to happen.

There’s a greater evolution going on over the scope of twenty twenty six. So cool things happening. I’ll note that this year, too many Mastodon servers just played on this whole wrapped thing, right? So you could get a wrap Staddon for twenty twenty five that wrapped up your most popular posts.

Some of the things you did, the most used hashtags, your archetype, all these different kinds of things. A little bit of fun just in the theme of all of the various different wrap things that are out there, but the fediverse will, I think, see a lot of activity and decentralised activity in general, because you’re seeing that through Mastodon and the other parts of the Fediverse. You’re seeing that with blue Sky and some tremendous work happening within the at, at protocol and some pieces that were there. Tim Chambers, somebody I come to really enjoy his writing over the time around open social items had a whole series of of predictions.

I’ll have the link for the show notes. He included some that were what he considered safe bets like blue Sky will cross sixty million registered users in twenty twenty six. He thinks he thinks the overall Activitypub fediverse outside of threads will cross fifteen million registered users, monthly active users, etc.. Uh, he’ll look at he had some ideas around threads. We’ll pass five hundred million. There’ll be continued federation. Anyway, if you’re looking for quick takes, it’s a good read. It’s some kind of interesting, fun stuff to think about and see where it will go around that.

Now, another story that I’ve been following this whole year has been internet governance kind of issues. And that culminated this month with a meeting at the United Nations called the World Summit on the Information Society. The twenty year review shortcut it has with this plus twenty. The good news coming out of all of that was that the governments of the world continued the path that we’re on, where everybody can be involved in some fashion in shaping the future of the internet, what was called in policy circles, the multi-stakeholder process.

But basically it means everybody has the potential to be involved in some way. It’s how the internet has worked since its origins. But there were some governments that wanted to put a different spin on it, where only governments would be involved and not businesses such as many of those of us listening to this, or universities or Or individual users. Anybody else like that?

So there were some good things that happened here. And something called the Internet Governance Forum, or IGF, has been made permanent rather than being renewed every ten years. It also had some other elements that recognize the the global network of national, regional and youth igfs that are happening all around the world. This is a venue, a way in which people, all of us listening, can be involved in internet governance. So it’s a great move, good step, lots of things. What am I looking at in twenty twenty six? You know, this whole episode is going to be about AI in different forms. I’ll be watching that too, specifically around the AI Agentic platform agents, the different pieces that were there and the different parts.

There’s a good article written by somebody over at the Open Future Foundation around why Wikimedia needs a seat at the Agentic AI Foundation, pointing out the work that happened in December that OpenAI and Anthropic and Block announced the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation, which also had Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg and Cloudflare joining into it. A lot of the commercial players all doing this. The point of this article was that it needs to have folks like Wikimedia involved and others. But in general, I personally will continue to be watching what’s happening at this agent level.

Agent to agent. Because that’s so much, I think, of what we’re going to be seeing as we increasingly look at AI driven tools and things. You know, that I’ll continue to be talking about decentralized social media, Mastodon, everything else. I’ll continue to be looking at, uh, internet and internet access.

You’ll hear me talk about low Earth orbit satellites, I’m sure, because we’re actually getting into a competitive situation where it’s more than just Starlink out there and also internet and information resilience. And so I want to leave you to a pointer, actually to a long read called landslide semicolon. A ghost story from Aaron Cassin, and I’ll have a link for the notes. But she writes a very long article piece around starting out about earthquakes, but getting into our information ecosystem and where we are, what’s out there, how it’s jumbled.

It’s worth reading and thinking about. Because really, the point is we need to think about how we have stories, how we work with things, how we have resilience in the information that we receive in some different forms. I encourage you to take a read about that. Think about it. Think what we will do in twenty twenty six. And with that, I wish you all a Happy New Year. I look forward to coming back at you in January. That’s all. You can find more of my audio writing at Dan York. Bye for now and back to you. Shel and Neville, Happy New Year.

AI Emptying Madison AvenueNeville Hobson In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “AI is About to Empty Madison Avenue,” Rajiv Kohli of Columbia Business School argues that AI is quietly dismantling the agency model. Google, Meta, and Amazon are using AI to automate the advertising value chain.

While advertisers see efficiency, agencies see an existential threat. Madison Avenue isn’t being disrupted by better ideas, but by better systems. Kohli warns that unless things change, advertising may become a clear example of AI-driven creative hollowing out.

Shel Holtz I recently joined the advisory board for an AI certificate program at the University of San Francisco. The faculty stated they don’t believe AI will take jobs, which made me want to bang my head on the table. It already is.

Organizations need to strategize: what are the risks of outsourcing everything to AI? You can be efficient, but what do you lose? If you outsource everything, you’re going to see advertising overwhelmed with “slop.”

Neville Hobson The focus on speed and efficiency misses the important part: the people. We need to help educate leaders that AI should augment people, not replace them.

Shel Holtz In a capitalist society, leaders feel compelled to maximize ROI. If they can run a company with no employees and produce larger returns, they will. That’s why strategic analysis is vital to show where humans add value.

“Slop” is the Word of the YearShel Holtz Merriam-Webster has crowned “slop” as its Word of the Year for 2025. It defines it as digital content of low quality produced by AI. But a Scientific American article reminds us that every media revolution produces rubbish. The printing press produced libelous pamphlets; desktop publishing produced ransom-note newsletters.

The backlash isn’t a rejection of AI, but of low quality. To stand out in a sea of slop, your content needs to be exceptional.

Neville Hobson That Scientific American piece was great—calling Gutenberg the “ChatGPT of the 1450s.” It isn’t anti-AI; it’s about the sheer volume. If you automate production at scale, that’s flooding the internet, and much of it will be slop.

Shel Holtz You have to stay on top of the research. A study found people liked AI-generated ads more than human ones—until they were told it was AI. That shows an anti-AI bias, but also that the “human in the loop” matters for trust.

Detecting AI WritingNeville Hobson There is a growing confidence that we can tell when something is written by AI. But in the Financial Times, Elaine Moore argues that most “AI tells”—like the use of dashes or words like “delve”—are just normal writing habits. Large Language Models sound human because they are trained on us.

However, Wikipedia has a field guide to spotting AI writing, looking for clusters of signals like vague abstractions. The debate is shifting from “Can we detect AI?” to “How much certainty do we really need?”

Shel Holtz If the writing meets our needs and is accurate, do I care if it was written by a human or a machine? Disclosure is going to be important for trust purposes.

Neville Hobson Trust is becoming ever more important. Finding a source you can trust—someone who verifies and doesn’t hoodwink you—is the key.

Shel Holtz I used Google Gemini to help find sources for my book, but I checked every single one. I saved time, but I kept the human in the loop.

OutroShel Holtz We hope you enjoy your Twixtmas. Please leave us a comment on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or Blue Sky. You can email us at fircomments [at] gmail [dot] com or leave a voicemail on the FIR Podcast Network website.

Our next long-form episode will drop on Monday, January 26th. We will resume our short mid-week 30 for This episodes starting next week.

The post FIR #494: Is News’s Future Error-Riddled AI-Generated Podcasts, or “Information Stewards”? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For somebody who posts on X or other social media platforms to become recognized by the media and other offline institutions as a significant, influential voice worth quoting, it usually takes patience and hard work to build an audience that respects and identifies with them. There is another way to achieve the same kind of reputation with far less work. According to a research report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, American political influencer Nick Fuentes opted for the second approach, a collection of tactics that made it appear like a huge number of people were amplifying his tweets within half an hour of posting them. While Fuentes wields his influence in the political realm, the tactics he employed are portable and available to people looking for the same quick solution in the business world. In this short midweek episode, we’ll break down the steps involved and the warning signs communicators should be on the alert for.

Links from this episode:

“America Last: How Fuentes’s Coordinated Raids and Foreign Fake Speech Inflate His Influence,” research report from the Network Contagion Research Institute
Eric Schwartzman’s LinkedIn post and analysis of the NCRI’s report

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everybody and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 493. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and today I’m going to wade deep into America’s culture and political wars. I swear to you, I’m not doing this because of any political or social agenda on my part. What I’m going to share with you is not a social or political problem, it’s an influence problem. And in communications, influence and influencers have become top of mind.

We’re going to look at the rise of Nick Fuentes’s significance on the social and political stage. For listeners outside the US, you may not know who Fuentes is. He’s a US-based online political influencer and live stream personality who’s built a following around the “America First” ecosystem and has sought influence within right-of-center audiences, including by positioning himself in opposition to mainstream conservative organizations like Turning Point USA and encouraging supporters to disrupt their events. Tucker Carlson has had him on his show as a guest. President Donald Trump has hosted him at the White House for a dinner.

In a recent report that our friend Eric Schwartzman highlighted on LinkedIn—that’s how I found it—the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) asserts that Fuentes is a fringe figure whose public profile rose to a level of significance by manipulating online systems. The NCRI, by the way, is an advocacy group focusing on hate groups, disinformation, misinformation, and speech across social media platforms. It’s been around since, I think, 2008. And they’ve taken their own fair share of criticism for bias, but this report looked pretty well researched, and there will be a link to it in the show notes.

The techniques that Fuentes used to rise to significance are, and this is the key here: If bad actors can inflate the perceived importance of a fringe political figure, the same mechanics can inflate the perceived importance of a product, a brand, a CEO, a labor dispute, or a crisis narrative.

I’ll share the details right after this.

In modern media ecosystems, visibility is often treated as evidence of significance. Of course, when the system can be tricked into manufacturing visibility, it can be tricked into manufacturing significance. Here’s the playbook. The report focuses heavily on what happens immediately after a post is published, specifically the first 30 minutes. That window matters because platforms like X use early engagement as a signal of relevance. If a post seems to be spreading fast, the algorithm acts like a town crier, showing it to more people.

The researchers compared 20 recent posts from several online figures. Their finding was that Fuentes’s posts regularly generated unusually high retweet velocity in the first 30 minutes, enough to outpace accounts with vastly larger follower bases. It outpaced the account of Elon Musk, for example.

The key detail here isn’t just the volume of retweets, it’s the timing. Rapid, concentrated engagement right after posting creates the illusion that the content is taking off, kicking it into recommendation streams. This is the same basic mechanic behind launch day boosting. You’ve seen this for people who have a new book out and they go out to friends and ask them to boost that new book the day it’s released. If you can create the appearance of immediate traction, you can trigger algorithm distribution that you didn’t earn.

In commerce, this shows up as engagement pods, coordinated employee advocacy swarms, and community groups that behave like a click farm. If your measurement system rewards velocity, someone can and will manufacture velocity.

So who’s responsible for those early retweet bursts? Across the 20 posts studied, 61% of Fuentes’s early tweets came from accounts that repeatedly retweeted multiple posts in the same window. In other words, this wasn’t a crowd. It was a repeatable mechanism, the same actors over and over, hitting the algorithm where it’s most sensitive. In business, you don’t need millions of genuine fans to create the signal of traction. You need a reliable, repeatable set of accounts that behave predictably at the right moment. This is why a relatively small number of coordinated actors can distort what public response appears to be, especially early in a narrative when journalists and internal leaders are trying to interpret what’s happening.

The report describes the amplification network as dominated by accounts that aren’t meaningfully identity-bearing. Among the repeat early retweeters, 92% were anonymous. Furthermore, many of these accounts were essentially single-purpose. They existed solely to boost specific messaging. Now, anonymity is a feature, not a bug in manufactured influence. In a corporate context, we see this as sock puppet commenters flooding a CEO’s LinkedIn post with applause or fake grassroots accounts inflating outrage against a policy change. If you’ve ever seen a comment section where the voices feel oddly similar and oddly committed, you’ve seen the symptom.

Perhaps the most operationally important finding involves outsourced capacity. Before a major inflection point in September, about half of the retweets on Fuentes’s most viral posts came from foreign, non-U.S. accounts. The report highlights concentrations in countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia. There’s no organic reason for these regions to be driving a U.S.-centric fringe political account. These geographies match known patterns associated with low-cost engagement farms.

If you’ve ever dealt with fake reviews or fake webinar attendees, you understand the market for outsourced attention. It’s snake oil. The same infrastructure used to inflate a political persona can inflate a brand narrative, especially when the goal is to trigger secondary effects like investor interest or the internal belief that everyone’s talking about this.

In the report, Fuentes isn’t presented as a passive beneficiary of an algorithm. The report states that he repeatedly issues direct instructions to followers: “Retweet this. Everybody retweet.” Turning amplification into a synchronized act. If you run employee advocacy programs or franchise networks, you’re already sitting on “raid capability.” The ethical version is mobilizing real stakeholders transparently. The unethical version is instructing coordinated networks to simulate stakeholder response specifically to game recommendation systems.

This is where communicators need to be brutally honest. The distance between campaign mobilization and manufactured consensus can be uncomfortably short.

Fuentes’s final move is the flywheel. Once you’ve manufactured signals that look like relevance, institutions treat those signals as real. The report argues that mainstream media coverage increased sharply after major news shocks, while the persistent manufactured engagement helped keep the subject elevated between those shocks. It also reports a 60% increase in high-status framing of the subject in mainstream articles after that inflection point.

This is classic social proof laundering. Once a narrative appears prominent on-platform, it becomes easier to place it off-platform: press mentions, analyst notes, investor chatter. At that point, people stop asking, “Is this real?” And start asking, “How big is this?”

For business communicators, here are three practical takeaways.

First, treat attention as an attack surface. If a narrative is unusually fast, unusually concentrated, or driven by accounts that don’t look like real stakeholders, assume you’re looking at influence operations.

Second, build signal hygiene into your intelligence process. If your team reports on social activity, incorporate basic credibility checks, like repeat actors, anonymity patterns, and geographic anomalies.

And third, audit your own incentives. If your organization celebrates reach metrics without interrogating provenance, you’re teaching everyone—agencies, vendors, and bad actors—that synthetic engagement is rewarded.

This isn’t just a problem that’s “out there.” The PR and marketing industries have plenty of muscle memory around manufacturing perception. The difference is whether we keep that muscle under ethical control or let the algorithm decide what we’re willing to do. Just because you can manufacture influence doesn’t mean you should.

Neville Hobson: That’s quite a story, Shel. I’m wondering how many people in our profession truly understand how this actually works. Your call to action, as it were, was to pay attention to this and pay attention to that. But I think people need to understand why and the deeper picture surrounding it.

So, for instance, the report—some of which you summarized in your narrative—struck me. And indeed, from the summary I asked ChatGPT to create (that saved me reading the whole damn thing), it was very helpful. According to the report, the researchers said that Fuentes consistently generates extraordinary engagement in the first 30 minutes after posting on X. Early retweet velocity outperforms accounts with 10 to 100 times more followers than he’s got. You mentioned Elon Musk; he’s one of them. When normalized by follower count, his engagement is orders of magnitude higher than comparative political influencers.

Why does this matter? This to me is significant to try and get a handle on this. Platform algorithms heavily weight early velocity as a sign of relevance. So once triggered, content is promoted regardless of whether engagement is authentic. Speed, not scale, is a manipulation lever. This is a critical insight for communicators. Algorithms cannot distinguish motivation, only momentum.

So when people talk about—as they do, and I remember using this 10 years ago as a sign that something is working—”Look at how this thing’s taken off!” This is seriously significant: understanding how this works.

Another part of that is, as you mentioned, the foreign origin engagement—the synthetic catalyst, if you like. Half the retweets on Fuentes’s most viral posts came from non-US accounts, and you ran off a list of countries that are the prime originators of large volume. It says there is no plausible ideological or cultural reason for these regions to be organically amplifying a US-centric white nationalist figure. Makes sense, doesn’t it? So why does that matter? Well, these geographies closely match known low-cost engagement farm infrastructures. So foreign engagement appears to act as a spark, creating the illusion of virality.

And it uses phrases that most people won’t know about—I’m only just getting familiar with it myself—like classic “signal laundering.” You’ve heard of money laundering, right? But now signal laundering. It highlights this coordinated amplification, which is not spontaneous engagement. It’s not enthusiasm spreading naturally, it’s coordination masquerading as popularity.

So I think all of us, as communicators trying to grasp something like this to understand the significance of it, are going to have to spend a little extra time understanding how it all works.

There’s one element that came out that I thought, “Wow, yes, you see this.” I can think of two people I follow on LinkedIn who do this. Illustrating Fuentes in this example is not a passive beneficiary; he actively runs it. The evidence includes hundreds of documented instances where he issues real-time commands on live streams like “Retweet this,” “Everyone retweet,” “Quote tweet it now.” I see people doing that even on LinkedIn. There’s one individual I’m not going to mention—because it wouldn’t be right to do that in this way—who has got thousands and thousands of followers. I was looking back through some of his recent posts and they are full of stuff like that. His email newsletter is nothing but that, actually. These directives align precisely with the early velocity spikes observed in the data, according to the report.

Interestingly, X’s own policies say that this behavior qualifies as coordinated inauthentic activity, platform manipulation, and spam amplification, yet the activity persists on X. So to me, the question for everyone listening is: surely you cannot trust a platform like X with your brand messaging, right? So why are you still there in that case?

It means loads more we could dissect in that context, but I think it’s necessary for people to truly understand how this works before you can understand what to do about it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you asked how many people in our business might actually understand this. I think if you look at a department like mine where there’s two of us and we’re mostly focused on internal communications, this doesn’t hit our radar. But if you’re a marketing agency and you are tasked with elevating a brand, you got to figure that if a 25-year-old white nationalist fringe character on the social-political scene can figure this out, the people running digital media for a mid-sized agency can easily figure this out.

I suspect there are probably YouTube videos telling you how to do this. You sign up with one of those farms in one of those countries that has the instruction to amplify every time you tweet, and you’re off to the races. And as you mentioned from the report, the algorithm can’t really tell the difference.

Now, this is something that I think is in large part on the platforms—whether it’s X or any of the others—to improve their processes so they can identify and block this sort of thing. The idea that you can start to get media coverage, that people will start including you in their reporting because you appear significant as a result of this blatant manipulation—when you really wield no influence, when the people retweeting you have accounts that have been set up just to retweet you—that’s on them, I think. But they’re clearly not doing anything about it. Musk wouldn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t expect him to. Zuckerberg’s not going to do anything about it. I wouldn’t expect him to. I wish he would, but knowing what I know about these people, I wouldn’t expect them to spend time and money becoming more ethical. It’s just not in their DNA.

So it’s on us. And where I can see this being used in the business context most blatantly is by advocacy groups when an organization is having a crisis. Because who speaks first is the one who gets the traction. Everything else is reacting and responding to that. And if you could get that kind of momentum, that kind of velocity, that kind of visibility for your point of view in opposition to the perspective of the organization experiencing the crisis, then you’re going to win in that crisis. It’s going to be very difficult for the organization, even employing the best digital crisis communication practices, to overcome that kind of a process.

So this is why I think we need to be aware of this. From my perspective, I have my own personal views about Fuentes and the fact that he’s doing this, but that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that if Fuentes can do it, your opposition can. It might be, let’s say, a union if you’re a non-union company and they’re trying to get a foot in the door. It could be a competitor trying to make you look bad and elevate their own organization as an investment or as a provider of goods or services. All of them can take advantage of this process because it’s possible.

And frankly, once you dig into it, while it seems complicated, it really isn’t. It’s just subscribing to these services, getting everything set up, and then you just start tweeting or posting on LinkedIn or wherever it is, and everything just follows.

Neville Hobson:: Yeah, I think I mentioned LinkedIn the way I did, but X is the serious negative platform, right? But I would imagine most other platforms that are used for business purposes are subject to this manipulation. And it makes you think you need to know more about the places that you spend time and populate and share information about your business.

The report goes into—or rather the interpretation I’ve made certainly—implications for communicators and organizations, or the key takeaways, I suppose, to summarize it all. I mean, you’re right, the report is long, and it would benefit from a simplified executive summary. Maybe what we’ve prepared might help people get a better handle on what to look at.

But some of the interesting things that summarize it: “Algorithms amplify speed, not authenticity.” And that’s what I think most people—and I’ve been guilty of this too—where speed is really the important thing here. The velocity of your message getting out there and going viral, as people still use that term, is what it’s all about. Absolutely, that’s not what it’s all about. And in this particular age we’re in now with artificial intelligence, I’m arguing very strongly that it is not about speed at all. It’s about being in the right place at the right time with the right message, not necessarily being the first or the fastest with that message.

Another point: “Anonymous and foreign networks can manufacture legitimacy.” How do you figure that out? Interestingly, and I agree with this very much so, “Mainstream media mistakes visibility for importance.” Absolutely true in my view. So all these tactics are portable.

And the final point, I suppose—there’s like 20 more I’ve got for now anyway—the real issue is not who used the playbook to do this. It’s how easy the playbook is to use. I think it’s absolutely right. And I think many people would succumb to kind of increased pressure to play the game because that’s what everyone else seems to be doing. But also it throws up, I think, a bigger concern. It’s become harder to measure engagement if what you’re measuring is suspect.

So that adds some big questions on how are you going to proceed from this point on. So:

What signals do you treat as evidence of relevance?
How easily could those signals be fabricated?
Are we rewarding momentum over substance? You need to know the difference.
And where does responsibility sit? Platform, media, or practitioner? Or all of the above?

Those are four questions—there’s probably lots more—but that might not be a bad starting point.

Shel Holtz: I don’t think it would. And I think the more practitioners who become aware of this, those that abide by an ethical code, need to raise their voices because I think the more pressure there is on the platforms, the more they will look to change the infrastructure to address this. If nobody complains or if it’s just people on the fringe like us, then nothing’s going to change.

And you’re right, Fuentes started all of this before the AI revolution. And AI is just going to make this worse with the ability to create those posts that get amplified because you have manipulated the system the way Fuentes has. So I’d like to see people kind of raise their voices. Maybe professional associations need to start advocating on behalf of fixing this. You know, AI has led a lot of people to talk about authenticity more than we already were, and we already were a lot. And if authenticity matters, then I really do think we need to raise our voices and demand change from the platforms so that people can’t do this.

Neville Hobson: I agree.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #493: How to (Unethically) Manufacture Significance and Influence appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville dissect the communication fallout from the $13.5 billion Omnicom-IPG merger and the controversial pre-holiday layoff of 4,000 employees. Among the themes they discuss: the stark contrast between the polished corporate narrative aimed at investors and the raw, real-time reality shared by staff on LinkedIn and Reddit, illustrating how organizations have lost control of the narrative. Against the backdrop of a corporate surge in hiring “storytellers,” Neville and Shel discuss the irony of failing to empower the workforce — the brand’s most authentic narrators — and analyze the long-term reputational damage caused by tone-deaf leadership during a crisis.

Links from this episode:

Another NOT SO HOT TAKE: Omnicom is a communications company. They didn’t forget how to communicate. They chose who to communicate to.
Omnicom layoffs—how a communications company created its own crisis
The Omnicom-IPG merger was confirmed this week. 4,000 jobs will be cut by Christmas. The announcement came the week after Thanksgiving. I’ve been here before.
Inside Omnicom’s Town Hall: Adamski confronts criticism, outlines new power structure after IPG acquisition
Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 492 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. In this episode, we’re going to talk about something that’s been playing out very publicly over the past few weeks in our own industry, i.e. communication. It’s about Omnicom, its merger with IPG, and the layoffs that followed. Following confirmation of the $13.5 billion merger, the company announced that around 4,000 roles would be cut, with many of those job losses happening before Christmas.

On the face of it, this is not unusual. Mergers of this scale inevitably create overlap, and redundancies are part of that reality. What makes this different was not simply the decision, but how the story unfolded and where.

On one level, there was the official corporate narrative. Omnicom’s public messaging focused on growth, integration, and future capability. It was language clearly written with investors, analysts, and the financial press in mind—not to mention clients. Polished, strategic, and familiar to anyone who has worked around holding companies. At the same time, a very different narrative was emerging elsewhere, particularly on LinkedIn and Reddit, driven by people inside the organization—people who had lost their jobs and people watching colleagues lose theirs.

That contrast became the focus of an Ad Age opinion piece by Elizabeth Rosenberg, a communications advisor who had handled large-scale change and layoffs herself. In the piece—which, by the way, Ad Age unlocked so it’s openly available—and later in her own LinkedIn posts, Rosenberg described watching two stories unfold in real time. One told to shareholders and external stakeholders, the other taking shape in comment threads written by the people most directly affected. Her point was not that Omnicom failed to communicate, but that it chose who to communicate to.

That observation resonated widely inside the industry. Rosenberg’s LinkedIn post made clear that she was less interested in being provocative than in naming something that many people were already seeing and feeling. She also noted the response she received privately—messages describing her comments as brave—and questioned what it says about our profession if plain speaking about human impact is now treated as courage.

As that conversation gathered momentum, another LinkedIn post took the discussion in a slightly different direction. Stephanie Brown, a marketing career coach, wrote about the timing of the layoffs. Her post was grounded in personal experience; she describes being laid off herself in December 2013 and what it meant to lose a job during a period associated with family, financial pressure, and emotional strain.

She acknowledged that layoffs are part of corporate life but argued that timing is a choice and that announcing thousands of job losses immediately after Thanksgiving, with cuts landing for Christmas, intensified the impact. That post triggered a large and emotionally charged response—thousands of reactions, hundreds of comments. Some people echoed Brown’s argument that holiday season layoffs carry an additional human cost. Others pushed back, arguing that earlier notice can be preferable to delayed disclosure even if the timing is painful.

What stood out was not consensus, but the depth of feeling and the willingness of people to share lived experience publicly. Across both posts and in the comment threads beneath them, a broader picture began to emerge. Former Omnicom and IPG employees described how they received the news. Industry veterans expressed sadness rather than surprise. Practitioners questioned what this says about internal credibility, culture, and leadership. Others pointed out that holding company economics have long prioritized shareholders and that this moment simply made that reality visible.

What’s notable here is that LinkedIn wasn’t just a reaction channel. It became the place where the story itself evolved. The press release was no longer the primary narrative. The commentary, the responses, and the shared experiences became part of how the situation was understood. So that’s the landscape we’re stepping into today: A major communication holding company announcing significant layoffs via a formal, investor-focused message, and a parallel, highly visible conversation driven by employees, former employees, and industry peers about audience, timing, and impact.

Rather than rushing to judgment, I think this is worth exploring carefully, especially for people whose job is communication, reputation, and trust. So, Shel, what would you say to all of this?

Shel Holtz I would say, first of all, that for an organization that purports to be a communication organization, their failure to recognize that they employ thousands of communicators who know how to use publicly accessible channels is a massive failure in communication planning. It should have been anticipated. But the story is dripping with irony, Neville. In light of an article the Wall Street Journal published last week, the article pointed to an entirely different approach that companies are taking than the one Omnicom defaulted to.

While Omnicom is watching its narrative get dismantled by its own employees on Reddit, the Wall Street Journal just reported that the hottest job in corporate America is—are you ready for this?—”storyteller.” Listings for jobs with storyteller in the title have doubled on LinkedIn in the past year. Executives used the word “storytelling” 469 times on earnings calls through mid-December.

Companies like Microsoft, Vanta, and USAA aren’t just hiring communicators anymore; they’re hunting for directors of storytelling and heads of narrative. Now, on one level, you can see why they’re doing this. The Journal points out that print newspaper circulation has dropped 70% since 2005. The army of journalists we used to rely on to tell our stories has evaporated. If companies want their news covered, they realize they have to become the media themselves. That’s what Tom Foremski said so many years ago: Every company is a media company.

But what this really means is that their traditional gatekeepers are gone. Listening to what’s happening with Omnicom, you have to wonder if these companies actually understand what storytelling means in 2025. We’re seeing a collision of two worlds here. In one world, you have the C-suite still believing they can control the narrative by hiring better writers. They think if they can just recruit a customer storytelling manager—that’s what Google is doing—or a former journalist to run corporate editorial—that’s what Chime is doing—they can fill the void. They think they can craft a sanitized, strategic message for investors and that will be the story of record.

Then you have the real world, Neville; it’s the one you just described. While Omnicom was probably busy polishing its official investor-focused story, the actual story was being written in real time on Reddit and LinkedIn by the people living through the chaos. These employees didn’t need a head of storytelling. They didn’t need a corporate newsroom. They had the truth. They had a platform.

This is exactly the loss of control we’ve been warning about for how many years. The Journal quotes a communication CEO who says leaders are finally realizing that brands that are winning right now are the ones that are most authentic and human. Yeah, he’s absolutely right. But here’s the problem: You can’t hire authenticity. If your new director of storytelling is busy writing a glossy piece about innovation while your employees are on social forums describing a culture of fear and disposal, you’ve lost the plot. The story isn’t what you publish on your corporate blog. The story is what your people say it is.

The Journal notes that a USAA storyteller might work some real experiences into an executive speech. Yeah, that’s fine. It’s also table stakes. If Omnicom or any of these companies rushing to hire storytellers want to tell a better story, they don’t just need to hire better writers. They need to give their employees a better story to tell. That’s the idea behind employee advocacy, after all, isn’t it? Because if the story you pay someone to write conflicts with the story your employees are living, the employees are going to win every single time. And as we’re seeing with Omnicom, they’re going to do it on their own channels and they’re going to do it without anybody’s approval.

Neville Hobson Yeah, one of the ironies that came across in the story, according to both of the women I quoted from the LinkedIn posts, is that Omnicom and IPG have spent decades advising clients on authentic communication, yet failed to apply that themselves. Rosenberg highlights comments from laid-off staff describing abrupt, impersonal Zoom calls, minimal explanation of rationale or future direction, and leadership absence at critical moments. These voices carried more weight than any press release because employees are the brand’s most credible storytellers.

Switch over to the Town Hall in early December, which Omnicom hosted—the first global company-wide Town Hall since the merger. It was actually completed at the end of November. The behavior of the CEO led me to think just reading this—is he tone-deaf or does he just not care?

One quote in Storyboard 18 says: “Opening the session, Florian Adamski, the CEO of Omnicom Media, reportedly addressed intense industry speculation surrounding the merger and restructuring. He criticized the tone of press and social media commentary, describing detractors as ‘haters’ and stressed that decisions have been taken after considerable deliberation, urging staff to stay patient as transitions rolled out.“

It goes on elsewhere to repeat that call from the leadership of Omnicom to be patient, everyone, it’s all going to be fine. But without any communication explaining how—or worse, even addressing the detail of what people have been saying about this. Is that tone-deaf or what?

Shel Holtz It is seriously tone-deaf. I remember years ago—this was at a Ragan conference in Chicago—a CEO was speaking. I think he was the CEO of Avon. He made the point that he thinks the minute a CEO is installed in that role and sits in the chair, there is a “stupid ray” aimed at them that affects their brains and makes them forget who employees are.

He made a point at least once a month of visiting frontline employees. It could be at a manufacturing facility where they were filling bottles, but he talked to them to remind himself that these are real people, that they have real lives, and that they are smarter than you tend to give them credit for when you don’t interact with them. You’re the CEO, you’re part of the executive team, and you think those are the “little people” down there doing all the work, not smart enough to absorb bad news.

In speaking to them, he found that they were scout masters, they helped their spouses run businesses, they were the president of the local Kiwanis club. They are smart, they can handle bad news, and they can understand things like business plans and corporate strategy. I think in this case, the Omnicom CEO obviously has not moved himself out of the path of that “stupid ray,” because his assessment of employees and the role they could play in this was seriously misguided.

Neville Hobson Yeah, your mention of that phrase “the little people” reminded me of that hotel owner in New York who went to jail for not paying taxes because she said “only the little people pay taxes.“

Shel Holtz That was Leona Helmsley.

Neville Hobson That’s it. So, one thing I also thought when I was thinking about this story: The optics are bad, but this isn’t about the optics. It’s about trust.

To me, this happened. 4,000 people are losing their jobs right before Christmas. It’s going to be extremely painful to many of them. They feel angry. The deeper risk is the long-term erosion of trust in Omnicom. Employees disengage or leave faster than those who are still there. Leadership messages lose credibility. Organizational resilience weakens, and clients notice the inconsistency between advice given and the behavior shown. This gap is damaging.

The other thing to mention—and it really confirms the point you made earlier—is that in a world where every employee has a public platform like this, organizations do not control the narrative. That will be obvious to you and me, but this sets it quite clearly. The story that endures is how people remember being treated when change was unavoidable.

You can’t actually predict what effects that is going to have on Omnicom. It may well be that in this age of polarization and utter cynicism, no one will care about this when they get hired and go work for Omnicom. But this is a firm that I wouldn’t like to work for based on this.

I started my working career in advertising at J. Walter Thompson back in the late 70s. Omnicom has a storied history in its current form, with the legacy brands they keep talking about in the press releases that are all being retired. Doyle Dane Bernbach, BBDO—some of these firms were around when I was at JWT all those years ago. It reminds me that nothing is permanent. The gloss in advertising is often just a veneer. I think they will not gain any credit for this, and the CEO’s reaction, just according to that town hall write-up, was pretty appalling.

Shel Holtz It’s just terrible. As we know, because we report on it every year, employees are still the most trusted source from a company according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. When you have this many employees out talking about what happened to them, telling their stories authentically, that’s what people are going to remember. They’re not going to remember the financial forecast that Omnicom has put forward.

Somebody needs to counsel this guy. I read somewhere that even for the layoff notification he was supposed to participate in, they said he couldn’t because he was having “technical difficulties.” I mean, come on, really? You’re not even going to get that personal message of regret from the leader of the organization?

We’re in a period right now where people are struggling to find jobs in communication. If Omnicom opens some jobs, people will take those jobs because it’s hard to find one right now. But if that pendulum swings and it becomes a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market again, I can’t imagine a lot of communicators who are going to want to work there. They may find themselves hiring a more mediocre workforce because the best of the best are going to say, “No, I’m really good, the world knows I’m good, I can work anywhere, and I’m not going to go work for those jerks.“

Neville Hobson I think it’s a good point. Another thing to mention is that I was surprised to see the comments on Reddit. There are hundreds, if not thousands, and in a way I wasn’t expecting. I expected a lot of ranting, a lot of ugliness, and maybe trolling. I didn’t see much of that. I saw what I would describe as sheer sadness by many people, and calm acceptance of the awfulness of it all by those who’ve been fired. The two LinkedIn posts I discussed are very much worth looking at, along with the comments.

Layoffs are inevitable, and indeed in the case of this acquisition, they were inevitable. But the communication failure was not inevitable if they had handled it differently. Employees now shape the public narrative in real time. Trust, once lost, quickly becomes an external issue, which is what we’re seeing playing out still. Communication principles apply most when it’s hardest to use them, like this situation, and I think they failed the test totally.

Shel Holtz Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we just recently completed an acquisition here where I work, and in our little two-person communication team in our small billion-and-a-half-dollar company, the communication was far superior to what we see coming out of this behemoth of a communication organization. It’s pathetic.

This is what Zuckerberg always said when he got caught doing something bad: “We’ll have to do better.” He never does, and I doubt that Omnicom will either based on this behavior, but they need to do better. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #492: The Authenticity Divide in Omnicom Layoff Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Josh Bernoff has just completed the largest survey yet of writers and AI – nearly 1,500 respondents across journalism, communication, publishing, and fiction.

We interviewed Josh for this podcast in early December 2025. What emerges from both the data and our conversation is not a single, simple story, but a deep divide.

Writers who actively use AI increasingly see it as a powerful productivity tool. They research faster, brainstorm more effectively, build outlines more quickly, and free themselves up to focus on the work only humans can do well – judgement, originality, voice, and storytelling. The most advanced users report not only higher output, but improvements in quality and, in many cases, higher income.

Non-users experience something very different.

For many non-users, AI feels unethical, environmentally harmful, creatively hollow, and a direct threat to their livelihoods. The emotional language used by some respondents in Josh’s survey reflects just how personal and existential these fears have become.

And yet, across both camps, there is striking agreement on key risks. Writers on all sides are concerned about hallucinations and factual errors, copyright and training data, and the growing volume of bland, generic “AI slop” that now floods digital channels.

In our conversation, Josh argues that the real story is not one of wholesale replacement, but of re-sorting. AI is not eliminating writers outright. It is separating those who adapt from those who resist – and in the process reshaping what it now means to be a trusted communicator, editor, and storyteller.

Key Highlights* Why hands-on AI users report higher productivity and quality, while non-users feel an existential threat * How AI is now embedded in research, brainstorming, outlining, and verification – not just text generation * Why PR and communications teams are adopting faster than journalists * What the rise of “AI slop” means for trust, originality, and attention * Why the future of writing is not replacement – but re-sorting

About our Conversation PartnerJosh Bernoff is an expert on business books and how they can propel thinkers to prominence. Books he has written or collaborated on have generated over $20 million for their authors.

More than 50 authors have endorsed Josh’s Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters, a comprehensive guide for business authors. His other books include Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean and the Business Week bestseller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. He has contributed to 50 nonfiction book projects.

Josh’s mathematical and statistical background includes three years of study in the Ph.D. program in mathematics at MIT. As a Senior Vice President at Forrester Research, he created Technographics, a consumer survey methodology, which is still in use more than 20 years later. Josh has advised, consulted on, and written about more than 20 large-scale consumer surveys.

Josh writes and posts daily at Bernoff.com, a blog that has attracted more than 4 million views. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, an artist.

Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshbernoff/

Relevant Links

https://bernoff.com/
https://bernoff.com/blog/ai-writer-survey-results-analyzing-royalties-neuroscientific-sneakers-newsletter-5-november-2025
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/99019-new-report-examines-writers-attitudes-toward-ai.html
https://gothamghostwriters.com/AI-writer

Audio TranscriptShel Holtz

Hi everybody, and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And we are here today with Josh Bernoff. I’ve known Josh since the early SNCR days. Josh is a prolific author, professional writer, mostly of business material. But Josh, I’m gonna ask you to share some background on yourself.

Josh Bernoff

Okay, thanks. What people need to know about me, I spent four years in the startup business and 20 years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Since that time, which was in 2015, I have been focused almost exclusively on the needs of authors, professional business authors. So I work with them as a coach, writer, ghostwriter, an editor, and basically anything they need to do to get business books published.

The other thing that’s sort of relevant in this case is that while I was at Forrester, I originated their survey methodology, which is called Technographics. And I have a statistics background, a math background, so fielding surveys and analysing them and writing reports about them is a very comfortable and familiar place for me to be. So when the opportunity arose to write about a survey of authors in AI, said, all right, I’m in, let’s do this.

Shel Holtz

And you’ve also published your own books. I’ve read your most recent one, How to Write a Better Business Book.

Josh Bernoff

Mm-hmm, yes. So, this is like, the host has to prod you to promote your own stuff. Yes. Yes. So by my two most recent books, I wrote a book called Writing Without Bullshit, which is basically a, a manifesto for, people in corporations to write better. and I wrote build a better business book that you talked about, which is a complete manual for everything you need to do to think about conceive. write, get published and promote a business book. Yeah, so they’re both both available online where your audience can find them.

Shel Holtz

Wherever books are sold. So we’re here today, Josh, to talk about that survey of writers that you conducted, asking them about their use of AI. What motivated you to undertake this survey in the first place?

Josh Bernoff

Well, I’ll just go back a tiny little bit. About two years ago, Dan Gerstein, who is the CEO of Gotham Ghost Readers and a really fantastically interesting guy, reached out to me because he knew my background of doing statistics and said, let’s do a survey of the ROI of business books, get business authors to talk about what they went through to create their business books and whether they made a profit from all the things that followed on that.

So at the conclusion of that project, which people can certainly still get access to that information, at authorroi.com, at the conclusion of that project, it was clear that we could do a really good job together. So when he came to me and said, let’s do a survey about authors and AI. It’s a topic I’ve been researching a lot, talking to many authors about how they use it. And I said, all right, yeah, let’s actually get a definitive result here. And we were really pleased that the survey basically went viral.

We got almost 1,500 responses, way more than we did for the business author survey, because there’s a lot more writers than authors in the world. And because we got such a large response, it was possible to slice that so I can answer questions like how do technical writers feel about AI or is this different between men and women or older or younger people. And so that enabled us to do a really robust survey which people can download if they want. It’s at gothamghostwriters.com/AI-writer, available free for anyone who wants to see it.

Shel Holtz

And we’ll have that link in the show notes as well.

Josh Bernoff

Okay, great.

Neville Hobson

It’s a massive piece of work you did, Josh. I, I kind of went through the PDF quite closely because it’s a topic that interests me quite a bit. And I was really quite intrigued by many of the findings that it surfaced. But I have a fundamental question right at the very beginning, because I’m a writer myself. But I encountered this phrase throughout, “professional writer.” I’m not a professional writer, but I’m a writer.

And I know a lot of communicators who would say, yeah, I’m a professional writer. I don’t think it fits the definition you’re working to. So can you actually succinctly say what is a professional writer as opposed to any other kind of writer that communicators might say they are? What’s the difference?

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, that’s there’s less there than meets the eye and I will describe why.

So, we fielded this survey, and we basically said if you are a writer, you can answer this survey, and we got help from all sorts of people who are willing to share it within their communities. So over 2000 people responded. But of course, you have to disqualify people if they’re not really a writer and the way we define that is, we said, you spend at least 10 hours a week on writing and editing? And somebody who didn’t, I’m like, okay, you’re not really a writer if you don’t spend at least 10 hours a week on it.

And we also looked at how people made their living. So let’s just say you’re a product manager. You’re probably doing a lot of writing, but you wouldn’t describe yourself as a professional writer. So part of what we did was to have people answer questions about what kind of writer are you?

And we had the main categories and we captured almost everybody in them, know, marketing writers, nonfiction authors, ghost writers, you know, PR writers and so on. And although we had not intended to do so, we got almost 300 responses from fiction authors. And we were like, okay, what are we going to do here? Because these people are very different from the people who are writing in a business context or non-fiction authors, but I don’t want to invalidate their experience.

So we basically divided up the survey and we said, most of the responses are from people who are writing things that are intended to be true. And a small group is written from people who are intentionally lying because they’re fiction writers. So then we had an ongoing discussion about what do we call the people who write things that are intended to be true. And Dan Gerstein and I eventually agreed to call them professional writers, which is not a dig on the professional fiction authors, but it’s just a catchall for people who are making their living as a writer and writing nonfiction.

Shel Holtz

Josh, you described in the survey report a deep attitudinal divide where users see productivity and non-users see what you called a sociopathic plagiarism machine.

Josh Bernoff

Thanks. Now, now, wait a minute. I didn’t call it that. One of the people who took the survey called it that. Yes, that was a direct quote. I mean, I just want to comment here that in the survey business, we call responses to open-ended questions verbatims, right? So these are the actual text responses. And because we surveyed writers, these are the best verbatims I’ve ever seen. This is extremely literate.

Shel Holtz

OK, that was, that was a response. Got it. Well, yeah.

Josh Bernoff A collection of people expressing their opinion and the sociopathic plagiarism machine came from one of those folks. Yes.

Shel Holtz

I did like that a lot. But for somebody like me, a communications director managing a team, how do you bridge that gap when half the team might be ethically opposed to the tools that the other half is enthusiastically using every day?

Josh Bernoff

You just tell the other people to go to hell. No, I’m kidding! Now this is, it’s true. So one of the most notable findings of the survey was that people who do not use AI are likely to have negative attitudes about it. So it’s not just like, you know, well, I don’t happen to drink alcohol, but it’s fine with me. No, these people are.

Josh Bernoff

This is bad for the environment. It’s an evil product. There were a lot of interesting verbatims in the survey from people like that. 61% of the professional writers said that they use AI. So this is a minority of people who are not using it, and an even smaller group who are opposed to it. But they are fervently opposed to it. The people who do use it are generally getting really useful things done. A majority say that it’s making them more productive. And the people who are most advanced are doing all sorts of things with it.

By the way, this is really important to note. The thing that everyone’s sort of morally up in arms about, which is people generating text that’s intended to be read using AI, is actually quite rare. Most of the, that was only 7% that did that and only 1% that did that daily. So most people are doing research or they’re, they’re, you know, using it as a thesaurus or, or, using it to analyse material that they find and, and are citing as own background or something like that. it, to come directly at your question though, it is important to acknowledge this divide in any writing organisation.

And I think that the people who are using AI need to understand that there are some serious objections and they need to address that. The people who are not using it, I think, need to understand that perhaps they should be trying this out just so that they’re not operating from a position of ignorance about what the thing can do.

And I think most importantly, the big companies that are creating AI tools need to be a lot more serious about compensating the folks who create the writing that it’s trained on because it is putting the sociopathic plagiarism machine aside, it’s pretty bothersome when you find out that the thing has absorbed your book and is giving people advice based on that and you got no compensation for that.

Shel Holtz

I just want to follow up on this question real quickly. Were you able to quantify among the people who don’t use it and object to it the reasons? I mean, you listed a couple, but I’m wondering if there’s any data around the percentage that are concerned about the environment, the percentage that, I mean, the one that I keep reading in LinkedIn posts is it has no human experience or empathy, which I don’t understand why that’s a requirement for say earnings releases or welcome to our new sales VP, but nevertheless.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, I going to say that describes a bunch of human writers too. They don’t seem to have any empathy. So we looked at one of the questions that we asked is how concerned are you about the following? And then we had a list of concerns. And it’s interesting that they divide pretty neatly into things that everyone is concerned about and things that the non-users are far more concerned about. So for example, the top thing that people were concerned about was, and I quote, AI-generated text can include factual errors or hallucinations. So even the people who use it are like, okay, we’ve got to be careful with this thing because sometimes it comes up with false information.

For example, if you ask it for my bio, it will tell you that I have a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and I’ve never attended Harvard. So it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not right!

On the other hand, there are some other things where there’s a very strong difference of opinion. So for example, question, AI generated text is eroding the perception of value and expertise that experienced writers bring to a project. 92% of the non-users of AI agreed with that, but only 53% of the heaviest users of AI agreed with that. So if you use AI a lot, it’s like, well, actually, this isn’t as big of a problem as people think.

The environmental question, I think that non-users, 85% of them were concerned about its use of resources, but only 52% of the heavy users were concerned about that. And I want to point out something which I think is probably the most interesting division here. If you ask writers, should AI-generated text be labelled as such, they all mostly agree that it should. But if you ask them, should text generated with the aid of AI be labelled as such, the people who use AI often think, well, you don’t need to know that I used it to do research, because it’s not visible in the output. Whereas the non-users are like, no, you used AI, you have to label it. So that’s a good example of a place where the difference of opinion is going to have to somehow get settled over time.

Neville Hobson

That’s probably one of those things I would say take a while to do that, given what you see. and I talked about this recently on verification. Some people, and I know some people who are very, very heavy users of AI who don’t check stuff that is output with the aid of their AI companion. That’s crazy, frankly, because as Shel noted in our conversation, the latest episode of FIR podcast, your reputation is the one that’s going to suffer when it’s when you get found out that you’ve done this and haven’t disclosed it.

But it also manifests itself in something, you know, the great em-dash debate that went on for most of this year. Right. But I wrote a post about a couple of weeks ago about this and about ChatGPT’s plan saying you can tell it not to use em-dashes.

And my experience is I’ve done that and it still goes ahead and does it. It apologizes each time, it still goes ahead and does it, you know. But you know what? That post produced a credible reaction from people. 40,000 views in a couple of days. That’s for me, that’s a lot, frankly. And I did an analysis, which I published just a few days ago, that showed the opinions people have about it are widely divisive.

Some see it as, I’m not going to give up my whole heritage of writing just because of this stupid argument to others who say you’ve got to stop it because it doesn’t matter if it got it from us in the first place, it signals that you’re using AI, therefore your writing is no good. That kind of discussion was going on. So I’d see this is continuing. It’s crazy. looking at the data highlights, there’s some really fascinating stuff in there, Josh, that caught my eye.

The headline starting with the right to see AI is both a tool and a threat. And yes, that’s quite clear from what you’ve been saying, but also this hallucinations concern 91% of writers. And I think that’s true across, you no matter how experienced you are, it concerns me, which is why I’m strongly motivated to check everything, even though sometimes you think, God, do it, don’t don’t question, just do it.

I reviewed something recently that had 60 plus URLs mentioned in it. And so I checked them all, and 15 of them just didn’t exist or 404s or server errors. And yet the client had issued it already and without checking that kind of thing. Stuff like that. So you’ve got a job to educate them.

So I guess this is all peripheral to the question I wanted to ask you, which is that correlation that comes across in the data highlights between AI usage and positive attitudes towards it and as opposed to the negative attitudes, but the users are very highly positive.

How should we interpret this divide? I guess is the question you may have touched on this already, actually, I think you may have actually, is it just a skills gap? Is it a cultural gap? Or what is it? Because the attitudes that are different, I guess, like much these days seems to me to be quite polarised, strong opinions, pro and con. How do we interpret this?

Josh Bernoff

All right, so I want to go back to a few of the things that you said here. I have some advice in my book, Build a Better Business book, and it’s generally good advice about checking facts that you find, finding false information on the internet has always been a problem for people who are citing sources.

There used to be a guy called the numbers guy in the, Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal, who would actually write a column every month about some made up statistic that got into print. All that we’ve done is to make it much more efficient. But people do need to check. And it’s interesting. You learn when you use these tools that it’s subtle. If you click and say, OK, that is a real source, that’s fine.

But often, it will tell you that that source says X or Y and then you go and you read it and you’re like, no, it doesn’t actually say that. So yes, you are now citing a source that when you go look at it says the opposite of what you thought it said. Real professional writers know that that is an important part of their job and it just happens to be easy to behave incompetently and irresponsibly now.

But believe me, I deal with professional publishers all the time and there are all these clauses now in their contracts which basically say you have to disclose when you’re using AI and if there’s false information in here then you’re responsible for it and we might not publish it. I will say this, so let’s just put this in a different context. So think about Photoshop.

Okay, when Photoshop started to become popular, people were like, wait a minute, we can’t believe what we see in pictures. Maybe the person doesn’t have skin that’s all that smooth. Maybe that background is fake. But in context where you’re supposed to be doing factual stuff, like a photo that’s in a magazine, there’s safeguards against this and the users have learned what is legit and what isn’t. And I think also that the readers have learned that, okay, we have to be a little skeptical about what we see. This AI has made it possible to do that with text way more easily, but it’s still the case that you, as a reader, you need to be skeptical and as a user, you need to be sophisticated about what you can and can’t do and what is and is not legit.

I do these writing workshops with corporations. I’m doing one next week with a very large media company. And I’m trying to help them to understand, start with clear writing principles and use AI to support them as opposed to use it to substitute for your judgment, generate crap, and then do a disservice to the poor people who are reading it.

Shel Holtz

I am always amused when I see people expressing such angst over AI generated images taking money from artists. And I didn’t hear the same level of anxiety when CGI became the means of making animated movies. What happened to the people who inked the cells? They’re out of a job. No, Pixar got nothing but praise.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, I know. Right. Right. They should. Yes, yes Yes, right and it’s like no no, they should have actually gotten 26,000 dinosaurs in that scene and I’m like You you were entertained admit it and you know that they’re not real and that’s it…

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Josh, your data shows that thought leadership writers and PR and comms professionals are the heaviest users of AI. Thought leadership writers, 84% of them and 73% of PR and comms professionals are using AI in their writing. Journalists are somewhere around half of that at 44%.

Did you glean any insights as to why the people who are pitching the media are using this more than the people being pitched?

Josh Bernoff

I have some theories about that. What I’m about to tell you is not supported by the data, although I could go in and start digging around. There’s infinite insight in here if I do that. So I think journalists are a little paranoid about it. And the fact that, yes, 44% of the journalists said that they used it, but only 18% said that they used it every day, which is at the very bottom of all the professional writers.

So I think they are not only concerned about their livelihood, but also that they don’t wanna make a mistake. They don’t wanna get anything into print that’s false. Whereas if you look at the thought leadership writers and the PR and comms professionals, it’s a simple question of volume. These people are under pressure to produce a very large amount of information.

And I can tell you as a professional writer that that there are certain tasks that you really would rather not spend time on if an AI can do it. So if you’re gathering up a bunch of background information and perplexity does a better job on contextual searches than Google, which it absolutely does, then you’re probably going to use it.

Now, there is the risk that these people are basically generating large quantities of crap and then sharing it. But I think that that rapidly becomes unproductive. If you’re basically spamming people with AI slop, then they will immediately become sort of immune to that, and then you lose trust and at that point you’ve destroyed your own livelihood.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, absolutely. I want to ask you about one of the other finds you had in here about ChatGPT is the clear leader amongst all writers. 76% using it weekly. I use ChatGPT more than any other tool. I’m very happy with it. It does what I want. But in light of how fast things move in this industry, how things change. How do you see that shifting or does it not actually matter at the end of the day which tool you use as long as it delivers what you want from it?

Josh Bernoff

Well, what you have here is people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to become the default choice, the sort of dominant company here. And if you look at past battles of this kind to be like, who is the top browser or what’s the top mobile operating system, this is a land grab.

If you sit out and wait and see what happens, you could very easily end up on the sidelines, which is why there’s so much money flooding into this. ChatGPT definitely has an early lead, but there was an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I believe, about the fact that they’re very concerned about Google. And the reason is on a sort of features and capability basis, Google is Google better?

It depends on what day it is, they keep making advances. But it does integrate with people’s basic use of Google in other ways, and for example, use of Google in email. And wait a minute, have we never heard this story before? Where a company that has a dominant position in one area attempts to leverage it in another area? Gee, that’s like the whole story of the tech industry for the last 30 years!

Josh Bernoff

The same is true, my daughter works in a company that uses Microsoft products, which is very common. And so everybody in that company is using Microsoft Copilot because they got it for free. There’s this, if you ask me who is going to have the top market share in 18 months, I have no clue, but I don’t think that ChatGPT is necessarily in a position to say, ours is clearly better than everybody else and so everyone will use what we have.

I will point out that the, I’m trying to remember if I have the number on this, but the average person who is using these tools in a sophisticated way is typically using at least three or four different tools. So just like you might use Perplexity for one web search and Google for another, you might decide to use Microsoft Copilot in some situations and use Google Gemini in another situation.

Neville Hobson

It’s interesting that because I started using Copilot recently through a change of how I’m doing something for one particular area of work I’m interested in. And it blew me away because I’m using Copilot, it’s using ChatGPT5. So and I see, I sense the output I get from the input I give it is in a similar style to what ChatGPT would write.

So I’m impressed with that and I haven’t gained any further significance to it. Maybe it’s coincidental, but I quite like that. So that’s actually getting me more accustomed to Microsoft’s product. So these little things, maybe this is how it’s all going to work in the end.

Josh Bernoff

Yeah, yeah, I will point out that professional writers that I talked to are very enamoured of Claude as far as the creation of text. And definitely if you’re doing a web search, Perplexity has got some pretty superior features for that. I find myself often using telling ChatGPT, don’t show me anything unless you can provide a link, because I’m not going to trust you until you do that. And I’m going to check that link and see what it really says.

So that’s, you know, the, the, the development of specialised tools for specialised purposes is absolutely going to continue here.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, I’ve been using Gemini almost exclusively since 3.0 dropped. I find it’s just exponentially better, but I’m sure that when ChatGPT releases their next model, I’ll be back to that. In the meantime, I did see Chris Penn commenting, I think it was just yesterday on that Wall Street Journal article pointing out that it’s baked into Google Docs and Google Sheets and all the Google products, whereas OpenAI doesn’t have any products to bake it into.

And that’s a clear advantage to Google. But Josh, you revealed in the research that 82% of non-users worry that AI is contributing to bland and boring writing. What I found interesting was that 63% of advanced users felt the same way, that it’s creating this AI slop.

So as a counsellor to writers, how would you counsel people, our audience is organisational communicators. So I’ll say, would you counsel organisational communicators? When cutting through the noise is vital, you need to get your audience. I deal mostly with employee communication, and we need employees to pay attention to this message, despite the fact that there are so many competing things out there, just clamouring for their attention. How do you avoid the trap of this bland and boring writing when you’re so desperate to cut through that clutter and capture that attention?

Josh Bernoff

Yes, well, large language models create bad writing far more efficiently than any tool we’ve ever had before. So, and of course, I’m talking to both corporate writers and professional authors all the time about this. And so basically, the general advice is that the more you can use this for things behind the scenes, the better off you are and the more you use it to actually generate text that people read, the worse off you are.

I’m gonna give you a very clear example. So I am currently collaborating with a co-writer on a book about startups for a brilliant, brilliant author who really knows everything about startups, has an enormous background on it. And he has insisted that I use AI for all sorts of tasks. In fact, he’s like, you know, why are you wasting your time when you could just send this thing off and tell it to do the research? And we’ve done some spectacular things like I had a list of startups and I told it to go out on the internet and get me a simple statement about who they are, what financing stage they’re in, what category they’re in.

And it goes off and it does that. That would have taken me days. But because this guy is intelligent, there’s a reason he’s hired me and not replaced me with AI because once it’s time to actually create something that’s gonna be read by people, we have to rewrite that from beginning to end. That’s, as a professional writer, that is my, how I make a living. And what I write is the complete opposite of bland and boring. And he doesn’t want bland and boring. He wants punchy and surprising and… insightful.

So I, you know, you can both say use AI for all of this other stuff and don’t you dare publish anything that it creates. and I feel like that is generally the right advice that everybody is going to end up where I have ended up, which is, even in a corporate environment, it can support you, but you’re not using it to generate texts that people are going to actually read.

Neville Hobson

It’s a really good point you’ve made there I think because one of the elements one of the findings in the survey report, AI powered writers are sure they’re more productive and I definitely sit in that category. I’m absolutely convinced I’m probably in that what is it 92% or whatever it is of the advanced users who think so how do I prove it?

Well it’s not so much the output it’s the quality. It kind of tunes your mind into some of the reports that you read or what others are saying elsewhere that use AI tools to support you in doing the stuff that is what AI is better at than humans. Unstructured structured data, whatever it is, finding patterns, all that stuff that we can all read about. And you do the intellectual stuff, the stuff humans are really good at.

Josh Bernoff

Absolutely.

Neville Hobson

And they sound great phrases and sentences. And I’ve said to lots of people, I don’t see too many people doing that. So they’re obviously not in the advanced stage, let’s say. I find it hard to believe, frankly. Really I do. In conversations I’ve had during this year on those who diss this, who say this is like some of your respondents have said, you know, it’s the, what is it, psychotic plagiarism machine or whatever it was, the stuff…

Josh Bernoff

Sociopathic, but yes.

Shel Holtz

Both things can be true.

Neville Hobson

…sorry, sociopathic, but it’s where they can, but it amazes me, it truly does. And I think if we’ve got this situation where clearly there is evidence that if you use this in an effective way, it will help you be productive.

It will augment your own intelligence, to use a favourite phrase of mine. So AI is augmenting intelligence, not artificial. And yet that still encounters brick walls and pushbacks on a scale that’s ridiculous. Worse in an organization when that’s at a leadership level, I would say.

So how do we kind of make this less of a threat as it’s seen by others, or is this part of the issue that those naysayers just see all this as a massive threat?

Josh Bernoff

Well, boy, that’s a deep question. So first of all, I always start with the data here, because I want to distinguish between my opinions and the data. And the data says that the more you use AI, the more likely you are to say that it is making you more productive. And as you said, 92% of the advanced users said that it made them more productive. And interestingly, 59% of the advanced users said that it actually made the quality of their writing better.

So it’s not just producing more, but producing better stuff. And one more statistics here. We actually asked them how much more productive. The average across all the writers who use it is 37 % more productive, but like any tool, you need to get adept at it and learn what it’s good at and what you can use it for. And this technology has advanced way, way ahead of the, the learning about how to use it.

So there has to be a, basically a movement in every company and all writing organizations to teach people the best way to take advantage of it and what not to do. And in fact, one of the things that I recommended and that I tell some of the corporate clients I work with is find the people who are really good at this and then have them train the other people.

Because there’s nothing better than somebody saying, okay, here, let me show you what I can do with this.

I’ll just give you an example. So this report itself, obviously people are saying, well, did you use AI to write the report? I started out trying to use AI to analyse the data and I found that it was not dependable. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna have to calculate these statistics the old-fashioned way with spreadsheets and data tools. Every single word of the report was written by a human, me, at least most people still think I’m a human.

But we had, you know, thousands of verbatims to go through. And the person to whom I delegated the task of finding the most interesting verbatim used AI to go in and find verbatims that were interesting, had certain, there were some positive ones, negative ones, you know, had some diversity in terms of who they were from. So we weren’t quoting all technical writers. And that’s a perfect use to go into a huge corpus of text and pull out some of the interesting things out of there because that would have taken days.

I can’t help mentioning here because in preparation for doing this report, I interviewed some of the most advanced writers that I knew, including Shel. And one of my favourite examples is a very intelligent woman who, Shel, I know you know, is completing her doctoral degree right now. And she told me that the review of existing research is an enormous element of this, and that using AI to help summarise and compare the existing research would save her three years in the completion of her doctoral degree.

You cannot walk away from that level of productivity. And she’s full of enormously creative ideas. So this is not a bad writer. This is an excellent writer, but what she’s doing is she’s saying, I had this brilliant idea. Hey, is there anything in the literature that’s similar to this? wait a minute. These people came up with the same thing. So I can’t claim the authorship. it went across all the research and nobody else is saying that. great. This is an original thing I can include. That’s a smart way to use it.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, just this past week, I interviewed our new safety director, just came on board. I used Otter AI to do the interview. I like that because I’m able to focus on the interview subject rather than scribble notes. And what I did was uploaded the transcript of the interview that I downloaded from Otter into Gemini. And I said because the interview led to a lot of digressions and a lot of personal back and forth that interrupted the substance of what we were trying to get to.

So I just said, clean up this transcript, get rid of everything that doesn’t have to do with his coming on board at our company as the new safety director, his background and all of that, and then categorise it. But don’t change any of his words, right? I want the transcript to be exact. And it did exactly what I asked it to do.

For me to take that transcript… well, first of all, for me to take all those notes and then put it in some sort of usable form before I even start writing the article would have taken a considerable amount of time. And yet it didn’t mess at all with what he was telling me in response to my questions. And I was able to use that to produce an article that I wrote.

One of my favourite uses though, as a writer, is when there’s a turn of phrase that I want to use and I can’t quite draw it out. I know what it is. It’s right there. So I’ll share what I’m writing about. And this is what I’m trying to say. And there’s a turn of phrase I’m thinking of. What is it? And it’ll say, well, it might be one of these. And almost always from the list it gives me, that’s the one I was thinking of.

Josh Bernoff

This is a way better thesaurus than anything else I’ve ever used. And at the age that we’re at, sometimes you can’t, you know there’s a word and you can’t bring it to mind. I’m like, yeah, that was a word I was looking for.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Josh, you found that 40% of freelancers and agencies say that AI has eaten into their income. If you were advising, say, a boutique PR agency today on how to survive in 2026, what’s the one pivot that you would advise them that they need to make based on this data?

Josh Bernoff

I think you need to focus on talent that has two skills. One is, clear and interesting writing skills are even more valuable than they used to be. So, you know, if you say, well, who are the best writers in our organisation, do everything you can to hang on to those people, because you’re going to need that to continue to stand apart from the AI slop.

And then the other side of that is to become as efficient as possible with AI for the rote tasks. So you also want people who are really skilled at using these tools to conduct research tasks. I interviewed a woman at the gathering of the ghosts, which is the event where this research was first presented. She matches up ghost writers to to author clients. And she gets like a background, briefing on every single person that she goes and pitches. And it’s really good at that.

So when she gets on the phone with these people, they’re like, wow. She’s really smart. She, she did a whole lot of homework here. And this is the kind of person I want to work with. Okay. It has nothing to do with her writing ability. It has to do with her ability to take advantage of these tools and, yeah, I think that we’re going to be able to get more done with fewer people. which is a, tail is all this time, really. That’s just, that’s just the direction that things go with automation.

But I, I have, I can’t resist pointing out here on the flip side. I think, a bunch of people, including publishers are now delegating work to AI and laying people off and it’s doing a bad job. I ghost wrote a book recently where the copy editing came back and I was like, this is inadequate. This is a terrible job. This was obviously done by a machine and done badly by a machine.

And my client and I decided that in order to avoid errors, we would hire our own professional copy editor because the publisher had skimped in exactly the wrong place. And the professional copy editor did a fantastic job. It cost a bunch of money, but we were much happier with that.

Neville Hobson

To continue this theme slightly, think I had the question, which I think Shel answered part of it, but the page in the report with the headline, nearly half of writers have seen AI kill a friend’s job. And I found that interesting because there’s constant talk in some of the mainstream media, some of the professional journals too, is AI going to replace jobs? One report comes out and before you know it, the headline saying yes, it is. The other report comes out saying no, it’s not.

But these are intriguing, I found, that they’re actual real world examples you’ve got from people who answered the questions you asked them in the survey. Where it says only 10% of corporate workers have had AI driven layoffs at their organization, but 43% of writing professionals know someone who has lost their job to AI. So is this a trend that’ll continue this way, do you think? how would you interpret this overall picture that you’ve shown? This particular page, page 20 in the report.

Josh Bernoff

Okay. Okay. Yes. So it was interesting. We expected to hear a lot more direct response of, yes, they’ve done layoffs of my work as a result of this. And the fact that only 10 % of the people who worked in corporations, which includes media companies, said that they had seen this was an indication to me that at least at the time we did this survey in August and September, that that was not a huge trend.

The fact that a lot of people know somebody who lost their job, you know, if one person loses their job and they have 12 friends, then we’re gonna get 12 positives on that. But that having been said, I’m not convinced that even if we did this survey now, which is what, like four months later, that we would get the same results.

It’s clear to me that there’s a lot of layoffs happening that a significant amount of it is AI stimulated. A certain amount of that is coders, for example. They need fewer coders to do the same programming now. My daughter got a computer science degree a few years ago because it was like everyone knew that that was how you got a job and you know, it’s not so easy right now.

I think that we’re going to see two things. First of all, we’re going to see this trend of people being laid off because AI includes productivity across the entire employment spectrum. It’s a huge trend that’s likely to happen. But I also think that you’re going to find companies backtracking and saying, oh my God, we thought we could have all this productivity, but it turns out that we need more humans here than I realised and we need to go back and bring them back.

I feel that it is driven by a certain amount by investment mania to cut back expenses and that in the end, as in so many cases, when you replace people with automation, you end up with a poor quality result.

Shel Holtz

I want to talk about fiction authors for a minute. And I find it intriguing that they are so universally anti-AI. Neville and I are both friends with JD Lasica. I don’t know if you know JD. He’s got a product out there called Authors AI. It’s a model that he and his partners have trained. It’s not using ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the large frontier models.

But what you do is you feed your novel to it, presumably in a first draft, and it analyses the novel against all of the criteria that has been trained on about what makes a good novel and gives you a report about, you need to do a better job of character development here, the story arc is weak here, things like that. So, I mean, there are uses for fiction writers beyond actually writing for you, but you did note that they almost universally detest it. Only 42% use it and they are…

Josh Bernoff

No, no, no, no. Let’s be clear here. It was the non-users among the fiction authors who almost universally detested.

Shel Holtz

Okay, I misread that. Emphatically angry was the language that jumped out at me. I’m wondering for those of us in business writing, is there a lesson we should take away from fiction writers about the preservation of the soul of a narrative?

Josh Bernoff

No, no, it’s interesting to me. So I’ve been conducting surveys now for probably 20 years. And one of the main things that you learn is that it’s never black and white. There’s never a hundred percent of the people that agree with anything. There’s never 0% of the people that agree with anything until this survey, when I found that fictional authors that do not use AI are as close as you can get to unanimous about it being a horrible, evil thing.

So yes, I was like, 100% of the people agreed with this? I’ve never seen that in my entire career of analysing surveys. But to give you a little bit more thoughtful answer than no, soulless fiction is boring and nobody wants to read it. And that happens to also be true of soulless nonfiction writing.

So let’s just take this report. If I used AI to generate the text in this report, you wouldn’t be talking to me because I found the most interesting things in the most interesting language to describe it. And the same applies if you’re writing about, you know, should we adopt a new project management methodology?

That’s a story, you know? We have this problem. This solution was suggested to us. We compared this to that. It looks like this is going to save money, but here are the things that I’m really worried about. This is an emotional story. And really, all nonfiction writing needs to have a story element to it. until AI becomes a little bit less soulless, which may never happen, you still need humans to tell those stories.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I agree with that. So before we get to that question of what question should we have asked you, I’m looking at page 28, what these findings mean for the writing profession. And it’s really well done this, Josh, you succinctly condensed it all. But to avoid me trying to interpret what you said, can you tell us a summary of what these findings do mean for the writing profession?

Josh Bernoff

Well, thank you.

You know, it’s interesting Neville, there was always a section like that at the end of my reports at Forrester Research, because that’s what they were paid for. And in this case, I said, no, I’m just going to do the data. And my partner here, the people at Gotham Ghostwriters, Dan was like, why don’t you write something about what this means for the industry? I’m like, I can do that. Good idea! Okay.

So I wrote this and I think that in corporate environments, it is important now to understand what this is good for and to take the people who’ve become advanced at it and use them to help train other folks. And it’s especially challenging, I think, in media organisations because on the one hand, they are under enormous pressure, profit pressure.

You know, think about a newspaper or magazine or publisher. It’s very difficult for them to be profitable, highly competitive environment. If they can cut costs, they’re gonna try and find a way to do it. On the other hand, it is exactly their content that’s getting hoovered up and ripped off.

So they need to have a balance here, think on a political basis, they need to lobby and basically do everything possible to preserve the value of their content and not have it be used for training purposes without any compensation. But I also think they have to be very prudent in what kinds of things that they take AI to do and what they don’t. Just like the people at that publisher who use the AI copy editing that did a terrible job. If they economise in the wrong places, it’s gonna be a very bad scene.

I can’t help but drop this in here. I learned recently about a romance bookstore, a bookstore that sells romances, a physical bookstore. And they’re using AI to analyse trends, figure out which books to stock and how to organise them and what to put into their marketing. And I just thought that was fascinating because the content is as human and emotional as you can be, and yet they figured out a way to use AI to be successful.

Shel Holtz

That’s really interesting. So let’s ask you that question now, Josh. I mean, we could spend another hour here, but what question didn’t we ask that you were hoping we would?

Josh Bernoff

I think that the most interesting finding here, and there were so many fascinating findings, so that’s saying something, was in the questions that we asked about what tasks do you do with AI? And what really amazed me was the huge variety of tasks. So I wasn’t surprised that research was, but I’m looking over to the side here just to make sure I get the information exactly accurate.

I wasn’t surprised that replacement for web search and finding words or phrases of thesaurus was something that people wanted, but I was surprised by how many people use AI as a brainstorming companion. That they’re actually asking questions about Can I write it this way or that way? What suggestions do you have? And getting great ideas back on that. To summarise articles is very popular, but you know, generate outlines, find flaws and inconsistencies. As a devil’s advocate, deep research reports. mean, this is, the people who get good at this, they keep coming up with new ways to use it.

So I think that if you look at what’s happening in the future, all this debate about AI-generated slop getting published is much less interesting to me than the capability that this has to make writers more powerful, smarter, more interesting, come up with more ideas, and to basically be an infinitely patient assistant that can get you to be the best writer you can possibly be.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, that devil’s advocate is one of the very first things I used it for when ChatGPT was first introduced. I would say I’m planning on communicating this this way. The goal, the objective is to get employees to think, believe, do X. What pushback am I going to get from this approach? And nine times out of 10, it would come up with a very valid list of reasons that this isn’t going to work. It would lead me to re-strategise.

Josh Bernoff

Well, Shel, as you know, you can contact me anytime if you need someone to tell you that you’re wrong! But I’m not available at three in the morning, and ChatGPT is so from that perspective, it’s probably better. Plus my rates are much higher than theirs.

Shel Holtz

Josh, how can our listeners find you?

Josh Bernoff

Well, the most interesting thing is to subscribe to my blog at bernoff.com. I actually write a blog post about books, writing, publishing, and authoring every weekday. People say, why do you do that? The only good answer I have is it’s a mental illness, but you may as well take advantage of it. And we shared the URL for this research report and certainly anyone who’s interested in writing a business book, just do a search on build a better business book and you can get access to that.

And certainly if someone is so desperate that they really want a human to help them, I am available for that.

Shel Holtz Thanks so much, Josh. We really appreciate your time.

Josh Bernoff Okay, was really great to talk to you.

Neville Hobson Yeah, a pleasure, likewise, thank you.

The post AI and the Writing Profession with Josh Bernoff appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Big Four consulting firm Deloitte submitted two costly reports to two governments on opposite sides of the globe, each containing fake resources generated by AI. Deloitte isn’t alone. A study published on the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) not only included AI-hallucinated citations but also purported to reach the exact opposite conclusion from the real scientists’ research. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel reiterate the importance of a competent human in the loop to verify every fact produced in any output that leverages generative AI.

Links from this episode:

Deloitte was caught using AI in $290,000 report to help the Australian government crack down on welfare after a researcher flagged hallucinations
Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government
Deloitte breaks silence on N.L. healthcare report
Deloitte Detected Using Fake AI Citations in $1 Million Report
Deloitte makes ‘AI mistake’ again, this time in report for Canadian government; here’s what went wrong
CDC Report on Vaccines and Autism Caught Citing Hallucinated Study That Does Not Exist

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everybody and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 491. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and I want to return to a theme we addressed some time ago: the need for organizations, and in particular communication functions, to add professional fact verification to their workflows—even if it means hiring somebody specifically to fill that role. We’ve spent the better part of three years extolling the transformative power of generative AI. We know it can streamline workflows, spark creativity, and summarize mountains of data.

But if recent events have taught us anything, it’s that this technology has a dangerous alter ego. For all that AI can do that we value, it is also a very confident liar. When communications professionals, consultants, and government officials hand over the reins to AI without checking its work, the result is embarrassing, sure, but it’s also a direct hit to credibility and, increasingly, the bottom line.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the recent stumbles by one of the world’s most prestigious consulting firms. The Big Four accounting firms are often held up as the gold standard for diligence. Yet just a few days ago, news broke that Deloitte Canada delivered a report to the government of Newfoundland and Labrador that was riddled with errors that are characteristic of generative AI. This report, a massive 526-page document advising on the province’s healthcare system, came with a price tag of nearly $1.6 million. It was meant to guide critical decisions on virtual care and nurse retention during a staffing crisis.

But when an investigation by The Independent, a progressive news outlet in the province, dug into the footnotes, the veneer of expertise crumbled. The report contained false citations pulled from made-up academic papers. It cited real research on papers they hadn’t worked on. It even listed fictional papers co-authored by researchers who said they had never actually worked together. One adjunct professor, Gail Tomlin Murphy, found herself cited in a paper that doesn’t exist. Her assessment was blunt: “It sounds like if you’re coming up with things like this, they may be pretty heavily using AI to generate work.”Deloitte’s response was to claim that AI wasn’t used to write the report, but was—and this is a quote—”selectively used to support a small number of research citations.” In other words, they let AI do the fact-checking and the AI failed.

Amazingly, Deloitte was caught doing something just like this earlier in a government audit for the Australian government. Only months before the Canadian revelation, Deloitte Australia had to issue a humiliating correction to a report on welfare compliance. That report cited court cases that didn’t exist and contained quotes from a federal court judge that had never been spoken. In that instance, Deloitte admitted to using the Azure OpenAI tool to help draft the report. The firm agreed to refund the Australian government nearly $290,000 Australian dollars.

This isn’t an isolated incident of a junior copywriter using ChatGPT to phone in a blog post. This is a pattern involving a major consultancy submitting government audits in two different hemispheres. The lesson is pretty stark: The logo on your letterhead isn’t going to protect you if the content is fiction. In fact, this could have long-term repercussions for the Deloitte brand.

But it doesn’t stop at consulting firms. Here in the US, we’ve seen similar failures in the public sector. There’s one from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission. They released a report with non-existent study citations to a presentation on the CDC website—that’s the Centers for Disease Control—citing a fake autism study that contradicted the real scientists’ actual findings.

The common thread here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the tool. For years, the mantra in our industry was a parroting of the old Ronald Reagan line: “Trust but verify.” When it comes to AI though, we just need to drop that “trust” part. It’s just verify. We have to remember that large language models are designed to predict the next plausible word, not to retrieve facts. When Deloitte’s AI invented a research paper or a court case, it wasn’t malfunctioning. It was doing exactly what it was trained to do: tell a convincing story.

And that brings us to the concept of the human in the loop. This phrase gets thrown around a lot in policy documents as a safety net, but these cases prove that having a human involved isn’t enough. You need a competent human in the loop. Deloitte’s Canadian report undoubtedly went through internal reviews. The Australian report surely passed across several desks. The failure here wasn’t just technological, it was a failure of human diligence. If you’re using AI to write content that relies on facts, data, or citations, you can’t simply be an editor. You must be a fact-checker.

Deloitte didn’t just lose money on refunds or potential reputational hits; they lost the presumption of competence. For those of us in PR and corporate communications, we’re the guardians of our organization’s truth. If we allow AI-generated confabulations to slip into our press releases, earnings statements, annual reports, or white papers, we erode the very foundation of our profession. Communicators need to update their AI policies. Make it explicit that no AI-generated fact, quote, or citation can be published without primary source verification. And you need to make sure that you have the human resources to achieve that. The cost of skipping that step, trust me, is a lot higher than a subscription to ChatGPT.

Neville Hobson: It’s quite a story, isn’t it really? I think you kind of get exasperated when we talk about something like this, because we’ve talked about this quite a bit. Most recently, in our interview with Josh Bernoff—which will be coming in the next day or so—where this very topic came up in discussion: fact-checking versus not doing the verification.

I suppose you could cut through all the preamble about the technology and all this stuff, and the issue isn’t that; it’s the humans involved. Now, we don’t know more than the Fortune article, I’ve seen the one in Entrepreneur magazine, and the link that you shared. Nowhere does it disclose detail about exactly what it was other than the citation. So we don’t know, was it prompted badly or what? Either way, someone didn’t check something. I don’t know how much you need to really hammer home the point that if you don’t verify what the AI assistant has responded to or the output to your input, then you’re just asking for this kind of trouble.

I did something just this morning, funnily enough, when I was doing some research. The question I asked came back with three comments linking to the sources. A bit like Josh—because Josh mentioned this in our interview—every instruction to your AI goes: “Do not come back with anything unless you’ve got a source.” And so I checked the sources, one of which just did not exist. The document concerned on the website of a reputable media company wasn’t there. Now, it could be that someone had moved it, or it did exist but it was in another location. But the trouble is, when these things happen, you tend to fall on the side of, “Look, they didn’t do this properly.”

So I’m not sure what I can add to the story, Shel, frankly. Your remarks towards the end about your reputation is the one that’s going to get hit. You look stupid. You really do. And your credibility suffers.

I found in Entrepreneur they quoted a Deloitte spokesperson saying, “Deloitte Canada firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report.” Excuse me? Where’s your little humility there? Because you’ve been caught out doing something here. And they’re saying, “We’re revising it to make a small number of citation corrections which do not impact the report finding.” What arrogance they are displaying there. Not anything about an apology—or fine, let’s say they don’t need an apology—but a more credible explainer that at least gives them the sense that they empathize here, rather than this arrogant, “Well, we stand by it.” It’s just a little citation? It’s actually a big deal that you quote as something that either doesn’t exist or is a fake document. Exactly. So I don’t know what I can say to add anything more. But if they keep doing this, they’re going to lose business big time, I would say.

Shel Holtz: It didn’t exist. Yeah, I understand their desire to stand by the report. I have no doubt that they had valid information and made valid recommendations, but that’s hardly the point. The inaccuracies call all of the report into question, even if at the end of the day they can demonstrate that they used appropriate protocols and methodologies to develop their recommendations based on accurate information.

You still have this lingering question: “Well, you got this wrong, what else did you get wrong? What else did you turn over to AI that you’re not telling us about because you didn’t get caught?” Even if they didn’t do any of that, those questions are there from the people who are the ones who paid for this report. If I were representing a government that needed this kind of work, first of all, I would be hesitant to reach out to Deloitte. I would be looking at one of their competitors.

If I had a long-standing relationship with Deloitte, and even if I had a high degree of trust with Deloitte, I would still add a rider to a contract that says either you will not use AI in the creation of this report, or if you do, you will verify each citation and you will refund us X dollars—the cost of this report—for each inaccurate, invalid verification that you submit. I’d want to cover my ass if I were a client based on having done this not once, but twice.

Neville Hobson: Right. I wonder what would have happened if the spokesman at Deloitte Canada had said something like, “You’re absolutely right. We’re sorry. We screwed up big time there. We made a mistake. Here’s what happened. We’ve identified where the fault lay, it’s ours, and we’re sorry. And we’re going to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Shel Holtz: “Here’s how we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Yeah, I mean, this is like any crisis. You want to tell people what you’re going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. So they say—and you mentioned—”AI was not used to write the report, it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations.” What does that mean, for God’s sake? That’s kind of corporate bullshit talk, frankly. So they use the AI to check the research citations? Well, they didn’t, did they? “Selectively used to support a small number of research citations…” I don’t know what that even means.

So I don’t think they’ve done themselves any favors with the way they’ve denied this and the way their reporting has spread out into a variety of other media, all basically saying the same thing: They did this work for this client and it was bad. Didn’t do a good job at all.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. So, I’m, as you know, finishing up work on a book on internal communications. It was originally 28 blog posts and I started this back in, I think, 2015. So a lot of the case studies have gotten old. So I did some research on new case studies and I used AI to find the case studies. And then I said, “Okay, now I need you to give me the links to sources that I can cite in the end notes of each chapter that verify this information.”

In a number of cases, it took me to 404s on legitimate websites—Inc, Fortune, Forbes, and the like. But the story wasn’t there and a search for it didn’t produce it. And I would have to go back and say, “Okay, that link didn’t work. Show me some that are verified.” And sometimes it took two, three, four shots before I got to one where I look and say, “It’s a credible source, it’s a national or global business publication or the Financial Times or what have you, the article is here and the article validates what was in the case study,” and that’s the one I would use. But it takes time, and I think any organization that doesn’t have somebody doing that runs the risk of the credibility hit that Deloitte’s facing.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I mean, this story is probably not going to be front-page headlines everywhere at all. But it hasn’t kind of died yet. Maybe there’s going to be more in professional journals later on about this. But I wonder what they’re planning next on this because the criticisms aren’t going away, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: No, and as the report noted, it’s not just the Deloittes of the world. It’s Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services justifying their advisory board’s decisions to rewrite the rules on vaccinations based on citations that not only don’t exist, but that contradict the actual research that the scientists produced.

Neville Hobson: Well, there is a difference there though. That’s run by crazy people. I mean, Deloitte’s not run by crazy people.

Shel Holtz: Not as far as I know. That’s true. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #491: Deloitte’s AI Verification Failures appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Studies purport to identify the sources of information that generative AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude draw on to provide overviews in response to search prompts. The information seems compelling, but different studies produce different results. Complicating matters is the fact that the kinds of sources AI uses one month aren’t necessarily the same the next month. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at a couple of these reports and the challenges communicators face relying on them to help guide their content marketing placements.

Links from this episode:

Webinar: What is AI Reading? (Muck Rack)
AI Search Volatility: Why AI Search Results Keep Changing
Study finds nearly two-thirds of AI-generated citations are fabricated or contain errors
Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 490 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. One of the big questions behind generative AI is also one of the simplest: What is it actually reading? What are these systems drawing on when they answer our questions, summarize a story, or tell us something about our own industry? A new report from Muckrec in October offers one of the clearest snapshots we’ve seen so far. They analyzed more than a million links cited by leading AI tools and discovered something striking.

When you switch citations on, the model doesn’t just add footnotes, it changes the answer itself. The sources it chooses shape the narrative, the tone, and even the conclusion. We’ll dive into this next.

Those sources are overwhelmingly from earned media. Almost all the links AI sites come from non-paid content, and journalism plays a huge role, especially when the query suggests something recent. In fact, the most commonly cited day for an article is yesterday. It’s a very different ecosystem from SEO, where you can sometimes pay your way to the top. Here, visibility depends much more on what is credible, current, and genuinely covered. So that gives us one part of the picture.

AI relies heavily on what is most available and most visible in the public domain. But that leads to another question, a more unsettling one raised by a separate study published in the JMIR Mental Health in November. Researchers examined how well GPT-4.0 performs when asked to generate proper academic citations. And the answer is not well at all. Nearly two thirds of the citations were either wrong or entirely made up.

The less familiar the topic, the worse the accuracy became. In other words, when AI doesn’t have enough real sources to draw from, it fills the gaps confidently. When you put these two pieces of research side by side, a bigger story emerges. On the one hand, AI tools are clearly drawing on a recognizable media ecosystem: journalism, corporate blogs, and earned content. On the other hand, when those sources are thin, or when the task shifts from conversational answers to something more formal, like scientific referencing, the system becomes much less reliable. It starts inventing the citations it thinks should exist.

We end up with a very modern paradox. AI is reading more than any of us ever could, but not always reliably. It’s influenced by what is published, recent, and visible, yet still perfectly capable of fabricating material when the trail runs cold. There’s another angle to this that’s worth noting.

Nature reported last week that more than 20% of peer reviews for a major AI conference were entirely written by AI, many containing hallucinated citations and vague or irrelevant analysis. So if you think about that in the context of the Muckrec findings in particular, it becomes part of a much bigger story. AI tools are reading the public record, but increasing parts of that public record are now being generated by AI itself.

The oversight layer that you use to catch errors is starting to automate as well. And that creates a feedback loop where flawed material can slip into the system and later be treated as legitimate source material. For communicators, that’s a reminder that the integrity of what AI reads is just as important as the visibility of what we publish. All this raises fundamental questions. How much has earned media now underpin what AI says about a brand?

If citations actively reshape AI outputs, what does that mean for accuracy and trust? How do we work in a world where AI can appear transparent, citing its sources, while still producing invented references in other contexts? And the Muckrec and MJIR studies show that training data coverage, not truth, determines what AI cites. So the question, is AI reading, has two answers, I think. It reads what is most visible and recent in the public domain, and it invents what it thinks should exist when the knowledge isn’t there. That gap between the real and the fabricated is now a core communication risk for organizations. How do you see it, Shel? Thoughts on that?

Shel Holtz It is a very, very complex issue. I was looking at a study from Profound called AI Search Volatility. And what it found was that search engines within the AI context, the search that ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude conduct, are probabilistic rather than deterministic, which means that they’re designed to give different answers and to cite different resources, even for the same query over time.

Another thing that this study found was that there is citation drift. That is, the percentage of domains cited in July are not necessarily present in June for the same prompts. You look at these results, the number that weren’t present in June that were in July for Google AI overviews, nearly 60%, just over 54% for ChatGPT, over 53% for Co-Pilot, and over 40% for Perplexity. So 40 to 60% of the domains that are cited in AI responses are going to be different a month later for the same prompt. And this volatility increases over time, goes from 70 to 90 percent over a six month period.

So you look at one of these studies that’s a snapshot in time and it’s not necessarily telling you that you should be using this information as a strategy to guide where you’re going to publish your content if the sources are going to drift. And by the way, a profound study by their AEO specialist, a guy named Josh Bliskolp, found that AI relies heavily on social media and user generated content, which is different from what the Muckrec study found. They were probably getting that snapshot in time where the citations had drifted. So, while I think all these studies are interesting, I think what it tells us as communicators looking to show up in these answers is we need to be everywhere.

Neville Hobson Yeah, I’ve been trying to get my head around this. I must admit reading these reports and the Nature one kind of threw me sideways when I found that because I thought how relevant is that to the topic we’re discussing in this podcast? And so my further research showed it is relevant as the content is being fed back into the system and that’s showing up in social results. You’re right. In another sense, I think you can get all these survey reports and dissect them which way to Christmas.

But they have credibility in my eyes, certainly, particularly Muckrec’s. I find the MJIR one equally good, but it touches on areas that I’m not wholly familiar with. This one in Nature is equally good, quite troubling, I think, that that one shows. Listening to how you were describing the profound report on citation consistency over time, I just kept thinking now about the Nature one as an example, let’s say. What if that sounds great, it’s measuring citation consistency over time, but what if the citations are fake, they’re full of hallucinations, they’re full of invalid information? Where does that sit? That’s my question, I suppose.

Shel Holtz Well, yeah, this shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s been paying attention. AI still confabulates. It’s still at the bottom. I think of the ChatGPT or Gemini that this is still prone to misinformation. They are configured more to satisfy your query than they are to be accurate. So when they can’t find or don’t know an accurate citation, they’ll make one up.

We still have attorneys who are filing briefs with cases that don’t actually exist. So this is the nature of the beast right now. If you’re not verifying the information that you get before you do something with it, that’s on you. That’s not on the AI. They’re telling you that these things still hallucinate. They’re working on it. They hope to have that fixed one of these days, but they’re not quite sure how that actually works. So it’s not like just going in and turning a dial or flipping a switch, the researchers are struggling to figure this out. And if it were that easy, they would have done it by now.

Neville Hobson Sure. Although what you just said does not come across at all in any of the communication you see from any of the chatbot makers, except in four point tight at the bottom, you know, it can hallucinate, you need to do your verification. I don’t hear that clear call to a kind of a warning shot, if you like, from anyone when they’re talking about all this stuff, and that needs to change in that case. I don’t feel that it’s as bad as what I got from what you were saying.

Although the point does rear itself quite clearly and it’s got to be repeated again and again. You’ve got to double check everything that you run through. Well, not run through an AI, but the results you get when you do a search. So, you know, it’s all very well talking about citation consistency of time frame from one month to the next. You’ve got to check that yourself. The question will arise, I think, for many. How do you do that? You might use a chatbot to do it, would you? Of course you would, because it’s a tool you’ve got in your armory, but you’ve got to check that.

Shel Holtz Well, I’ve got Google in my armory too. If I see it make an assertion and has a citation, I’m going to go to Google and look it up. I’m not going to look up the URL that the chat doc presented. I’m going to type in the information about the report or the study or the white paper or whatever it was that is cited and see if I can find it. And then if I can and it’s the right one, I’m going to check and see if the link is the same one that the AI provided.

I did a white paper. I used Google Gemini’s deep research for the first pass of this, it was loaded with citations. Where I spent my time wasn’t in doing the initial research, it was validating every citation that it provided before I passed this along to people. So that’s got to be part of the workflow with these things for now. I hope they fix it one day, but for now, you can’t just crank one of these things out and, you know, submit it to a judge or, you know, use it in your medical practice or pass it along to your boss. You have to validate that it’s all accurate.

Neville Hobson Yeah. By the way, didn’t you say once a long time ago now, I expect you didn’t use Google anymore? was only only ChatGPT or Gemini.

Shel Holtz I switch back and forth based on which one is performing better on the benchmarks. I also find that the three primary models, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude, are better at different things. So I tend to use different ones for different things. But Gemini 3.0 is spectacular. This most recent upgrade that just came out, I think it was last week, wasn’t it? It’s amazing. So I have sort of shifted most of my work using one of the large language models to Gemini right now. I still use ChatGPT for a few things right now. Of course, they’re going to come out with their own big upgrade, probably. Well, there’s some speculation before the end of the year. So we’ll see where they land. But right now, I find Google Gemini is best for a number of things. And by the way, Nano Banana Pro, the image generator. If I were the product manager for Photoshop or for Canva, I’d be worried because you can just upload an image and edit it in Nano Banana with plain text and just tell it what you want done and it does it and pretty awesome. I’ve been playing with it. I can tell you what I did with it, but it’s spectacular.

Neville Hobson Okay, so yeah.

Shel Holtz And fast. You compare that to OpenAI’s image generator, which takes minutes. You’re just sitting there watching this gray blob slowly resolve. Nano Banana’s, boom, there it is.

Neville Hobson Yeah, I see a lot of people posting examples of what it can do. It looks pretty good. So going back to this, though, I think let’s talk a bit about the kind of verification because I think many people know, I don’t know how many it might be, maybe a small number needs some guidance in what to do with that. It’s a quite an additional step, you might argue, in what some people see as the speed and simplicity of using an AI tool to conduct your research, for instance, or to summarize a PDF file or whatever it might be. So what would be your tips for a communicator then on building this into the workflow so that it becomes a natural part of what they’re doing and not a pain in the ass, frankly? So what would you say to them?

Shel Holtz Yeah, well, my tip is to build it into the workflow. It’s still going to save you, well, first of all, it’s still going to save you time. For me to go through and validate the facts that are presented in a bit of AI research takes me less time than it would to conduct the research and draft the white paper. And by the way, I want to be sure everyone understands, I do heavily edit the white paper for language, for style. I rewrite entire sections based on how I would say this. But for that first draft, think that’s the point is that you have to look at these as a first draft. This is why we have interns, right? Is to crank out first drafts of things and save us the time. And I still think that metaphor for AI being a really smart intern who doesn’t go home at the end of the day, doesn’t need a paycheck and just works 24 hours and never gets sick. I think that’s an apt metaphor.

But to just ignore the need to review these things and think it’s going to give you a finished product, that’s a mistake. And you need to come up with a workflow, define your own, but it has to include validation of the information that it provided. If it doesn’t, you’re setting yourself up for some real grief. I mean, if you share the results of that with somebody who is important in your career, in your life, and they make decisions based on it that turn out to be bad decisions because it was a confabulated citation, then that’s going to roll right back on you. So you have to build it into the workflow, just like any other workflow. This is the step that comes after the first step.

Neville Hobson I wonder if this is, tell me what you think, is this significantly more concerning if you’re in academia, say, or working for scientific firm in the science side of things, where peer reviewed, citation-led work on research for medical breakthroughs, or whatever it might be, or scientific discoveries, typically takes months, if not years to go through a process. What would you do if you were in that situation where you are, I know they’re relying on this and this is now emerging that academic papers in particular, well becoming what, untrustworthy? That’s to me is a pretty big deal if many people see it that way. I’m just curious how you discuss that with someone.

Shel Holtz I don’t think my guidance would change. There is an obligation to ensure that what you are sharing is accurate. And if you are using Gen. AI to produce some or all of this report, that obligation extends to fact checking. Mean, hire an intern to do the fact checking so that you have time to do other things. There’s a reason to have an intern. I’ve had this as a question that we hear, if AI can do what an intern can do, what will an intern do? And the answer may be validate what the AI cranks out.

But the risk is so severe that this just needs to become a matter of routine. And especially in science, where these things can be translated into medicines and treatment protocols and the like, you don’t want to be responsible for people getting sicker or dying because you had a confabulated resource or a citation that you didn’t check before you moved on to the next step with this. And if the peer review of the document that you have created produces those errors, if the peers that are reviewing it find the fictitious citations or the wrong citations, it’s your reputation that’s on the line. No one’s going to blame the AI. They’re going to blame you. So your credibility is on the line.

One other point I want to make here in terms of what I would recommend, I would go back to Ginny Dietrich’s PESO model, paid, earned, social and owned, and recognize that that model hasn’t changed in the age of AI. If you want to be cited, don’t chase the shiny object of the latest report that says, it’s reading this, it’s reading that. The fact that it shifts from month to month means you need to be in all those places. And before AI, we were paying a lot of attention to the PESO model. And I’d hate to see it fall by the wayside as lazy people think they can get away with just doing one thing. It’s gotten so easy because AI reads this. Well, that’s this month. Next month, you’re toast.

Neville Hobson Yeah, of course I recall that many people I know still now talk about I don’t need an intern anymore because I have an AI.

Shel Holtz Yeah, well, then they must be spending a, they’re either spending a lot of time validating with the AI produced or they’re putting garbage out into the world.

Neville Hobson I sense not a lot of time, actually. So this then comes back to you got to put in the time. On the some of the work that I’ve been doing recently on research reminds me of something I did, I guess, two weeks ago, which was checking the links in a report that cited this, this and this. And I would say of the 65 or so links I checked 15 404s or not known or not, you know, or even the browser errors you get when it can’t connect to something. So no one had checked those. But I’m okay with that because that’s why I’m here. That’s what I will do. And you’ve got to do it. I agree, you’ve got to do it.

Shel Holtz Well, exactly. Yeah, and the net is still a gain for you, the communicator. You’re still going to save time. You’re just not going to save as much as you think you will if you don’t have to do anything other than write a prompt. There’s more to it than that.

Neville Hobson Right. So I would say that could to conclude on that then we kind of rang the alarm bell about in the in my narrative intro about, you know, this this report in Nature in particular, that flagged up all these fake citations. Just see that then as something if you’ve got a report that that had lots of links in there and all sorts of things being said, you have to manually check each one. And that then comes

Shel Holtz Yes, yes you do.

Neville Hobson back to good old Google probably. But it’s not just the tool, it’s the framework under which you do it in that for instance, minor thing. But if I was doing that, now I would be doing it on a clean interface like the browser I’m not logged into, probably different browser perhaps than I normally using even a different computer if I really wanted to take to extreme level. But it gives you more confidence that your own persona, if you like, is not influencing anything even unbeknownst to you that it might be doing. I mean, I’m not saying it is, but this gives you the, the best way of doing it, I would say so this is best practice. So we should write a best practice guide on this, perhaps. But you know, it’s it’s food for thought.

Shel Holtz It certainly is. And by the way, I think I said paid, earned, social and owned when I was running down what the letters in PESO stand for. The S is actually shared, which includes social, but has a few other things in it. Go look up Ginny Dietrich’s PESO model, folks, and you’ll find it.

Neville Hobson think she did an update to to this for the AI age. I’ve seen to recall a lot of talk about that. Yeah, as well as a tool for ChatGPT that that you could use just, you know, based on that, basically.

Shel Holtz She did. Yeah, she did. I believe she did. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #490: What Does AI Read? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the long-form episode for November 2025, Shel and Neville riff on a post by Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute, who identifies “idea inflation” as a growing problem on multiple levels. Idea inflation occurs when leaders prompt an AI model to generate 20 ideas for thought leadership posts, then send them to the communications team to convert them into ready-to-publish content. Also in this episode:

A growing number of companies are moving branding under the communications umbrella, detouring around Marketing and the CMO. It’s all about safeguarding reputation.
Quantum computing has been a topic of conversation in tech circles for years. Now, its arrival as a commercially viable product is imminent. Communicators need to prepare.
AI’s ability to generate software code from a plain-language prompt has put the power to create apps in the hands of almost anyone. There are communication implications.
Share some photos of yourself with an AI model, or companies that provide this as a service, and you can get an amazing likeness of yourself. But is it okay to use it as your LinkedIn profile?
Research finds that leaders not only handle change management badly, but it’s also having an impact on employees who have to endure the process. Communicators can help.
In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on WhatsApp launching third-party chat integration in Europe; X is finally rolling out Chat, its DM replacement, with encryption and video calling; Mozilla has announced an AI “window” for the Firefox browser; WordPress 6.9 offers new features, collaboration tools, and AI enhancements; Amazon has rebranded Project Kuper as Amazon Leo; and Open AI says it has “fixed” ChatGPT’s em dash problem. (We dispute that it’s a problem.)

Links from this episode:

Why companies are merging communications and brand under one leader
Will quantum be bigger than AI?
‘Vibe coding’ and other ways AI is changing who can build apps and how
The market has spoken: Vibe coding is serious business
The potential of vibe coding
Everything Wrong with Vibe Coding and How to Fix It
Vibe Coding: How to Avoid Over-Engineering and Build Smarter, Not Harder
Mastering Vibe Coding: How to Get Better AI-Generated Code Every Time
Why AI Thought Leadership Hurts Content Teams
Is it Ok to use AI-generated images for LinkedIn Profiles?
Your Staff Thinks Management Is Inefficient—They May Have a Point

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 489 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form monthly episode for November 2025. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in England.

Shel Holtz: We have a jam-packed show for you today. Virtually every story we’re going to cover has an artificial intelligence angle. That shouldn’t be a surprise — AI seems to dominate communication conversations everywhere these days.

We do hope that you will engage with this show by leaving a comment. There are so many ways that you can leave a comment. You can leave one right there on the show notes at firpodcastnetwork.com. You can even leave an audio comment from there. Just click the “record voicemail” button that you’ll see on the side of the page, and you can leave up to a 90-second audio.

You can also send us an audio clip — just record it, attach it to an email, send it to fircomments@gmail.com. You can comment on the posts we publish on LinkedIn and Facebook and elsewhere, announcing the availability of a new episode.

There are just so many ways that you can leave a comment and we hope you will — and also rate and review the show. That’s what brings new listeners aboard.

As I mentioned, we have a jam-packed show today, but Neville, I wanted to mention before we even get into our rundown of previous episodes: did you see the study that showed that podcasting is very male-dominated as a medium?

Neville Hobson: I did see something in one of my news feeds, but I haven’t read it.

Shel Holtz: I heard about it on a podcast — I don’t remember which one — but I found it really interesting because the conversation was all about equity. And I’m certainly not in favor of male-dominated anything, but podcasting is not an industry where there is a CEO who can mandate an initiative to bring women into a more equitable position in podcasting.

This is a medium — let’s face it, even though The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and other major media organizations have jumped into the podcasting waters — where it’s essentially a hobbyist occupation. You and I started this because we wanted to, and the tools are available to anybody who wants them.

I remember when we started this, one of the analogies we used was trying to walk into a radio station and say, “Hey, I want to have an hour-long show every day on public relations.” You’d be laughed out of the radio station because there’s not an audience big enough to support that kind of content. But here, if you can find an audience, you can have a podcast.

So I don’t know how you go about making this more equitable, but I found that to be an interesting perspective.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. There are some podcasts I’ve listened to that are hosted by women — which, frankly, are few beyond the realms of kind of “feminine-oriented” content. But there are a couple in our area of interest in communication that are. So they’re out there, but the majority, very much, are men.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. I mean, just in internal communications, there’s Katie Macaulay, and there are a lot of women doing communication-focused podcasts. Maybe if you’re going to look for somebody to make this a more equitable media space, it has to start with the mainstream media organizations that are producing podcasts — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal of the world.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, over here you’ve got The Times and a few others who have women doing this. They are there in the mainstream media orientation, but the kind of homebrew content that we started out with, I don’t see too many.

Shel Holtz: No.

Well, Neville, why don’t we move into our rundown of previous episodes?

Neville Hobson: Okay, let’s get into it.

So we’ve got a handful of shows. We’re actually recording this monthly episode about a week and a half earlier than we normally would. I think the reason for that, Shel, is something to do with U.S. holidays, your travel, and stuff like that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m going to be in San Diego next weekend, visiting my daughter and granddaughter because they’re not able to come up here for Thanksgiving. And then the next weekend is Thanksgiving weekend. So that’s why this is early this month.

Neville Hobson: Right. Okay, that explains it.

We are, we are. So, not too many episodes since the last one, but they’re good ones, though, I have to say.

Before we talk about those, let’s mention episode 485, which was prior to the last monthly. We had a comment.

Shel Holtz: We had two that we didn’t have when we ran down this episode in our last monthly episode. The first is from Katie Howell, who says, “Already reward return visits over one-off reach and the clever brands are catching up. If your brief still says ‘go viral,’ you’re chasing a metric that won’t help you keep your job. Repeat engagement with the right people is the proper goal. Less glamorous, miles more useful.”

And Andy Green says, “Good clarification over strategies, but you also need to recognize viral — also known as meme-friendly — is at the heart of effective communications. Also greater recognition of the impact of zeitgeist. Check out Steven Pinker’s latest book, When Everyone Notes.”

Neville Hobson: They were on LinkedIn, I think, weren’t they? That’s where most of them come in.

So, to the ones we did: we have the monthly of October that we did on the 27th of October, when it was published. The lead story we focused on in the headline was “Measuring sentiment won’t help you maintain trust.” Other topics — there were five others — including an interesting one: Lloyds Bank, the CEO and executive team learning AI to reimagine the future of banking with generative AI.

We talked about case studies in a piece that described, “Conduct, culture, and context collide: three crisis case studies,” reviewed in Provoke Media.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they did 13 or 14 case studies. It was a very interesting article, so we highlighted a couple. And there was more content there too.

Neville Hobson: Episode 487, we published on the 5th of November. This was a really interesting discussion. You and I analyzed and discussed Martin Waxman’s LinkedIn post about slower publishing, deeper thinking, better outcomes — a pivot he’s made with his business and his newsletter.

He left a number of comments, but on the show notes post he left a long comment that was great. We don’t normally get comments on the show notes, so thank you, Martin.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there were several comments from Martin. I’m going to run through these. He said, “Thank you for having me as a virtual guest once-removed on the episode, Neville. I just listened today and enjoyed your and Shel’s take on my post. You gave me a fresh perspective and I was honored and thrilled to be a conversation topic. And thanks to both of you for holding up the comms podcasting torch all these years and having a lot of fascinating and insightful ideas to share.”

You replied. You said, “Thanks so much, Martin. It was our pleasure. Your post struck a chord with many of us who feel the pace accelerating. It was a great springboard for our discussion, and I’m glad our take offered something new in return. Slowing down to think more deeply about how we use AI feels like the most human move we can make right now.”

But Martin also posted on his own LinkedIn account — and this isn’t short, so bear with us, everybody, as I read through this because I think it’s worth sharing:

“As the first and longest-running communications podcast — and one I’ve been listening to for a long time — this meant a lot. As I listened and heard Shel and Neville’s take on my observations, I gained a new perspective, one I didn’t see when I was writing and revising my post.

“Something I didn’t mention out loud is that it’s been getting more and more difficult to come up with fresh ideas on where AI fits in marketing and communications and the various implications around that, the kind that inspire a person to write. Like social media, it feels like we’ve tipped past the point of saturation.

“As Shel said, we’re now getting drenched by the all-too-familiar commentary and quasi-expert advice swirling around our feeds. That certainly doesn’t diminish the utility of AI or using it where it helps. And I appreciate Shel’s view on how AI helps speed up doing the good-enough tasks that are inherent in all work, to concentrate on the things you want to spend more time on.

“I could also relate to Neville’s comments about saying no to projects that don’t excite you so you can focus on the ones that do. And yes, the three of us are all fortunate to have reached that stage in our careers when we have a little more freedom to pick and choose. I also realize that many people aren’t in that situation.

“As someone who has spent my entire career writing, it’s exciting and a bit frightening to wonder what I’m going to write about next. Yet there’s energy in uncertainty. So thank you to Shel and Neville for having me back as a guest, albeit one who didn’t have to press record.”

Neville Hobson: Really, really super comments that Martin left. Thank you, Martin.

And then our final one before this episode, 488, we published on the 10th of November. I enjoyed this discussion a lot — about Coca-Cola’s generative AI Christmas video that they have done before, but this one got rid of all the people; it was full of bunny rabbits and sloths and all sorts of stuff and those red trucks.

There were plenty of opinions out there, ranging from “What a creative and technical masterpiece this is” to “Utter AI slop.” So we were quite impressed with it and stood back to look at what they were doing rather than being judgmental in any shape or form. But there were plenty of comments, and we had at least one we should mention, right?

Shel Holtz: Yes, from Barbara Nixon, who said, “Thanks for sharing this. I’ll use it as a basis of discussion in my PR writing class next week.”

Neville Hobson: That’s cool. So that’s the content leading up to this one. And of course, now we’re in the November episode that kicks off the next cycle of reporting for the next edition, when I can talk about what we did since this edition.

Shel Holtz: That’s right. And I also want to let everyone know that there is a Circle of Fellows coming up. I would be reporting on this if we were recording at the normal time of the month toward the end of the month, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It is coming up on November 25th, Tuesday instead of Thursday, because Thursday that week is Thanksgiving. So it’s happening at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, November 25th. This is episode 122, and the topic is “Preparing Communication Professionals for the Future.”

It’s a larger-than-usual panel — there are five Fellows instead of four. It’s going to be a good discussion. I think the future — obviously AI factors in here, I think quantum computing does too, as we’re going to talk about shortly in this episode — but also changes in business trends. The zeitgeist is changing, and politics is going to have more of an influence on business. All of these are things that I’m sure we will be discussing.

We look forward to having you join us for that. Of course, if you can’t be there to watch it in real time, it is available both as a video replay on YouTube and as an audio podcast that you can subscribe to right here on the FIR Podcast Network.

And we will now jump into our content for the month — but not until we run this ad for you.

Neville Hobson: So, one of the most interesting shifts happening inside large organizations right now is the move to combine communication and brand under a single leader. We’re seeing this across companies as varied as IBM, GM, Anthropic, and Dropbox, and the trend is accelerating.

According to research cited by Axios, CCO-plus roles — where communication leaders take on brand or marketing responsibilities — have risen nearly 90% in recent years.

What’s driving this? The short answer is volatility, says Axios. AI is changing how people discover what a company stands for, and reputational storms seem to ignite faster and with far greater consequences. A marketing decision that once would have sparked a debate in a meeting room can now become a political flashpoint within hours. That forces the question of who should really own the brand narrative.

Communication leaders are increasingly being seen as the natural fit. They understand stakeholders. They have a risk mindset. And they are often the ones who know how to navigate the cultural and political sensitivities that shape reputation today.

In other words, this is not just about messaging. It’s about trust, judgment, and the ability to connect what a company says with how it behaves. There is still a need for specialist marketing functions, but for many companies, brand stewardship is shifting toward the people who are closest to reputation.

And in a world where AI can bend or reinterpret a narrative in seconds, bringing communication and brand together under one trusted voice feels less like a structural tweak and more like a survival strategy.

So the bigger question for us is what this means for the future of the communication profession. Are we seeing the emergence of a new kind of leadership role — or simply a correction to reflect the reality that brand and reputation have always belonged together?

Shel Holtz: That’s a very interesting trend, and I don’t disagree with it in general. If you look at the big picture, it does make sense. Public relations is all about reputation; it’s all about maintaining relationships with the various stakeholder audiences.

So, as a communicator, you tend to have a big picture. You understand what the reputation is among investors, among the local communities in which your organization operates, among the media, for example, among your customers.

Marketing is all about driving leads for sales in most industries, and they don’t necessarily have that big picture. So it makes sense. And to bring marketing into the communication fold means that you get the benefits of the things that marketing is exceptional at — and branding is one of those things.

Most communicators aren’t involved in developing the trademarks for the organization and the logos and the like — that tends to be marketing, and for good reason. But to have that within the purview of communications enables that chief communication officer-plus to ensure that what’s coming out of that operation aligns with and is consistent with the things that we know drive the reputation of the organization.

You can find some gotchas maybe in the outputs that they’re developing that they wouldn’t have thought of.

That said, I know in my industry, which is commercial construction, the marketing department is not doing traditional marketing. There’s not a lot of effort to drive leads. The relationships with prospective clients are driven through other means. It’s getting to know people through industry contacts and the like. It’s building those personal relationships with developers and owners and the like.

I’ve just celebrated my eighth anniversary where I work, so I’ve seen this in play for long enough to understand that it’s right and it works very, very well.

In my company, the marketing department is also the steward of the brand, and I am fine with that because I’m mostly doing internal communications. I’m also responsible for PR, as far as it goes — media relations and the like — but I don’t have that relationship with the client base. Not at all. It’s rare that I meet a client. Usually I’ll shake hands at a groundbreaking or something like that if I’m out covering it, but by and large, this is something that the marketing department does.

So I’m inclined to say I agree with this, but it depends. And I think there are probably exceptions, and my industry is probably one of them. I’m part of a group called the Construction Communicators Roundtable — 18 or 20 commercial construction companies represented there — and I get the impression that it is the same with all of them. So this may be an industry-by-industry thing.

I don’t disagree with it, but I do think it depends.

Neville Hobson: “I think it depends” is definitely the start point to the discussion on this, I would say. My thought when I read the article — and the reason I included it in the topics for this episode — was precisely that: it does depend.

I’m not sure it is strictly industry-by-industry, meaning that this industry is entirely this way and this one isn’t. It’s probably a mixture. But there are some compelling reasons, I think, why it makes sense to do this even with the argument you’ve made for not doing it, let’s say.

For instance, one interpretation I have from Axios’s research is that the argument is: brand is no longer just a marketing asset. It’s a reputational construct shaped by every stakeholder interaction. That squarely leans toward understanding the impact on reputation — particularly in that communicators are the ones for that, not the marketing person.

It also speaks to the need for a trusted, politically aware leader. This combined role, according to Axios, is shaped by the reality that brand crises are increasingly political. Organizations want leaders who bring judgment, sensitivity, and crisis literacy. And that, in my view, leans much more into the communication person than the marketing/brand person.

And the one I think that is most interesting is the broader reinvention of the communication function. Sorry, marketing folks — this is about communication. The trend echoes the ongoing elevation of communicators as strategic partners rather than support functions, reinforcing the argument that communication is increasingly a governance role, not just an executional one.

Now, that argument would apply to marketing too, but not in quite the same way. Taking into account all of that — particularly the connection with reputation, the political awareness, and I like this term “crisis literacy,” fair enough, it’s a good way of describing it — this is more likely to fit in the bucket where the communicator sits than the marketing one.

And by the way, I’ve seen a number of people’s job titles — communication and brand. And I saw someone recently on LinkedIn who is a Chief Communication Officer and Director of Brand and Reputation, playing exactly to what Axios’s point is.

So yes, “it depends,” but I think there’s a compelling reason why, if you’ve got to pick one person, it should be the communicator.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and again, I don’t disagree. And still I am untroubled by the fact that marketing owns the brand where I work. And I should clarify: they’re not engaged in traditional marketing. This is not a marketing department like at, say, Procter & Gamble or Coca-Cola. They’re engaged primarily in business development.

So they’re putting together the proposals, they’re responding to the RFPs, they’re preparing the members of the team to go out and be interviewed by the owner or the developer who’s selecting the general contractor. So it is B2B. And, I mean, if they’re not concerned about the organization’s reputation, nobody is.

So this is why I say it depends.

The other point I will make is that even though we are not part of the same reporting structure, we’re pretty well joined at the hip. The VP of Marketing and I talk all the time. He’ll call me into his office to run stuff by me, I’ll run stuff by him. We meet regularly. We have a marketing director right now we are working with incredibly closely to develop a year-long recruiting campaign. We’ve won a ton of work and we need to staff up to support that work.

We’re going to take advantage of her expertise in branding and in marketing to recruits, and we’re going to take advantage of our expertise and the things that we do well. And that collaboration is probably going to produce a much better result than if it had just been one of us or the other of us.

So at the end of the day, I don’t think it matters who has the highest title, as long as everybody’s working together, they’re aligned, and they’re working toward the same goals. So again, I don’t disagree with the sentiment and the underlying foundation of the point that was made in this piece, but I think there are organizations where that is being done without having the communicator necessarily at the top of the food chain.

Neville Hobson: That’s the place where I think the communicator should be — which, of course, plays to the decades-old desire expressed by many in our profession that the communicator needs a seat at the top table.

I guess the concluding point I would say is: anyone listening to this discussion who occupies that joint function and would care to share his or her thinking about all of that — we’d love to hear a comment.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, a seat at the table, yeah.

We would always love to hear comments.

If you feel like AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, you’re not wrong. It seems like it was just last week we were talking about blockchain and the metaverse and a slew of other technologies. But while we’ve been fine-tuning prompts and governance, another technology has been quietly moving toward the comms agenda — and that is quantum computing.

The BBC recently framed it as potentially as big, if not bigger, than AI. It’s time to start paying attention to quantum computing and how it matters to communicators.

A quick primer: classical computers process bits, zeros and ones. Quantum computers use quantum bits, known as qubits, which can be zero and one at the same time. That’s called superposition.

If you read the book or watched the Apple TV series Dark Matter — I did, it was really good — you know about superposition, and it has been the foundation of a lot of other science fiction: this idea of being able to be in two places at the same time, quantum superposition.

Two, the zero and one in the same place at the same time can influence each other through something called entanglement — a phenomenon where two or more quantum bits, those qubits, become linked, sharing a single quantum state, so they cannot be described independently even when separated by vast distances.

In some problem classes — chemistry, simulation, optimization, factoring — this enables speed-ups that make the impossible suddenly possible. The machines we have today are still noisy, error-prone. But the security world is acting as if a capable quantum machine will arrive within the planning horizon, which is why standards bodies and platforms are shifting now.

You’ve already seen early signals in consumer tech: post-quantum cryptography, warnings from cybersecurity experts, and quantum-resistant messaging from big platforms. Quantum-resistant messaging uses new encryption algorithms to protect communication from both current and future quantum computers. It’s also called post-quantum cryptography and aims to safeguard data by using mathematical problems that are believed to be difficult for both classical and quantum computers to solve — unlike current algorithms, which can be broken by a powerful enough quantum computer.

In fact, I’m reading a really interesting book right now. It takes place about 150 years in the future, and everything that we today thought was encrypted and nobody would ever see — they’re seeing it all because they have access to quantum computing.

These aren’t just niche issues. They tie directly into how you tell stories, how you prepare for crises, and how you work.

So what does this mean for communicators beyond asking IT if we’re on top of it? I’m going to run through three buckets, and then we’ll tie in how quantum and AI overlap, because that’s where things get especially interesting.

First, storytelling and public understanding. Quantum is famously hard to explain, which makes it vulnerable to hype and confusion. Your job is to translate it without overselling it. “Quantum-safe” doesn’t mean “quantum-proof,” for example, and timelines remain uncertain — we don’t know when you’re going to be able to go to your local Best Buy and get a quantum computer.

You’ll want to build narratives now that help your audience support the idea that your organization is looking ahead, not getting caught flat-footed. Use everyday language. Say, “We’re updating encryption today to protect the data of tomorrow.” That works better than “We’re quantum resilient.” You’ll gain credibility when you help people understand what’s changing and why they should care.

Second, this is all about crisis preparedness and trust. If your organization holds long-lived sensitive data — health records, intellectual property, government contracts — then you need a communications plan for cryptographic agility. That means plain-language FAQs explaining why you are updating encryption, updates to stakeholders as you migrate to approved standards, and scenario planning for legacy data exposure.

Quantum computing introduces a new dimension of risk: the idea that what you publish or promise today could be decrypted or exposed years later. In a crisis, you’ll need to be ready to say, “We anticipated this risk, and here’s what we did.” That anticipatory positioning goes a long way toward preserving trust.

Third, it’s about how communicators can use quantum — and quantum plus artificial intelligence — in our work. Eventually, you’ll have new tools. For example, quantum computing may be able to provide far more advanced modeling of message flows, audience networks, and sentiment behavior, letting you identify optimal outreach paths or refine campaigns under dynamic conditions.

You could simulate scenarios in complex environments more quickly, refining your messages in a what-if matrix classical tools can’t easily handle. These scenarios might include things like stakeholder cascade effects, social media virality, and supply chain disruption.

And as quantum key distribution and quantum-resistant encryption mature, you’ll be in a position to tell audiences, “Our channels use the latest quantum-secure messaging,” which becomes a differentiator from your competitors.

Then there’s the overlap with AI. Quantum computing will amplify AI’s capabilities, helping it crunch deeper patterns faster and handle volumes of data plus complexity that classical systems struggle with. For communicators, that means the analytics layer you rely on — for sentiment, for influence mapping, for risk modeling — will evolve.

AI plus quantum means faster insights, more complex scenario modeling, and new ways to anticipate issues before they explode. So when you describe your comms strategy, you might say, “We use advanced modeling powered by AI today, and we’re tracking quantum-enabled tools so we’re positioned for the next wave.”

The fact is, quantum isn’t just a side story to AI — it’ll reshape AI. Research indicates that quantum computing and AI together massively increase computational speed and breadth of analysis. For example, quantum can remove some of the bottlenecks in data size, complexity, and simulation time that limit today’s AI systems.

For you as a communicator, that means three practical things.

First, what you pitch as “AI-enabled” today will evolve into “AI-plus-quantum-enabled,” and part of the story you tell stakeholders is, “We’re future-proofing so we don’t fall behind.”

Second, monitoring of reputational risk must extend to both AI misuse and quantum misuse — encryption break, advanced surveillance, things like that. The combination raises the bar for your “what could go wrong” list.

And third, your metrics and narrative signals will shift. When AI and quantum intersect, you’ll need to help people understand not just faster insights, but insights from a new class of computing. That means simplified metaphors and careful framing. The message no longer just flows faster — the infrastructure itself is changing. If AI rewrote the message, quantum will test the envelope it travels in.

You don’t need to wait until quantum has fully arrived. You need to start telling that story now. You need to show that your organization is looking ahead, educating stakeholders, and building trust today so that when the change arrives, you’re not scrambling.

Neville Hobson: Well, that’s heavy stuff, Shel.

It’s interesting how Zoe Kleinman, the BBC journalist who wrote this piece, started her article. She says, “You can either explain quantum accurately or in a way that people understand, but you can’t do both.” So I think this is very much in the “accurately” bucket, this discussion.

Shel Holtz: Isn’t it, though? I strive for accuracy.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, and she notes as well, it’s a fiendishly difficult concept to get your head around. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried to thoroughly understand this — and maybe I should get rid of the word “thoroughly” because I can’t thoroughly understand it. I need to understand the bits that matter.

So to me, on the one hand I’m thinking, “Fine, this has not arrived yet,” but your point about “get prepared” is a valid one. Although I wonder how many people are going to say, “Well, it hasn’t arrived yet, so what are we going to do? How am I going to do this?” That’s where communicators come in, by the way.

But I think she gives a great example that you really can grasp. Talking about how quantum computers could one day effortlessly churn through endless combinations of molecules to come up with new drugs and medications — a process that currently takes years and years using classical computers.

She says to give you an idea of the scale, in December 2024 Google unveiled a new quantum chip called Willow, which it claimed could take five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete — that’s 10 with 24 zeros after it.

I mean, just thinking about the number, you cannot imagine how long that would be. The sun would probably have died before it gets to it. This would do it in five minutes.

So it then talks about what it paves the way for — personalized medication, all that kind of stuff.

I don’t think we’re at the stage yet where you could equate this to, “Okay, in your average business, all the business processes they do will be materially impacted by this in a very powerful way.” We’re not there yet, because you can’t explain it like that, I don’t think — hence these very big-picture examples.

Everything I read about quantum talks about this: personalized medication, chemical processing, quantum sensors to measure things incredibly precisely. That’s all coming. It’s not here yet.

So it’s interesting. The examples they give are all wonderful, I have to say, but the mind boggles. My mind certainly does, when you look at so much information on this that you wonder: what on earth are you going to pay attention to in order to get a handle on how it’s going to affect my industry, my company, my job, how we live, my family — all these things? No one’s got that yet, and that’s probably what people want to know — but you can’t yet.

Shel Holtz: No, but it’s close enough that we need to start preparing for it and we need to start communicating about it, especially if you’re in an industry that is computing-intensive in its work. And I’m not talking about customer relationship databases and things like that; I mean in your R&D, for example. And certainly the cryptographic implications are severe on the risk side.

So being ready for that now, rather than scrambling to get ready once it’s actually here, is, I think, an imperative.

You do need to be a physicist or physics-adjacent to really understand this. But I’ll be honest: science has never been my thing. Science and math were my worst subjects in school. The humanities were where I rocked. And I struggle understanding the zeros and ones in fundamental computing — the opening of the gates and all that.

But you know what? I don’t need to know how my carburetor works in order to drive my car. The fact is that these tools are coming, and understanding how they work or not, people are going to be able to use them.

And as I say, it’s close enough. It’s probably within the next 10 years that companies are going to be able to buy quantum compute time, if not buy a quantum computer, that we really need to start thinking about it. We really need to start preparing for it, especially from a security standpoint.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I get that. I think, though, that people — communicators, this is our area of interest and focus — would need to know: how are we going to do all this when so much of it is theory?

They’re talking about — I’m just looking at the piece here that goes into detail about how to break current forms of public key encryption. Hot topic: security of information. It says here it’s awaiting a truly operational quantum computer. That’s years away. But as the article notes, quoting a cybersecurity expert, “The threat is so high that it’s assumed everyone needs to introduce quantum-resistant encryption right now.” That’s not the case. So there’s probably a lot of hype.

Although it mentions earlier — and I think you might have mentioned — that there’s even more hype about AI. So this was the king of hype before AI emerged.

The prediction I’m reading is that an operational quantum computer could be around the year 2030. So that’s five years away. Okay, in that case, now is the time to get prepared for this, then.

Shel Holtz: That’s pretty fast. And there are operational quantum computers in labs.

Absolutely — there are operational quantum computers in research labs right now. They’re not commercially viable yet, but as you say, the projections run anywhere from five to 15 years. That’s fast; that’s soon.

When we were talking a lot about the metaverse, we were saying the fully operational metaverse was 10 years away — you need to start thinking about that now. Same thing here.

Neville Hobson: Did you notice the concluding paragraph? This is actually where it kind of fits in with the current status of alarm and concern from a political point of view about what certain countries are up to — China, which it calls out as an example.

It says the GCHQ — that’s the UK’s intelligence cyber agency — says that it’s credible that almost all UK citizens will have had data compromised in state-sponsored cyber attacks carried out by China, with that data stockpiled for a time when it can be decrypted and studied, and that you need a quantum computer for that.

For instance, the economic headline in the UK right now — the cause of the kind of unexpected dip in GDP — is caused specifically by the cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, the automaker. That cost nearly two billion in losses because of the cyberattack that compromised them and their supply chain.

So this brings it home to you: what are they doing with the data? They can’t do much with it until they’ve got the computing power to be able to. So these things add to… I’m not sure it really adds to understanding — it adds to confusion, adds to worry, probably.

So it’s helping people organizationally, in this context, understand why we need to be prepared for this. And it needs to be, I think, presented in terms they can more readily grasp and understand than is currently the case for what I’ve seen people talk about in quantum computing.

This is a good article, by the way, and I think Zoe Kleinman did a really good job. I’ve read another article — I think it was from Microsoft — where you truly need to have a degree in advanced physics just to understand the article. These are not designed for your average Joe to grasp. There’s a gap.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. But I think the role of the communicator here isn’t to help people understand how quantum computing works any more than it is with classical computing. Our job is: what are the benefits and what are the risks? What do we need to prepare for? Where do we need to start building that foundation so that when it arrives, we’re ready and not suffering consequences or falling behind our competitors?

So I think that’s the role of the communicator: to say, “Look, you don’t need to understand how it works. These are the things that it’s going to be able to do, and these are the implications for us and our business and our reputation and our competitiveness.”

Neville Hobson: So I see an opportunity here for someone like Lee LeFever to come up with one of his really cool videos that explains in simple terms what quantum computing is.

Shel Holtz: I’ve got to go find myself a good explainer video — see if there is one out there that does a really great job of it. There probably is. Maybe Lee has, for all I know.

Neville Hobson: So, let’s continue on the theme of a computing topic which is not really connected to it, but it’s a similar theme. We’re going to talk about vibe coding and what it means for communication leaders.

Every so often a piece of technology comes along that seems small on the surface but signals a much bigger shift beneath the surface. Vibe coding is one of those moments.

On paper, it sounds like a technical trend: using AI to build software by simply describing what you want in natural language. No coding, no syntax, no engineering background needed. You just talk, and an AI generates a working prototype. Sounds wonderful.

In early November, it was named Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. Of course it’s two words, but who’s counting? Anyway, it was chosen to reflect the evolving relationship between language and technology and how AI is making coding more accessible to a wider range of people.

This is not a coding story; it’s a future-of-work, future-of-skills, and future-of-organization story.

What makes this interesting for us is not the code; it’s what happens when anyone in an organization can create digital tools on the fly. A business analyst can build a workflow. Someone in HR can automate a process. A communicator can sketch out an app for an event or a campaign — all without waiting for IT.

Suddenly the boundary between people who solve business problems and people who write software starts to blur.

This has real implications for culture and communication. It empowers people in new ways, but it also introduces new risks. AI-generated code is fast, but it’s not always secure, compliant, or ready for production — or even necessarily working properly.

And as we know, when technology becomes more accessible, organizations need a stronger narrative on how to experiment safely, what the guardrails are, and when creativity gives way to rigor.

There is also a shift in skills. According to Cognizant, in the age of AI the most important capability is moving from problem-solving to problem-finding — being able to frame the right questions, articulate needs clearly, and work collaboratively with both humans and machines. That is a communication skill at its core.

So the story here isn’t about developers being replaced or apps being magically created. It’s about how work changes when AI becomes a conversational partner.

And it raises a bigger question: if every team can now build its own tools, what role do communicators play in shaping culture, governance, and the shared understanding of how organizations innovate? Big questions there, Shel.

Shel Holtz: It is a big question. There are big questions there.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about vibe coding and listening to a lot of podcasts that talk about it. I have been so excited about it, I’ve been working on a proposal — completely unsolicited, no one at my company knows it’s coming — but it is for a vibe-coding training program for project engineers: the entry-level people on the building side of our industry.

Because right now, if they need something — say a dashboard, an app that creates a dashboard that pulls data in from various sources, or that allows you to plug data in and produce charts and graphs and the like — they have to open a ticket, and IT has to create it if they have the time. They’ll prioritize based on the urgency of the things that they’re working on, and you may not get what you want, and it may take a long time.

Now you can just do it yourself.

So I’m very excited about this, especially given the threat that entry-level jobs around all of the business world are facing from AI. They need to be redefined, because entry-level people have to be part of the mix — how do you develop those who are going to move into higher roles in the organization if they don’t start somewhere?

So it’s a rethinking of what those roles are, and enabling these people to create their own apps is one of them.

But now they would still have to submit that app for approval, because if you don’t have expertise in coding you may have done things that you’re unaware of that can create certain risks or problems, or it may stop working at some point. All types of things could go wrong.

I think vibe coding without any foundation in coding is fine for some very, very simple things. I think the more complex it gets, the more of that foundation you need.

While you were talking, I went and looked at what Christopher S. Penn had to say about it, because I’ve heard him talk about it a number of times both in his writing and in the video podcasting that he does.

He thinks that you do — if you’re going to be doing this in a serious way — need to have an understanding of the software development life cycle.

At a minimum, this is what he says: you have to be able to provide detailed instructions and guardrails to the machine. You have to know what you’re doing to prevent poor results, like a vague code request — it’s like asking an AI to write a fiction novel with little information. That would just result in slop, right? Same with code. You have to give it a precise enough series of prompts to get the output that you want.

You need to know not only when the solutions are right or wrong, but also whether they’re right or wrong in the context of the work.

He says best practices for vibe coding require a structured approach that relies heavily on planning, which maps to the Trust Insights Five P Framework — which is really good, go look it up at trustinsights.ai.

This structured method is essential to vibe-code well and includes steps like: spending three times as much time in planning as in writing the code, creating a detailed product requirements document and a file-by-file work plan, and integrating security requirements and quality checks.

And then, of course, if it doesn’t work right the first time, you can keep iterating — but you should have some understanding of debugging and know somebody who does in order to get it to do exactly what you want.

So I think for very simple stuff, yeah, you can just tell it, “Please create me an app that does X, Y, or Z.” But the more complex it gets, the more of a grounding in coding you’re going to need.

Neville Hobson: So that’s where guardrails and guidance and policies and procedures come into play.

But you know what’s going to happen — we saw it with ChatGPT — is that people are going to get hold of the tools to do this and just go ahead and do stuff themselves. That’s what’s going to happen, with the risks inherent in doing that for everything you’ve outlined.

I look at what I’ve done that I suppose you could call vibe coding. What I did on my websites, which run on Ghost — it’s not like WordPress in that you want a theme that you customize, dead easy, build a child copy and all that. Not with Ghost; you’re into the code.

So I used a combination of tools, including the excellent VS Code tools from Microsoft, but also a tool called Docker — astounding, running on Windows. But my “coding partner” was ChatGPT-5. I prompted it with what I wanted to do, and it wrote the code.

We tested it and nothing fell over, except where there were some things like CSS for styling — some dependencies didn’t work for some reason until it fell over and we went back and fixed it.

I was amazed, constantly, by being able to talk to the chatbot in plain English about what I wanted to achieve, and it then proposed how we find the solution to doing that, and then it wrote the code.

I couldn’t do that because I don’t know the code. I would have had to hire a developer or, if I were doing this properly in an organization, file a ticket to get support. I did this myself over a weekend, and I’m still truly amazed. It was an offline copy — all working, everything worked. We packaged it, uploaded it to the Ghost server, enabled it, and the live site just worked. All the changes were perfect; nothing was wrong by that point.

Now, that’s not necessarily the same as building a website for an event, or an app for an event. That would be interesting to see how that would work. So there are levels to all of this.

I think it’s finding the balance between: you have to follow these rigid guidelines if you want to build X for your role in the company, or you want to do something like a website or an app, where the guidelines are not so rigid — they’re still guidelines.

This is designed for a world where content creation and data analysis are becoming everyday skills, as is software creation. Yet I don’t disagree with your take on training at all, nor with what you quoted Chris Penn saying — they make complete sense to me.

But the reality, particularly in enterprise organizations and even more so in small- to medium-sized businesses, is: you’re just going to give it a go and see what happens. Risks and all.

Shel Holtz: Sure. Regardless of whether you’re trying to do something very simple, where you don’t need an understanding of the software development life cycle — you can just tell the AI, “Write me this app,” and if it’s simple enough you’re probably going to get something serviceable — or something more complex.

For the more complex stuff, you need to have a deeper understanding of the output you want, and you have to spend a lot of time planning so that you can give it the right information. It’s not that you sit back in your chair and say, “I think A, B, and C.”

You can work with the AI to develop that stuff, of course, but one thing I do at the end of virtually every prompt — not the really simple stuff like “How many Oscars did somebody win,” but the more complex prompts — is add, “Ask me questions one at a time that you need answered before you give me your answer.” Because it’s going to think of things that I haven’t thought of.

So yeah, I think my point is that whether you’re doing something simple that doesn’t require a lot of upfront work or you’re doing something more complex that does require a lot of upfront work, this is going to speed up the development of software immeasurably and have a big impact on how this gets done and by whom. That represents significant change in the current structures in organizations, I would say.

Neville Hobson: You’ve got it. So this is worth paying attention to as well. Get used to the phrase “vibe coding,” I would say.

Dan York: Greeting Shel and Neville and our listeners all around the worl. This is Dan York coming at you today from Los Angeles, California, where I have been attending an event by an organization called the Marconi Society that has been looking at internet resilience. Basically, how do we keep the internet functioning, uh, in the light of disruptions and things of various different forms?

Great conversations. Great, uh, thinking. I look forward to talking a bit more about it in the future when there’s some things that are useful to share with our listeners, but in the meantime, I wanna talk about chat. Specifically two different platforms. But first, if you’ve been paying attention for a while, you know the chat systems like WhatsApp, iMessage, uh, telegram, signal, whatever.

They’re all their own thing. You can only chat with people in there. Well, in the European Union, the EU passed something that’s called the Digital Markets Act, or DMA that required. Chat systems that operate in the EU to roll out, to have third party integration in some way that you, that other chat systems could interoperate with that.

So we’re starting to see a bit of what this could be with the announcement from Meta that they will very soon be launching third party integration between WhatsApp in Europe with two other messaging systems called Birdie Chat and hiit. Now, if you haven’t heard of them. Neither have I and neither did the writer of the Verge who was putting this together.

But the point, the point is they’re trying to make it so that chat systems could interoperate. We’ll have to see what this means. The important part to me. Was that WhatsApp is actually doing this to ensure that the end-to-end encryption continues to work, that your data can’t be seen by other people when you’re using the messaging system, which for me is critical for the privacy and security of any kind of conversation I’m having.

So that is preserved in the system. So we’ll have to see where that goes. But speaking of end-to-end encryption X, the formerly known as Twitter, which I don’t even use anymore, but I was pleased to see that they are rolling out a new system to replace what we’ve always called dms or direct messages.

They’re rolling out a new system that they call Brilliantly Chat, but it will have video calling. It will also have end-to-end encryption, and it will have other things. It’s coming first. It’s rolling out on iOS and the web, and then it will be coming on to Android, et cetera. So it looks interesting. So there’ll be a new messaging component there.

So for those who are still using X, stay tuned. Your messaging system may be changing around in what you’re looking at, moving to something completely different. Mozilla announced an AI window for Firefox. Uh, there’s been a slate of AI browsers. I think I talked about some last week. There’s last month. I mean, there’s been other different announcements, but this isn’t available yet.

But it appears to be an interesting thing that it would be a, a window that would sort of be separate from your main browsing experience that would allow you to engage with an ai um, assistant basically, while you are. Browsing and stuff. Stay tuned. Again, we’ll have to watch. It’s if you’re a Firefox user, this will be something that you’ll be able to go and work with as you go along.

Another, just switching gears again. WordPress is coming up on its final release for 2025. It’ll be WordPress 6.9. The target delivery date is December 2nd, and it’s got a couple of interesting things. A lot of the release is focused on, uh, a new APIs for developers on performance improvements and things like that, but there’s.

Two interesting parts for people listening to this podcast probably one is that it will be introducing something called notes or block notes that you can be able to add in a similar form to how you might do something with Google Docs, where if you’re editing a doc, you can leave an A note. And be able to go and, and respond to that, reply to it, you know, close it out, whatever else.

This capability is coming into WordPress so that if you’re doing collaborative editing with other people on your team, you would be able to leave notes about this and say, you know, I, I don’t like this text, or whatever, or, you know, that we should really include an image here, and then other people can reply to that and work with it.

This is all visible only within the. Editor interface. So one of the big pushes for WordPress right now is to look at collaboration. And so this is part of that enabling you to be able to work with your team and, and leave notes for each other and be able to work with that and, and use that. So stay tuned.

This is coming out December 2nd with WordPress 6.9. Another interesting piece about in this release. Is the ability to, to very quickly and without a plugin or anything, change the visibility of blocks mostly so that, so that they’re visible in the backend, in the editor, but not out on the front end. And the important part about this is if you’re testing things, if you’re, if you’re working on, on developing a new interface or a new pages and something and you want to try something out, you can get it all ready to go in the editor.

Then you can flip on the visibility, look at it, check it, whatever, flip that off if you don’t want to, or if you’re preparing for a new announcement, you can have all of that ready to go, uh, on a page. And then just toggle the visibility of the blocks. Now, yes, there are other ways you could do this as well inside of WordPress, but this is just a new way that you could work with this in doing that.

So two features I personally find interesting of the upcoming release. The ability to toggle the visibility of blocks and the ability to leave comments if you’re collaborating with other people. Switching to something completely different. Again, if you’ve been listening to me over the years, you know that I’ve been following what’s called low Earth orbit or LEO satellite systems, such as starlink and what they can do out there.

For the last, actually about seven years, one of the other competitors has been Amazon’s, what they’ve called Project Kuper. Now. The, one of the challenges, first of all, is they’ve had issues launching their rockets, but they’re getting there. They’re getting their satellites up, they’re getting ready to offer service.

One challenge has been, people haven’t known how to pronounce it. Is it Kiper Keeper Cooper? What is it? Well, Amazon’s, it was, it was a project name. It wasn’t really meant to be the out there, it was just an internal project name. So they’re solving this by calling it simply Amazon, Leo. That’s what they’re calling it.

Now, what’s I find fascinating is, I mean, first kudos to them. Good to have it. So now we’ll be hearing about SpaceX’s starlink and we’ll be hearing about Amazon. Leo, I find it rather clever because of course people have been talking about satellite systems in leo, which is low earth orbit. It’s a specific range from zero to 2000 kilometers or 1200 miles.

That’s this range, um, above Earth. But now when you talk about LEO systems, you’ll sort of be like, well, are you talking about LEO systems in general or are you talking about Amazon Leo? So. You know, kudos to them for being clever to take that name and, and run with it. So stay tuned, more tech, more things coming out.

With that, they’re gearing up to really launch this service and provide a competitor for starlink. So especially if you’re in an area that has poor internet access, this may be an option at some point soon. Finally. Chat, GPT just announced something, which is that they are making it so that you don’t, it won’t generate m dashes for all those people who work with typography and punctuation who have liked their M dashes.

One thing about chat GPT was that it was putting m dashes in a lot, which are the longer dashes, and it was being a, a signal that something was created by AI or by chat GPT. Well now. You can now turn that off so it’s becomes a little bit harder, but perhaps the people who like using M dashes will be able to start using them again.

We’ll see. That’s all I’ve got for you this month. This is Dan York. You can find more of my audience writing@danyork.me and back to you shall Neville. I look forward to listening to this episode. Bye for now.

Neville Hobson: Thanks a lot, Dan. Great report as always.

There was some stuff in there that was really quite interesting. I think the one I would comment on was your last topic — what ChatGPT has done with the em dash.

Shel and I talked about this in a recent episode, and it is quite extraordinary how people get so exercised and excited about how it “indicates without any shadow of doubt” that an AI wrote something, no matter whether you did or not. There are lots of opinions flying about that.

But the thing you mentioned I found quite interesting, that OpenAI has done this so that you can tell the chatbot not to use an em dash and this time it’ll work.

Well, I started doing that about eight months ago in the custom personalization box. One of the things I’ve told it to do is to avoid using em dashes and instead use en dashes, with a space either side. That certainly goes against all the rules of grammar people talk about in terms of how you should use these things, but I like that. I prefer that.

I don’t like em dashes at all — particularly where they touch the preceding and following words in the sentence. It doesn’t look right to me. Yeah, I know, it’s been like that for centuries, I know all that. But they did that.

So I thought, okay, does that mean my personalization command will actually work properly now? Because sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. I have to keep reminding the chatbot to do this.

What struck me as well is that when OpenAI announced this, both OpenAI and Sam Altman himself, there was no statement about, “Okay, this is what will happen now: if you put an em dash in, it’ll change it to a normal hyphen or an en dash,” or what. No one said anything. And I can’t find anyone with an answer to that question. So that’s still the question: what’s going to happen?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m of mixed mind on the whole dash controversy. I’ve been using dashes as a writer for more than 50 years. I started using them extensively when I was setting type as a part-time gig in college, and a lot of the technical manuals that I was typesetting had dashes in them.

The reason — and I’ve said this before on the show — the reason AI is using dashes is because in all of the stuff on the web that it hoovered up as part of its training model, there were lots and lots of dashes that humans created.

I have no issue with an em dash. I think this whole attack on the dash is absurd, and it’s from people who don’t know punctuation.

On the other hand, I look at a lot of outputs I see from AI — and I’m not talking about stuff I plan to use in publications, just answers to questions or research that I’m going to factor into, say, a proposal — and I see the dashes misused. They’re put in places where commas belong.

So from that perspective, yeah, I’d rather do the placement of the dashes or en dashes myself. I mean, I don’t remember what the rules were, but there used to be rules around when to use an em dash and when to use an en dash, right? I think those have largely fallen by the wayside.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, no, there still are rules — largely ignored by my use completely against those rules.

But I find it’s a very good point you just made, because when I write — and this I find quite interesting — I’ll write a piece of text, say a first draft of an article, and I’ll run it through the chatbot to give me its opinion. And it will often “correct” commas and put en dashes in instead.

And I think: is this an American thing, or is it the kind of bastardization of the English language generally, that things are changing with variants of how people use the language, so it’s hard to know what correct syntax is now?

It doesn’t matter, in my view, as long as people understand what you’re trying to convey. Yet I recognize equally that to many people it is of significant importance. So this is not an argument that’s going to stop anytime soon, I don’t think.

Shel Holtz: No. And the other thing is, along with everything that was contained in the training sets that the models used, so were the rules of grammar and punctuation. So I suspect at some level it’s actually using them correctly, but not the way we use them in current modern English.

And that’s why I will change a lot of them to commas if I’m going to extract something from AI output and use it in a proposal or in a research document.

Neville Hobson: So I suppose people like authors — and others, not just authors, but anyone who feels strongly about using dashes and who uses ChatGPT — I would say to you: put in a custom personalization line that tells the chatbot to use dashes, not take them out.

Shel Holtz: Yes, that’s absolutely right. And especially in technical documents now, because that’s where I saw most of them.

I want to give a shout-out to Robert Rose over at the Content Marketing Institute, among other ventures. This Old Marketing is a great podcast — Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi. If you’ve never listened to that, I highly recommend it.

Robert has written an article called “Why AI Idea Inflation Is Ruining Thought Leadership and Team Dynamics.” And if you lead a content team, it probably feels less like a think piece and more like a documentary.

His core point is pretty simple: gen AI has made it incredibly easy for senior leaders and subject matter experts to generate ideas for content. Not thoughtful, worked-through concepts — just lots and lots of “We should do something on this”-type ideas. It’s like we turned content strategy into Netflix. There’s always something new in the queue, but more often than not, you don’t feel great about picking any of it.

This isn’t hypothetical. The Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B content marketing trends report found that 95% of B2B marketers now say their organizations use AI-powered marketing applications. Ninety-five percent — that’s pretty much everyone.

And going back a bit, a previous CMI study found 72% were already using gen AI, but 61% of their organizations had no guidelines for it.

So we have this perfect storm: nearly universal use, very little governance, and leaders with what Robert calls “idea superpowers” that they didn’t earn the hard way.

You’ve probably seen this movie inside your own organization: an executive spends a weekend playing with ChatGPT and asks for “20 provocative points of view we should publish this quarter.” And Monday morning, your content Slack channel lights up with screenshots. None of these ideas are attached to actual budget, resources, or strategy — but because they came from the corner office and because they looked polished, they land on the team like assignments.

Robert’s argument is that this idea inflation doesn’t just create more work; it erodes trust between leaders and content teams. The strategists and writers become order-takers, constantly reacting to an AI-fueled idea fire hose instead of shaping a coherent editorial agenda.

Over time, resentment builds. Leaders feel like, “I keep bringing you ideas and nothing gets done,” while teams feel like, “You keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and calling it thought leadership.”

The data backs up that this isn’t just a workflow annoyance — it’s starting to show up in audience behavior. One study from last year, from Bynder, found that about half of customers say they can spot AI-written content, and more than half say they disengage when they suspect something was generated by AI. We referenced this earlier, Neville.

Another study published this year looked at brands using gen AI for social content and found that overt AI adoption actually led to negative follower reactions unless it was blended carefully with human input.

So the idea treadmill doesn’t just burn out your team; it risks flooding your channels with content that audiences increasingly mistrust.

At the same time, we’re seeing a massive shift on the supply side. Axios, working with Graphite, reported that the share of articles online created by AI jumped from about 5% in 2020 to nearly half — 48% — by mid-2025.

In other words, the content universe is experiencing its own inflation problem: a lot more stuff, not a lot more meaning.

So where does that leave content marketing leaders? Robert’s prescription — and I think this is where communicators really earn their pay — is not “turn the AI off.” It’s to reassert our role as editors of the idea layer, not just the content layer.

That starts with reframing the relationship with your thought leaders. Instead of treating every AI-generated list as a backlog to be cleared, treat it as the raw ore. You sit down and say, “Great, let’s pick one of these and go deep. Which of these ideas would you still fight for if AI hadn’t made it so easy to generate 20 others?”

This is where the leadership part comes in.

The CMI 2026 Trends Report — yes, we’re at the point where we’re looking at 2026 trends — makes the point that the teams who are winning aren’t the ones shouting “AI” the loudest; they’re the ones doubling down on fundamentals like relevance, quality, and team capability, and letting AI breathe more life into those efforts.

In practical terms, what does this mean?

It means putting a simple idea filter in place. If an idea doesn’t align with your documented content mission, target audience, and a defined business goal, it doesn’t make the calendar — no matter how clever the AI prompt was.

It means creating a shared point-of-view backlog where leaders can park AI-assisted concepts, but agreeing that only a small number graduate into actual content every quarter.

And it means being transparent with your team about volume: “We’re going to say no to more ideas faster, so we can say yes to a few that matter.”

There’s also a morale decision here. Other research shows a weird tension: a majority of marketers say AI makes them more productive and even more confident, but a lot of them also fear it could replace parts of their role.

If you’re leading a content team, how you handle idea inflation becomes a signal about your priorities. Are you using AI to respect people’s time and focus on better work — or are you using it to flood them with tasks they can never realistically complete?

And while Robert’s article is squarely aimed at content marketing, I don’t think it stops there. The same dynamics are starting to show up in internal communications, executive comms, even investor relations. Anywhere a leader can spin up “10 talking points for our next town hall” with a prompt, you’re going to see this idea inflation in practice.

If communicators don’t step in to slow that down and curate it, we risk overwhelming every stakeholder group with more, faster, shallower content — and training them to tune us out.

So I read Robert’s piece less as a complaint about AI and more as a leadership challenge. In a world where ideas are cheap and infinite, can you be the person who protects your team, your audience, and your brand from inflation?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very good piece. I agree. I’m not sure I like the phrase “idea inflation” — it sounds pretty gimmicky to me, I must admit — but it does capture it quite well.

I found it really interesting reading Robert’s article where he talks about “why AI feeds the engagement crisis.” Now that’s a phrase I can get my head around: engagement crisis.

There are some to-the-point views here which make you think, “Absolutely right.”

For instance, he says when people hear the phrase “employee engagement” they tend to picture enthusiasm — people who are motivated, satisfied, and inspired by their work. But he says employee engagement means more than how people feel about their jobs; it’s also about how much meaning they find in the relationships that shape their work, and AI is causing those relationships to fracture.

“The dynamic between marketing leader and content practitioner, once a creative dialogue, has become transactional. The leader produces ideas, the practitioner packages them.” That’s in line with what you were saying. “Each side feels overextended, underappreciated, and increasingly indifferent.”

And I like how he progresses the thinking here, because you can picture this. “Nobody challenges ideas anymore because nobody loves or hates them enough to care about getting them right.” That’s a hell of an indictment, but I think it’s quite spot-on about some of the behaviors that are happening.

“In that scenario,” he says, “there is no right. When the origin of the idea and the expression of it both come from a machine, neither side can recognize originality or craft when they see it.”

These are alarm bells, to me, that are ringing — that leaders need to really pay attention to.

It’s difficult, though, because it reminds me of two or three cartoons I’ve seen recently on LinkedIn — different, but broadly the same — which show a kind of flowchart of an idea for a press release or an announcement you need to make, and it needs to be this.

So it goes to the next step; then someone says, “Actually, we need to make sure we include that.” Okay, fine, you do that. Then the CEO chimes in with six things he reckons need to be in there as well. And so it goes around all these various steps until you’ve got this bloated thing that gets to the final point in the cycle, with the person at the top of the loop saying, “This is terrible. This is rubbish. This isn’t telling a story. We need to be a lot simpler than this.”

The communicator — by the way, the smart person in this story — had kept the original draft: short, concise, three bullet points. So she submitted that, and everyone said, “Oh, that’s what we need; we’ll approve that.”

To me, that’s a great analogy for this. But someone’s got to recognize the bloat — the inflation of ideas, let’s say — that arises in situations where you’ve got so many people who’ve got their own stakes in the ground and their own agendas they follow.

This isn’t a criticism; it’s a recognition of reality in organizations.

So the communicator in that little story I just told was the smart person here. You’ve got to navigate this sort of thing when it happens. The marketing folks who get dumped on from the corner office — someone at that stage has got to recognize the likely trajectory of all of this and plan accordingly, so that when it gets around to the top of the circuit, they go back to the smarter idea.

It sounds easy saying that, doesn’t it? In reality, it’s not quite like that. Nevertheless, this is a leadership issue. This is not a marketing or content issue — this is a leadership and management issue, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: It is, and I think it’s an opportunity for communicators to demonstrate some leadership. Because, as Robert says, it’s really easy for an executive over a weekend to get a model to produce 20 ideas for “thought leadership.”

That’s not thought leadership. We’ve talked about thought leadership fairly recently on FIR. This is subject matter expertise that brings new thinking, new angles, sheds new light on the situation. You have a unique perspective to share — that’s thought leadership. It’s generating content that makes people go, “Wow, I hadn’t thought about it that way before; now I’m thinking of it.” You’re leading thinking — that’s what thought leadership is.

I’m not sure that, “Here’s a list of 20 things Gemini came up with for me,” is anywhere near thought leadership unless you see one that you actually have unique perspective and expertise on. And you say, “That’s a great one to talk about.”

If that’s what you’re using AI for, great. But if you’re just copying and pasting that list and sending it to your communications team and saying, “Write these, these are thought leadership pieces,” that’s just going to erode trust in that leader and the organization they represent.

I’ve got no issue with generating lists in AI models — I do it all the time.

On our intranet we have a “Construction Term of the Week,” and I exhausted the list that our engineers sent us, and they’re not inclined to add more. So now I’ll say, “Give me 20 terms related to MEP” — that’s mechanical, electrical, plumbing — and I’ll pick one and that’ll be the term of the week. That saves me a lot of research. It’s a great use of AI, I think.

But if I were to say, “Give me 20 ideas for thought leadership that I can propose to my CEO so we can get a thought leadership article up on LinkedIn,” man, I would never do that. That’s a terrible idea — but evidently, lots of people are.

Neville Hobson: Plenty to think about here. So let’s move on to another topic with plenty to think about.

Question: is it okay to use AI-generated images for LinkedIn profiles?

Over the past few months, we’ve seen AI-generated headshots spreading across LinkedIn. I certainly have. The ultra-polished portraits with perfect lighting, perfect posture, and, in many cases, a slightly uncanny resemblance to the person they represent — these are typical. That description defines most of what I see.

Your first thought when you see it is, “They’re clearly AI-generated,” and you don’t necessarily have a critical take on it, but you note it.

I have to admit, I tried this myself recently — a few months ago, in fact. For a while, my own LinkedIn profile featured an AI-generated photo. It looked professional enough with uncanny realism, but the longer it sat there, the more uncomfortable I felt about it.

It wasn’t quite me. What if people thought it was me and later realized it wasn’t? I hadn’t said it was an AI-generated image created from a selection of actual photos of me. What would the effects be?

Eventually, I removed it and used a real photo.

That personal hesitation is exactly what Anna Lawler explores in a thoughtful LinkedIn article about the ethics of AI headshots. Lawler is Director and Head of Digital and Social Media at Greentarget, a corporate comms agency based in London.

She describes the pressure to have a sharp, executive-style image ready the moment a new role is announced — something many of us will recognize. AI offered her a quick, clean solution. But then came the real question: should she use it?

Her piece gets to the heart of what communicators are wrestling with right now — well, many communicators, I would say.

What does authenticity look like when technology can generate a version of you that is polished and accurate, but still artificial? Does using that image strengthen your professional brand, or does it introduce a small crack in trust?

What if you don’t disclose how the image was created? And does it matter if no one can tell the difference?

Anna’s LinkedIn post attracted many comments about whether to do this. One comment was blunt: “Just no. Not at all. Never.”

Another explored the idea a bit: “You’ve used an AI image of yourself which looks dead like you — so much that your dad couldn’t tell the difference, other than to say you look well. How different is this to putting a filter on a real photo of you? So no major harm done for a personal LinkedIn photo. But what happens when PRs and marketers start doing this on behalf of others?”

Another analyzed the situation: “Most images — portrait or otherwise — are subject to some form of post-production. It is similar to editing a paragraph of text. You take the original content and adapt it to fit the requirements of the medium, ensuring the tone and voice are appropriate. In the case of a photograph, a human may use Photoshop. In the case of text, they can do it in Word or use Grammarly. If the final decision of whether or not to accept the edits lies with the human, does it matter what method was applied to make them?”

If the purpose of a profile photo is to represent who you are, does an AI-enhanced or AI-created version cross a line? Does “close enough” count?

Anna makes a thoughtful distinction between personal use and corporate use — on websites or official materials, where misrepresentation risks are far greater. She also highlights the reputational and ethical factors that communicators must now weigh, because our profile photos are no longer just photos. They signal identity, credibility, and intent.

It raises a bigger question for all of us: as AI becomes more deeply woven into our professional lives, where do we draw the line between convenience and authenticity? And how do we guide our organizations through those decisions when the norms are still being formed?

Now I know you’ve got some views about this, Shel, so what do you think?

Shel Holtz: Hell yeah, I have some views on this.

I’ve stated before on the show and elsewhere that I think the line is around deceit. Are you trying to deceive somebody? And if the use of AI could lead somebody to be deceived, then I think you need to disclose. If not, I don’t think there is any compulsion to disclose.

What if I have a photo of me — and that’s what I use — but I use a service like Canva or Photoshop to remove the background and put in an AI-generated background? Is that okay?

AI is a tool. It’s just a tool.

We use tools for… I mean, we use photos — there was a time when there were no photos available. You had to hire an artist to paint your portrait if you wanted somebody to know what you looked like.

I think the utter prohibition that some people are suggesting on AI images on LinkedIn is, frankly, stupid. I disagree with it wholeheartedly.

My profile picture on LinkedIn is AI-generated. Now, why did I do that?

When I started at Webcor in 2017, there was a professional photographer who was taking everybody’s photo, so your profile photo on the intranet directory was consistent and professional. I used that everywhere for about six and a half years. Then I lost 70 pounds, and frankly, I didn’t look like that anymore.

I didn’t have access to a professional photographer through work, and I didn’t have the time to go sit for a portrait. So I did that thing where — and I didn’t use one of the paid services; I think it was Gemini — I gave it 20 headshots of me looking the way I do now, post-70-pound loss, and I said, “Aggregate these into a professional headshot.”

I had to do it eight or 10 times before I got one that actually looks like me, where you can’t tell the difference. And that’s the one I’m using.

Is it misrepresenting me? No, it’s not. It looks like me, and I am fine with that. I don’t think I’m deceiving anybody. I don’t think I’m pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes. It’s me.

I don’t have any issue with that at all, and I can’t imagine an argument that would convince me otherwise.

Neville Hobson: No, I get you 100% on that, Shel.

In my case, I mentioned I had an AI-generated image as my LinkedIn profile picture, which I removed. There’s now a normal shot; it’s not as good, in my view, as the one I took down.

But that same picture, large size, I’ve got on my About page on my website. And there’s nothing there saying it’s AI-generated. People I’ve shown it to — only about four or five — couldn’t tell the difference that it wasn’t real when I told them it was AI-generated.

So your point about deceit is a very valid one.

If I put a picture of me up there looking slightly thinner maybe, with fewer age-driven gray hairs appearing, and I made myself blond maybe, changed my eye color or something — that’s not me at all. That, to me, would cross the line.

But I also, on the other hand, get entirely the illogic — if I can use that word — of people who are critical about this. But that is part of the platform you’re on, and people will judge you.

Now, I’m of strong belief myself that I really don’t care much about what people think about me in the sense of that, but this can have impacts.

I don’t want to do something that stimulates that kind of discussion or opinion-forming or commenting. And people are doing that a lot.

So to me, it’s simple: this is not a huge deal, to have an AI-generated image up there, when I can just have a normal pic that I take with my webcam and touch it up in Photoshop — which I do. I had one previously where I changed the background because I didn’t like the background.

That happens all the time. That’s not deceit. Nevertheless, there are some things you might want to take a stand on. This isn’t one of them for me — “I’m not going to use it” or “I am going to use it.”

So why have I kept it on my blog, you might ask? That’s part of a simple experiment. No one’s noticed or commented, and it actually fits the way I want to portray myself in the context of what I’ve written about myself on that page.

Shel Holtz: Thematic consistency.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s different from using it on LinkedIn, because that’s a wholly different description on LinkedIn. So I’ll keep it up there until someone screams loud enough, saying, “You’re a fake, you’re deceitful,” which I don’t believe is going to happen.

Shel Holtz: The camera is a tool. A photo of you is not you; it is a representation of you that was captured by the camera. What if the white balance was off? What if the depth of field was off? There are so many things that a camera captures that are inaccurate or inconsistent.

AI is a tool. In five years, no one’s going to be having this discussion. It’s going to be so common, and the outputs are going to be so spot on that this isn’t even going to be an issue.

I just think if people are talking about this, they need to find more fruitful things to spend their time talking about.

Neville Hobson: This is always going to be here, and it depends on how you want to judge it.

But to me, there’s another thought to throw into the mix here, which we’ve touched on previously: this is not just about a photo. It has more about it than just a photo of someone. This is about your identity. This is about your credibility. This is about how others perceive you. That does matter — to varying degrees, depending on the industry you’re in and how you portray yourself and the people you’re connected with.

So it’s a preview, I suppose you could argue, of wider ethical decisions that we must make as AI is embedded everywhere — until it gets to the point, as you say, where no one’s talking about this anymore. We’re not at that point yet.

Shel Holtz: Maybe I’ll take my LinkedIn portrait and have the AI generate it in the style of a Pixar 3D animated movie and see what people say.

Neville Hobson: Well, you used to have a cartoon up there back in the early days.

Shel Holtz: I did. That was a service that would take your photo and turn it into a cartoon, an illustration. It was a service that used freelance artists. They would parcel it out to one of them. It was pretty cheap; you got it back in multiple file formats. It was great.

Neville Hobson: There you go.

I think I can answer my own question about why I’ve kept it on my blog, because the blog serves multiple purposes. It’s no longer a business site — I’ve changed what I do. It’s much more a personal site that’s intermingled with business. That’s different to LinkedIn, which is a social network with a business focus — that’s different. So that’s why I keep it up there, I guess.

Shel Holtz: All right. So if an executive has their photo taken and they have a makeup artist work with them, is that an accurate representation of them? Do they need to disclose that they were wearing makeup for this photo?

Come on. Let’s talk about more serious things, folks.

Neville Hobson: Like I said, logic is not part of this discussion; it’s emotion-driven. This is again a reflection, I think, of accessibility to ways to voice your opinion if you have one — and everyone has one, and they are voicing it.

Shel Holtz: Clearly. Well, let ’em.

Neville Hobson: I say thank you to Anna Lawler because that prompted this. She wrote the piece at the beginning of the year, but it did prompt all of this in my mind. I think it’s worth reading, so there’ll be a link to it in the show notes.

Shel Holtz: Well, I read an article recently with a pretty brutal headline: “Your Staff Thinks Management Is Inefficient. They May Have a Point.” This was in Inc. magazine.

It’s just the latest in a long string of big changes that employees feel are being done to them rather than with them.

The article by Bruce Crumley leans on new data from Eagle Hill’s 2025 Change Management Survey. In the past year, 63% of U.S. workers say that they’ve been through significant change: tech like AI, new products, return-to-office shifts, headcount changes, cost-cutting, cultural changes, acquisitions. But only a third of them think those changes were worth the effort.

A lot of them say their efficiency actually went down, their workload and stress went up, and the supposed innovation never really materialized.

Now, when Eagle Hill digs into the “why” around this, the picture gets even more familiar. Employees say management is picking the wrong priorities, not managing the rollout well, not supporting people as they adapt, and not monitoring how the change actually lands.

Only about a third feel leaders really listen to their input on what needs to change. Forty percent say they’re basically ignored.

The line that jumps out for communicators is Eagle Hill’s conclusion that the key to successful change is not what you change, but how you change — and that change is experienced at the team level, not somewhere on the org chart.

Now, layer AI on top of that. From the employee perspective, there’s a pretty consistent story emerging: they’re interested in AI, but they don’t feel included or supported.

Eagle Hill’s tech and AI research found that 67% of employees aren’t using AI at work yet, but more than half of those non-users actually want to learn about it. At the same time, 41% say their organization isn’t prepared for the rise of AI.

Workday’s global survey paints a similar picture. Only about half of employees say they welcome AI in the workplace, and nearly a quarter aren’t confident their organization will put employee interests ahead of its own when implementing it.

Leaders are more positive about AI than employees are, but they share that same lack of confidence about whether the rollout will be done in a people-first way.

And there’s a trust gap on top of that. Gallup finds only 31% of Americans say they trust businesses to use AI responsibly. Over two-thirds say “not much” or “not at all.”

Let’s make it even spicier. A recent global study from Dayforce found that 87% of executives are using AI at work compared with just 27% of employees. Execs are out ahead, using AI heavily, while a big chunk of the workforce is still on the sidelines — worried, undertrained, or just not invited in.

So if you’re an employee sitting in the middle of all this, what does it look like?

You see leadership trumpeting AI as the future. You get more tools, more dashboards, more “transformations,” as they call it. Your workload goes up during rollout. Your voice doesn’t seem to shape the priorities. And you’re told it’s all about efficiency and innovation while your own day-to-day experience feels more chaotic.

“Management is inefficient” starts to sound like a very reasonable conclusion.

That’s where communicators can earn their keep, especially around AI.

First, we can make the “why” legible. A lot of AI change stories stop at “This is cutting-edge” or “This will make us more efficient.” The Eagle Hill findings are basically a giant flashing sign that says that’s not enough.

We need to tell a story that starts with the team: What pain point is AI solving for you? What are you going to stop doing because this is now available? What does success look like in your specific function, not just on an earnings slide? Helping leaders anchor AI messaging in outcomes people actually care about is step one.

Second, we can bring employees into the design of the change rather than just leaving them on the receiving end. That means building in genuine listening — pulse surveys that ask, “What’s getting harder as we roll this out?” Small-group sessions where teams can talk about how the AI actually fits into their workflow.

Storytelling that highlights not just the shiny pilot, but the tweak that came from frontline feedback. And then — and this is the part we skip so often — closing the loop and saying, “Here’s what you told us, and here’s what changed.”

Same as surveys, right? We issue surveys, we get the feedback, and maybe changes are made — but we don’t tell anyone. If 40% of people feel unheard during change, that loop is our job.

Third, we can equip managers to be translators instead of amplifiers of confusion. Most people don’t experience “the organization”; they experience their manager. So when Eagle Hill says the team should be the core unit of change, that’s a giant invitation to communicators to build manager toolkits around AI.

Simple talk tracks: “Here’s how to explain this change in two minutes.” “Here’s what to say if people are worried about their jobs.” “Here’s how to be honest about the short-term workload bump.”

FAQs, slides, even suggested phrases that sound human instead of legalistic — that’s all in the comms wheelhouse.

Fourth, we can push for pacing that matches reality and help leaders talk about trade-offs. A lot of the resentment in these surveys comes from people feeling like change is something piled on in addition to their regular day jobs.

Eagle Hill’s advice to slow down, phase changes, and temporarily ease workloads isn’t just an HR tactic; it’s a narrative opportunity.

Imagine the difference between: “Here’s another AI tool, please adopt it,” and: “For the next eight weeks, we’re pausing X reports and Y meetings so you have time to learn this new workflow. Here’s the schedule. Here’s where to get help.”

We communicators can frame that pacing as a deliberate, respectful choice.

And finally, we can insist that AI change stories include trust as a first-class citizen, not a footnote. That means naming the concerns, not dancing around them.

Employees are reading headlines about bias, surveillance, job loss. They’re seeing that most people don’t fully trust businesses on AI. We can help leaders say out loud, “Here are the guardrails; here’s what we will use AI for, and here’s what we will not. Here’s how we’ll measure the impact on workload. Here’s how you can challenge a decision if you think AI got it wrong.”

That transparency is the only way to close the trust gap.

If we don’t do any of this, AI just becomes the latest exhibit in the “management is inefficient” file — another transformation employees experience as stress without payoff.

If we do our jobs well, AI can actually become a proof point that this time, the organization learned from the last wave of change — that it listened, it paced itself, it treated teams as the unit of change, and it used communication as a way to share power, not just spin the story.

Neville Hobson: I have to admit, I’m quite shocked to hear the picture you’ve painted there — that it’s so bad. Is it truly that bad?

Because this is actually, to me, like what you just said, particularly your concluding part — this is Leadership 101, for Christ’s sake, and yet so many people aren’t doing this.

Shel Holtz: Well, if the research is accurate, then it really is that bad.

Neville Hobson: What the hell is going on?

This actually touches on everything we’ve said so far in this episode — what leaders need to do in certain situations. Don’t allow it to be like this.

The whole idea of “management” being all up to speed with AI while employees are completely in the dark and don’t have a clue how to use the tools — I find that truly hard to believe as a significant factor across the board.

That doesn’t gel with some other research I’ve seen here in the UK — and mostly in the US — where the issue is getting leaders to embrace it, while employees are out there experimenting, which is why there aren’t guardrails or guidance properly.

So this is a pretty shocking state of affairs, it seems to me, Shel.

Some of the things here are so obvious that I just wonder why people enable this situation to be the norm, if it is as portrayed in this article.

There are a lot of tips though — I have to say everything you need to know about what to do is here. So pick this up and read it, for God’s sake, please.

Shel Holtz: I remember early in my career, I was at a Ragan Communications conference and a CEO was speaking. He said he believes that every CEO, as soon as they sit in the CEO chair, gets hit by a “stupid ray” aimed right at their head — because they stop listening.

They think, “I’m the CEO. I’m here because I know everything, and I can make these decisions in a vacuum. I am at the top of the food chain.”

I think that’s happening right now. If you look at the number of layoffs that are happening, and AI is a factor in these — they’re coming right out and saying it. They’re not hiding it; they’re saying, “AI can make us more efficient.”

They’re not talking to the teams that do the work, to find out, “If we end up with three people instead of 10 because you think AI can do the work, we happen to know that’s not the case, and this is going to make us less efficient.”

There’s not a lot of listening going on in these decisions being made. There’s not a lot of querying of the teams to find out exactly how they can use AI to be more efficient and what that means for the staffing of the team.

I think there are executives who say, “I have this tool, I’m in charge, I’m slashing the workforce.” I think that’s what’s happening. And I think that’s why so many employees think that the leaders are now inefficient.

Neville Hobson: Well, it’s missing completely the voices that — as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, and indeed thinking back to our interview with Paul Tighe from the Vatican — it’s missing the humanity.

It’s missing, “How does AI augment and improve how people do their jobs, not replace them? Not ‘become more efficient, therefore we don’t need so many people here.’” That voice is missing.

To me, that’s the essential part. You could extend that thought: that voice is not just about AI, although that’s a huge element because it is permeating organizations, and in many cases not in a good way, because the conversations are all about becoming more efficient and not needing people. It’s part of that bigger picture.

This article does talk about, in its concluding parts, “Change is experienced collectively, not individually.” That means a team, not the org chart, must be the core unit of change.

They talk prior to that paragraph about how the majority of modern workplaces are shaped by the teams that drive most activity and success. Initiatives come from the top, but success relies on the base embracing them. These are the fundamentals of leadership, surely.

I’ve noticed here — as an aside — that in some of these things you hear about that are going wrong in organizations, the people leading are just damn incompetent. Some of the speeches and things they say in public exhibit nothing but utter incompetence, and they should be fired.

That’s a bigger story, frankly, but it’s part of it. The most useless people leading these organizations are dragging them down, and the employees are the ones who are suffering. I’m straying into big-picture politics and opinions, but nevertheless, that’s what you see.

Shel Holtz: I’ll join you in that string.

It seems clear to me that a lot of leaders are abdicating the principles of leadership to the exuberance they feel about the potential for AI, and they’re just running with it. I don’t think that’s going to bode well for the performance of their organizations, especially when they’ve lost the trust and confidence of the people who are expected to execute on all of this.

Neville Hobson: So on that note, we would say that the next episode will have a lot of good news.

Shel Holtz: I sure hope so.

But that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. Our next long-form monthly episode — we will return to doing this toward the end of the month. We’re planning on recording that on Saturday, December 27th, and releasing it on Monday, December 29th.

Until then, go back to the beginning of the episode and learn about all the ways that you can comment. And we will have our midweek short episodes beginning in a week or so.

And until then, that will, in fact, be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #489: An Explosion of Thought Leadership Slop appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For the second year in a row, Coca-Cola turned to artificial intelligence to produce its global holiday campaign. The new ad replaces people with snow scenes, animals, and those iconic red trucks, aiming for warmth through technology. The response? A mix of admiration for the technical feat and criticism for what some called a “soulless,” “nostalgia-free” production.

Shel and Neville break down the ad’s reception and what it tells us about audience expectations, creative integrity, and the communication challenges that come with AI-driven content. Despite Coke’s efforts to industrialize creativity — working with two AI studios, 100 contributors, and more than 70,000 generated clips — the final product sparked as much skepticism as wonder.

The discussion explores:

Why The Verge called the ad “a sloppy eyesore” — and why Coke went ahead anyway
The sheer scale and cost of AI production (and why it’s not necessarily cheaper)
Whether Coke’s campaign is marketing, corporate signaling, or both
How critics’ reactions reflect discomfort with AI aesthetics in emotional brand spaces
Lessons for communicators about context, authenticity, and being transparent about “why”

Links from this episode:

Coke’s AI Ad Isn’t Just Marketing. It’s Corporate Communications.
Coca-Cola | Holidays Are Coming (YouTube)
Coca-Cola | Holidays are Coming, Behind the Scenes (YouTube)
Coca-Cola’s new AI holiday ad is a sloppy eyesore
Coca-Cola Sparks Backlash With New, Entirely AI-Generated Holiday 2025 Ad, Insists ‘The Genie Is Out of the Bottle, and You’re Not Going to Put It Back In’
Coca-Cola Is Trying Another AI Holiday Ad. Executives Say This Time Is Different
What Coca-Cola has learned on its generative AI journey so far
Coca-Cola’s AI Chief Dishes on Why the Brand Went Ahead With Another AI Holiday Ad
Hilarious graphic shows how bad the Coca-Cola Christmas ad really is
Remember kids, without the creative, we just have blank squares. It’s ALL about the CREATIVE.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson:
Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release, episode 488. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz:
And I’m Shel Holtz. Coca-Cola is back with a holiday spot created using AI for the second year running, and the blowback is about as big as the media buy.

If last year’s criticism centered on uncanny humans, this year they tried to sidestep that by leaning into animals, snow, and those iconic red trucks. The problem is that a lot of viewers still found the whole thing visually inconsistent and emotionally hollow — more of a tech demo than Christmas magic.

The Verge didn’t mince words, calling it a “sloppy eyesore.”

This wasn’t a lone creative prompting a model in a dark room. According to The Verge, Coke worked with two AI studios — SilverSide and Secret Level — involving roughly 100 contributors. So when people say AI is taking work away from humans, this example complicates that argument. The project generated and refined over 70,000 clips to assemble the final film, with five AI specialists dedicated to wrangling and iterating those shots.

If you think of AI work as cheap and easy, that scale tells a different story. This was massive, industrialized production. Despite all that, audience reaction has been harsh. Delish collected consumer responses labeling the ad “soulless,” “nostalgia-free,” and — my favorite phrase — “intentional rage bait.” In other words, people felt provoked, not moved.

The general sentiment is familiar: “Just bring back the classic trucks or polar bears and let real filmmakers work their craft.” The level of blowback reflects a mainstream discomfort with AI aesthetics invading a beloved ritual.

So why is Coke doing this again? Partly for speed and efficiency, sure — but the more interesting rationale is signaling. As Forbes argues, this isn’t just marketing, it’s corporate communication: a message to investors and partners that Coke is a modern operator experimenting across its value chain. In that sense, the ad is a press release in moving pictures — “We’re innovating.”

Whether consumers cheer or jeer, the signal still gets sent.

For communicators, I see three takeaways.

First, scale doesn’t guarantee soul. You can throw 100 people and 70,000 clips at a film and still end up with something that feels off. Craft and continuity remain stubbornly human problems, and current video models still struggle with temporal consistency and art direction.

Second, context beats novelty. Holiday ads are about rituals and memories. When the urge to adopt AI clashes with audience expectations for warmth and authenticity, “innovative” can come across as “indifferent.” If you’re going to bring AI into sacred brand moments, you need strong creative guardrails — and maybe keep flagship storytelling human-first until the tools catch up.

Third, be explicit about your “why.” If your real audience is Wall Street or prospective partners, say so — ideally without sacrificing the consumer experience. Coke’s narrative of blending human creativity with new tools can work, but only if the end result still feels like Coca-Cola. Otherwise, you’re asking consumers to bankroll your R&D with their attention during the most sentimental time of the year.

These trucks will keep rolling — and so will the debate — until the models solve for continuity and feel. Brands risk trading wonder for workflow, and audiences know the difference.

That said, I watched this ad last night during Monday Night Football. Looking at it through that lens, I didn’t see what the critics were talking about. I suspect most of the audience didn’t either. The vast majority probably aren’t aware it was generated with AI and didn’t see any problem with it. I think the hypercritical responses are mostly from people who are following the AI conversation closely — and maybe looking for an excuse to slam something that wasn’t made by human creators.

Neville, what do you think?

Neville Hobson:
I watched the video on YouTube — both the global version and the one Coca-Cola uploaded for European audiences. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference. They’re exactly the same length. Like you, I thought it was well done.

It was pretty clear to me within a few seconds that it was AI-generated — not because it looked AI-generated, but because of the scale and scope. You just know they’d use AI for something like this.

Coke has used this theme for years — the trucks, the snow, the feel-good singing. This time, there aren’t any humans front and center; it’s all animals. But as storytelling, I thought it worked.

That said, I did see some severe critiques, particularly from design industry voices. Creative Bloq, for example, called it an example of “how a company risks decades of hard-won brand equity through the use of nascent tech that’s still not up to the job.” I think that’s a bit unfair and shows a lack of understanding of what Coke was really trying to do.

There’s also a fascinating behind-the-scenes video Coke posted. It’s narrated by AI voices — the same ones from NotebookLM, actually — so it’s an AI explaining an AI. And the prompts they show are incredible: dozens of paragraphs for a single shot. This wasn’t a one-line “make a Christmas ad” job.

That explainer reinforces your Forbes point — this could be as much about corporate signaling as marketing. Personally, I see it more as a brand experiment than a corporate ad, but I can see both perspectives.

And yes, some critics are inevitably Coke detractors. One UK designer, Dino Berberich, posted screenshots showing technical errors — missing truck wheels, misaligned shots, and so on. Maybe Coke fixed those later, maybe not. But if they take that kind of feedback seriously, it’ll be invaluable.

Overall, I think it’s what you’d expect from Coke. Set aside the fact that it’s AI — it’s actually quite good. It continues the “Real Magic” theme they’ve been running for years. I remember one a couple of years ago with paintings in an art gallery coming to life when they got a Coke — also beautifully done.

So this feels like the next step in their evolution. Most viewers won’t realize it’s AI unless they’re already thinking that way. Awareness is growing, but the average person just sees a nice Christmas ad.

Of course, we’re now in a world where people start by asking, “Is this AI?” before saying, “Wow, what a great image.” That mindset can distract from the story — but it’s part of the landscape now. This kind of work will only get better, and Coke is helping to move it forward.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah, I agree. And if you look at Berberich’s LinkedIn post, you can see the issues he points out, but that’s not how most people watch ads. They’re not stopping every frame to analyze wheel placement. They’re watching during a football game or between shows. Most people just see a Coke commercial with some fuzzy bunnies.

One critique I read said the ad couldn’t decide whether it wanted cartoony or semi-realistic animals. I didn’t notice that. If you go in looking to criticize AI, sure, you’ll find something. But again, that’s not most people.

The YouTube comments are full of people saying things like “I’ve never wanted a Pepsi more in my life.” But honestly, nobody’s switching brands because of an ad like this. People drink Coke or Pepsi based on taste, not commercials.

As for Forbes’s point about corporate signaling — I don’t think this was meant as a corporate ad, but rather a way to say, “We’re embracing AI.” And the fact that they released a behind-the-scenes explainer reinforces that. They’re telling the world they’re leaning into this technology, iterating, and getting better at it.

You know, I don’t remember this kind of backlash when animation shifted from hand-drawn to CGI. That shift also displaced artists — the inkers and colorists who worked on traditional cells. This feels like a similar transition.

You still have people giving thought to story, design, and imagery — but the tools have changed. Does it have the same soul as a Pixar film? No. But then, Pixar doesn’t have the same soul as early Disney animation either. Time marches on. Deal with it.

Neville Hobson:
Exactly. And a lot of the negativity is just the nature of online discourse these days. Anything posted publicly attracts critics, trolls, and nitpickers. Among them, there are some valid points, but it’s hard to find them amid the noise.

The explainer video also includes a section showing how Coke evolved its Christmas ads — from sketches to animation to AI-rendered realism. It’s fascinating to see how deliberate that process was. Again, Coke released this publicly, which supports your point: this is about transparency and experimentation.

So yes, critics have a right to their opinions, and some make constructive points. But for most people — what we’d call “Joe Bloggs” here in the UK — it’s just a nice Christmas ad. They’re not thinking about AI strategy.

From real trucks to AI ones, Coke is pushing creative boundaries. Some say they should’ve shot it live and hired more people, but there’s no crime in trying something new. They’re pushing the envelope, and I think they’ve done a pretty good job.

Shel Holtz:
And to reiterate: they did employ people. Two studios, probably dozens of professionals. I doubt they saved much money doing it this way. They’re just moving forward with the technology — and that’s the point.

And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #488: Did a Soda Pop Make AI Slop? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

What happens when the AI conversation turns from a quiet side road into a crowded superhighway? Recently, Martin Waxman — digital strategist and LinkedIn Learning instructor — pressed pause on the churn to make room for curiosity, quality, and quiet. He’s not quitting; he’s recalibrating: publishing less often, thinking more deeply, and reminding us not to let AI do the thinking we should be doing ourselves.

For communicators, that raises bigger questions: When do we slow down? How do we trade volume for value? And what does “good enough” look like when our audiences are drowning in near-identical insights?

Neville and Shel dive into this topic in today’s short, midweek episode of “For Immediate Release.”

Links from this episode:

Knowing Where to Start and When to Make a Shift
What If You Redefined What Work Means to You?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz:
Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode number 487. I am Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson:
And I’m Neville Hobson. In this episode, we have a story that’s less about technology itself and more about what happens when you pause to think about the pace of it all. A few days ago, Martin Waxman published a reflective piece on LinkedIn called “Knowing Where to Start and When to Make a Shift.” Martin, as many of you will know, is a Canadian digital strategy consultant and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He was our guest in an FIR interview in January. Martin writes the AI and Digital Marketing Trends newsletter, which has become one of LinkedIn’s most successful, now reaching well over half a million subscribers. It began humbly in 2020 when Martin set out to explore the intersection of AI and marketing at a time when few others were doing so. His goal was to reach maybe 10,000 readers—he’s now 50 times past that. But this isn’t a story of relentless growth or scaling up. It’s the opposite. We’ll explore this next.

Martin’s post isn’t a farewell—it’s an adjustment. After years of writing about AI’s impact, he’s decided to slow the pace of his newsletter and make space for deeper thinking. In his words, the AI conversation has moved from a path less followed to a crowded superhighway. Everyone seems to be writing about the same things and the constant noise can be exhausting. So he’s taking stock, reevaluating his direction, reshaping his LinkedIn Learning course, and thinking about how to bring a fresh human perspective to the next stage of this conversation. There’s a generosity and humility in that move that feels rare today. He talks about resisting the temptation to let AI do the thinking for us—stop relying on AI as a crutch, embrace the blank page, don’t give up on your brain. He’s reminding us that creativity and discernment still start with people, not prompts. And he’s choosing to slow down—to step back from the rapid churn of publishing and make room for curiosity, quality, and quiet.

That theme of slowing down connects powerfully with a discussion I led in September in an IABC webinar on redefining what work means. The answer may not be doing more or moving faster, but taking the time to notice, reflect, and realign what we do with what really matters. Martin’s story feels like a practical expression of that—an intentional deceleration that invites us to think more deeply about purpose and pace in our professional lives. As we unpack his post today, perhaps the real question isn’t just about how communicators keep up with AI. It’s about how we decide when to slow down, how to add meaning amid abundance, and what to let go of so our work and our thinking can stay human. With everyone producing AI-related content, Martin’s pivot reflects a move from volume to value. How can communicators preserve credibility and originality when audiences are saturated with near-identical insights? Martin’s post isn’t just about pausing; it’s about reclaiming agency in how we learn, create, and lead with AI. It invites communicators to redefine productivity, not by the speed of output, but by the depth of thought.

Shel Holtz:
I was very taken with Martin’s post and I’m very happy for him that he has come to terms with this and made decisions that will make him happier. It’s not for me, however. I see this notion of slowing down in two ways. One is slowing down so you can take the time to produce quality output. I confess that I use AI to write things I don’t want to take the time to do. They’re not important enough that I need to be the author; they’re fairly rote. I give notes to AI, it cranks out a serviceable first draft, and I take 20–40 minutes to edit and revise rather than spending two or three hours. Nobody has ever questioned the provenance of these pieces. In fact, I’ve gotten praise for some of them, which makes me chuckle. I do this so I can appreciate the blank page and write the things where it’s important that it be me at the keyboard, in my voice.

The other way to look at this is simply slowing down in life. I appreciate people who want and need to do that—and especially people who find a way to accommodate that need. I want to go faster myself; I want more hours in the day to get more done. If I’m not being productive, I feel at loose ends and anxious, wondering what I can be doing now. Just this weekend, after a sleepless night, I wandered into the garage, noticed a box out of place, and the next thing I knew I’d been straightening the garage for an hour. That’s my personality: I have to be doing something almost all the time. So I think you have to look at what’s right for you. Don’t feel pressured to slow down if that’s not going to make you happy.

Martin’s prescription is a good one for people who are overloaded and overwhelmed, and I understand his interest in dialing back commentary on AI when so many are producing similar content. He has a unique perspective—he’s a thought leader and tends to be ahead of the curve—so I’d continue to pay attention to him. But scroll through LinkedIn and two-thirds of the posts seem to be about some angle on AI.

Neville Hobson:
I understand you, Shel. I’ve known you a long time, so I know that anxiousness about not doing stuff. I was like that. Each person is different; this applies to individuals, not a universal formula. The starting point is wanting to change—professionally, personally, or both. I went through that after moving a year ago to a rural part of southwest England from a busy urban area. That change catalyzed others, which is why Martin’s post resonated so strongly with me.

Now I take more time deciding what I need and want to do—not everything must be done right now. I still work late sometimes, but only when I feel like it, not every day. I’ve also been able to make changes and still pay the bills. I spend more time with my grandkids and my wife, take days off in the work week, and sometimes work on Sunday—with purpose. Going back to the IABC webinar on redesigning your work and life, doing things such as what Martin described fits into that bucket. We ran a quick poll at the start: “How aligned do you feel with your current work?” A third (33%) said, “I feel aligned—my work reflects my values and energy.” Sixty percent said, “I’m actively rethinking how and why I work.” Another 7% felt stuck or disconnected from what matters. So only a third felt aligned; nearly two-thirds are rethinking how and why they work, and some feel completely disconnected. In the chat, people said they now feel the need to question things they hadn’t been questioning—and that they aren’t happy.

Not everyone has the luxury to change, but there are things you can control. This isn’t a whole-life overhaul. It can be incremental—small steps. What Martin’s doing, as I interpret his post, is a small-step pivot in how he publishes his newsletter and updates his LinkedIn courses. He says he’s slowing his publishing frequency from twice a month to a less regular schedule—perhaps monthly or whenever something genuinely strikes him. Most comments I’ve seen are supportive.

He offers useful tips. “Stop relying on AI as a crutch” is a good one—don’t use it for the easy way out; use it to push you in unexpected directions. Embrace the blank page. For me, starting and stopping, taking a walk, doing something else often unlocks progress. Another tip I liked: aim for higher quality than before. Do less, take more time, and produce better work. That makes sense—rushing often reduces quality. Of course, that assumes you can do it.

Shel Holtz:
We’ve got deadlines out here in the real world, you know?

Neville Hobson:
You do, and you’ll still have them. But not everything has to be dropped immediately. This gives you empowerment to choose: that report due in ten days doesn’t have to be mapped out right now unless you want or need to. The key is deciding what you want to do about your life—and measuring it in a quantifiable way if that helps. Martin seems to have made an honest assessment of where he’s at, prompting further thoughts for his training and writing. Do you think this represents the visible front end of a trend among communicators choosing depth over frequency—slowing down to produce better quality work? I’m not sure I see it broadly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s behind what some people are doing.

Shel Holtz:
You could connect this treatise with what we’re seeing from employees pushing back on full-time return to the office and preferring hybrid schedules. People want to be with their kids, care for elderly parents, or simply avoid traffic—as I did this morning behind a gnarly accident, hence our late recording. People are reevaluating how they work, and organizations will have to come to terms with it. Look at Glassdoor reviews and a common complaint is being worked to death—long hours and expectations that you’ll put in the time.

There’s another way to interpret this. Martin was on a panel I moderated at an IABC World Conference in Toronto a couple of years ago on AI. Someone asked about using AI to write—is that acceptable? Martin said most of what we do in communications just has to be “good enough.” If AI writes “good enough,” why is that a problem if it frees up time for other work?

The way I choose to interpret Martin’s post is: I don’t have to slow down across the board. I can slow down one thing to make time for another. Example: there are two of us in the communications department where I work, and we were swamped. As people learned what we could do, requests multiplied. Juggling them without letting anything fall through the cracks became hard. My boss suggested two things. First, open a ticket system. We use ServiceNow, so now anyone who calls with a request is asked to open a ticket. We can better manage work, keep notes on what’s been done, questions asked, and promises made. Second, we had to learn to say no. If we want more resources, start saying no more often.

We have—“Sorry, we don’t have time for that. It’s important to you, but it doesn’t rise to a top priority for our department based on leadership expectations.” Saying no frees time. Does that time fill up? Yes—but it fills with higher-priority, more interesting, more relevant work. So slowing down doesn’t necessarily mean slowing down overall. It means slowing one thing to make time for another—maybe more time with family. In my case, it’s more time on the work that matters and less on the work that doesn’t. There are multiple ways to interpret and apply what Martin has presented.

Neville Hobson:
I agree, Shel. To repeat your point, each of us is different. On saying no, I learned that too and put it into practice this year by turning down opportunities for paid work because they weren’t the right fit or interesting enough. I felt great. Instead, I learned, read, wrote blog posts—things I wouldn’t have had time for. I saw my grandkids more; my wife and I went out to lunch and visited places. I sleep well now without the worries and stress. I do miss some things, but the balance now outweighs any of that by a big margin.

Martin looks ahead and wonders what comes next once we’ve mastered the tools. When AI becomes mundane and the question shifts to meaning and impact, what might the next conversation look like? He asks how communicators can lead the dialogue on quality, ethics, and human contribution in a world where automation is taken for granted. That’s at the heart of much of what we’ve been discussing—and what I want to keep exploring. What do we say when automation is taken for granted? What are your thoughts?

Shel Holtz:
I think it’s consistent with the old Melbourne Mandate from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management. It positioned communication at the center of the organization as, more or less, the conscience of the company. What the conscience focuses on varies with circumstances, but maintaining humanity in the organization fits that model well. We need to present leadership with data supporting the need to do that, along with ideas for how to do it without losing momentum. It fits squarely with that notion.

Neville Hobson:
We’ve shared some good thoughts here, Shel, and I’m curious what our listeners think. If anyone has a perspective—agreement or disagreement—let us know.

Shel Holtz:
You know where to reach us. That’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #487: Beyond the Churn — Slower Publishing, Deeper Thinking, Better Outcomes appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Sentiment analysis has become a default metric for communicators. If sentiment is positive, trust must be high. But if your company’s words are diverging from its actions, trust could be eroding while sentiment remains constant. You won’t know until it’s too late. The new metric to consider is “trust velocity.” Neville and Shel unpack it in this monthly long-form episode for October 2025. Also in this episode:

Is rage bait a valid marketing tactic?
Lloyd Bank’s CEO and executive team are learning AI to reimagine the future of banking with generative AI
A McKinsey report recommends that public affairs teams begin to factor geopolitical issues into their thinking
When conduct, culture, and context collide: Three crisis case studies reviewed
German firm launches ad campaign after its lift is used in the Louvre heist

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on AI browsers and Mastodon’s approach to BlueSky-like starter packs, but in a consent-based manner.

Links from this episode:

How thirst traps and rage bait affect workers on the clock
Lloyds to put chief executive and all top bosses through six-month AI course
Lloyds Banking Group's CEO and top bosses learn AI | Geoff Kates posted on the topic
Lloyds Bank AI training course criticized as outdated and unnecessary
Lloyds Banking Group scales adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot to supercharge their AI transformation
Upgrading corporate affairs for a new geopolitical era
Q3 Crisis Review: When Conduct, Culture, and Context Collide
FIR #483: How Tylenol Handled a High-Profile Falsehood
AI Models Measuring ‘Trust Velocity’
AI and Reputation: Trust Data You Can Use
‘Quiet as a whisper’: German firm launches ad campaign after lift used in Louvre heist
Louvre heist lift-maker seizes the moment with new ad campaign
German Company Launches Viral Ad Campaign For Lift Used in Louvre Heist: ‘Quiet as a Whisper’

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everybody and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 486, the long-form episode, the monthly ones we do for October 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz in the U.S. and we have a jam-packed episode for you today. So we’re going to jump right into it. Before we get into anything substantive though, I do want to ask that if you have any comments to share with us, and we always hope that you do, we have a number of comments to share with you today, please leave them on LinkedIn, where we share our posts, on Facebook, where we share our posts. You could even do this on threads or what’s, not WhatsApp, Blue Sky. That’s the one, Blue Sky. Yeah. You can send email to fircomments at gmail.com, attach an audio file. We haven’t had one of those in forever. You can record those audio files on our website at firpodcastnetwork.com. And you can always leave your comments right there on the show posts at firpodcastnetwork.com.

Neville Hobson: Blue sky.

Shel Holtz: And we do appreciate your ratings and reviews as well. So let’s get started with the rundown of our episodes from the last monthly episode in September till now. Before we do that, though, we had a couple of comments come in for some earlier episodes. You know, I was thinking, geez, these aren’t the episodes that we did between the last monthly and now. Then it occurred to me that, it’s a podcast. People can listen whenever they want. And apparently that’s what Sally Getch did. She said, yes, I am months behind listening to episodes, but I can’t believe no one mentioned the public library website is a way to get around paywalls. Contra Costa County Library gives you access to a ton of newspapers and magazines. So if you’re trying to get around a paywall, check out your local library’s website. They may provide access to that. And I have to confess, not something that occurred to me. Then episode 478, we have a comment from Steve Davis in Australia. Steve Davis says, Hi, Shel and Neville. I haven’t heard the term AI doomer before, and I don’t know if it’s right for me or not. We’ve been integrating AI tools for about two years in our practice, but we’re very focused on integrating them in a nuanced way. Maintaining the primacy of the human aspect of our creative and marketing business is key, and it’s what brings a lot of value.

Neville Hobson: Me neither.

Shel Holtz: AI tools and particularly large language models helped me do some grunt work in pulling some of our ideas together, but always on a short leash. Because of the name of our business, we have a great affinity with Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. So I start every workshop with one of his quotes. However, at a recent one using AI in a thoughtful way, I actually wrote a song for Oscar to sing. You’re welcome to use any or all of this if it helps illustrate an approach to thinking about our charming little robots. I have a couple of thoughts on this before I go to his comment on episode 479. The first is, well, thank you for that little ditty, Steve. And rather than the usual music we use to play out the episode, we’ll play that and we will include a link to your musical channel on YouTube in the show notes. But in terms of P, the Doomer, these are the people who believe that AI is going to end humanity. And P-Doom is the percentage of risk that you think there is around the potential for AI to end the world. And in AI circles, they tend to ask each other, what’s your P-Doom? And everybody knows what that means. Oh, 70%, right? So. That’s what that means. I don’t necessarily subscribe to this concept, although I did listen to a podcast with a guy who’s been working in AI since the 1990s. And he has come around to actually believing very strongly that this is a likely scenario. So it’s always something worth considering.

Neville Hobson: It’s totally new to me. I’ve not heard of that term before.

Shel Holtz: It may be an American term that we bandy around here, although I hear it on podcasts all the time and you can listen to those anywhere, right? For episode 479, Steve writes, hi guys, I’m not sure you get these emails. And that’s because I only check our email once a month before this episode. We don’t do comments during our short form midweek episodes. So Steve, that’s why you didn’t hear us reference it, but.

Neville Hobson: That’s true. You

Shel Holtz: Do appreciate these. says, I’ve just been listening to episode 479 and the noble idea of creating a community site to get authentic content and attract LLMs. The problem is that increasingly people are contributing AI generated content into these places in lieu of actually writing content themselves. LinkedIn has basically become a cesspool. I hold little hope for new communities to thrive unless there is some mindset shift or mechanism to ensure what’s being shared is being communicated directly by humans. If not, these community projects will become yet another source of plastic information. That’s probably not as harsh a reading of the situation as the Oscar Wilde song I sent you last week, but it shares some common ground. And to that, I would only say, I guess your experience on LinkedIn is based on who you follow, because most of the people I follow are definitely still writing their own content, and I’m able to speed through anything that looks disingenuous or as you say, Steve, plastic. But I also think that those communities in some regard are alternatives to being found in search engines. Building the community and having those people engage in conversation I think may find its way into LLMs, but it’s also an alternative for getting your content out to people as opposed to having them go to the 10 blue links on the first Google search engine results page. Just a thought.

Neville Hobson: make sense? Totally. No great comments, Steve and the the song really super I must I enjoyed listening to that good voice singing that’s really super. So let’s look at the few episodes that we’ve done since the last monthly. That was episode 482 we published it on the 29th of September. The lead story in that like all our long form episodes. This has six topics. That’s why they they take long. The lead story in this one, though, was talking about work slop. So it’s kind of like AI slop except in the workplace. So it’s the latest term referring to low quality AI generated content in the workplace that looks professional but lacks real substance. So we explored the sources of this, how big a problem it really is, and what can be done to overcome it. A couple of other topics in that episode, notable to mention, Chris Hewer is at work on a manifesto for the H Corporation. And he had an online session, which I participated in, of people interested in this, which is, in a sense, making organizations human centered. It needs a lengthier narrative to go along with that to help you understand what it is. But he covered that in what we commented on, which was a summary, lengthy summary in a post on the recent online discussion leading up to talking about the H Corporation. So it’s definitely worth listening to that. And then one other.

Shel Holtz: Well, we have a comment actually from… I’m sorry, I’ll make a time code. I thought you were moving on to the next episode and we have a Chris Hewer comment.

Neville Hobson: Okay? Okay? No, no, I was going to mention one of the other topics we talked about. That’s okay. That’s okay. You can have to do a bit of tricking editing here because I’ll just go straight into mention. Okay. And one other topic we talked about, which we’ve talked about a few times on the podcast, communicators everywhere continue to predict the demise of the humble press release. But one PR leader has had a very different experience with that intriguing snippet, you can dive in and take a listen to that. So that was 482.

Shel Holtz: And we had a comment from Chris Hewer, in fact, thanking us for adding so much incredible value to the conversation on H Corp Manifesto. I am truly honored to have had your friendship and support now for almost 20 years, but in this big moment, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Particularly important in our efforts to define the human-centric organization is a point you raised that I hadn’t properly considered. The role of communicators in all this is to ensure that the attention of leadership and stakeholders is placed beyond the short-term efficiency gains and into the impacts of tomorrow. Not only in terms of thinking about the unintended consequences of layoffs, rifts, such as that experienced by Duolingo and Klarna earlier this year, but also in terms of the longer-term consequences of markets losing customers because they don’t have income to buy the organization’s products or services. Maybe we can collaborate on a kit for communicators to lead or host some of these conversations internally. We’ve already created a conversation guide to ethical AI integration stemming from the work Shel and others have done as research fellows of the Team Flow Institute, which we can use to get started. Neville, you replied to that. You said, thanks. Communicators are ideally positioned to frame these discussions in ways that resonate with both leaders, leadership and employees, ensuring the focus isn’t limited to today’s efficiency gains, but also encompasses the longer term human and societal impacts. It’s about helping organizations see beyond immediate cost savings and recognize the broader consequences of their choices for their people, their markets, and their reputations. That perspective feels more important than ever in shaping how AI is integrated into the workplace.

Neville Hobson: I forgot and I left that comment. Thanks for reading it out. Yeah, that was a good comment from Chris, I must admit. So waiting. Yeah, I think I did. You sounded quite eloquent saying all those things. So thanks very much for that comment, Chris. So moving on to the next episode, 483. We published that on October the 9th. This was a very timely one. Again, this is something we’re going to talk about a bit later too, the kind of political consequences of political intervention in topical business issues. And this related to President Trump with the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declaring that the product of Kenview, which is the owner of Tylenol these days, changed hands quite a bit over the years, that this product Tylenol leads to autism in children when taken by mothers during pregnancy. As you probably might expect, the reaction to that almost universally was, don’t be stupid, it doesn’t do that at all. And I’ve noticed some of the commentary here in the medical profession was a little more forthright than they have done in the past, to be very deferential to Trump to not offend him. That was different this time, it seemed to me. So nevertheless, we talked about that, the crisis. made a reference to the big one for them back in the 1980s, with the poison tampering of the products in Chicago that led to a number of deaths, how they recovered from that. Okay, that was then, this is now, but nevertheless, they still did well, as we noted, the stock recovered, it dropped dramatically. After one day, thanks largely, we said, to Tylenol’s Savvy, an almost perfect response to the crisis. So that was pretty good. We don’t have a comment on that one. So let me move on to 484. Yeah, this is kind of interesting one that we talked about the public relations industry, maybe having its Tilly Norwood moment. You might remember it’s not front of mind for everyone these days, but Tilly Norwood is a manufactured AI actress who caused quite a kerfuffle. it was unveiled, uncanny realistic realism was quite extraordinary. So is this the Tilly Norwood moment for the PR industry with the introduction of Olivia Brown, a 100 % AI PR agent that will handle all the steps of producing, distributing and following up on a press release? Is this PR’s future or just part of it, we said? Debate is still going on about that and I believe we have a comment on this one, Joe. Two, okay.

Shel Holtz: We have two, the first from Sally Slater, who says, is so fascinating. I had brief aspirations of trying to automate the whole cycle end to end, but chatted with some journalist friends first. They hell-nodded real quick. Journalists in particular are sensitive to AI disruption. Their jobs are as much as, if not more, at risk as comms and content writing pros. So they really don’t like the idea of dealing with a robot instead of a human. Which is interesting because one of the items that I toyed with making one of my reports today says that the research shows, and this is in the US, that journalists are fine with PR people using AI in their pitches and in their relations with them. By and large, it’s not 100%, but it’s up there. You replied to Sally’s comment, Neville, so you get to hear your words in my voice again. That’s such an insightful point, Sally. It’s easy to frame this as an efficiency debate for communicators. But your comment highlights the other side, the impact on journalists themselves. The erosion of trust isn’t only about what we send, but also about who journalists are dealing with. Once they sense that they’re talking to a robot instead of a human, the relationship changes entirely. And when that robot is reportedly relentless in its follow ups, there’s really no escape from the machine. And then we had a comment from Andy Green who said, I can envisage many. Digital agencies embracing this to cover what they perceive as the PR dimension to a campaign. These people think in numbers, not stories, and not understanding societal issues.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a big topic. I think the bit that tends to excite people in this particular story was the way in which I’ve seen other people commenting on this, this is an end to end solution in a sense, that you tell the PR, the virtual PR what your campaign is all about, it goes away, plans it, prepares the press release, handles all the follow up and therein lies the interesting bit because… I’ve seen words used to describe it as relentless follow up. It will not stop. And that’s the bit I’ve seen a number of journalists saying, I got to find a way to ditch this damn thing. And that’s not really what they are expecting here. And I can see that offending a lot of people, you know, but is this part of the future? Again, the debate is still ongoing on this. It’s a great topic, though, isn’t it?

Shel Holtz: It is.

Neville Hobson: So then 485 is the last one we did before this monthly episode. We did that one, published it on October the 21st. Is it time to stop trying to go viral? We asked in that one. Crafting content with the intent of going viral has been part of the communication playbook for more than a decade. There was never a guaranteed approach to catching this lightning in a bottle, but there didn’t stop marketers and PR practitioners from trying. So we said this effort is increasingly futile. We talked about how several marketing influencers have suggested that it’s time to move on from the attempt to produce content specifically in the hopes that it will go viral. We talked about, or rather we shared some data points on that and debated whether going viral should remain a communication goal. We disagreed on a number of issues here, but I think we were aligned in the word viral being the kind of confusion point here, because if we take viral out and talk about just the marketing aspect where you’re trying to achieve an outcome from something that is more than just a viral message, but we talked about that some length in this episode. So is it time to stop trying to go viral? We said, yes, basically, didn’t.

Shel Holtz: We did, and Katie Howell agreed in a comment. said, platforms already reward return visits over one off reach and the clever brands are catching up. If your brief says go viral, you’re chasing a metric that won’t help you keep your job. Repeat engagement with the right people is the proper goal. Less glamorous, miles more useful. And another comment from Andy Green, good clarification over strategies, but also need to recognize viral, AKA meme friendly, is at the heart of effective communication. Also greater recognition of the impact of zeitgeist. Check out Steven Pinker’s latest book, When Everyone Knows.

Neville Hobson: Good comments. No question.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and thanks everybody for your comments. They really contribute a lot to these monthly episodes, so keep them coming.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we’ve had discussion that is not part of our kind of rundown list of topics. So it’s really good to have this kind of off the cuff stuff entering the discussion.

Shel Holtz: Very quickly, I just want to let everyone know that the latest episode of Circle of Fellows is up on the FIR Podcast Network. This is the monthly panel discussion among fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. This was a really interesting discussion about the fact that the role of the communicator keeps evolving, but the goal of supporting the business and the business plan remains absolutely fixed. And how do you square that particular circle. had Laurie Dawkins, Mike Klein, Robin McCasland, and Martha Lozichka on this episode. It is up now. We’ve just recorded it this past Thursday. It’s available for your listening pleasure. Episode 122 is on November 20th at 5 p.m. Eastern time. And another interesting topic, it’s about preparing the next generation of communicators. And we will have five fellows in addition to me moderating this episode. It will be Diane Gajewski, Sue Heumann, Theomari Karamanis, Letitia Narvez, and Jennifer Wah. So put that on your calendars, November 20th at 5 p.m. for that conversation. And now we’re ready to jump into our stories for this episode, but first, we’re going to try to sell you something. Social media and the e-tension. E-tension. Everything gets an E in front of it now. Social media and the attention economy are both changing how we communicate externally and how we engage internally. There’s an article I read, a really fascinating article, that asks whether marketers should lean into rage bait, the use of content designed to provoke anger and engagement. The second article that I read on this topic, also very fascinating, looks at how social media content and consuming it, including contentious posts and RageBait style content, is affecting the mood of people at work, how it’s affecting productivity and how organizations might respond. So something here for those of you who are considering using RageBait in your marketing and something here for you who deal with internal communications, all about this issue of RageBait. So let’s start with the external lens. The piece from Morning Brew via their brand strategy column is titled, Should Marketers Lean Into RageBait? makes the basic point that in an era where attention is the scarce commodity, brands are increasingly tempted and some are already experimenting with campaigns designed to provoke outrage. They stir up audience reaction, they polarize conversations, and all of this drives engagement. The article lists examples. Brands like American Eagle, ELF, The Ordinary among them have been accused of or credited with rage baiting in various forms. The proposition is actually compelling. It does drive clicks, it drives shares and visibility. But the caution coming from the article is just as strong. Not all press is good press. Building exclusion or anger into your brand could carry long-term risks to trust, reputation, employee sentiment, and ultimately consumer loyalty. Now, switch to the internal lens. This is an article from HR Dive. It was titled, How Thirst Traps and Rage Bait Affect Workers on the Clock. Reports on research from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, researchers surveyed workers over two studies, asking them to reflect on the most salient social media posts they saw that day, how it made them feel, and how productive they were. The results? When people saw fit pics or family posts, they felt more self-assured and engaged, but when they consumed contentious content, politics, rage-bait-style posts, They felt anxious, withdrawn from coworkers and less likely to engage productively. The takeaway content that triggers emotional turbulence may carry hidden organizational costs from distracted employees, reduced collaboration, maybe even increased attrition. So what should organizational communicators, that would be all of you, do with this convergence? Let me offer four action points. First, Be intentional about how your external messaging may echo internally. If your brand is experimenting with provocative campaigns, know, calling out norms, stirring up debate, maybe even courting a little outrage, ask yourself, what are the internal ripple effects? An external campaign that invites polarizing reactions may energize some audiences, and I would argue possibly just in the short term, but internally, it could signal to employees, our company is comfortable being controversial. That could boost excitement for some, but raise discomfort for others. Communicators need to work with HR and talent teams to assess sentiment inside the organization. How are employees reacting, especially those who engage on social media during the day? Are we inadvertently creating internal friction or disengagement by the tone we adopt externally? Second, create and enforce thoughtful social media consumption policies and supports. The HR Dive article suggests a practical approach. Treating social media use at work like a smoke break. Designate pause time, especially during heavy project phases because volatile content can hijack someone’s attention. As communicators, you should partner with HR and IT to provide guidance and structure. For example, quiet hours of connectivity, guidelines for personal device usage during high-focus times, and training about the emotional contagion of negative or polarizing social content. Document the rationale. productivity, wellbeing, and team cohesion. Third, align external and internal narratives around emotional tone and brand purpose. If your brand decides that provocative is an acceptable part of your tone, then the story you tell employees must reconcile with culture. Yeah, we provoke debate, but we do so respectfully, grounded in purpose and we value inclusive dialogue. That alignment prevents cognitive dissonance. You know, our brand is edgy externally, but our culture is conservative internally. And it supports trust, which we’ll be talking about in greater detail later. It also gives you a stronger foundation if things go sideways. You’re always defining the why behind your tone and you’ve prepared employees for what that means. And fourth, monitor, measure, and respond, both externally and internally. Externally track engagement metrics, brand sentiment, media coverage, social listening signals after campaigns that lean into controversy. Internally, partner with HR to monitor employee sentiment, surveys, pulse checks, be ways to do this. Collaboration indicators, retention metrics, maybe productivity signals tied to social media exposure. If a campaign triggers backlash, you should have a response plan. How would you communicate internally? How will you support teams to cope with any fallout? How will you pivot? Look, we’re working in a moment of heightened sensitivity. Clearly, socially, culturally, digitally, The attention economy is powerful, but the rule book is not what it used to be. What once was any attention is good attention is not universally true anymore. For external campaigns, building outrage may bring short-term visibility, but a thoughtful internal strategy, may undermine employee morale, productivity, and trust. I just said that wrong and it’s bad enough that I need to reset. For external campaigns, building outrage may bring short-term visibility, but without a thoughtful internal strategy, it may undermine employee morale, productivity, and brand trust. And inside the organization, the invisible cost of consuming polarizing social content is real and measurable. So the role of the organizational communicator becomes as much about internal ecosystem design as external narrative design. You’re not just pitching or broadcasting. You’re orchestrating tone, channel, culture, and consequence. If you lean into controversial creative, do so with your eyes open. Prepare your employees, monitor sentiment, align culture, and build in the feedback loops that show you’re aware of the risk and capable of navigating it.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, interesting. Listen to what you’re saying, Shel. My own thought is I have almost an inbuilt instinct that this is a bad thing, rage bait. And indeed, reading the marketing brew piece you a comment from a TikTok creator called Dulma Altan, who posts about business strategy struck me as probably summarizing the whole thing. If rage bait becomes a widely adopted strategy, she says, she anticipates that audiences might unfollow brands to avoid seeing it. And there to me is a big alarm bell. I recognize the interest many marketers have in provocative kind of content, whether whatever we call it, rage bait, okay. Example, I suspect would be something that’s very topical. is the American Eagle’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign for genes. Just one recent example, Marketing Brew says, it got plenty of people talking. Company execs defended the campaign, which drew backlash over the summer for its reference to genetics. And the chief marketing officer, Craig Bromance, told Marketing Brew that the campaign wasn’t designed as intentional rage bait, but instead aimed at sparking a conversation about optimism, confidence. and self expression. You can spin it any way you want, frankly, but he says so far, the company has reported initially positive results. So therefore I could say, okay, basically what you’re saying is the the end justifies the means then right? Is that what you’re saying? Well, you got great results for something that offended and upset a lot of people. Therefore, it’s okay is what I hear your message. I think you’re dead wrong, mate. That’s really not what you should be doing at all. So I wouldn’t support this at all. I don’t see any redeeming feature of this that has honor attached to it at all. you know, there’s other examples we could talk about, but the American Eagle one I did find quite interesting how that played out. And there are other examples too. And it’s interesting the angle you’ve brought into it, on the impact it will have on employees. And I often wonder whether marketers don’t really take that into account when they do some of these things. So this is not good, in my opinion.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think marketers consider the impact of any of their campaigns on employees. Employees are not their audience. Although employees are, let’s face it, expected to reinforce and support the message of marketing. So your employer brand could take a hit unintentionally from something like this. But you also referenced from that article that the people who are offended by it could stop following you. What that means is that the people who are still following you are the people who are likely to succumb to this kind of rage and enjoy getting worked up and angry and hurling invectives at other people in the conversation. Is that the market you really want for your product or service? So, yeah, I think there are some long-term consequences of engaging in this kind of marketing that you really have to sit back and consider. It’s a very strategic approach to, it’s a critical thinking approach. to taking on this particular type of marketing activity.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And again, going back to marketing brews article, they had some interesting comments from people they talked to about this. One in particular struck me from Megan Morris, the co-founder and CEO of a creative agency called Full Fat. She commented, quite interesting, if a brand is intent on courting controversy, she pointed to a Doritos campaign from early this year in which the brand implied it might change its signature triangle. chip shape into a square as exemplary an example for example the campaign drew some backlash and plenty of online chatter but all in good fun that is really nicely done rage bait if there is such a thing morass said megan trust me there is no such thing as nicely done rage bait okay it’s right it’s it’s nothing serious said morass it’s not going to create any emotional or behavioral triggers so

Shel Holtz: It’s faux rage bait. It’s what it is.

Neville Hobson: You could do that. Why would you not do that? Why would you go ahead and do something that seriously offends people, risks damage to your brand and your audiences across social channels and elsewhere who could have dropped you and don’t talk about you except in negative things? Why would you want to do that? This is good. But let’s not call it rage, please, no matter how nicely done it was. So that was a good one, Shel. So let’s talk about AI, actually. We haven’t talked about AI yet. Yeah, I found this a very interesting one. And it’s in the financial services industry. I doubt it’s unique to this particular institution, Lloyd’s Banking Group. But they’re doing something at sending a very public signal about AI, starting at the top.

Shel Holtz: AI, yeah, we should talk a little bit about AI.

Neville Hobson: The CEO Charlie Nunn and the entire executive team are enrolled in a six-month, 80-hour generative AI program designed with educational technology company Cambridge Spark and University of Cambridge experts with hundreds of senior leaders also in scope and more than 110 already through the course. Lloyd says that the program blends hands-on sessions, virtual master classes, and real-world projects with potential future Gen.AI use cases put forward to progress to pilot phase. These include using Gen.AI to support market insights, customer relationship management integration for commercial customers, freeing up time for strategic high-value client engagement, and improving overall customer experience and retention. This sits alongside a group-wide scale-up of Microsoft 365 Copilot. So it’s not training in a vacuum, but part of a platform commitment and an enterprise change program. Reactions unsurprisingly are mixed. Supporters say you cannot lead what you do not understand. Executive fluency creates permission, governance and budget for real change. Critics call it AI theater, a costly slow course in a fast moving field and argue a sharp briefing cadence would beat a six month syllabus. Both can be true. Literacy without delivery is performative. Delivery without literacy is reckless. If this is more than theater, we’ll see it in KPIs, resolution speed, onboarding time, and front-line productivity, not in slide decks. So glancing at some of the reactions on LinkedIn illustrates all of this. One supportive post on the business network said, I think this is a great move by the bank. The only way to understand and gain the full benefit from AI is a full understanding of the benefits and problems from the top downwards. One commenter said, being a little deliberately controversial, I do wonder if some of the staff and directors will return from these courses with a very different view of AI’s potential, not just for good, but for harm too. Other comments included empowering leadership with AI literacy as a foundation of sustainable innovation and bold move and sets a strong message internally and to the industry. But another post is more critical saying that Lloyd’s AI training courses are a waste of time. and money and a weak attempt at demonstrating that they’re staying up to speed on tech developments. What they learn in month one will be mostly obsolete by month six. One commenter on this post said, most AI education is not as good as what you’d get if you just asked the AI to teach you about it. Well, according to Lloyds, their entire executive committee and senior leadership team are expected to complete the program by the end of 2026. The communication question. is whether this becomes a credible narrative of capability and control or raises expectations that the bank cannot possibly meet on customer experience, risk or productivity. Is this smart leadership signaling that builds real execution muscles or a well-packaged promise that will be hard to cash? I do wonder.

Shel Holtz: I think this is a great idea. I am 100 % behind this. We had the conversation on Circle of Fellows day before yesterday. Remember, the theme was that the role of the communicator remains fixed. It is to support organizational objectives and goals. However, the way we do this continues to evolve. And one of the questions that came up was, how do you learn new technologies? When you are a chief communication officer, for example, you’re pretty busy. How do you learn new technologies? And one of the answers was, well, reverse mentoring. I don’t think reverse mentoring is adequate for AI. The implications for business, for your business, are too huge to rely on a young employee saying, here’s how I use it. Isn’t this cool? Look what you can do. I think you need to understand strategic implications here. I think you need to understand how this is going to affect the way your business is managed, the way the work gets done, the way your organization interacts with customers and other stakeholders. How are things going to change? I think, you we’ve talked about a lot of these implications in previous episodes. The fact that there are going to be job displacements. The fact that entry-level jobs are going to change dramatically if 75 % of the work that an entry-level person does, because it tends to be more grunt work. If that can be done by AI, what does that do to entry-level jobs? You have to have entry-level jobs where your future higher-level employees are going to come from, if not from those entry-level jobs. So there’s a lot of thinking that has to be done around this. And what I see in most organizations is training being pushed down to the people who do the work, not the people at the senior level of the organization. They’re the ones endorsing training for everyone else. They’re not learning it themselves. And how can they lead the organization through this kind of change? And let’s be clear, we’ve never seen the kind of change that’s coming before. And I think this is the way to do that. You get your leaders completely immersed in it and trained in all the dimensions that are going to have an impact on your organization. I think it should be a requirement. And I think it’s actually kind of sad. that there’s an article about an organization that’s doing it because that means that most of them are not.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m with you on that. And I agree fully that I think this is an extremely good idea, a very good initiative. When I was researching and looking into it, it became clear to me that this was truly immersive up and down the every hierarchical level in the organization. So that at the end of this 80 hour program over a six month period, the leadership team and the whole executive committee are going to know what it is, how it works, what are the impacts in X number of areas in the business throughout the entire business to understand the magnitude of what this means. And it puts them in a very good position, I think, to ask questions, to support it, to debate it. If they don’t want to support it, they don’t think it’s very good, that’ll stimulate further discussion. So it’s kind of like They are on the same level as the folks lower down the organization who doing all that grunt work you mentioned. And they will understand more about the value of that and what support those people need elsewhere in the organization. So it is interesting and it’s totally unsurprising to see some of the criticisms out there that is just illustrative of people’s different opinions. And I think the fact they’ve done this and then the scale up of Microsoft 365 pilot. in parallel with this in a wider part of the organization. They’re taking this extremely, extremely seriously. And I’m sure other institutions in the financial industry are doing similar things, bet, except I saw Lloyd’s writing about it themselves. I saw media reports on what Lloyd’s Lloyd’s press releases about some of the stuff they’re doing were extremely well explained what this is all about. So I think it is something that is worth paying attention to how they’re doing with this. So it’s good that they have shared this information.

Shel Holtz: I’m baffled at the notion that there’s criticism of this. You don’t want the leaders of organization to be up to speed on the technology that’s going to change the entire world. mean, come on. I just don’t get that. These are the people who are going to be guiding the organization through this change. And if they don’t understand it, they’re not going to guide the organization very well.

Neville Hobson: Go figure.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Well, there’s a new report out from McKinsey. They are a report machine. They are a report factory. So there’s always going to be new reports out from McKinsey. This is a good one, though, and one that as we are so focused on AI and some other issues that organizations face on a daily basis is one that’s sort of bigger. And we may not be seeing the forest for the trees. The role of corporate affairs is being redefined in a world of rising geopolitical and geo economic complexity. If your eyes glaze over, that is probably part of the problem. Because if you work in communications, external affairs or stakeholder relations, this really is something you need to pay attention to. They begin this with something that we all are sensing right now that geopolitics is back and in a big way. After decades of a relatively stable global order, we’re now seeing rising trade policy shifts, export and import controls, sanctions, regulatory fragmentation, and governments using economic tools in strategic ways. These changes are putting new pressure on companies, not just on operations or supply chains, but on how they engage externally, how they structure themselves, and how they tell their story. McKinsey’s research finds something really intriguing. While executives view trade policy change and geopolitical instability as major risks, only 28 % say trade policy change is a top leadership priority and just 15 % say geopolitical instability is. So there’s a gap between risk and attention. That is where we step in. The article lays out a five-point playbook for upgrading the corporate affairs function. I want to walk you through these and then we’ll talk about what you can do in practical terms. Number one is map the world. Which geopolitical trends matter for your business? When you’re exposed, what the value at stake is, who the key stakeholders are. Many companies don’t quantify their exposure. McKinsey says only a small share do rigorous modeling. Find your corner solutions, you know, your best case and worst case, so you know what you need to be prepared for. Next, hone your narrative and strategic offering. Once you know the terrain, you need to refine how you talk about it. McKinsey notes that language matters. For example, the difference between the word advocacy and the word lobbying. And leaders are increasingly expected to act as commercial diplomats. For communications people, this means your story can’t be generic. It needs to reflect the geopolitical context behind the business and tailor the message accordingly. Third, optimize your engagement. It’s not enough to hope that someone will listen. You need to engage proactively with regulators, governments, associations, third parties, and choose the right level and channel. For example, you might find local or state or provincial officials more relevant than national ones, or you might use a trade association forum rather than a press event. It’s about effectiveness, not volume. Fourth, adapt the function’s organizational structure. Corporate affairs can no longer be an above the line support activity. It needs to be embedded in the business units, aligned with key metrics and operationally relevant. For communicators, that means moving from being message makers to being strategy partners with influence on business decisions and operational design. How much do we talk about wanting a seat at the table? Wanna know how to get one? Finally, the article calls for upgrading skills, analytics, geopolitical insight, and even AI. McKinsey notes that while AI and analytics can help, communicators must be paired with these AI tools in order to provide that human judgment. This means getting comfortable with new tools, but also building the strategic thinking around them. So what does this mean for you, the organizational communicator right now? First, advocate for and help lead the map of the world exercise. Partner with your risk operations and strategy folks to identify the top geopolitical and trade policy issues that affect your organization. Which markets are exposed? Which supply chains cross sensitive jurisdictions? What’s at risk if things change? Number two, revisit your messaging to reflect these stories and risks. If your company is operating in geopolitically sensitive markets, your external and internal narrative should acknowledge that and not simply assume a Global will work the same way everywhere, story. Choose language that resonates with regulators, governments, local stakeholders. Point three, review your stakeholder engagement plan. Are we talking only externally when something goes wrong? Are we connecting with the right offices and arenas? Should we be attending different forums, using different channels, working with different third-party partners? This is your chance to make the engagement smarter. The fourth action point, elevate your role in the organization. Use this geopolitical context to show how communication really matters to the business’s license to operate. Work with business leaders. What do they need? What are the key risks for them? How can you help structure narrative engagement and intelligence so it’s not just a communication afterthought? And action point five, embrace new tools and insight. You don’t need to become a data scientist overnight, but you should start experimenting. Just one thought, use scenario planning for external affairs. build a what-if narrative for potential trade disruptions or create a dashboard tracking emerging regulatory actions. We’re not just talking about a world where communications can add polish. We’re talking about a world where communications and external affairs and by extension, organizational communication has to be strategic, agile and grounded in real business context. As McKinsey puts it, your function can either shape the geo-economic environment or be shaped by it. If you’re in communications, raise your hand and say, let’s upgrade how we do this. Let’s map our exposures, refine our narrative, engage more smartly, embed ourselves in the business, and build new capabilities. Because this change isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

Neville Hobson: That’s a very interesting report from from McKinsey, I think you did. You did a pretty good job in in in summarizing the whole thing and those very steps you mentioned. It’s hard to pick a topic that is that you that you didn’t cover. In fact, you you cover them all. But the one that I would definitely reference is the is the towards the end of the report where it talked about leveraging AI. It made me think instantly of the Lloyds Bank executive training. So this talks about leading enterprises are creating AI lighthouses. Now that’s a new phrase to me, but I can visualize a lighthouse. I mean, I kind of get where they’re going with that. That incorporates analytical, generative and agentic AI to reimagine their corporate affairs workflows. So for example, it says an AI agent can automate a communication campaign cycle from setting the requirements to generating content to testing messages to tracking impacts. Teams can also use GenAI. to create briefings, combine the external sources of insight on stakeholders with internal insights on policy positions and lines to take. The shift is certainly taking hold, says McKinsey. So that’s just one example. But that illustrates to me that you need to have the kind of thrust of this overall argument in this story, in this article, made aware within the organization at the senior levels in particular, the whole spectrum. that helps them understand why they need to do this. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this or some form of this or an element of this is part of what Lloyds Bank is doing in their executive education program that they’re running. know, McKinsey quotes Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, among other things, has gone so far to predict Wait for it. 95 % of what marketers use agencies, strategists and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by AI. Now that brings in another element of these kind of elements that are popping up. was in a, what do call it? It’s not a webinar exactly. It was more a Zoom presentation via LinkedIn yesterday on. changing the billable hours function in consulting firms from hourly billing through to value-based charging. Now, I didn’t hear much new in that session, to be honest, but I keep hearing people talking about this topic now. And there’s something I’ve written about two years ago when I was getting interested in it. How would you do this? I said to myself in a blog post. So I sort of said it to everyone basically. How would you change your model suddenly? yet recognizing that your clients who are some of these leading enterprises, are tweaking it quite straightforwardly, very clearly, that, wait a minute, I’ve hired this person or this firm to work with us, and they’re charging us X by the hour, and yet 80 % of that time, they’ve got an AI doing it. So what are we paying for? So those questions are being asked. And indeed, some consultants are asking those, how do I change this before my client asks me to change it? So that’s part of the picture. So leveraging AI to me is part of that very much so.

Shel Holtz: absolutely. And at the speed with which these geopolitical and geo-economical events are happening and the fallout is happening, we absolutely need to be using the tools that can help us stay on top of it and analyze the data that comes in. So I think the workflow recommendation, not just, gee, how can I help it? how can it help me write a headline or edit a press release? We really need to be looking at the data analytics capabilities and how agents can collect information, analyze it, and then do something with it on our behalf, with human guardrails, of course. But I agree with you. If this McKinsey article had come out a couple of months ago, I would say I’d Bet those folks at Lloyd read this, but they’ve already taken their action by the time this came out, which means that they’re even more on top of things than the people reading this and going, hey, I ought to be doing this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I suppose the good thing to mention to conclude, particularly this 95 % thing that Sam Altman talked about, is what McKinsey says that as AI gathered intelligence, they start to say, however, as AI gathered intelligence becomes increasingly commoditized, teams need to supplement it with direct knowledge of events only humans can provide. So that means you need to reinvent yourself slightly, I would say maybe more than slightly to be positioned and perceived and indeed deliver if you can precisely on that. So you’re part of the, I’m going to say the 5%. I mean, it’s not quite like that, but you’re someone with direct knowledge of events only the human can provide. So you will leverage AI to support you. in delivering whatever it is you’re delivering to your client or your employer as part of this big picture of what you need to do in this new geopolitical era. So it’s no small feat this. If you’re not thinking about it, and these kind of warnings people talk about all the time, but it must be clear, I think, to most people. You get a sense of momentum is really building in this. We keep seeing articles. and opinion pieces, the reports you name it almost daily on this about AI, that about AI, along with the critics as well. So it’s a rather muddy picture to understand. who should I pay attention to with all this? But it’s relentless. It’s coming at us left, right and center. we need to be on top of that. Communicators are well placed to help their company employ and navigate this.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there’ve been a couple of posts lately. There was one from Chris Penn yesterday talking about how you can’t opt out of AI anymore because of the AI browsers now that all of the browser providers are baking into it. But I also see a lot of posts on LinkedIn, several every day, from marketers and communicators saying, AI is never going to take our jobs because of this human requirement and that human requirement. They’re trying to make themselves feel better. And they should be doing exactly what you just said, reinventing themselves.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s an essential thing to do now and you need to get on top of that. So we’ve got down now, right? Yeah. Can we take a quick P break? No, I didn’t. I had lots of water though before that. So listen, the last time I did this, I went out with the earbuds plugged in. When I came back, I completely screwed up the audio. So I’m taking them off. I’m taking them off. I may need to still recalibrate them when I come back, but I’ll leave them off here. Right, I’ll be back ASAP.

Shel Holtz: Yes. and I need to make a time code. Yes. Did you have a code zero? So leave the earbuds there. Okay, no worries.

Neville Hobson: Yadoke. Let’s see, do we still have these things plugged in? Can you say something?

Shel Holtz: Check one, check two.

Neville Hobson: It It worked. Good. Now.

Shel Holtz: getting dark outside. We’re expecting rain today.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we, our clocks go back overnight tonight. So I think you’re next weekend, right?

Shel Holtz: I was going to ask when that happens. I even made a note. So I think for two weeks.

Neville Hobson: So I think you’re the first Sunday in November. That’s next weekend.

Shel Holtz: I, is it, Alexa, when does the, when do the clocks change in the US? When do we fall back? Daylight saving time ends on Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 at 2 a.m. local time. So, so we’re fine for, yeah, for next Monday. It will be on the same schedule. Right.

Neville Hobson: Next week, next weekend. Right, so next week we’re not doing anything. So next Monday, we’ll still, we’ll be back to the normal eight hours difference. So next week was, yeah. So next week we’re seven hours apart, just FYI. So back to normal following week. Okay. So hang on, let have a quick sip. I’ve got this tickly cough and we had our flu jabs on Thursday and I tell you, both of us, we knocked a bit with this.

Shel Holtz: Exactly. Alexa, stop! Right. OK. Really?

Neville Hobson: I think we had the mild case, not as bad as last year, because last year we had COVID and flu at the same time. This year we didn’t get COVID because the government’s changed the eligibility. And as the cynics say, me included, say it’s because of the same money on the budget probably. So last year it was anyone over 65. This year it’s anyone over 75, unless you’re a special need or all that. So first time since 2020, we haven’t had a COVID yet. Now I could go… to the pharmacy just down the road and pay a hundred pounds and have it done privately. I ain’t gonna do that. Because it’s FluJab and everything else we do is on the NHS, it’s free.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, see, had, yeah, we still get the COVID at 65, so, but not younger. Used to be anybody, so.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think people are looking at budgets more than anything. Anyway, so.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, we’ll see if there’s another COVID outbreak that leads to a change.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So you could mention Dan.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’ll say something about Dan and then I’ll throw it to you.

Neville Hobson: then we’ll go on to this corporate crisis thing.

Shel Holtz: Right, okay. And my velocity thing is actually pretty short. So, all right, 100.

Neville Hobson: Yep. Ready?

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I’m sure that was a great report. Neither of us have had an opportunity to listen to it yet. We’ll do that later. But the reports are always great. So I can’t imagine this one’s any different.

Neville Hobson: are. No, I’m sure it isn’t. Thanks, Dan. It’s good to have them. So this next topic is an intriguing one, I think. We’re going to take a look at a report by Provoke Media that editors of the magazine, plus invited experts they brought in, weighed in on corporate communication crises involving 14 organizations. So these included Tylenol, Nestle, JP Morgan, Cracker Barrel, Suntory, Intel, Meta, Adidas, Astronomer, Jet Two and more. We talked about Tylenol ourselves in episode 483 in early October. So 14 corporate comms crisis, that’s quite a bit and many will be familiar to you. The report reveals a world where reputation risk is increasingly shaped by behavior rather than policy. and where leadership conduct, cultural context, and digital amplification combine to test corporate credibility in real time. These crises share a clear pattern. Behavior lights the match, culture supplies the oxygen, and context decides how fast the fire spreads. The organizations that recovered fastest moves with speed and accountability, not legalistic hair splitting. They put people first, sought credible third party validation, and treated employees as a primary audience. Where leaders delayed, defended on technicalities, or ignored the cultural moment, issues lingered and reputations bled. We can’t discuss each of the 14 in detail as there just isn’t enough time. What we can do, I’m sorry, we would have been here till 10 o’clock tonight probably, Shale, I mean, it would have been too long. What we can do though is consider three of them to see what happened and what we can learn. And there’s a link in the show notes to Provoke’s detailed report. So what we’re to do is I’m going to outline the three one by one and in between, Shail and I will have a chat about each particular case as we go along. So we’ll start with Nestle, where the CEO’s secret affair tested the corporate compass, mild, mild way of putting it, I think, an undisclosed relationship between CEO Laurent Frick’s and a senior employee surfaced. a clear breach of the world’s largest food company’s code of conduct. It raised questions about power imbalance, conflicts of interest and disclosure standards. The issue quickly moved from private conduct to public governance, forcing the board to weigh privacy against policy and to show whether values apply when they are inconvenient. Fricks resigned roughly a year into the role. Already suffering from a sales slump and bracing for new US tariffs, The Swiss company saw its share price dip after Frex’s departure, compounding its underperformance. Investors, having seen two CEOs exit within a year and a one-third drop in the share price over five years, were not impressed. I think that’s putting it mildly, Shell, to be honest. what do you think of this undisclosed relationship between CEOs and relationships with senior, or maybe not so senior, in some case, employees? seems to be, dare I say, almost a common occurrence to what you read these days. But the consequences, certainly in case of Nestle, of this crisis were quite serious.

Shel Holtz: very serious, especially since this company has been going through CEOs as if it was a revolving door. And for the world’s largest food company, little stability at that senior level is probably a good thing. But you’re right, this is becoming a routine thing. Probably the most notorious case recently is the CEO of Astronomer, tech company at the Coldplay concert getting caught with his head of HR on Kiss Cam. Both of them married, but not to each other. You would think that senior executives in these roles would see these things happen and the consequences when these secret affairs are revealed and say, I can’t do this, but we are biological beings, you know, and people succumb. So I don’t know that we can stop these stories from emerging when they happen. I can’t imagine that they’re going to stop happening. The question is, how do we deal with these? what did the Provoke article say about how Nestle dealt with this? it, was their analysis that they dealt with it effectively?

Neville Hobson: Well, there’s various comments about that. I was looking at the article because it’s quite lengthy. They moved quickly about appointing a new CEO for continuity, much more than any comment they made about passing judgment on the behavior of the CEO on his romance and more about how his lack of transparency and poor judgment reflect on Nestle. Given that as CEO, he’s the moral compass of the organization. So that was the backdrop behind all of this. And it doesn’t go into any detail about what led Frex to the decision to leave, but he resigned swiftly and left very fast and there was no exit package. And he seems to have vanished now. So I’m just looking to see, yeah, the main comment basically is the share price effect, the negativity of the share price. that was negative on the news of the ousting of the CEO. But public perceptions of Switzerland have not followed suit, they say. According to Calibre, a reputation management firm, the company’s reputation has improved steadily over the past three years, with its trust and like score rising from 50 in the third quarter of 2022 to 69 in the same period of 2025. measure of how much people trust and like the brand on a 0 to 100 scale. This suggests that in Nestlé’s home market anyway, the company is viewed as handling the incident appropriately. It remains to be seen how the change of guard and continued coverage of the story will affect its reputation in the coming weeks and months. So Intrigue is a Swiss company, and the Swiss are different to the rest of Europe in how they regard such things and the behavior. So they were impressed with how it was dealt with within Switzerland, but that remains to be seen how the rest of the world feels about it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and of course they’re a global company. One thing that I miss, at least I haven’t heard it or seen it in these types of stories, I haven’t seen it in the astronomer story, I haven’t seen it in the Nestle story, is that they take action relatively quickly. This is a violation of our policy, it’s unacceptable, and this executive will be leaving. And we’re going to hire another one who could very likely do exactly the same thing. We never hear what we’re going to do about this to keep it from happening in the future in order to protect the reputation and protect the brand. And I think maybe that’s something that organizations should think about. In any crisis, you’re supposed to say, here’s what we’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Here’s something that is clearly defined as a crisis. And there’s none of that with any of these organizations.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, and that doesn’t come across at all in this story. One additional comment talks about how Nestle’s bigger challenge lies beyond one wayward CEO. Talk about the new CEO, Philippe Navratil, has his work cut out for him, and it will require clear communication about what strategies he’ll pursue to turn the business around. So it’s not about the wayward CEO, it’s the actual business story. that’s not where the problems stop according to this person. Two abrupt CEO departures can erode employee trust and damage culture. Nestle needs to manage its external positioning and rebuild morale internally. So yeah, that new CEO has got his work cut out for it, I’d say. Okay. So then our next story is on Suntory, the Japanese global drinks company. This case is the hard realm of product integrity. The leadership crisis began when CEO Takeshi Ninami resigned amid a police investigation into suspected illegal supplements, although none were found. Executives moved fast with the press conference, while President Nobuhiro Tōri said the conduct fell short of what is expected of a chief executive. So this is Japan, and the culture of how people apologize and address issues is very different than how would be in the West. So… According to Provoke, crisis experts point to disciplined governance in the response, external counsel engaged early, tight board CEO coordination, rapid public disclosure, and deliberate avoidance of commentary on live legal matters, all of which limited speculation and protected shareholder value. The playbook was cross-functional, legal, HR, and comms, moving in sync with internal stakeholders treated as first order audiences to maintain trust. Context mattered too. In Japan, pre-verdicts resignation signals moral responsibility and respect for stakeholders. Notably, Ninami asserted his personal innocence in his capacity with the business lobby, separating that from his corporate role to reduce the company’s reputational risk. The playbook that works is speed, independent scrutiny, and making customers whole, with visible updates that show the remedy is real. choose legalistic defense and you convert a product issue into a long tail credibility problem. And by the way, Shell, I didn’t see any reference to how would they fix this to avoid this kind of thing in the future. It’s not the same as a relationship imbalance with an employee. If anything, this is slightly more serious, legal supplements being imported into Japan. So how do they prevent this? haven’t seen anything mentioning that yet, but this is again an interesting one. And maybe there are elements of this that would be interesting to learn from a Western perspective, because in Japan it’s very different, the culture.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I don’t think this one requires that, what are we going to do to prevent this in the future element quite as much as one that just keeps happening, right? But this is a case where a guy, if you believe him on the face of it, bought something he thought was legal that wasn’t, and it ran afoul of the company’s drug policy. That’s pretty clear cut. He violated our direct policy. He’s out. And as long as they move swiftly, and I think, you know, your internal communication is probably more important than your external communication on this one. This tells you that there are two classes in the organization, right? If the CEO can be canned for this, means obviously you can too, but in a lot of organizations, the leaders would get away with it because they run things. the employees would be treated differently. So I think there’s a positive message you could actually send to your employees here is that we treat everybody the same. And that might be a message that would be worth taking externally as well. We don’t distinguish between the leaders and the frontline employees. Everybody is subject to the policies of this organization and we executed on this policy. Done deal, moving on. So yeah.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, did get, Santori did receive quite a bit of praise from critics. One person, Caroline Shoya, the founding director of the PR group in Australia, said that Santori’s handling of the incident demonstrated strong governance discipline and execution of its crisis playbook. The immediate use of external legal counsel, board CEO coordination and quick public disclosure. help limit speculation and protect shareholder value. Its speed and clarity of communications reinforced accountability and transparency. The company avoided commenting on ongoing legal proceedings, avoiding further risk. And in the case of the employees, this was quite interesting too, that she said, Ninami’s resignation highlights how leadership integrity issues can quickly spiral into company-wide reputation risks. A leader’s personal conduct impacts corporate trust, making it a governance and communication priority. boards and corporate affairs leaders must actively anticipate this risk and be prepared to address it. So that’s part of that overall picture, which clearly, according to the critics, they praised how they dealt with it and the speed at which they did it and the transparency under which they did it too.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and both of these cases are cases of personal behavior affecting the organization. In this case, I think there was an extra dimension to it because of this particular individual status. He was a former advisor to prime ministers before he took this job. He was Japan’s corporate face at the Davos World Economic Forum. He is a very prominent and very well-known figure in global business world and this probably shook a lot of people. But at the end of the day, he took drugs that he wasn’t supposed to, so he’s out. And I think there’s a positive message that you can share with that.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, he did consistently talk about he believed that he was doing nothing wrong at all. He was had the right to do this. That’s what he’s been saying. I’ve not seen anyone saying yes, you’re right. No one’s agreeing with that. He’s not getting criticism either. But the consequences are still there.

Shel Holtz: I think his message should have been, I truly honestly believe these were legal. I should have checked more thoroughly before I purchased these. I am going to be doing that in the future and I regret my behavior. So easy enough.

Neville Hobson: There you go. So that’s a good advice there, I think. So the final look is at a case that’s in the US. Certainly you’re very familiar with this, know you are, Shaldee. The ABC Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel crisis. It’s a case study in how political intimidation collides with stakeholder power. So after talk show host Jimmy Kimmel criticized the Trump administration live on air for exploiting the killing of activist Charlie Kirk. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, that’s the broadcasting regulator in the US, warned ABC the easy way or the hard way, reminding broadcasters their licenses depend on his agency. Within hours, Nextstar, which controls over 30 ABC affiliates, dropped the show. ABC followed. Sinclair went further, demanding Kim will make a payment to Kirk’s family and the right-wing group. The reaction was immediate. Hollywood guilds condemned the move. Protests erupted in New York and Los Angeles and consumers threatened boycotts of Disney parks and cancellations across Disney +, Hulu and ESPN. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner publicly rebuked. Current Disney CEO Bob Iger, where’s all the leadership gone, he said, sharpening the governance glare. Over six days, more than 1.7 million paid subscriptions were canceled. Advertisers were targeted online. and under sustained pressure the program was restored, even Sinclair reversed. The lesson is not subtle. An easy jerk tilt to appease a hostile regulator ignores the whole stakeholder universe. For communicators, the job is to map power beyond the politician. Customers, talent, affiliates, advertisers, and defend principle with a plan, not a panic. ABC and Jimmy Kimmel is a crisis by choice when commercial caution appears to muddle creative expression. The options are stark. Principles for Sale that invites questions about editorial independence, sponsorship guardrails, and whether a broadcaster can defend free expression while protecting its commercial relationships. Transparency about standards and boundaries beats backstage contortions every time. I don’t know, does that sort of summarize it all pretty well in your take in terms of what happened?

Shel Holtz: It does. This was a case of an organization jerking its knee and acting very rashly and very quickly without thinking in terms of the long-term consequences. I think at the executive level, you get very insulated and forget what the common folk might do. But when the common folk band together, 1.7 million of them might cancel their Disney Plus subscription, which is exactly what happened over that. That is a ton. of money for a company that is increasingly reliant on its streaming service for its revenue. So I think that may have been part of the calculus in bringing the show back as quickly as they did. And his opening monologue, which I watched on YouTube, I thought he handled very deftly without kowtowing. He did apologize for anybody who was offended, but he didn’t make the apology that some people wanted him to make. I heard, and I don’t know if this is accurate, but I heard that Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, was contacted relentlessly by A-listers in Hollywood telling him this was bad, you shouldn’t do this, and that that factored considerably into the decision to bring Kimmel back, which, you know, frankly pissed off Trump and his base. But He’s still there. And frankly, his viewership has gone up considerably as a result of this. So for Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, if he thought this was going to get rid of Jimmy Kimmel, all it did was give him more viewers. So here’s another person who should have thought more long-term and more critically before jerking his knee and making such a ridiculous threat.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So the final comment to add to this is from Provoke’s article where they quote a crisis communications program name to ask not to be identified saying this is about the cancellation. saw that real people still have the power to influence corporate decisions. It was a reminder to communication professionals that they need to remind CEOs that they have to take the whole stakeholder universe into account when they make these decisions. You said something similar, I think. yeah. So three examples.

Shel Holtz: Yes. What do I pay? I think I pay $20 a month for a Disney Plus subscription. I mean, they’ve got Marvel, they’ve got Star Wars, they’ve got National Geographic, and several other properties. Now they’re folding Hulu into Disney Plus and ESPN. So for 20 bucks, that’s a bargain. And 1.7 million people said, I’m not going to pay my 20 bucks a month, my 240 bucks a year. multiply 1.7 million by 240, that’s a chunk of change that they can’t afford to lose. So that is power. And when consumers decide they’re going to wield that power, they definitely can’t have that kind of influence.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, you’re right. I also subscribe to Disney Plus. I don’t pay 20 bucks equivalent, I pay nine pounds, which is about $11, I suppose. Doesn’t give me ESPN, gives me Hulu and a lot of stuff there. It is good. It’s probably, I would say after Netflix, it’s the one I watch the most more than any other. So, okay, so three crises we’ve looked at of the 14 provoke disgust. I would say across all of these crises, the lessons consistent. Behaviour creates the crisis. Values aligned action resolves it. Is it that simple? It seems so to me. Read the room, act at the speed of trust and rebuild with proof. Note that phrase by the way, act at the speed of trust. Rebuild with proof, independent reviews, measurable fixes and ongoing debates. Anything, anything finally you want to add to this topic?

Shel Holtz: No, we’re going to move right into the next topic because it talks about trust velocity. So it is a perfect segue. Unless you want to talk about what other streaming services we like. We have entered a new era in how trust works, not just for tech companies, but every kind of organization. In the past, trust was something you built slowly and managed over the time. If you lost some during a crisis like those we just talked about, you worked to rebuild it. Today, trust moves at the speed of attention. It can surge or collapse in a day, especially when people see a gap between what your organization says and what it does. Gee, we ought to maybe call that the say-do gap. That’s the essence of a new concept in reputation analytics. It is called trust velocity. The rate at which confidence in your organization rises or falls based on how closely your promises match your proof. Traditional reputation monitoring focuses on sentiment. whether audiences sound positive or negative, but sentiment can stay flat while risk is growing quietly in the background. For example, imagine your company saying, we’re committed to sustainability while social posts start showing waste problems in your supply chain or community leaders call out a lack of local follow through. Public tone might still sound neutral until suddenly it doesn’t. Trust velocity. picks up that tension early. It doesn’t just matter tone, it measures friction between words and evidence. And this idea aligns with what Edelman calls a trust inflection point in his 2025 AI trust imperative. A report that while focused on AI really applies to every business. Edelman found that people’s patience for vague or unverifiable claims of any kind has run out. The takeaway for communicators couldn’t be clear. If you can’t just say we’re respond… Sorry. You can’t just say, we’re responsible, we care about people or we act ethically. You have to show how. That means documenting your practices, explaining how decisions are made and being transparent about oversight. If there are limits or shortcomings, own them. If you’re learning, show what you’re doing to improve. And if a program or policy is falling short, pause it, fix it and communicate the fix. Because today responsibility without receipts is a reputation risk. Edelman also found that the wider public has a growing sense of grievance. 60 % of respondents worldwide say institutions, whether business, government or media, make their lives harder and serve narrow interests. When that’s the baseline, 60%, that’s a staggering number, trust isn’t a given. It has to be earned through consistent, visible follow through. Now the Pew Research Center adds another layer to this conversation. Their new global study on trust in AI regulation shows very different confidence levels by region. It says a majority of people in Europe trust the EU to handle oversight, but in the US, trust is split down the middle and far lower in many other parts of the world. And I have to throw in a caveat here. I’m not sure if the survey that was conducted by the Pew Research was just the countries of the EU or the broader European. community of nations. So when they talk about trusting the EU to handle oversight, I don’t know if it’s only people in EU countries. That wasn’t listed in that report. But this nevertheless has implications far beyond AI companies. It’s a signal that regulatory trust itself is fragmented. In some places, people believe in strong oversight. In others, they assume institutions can’t be trusted to keep companies accountable. So if you communicate globally, your trust narrative has to flex. In Europe and similar markets, emphasize alignment with recognized standards, transparency, independent audits, compliance with oversight frameworks. In the US, audiences tend to want proof, not promises, clear evidence, measurable safeguards, and third-party validation. Whatever the market, the principle is the same. You earn trust not by saying we’re compliant, but by showing the data, showing the decisions, and showing the people behind them. So how can communicators put this idea of trust velocity to work right now? Start by defining five to seven promises your organization truly makes. Safety, inclusion, sustainability, innovation, customer care. Then set up two lanes for each promise, what we say and what we do. The first lane is the messaging. That would be executive statements, campaigns, internal posts. The second is behavior. Metrics, policies, audits, employee feedback, supplier data, customer experience. When those two lanes start to diverge, your trust velocity drops. That’s your early warning. A simple way to track this is with what some organizations call an integrity board. One slide per promise. What we said, what happened, is trust rising steady or falling? What’s our next move? And when you close the loop, tell people, you said, we did, here’s proof. It’s a simple but powerful cycle. Listen, measure, act, communicate, repeat. The bigger point is that reputation management today isn’t just about messaging, it’s about evidence management. Transparency, data, and openness are now communication tools. So if you’re thinking about how to strengthen your organization’s credibility this quarter, here’s a concise way to put it. We measure ourselves by how fast we close the gaps between promise and proof, and we communicate those gaps Honestly, that’s trust velocity. And in this world where information moves instantly, it may be the single most important measurement of all.

Neville Hobson: Now, that’s very interesting, particularly the Pew study I found. It’s interesting the, excuse me, the overall recommendations in this topic. I think the thing that interests me is the governance bit more than anything, so it doesn’t backfire. And I’m wondering, I don’t see this mentioned in plans that touch on this topic, I suppose. Source of truth lists, I like that a lot. name which data counts as proof. So you don’t just bung a report in to back up without specifying what in the report is backing up what you’re saying. I see that a lot, by the way, that, you know, here’s his, his this and then there’s an attachment. That’s a big report without telling you what in it you need to pay attention to. So I think there’s food for thought here, without any doubt. And going on to the Pew one, this to me illustrates differences in Europe and the US. I’m using the word Europe deliberately to brace that whole area. it’s the EU, though the European Union has a particular, how could you say approach to trust. So you will hear reports and comments by people in positions of power and authority, but how much people trust the EU to look out for the interests of the citizens of the European Union. And that, frankly, gives you an indicator of one reason why the Brits are particularly not keen to be part of an institution like the European Union. We’re more of an independent mindset than you see elsewhere in continental Europe. But really interesting, difference, it does it, I guess, is a question really. Does this illustrate the political divide post Trump in the US versus Europe, generally speaking? So for instance, you’ve got the metric from Pew, Americans are split, 44 % trust the government’s regular AI versus 47%, you don’t. It’s almost the opposite of Europe or in the EU in the case of what Pew is reporting. A median. 53 % trust the EU to regulate air effectively. That’s quite significantly more than in the United States. So is that the nature of Americans? I think it might well be, Sheldrake from history, that not trusting the central government so much as they would, you know, their community or whatever it might be.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think you have both in play in this particular instance. I don’t think people trust the US government to regulate much of anything. It’s very, very slow to respond. It is very, very prone to influence by lobbyists. And it just doesn’t catch up with what’s going on in the country anywhere near fast enough. But in terms of the Trump administration and AI, their view is all gas, no break. We need to be on top. We need to be first. Don’t stop innovating. Don’t stop developing. Stop worrying about the potential risks and win. So if anybody thinks that this administration is going to lead an effort to regulate AI, think again. That regulation is going to happen state by state. California, Governor Newsom has recently signed legislation. He vetoed it last year and then they watered it down a little and he signed it, but it still put some guardrails up. This is not the optimum approach because then AI companies have to develop their products and their services to ensure that they don’t run afoul of 50 separate pieces of legislation. Much better if it was done centrally, but it’s not going to happen. And I think the people who say, yes, I trust the government to do this are probably by and large on the right side of the, and I mean political right, not correct, the political right side of the equation. And they like what this administration does, which is not regulating. They’re deregulating right and left. So is there a great deal of trust that the U.S. government is going to regulate AI? No, absolutely not. They’re not going to.

Neville Hobson: there. Yeah, that’s our landscape in that case. So basically, you’re on your own, I suppose you could say in terms of corporate approach to, to, you know, the implications for organizations trying to do business in various markets, whether it’s within the US or elsewhere, you can’t rely on your government, unless you happen to be in Europe, where you more likely to rely on the centralized state. The federal system in Europe is not like the US. There many similarities, of course, but there isn’t, for instance, an EU-wide defense structure with a defense, Secretary of State for Defense, or as you have it, war, as he is now. You don’t have any of that. It’s still national governments, but they defer to the central control of the European Commission and the European Parliament, which is one reason why the UK is opted out, which is a whole separate topic. recognizing the landscape, I suppose, is a key message to take away from this, pay attention to these developments, and make your plans accordingly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and it’s not just AI. Keep that in mind. Remember, we talked about things like sustainability. It’s the say-do gap. And I find it interesting that the Engage for Success organization in the UK around employee engagement lists the say-do gap, which they label as organizational integrity, as one of the four pillars of employee engagement. I think we need to spread that now and make it the basis of organizational trust. The company I work for, trust is one of the key things our leadership is working on. So we can’t be in a vacuum. I think a lot of organizations are looking at trust as the most important capital they have. How do you build it? Well, not by measuring sentiment. We have gotten very complacent with sentiment as the indicator of how people feel about us. We spend a lot of money on it. There are people out there selling it. Time to move on. I’m not saying ignore it, but we need to start looking at these other indicators as well.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Okay. So then, I guess our final story is a great one to end on Shell, I have to say this is a case study in real time marketing with a moral whiplash is how I’ve titled this. This many of you listening, probably most of you will know what this story is about the days after a Paris gang used a furniture lift to climb into the Louvre Museum in Paris and in less than 10 minutes make off with an estimated 88 million euros in Napoleonic jewelry. So the German manufacturer of that furniture lift, company called Burka, B-O with a normal out, C-K-E-R, the brand is the Agilo Furniture Lift, posted a tongue in cheek ad on Facebook and Instagram. The title of the ad or the headline was When You Need to Move Fast in German, with a copy boasting that the lift moves up to 400 kilograms at 42 meters per minute, as quiet as a whisper. The post went viral, about 1.7 million impressions versus the brand’s usual tens of thousands. Most reactions were amused. A vocal minority called it crass and insensitive to French sentiment. Berker says the lift had been sold years ago to a Paris rental company and was apparently stolen during a demo. The family-run firm admits it was shocked to see its product in the news. But once it was clear no one was hurt, they decided to make the most of the moment. Whether that generates real leads remains to be seen. But marketing chief Julia Schwabat said that after the news report, countless people, our staff, business partners, clients got in touch with us and we thought, wow, we have to do something with this. By Monday morning, the campaign was live. So is this clever, culturally aware nimbleness or opportunism that trivializes a crime and risks alienating stakeholders beyond the meme? The communication question is where you draw the line on humor, harm and brand voice when you are adjacent to a scandal rather than the cause of it. Is this a masterclass in agility, or a case study in playing with fire?

Shel Holtz: I think this is a master class in agility. David Meerman Scott would in a heartbeat call this news jacking. So I think the distinction between the kind of news jacking that David referenced in his great book on the topic and this is usually news jacking is when your company takes advantage of news to draw attention, not when the company involved in what you’re news jacking from. does it. So that’s a subtle distinction, but it’s essentially what they did. And I think they did it extremely well. I could see if they’d been caught, the thieves, and had used some other piece of equipment, they could have done something like they might have gotten away with it if they had used ours. There’s so much, again, as you say, nobody was hurt, which I think opens the door to having fun with this. mean, you know, I don’t think most people are viewing this particular crime as some horrifying crime. They’re thinking of it as something that you would watch a movie about, right? I’ve even seen a photo of some dapper dressed young man and there’s all kinds of discussion. about whether he’s the detective who’s going to solve the case or if he’s even real. So people are having tremendous fun with this. I don’t see why the company whose equipment was used by no action of their own can’t join in the fun.

Neville Hobson: No, in fact, we we reference back to our conversation about rage baiting, where they comment in there about if you can do something that is a bit of fun, and a paroxysm, positive response or reaction, why would you do the rage bait route? This is sorted in that kind of area. I think, you know, thinking about it, when I saw the, you know, when the when the the heist happened, it was news headlines on every single news channel over here. And I remember seeing the photo of the furniture lift parked outside the back of the Louvre, which was on a public street. And it was parked there. And I was thinking, what is that? Is that something the police are using or what? It wasn’t clear to me until it suddenly came out in the news reports. This is what the crooks used. And I thought, my God, it added an element of, you’ve got to be kidding me that this will happen. Where’s Inspector Cluso? Let’s get him on the phone. And I saw loads of loads of people posting that on Facebook, on threads, you name it, it’s called the Spectaclusa. And so it had that humorous element to it, which I think is exactly on target in this context of what happened. No one was hurt. There are elements of high amusement and comedy even to this. mean, the crooks, it was actually seven minutes they escaped. came down the lifts and of course the velocity that it does it at 42 meters per minute. They were down in no short order. They had motorbikes parked there that they all jumped on and sped off. One of the crooks dropped one of the objects that they’d stolen from the regime, which was a necklace or a crown. can’t remember what. It was one of Napoleon’s prized possessions. They got that element into it. They weren’t perfect, these guys, but they got away and no one knows where they are who they are even. Quite extraordinary.

Shel Holtz: It really is. And even the media is having fun with it. I think it was CNN, might’ve been the New York Times, they interviewed a bunch of thieves for their opinion on this. And the consensus was, had to be an inside joke. you know, who’s not having fun? Well, the Louvre’s not having fun with this. And the French police and the French government aren’t having fun with this. Pretty much everybody else is.

Neville Hobson: There is that. They’re not. I think there’s some serious elements emerged as I’ve heard and seen on the TV and in the press. For instance, the back of the building, this is one area where they had no CCTV cameras. That’s a fail. That’s a real fail. That is, know, the crooks knew that, the crooks knew that. So anyway, you got it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Well, again, inside job, right? But yeah, I think this is a reason to go get David’s book and read it and figure out what you need to do to be on top of these things so that you can take advantage of an opportunity when it arises.

Neville Hobson: So what’s the title of David’s book?

Shel Holtz: News jacking. Yep, that one. It’s very good. Yeah, my favorite story out of that was about the London Fire Brigade. I don’t remember exactly what the story was, but they ended up taking advantage of the story as a way to recruit women into the Fire Brigade. I don’t remember. what precipitated it, but they jumped on that story in order to offer this opportunity and they got good results out of it. So read the book, you’ll get that story. And that will take us to the end of this episode of For Immediate Release, episode number 486 for October 2025. Our next episode will drop on Monday, November 17th. I know that’s… earlier than usual, but Thanksgiving is coming in the U.S. and I’ll be tied up that weekend and I’ll be tied up the weekend before. I’m gonna go down to San Diego and visit my daughter and my granddaughter. So we’re gonna record in the middle of the month. So look for us on November 17th and remember to stick around for a minute and listen to that song because it’s pretty entertaining. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #486: Measuring Sentiment Won’t Help You Maintain Trust appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Things change fast in the digital world. On the other hand, business tactics can be slow to adapt. Crafting content with the intent of “going viral” has been part of the communication playbook for more than a decade. There was never a guaranteed approach to catching this lightning in a bottle, but that didn’t stop marketers and PR practitioners from trying.

That effort is increasingly futile, as the social media companies that host the content have altered their algorithms, and people are paying attention to different things these days. This has led several marketing influencers to suggest that it’s time to move on from the attempt to produce content specifically in the hopes that it will go viral. Neville and Shel share some data points and debate whether going viral should remain a communication goal in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Is Going Viral Dead?
Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagement
We Don’t Care About Viral Marketing Anymore
The Viral Effect: Unpacking the Influence of Viral Marketing Campaigns on Generation Z’s Purchase Intentions

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 485. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and it is time to stop making going viral the point of our work. I’m not arguing that reach is irrelevant. I’m arguing that virality as an objective is a strategic dead end. High variance, low repeatability, and increasingly disconnected from outcomes that matter. I’ll explain right after this.

For years, viral success stories seduced communicators, and I’m among them. There’s a thrill in watching that graph spike, but we’ve learned a few hard truths. First, virality is unpredictable by design. Platforms tune feeds to maximize their goals, not yours. Second, even when you catch lightning in a bottle, the spike rarely results in any kind of durable advantage. A new peer-reviewed analysis of more than a thousand European news publishers on Facebook and YouTube, published in the journal Nature, found that most viral events do not significantly increase engagement and rarely lead to sustained growth. In other words, the sugar high fades, and it fades fast. Meanwhile, veterans of content-led link earning have publicly stepped away from virality as a North Star. Fractal, an agency that once made viral part of its brand, now says flatly, and I’m quoting, “We don’t care about viral marketing anymore, and neither should you.” Their pivot is toward durable metrics like authority, affinity, and relevance. You might think that’s a vibe shift, but it’s not. It’s a strategic correction. Even the classic research on viral ads, the eye tracking work that taught us how emotional arcs and brand cameos drive sharing, was never proof that you can plan a viral outcome, only that certain creative choices improve your odds at the margin. Helpful craft guidance? Yeah, sure. A basis for corporate OKR? That’s objectives and key results? Nope. Layer on platform dynamics and the case gets stronger. Meta’s shift away from news culminating in the shutdown of CrowdTangle, the very tool journalists used to see what was going viral, has reduced transparency and made spikes harder to both trigger and to verify. When the scoreboard moves behind a curtain, playing for highlight reel moments becomes folly. In some markets, we can literally watch viral news get deprioritized. In Australia, publishers report Facebook engagement at all time lows as memes and creator posts fill the feed. If the feed favors entertainment over information, it also favors retention over reach. Your viral playbook ages out fast in that environment. The New York Times captured the cultural angle. The internet that rewarded sudden mass attention is giving way to one that rewards depth: revisit rates, creator loyalty, community momentum. A share count trophy doesn’t impress the algorithm anymore. Sustained, meaningful engagement does. So what should replace viral as the goal? Let’s cover a few things. First, it’s designed for compounding attention, not explosive attention. Planned content is a series, not a stunt. Build episodic formats: office hours, ask me anythings, recurring data notes, anything that trains the audience to keep coming back. The scientific finding I studied earlier is the tell. Durable growth comes from consistency, not from lucky breaks. Second, shift your KPI set. Trade shares and views as headline metrics for return rate, session depth, qualified traffic, assisted pipeline, issue literacy, whatever truly maps to your business or reputation outcomes.

Neville Hobson: .

Shel Holtz: Fractal’s rationale for de-emphasizing virality in form of authority and affinities is a good model. Third, optimize for platform fit, not platform luck. Where audiences actually engage, optimize to the native behaviors that correlate with retention. A quick example outside our usual stomping grounds, science communities now see richer discussion on BlueSky than on X because the culture and mechanics favor constructive back and forth over dunking. Smaller network, higher quality signal. Build earned elasticity into distribution is the fourth tactic. Yeah, keep a line item for opportunistic amplification. Creator partnerships, timely collaborations, paid boosts that extend life for posts that deserve it. But treat amplification as gasoline for a fire you’re already tending, not a match you light and hope it sets the world on fire. Fifth, prepare for attention risk, not attention gain. The wider your message travels, the less control you have over how it’s interpreted. Your plan needs counter message, clarification assets, and issues response baked in. Meta’s data opacity only raises the bar for preparedness. So when does a viral goal still make sense? Well, there are edge cases, awareness blitzes for entertainment launches, urgent public interest alerts, or short run stunts designed to trigger specific behaviors.

Neville Hobson: Hmm

Shel Holtz: like getting signups during a defined window of time. Even then, the viral moment has to be tethered to a post-moment system, a next step path, a nurture stream, community onboarding, so the spike has somewhere to go. If you’re still writing, “go viral” on a brief, cross it out, replace it with create repeat engagement among the right people, increase qualified discovery, or raise message salience with priority stakeholders. Those are hard, unsexy verbs, but they’re the ones that move the work forward. And if you’re thinking, “we’ve always chased reach, why change now?” consider the evidence. The platforms don’t reward virality the way they used to. The data windows are narrowing and the best research we have shows spikes don’t stick. Plan for compounding attention. Let virality, if it arrives, be a bonus, not the business model.

Neville Hobson: Good assessment, Shel. I had to admit, I was thinking about the two words, viral marketing. And what came to my mind, as it’s not a topic I’m kind of thinking about every day, was what we saw a decade ago, which was spontaneous stuff that largely wasn’t planned, although much of it was planned, but didn’t really work. Things like, for instance, I reminded myself today and I looked at the video, the Chewbacca mom back in 2016, I think it was, that was a surprise hit. I mean, really, it was natural. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t planned. It was brilliant. It was wonderful, actually. But it perhaps illustrated the point you’ve just made, which because that wasn’t part of any kind of plan at all, it was spontaneous. So it didn’t have any kind of road to go down. It just corrupted and grabbed lots of attention. And that was it. The guy whose name I can’t recall nor his company, but who was interviewed on the BBC, sitting in his home office, business suit and tie and all that, and his two little children burst in. One was a little toddler and one was even younger, who came in on like a baby stroller. And then the maid came in behind to drag them out. And all the time the interviewer was asking the questions and he was saying, “I do apologize. I’m very sorry about this.” It was super. And that went viral. I think it was. Yeah, he was in lockdown. So he was doing that. So that that would end about 2020. So I think the, you know, the that time was one where these ideas were emerging, that the the kind of places where you could stimulate this weren’t as widely

Shel Holtz: That was during COVID, right? When he was doing the broadcast from home.

Neville Hobson: covered as they are today and there’s more of them today. But apart from that, the whole landscape has shifted and mindsets have shifted even. Knowing that this is going to be our topic today, I actually asked Google is something I do quite often, just a simple provocative question, is viral marketing still a thing? So Google search, was not GPT or perplexity, none of that. And the AI overview result was actually quite interesting. Yes, viral marketing is still a thing, says Google, but it’s evolved to be more sophisticated and integrated into social media strategies. While going viral is never guaranteed, it says, the core concept of creating engaging content that people want to share spontaneously remains a powerful tool for brand awareness and can be boosted by social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. And that, I think, makes total sense to me, that qualifier of it, which we didn’t hear very much a decade ago when Chewbacca Mom and the BBC interview guy were the stars of the online world. But that to me always made sense that you don’t do something from a business point of view, just get it out there. Yet lots of people did precisely that without any seeming strategic approach to what was the outcome they were expecting of this other than to get thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people sharing it or commenting or liking it or whatever. What were you going to get from all of that? Where’s your strategic aspiration in that regard? That’s different now. And I did take a look at Fractal’s piece that was actually published back in 2021. That’s quite old. But nevertheless, I’ve seen others saying that’s it, viral marketing’s done. And I think it’s more nuanced than that. You need to qualify it. One thing I did like from the Nature report, the analytical report, almost academic report, Nature did, was defining, or they say, identifying two primary types of viral marketing, which I’ve not really heard many people talking about. They call it a loaded type virality, which manifests itself after a sustained growth period, growth phase, representing its final burst, followed by a decline in attention. The second one is the sudden type virality, with news emerging unexpectedly that reactivates the collective response process. And they talk about quick viral effects fade fast, while slower processes lead to more persistent growth. So this is now a far more evolved and attractive proposition to consider this. So I would say just based on my quick Google AI overviews read up and skimming parts of this Nature report that I think I don’t think it is time to drop going viral from the list of marketing. I’d say you need to prep yourself for the new way of doing this or a more effective way of doing this as part of your marketing strategy. Don’t you think?

Shel Holtz: No, I don’t. We’ll disagree on this because if you look at both of the examples you shared, the Chewbacca mom and the guy on the news.

Neville Hobson: But don’t forget that was 10 to 15 years ago.

Shel Holtz: Yes, it was, but neither of them were trying to go viral and neither of them were representing a brand that wanted to expand reach. They both just happened to catch the attention of people who said, “this is really fun or amazing. I’m going to share it.” And then other people shared it. I remember even at the height of the viral video craze, the agencies that said, “we can help you go viral,” basically were saying, “we think we have cracked the code on what makes things go viral. We are going to develop our videos so that they conform with those things. And maybe one out of 10 that we produce will go viral because there’s also some secret sauce that we haven’t been able to decode yet.” And now on top of the difficulty you had planning for something to go viral back then, now you have the algorithms that aren’t rewarding the kind of content that it did reward 10 years ago when those kinds of videos did go viral. I mean, think about Oreo 10 years ago, 11 years ago when I think it was their 100th anniversary and they had the hundred days of Oreo with different sort of memes about Oreos. And they would replace them with something unplanned when there was a breaking news event and they could come up with a way to design one of these images so that it was consistent with the news that was breaking. And a couple of those went viral. I don’t think they would today. I don’t think the algorithm would necessarily reward them the way they did back then. So I think if you create something that’s clever and entertaining and it happens to go viral, or even if you bake in some of the things that you hope will make it go viral, that’s fine. But I don’t think that should be your plan. I think your plan should be those other things that I referenced, getting people to come back, having repeat visitors and slowly building the audience, building the community. They’ll share, but it doesn’t need to go viral at that point in order to deliver the kind of ROI that marketers are looking for.

Neville Hobson: So I think the AI overview bits and pieces that Google popped up from a number of sources say all of that, actually. I mean, all those examples from a decade or more ago, I don’t think are relevant today because of the fact things have changed along the lines that you’ve said. But I think I like the way in which this summary talks about why viral marketing is still relevant, that actually says all the things that you’ve just said. Emotional and entertaining content, share worthy ideas, timely and relevant, audience engagement, that’s what you’ve got to aim for. They also talk about, those by the way, what the results of this search say are the key elements of modern viral marketing. That’s what you said. So whatever you call it, maybe the viral needs to be pushed away into the shadows a bit more, I think, because…

Shel Holtz: especially post-COVID,

Neville Hobson: Yeah, so, you know, I still hear people not much, I have to admit, but I saw someone writing about it on, I think it was LinkedIn, about creating a viral video. And thinking that you’ve never been able to create a viral video, you’ve been able to create a video that may go viral, but people tend to not quite see that point of view. So what’s changed that I say, using the video as an example, you create a piece of content that you get amplified through social media and set aside algorithms for a second. That’s emotional and very entertaining. Lots of people like it. And it’s part of your plan of other things you’re doing around product X or whatever it might be. And platforms today make it easier than they were even 10 years ago for content to spread quickly. As Google AI says, acting as a force multiplier for marketing efforts. So I think there’s still mileage in looking at this method of, let’s call it viral marketing. It still has legs in my view, if you approach it the right way and create it or look at it in terms of what you describe, which fits exactly what Google’s AI overview says. This is not about Chewbacca mom or BBC interview guy where it was spontaneous. People thought it was terrific and they shared it. That was it basically. It still shows up, by the way, when you do and the BBC interview guy says he’s indelibly got in his resume now, the BBC interview guy, as it’s called. So people are you without one, right? So I think it is worth considering it. Maybe don’t call it viral marketing. This is really part of your overall marketing strategy that you employ all the things you mentioned and all the stuff that’s mentioned here to. And indeed all the stuff that the Nature report mentioned too about the two types of viral marketing. So I think it’s got legs still.

Shel Holtz: In terms of brands, I’m trying to think of something that went viral in the last few years and something that they wanted to go viral. There’s been plenty that has been spread around that I’m sure they wished hadn’t gone viral. But I can’t think of a marketing effort that has taken that path in the last few years. I just can’t think of one. So I’d rather put my energy elsewhere.

Neville Hobson: Maybe they’re not doing it. Yeah, they’re not doing it the way they did it before then. So they’re doing it, they’re calling it something else.

Shel Holtz: I remember there was one, I remember reading an interview, I think we talked about this on the show at the time, even though it’s probably a decade ago. He spent money to have a video go viral. That was what the agency planned and it didn’t. And he was upset until he started getting a lot of lead generation response. It turned out that it had only been seen by about 1,500 people, but they were the right 1,500 people, because of the tags, was a very technical video, and it actually led to return on investment. I remember somebody saying, “having a hundred people see your video is a win if your target audience was the U.S. which has a hundred members.” So how much reach do you want? You want to reach the right people. You don’t want to reach everybody who’s not going to buy your product or spend money on your service. I’d rather target, I’d rather build an audience. I’d rather focus on episodes and recurring content that brings people back over and over and over again. Maybe one of those will go viral and if it does, it’s a win.

Neville Hobson: Well, I think you’ve actually then differentiated that quite well, because the example you gave of the agency who tried to plan the viral video or plan the video to go viral, I don’t know quite, I’m not quite sure how you would do that, to be honest. Is the issue there? What you described in terms of the actual outcome, which sounds like it was accidental, they certainly didn’t plan that. But again, that’s what 10 years ago, I think you mentioned. So now I’m pretty sure that that would not be the case. It would not be done that way at all. They would, I would imagine if they were doing this now, would be definitely well structured, well thought through as part of their marketing activity. And maybe the viral wouldn’t appear anyway.

Shel Holtz: could be, but if anybody has planned for something to go viral out there and had success with it, drop us a line. We’d love to know about it. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #485: Is It Time to Stop Trying to “Go Viral”? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Hollywood erupted in debate and discourse when a company unveiled a completely AI actress, Tilly Norwood. The public relations industry may be having its own Tilly Norwood moment with the introduction of Olivia Brown, a 100% AI PR agent that will handle all the steps of producing, distributing, and following up on a press release. Is this PR’s future, or just part of it? Neville and Shel engage in their own debate in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

Olivia Brown AI – Your 24/7 PR Superagent
Introducing Olivia Brown: AI Agent for PR Teams | Fery Kaszoni posted on the topic | LinkedIn
Fresh concerns over using AI in PR – where do we draw the line? | City Road Communications
AI in Journalism: What Reporters Really Think About Artificial Intelligence
Nearly a quarter of corporate press releases are probably written by AI now

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 484 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. A new name is stirring debate in UK public relations. Not a person, but an AI agent called Olivia Brown. Launched by Search Intelligence, an SEO and digital PR agency, Olivia Brown promises to automate the entire PR process from brainstorming ideas to writing press releases, identifying journalists, and even following up with them automatically. For £250 a month, it’s marketed as a digital PR assistant that can cut campaign time from 16 hours to one, according to its founder, Ferry Casone. Is this the future of PR? We’ll explore that question right after this.

Journalists and PR professionals are sounding alarms about Olivia Brown. Press Gazette reports that Olivia Brown has already been flooding inboxes with AI-generated press releases, complete with invented expert quotes and relentless follow-ups, all camouflaged to evade AI content detectors. Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the CIPR, calls this a threat to the very foundations of the profession, arguing that instant automation erodes judgment, relevance, and trust—the cornerstones of ethical communication.

Dominic Pollard at City Road Communications goes further, saying this kind of technology flips PR upside down. Instead of starting with a genuine story, it fabricates one designed to match a publication’s existing output—what he calls coverage for coverage’s sake. Supporters, meanwhile, frame Olivia Brown as an amplifier of authenticity, not a diluter of it. On LinkedIn, Cassone describes it as a tool that frees up time for creative thinking while improving productivity.

Beneath the surface, Olivia Brown isn’t just about automation. It forces us to confront a deeper issue: when AI can generate stories, quotes, and even relationships on an industrial scale, where does that leave trust, the single most valuable currency in our profession? Let’s unpack what this means for communicators, for journalists, and for the fragile relationship between authenticity and efficiency in the age of AI-driven PR. I’ll start with this question: Is this the future of public relations or the beginning of its undoing?

Shel Holtz: Are you asking me? Yeah, it’s somewhere in between, I think. This does not trouble me very much. This is a situation where you have a tool that primarily cranks out press releases. It does some work preceding that, but ultimately it’s about cranking out press releases. We have discussions happening—you and I have discussed these conversations in previous episodes—about whether the press release is dead or not. I happen to believe it is not. But there is far more to public relations than press releases.

This is touted as a tool for the agency, not for the client. It’s my understanding based on the little I have read of this that you pay £250 a month to the agency for them to use this on your behalf. It’s not an interface that’s available to the client. Is that right?

Neville Hobson: No—the whole website area, the whole dashboard thing—it’s way beyond just press releases, really it is, according to what they say themselves.

Shel Holtz: OK, because all I’ve read is this LinkedIn post, and it makes it sound like it’s an augmentation of what the agency does. Either way, I’m largely untroubled by this. Some people will use it. Some people will recognize the value that you get out of having a human PR agency doing your public relations work for you.

I don’t know how adept generative AI is at this point at building relationships over the long term. It seems to me that outside the memory that some of the large language models have that recall previous conversations, you don’t get the benefit of having worked with someone over time and getting to know them and getting to know the issues and the challenges and the triggers and these types of things. But some people who maybe have less of a budget will use it. It could be a gateway, in fact, from using an AI public relations agency, if you will, to working with a broader mixed group of humans who are using AI in their work.

But the fact is that we have some data that can support this. First of all, research has found that most journalists are untroubled by PR people using AI. There was one from Cision this year that showed that a majority of journalists are not strongly opposed to AI-generated pitches—about 27% are strongly opposed. Concerns that arise are around factual errors, but that’s on the humans in the agency to address.

There is other research that says a quarter of press releases that are being distributed right now are already written by AI. So we’re going to see press releases written by AI. We’re going to see PR professionals using AI to help them in their work. And then you have Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, joining a chorus of voices who anticipate that there will be billion-dollar companies run by AI with no humans in them at all. I don’t know how soon that’s coming, but I believe that it’s likely at some point.

I don’t see this as an authenticity challenge as long as there’s a human reviewing what’s going out before it goes out—whether it’s a PR person or the client. This is going to happen. But is it going to replace traditional public relations? I don’t see that. This is that old Mitch Joel line of “along with,” not “instead of.”

Neville Hobson: Okay, so you don’t feel uncomfortable about the fact it makes up people, makes up quotes, fabricates stories and all that.

Shel Holtz: This is a problem. No, I don’t feel comfortable with that. That’s something that has to be addressed. I can’t believe that they actually released it.

Neville Hobson: That’s at the heart of their service. That’s what they do. I’m reading Ferri Cassoni’s post on LinkedIn where he gives the steps of a typical “what happens.” Client joins the agency—meaning him. The PR exec starts a new campaign with Olivia. It’s all about how much time all this takes, but Olivia comes up with 100 ideas in five minutes. A PR executive selects five of those ideas.

The PR exec goes to the client and asks for expert tips for the five campaigns. The PR exec copy-pastes the expert tips into Olivia. It writes up five press releases with the client’s tips in five minutes. PR exec double-checks the content, tweaks it, and adds their own sprinkle to it if they want to. Once the release is written, Olivia scans 30,000 news articles on news outlets likely to pick up the story and identifies hundreds of journalists for each story separately with high accuracy, creating a personalized, on-the-fly media list—hours saved up to 20, it says.

Olivia sends the expert tips via email to all those hundreds of contacts for all five stories. Olivia follows up in two days to see if journalists need any extra info regarding the stories—hours saved, one. And it doesn’t say this, but others have commented, then relentlessly keeps emailing all those journalists: “Have you read it yet? What do you think? Are you going to run it?” Without Olivia, all this would take 16 hours, and with Olivia, it takes one hour.

I mean, come on. This is crazy, in my view. If this is the future of PR, I do not want to be part of this, I tell you. You’re right—we’ve seen automated press release stories before. I’m not sure we reported it on FIR, but I wrote a blog post about this podcasting tool that’s industrial scale—creating podcasts completely run with AI presenters and so forth. I think I read it’s 3,000 shows a week. It blasts them all out, and it’s already all over Spotify.

So that is part of our future, I suppose. Is it the future we think it should be? I’m not sure. It troubles me hugely, Shel. I have to tell you that this is out there because many people—you know this as well as I do—are just going to take what it does and blast it out. That’s most of the criticism I’m seeing. So I’d love to hear from a client or someone who is reputable using this, saying what experience they got and how they feel about it. But right now, it seems to me this surely cannot be the future of public relations.

Shel Holtz: And like I say, it’s not the future of public relations—it’s part of the future of public relations. Right now, as I have said probably 500 times on this podcast, anybody can hang up a shingle that says “public relations” and do work that they claim is sound, professional public relations work with absolutely no background in it. We see press releases written by humans—and we know they were written by humans because we saw them before AI was around—that are just awful.

This is just another way to produce awful press releases, but it’s also a way to speed up a process with people in it. So yeah, you’re going to get slop. You’re going to get really bad stuff. You’re getting that anyway from the industry. If professionals can use this to speed up the process and give better outputs on a quicker schedule to clients—with that human intervention of checking the facts—and I’m not necessarily saying it’s this one, this Olivia Brown, but something like it that does a better job of research and fact-checking…

I mean, Ethan Mollick just posted over the weekend that people claim, “I use ChatGPT-5 and it makes stuff up.” And he says, not if you use ChatGPT Thinking—it makes up far less. But they don’t know to go in and do that. So we need a tool like Olivia Brown that knows how to basically fact-check and think about what it’s doing rather than just spew the first thing that comes into its digital mind.

But this is not the be-all and end-all of PR. Even looking at this entire process outlined in this LinkedIn post, it’s still ultimately about sending out press releases and checking with the reporters. You know that there is public relations work that goes far beyond press releases. There’s PR work that never involves sending out a press release. There’s crisis communication. There’s reputation planning and the kind of work that we do around building or shifting reputation.

I always like to remember the case—I think it was Burson-Marsteller working with, I believe, StarKist Tuna—that was caught up in the boycott of canned tuna as a result of the dolphins that were being caught in the nets. The activists who were looking for a change in the rules on how they caught tuna initiated this boycott. StarKist already had policies around dolphin catches. They were already on the side of the activists, but their product was caught up in this.

Working with Burson-Marsteller, they were able to get the word to the activists in a negotiation with both parties at the table in the same room—could be done over Zoom now, I suppose. They came to the conclusion that, “You’re the good guys,” so the boycott was amended to say “except StarKist.” There wasn’t a single press release involved there. And Olivia Brown is not configured to do any of that.

So I don’t think traditional public relations is going anywhere. This is just a further enhancement of the automated press release concept. We interviewed Aaron Kwittken—he’s doing that with Profit. All this does is add the ideation at the front end and the journalist contact at the back end. Other than that, it’s the same product. I just don’t see it as that big a deal.

Neville Hobson: But it makes up people; it makes up facts. That’s at the heart of it. This is what’s here now, and that’s what it’s doing.

Shel Holtz: Olivia Brown—this particular product—is not good. The concept is fine. That’s what I’m saying.

Neville Hobson: I’m not talking about the concept. The concept is this—this is what’s on the market now. The point is to talk about this in the context of what’s happening right now. It’s attracting a lot of comments here in the UK—maybe it hasn’t hit the US radars yet—but most comments I’m seeing are very critical.

Shel Holtz: If it makes up people, it’s problematic. It’s the first shot out of the gate.

Neville Hobson: This is not a good thing at all. The notion of this—industrializing PR for coverage’s sake—automates the entirety of it, including the follow-up to journalists, the relentless pursuit of answers. What about your reputation when people start thinking, “I don’t like these people; they keep hitting me up with all this stuff”? Is this the answer to your dreams to get that coverage you’re after? And never mind how you do it—the means justify the end, right?

Shel Holtz: Well, this is version 1.0 of Olivia Brown, right? They’re going to get feedback and presumably come out with 1.5 that addresses some of these things. I’m not defending Olivia Brown.

Neville Hobson: I wouldn’t hold your breath on that, Shel. I wouldn’t.

Shel Holtz: You’re going to have press releases with fabrications get called out, and people are going to point to Olivia Brown as the source of the releases that led to that coverage. You’re going to have clients who are going to be upset when they’re called on the carpet for inaccurate or completely fabricated content. Either this thing is going to be a dramatic failure as clients publicly turn on it, or they’re going to make tweaks and improvements—the way most software is improved.

Either way, you’re going to see other people look at this and go, “I can do this better.” And we’ll see more of these. We’ll see some that start to take on other elements of public relations. PR is going to be AI–human hybrid—there’s no question about it. And the workflow that’s outlined in the LinkedIn post seems ripe for AI augmentation. But they’ve got to fix the problems with this. No question. It’s unacceptable to be fabricating in public relations. Accuracy matters.

Neville Hobson: I don’t see any signs whatsoever that that’s on the radar to do. This is the product. Your point about AI and automation—I don’t disagree with that at all; that’s what we’re going to see. But this, though, is a whole different thing, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: We should ask them. Let’s interview their CEO.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, maybe. I’d like to find out what others say about them—if they’re using them—to see if there’s anything worth talking about. Is this so revolutionary that we would want to do that? So anyone listening who uses Olivia Brown and would like to share their experience, do get in touch. We’d love to hear it.

Shel Holtz: fircomments@gmail.com. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #484: Is Olivia Brown the Tilly Norwood of PR? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Kenvue’s stock tumbled when U.S. President Donald Trump, with Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., standing behind him, declared that its product, Tylenol, leads to autism in children when taken by mothers during pregnancy. As social channels were flooded with misinformation supporting the evidenceless claim, it’s easy to imagine the stock continuing to slide, mirroring the trajectory launched by attacks on Bud Light.

Remarkably, the stock recovered after one day, thanks largely to Tylenol’s savvy and almost perfect response to the crisis.

Tylenol isn’t the first brand to find itself in President Trump’s crosshairs. It is unlikely to be the last. In this short, midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore what the company got right, and what other companies can do to prepare for their turn in the glare of the presidential spotlight.

Links from this episode:

The US President Called Your Product Dangerous. What Do You Do Now? – Darden Report Online
How Companies Can Respond To Allegations Their Products Are Dangerous
Tylenol says old post ‘taken of out context’ by White House
Tylenol maker responds to Trump’s acetaminophen claims
Tylenol is Just the Latest Brand Trump Has Picked a Fight With
Tylenol’s Maker Shows How to Respond to Crisis
Tylenol maker shares rebound a day after Trump’s unfounded claims about its safety
Lawsuits against Tylenol’s maker get a boost after Trump’s comments
Tylenol Issues Clarification After White House Resurfaces 2017 Tweet on Usage During Pregnancy
‘Highly concerning’: Major medical groups react to Trump’s claim that Tylenol is linked to autism

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

@nevillehobson (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode number 483 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:07)
And this is Shel Holtz in the U.S.

If you manage a brand today, here’s a scenario you actually have to plan for. A single, high-profile figure with a massive audience declares your product dangerous without credible evidence. And the story just blows up across cable, X, TikTok, the news. This is not a hypothetical. That’s where Tylenol found itself after President Trump asserted that acetaminophen taken during pregnancy can lead to autism.

The claim doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, but it did what these claims always do. It spread, it stuck, and it spooked people. So what do you do when your product is suddenly the villain of the day? The Darden School at the University of Virginia framed the choice starkly. You can keep your head down and hope the cycle moves on, or you can push back fast, clearly, and repeatedly. Their advice leans hard to option two, anchored in what they call the four Ts.

timeliness, transparency, trust, and tenacity. Respond quickly, show your work, over-communicate the facts, and stick with it longer than the news cycle would suggest. Importantly, don’t get into a personality contest with the attacker. Keep it respectful but firm, and put your history, your standards, and your science front and center. Crisis pros will recognize that playbook. Forbes Crisis columnist Edward Siegel made a similar argument the same day.

Assume confusion is your default environment. Get your narrative out immediately and synchronize legal, medical, and corporate voices before the vacuum fills with speculation. He also stresses preparation. If you wait to write the plan until you’re trending, you’re already too late. So how did Tylenol’s maker Kenview do? On speed and tone, they moved quickly and they stayed in their lane. In on-air and short-form video responses, they reiterated a constant message.

Acetaminophen remains the recommended first-line option for pain and fever in pregnancy when used as directed, and their guidance has not changed. No name-calling, no politics, just reinforcement of established guidance and a promise to keep sharing facts as they have them. They also benefited from credible third parties saying what they couldn’t credibly say about themselves.

And I remember this from my days at Allergan. We had a medical advisory board made up of ophthalmologists that we could turn to to make public statements. They didn’t receive money from us. They were volunteers, but they were tied to us. They were familiar with our products and could be very, very helpful as credible third party voices. In the Tylenol case, major medical organizations publicly pushed back on the claim.

@nevillehobson (02:39)
and

Shel Holtz (02:53)
emphasizing the lack of evidence for a causal link and the potential risks of not treating fever during pregnancy. That chorus was immediate and visible in mainstream coverage, which matters because parents weren’t going to go spelunking in PubMed in the middle of a scare. They wanted to hear doctors on the six o’clock news. Another thing Kenview got right, they didn’t let market rumors set the narrative. While the stock dipped on day one, as you might expect,

It rebounded the next day as cooler heads and clearer information landed. That’s a reminder to communicators that investors are another primary audience in these moments. You can’t let medical misinformation turn into a capital market story because you were slow to brief. There was also a potential booby trap that Kenview navigated reasonably well. An old context-free social post about pregnant women avoiding Tylenol started recirculating.

and was seized on by partisan accounts as an aha proof point. The brand clarified the context and restated its guidance. The lesson for the rest of us is that social archeology is part of the crisis prep. Now, you need a rapid old posts review the moment a story breaks so you can get ahead of whatever’s about to be resurfaced. Zooming out, there are broader takeaways for communicators whose brands could be targeted by a political figure or

anyone with a megaphone and a base. First, build your science bench before you need it. You want independent credentialed experts ready to validate or correct claims within hours, not days. That means pre-briefing medical societies, key opinion leaders, and credible third party validators about your safety data and your monitoring plan. The Darden piece got it right. Facts alone rarely win the day, but facts delivered by trusted humans stand a fighting chance. Second,

Treat employees as a primary audience. In moments like this, they’re your most important ambassadors and your most vulnerable stakeholders. Darden explicitly calls out the need to communicate aggressively with your own employees. Give them the message, the FAQs and the why, and equip managers to handle tough conversations at the school gate, the church picnic, and inside the store aisle. Third, scenario test the politics.

This is not a normal product risk issue, it’s identity content. You can expect pylons, boycotts, and gotcha screenshots. Prepare neutral, values-based language that focuses on consumer safety and evidence, not the personalities involved. Resist the temptation to litigate the attacker’s credibility. Let other people do that. In this case, RFK, there are plenty of people piling on him. You don’t need to do that as the brand. Your brand should sound like the adult in the room.

Fourth, integrate legal early, but don’t let them throttle your speed. You can say quite a lot quite fast without increasing liability. Reaffirm established guidance linked to authoritative sources, explain how you evaluate safety signals, and spell out what you’re doing next. The clock is your biggest risk variable. Finally, run an always-on listening program that’s tuned not just to your brand terms, but to the themes and communities.

that could turn you into the next culture war football. When the first sparks fly, rapid response should include fact cards, short explainers on video and exec posts that can be embedded by newsrooms and creators alike because that’s how information travels now. So what kind of grade would we give Kenview? On the essentials, speed, message discipline, reliance on credible third parties and investor signaling.

I think it’s a solid B plus, A minus. There’s room to go further on pre-bunking misinformation with evergreen explainers that can be resurfaced instantly and on employee and retailer toolkits for frontline conversations. But in a modern misinformation storm, their posture, firm, factual, and unflappable, was the right one. And for the rest of us, the homework is clear. Write the plan now, build the bench now.

and decide in advance how you’ll sound when that moment comes because at some point for some brand it’s coming.

@nevillehobson (07:10)
It’s quite a story, isn’t it, Shell? I mean, it’s listening to how you explained it all, thinking this is probably one of those moments for any large brand, I suppose, who could think that could be us because you have a critic in the form of the U.S. president who comes out with things, says things. And as all the reporting I’ve seen talks about with that, shred of car sign evidence to back up his claims.

but plenty of factual information has been around for long time that challenge it totally to dismiss it all. Could that happen to, let’s say, know, Ford Motor Company, one of their carts where President Trump is going to say this car is dreadful, they’ve had 50 recalls, which isn’t true, of course, and people have died needlessly through car accidents because they didn’t take care of whatever. The next day or the day after it’s dismissed as but in the meantime,

you know, 50 buyers across the US aren’t going to buy that truck anymore. So things like that. It’s that’s the environment, isn’t it? You can’t, you can’t plan for that normally. But we’re not in a normal landscape, are we? If this kind of thing goes on.

Shel Holtz (08:16)
No, not at all. And the Darden piece did make the point that you need to prepare for boycotts. They’re going to happen in this environment. this response that we saw from Darden and from others in terms of how Kenview, the maker of Tylenol, handled it, focused on products that are science-based. There are other products out there that are more engineering-based or based on some other field.

that could easily become targets as well. And we talk about Trump with this type of behavior, but remember this is something that his secretary of health and human services presented to him that then he then presented. And I think what you’re going to see in the post Trump Republican party is respect for his playbook. And you’re going to see this kind of behavior continue.

under a prospective president Vance, for example, or at the state level with the governors. And I don’t wanna limit this to the political right. I people who see this working on the extreme left could end up employing the same tactics. You can’t look at this as a communicator, as a political thing, even though that’s exactly what it is.

which is why the advice from Darden, which is exactly what Kenview did, was don’t engage at the political level, engage at the scientific level, engage at the fact level, but stay away from pointing fingers or getting into a one-on-one argument with a political figure.

@nevillehobson (09:47)
The difficulty though, particularly in the United States, I would say, Sheldon, is that we’re at a moment where everything is polarized completely. And so you’re out there with facts, scientific evidence, the works. And there is this group over here who’ve got their spin on the facts and they’ve got loud voices and a lot of people listen to them.

potentially, I would argue inclined to listen to that kind of denial, like the anti-vaxxers and all these conspiracy theorists. So we would bring out those kinds of people, in which case, it’s almost like you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t say anything, you’re damned. If you do say anything, you’re damned. But I think that that’s the additional challenge. And I would say you still got to go out there with factual scientific backed information or whatever, as advised by the

the folks you’ve been quoting. But it’s not a not a pretty place to be a player in. Because it could go horribly wrong. Your jet your attention is on you no matter what. And is it your story that people are paying attention to or the other guy’s story? Or is it a big question mark, people start then questioning all the scientific evidence which has already happened with this. So I seen quite a bit.

here in the UK of talk about this in the mainstream media, plus in medical journals, too. The medical journals actually have been extremely forthright in their dismissal of Trump’s claims, which is really mirroring what others are saying in dismissing it. There’s no evidence to prove this. Yet I wonder, as we’ve talked before, and it’s kind of the basics of how you plan a crisis communication.

approach, I suppose, where logic isn’t what is going to work. Ultimately, it’s the emotional element. I don’t know what that translates as something like this. You got to stick to your guns, of course. And if you do have facts, you shouldn’t not produce them simply because others criticize them and saying they’re denying them saying this is fake. So and in fact, challenging those people logically just doesn’t make much sense, I think. So it’s probably a storm. Somehow you have to weather.

And I think there are examples you mentioned already on how you would do that. But I think you would you would likely be wise to assume or to say that we need to look at the worst case scenario here, not the best case scenario. What’s the worst case that could happen that it turns into a complete trashing of your company and all your brands, for instance. And there’s fake evidence being produced all over that. Yes, it does kill people if they take your product, this kind of thing.

So it’s not an enviable place, but that is the landscape, isn’t it? With regard to almost anyone with a brand and a good news story or making a product that’s beneficial to people, there are people coming out of the woodwork who have all sorts of things to say to trash what you’re doing and the fact that your product is not safe at all. It’s a hell of an environment show, that’s a fact.

Shel Holtz (12:42)
It is, but it’s the environment we’re living in. So being prepared, I think, is critical these days. I didn’t check, and I probably should have. When Tylenol was owned by Johnson & Johnson, they had a credo. It was four stakeholder audiences in the order that the company prioritized them, and patients were first. And you may remember, of course, this is not the first crisis that Tylenol has faced.

@nevillehobson (12:45)
you

Shel Holtz (13:08)
Back in the 80s, there was the product tampering in the Chicago area that led to several deaths. And even though we tend to look at this now a little more idealized than the response actually was, it’s still a case study that is taught in business schools everywhere that they eventually pulled the product nationally, even though there was no evidence that.

there were any tampered products outside of the Chicago area. And their public statements were that we’re doing this because our credo says that we put patients first and we’re not willing to put anybody at risk. The shareholder, by the way, was last on the credo list. think was employees were second, the communities in which they operate were third and shareholders were last.

And their philosophy said, if we take care of the first three shareholders will be just fine. And in fact, when they reintroduced Tylenol, it was with a safety cap that they innovated. And that led a lot of customers of other pain relievers to switch to Tylenol because their product didn’t have a safety cap. By the time the competition caught up and developed their own safety caps, these were all now Tylenol customers. So the shareholders ended up just fine.

@nevillehobson (14:12)
Hmm.

Shel Holtz (14:21)
And I like that approach. But the point is that what they ended up appealing to, even though they might not have characterized it this way, was the emotions of the public. It’s, they care about us. And I think as long as you can maintain that emotional connection that we care about you, not just putting out scientific data. And I think this is where a lot of that third party comes in.

These people want women to suffer with fevers and pain during pregnancy when there is no evidence that taking Tylenol will hurt. I’m waiting for that first report of somebody who would not take Tylenol, developed a fever and died or miscarried or what have you emerges. You know the media is gonna be all over that when it happens. So again, there’s so many dimensions involved in preparing yourself. The nice thing about

@nevillehobson (14:47)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (15:10)
This story that I don’t think Kenview had to worry about was a lot of the third party reporting. You saw the doctors that the cable networks typically go to when there’s a medical related story and they were so contemptuous of this report that anybody who’s watching and of course the wrong people weren’t watching, but you didn’t need to hear from Kenview in order to understand that

This is bunk. I mean, it was third parties who made the point that autism existed before Tylenol did. So if Tylenol is responsible for this, where did all these previous cases come from? And for those who suggest that, well, there has been an increase in the number of autism cases, that’s not true. There’s been an increase in the number of diagnoses because autism is not that old a diagnosis and as more and more doctors.

recognize it, they are making that diagnosis. So leaving that information for third parties to convey while you stay in your lane, as Darden put it, I think is a good idea if you’re the type of organization that has those third parties available or already on the hook to go out and speak on your behalf.

@nevillehobson (16:20)
Yeah, I think one other thought that one of the links you shared is an Adweek report that Yahoo News reported that the headline says it all really, titles just the latest brand Trump has picked to fight with. And there are a handful of things that will be in recent memory for every listener to this podcast. We’ve talked about some of these on previous episodes. John Deere, the agricultural equipment manufacturer.

that Trump threatened them with 200 % tariffs on everything that they want to sell in the US if they move manufacturing from Iowa to Mexico because of the tariffs. They went ahead and did it anyway. I’ve not seen what the consequences were for them, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Macy’s, the department store, Mexican immigrants are bringing drugs and bringing crime and were rapists in America. That’s what Trump was saying about that.

So that’s a deal with that. Apple, well, they’re talking about manufacturing in China with the phones. Thailand, we’re discussing now. Boeing, talks about them. Jaguar cars, he has strong opinions about their new logo and rebranding. That’s extraordinary for a politician, nevermind someone who’s the president of a country with those kind of opinions. But he’s different kind of person. And I guess the latest probably, this American brand,

Cracker Barrel, we have a similar brand here in the UK, but it’s not to be confused with this one, that he talked about that he described it as woke, the rebrand that when they went through this rebranding, they should go back to the old logo, he said on more than one occasion. And people are trying to figure out why why why he bothered him so much. Anyway, it did. And he said they should admit a mistake and go back to the old one and the restaurant chain.

did in fact go back to the old logo. So that’s the nature of things. So hence, you’re a big brand, you’ve got high visibility, you need to factor this into your crisis plan.

Shel Holtz (18:13)
Yeah, it must frustrate a lot of brand managers to hear advice to stay in your lane when the person attacking you is in every lane all at once. We’ll absolutely not stay in his lane. So yeah, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (18:25)
Extraordinary.

The post FIR #483: How Tylenol Handled a High-Profile Falsehood appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We’ve all heard of AI slop by now. “Workslop” is the latest play on that term, referring to low-quality, AI-generated content in the workplace that looks professional but lacks real substance. This empty, AI-produced material often creates more work for colleagues, wasting time and hindering productivity. In the longform FIR episode for September, Neville and Shel explore the sources of workslop, how big a problem it really is, and what can be done to overcome it.

Also in this episode:

Chris Heuer, one of the founders of the Social Media Club, is at work on a manifesto for the “H Corporation,” organizations that are human-centered. A recent online discussion set the stage for Chris’s work, which he has summarized in a post.
Three seemingly disparate studies point to the evolution of the internal communication role.
Researchers at Amazon have proposed a framework that can make it as easy as typing a prompt to identify a very specific audience for targeted communication.
Communicators everywhere continue to predict the demise of the humble press release, but one public relations leader has had a very different experience.
Anthropic and OpenAI have both released reports on how people are using their tools. They are not the same.
In his Tech Report, Dan York looks back on TypePad, the blogging platform whose shutdown is imminent; AI-generated summaries of websites from Firefox; and Mastodon’s spin on quote posts.

Links from this episode:

Neville’s remarks on the human-centered organization, along with Chris Heuer’s original LinkedIn post
Building a Shared Vision: Organizations Advancing Human-Centered AI
Defining the Human Centered Organization
The Birth of the H-Corp
The Effects of Enterprise Social Media on Communication Networks
AI misinformation and the value of trusted news
Corporate Affairs is Ripe for AI Disruption
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable
AI “workslop” sabotages productivity, study finds
AI isn’t replacing your job, but ‘workslop’ may be taking it over
workslop: bad study but excellent word
An Explainable Natural Language Framework for Identifying and Notifying Target Audiences In Enterprise Communication
How smart brands are delivering Netflix-level personalization with AI
We Tested a Press Release in ChatGPT. The Results Changed Everything.
LinkedIn post from Sarah Evans on press release performance in AI search results
Sarah Evans’ 10 PR myths
Ethan Mollick’s LinkedIn post about how people are using AI for work
Here’s How People Use AI, Per OpenAI, Anthropic And Ipsos Data
OpenAI and Anthropic studied how people use ChatGPT and Claude. One big difference emerged.
Anthropic Finds Businesses Are Mainly Using AI to Automate Work
How people actually use ChatGPT vs Claude – and what the differences tell us

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Typepad is Shutting Down
Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal
On Firefox for iOS, summarize a page with a shake or a tap
Introducing quote posts
Quoting other posts – Mastodon documentation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz:
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 482 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form episode for September 2025. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson:
And hi everyone, I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz:
As I mentioned, this is our long-form episode. That means we’ll be reporting on six topics of interest to communicators. Interestingly, I think all of them are connected either directly or indirectly to artificial intelligence. I also have Dan York here with an interesting report. You and I both have a few things to say about one of the topics that Dan is reporting on.

As always with our monthly episode, we have some housekeeping before we jump into the topics. Neville, you’re going to catch us up on the items we reported on since the last episode. And we have some comments on some of these reports. That’s an opportunity to remind everybody that we love your comments—please participate in this podcast by sharing them. It doesn’t have to be about something we reported on; you can introduce a topic. This used to happen all the time in the early days of the show—someone would say, “Why don’t you guys talk about this?” and we would, and it became the content of the show. So please leave a comment on the show notes or on LinkedIn—which is where most of our comments come from these days. People leave a thought or some feedback on our announcement of the new episode. You can also do that on Facebook in multiple places. And you can always go to the website and record a comment—there’s a button that says “Leave voicemail” and you can record a 90-second comment. Or send us an MP3 file to fircomments@gmail.com. Lots of ways to participate in the show, and we really hope you will. We’ll share some of the comments we received in the last month, Neville, as you remind us what we talked about.

Neville Hobson:
Indeed. September was kind of an odd month because you were on holiday for two weeks and we didn’t do any live recording during that time, but we had a couple of short recordings tucked in our back pocket to publish in the interim. Let’s share what we did since the last monthly episode for August—that was on the 25th of August, episode 478. Our lead story explored when corporate silence backfires and how communicators can help leaders make better choices. We also discussed AI PR deepfakes and more, including Dan York’s report. That was a 90-minute show like this one is likely to be.

Episode 479 on the 1st of September—“Hacking AI Optimization vs. Doing the Hard Work.” Amid the rise of GEO, we discussed how brands are seeking workarounds to appear in AI-generated answers, but shortcuts don’t build trust. Old-school PR and marketing still matter. We got a comment on that one, right, Shel?

Shel Holtz:
We did, from Frank Diaz, who’s become one of our loyal listeners. He said, “This was my conclusion as well. Once I filtered everything…” He shared a checklist on mastering AI citation strategy for SEO on LinkedIn. We’ll include a link in the show notes for context.

Neville Hobson:
On the 9th of September we published episode 480, “Reflections on AI Ethics and the Role of Communicators.” You had already gone on holiday. This was a conversation between Sylvia Cambie—who was a guest co-host back in July when we interviewed Monsignor Paul Tighe from the Vatican about artificial intelligence—and me. We picked up where that interview left off with reflections on AI dignity, what really matters, and what caught our attention. Interestingly, that episode got more listens and downloads than the interview itself—perhaps because people were catching up after summer.

Episode 481 on the 24th of September—so you can see a nearly two-week gap there—“The M-Panic: AI Writing and Misguided Assumptions. Can Tone and Authenticity Survive AI Polish?” We dove into the “M-kerfuffle” that’s had communicators divided much of this year. You also explained how you turned 28 blog posts into a forthcoming book with AI’s help—classic AI-assisted writing in action. We had comments too, didn’t we?

Shel Holtz:
We did. Daniel Pauling wrote that the dash doesn’t solely come from training data—a point I’d made, saying the reason you see so many dashes is because the training sets include a lot of dash-heavy content. Daniel said it also comes from how generative AI is programmed to be more friendly and what it associates with friendliness. He referenced a post where he went into detail—we’ll include that link. John Cass had a thoughtful comment about how writing wasn’t rigid in the 17th century—Shakespeare even spelled his name multiple ways—arguing that language is a visual representation of speech and we should speak the language of our audience, not the textbook. He suggested anxiety around AI and writing often comes from our best writers, but human creativity is collective. I noted that Chris Penn recently wrote that AI won’t hurt creativity because creative people will keep creating. We saw that on a cruise art auction: people bidding thousands on works by young artists. The creative impulse persists. John replied that’s true, though some high-level creatives feel AI disrupts their thinking—maybe true for a few people; not everyone thinks the same way.

Neville Hobson:
Good essay-comment from John. And between all of that we recorded a new interview just before you went away—Stephanie Grober in New York, quite an authority on GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. The anchor for the conversation was: is GEO the next SEO, a passing fad, or good comms practice in disguise? We talked about what GEO means for communicators today and what to do about it. That was published on the 16th of September. So we had five podcast episodes since August—not bad, considering you were away half the month.

Shel Holtz:
Not bad at all. We are a content machine. And that machine continues with Circle of Fellows—the monthly panel among IABC Fellows. I was at sea for this one; Brad Whitworth moderated a discussion about what it means for communicators that hybrid appears to be winning as the preferred workplace configuration. Priya Bates, Ritzi Ronquillo, and Angela Sinickas participated. It’s up on the FIR Podcast Network.

The October episode sounds great: number 121. I’ll moderate at noon Eastern on Thursday, October 23. The topic: evolving roles and strategic goals. The description from Anna Willey: communicators are adapting alongside new tools and channels; strategic goals must align with organizational objectives as they impact brand reputation, enhance internal communications, and address ongoing change. Panelists so far: Lori Dawkins, Amanda Hamilton-Atwell, and Mike Klein, with a fourth to be named. You can join live and participate or catch the podcast. That wraps up our housekeeping—we managed to do it in less than 13 minutes. Right after this, we’ll be back with our Topics of the Month.

Neville Hobson:
Our first topic for September: Throughout this year we’ve returned again and again to one central theme—AI must be about people, not just machines. Whether we were talking about the future of work, managers’ roles in an AI-enabled world, or the Vatican’s perspective on AI ethics (“the wisdom of the heart” in our July interview with Monsignor Paul Tighe), the question has been the same: How do we ensure technology serves humanity rather than the other way around?

That’s the context for Chris Heuer’s latest work. Chris is an internet pioneer and serial entrepreneur—many of you will know him from the Social Media Club nonprofit he founded in the early days of social media, which reached 350 cities globally. Building on an online brainstorm Chris led on September 17—more than 50 people connected worldwide to discuss defining human-centered organizations, which I joined and wrote about on LinkedIn—Chris has published a follow-up titled “The Birth of the H-Corp” (H for humanity). It’s a bold attempt to define what organizations owe humanity in the age of AI.

The central concern: efficiency has become the dominant corporate narrative. He cites Shopify’s CEO saying managers must prove why AI can’t do the job before hiring another human. We referenced that in an FIR episode this summer. That kind of AI-first thinking risks eroding human dignity. Chris argues for an alternative: organizations must enable humans rather than replace them, reinvest AI gains back into people, and make empathy and ethics structural rather than optional.

What’s powerful is the recognition of tensions—for example, how AI can hollow out junior roles and undermine leadership pipelines. Participants flagged cultural sovereignty—the idea that AI shouldn’t just reflect Silicon Valley’s worldview but the diversity of human society. Chris’s goal is to draft an H-Corp manifesto later this year—likely November—likening this to the naming moment of social media: a concept that crystallizes shared ambitions and sparks a broader movement. It won’t be perfect, but it could serve as a north star for organizations that want to put human flourishing at the center of AI adoption.

For communicators, this is an important conversation: How do we frame the internal narrative so AI isn’t just about productivity and cost-cutting, but about augmenting human potential? How do we give shape to something like H-Corp so it doesn’t remain an ideal but becomes practical reality? It’s not about resisting AI or slowing progress; it’s about making deliberate choices so organizations put people at the center of change. Will communicators, leaders, and organizations seize the opportunity to shape AI for human flourishing—or let the technology shape us by default? Could H-Corp become a rallying concept as ESG or CSR did—or will it get diluted into corporate sloganeering? What role should communicators play to keep it real and practical? I bet you’ve got ideas.

Shel Holtz:
Of course—otherwise why would we be here? First, I think AI is less responsible for this situation than the general nature of business, especially in a capitalist society. I’m not going to get philosophical about capitalism—I’m a proud capitalist. I like making money and would like to make more. If the goal of an organization—especially a public corporation with fiduciary responsibilities—is to earn a return for investors, then when AI comes along it makes complete sense that leaders ask, “How does this help us maximize returns?” Reducing costs and staff and having a machine work 24/7—of course that’s where leaders go first. It doesn’t mean that’s what organizations should do, but I get why they do it.

Also, with any new technology, the first thing we do is what we were already doing—but better. The earliest uses no one had thought of come later. I don’t think generative AI has been around long enough for that next phase yet. We’re still using it to do what we’ve been doing; later we’ll discover new, more human-centered applications. For some organizations that will come; for others, it won’t—they’ll stay focused on maximizing profit.

Another issue: most organizations aren’t tackling AI strategically in its early days. There’s ample data showing people aren’t looking at this holistically. I was just talking at my company about the entry-level construction job—project engineer. Much of that role may be automated. Submittals, for example, take time and expertise; AI could produce them in minutes with the right inputs. Does that mean fewer project engineers? Our conversation was: how do we redefine the role so they still learn what they need to move up—project manager, project director, superintendent, whatever? The job won’t be the same, but it remains foundational. Same in communications: the entry-level comms role won’t be the same job in five years. Does the job go away—or do we rethink it? Smart organizations will rethink it—that’s a humanistic approach because we’re not dispensing with the role; we’re redefining it.

Neville Hobson:
It’s a big topic. I don’t disagree that some companies will shut their eyes to anything beyond “we use this to make money.” But the conversation—at the heart of what Chris is talking about—is helping organizations see the people. Language matters, too—how we talk about “replacing” versus “augmenting” can devalue human work.

Another argument from the brainstorm: human-centered talk often defaults to privileged voices and excludes marginalized groups. There’s a perception that there’s one version of AI—English, global north. What about the global south? Some countries have launched Spanish-language chatbots relevant to their populations; ChatGPT may not be the relevant tool for them. We should stimulate conversations in organizations: “Yes, but think about this as well.” That can create discord, but it’s necessary.

This idea is worth promoting: don’t devalue people. Put them first. Yes, aim for profit—but how do we help our people help us make that profit? People suffer in change; they’re often last in line when tech is deployed. Let’s bring empathy back into organizations. The landscape is changing at light speed—new capabilities, “pulse” updates to mobiles, etc. I think Chris Heuer’s offering could become a rallying concept. With influential voices like the Vatican and others globally, maybe it gathers steam.

Shel Holtz:
It could. My skepticism is about incentives. Leaders are obliged to produce maximum returns. How do we connect the dots so they see something in this change aligned with their goals? That’s what I want to see in the manifesto—most manifestos dwell on what’s wrong and not how to fix it.

Neville Hobson:
Right—so the H-Corp manifesto expected in November becomes the template to address those questions: how do we include X, Y, Z? I sensed a groundswell of willingness on the Sept. 17 call. It’s a small group; getting the word out may persuade others to get involved. You’ve got to start somewhere. This could be a rallying concept.

Shel Holtz:
I’ll predict that in November this will be a theme for one of our FIR episodes.

Neville Hobson:
Maybe we interview someone—perhaps Chris.

Shel Holtz:
Could be Chris.

Neville Hobson:
If this strikes a chord, go to the Humanizing AI Substack (link in show notes), read Chris’s post introducing the H-Corp manifesto, and see if you want to get involved. It’s open—share ideas and see what happens.

Shel Holtz:
One thread running through much of our coverage is how digital tech is reshaping organizational communication, minute by minute. Three new reports over the last couple of weeks are fascinating on their own; together they create a big picture communicators must grapple with.

First: a major new study of enterprise social media (internal platforms like Slack, Teams, Viva Engage). Researchers studied 99 organizations adopting Microsoft Viva Engage (which grew out of Yammer). Enterprise social media made communication networks denser, more connected, and more democratic. Employees didn’t just talk to the same people—they formed new ties, especially weak ties across teams that spark ideas. Leaders and employees connected more directly, and influence was more distributed. Viva Engage, unlike siloed Teams channels, enables more open conversations around broader themes. This change breaks down silos and fosters innovation—critical when hybrid/remote work can leave people isolated.

Second: Boston Consulting Group estimates more than 80% of corporate affairs work, including communication, could be augmented or even automated by AI. The biggest gains come when organizations redesign processes around AI—not just bolt it on. For communicators: think proactively not just about writing faster, but re-imagining workflows with AI in the mix.

Third: VoxEU points to a serious risk: as AI makes it easier and cheaper to produce plausible misinformation, the value of trusted, credible information goes up—externally and internally. If employees can’t tell what’s credible—about competitors, market conditions, or even their own company—their decision-making is compromised. If misinformation creeps into internal channels, it can spread quickly through the very networks making us more connected.

Put together: enterprise social media can make networks open and innovative, but they’re vulnerable if we don’t ensure accuracy and trust. Hovering over that is BCG’s reminder that AI will disrupt a huge portion of what communicators do. The challenge: if we don’t take responsibility for credibility and quality, AI will amplify misinformation and mistrust. The opportunity: use AI thoughtfully to improve connection and personalization while leaning into our role as stewards of trusted information. Connection without credibility is fragile; credibility without connection is limited. Our job is to deliver both.

Neville Hobson:
Big challenge. The VoxEU report on AI misinformation and trusted news stood out. One interesting finding: once misinformation was identified, people didn’t disengage—they consumed more. Treated individuals were more likely to maintain subscriptions months later. The report’s conclusion: when the threat of misinformation becomes salient, the value of credible news increases. How do you put that in place inside an organization?

Shel Holtz:
I remember my first corporate comms job at ARCO. Our weekly employee paper had bylines so employees knew who to call with story ideas. Bylines also establish credible sources—names employees learn to trust. As networks flood with information, people will gravitate to known credible voices. The same is true externally with content marketing: put a person behind the content so audiences recognize trustworthy outputs. We’ll need to build credibility with our reporters, thought leaders, and SMEs—internally and externally—so they become beacons of trust amid misinformation.

Neville Hobson:
VoxEU (focused on media) says if outlets maintain trust, the rise of synthetic content becomes an opportunity: as trust grows scarcer, its value rises, and audiences may be more willing to pay. Translate internally: employees won’t “pay,” but they will give attention to reliable, trustworthy writing—especially when the author is identified and credible. That seems like common sense.

Shel Holtz:
Agreed. Some employees don’t care what’s going on; they just do their job and go home. But if they’re overwhelmed with plausible-sounding contradictions, internal communications can become the trusted voice. People who didn’t pay attention before may start following channels and authors they’ve come to trust—if we consistently produce credible content.

Neville Hobson:
One line from VoxEU’s conclusion fits perfectly: the threshold to trustworthiness rises with the volume and sophistication of misinformation, meaning media outlets can’t stand still; they must continually invest in helping readers distinguish fact from fabrication, keeping pace with AI. Fits internally, too.

Shel Holtz:
Combine that with the other two reports: use enterprise social networks as channels for credible information and conversation, and use the BCG disruption to redefine our work so our time remains valuable even as 80% of tasks change.

Neville Hobson:
Okay, another buzzword: “work slop”—content that looks polished but is shallow or misleading, created with AI and dumped on colleagues to sort out. Harvard Business Review argued work slop is a major reason companies aren’t seeing ROI from AI; 40% of employees are dealing with it. But there’s a critique in Pivot to AI saying the data came from an unfiltered BetterUp survey—calling HBR’s article an unlabeled advertorial that shifts blame onto workers while pitching enterprise tools.

So two threads: “work slop” is a brilliant label for a real problem; but some coverage may itself be work slop. Questions: Is work slop a real productivity killer or just a catchy buzzword? What responsibility lies with leadership vs. employees? And how should we treat research that blurs into marketing?

Shel Holtz:
I think it’s real, though I don’t know that it’s as dire as painted. The first time I saw “work slop” was from Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn. He echoed Pivot to AI’s point: the term can shift blame onto employees told to “be more productive with AI” without leaders doing the hard work of rethinking processes or defining good use. Poor output becomes “AI’s fault”—that’s not leadership. For communicators, we should advocate responsible AI use from the top down, not just coach employees to cope.

Also, this is new-tech déjà vu. Remember desktop publishing? Suddenly every department cranked out a newsletter—because they could. It created information overload until companies set guidelines. Today, many orgs haven’t offered training, guidance, or frameworks for AI. People are experimenting—good!—but without prompt skills or evaluation skills, they’ll create work slop. We’ll see a lot of it until organizations get strategic about AI and define expectations and verification. We even did an episode on “verification” becoming a role—someone checking outputs for accuracy and credibility. We’ll see if that shakes out, but that’s where work slop comes from. I don’t think it’s a long-term problem; it will resolve like the 86 departmental newsletters did.

Neville Hobson:
How do we address the eruption of AI-generated content? Even if it isn’t outright wrong, it’s too much to read—hurting productivity.

Shel Holtz:
Organizations need a strategic approach. Our CEO often says there will be a day the switch flips; if you’re not ready, you’re irrelevant. The orgs allowing prodigious work slop haven’t reached—or acted on—that conclusion. They need governance, training, and clear “assist vs. automate” boundaries.

Neville Hobson:
Thanks very much, Dan—terrific report. TypePad caught my attention. I was on TypePad from 2004, moved to WordPress in 2006, kept TypePad as an archive until 2021. Interesting—and urgent—to hear it’s ending. Migration is easy except images; that’s not trivial. I know three people still on TypePad with no idea the door’s about to shut. Good callout.

Shel Holtz:
I was never a TypePad user, but many early influential blogs were there—Heather Armstrong’s Dooce, PostSecret, Freakonomics before it became a podcast. We’ve been doing this long enough to cover birth, life, and death.

Neville Hobson:
We have. Dan also mentioned Mastodon introducing commenting—probably a big deal. I’m not hugely active there. What do you think?

Shel Holtz:
I still have a Mastodon instance—interested to dig in. I was more intrigued by the Vimeo item. They’ve struggled to define a niche in YouTube’s world—often pitching private, high-quality business video hosting. I still get pitched. But one constant headache in internal comms is getting the right message to the right people. If you’ve ever sent a company-wide update because you weren’t sure who needed it—or spent hours hunting down the right list—you know the pain.

That’s why a research paper from Amazon’s Reliability and Maintenance Engineering team caught my eye: “An explainable natural language framework for identifying and notifying target audiences in enterprise communication.” In plain terms: a system that lets you ask in natural language who should get your message, then the AI not only finds the audience but explains how it got there.

Example: “Reach all maintenance technicians working with VendorX’s conveyor belts at European sites.” The system parses that, queries a knowledge graph of equipment, people, and locations, and returns the audience—with reasoning (“here’s how we matched VendorX… here’s how we identified European facilities…”). Explainability is critical; in safety contexts you can’t trust a black box.

Implications: we struggle with over- and under-communication. We over-broadcast because we don’t trust lists; we miss people who need the info. A framework like this could make targeting as easy as writing a sentence—with transparency you can trust. It mirrors marketing’s move from “Hi, {FirstName}” to real context-aware personalization. Employees aren’t different from customers: they don’t want spam; they want relevant comms.

Challenges: privacy concerns about graphing people and work, the need to validate reasoning, and data quality (titles, records). But it’s a blueprint for rethinking audience targeting—imagine HR or IT change comms targeting precisely with explainability. It’s research, not a product yet, but communicators should watch this closely.

Neville Hobson:
Good explanation. I couldn’t find a simple one online—Amazon’s site doesn’t surface it well. Amusingly, an AI Overview explained it best, which is a good illustration of why traditional search is fading. My question: is this live at Amazon?

Shel Holtz:
I don’t think so—it’s a framework for consideration. Presumably they’d build it for Amazon first, then maybe market or license it. If you’ve worked in internal comms, you know targeting is hard; the info you need often isn’t accessible. This gives you the ability to do it—and verify it. I can’t wait to try it someday.

Neville Hobson:
Calendar marker set. Share that AI Overview with me—I’ll screenshot it.

Shel Holtz:
Copy and paste works, too.

Neville Hobson:
In recent episodes we’ve explored how the press release keeps reinventing itself. Far from dead, it moved from media distribution to SEO—and now, according to Sarah Evans (partner and head of PR at Zen Media), into a generative-AI visibility engine. In a long read, she describes testing a press release about Zen Media acquiring Optimum7, distributed via GlobeNewswire, then tracking how it was picked up not just by news outlets but by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI. Within six hours, ChatGPT cited it 40 times; Meta’s external agents 17 times; Perplexity Bot and Applebot twice. Evans said there were 61 documented AI mentions in total in that period.

Implications: press releases aren’t just reaching journalists or Google—they’re feeding AI systems people use to ask questions and make decisions. The key metric becomes: is it retrievable when AI is asked a critical question in our space?

We’ve covered this angle a few times—from “Is PR dead (again)?” to the reinvention of releases for algorithms—and now this: the release as a tool for persistent retrievability and authority in the age of AI. If AI engines are the new gatekeepers, how should communicators rethink writing and measurement? What do you think, Shel?

Shel Holtz:
I’m glad you’re citing Sarah Evans—she’s terrific. We should invite her on the interview show. In another post—“10 PR myths I’m seeing”—she debunks “Press releases don’t matter.” She says they matter more than ever. We’re seeing early results with releases averaging about 285 citations in ChatGPT within 30 days. That suggests LLMs treat press releases as credible sources—especially when picked up in reputable places.

She also talks structured information. Gini Dietrich recently suggested having a page on your site not linked anywhere—meant for AI crawlers—with structured/markdown versions of the content so AI can better understand and apply it. Bottom line: press releases aren’t going anywhere. Every time someone proclaims them dead, they persist. (Side rant: embargoes aren’t real unless we agreed in advance.)

Neville Hobson:
I ranted about embargoes recently too. One question: what does retrievability mean for communicators? If AI engines, not journalists or search engines, arbitrate visibility, how do PR teams measure success differently? Are AI citations more valuable than traditional pickups?

Shel Holtz:
Both are valuable. Search has declined, but not to zero—not even to 50%. People still search. Some haven’t adopted AI for search; some queries are better served by ten links than an overview. (When we were in Rome, I searched for restaurants open before 7 p.m.—classic Google links job.) Sarah Evans’s myth list also says “Choose traditional or modern PR” is false—the strongest strategies use a dual pathway. As Mitch Joel says, “and,” not “instead of.”

Neville Hobson:
Worth reading Sarah’s Substack—and the link you’ll put in the notes—to make you think.

Shel Holtz:
Absolutely. I’ll probably be doing a press release in the next week or two—can’t say more, but it’s coming. One more debate: how people actually use AI. Ethan Mollick argues people lean on AI for higher-level cognitive tasks—framing, sense-making, brainstorming—rather than just automating grunt work. Recent usage studies from OpenAI and Anthropic offer fresh data.

OpenAI’s analysis of ChatGPT usage shows augmentation—writing, editing, summarizing, brainstorming, decision support. “Asking” (decision support) has become the largest slice—aligning with “thinking partner.” Anthropic paints a different enterprise picture for Claude: businesses use it chiefly to automate workflows, coding, math-heavy tasks, document processing, and reporting pipelines. Automation exceeds augmentation; some quantify ~three-quarters of enterprise use as automation patterns.

Zooming out, Forbes’s overview with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ipsos notes adoption is broadening fast, trust is uneven, and behaviors vary by context. ZDNet frames it succinctly: ChatGPT is mostly used for writing and decision support (often non-work or para-work tasks), while Claude skews toward structured enterprise automation—coding and back-office flows.

So where does that leave Mollick’s claim? Both realities are true depending on the user and context. Among general knowledge workers, AI is a thinking companion; among engineering/operations teams and API-wired apps, AI acts as an automation substrate.

Implications for communicators:

AI is in the room at the idea stage—become editors, synthesizers, and standard-setters.
Automation is marching into comms-adjacent workflows—govern quality, provenance, and accountability.
Don’t pick a side; design for both—declare the “assist vs. automate” boundary, instrument the pipeline with checks and tags, build a “thinking partner” prompt bench, and mind the labor story by narrating changes transparently.

Neville Hobson:
Good advice. ZDNet’s split between personal and non-personal use was interesting. I’m a mixed user—lots of research that’s kind of work-related. I use ChatGPT mostly; not Claude lately. One note: I used ChatGPT for coding when I rebuilt my website on Ghost—editing theme templates with Handlebars. ChatGPT was astonishingly good—especially after GPT-5—at brainstorming workarounds and generating CSS/JS tweaks that worked perfectly on first publish. Claude also pinpointed issues following theme dev instructions. For a non-coder, that was huge confidence. These tools were brilliant alongside Docker and VS Code. I’m impressed.

Shel Holtz:
No question ChatGPT does very well with code; all frontier LLMs do. Claude currently tops some benchmarks (SWE-Bench, HumanEval, etc.) and is marketed heavily to developers, with strong APIs and tool integrations. OpenAI pushes ChatGPT more broadly—consumer and enterprise—so you see “what should I wear tonight?” and recipes alongside enterprise tasks. I’ve read that Gen Z uses AI to make basic day-to-day decisions—fascinating.

Neville Hobson:
The report says ChatGPT usage hit 700 million weekly users as of July. Growth is relatively faster in low- and middle-income countries. Early users were ~80% men; now about 48%, with more active users having typically feminine first names (their method). Useful metrics—but what does it mean to the average communicator? Hopefully they don’t walk away thinking “ChatGPT is only for coding.”

Shel Holtz:
Right—the point is not either/or. There are two valid use modes—collaborative and automated. Provide resources, tools, policies, guardrails, and governance so people can use both modes effectively. You can’t have a Wild West; you need standards you can support. But beware of swinging too far. I spoke to a company restricting staff to an internal AI that can’t do what NotebookLM does—hamstringing themselves. Organizations need to be pragmatic.

And that will wrap up episode 482, our long-form episode for September 2025.

Neville Hobson:
Market conditions will impact that approach, I bet. Okay.

Shel Holtz:
Right now we’re planning to record our long-form October episode on Saturday the 25th or Sunday the 26th—depends on Neville’s schedule. Either works for me. That episode will drop Monday, October 27. We’ll have short mid-week episodes in between, maybe even an interview—we’re lining up one or two. Until then, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #482: What Will It Take to Stop the Slop? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel dive into one of the hottest debates in communication today: what happens to tone and authenticity when artificial intelligence steps into the writing process? From the surprisingly heated arguments over the humble em-dash to fresh research on AI’s “stylometric fingerprints,” we explore whether polished AI-assisted prose risks losing the human voice that builds trust. Along the way, we look at how publishers like Business Insider are normalizing AI for first drafts, how communicators are redefining authenticity, and how Shel used AI to turn years of blog posts into a forthcoming book.

Links from this episode:

Human-AI Collaboration or Academic Misconduct? Measuring AI Use in Student Writing Through Stylometric Evidence
Distinguishing AI-Generated and Human-Written Text Through Psycholinguistic Analysis
Some people think AI writing has a tell — the em dash. Writers disagree.
AI is breaking my heart: Why authentic writing matters more than polished words
The Em-Dash Responds to the AI Allegations
Business Insider reportedly tells journalists they can use AI to draft stories

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 481 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:08)
And I’m Neville Hobson. In this episode of For Immediate Release, we’re going to explore the question of tone and authenticity when artificial intelligence becomes part of the writing process. That seems to be a bit of a hot topic these days from what I see online. AI tools don’t just generate text. They also polish, rewrite, and shift tone to make communication sound warmer, more professional, or more concise. But what happens to authentic voice when AI smooths the edges?

Do we risk losing individuality, nuance and trust if everything starts to sound the same? We’ll talk about that right after this.

It’s a debate playing out among communicators. This year, the humble M-dash has become a flashpoint. Some insist that overusing M-dashes is a dead giveaway of AI altered text. Others push back saying that’s nonsense and unfairly stigmatizes a perfectly good mark of punctuation. Washington Post ran a feature in April with the headline, Some people think AI writing has a tell. The M-dash writers disagree. Then in August, Brian Phillips wrote a lyrical defense in the ringer.

pleading, stop AI shaming our precious kindly M-Dashes, please. And McSweeney’s even joined him as satire, publishing the M-Dash response to the AI allegations written from the dashes own point of view. That is really, really very amusing, worth a read. The fact that such debates exists highlights how sensitive people are to the signals of authenticity in writing. Fresh research in 2025 suggests this is more than speculation.

Some recent studies show that AI leaves stylometric fingerprints in writing that can be detected, raising questions about authorship and voice. A stylometric fingerprint is the unique combination of statistical linguistic features within a piece of text that identifies its author much like a human fingerprint. AI can make writing clearer and more polished but risks homogenizing style and raising ethical questions. Beyond academia, commentators argue that polished words without voice

risk-leaving communication hollow. And while researchers are busy analyzing stylometry and psycholinguistics, communicators are having a very different kind of debate about punctuation. So while academics study the fingerprints AI leaves on writing, the popular imagination has latched onto something much simpler, the punctuation choices we make. The M-debate may be tongue in cheek, but it speaks to a serious point.

How sensitive we’ve become to the signals of authenticity in text right down to a single line on the page. For communicators, the challenge is not whether to use AI, that ship has sailed, but how to preserve authenticity when tone shifting tools are in the mix. The call to action is to define what authenticity means in your context, decide which writing tasks AI should support, and ensure human voice and accountability remain front and center.

In the end, and authenticity aren’t about perfectly polished words. They’re about whether people believe there’s a human voice and accountability behind the message. Your thoughts, Shale?

Shel Holtz (03:19)
I have a lot of thoughts on this, ⁓ beginning with, well, at least it’s not the Oxford comma, because that’s a source of debate without artificial intelligence. The dash has found its way into AI outputs because of the AI inputs. The training sets include this massive corpus of writing that has been scraped from the web.

@nevillehobson (03:28)
Don’t start on that.

Shel Holtz (03:49)
that includes dashes. This is what it learned from. It saw a lot of ⁓ dashes used in writing, and that’s a pattern that it recognizes. It recognizes where they’re used and implements it in the outputs it creates. It did not think to itself, you know, I haven’t seen many dashes in my training set. That’s a shame. I’m going to start using more of those. That’s absurd.

When I was in college, I had a part-time job setting type. Yeah, I’m old enough that I actually set type. And I remember learning when to use the ⁓ dash based on the copy that I was transcribing into typeset. And there were a lot of them, even back then, when most people were still working on typewriters. So I think this notion that it’s a tell is ridiculous.

It’s, as you quoted somebody saying, a perfectly serviceable bit of punctuation. But let’s go beyond this notion of punctuation. mean, leave it to communicators where we have some really weighty issues to deal with that we’re going to spend most of our time talking about punctuation. I think this is one of the reasons leaders don’t take communicators very seriously. They’re thinking about business decisions and we’re thinking about

⁓ letting and kerning and things like that. We really need to get more focused on business outcomes and how communication and the use of AI contributes to that. This is what the Business Insider has done. Business Insider, I don’t know if you saw this, it’s a very recent announcement, have ⁓ officially given permission to their journalists to use AI to write the first drafts of their articles. They were already…

@nevillehobson (05:44)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (05:47)
allowed to use AI for research, but not for any of the drafts they produced. Now they can produce the first draft. Now, why was that decision made? I’m not privy to what was going on in the mind of the president of Business Insider who made this decision and communicated it through internal memo to her staff. But I have to believe a couple of things are in play. First of all, journalism is in financial difficulties and you need

fewer people to crank out more stories. And if you can get it done faster by having AI generate a first draft, you then go in and fact check and clean up and apply your own writing to, I’ve done this, I’ve done first drafts in AI. And by the time I’m done rewriting, it’s a completely different piece. Still took me about an hour and a half less than it would have if I had had to sit there and write the first draft. I don’t do that for every kind of

article or other material that I need to produce, but on some things it just makes sense and it makes life easier. But the other reason I think Business Insider decided to go down this road is because AI is getting better at producing these kinds of drafts and it’s going to continue to get better. In the world of business, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience Neville, I know I have, is outside of the world of

communication when you are dealing with people in other parts of the business. And I don’t mean this in any sort of pejorative way. This is not an insult. These people are brilliant when it comes to the areas of specialization that are the focus of their jobs. But they can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag. They’re terrible, terrible writers. And if using AI can help them write a memo, write an email, write a report, write an article,

better than they could have on their own, I think we’re at a point where that’s fine. And as I say, it’s going to continue to improve. If AI can generate a good first draft now, how many months or years before it can generate the good final draft? I heard Casey Newton talking about this on Hartford saying, yeah, maybe ⁓ there’s not going to be work for us journalists anymore when the AI can write all the drafts.

don’t think that’s necessarily the case because the research still involves talking to people and that sort of thing. the writing with AI is getting to the point where I think this is a very transitive conversation that we’re having about authenticity and human writing. think AI is fully capable of doing this in a lot of circumstances and we need to stop our hand wringing about it and figure out how to do it well.

So that it produces the best results we can possibly deliver for our clients and our companies

@nevillehobson (08:50)
I agree. But we’re talking about human beings here who don’t exhibit some of that sometimes. I think the key thing to me is this kind of phrase I found last on my own mind, AI assisted writing. That’s actually pretty accurate phrase to describe in a sense what we’re talking about here. The issue of tone and authenticity is really the point that I’m keen to explore, where

voices more than grammar, for instance, AI can clean up text, sure, it can improve text. And you could argue that’s a subjective way, phrase, improve. Others might not see it as improvement. And therein, you get into rabbit holes, without question, which is where we’re at in a lot of this, I think. But AI can clean up text. But I think authenticity demonstrates itself through word choices, rhythm.

even the imperfections. I did something the other day that ChatGPT5 assisted me with, and I thought about this when I mentioned that. Did I assist it or did it assist? No, it assisted me because I asked it to do things. And I noted, kind of taken aback slightly, that on the first draft of what it did, it told me what it was going to do. And it said, I’m going to give this to you in your tone of voice.

And it did. And I read this, goodness, I could have written this myself. And that did take me back a bit. Maybe I’d not noticed that before. But that example also prompted a lot of my thinking into leading up to this discussion today. Because tone ⁓ and authenticity or rather tone, yeah, I mean, it is authenticity.

even though the debate is still there about what defines authenticity, I’ve had discussion that with lot of people is what do mean authentic? What does that actually mean? And it means different things to different people. I think this discussion or debate or whatever we might call describe it is likely to be one of those never ending ones, the dash, you mentioned the Oxford comma, that’s been around for decades, it’s still a major issue for some people. But being clear on this,

And for the reasons I think are quite clear, you mentioned, you know, the large language models, they scrape all this stuff off the off the internet, and it’s got m dashes in, it’s got all this stuff. No one really noticed that until recently. Most people don’t even think about that. I see writing and I even used to use this where I didn’t do m dashes, because that’s not in my background of writing. I do, for instance, on a keyboard.

using WordPerfect back in the day, I might do double hyphen that would convert that into an M dash. I never thought of that even, I didn’t even think about, hey, that’s an M dash, I didn’t even notice. So I don’t like M dashes, actually, the formal way people use them, or the historical way which I see AI doing the same, you got a word, there’s another word, and there’s an M dash in between, and then they’re touching the word. I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of it. So I don’t use M dashes, I use N dashes mostly.

when I do my writing. So this looks neater in my mind and I don’t care about it’s some ⁓ grammar geek is looking at that thing here that alters the meaning of what you’ve written. No, it doesn’t.

Shel Holtz (12:19)
Yeah, and

just to point out when I was doing typesetting, and I don’t remember what the rules were because I was 19 at the time, but there were definitely rules about the M dash is used in these conditions and the M dash in those conditions. I don’t remember what they were, but they existed.

@nevillehobson (12:22)
Sure.

I know,

of course there are rules, of course there are rules. So, but today in 2025, we’re looking at something that is, I guess, out of out of anyone’s control. Now, this this thing will evolve the language. I’m pretty certain of that, particularly. And typically we talk about the English language. The same thing applies in other languages, but English language as the world’s most spoken language.

meaning not native, it doesn’t matter, second language, third language doesn’t matter. It’s different everywhere. And so the rules are shifting. So, you know, I look at ⁓ the economist guides, the APs guide and all this, and indeed, I’ve got a copy of the AP guide from 15 years ago. don’t think anyone follows that now. It’s different. It’s different what you see now. So the ⁓ the web we’re at now is ⁓ beyond ⁓

can you say the the use of AI? I mean, it’s a given, as I mentioned in my intro, whether to use AI that ship has sailed long time ago. But we’re talking about preserving authenticity that exercises a lot of people in right, hence the criticism. I did read a piece by ⁓ I’ve forgotten who it was. It might have been Anne Handley, I think might have been the grammar girl actually talking about this recently. That’s right, right, exactly.

Shel Holtz (14:00)
That would be Minyung Fogarty.

@nevillehobson (14:04)
that ⁓ was pretty ⁓ bullish about the use of this in ways that we shouldn’t be wasting energy and time talking about this. Yet there are many people, because I see them talking about it online and social networks, who are convinced that an end dash anywhere they see an AI has written it. And I don’t think we’re to be able to get rid of that anytime soon. In which case, my advice is just do not worry about that. No one, know, right, ignore them.

Shel Holtz (14:28)
Yeah, ignore them. Ignore them.

I recently finished the first draft of a book. people who have been following writing. Oh, no, I’ve finished lots and lots of books reading, no, writing. This is a book on employee communication. And it is based on a series of 28 blog posts I wrote based on a framework I developed about 10 or 11 years ago.

@nevillehobson (14:39)
Do you mean reading it or writing it? Reading it or writing it? Writing it.

Right, okay.

Shel Holtz (14:58)
to aid me in the consulting work I was doing at the time. I wrote all these blog posts before AI was available to help you write. So they’re all in my voice, but they’re blog posts. They’re not book chapters. So I didn’t have the time between my full-time gig and FIR and a couple of volunteer activities that I have to sit and rewrite everything. I started, I tried, and it was just way too time consuming.

And I was listening to Chris Penn talk about how he did a book that Amazon could not challenge him that it was his, even though he leaned heavily on AI for the work. I didn’t do what he did because I already had a first draft with those blog posts, but I adapted his concept. So here’s what I did. I first created a very hefty document that contained a lot of what I have written.

⁓ I still had PDFs of a couple of the books I had written before. I had all of my blog posts, ⁓ many, many articles, this type of thing, even transcripts from some FIR episodes. And I put them in a PDF. And then I created a document ⁓ that said, these are approaches I take to writing. These are words and phrases that I use. I do a lot of parenthetical statements.

And here are things that AI tends to do in writing that I never do and don’t do any of this. And then I created a gem over on Gemini called Write Like Shell. And I loaded both of those documents into it. This was just for this book. And then chapter by chapter, and I started off by giving it the instruction that I’ve got 28 blog posts. I need to turn them into chapters of a business book.

I also need to update case studies because many of these are 11, 12, 13 years old and no longer relevant. And I need to come up with the kinds of elements that you see recurring in chapters of a business book. So I’m going to give you my blog post one at a time using these documents that I have shared, my corpus of my writing and my instructions on my writing and AI writing and how to apply that. Rewrite this post.

as a book chapter. And I was knocked out at how well it did. I still needed to spend an hour on editing and rewriting and making revisions. But I ended up doing that for 28 chapters. Is that an AI written book or is that a shell written book? I would argue that that’s my book. It based what it did on my writing. It did its new version based on how I write. And then I went back and made sure it was my writing.

@nevillehobson (17:48)
Right.

Shel Holtz (17:55)
So, you know, when we talk about using AI to write, the question is, what is your process? Are you saying write this and then you go publish it? I would never do that, but I think there are a lot of people who do.

@nevillehobson (18:03)
Right. No, no, ⁓

I agree with you. In fact, what you described is to my mind fits precisely the the label of AI assisted writing. That in my mind, what you’ve just explained is what’s the difference between what you did and between what you might have done if you’d hired a human being assistant to help you do this? What’s the difference? The AI is faster.

Is it accurate? Well, you only you will know that and you’re going to review it all anyway. And this to me is is is totally fine. And you’ve got no you would have no alarm about well, should I kind of write this chunky paragraph explaining that I’ve done it like this? No. Why? Why would you do that? Because similar tools have existed until now that were nowhere near as good as this. I mean, I think if some of the grammar assistance you

get from even in Microsoft Word back in the day, we’re Grammarly now that’s evolving that uses AI. And it’s, ⁓ you know, we got all these tools. Right, you’ve got all this there, which kind of neatly circles back to the main issue here, which is tone and authenticity, how do you still bring that along? And I think that is something where the the the user, the prompter, the communicator, whoever who is

Shel Holtz (19:01)
Yep. Hemingway is another one.

@nevillehobson (19:25)
engaging with the AI is his or her absolute responsibility to set the parameters for the AI in that context, to educate the AI on you. I’ve done that a lot. spent a lot of time on chat GPT. And that was one of my big bug bears, by the way, about chat GPT five, it seemed to have forgotten half of what I told chat GPT four about. So I’ve redone all that with chat GPT five. And I can see that in how it

ask me questions, how it prompts me and how responsible I ask it to do stuff like that. So that to me is is one way in which you can be confident yourself that the tone and authenticity of your AI assisted writing is okay. And that really is really what it comes out is not about creating a kind of a corporate manual for everyone has to follow. And I think it’s also to do with the comfort levels you have in your perception of that.

piece of writing or reading that someone has written that may have been assisted by AI may not more than often than not, it’s likely to have been assisted by AI. What is wrong with that? Well, a of people find something wrong with that nevertheless. So go back to right.

Shel Holtz (20:38)
Yep. And again, I think that’s that transitory issue that I think we face. I think in three or

four years, no one’s going to be talking about

@nevillehobson (20:45)
No, I’m sure you’re right, Shell. I mean, I think now we’re seeing things emerging in these academic papers. One of the examples I mentioned about stylometric fingerprints. think we’ve hopefully I think we’ve passed now through the phase of people saying, hey, I’ve got this software tool that could tell instantly if something’s written or not. No one cares about that unless you are being deceitful and seriously trying to game something. You ain’t going to succeed with that even. So things have changed. Things are evolving real fast. And people’s

if you like, expectations are evolving too, particularly the younger you are. And according to one of the papers I read, younger audiences are comfortable generally speaking with AI polish, but care deeply about whether a message feels authentic. And that’s what we need to be paying attention to. So help in defining authenticity is one job communicators could take on. We’ve got through the training, yes, we know, here’s how you do this with this LLM.

Here’s what you could do with that. Now let’s pay attention to the tone. Are you paying attention to that? So I think the kind of road is shifting in a slightly different direction than otherwise we might expect because of this. And the academic research seems to be backing this up as well. Things are changing fast, it seems to me, and you’ve got to be on the case.

Shel Holtz (22:03)
Yeah, and by the way, I have sent this first draft of my book to a group of thought leaders in the employee communication space. I asked them for their input. You know, what needs to be fixed? Is it terrible or should I proceed with this? And if you like it, please write a testimonial. ⁓ And so far, not one person has come back to me and said, I could tell you used AI in this. Not one.

So, you know, if you do this right, if you use it as a tool and do it right and come up with a workable process, I guarantee you all those people who say, can tell when it was written by AI, they can tell when it was written by AI by somebody who didn’t know what they were doing when they prompted the AI to write something. That’s what they can tell.

@nevillehobson (22:32)
Maybe we should ask them.

Yeah,

that’s the watchword, I think. And so, by the way, I see this year, I think there’s been at least six books published about internal communication. So everyone’s on a book bandwagon. I hope yours is gonna be slightly different, because they’re all saying the same thing about strategy, what’s important, how to use AI. Yours will be different, right?

Shel Holtz (23:13)
Mine does, I think it barely references AI. No, mine is about a framework for how to, if you read those other books and you go, okay, I understand the models and I understand how to develop a strategic plan, but I still don’t know how to apply this on a day-to-day basis. The framework is how you do that. One the very first things I say in the book is you’re not going to learn the models of internal communication in this book.

@nevillehobson (23:30)
Perfect.

Shel Holtz (23:42)
Go back and read something fundamental, then come back and read this to figure out what to do with all of those models that you’ve learned about. So yeah, it’s different.

@nevillehobson (23:51)
Cool. Excellent.

Shel Holtz (23:54)
So hope people like it. ⁓ If I actually, I don’t know how I’m gonna publish it yet. I don’t know if I’m gonna self publish this or look for a publisher. I’m waiting for the feedback from the thought leaders that I have sent it to who have agreed to read it. ⁓ But it wouldn’t be done. And this is the point. It wouldn’t be done if I didn’t have AI to help. It would still be sitting there as 28 blog posts. So, you know, criticize it all you like. ⁓ It works.

And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

The post FIR #481: The Em Dash Panic — AI, Writing, and Misguided Assumptions appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

GEO – generative engine optimisation – is suddenly everywhere. Is it the new SEO, a passing fad, or simply good communication practice in disguise?

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson talk with Stephanie Grober, Marketing & PR Director at Horowitz Agency in New York, about why GEO matters, the competing narratives surrounding it, and how communicators should prepare for the impact of generative search.

What we discussed

What GEO actually is – and how it differs from (or builds on) SEO
The hype versus the reality: is GEO a genuine discipline or simply “snake oil”?
The importance of authority, credibility, and tier 1 media coverage in shaping generative search results
Why trade and niche publications are still crucial for visibility
Practical steps for PR and comms professionals to get ahead, from media training to message consistency
The evolving role of content marketing, press releases, and multimedia in a GEO-driven environment
How law firms and professional services balance credibility with regulatory and compliance requirements
Where GEO may be heading over the next 12 months

About our Conversation PartnerStephanie Grober is the Marketing & Public Relations Director at Horowitz Agency, an integrated marketing and public relations agency with offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and Vancouver (B.C.). Her team works with law firm clients ranging from BigLaw to boutiques, designing and executing content and communications strategies that generate bottom-line growth in measurable ways.

Leveraging deep relationships with the press, she delivers high-quality earned media placements for clients and utilizes her extensive marketing background to amplify these results through a multi-channel approach.

Stephanie joined Horowitz Agency in 2021 after serving as Marketing and Communications Manager for a Top 50 accounting firm in New York City.

Follow Stephanie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniegrober/

Relevant Links

https://searchengineland.com/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-444418
https://www.geekytech.co.uk/what-is-generative-engine-optimisation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/seogrowth/comments/1m6k4gx/is_anyone_actually_doing_generative_engine/
https://zapier.com/blog/generative-engine-optimization/
https://a16z.com/geo-over-seo/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/stop-trying-to-make-geo-happen/554629/

Audio TranscriptShel Holtz (00:01.989)
Welcome everybody to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz. I’m here with Neville Hobson and our guest today, Stephanie Grober, who is marketing and public relations director at Horowitz Agency. Stephanie, it is terrific to join you today.

Stephanie Grober (00:19.33)
Thank you guys very much for having me very excited to be here and chat a little bit about what we are calling GEO.

Shel Holtz (00:27.471)
We are, even though some people are disputing that particular moniker. But before we jump into this, Stephanie, I think our listeners would appreciate knowing something about your background.

Stephanie Grober (00:40.748)
Absolutely. So at Horowitz Agency, we specialize in working with law firms and select individuals. So very much rooted in legal marketing. I’ve been in professional services marketing for about six years now, and I’ve been a marketer for my entire career across several different industries. So I was fortunate to be able to continue honing my craft, focusing on communications and now communications, marketing, NPR for law firms and leading attorneys.

Shel Holtz (01:13.837)
And what got you into studying this field of AI and generative engine optimization?

Stephanie Grober (01:22.7)
Well, it’s a very exciting time for public relations professionals. When you are talking about AI and generative engine optimization, you’re going to hear the words authority and credibility, right? And authority and credibility are core principles of public relations. So that right there should signal, wow, this, this sounds like a PR play. And so as research has come out and we’re learning more about generative engine optimization and essentially the AI overviews that are populated when somebody puts a search term into a search engine, we’re finding that the AI is creating a brief summary using sources from the internet.

And what are those sources? Well, a lot of them are authoritative sources from top publications where you may have a PR professional working with you to get you quoted. So it all circles back to PR, makes it a very exciting time for PR professionals. Those who have already engaged the services of PR consultants or may have PR services happening in-house are a little bit ahead of the curve right now because they’re already going to be appearing in the authoritative sources that AI likes.

@nevillehobson (02:50.272)
Great. That’s a very good overview. We talked about this topic, actually, as you know, Stephanie, in the regular episode of this podcast, where we looked at this thinking about this interview, this conversation we’re going to have with you. And in fact, it made me think today, earlier today, my time in the UK, I was watching a video by Danny Sullivan, who as a name, you’ll know, he was a big deal, Search Engine Land magazine he was a founder of, he works at Google now. But he was giving a presentation at WordCamp in Portland just last week about SEO. And it was actually about SEO and GEO was how he pitched it. I was intrigued because he talked about essentially the same thing. And I thought, well, that’s not my understanding of it, unless I got it wrong. But that’s really what Shel and I talked about the other day.

Although to be fair, he did talk about what the, the most effective thing to do isn’t to argue about or worry about acronyms or initialisms or whatever. It’s about, building trust, creating clear, incredible content, putting it where you can, which already are. I thought, God, did he listen to our episode or maybe, but of course that was last week, not, the other day. but he did get me thinking about this. Is GEO an evolution of SEO? Is it? the same thing by another name. We talked about this and that’s not what we figured out what’s what’s your take on that?

Stephanie Grober (04:26.786)
Well, I loved what Shel said in the episode from earlier this week that there is no magic bullet, right? Necessarily. That is the approach I take to marketing. I, you know, working in very traditional industries, professional services, often B2B, highly regulated spaces. So understanding that, which informs our approach to marketing and may be different than a direct to consumer play, for example, you know, some brands have a much younger demographic audience, B2C needs while we are, you know, working with highly distinguished attorneys, professionals in a very traditional space. But I agree with Shel. There may not be a magic bullet here. And as for the distinction between SEO and GEO, I do see GEO as complimentary to SEO. You could say that it’s an evolution.

I wouldn’t say that they are exactly the same thing, but they are very parallel to each other. I think that if you have successfully been employing SEO strategies as a part of your overall marketing efforts, then you are probably ahead of the curve, as far as GEO. And that would be because you’ve been consistently adding optimized content to your website. You know, which keywords you want to appear in search.

You may have been structuring your content in smart ways that already are answering questions. And that would be all on your own website, right? But now when we’re talking, GEO, we’re talking about getting that content out to external sources and reinforcing many of the same things. So SEO, could say it’s about keywords. GEO is about credibility, but the LLMs, they still have to learn.

So those keywords are gonna be important for them even in your external sources. And overall, what we’re looking for with GEO is mentions and visibility, whether it’s you as an individual or your brand.

Shel Holtz (06:34.097)
One of those magic bullets that people have jumped on in the last few weeks is some research that found that Reddit is the source of a lot of the content that is turning up in AI results. And Professor Malik just a couple of days ago, Ethan Malik at the Wharton School said essentially, nope, he said what they did was look at how often the sites come up in the answers at least once in the web search function of some AI agents when they do a web search for more information in response to a keyword search. He points out that the company searched for a bunch of keywords using Google AI mode and ChatGPT web search and perplexity, and then said they measured how many times those sites were included in the reply.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re doing research or if you’re just in one of the LLMs doing your job, that Reddit or Quora for that matter will be the dominant source of the information that you get. And yet this chart is everywhere and everybody’s talking about it. I confess, I went to our leadership in the organization I work and I said, we need to be in Reddit. And now…

It appears I was just chasing a shiny object or a magic bullet. How do you stay on top of what is working in this generative EO space?

Stephanie Grober (08:16.376)
So as a marketer, always have to think about which channels make the most sense for your brand or your individual brand, whoever you’re representing. Like I said, we work in legal with law firms. So Reddit is not exactly the space. There are some very famous attorneys who’ve done ask me any things on Reddit, and I’m sure that is helping them. I do believe that user generated content sites are coming up in GEO.

AI overviews simply because of how the content is structured in a very human questioning way, but it’s not going to be the right place for everybody. So when we take a look at that at Horowitz agency as PR professionals working with law firms or other other business professionals, there’s some other interesting stats. I think that stood out. So Muckrack put out a great report recently also analyzing which sites are read by AI.

And I believe it was almost 30 % of the sources are journalistic outlets with prominence and attention paid to outlets like Reuters, AP, Axios, for example. So those are sort of your tier one media. So that is a strategy you can employ for your credibility. If you don’t think that Reddit is the right place for you, okay, then let’s go after the tier one media

Now I will caveat that by saying, niche outlets are also very important to AI. So don’t think that you have to be an AP or Reuters. If you ask a niche question, it is very likely that the AI is going to read a niche or trade press outlet. So those are very valuable as well. But overall journalistic sources are a very valuable way to start appearing in GEO results. That’s where from a PR perspective, we can start maximizing our approach and our strategies, tailoring them there to support GEO.

@nevillehobson (10:21.792)
You emphasised the importance of securing tier one coverage, all those publications you mentioned, the idea being that being visible in such places can influence how generative engines surface content. But coverage like that takes time, doesn’t it? And it isn’t always immediate. So how do you advise professional services firms to balance the longer term credibility building with the short term pressure to be visible in generative search results?

Stephanie Grober (10:51.534)
Absolutely. It does not happen overnight. That’s something we tell our clients and probably any PR professional or communications professional in-house is going to share with stakeholders. You know, we don’t wake up, decide to do PR and land a New York Times article the next day

So the best approach today is to make sure that as part of your overall marketing plan, PR is included and you have a comprehensive… hopefully you already have that, but if you don’t have that and you’re thinking, I want to make sure that we’re doing GEO right, don’t neglect PR. There’s a few parts of the PR process. First one is just having your sources become media trained and responsive. And again, that takes time to be comfortable speaking to the press, to identify what they want to comment on, to give good sound bites.

That all takes some practice. So somebody who’s just starting out in PR might not be comfortable if the Wall Street Journal calls them on day one and they’re like, this is my first rodeo. So you wanna have some practice working with smaller outlets. Again, working with those trade publications which are still going to be very valuable.

So we don’t only wanna prioritize tier one, but just having a variety of PR opportunities, seeing what works best, that’s something that takes some time. So if you’re not already doing that as part of your PR strategies, the time to start is now, it’s all going to benefit your GEO. And then another key part of this is making sure the messaging is consistent. And that is down to the way you are cited in the press, for example

So, you know, as one example that comes to mind is if you’re somebody who is always referred to in the press as a celebrity criminal defense attorney over and over, that’s going to train the LLMs. When somebody is searching for a celebrity criminal defense attorney, you’re gonna come up in that AI overview because the reporters have referred to you that way in interviews. So how you present yourself to the media and how they cite you is important. It’s important to be consistent.

And then of course, you know, what you’re saying in each opportunity matters too, but I think down to the way that you are cited is, very key.

@nevillehobson (13:24.213)
I’ve got just a quick follow up on that tier one element before we kind of move on from that. But I’m just curious, actually, Stephanie, because you mentioned earlier the names of a couple of the new media, if I can call that, people like Axios. Isn’t the landscape evolving so fast, generally speaking, the media landscape that trying to kind of give labels or pigeonhole a media property as this is tier one and it’s
based on those old definitions back from print media days, I suspect. We’ve got, know, Exhaust is one of the new ones, but there are any number of I’ve never heard of you type of outlet by influencers, quote unquote, who have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. And I’m wondering, Shel, I’ve talked quite a bit about nano influences and others who are kind of disrupting the traditional ways in which things are structured.

So where does this fit in that case? And probably the example you gave is someone brand new to this to PR just starting out suddenly is immersed in all this. What, how do you deal with this in this changing environment?

Stephanie Grober (14:36.91)
So the media landscape has changed drastically. Reporters in newsrooms, there’s been mass layoffs. What I think is interesting about GEO is as we’re saying GEO is so important, journalists are struggling. Newsrooms are letting people go. They’re restructuring at the same time. So how does GEO exist without journalism? And I hope that it demonstrates the… need and necessity of great journalism.

They can’t exist without each other because otherwise, you know, what has authority, what do we trust, right, to build a response from the AI. So like you said, Nebel, the landscape is changing. There’s new outlets every day. That continues to happen to myself and my team. We’re constantly discovering new outlets.

There’s journalists who have left major newsrooms, who have started their own newsletters, they’re on Substack, they’re podcasting. All of this is important, is the good news when we’re talking GEO, because GEO assesses a very wide variety of sources, including video, including podcasts. So I recommend that anyone who is wading into PR take as many opportunities as they’re comfortable with.

And again, don’t only hold out for Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Take a variety because you never know what is going to give you the most bang for your buck or where somebody is going to discover you. This is all about discoverability. This is about mentions. And the more you can do it, the better. All of the LLMs have their own way of reviewing sources at this point. They are not consistent.

There is not one formula that they’re using, whether it’s chat GPT or Claude or perplexity. Some of them use journalistic sources at a higher rate than others. Some of them use smaller outlets. Some of them have partnerships with major newsrooms like Financial Times to train the AI. So we’re in the very early stages.

That’s why, again, I don’t think that there is a one size fits all formula. I don’t think that there is a magic bullet today where it’s do it this way or you’re going to fail. It’s be prepared to be flexible, but be everywhere that you can. So as things shift, you’re still ahead of the curve. And anyone who has been a marketer through the rise of digital marketing, I think is probably familiar with that, and anyone who has been on the internet since the beginning of the internet is probably familiar with that, right?

When I grew up, it was the dawn of Wikipedia and things have really changed. We just got Google. I remember the first time a librarian told me about Google. So this is all gonna change. It’s gonna change very rapidly. It could go away. It could be the most important part of marketing I don’t think we know yet.

Shel Holtz (17:50.39)
How do you measure all of this? The success metrics for traditional SEO are pretty clear and not that difficult, but what should PR people be paying attention to in GEO? I’ve seen things like share of answers, citation rate, sentiment and model responses. What’s genuinely measurable that’s meaningful today?

Stephanie Grober (18:16.046)
So there are definitely some tools that are purporting to provide AI analytics, GEO analytics, which are available. I think the best way to measure today is simply through your own experimentation. Enter the questions you think your clients are asking in search, read the overviews, do you come up? Are your competitors coming up? And use that as a guide to see where you need to focus your efforts.

And again, it might be certain keywords, certain questions that you want to prioritize, but that’s the easiest way just to be the end user and see how you come up, ask, ask the LLMs to describe you, to describe your brand, your company and see what comes back to you. so again, it’s not going to be perfect. We see a lot of errors or mistakes or misassignments of names and things when we do this.

So, you know, this is not the be all and end all to being successful. And I will say that, you know, AI search accounts today for, I think less than 30 % of search traffic. So, fortunately it’s not the only driver of traffic and, you know, discoverability, so we have a little time to iron out those kinks.

@nevillehobson (19:35.906)
That’s really interesting. In episode 479 of this podcast, the one I mentioned earlier that we did, knowing we’re going to talk to you today, we talked about companies spinning up standalone, community driven content brands that become credible in their own right. When does that approach do you think makes sense? And what safeguards keep it authentic, rather than just a thin GEO play?

Stephanie Grober (20:03.592)
Unique content is incredibly smart. So if that is something that is sustainable for your company and your brand, I think it’s a brilliant idea. Content is king everywhere and in every industry, I think some more than others, but content is really king. So it just needs to be something that is sustainable. If you have users generating content, that’s excellent.

in working with attorneys thought leadership is huge. Attorneys are always writing. They’re speaking. can repurpose their content. So there’s always fresh content going up, on websites and things like that. one thing I wanted to mention too, as, as we’re discussing this, whether it’s a brand that builds their own content platform, or a company working with content in another way is that the LLMs prefer recent and fresh content.

So, you if you were writing or speaking or quoted in the press five, six, seven years ago, that’s not gonna help you today. It’s time to get back out there. In the past 12 months or so is ideal with ongoing fresh content. So just something to keep in mind because I know, you know, time passes quickly and we’re like, when was I quoted? No, it was like five years ago.

Anyway, back to the content. I think that’s a very smart and strategic play if it can be supported. We know that marketers only have so much time in their day. There’s a lot of things that demand attention. So you have to choose to prioritize what makes the most sense and is a sustainable effort for your team.

Shel Holtz (21:43.063)
In that episode that we recorded this week and in a previous episode, in fact, that we dedicated to this topic, we discussed the argument that press releases need to be reformulated for algorithms. I’m skeptical of that. How do you adapt or should you adapt everyday PR assets, whether it’s press releases, content that goes on your company’s website newsroom? Thought leadership pieces from your executives on LinkedIn or wherever? How do you adapt those so they’re more likely to be used and cited by LLMs but still useful for the human readers they were originally designed for?

Stephanie Grober (22:32.75)
Absolutely. And when I listen to that art that that episode rather, you know, one thing that crosses my mind is, is, you know, part of me wants to say the press release is dead. Can we say that? I’m not sure. It feels like it might be dead, but there is also a school of thought that GEO is reviving the press release.

Now, if you put out press release across the wire, meaning in most cases you’re paying to put it out across the wire, that might be something that hits an LLM and is used to train on a certain topic. So in some ways, a press release still can have influence in that way. Other than that, the typical press release is not going far these days. It’s very difficult to maximize a press release.

We are competing for attention in the media landscape. There are less journalists. There is more news. The news cycle is shortened. It’s not even 24 hours. It’s about 24 minutes, it feels like most times. So just your standard press release, not put across the wire, not going far for most companies, you know, unless you are a enterprise corporation or, you know, very exciting in some other way.

@nevillehobson (23:58.229)
Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting. Is the press release dead? It’s a topic that pops up frequently. I think Shel and I have talked about this, the press release is dead, at least six times in the last six years. It could be more.

Shel Holtz (24:12.945)
By the way, I do like to remind people that for compliance purposes in the U.S., they still have some value, regulatory compliance.

Stephanie Grober (24:20.301)
Yes.

@nevillehobson (24:20.936)
Yeah, I’m sure that’s the same here in the UK too, although it may not be specifically a press release, a device you need to have as a compliance record. But I mean, it’s a thorny question because I see people commenting on this here and there on social networks particularly now and again that, yes, this is dead and B, no, it’s not.

But this notion of repurposing press releases to take into account the audience change, i.e. it’s not people, it’s the algorithm. I’m not using the word machine. I see people talk about it’s the machines. It’s not the machines. It’s the algorithm, right? So I think that is a credible view.

I disagree with you there, Shel. I think that is something that we are seeing that you need to prepare your content to publish it online with two audiences in mind, which are the humans and the algorithms. And the example Shel mentioned that we discussed specifically in an episode was somebody who has thought this through, it’s a really good visual explainers on the differences between them. They made a lot of sense to me, I have to say.

But is it going to be like the press release, the social media press release from 2006 to 2010, that was a template of the things you should include for social media to take advantage of it generated quite a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz, lot of hype and ultimately just kind of faded away. It didn’t really, you know, attract a lot of attention.

Is this likely to be the same case? I wonder. So I think this does this is important this change along with all the other things that we’ve been discussing. And I just wonder where this is going to fit if people are going to be creating press releases where the prime audience they’re thinking of is an algorithm. Where does that fit into the picture?

Stephanie Grober (26:19.436)
Well, there’s the algorithm, there’s the machines, but ultimately humans are still engaging with the content, right? So if the AI is gonna feed it back to us, it has to appeal to the human audience. So I think that there’s only so many differences between them. I personally have not seen a huge variation in the style of a great press release myself. And I think most communications professionals… I hope that most of them have a great sense of what it takes to have a really effective press release. I would say again, in the industries that I’ve worked in, that’s not changed very much regardless of whatever flashy marketing terms and strategies are in use at the time. But as far as getting it to hit,

The LLMs, the algorithm, it has to address the human at the end user who has a question and is seeking information and it has to answer that question.

Shel Holtz (27:23.025)
Yeah, that’s interesting because one of the very first arguments that I heard about what you need to do for your brand or your content to show up in the LLM results is to get away from saying what and get more into saying how. More explanations, more details. This leads me to believe that content marketing is probably a strong contributor to what LLMs get trained on.

I’m thinking of the great content marketing that comes out of Microsoft where they’ll have a lengthy feature, but it contains some short videos. It contains some short audio clips. It has infographics and photos and text. And it’s all there in that format so that whoever wants to use it can just grab that audio file and maybe use it in a radio broadcast or just grab that video clip and use it in a TV news report. Does that make sense? Should we be focused more on content marketing and less on more traditional forms of communication?

Stephanie Grober (28:34.432)
I think so. And I think how we are content marketing is important. The variety, the structuring of your content, exploring some Q and A type pieces is a great idea. And hopefully folks are already doing this because of SEO, right? It shouldn’t be such a surprise where your headings and the structuring of your content pieces were important. We see that in, in journalistic content too, right? There’s, there’s headings because news outlets want their articles to come up in search rankings as well.

So this shouldn’t be groundbreaking to anybody, but think about variety in your content. Think about making sure it’s answering questions, play with the format, use various types of multimedia to support your content. I think that is absolutely a sound approach today.

@nevillehobson (29:35.04)
So I’ve got a question about, you mentioned it actually, AI overviews earlier on in this conversation. Quite a simple question, really. Less and less people are clicking through. They’re gonna get their search results using Google and they’ll have then a summary on the right-hand side of the screen. And that gives them all they need and they do not proceed any further.

What impact is that having, do you think, and will continue to have on search generally and how you measure search, whether it’s GEO or SEO, how big of a concern should that be that people are not clicking through? And by the way, I’ve seen some reports in the last few days, which I haven’t bookmarked, frankly, but they’re talking about, you know, this is not what’s happening. People are clicking through. That doesn’t seem to fit what I see.

I don’t know, respectable search results being produced or data being produced showing that that is not the case. What’s your thought on that, Stephanie?

Stephanie Grober (30:36.482)
I think it’s so early still that we don’t know yet, right? Because AI, no, GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, the generative search results still make up a very low percentage of the overall engagement with our search engines. What I did see some reports of is that the click-throughs may not be to a brand’s homepage anymore but some of their internal blog pages or specific content pages. So I think it’s smart to make sure that those are optimized.

And again, it comes back to the content marketing that we were just talking about. Folks land somewhere else now in your website environment. I think it varies very much brand to brand, company to company, depends on what type of answer the end user was seeking.

And then again, we have to think, is everybody trusting AI? Personally today, I don’t fully trust the answers AI is giving me. I’m always going to go back and research them. Now that might change individual to individual, generation to generation, but it’s not perfect yet. So, you know, I don’t think we’re at a place where somebody is just going to solely get their questions answered by AI and go about their day.

Maybe we will get there and we will see a real sea change in the way web traffic works, but I don’t think this is going to completely break the system. And I don’t think it’s going to end search traffic as we know it. and you know, if folks are answering a question where they need something, they’re still going to have to click through to get it. AI can’t procure something for you. perhaps it can answer a question, but most likely you’re going to want to click through to read further and do your own research if the AI is just producing relevant sources for you.

Shel Holtz (32:38.473)
Your agency, Horowitz Agency, has to deal with an additional wrinkle with all of this, given the nature of the market sectors that you serve. Law firms, financial services, accuracy and compliance really aren’t negotiable in those industries. So how do you balance making content citable for AI, while staying inside the lines on confidentiality, disclaimers and regulatory restrictions?

Stephanie Grober (33:08.174)
I think what I love about legal marketing is that it is so professional and it tends to err more towards the traditional side of things and value just great marketing. So law firms don’t always go for flash in the pan. Law firms weren’t racing to be on TikTok, although there’s some lawyers who are very successful, but the new hot thing isn’t always what a law firm or a professional services firm is looking to do.

Rather, they embrace the fundamentals of great marketing and then make sure that everything that is put out adheres, complies, represents the brand consistently and correctly. There’s a lot of layers of approval. Anyone working in corporate marketing is probably very accustomed to that. And I think that that’s a great thing. We are not trying to utilize any gimmicks.

We are not trying to trick the AI because we have to stand behind what is put out on behalf of our clients. And when you’re talking about professional services, that’s really guidance and counsel to folks with very important personal or business questions.

Shel Holtz (34:24.593)
And let me ask you a quick follow-up question on that, as long as we’re talking about law firms and financial services. Those are pretty close to the top of the list of professions at risk from AI. Have you seen any movement among your clients in that direction? Are they starting to replace maybe paralegals or customer support people with AI?

Stephanie Grober (34:49.132)
Law firms are embracing AI, much like every industry, industry agnostic, think companies are embracing AI. They’re spending a lot of money on ways to incorporate AI into their processes. But I think it’s too early to say if any humans have been replaced. So what I get this sense from some major law firms is that they at the very lowest levels are taking away some of the hours of intensive research that might need to be done.

But then they are prioritizing the value giving advice that their professionals can provide. So it might not take as many billable hours on research, but you might get more value in the conversation with your attorney or advisor. Of course, marketers are using AI in very interesting ways.

But again, it’s not perfect. So I think it’s still very early stages. Certainly it’s not replacing anyone in these industries yet today. And we’ll see if we get to a point where it will. Now, the same can be said for communications professionals. Is AI going to take our jobs? I personally think if AI is writing all the content, then… wouldn’t we reach a point where human written content is actually at a premium and bespoke and in demand? Because how can you stand out in a sea of AI written content, right? That doesn’t sound appealing at all. I mean, that’s not what I wanna read. hopefully we’ll still be here in five years.

Shel Holtz (36:36.049)
Yeah, I just saw yesterday that Mark Benioff at Salesforce announced that they are letting 4,000 customer support people go and replacing them with AI. I was thinking on the financial services side that might be a similar trend at some point.

Stephanie Grober (36:54.516)
Mm-hmm. Perhaps, but I think it’s very risky in, you know, legal services, accounting, when you’re talking about that. you know, these industries are waiting in very carefully.

@nevillehobson (37:11.518)
We could do a whole episode just on this topic. So sticking with GEO looking ahead as I tend to do, there’s the horizon. Where do you see GEO going and evolving over the next year or so? And traditionally that question might be over the next five years. No, the next year or so. Do you think it will mature in that timeframe or will it need longer, becoming maybe a reliable discipline like SEO eventually did? Or is it more likely to, I guess, remain a contentious topic? People not agreeing on what it’s for, but there’s good practices that we’ll see emerging amongst all the hype. How do you see it, Stephanie?

Stephanie Grober (37:58.167)
It’s very hard for me to predict. At this point, there’s not an easy way for all of us to opt out of AI search results with every search engine. If that were to become an option, would folks just simply turn it off? And would we not even need to have this conversation if it simply falls from sort of the consciousness? Or is it going to be continued to be sort of forced upon us as search engine users?

Of course there was the Google antitrust case decision this week where, know, they’re keeping chrome and Gemini is going to be, feeding us its results. So I don’t see that going anywhere in the next year. I will be watching to see if AI search gets smarter and gets more accurate. and how our clients or those I work with appear in the search. So it will be sort of testing for us.

Of course, we’ll be looking out for more case studies of it leading to work. Anecdotally, there are folks in legal who are saying, yes, I’ve gotten clients from chat GPT searches, which is great. I personally know that there are some attorneys I’ve worked with in corporate law, for example, who after a great streak of appearing in outlets like Wall Street Journal, CFO.com, know, AI will tell me about them if I say who is a great &A attorney in Los Angeles. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I’ll be looking for in the next year. I can’t say that definitively we’re going to see a sweeping change more than that.

Shel Holtz (39:44.634)
In the episode that we recorded earlier this week, I mentioned that I had read an article about, I think it was a LinkedIn article from somebody who said he had tripled the volume of output in order to have more content out there that could be hoovered up by the models in the hopes that the volume would lead to more visibility in results.

I’m not sure that’s the answer, but certainly budgets aren’t keeping up with volume. The point was made that this individual did not get more budget to help create all that content. So if your firm were hired by a communications leader and asked you to adjust their content strategy for GEO, what process changes would you recommend, say, over the first 90 days?

Stephanie Grober (40:42.35)
Absolutely great question. One thing I wanted to mention too, when we’re talking about important content right now is rankings, reviews. So whether it’s professional rankings for an individual or best of lists, I would make sure that a client is incorporating those into their strategy. Because what better way to train an LLM than by appearing on a best of list from the last six to eight months, right? That’s exactly what you want to come up for most likely in a search.

We do probably over 500 nominations for our clients each year. So that is always a part of our strategy, but very important. I’d be looking at online reviews, whether for a company, could be your Google My Business reviews. It could be Yelp, Facebook, wherever you might get reviewed, in whatever way you might get reviewed. And then making sure that the client is out there, mentioned and visible again.

Each month, fresh mentions in journalistic outlets, whether they are prestige media or trade press, they still have value. Multimedia, getting them on video, getting them in podcasts anywhere we can. And then from a content strategy as a marketer, hopefully at this point you are repurposing, but use AI and let it help you repurpose.

There’s so many tips and tricks that marketers can use when it comes to AI. And that includes taking what you already have and making it new, repurposing it into different formats to make your job a little bit easier. So that today is one of the biggest benefits of having AI available to us as a tool to make content production easier.

@nevillehobson (42:30.014)
You make a good case for that, Stephanie. That’s exactly what I say to people. If you don’t use it or you’re skeptical, this is one thing you could do, you’ll benefit from doing this. That’s been great, this conversation. I think we’ve reached a point now for that famous question, Shel mentioned at the very beginning, which is, what didn’t we ask you that you really wish we had?

Stephanie Grober (42:53.998)
You know, I think a great question would be what is going to be the greatest impact that AI has on PR, public relations, and communication? I think those industries are still inherently human. I think they are relationship driven. I don’t think that we’re ever going to take humans out of the equation.

So even as we are working to boost GEO results, doing public relations, getting media mentions, we’re working with people. You have a PR professional, you have a client source, you have a journalist who’s a person, and that is still very valuable. AI can’t do that for us, it’s relationship driven. So make sure people are doing your PR, not AI.

@nevillehobson (43:43.818)
To kind of add add to that topic, Shel and I have talked about a few times on the podcast during this year. And it’s in the kind of area of AI agents, but it’s looking at I think, Shel’s phrase for it is ‘synthetic employees,’ where you have you have a situation that isn’t too far fetched in the near future, whether that means two years, five or 10, I don’t know where think about your team and your organization, where you’ve got maybe 15 people in that team of which three perhaps might be AIs effectively. So this isn’t like, you know, some of the illustrations you see on posts where you’ve got people and there’s like a robot in there. It’s not like that. I don’t know what it’ll be like. It might be like that actually

But is that kind of like a serious disruptive element suddenly appearing on the horizon that will have a huge impact on this amongst many, many, but think specifically what we’re discussing today and the change it might bring to that where you’re introducing AI team members in a team. What do you think about that?

Stephanie Grober (45:00.706)
I think that there are tasks AI can do well, but when it comes down to communications, strategic thinking, most of us don’t like it. We don’t love fully AI generated content, right? Where nobody’s reviewed it. We’re not thrilled. Journalists most often don’t want to get pitches that were written by AI, outlets don’t want to receive articles that were written by AI

So, you we pitch byline articles for clients all the time. A lot of newsrooms now have a, you know, a disclaimer that we may reject your piece if we think it’s written by AI. So it remains to be seen, you know, there are AI helpers, they’re on our teams right now, you know, how many companies are incorporating AI, we do have AI teammates.

We’re figuring out the best use for them. Some are better than others. Some are more trusting of AI than others. And some folks are more clever to use it as a tool than others. when it comes to communicating back and forth with artificial intelligence completely, the more strategic and in depth you get, just don’t know if that’s what we’re going to see in the very near future.

Shel Holtz (46:29.649)
Yeah, I have an AI colleague now. I have a two-person communication team where I work myself and one colleague and no budget for consulting. And so what I did was it took about four or five hours because I really worked on this, but I created a custom GPT who’s the senior communications consultant with a specialization in my industry. it doesn’t do stuff for me, but it’s a sounding board.

If I develop a strategy and I want somebody to play devil’s advocate, I can’t go to my $400 an hour consultant, I don’t have a budget for that. So I’ll just ask the AI consultant. I realize that it’s not as good, but in the absence of any alternatives, it’s fine. And it has come up with some really good responses. So…

Stephanie Grober (47:18.7)
Yeah, and I dare say that you’re probably, you know, far ahead of some others. So learning how to use it, learning how to maximize its output, how to get the most out of it and have consistent results, I think is where we should all strive to be today. And then in the meantime, you know, follow many voices on AI, on GEO.

It’s changing, it’s evolving so rapidly that, you know, don’t put all your eggs into one basket. Don’t buy into a one size fits all approach today. It’s still too soon. And don’t abandon your other marketing strategies or tactics in favor of some of the AI driven ones.

Shel Holtz (48:03.843)
Yeah, as we pointed out in that episode from earlier this week, recommendations from people you know are still top of the heap. Stephanie, this has been great. We really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us today. How can our listeners find you and maybe read some of what you share online?

Stephanie Grober (48:23.146)
LinkedIn is great. Stephanie Grober. I’m with Horowitz Agency. Love LinkedIn, I’m constantly talking to my clients about spending more time on LinkedIn. So I’d love to connect with anybody there. Our website is HorowitzAgency.com. And I look forward to keeping the conversation going.

Thank you guys very much for the time today.

The post FIR Interview: Generative Engine Optimisation with Stephanie Grober appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this reflective follow-up to our FIR Interview in July with Monsignor Paul Tighe of the Vatican, Neville and guest co-host Silvia Cambié revisit some of the key themes that resonated deeply from that conversation.

With a particular focus on the wisdom of the heart – a phrase coined by the Vatican to contrast with the logic of machines – Neville and Silvia explore the ethical responsibilities communicators face in the age of artificial intelligence.

The discussion ranges from the dignity of work and the overlooked realities of outsourced labour, to the limitations of technical expertise when values and human well-being are at stake.

Silvia expands on her Strategic article focusing on precarious workers, while Neville revisits ideas shared on his blog about the Church’s unique role in advocating for inclusive, human-centred dialogue around AI.

Above all, this episode highlights how communicators are uniquely positioned to help organisations navigate the moral and societal questions AI presents – and why they must bring emotional intelligence, narrative skill, and ethical awareness to the forefront of this global conversation.

Topics Covered The idea of wisdom of the heart vs logic of the machine* * Redefining human intelligence in the AI era * The Vatican’s call for a global, inclusive debate * Dignity of work and the reality of outsourced labour * What ethical AI really means – beyond compliance * Why communicators must be part of the AI conversation

Links from this episode: FIR Interview: Monsignor Paul Tighe on AI, Ethics, and the Role of Humanity * ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note* on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence * Speaking for Humanity: The Wisdom of the Heart in the Age of AI * A View from The Vatican: AI, Ethics and the “Dignity of Work” * We must build AI for people; not to be a person * What Does It Mean to Stay Human in the Age of AI? * The Rise of Culturally Grounded AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Transcript (from video, edited for clarity):@nevillehobson (00:03)
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 480 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK. Shel’s away on holiday, but I’m delighted to be joined by Silvia Cambié as guest co-host for this episode. Welcome Silvia.

Silvia Cambie (00:17)
Thank you Neville, delighted to be here today.

@nevillehobson (00:21)
Excellent. Glad you said that. So in this short form episode, we’re going to spend time on an interview we did in late July that you, Shel and I did for an FIR interviews episode. We interviewed Monsignor Paul Tighe from the Vatican. He played a central role in shaping the church’s thinking on artificial intelligence and its broader societal impact.

He was instrumental in the development of Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican’s note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence published in January 2025. In our interview, Monsignor Tighe offered a powerful reflection on how AI challenges us not only technically, but also morally and spiritually. He urged us to consider what makes us human in an age of machines, calling for a global conversation grounded in dignity.

agency and what the Vatican calls the wisdom of the heart. So in this episode, Silvia and I want to share what resonated most for us from that conversation and why we believe communicators have a vital role to play in shaping this future. I mentioned this before during the interview, Silvia, that you were instrumental in securing that interview. So tell our listeners, how did it come about?

Silvia Cambie (01:38)
Yes, indeed Neville. So you and I were talking in the spring when Pope Leo XIV was elected and we were talking about his background in math and science. And so on top of that, the Vatican has been contributing their views to a lot of papers like Antiqua et Nova to the Minerva Dialogue, which is a forum that basically collects views about the human

the interaction between humans and AI and the dignity of work. So we were thinking of bringing these voices to the forefront and in particular in relation to your listeners, your listeners and Shel’s listeners who work in comms and work in change management and are often confronted with the moral aspects, values.

the ethical part of governance. And at the moment, they’re looking for a North Star because we are at the forefront as communicators of this wave of AI introductions, AI pilots. But we, at the same time, we often lack guidance. So that’s why we wanted to collect these views from the Vatican, from Monsignor Tighe.

relate them to our work, make them very concrete and kind of actionable, something for our listeners to use, to be able to use. And so I think you were mentioning before what resonated with us, with you and me. And so we had our conversation with Paul Tighe back at the end of July. And then we

@nevillehobson (03:10)
Get it.

Silvia Cambie (03:25)
also listened to a lot of the podcasting podcast interviews he’s done. And we’ve read, you know, articles he’s written and so on. And I think something that resonated ⁓ a lot with me is really the the fact that he believes that technology is never neutral. It’s always the product of a mentality of a culture. And technology is often.

@nevillehobson (03:36)
Hmm.

Silvia Cambie (03:52)
created, produced, programmed by people who, you know, focus on profit, focus on ⁓ productivity. And at the moment, there is a sort of a new trend because of AI that people have to adapt to the demands and pace of machines. A lot of people have to have deadlines these days set by algorithms.

And that is creating a certain dynamic which I have witnessed many times when I work in managed services, which is you’re basically following the rhythm of a machine and you have no time to think, you have no time to develop new ideas, to stop and ponder and get insight out of what you’re doing, out of what your client needs. So at the end of the day, everybody loses.

⁓ You don’t have fresh ideas. The client doesn’t get a fresh view or, you know, fresh recommendations on how to do things. So it’s all very mechanistic and it’s a real risk out there that people, you know, will have to follow the rhythm of machines in the work. And therefore what Paul Tighe mentioned.

which is the wisdom of the heart, as you mentioned before, the ability to relate to other people, how you relate to your client and solve their problems. So I think I’ve seen that in my work and I think that is a real risk. And we have to be aware of that. And as communicators and change managers, there’s a lot we can do because we are on the front lines.

And yeah, so I think this point about technology, that technology is never neutral and that ⁓ there’s this risk and danger that we will have to follow the pace of machines and lose the wisdom of the heart and lose the ability to draw insight from what we do. That’s something that really resonated with me.

@nevillehobson (06:01)
Yeah, I understand that. It’s similar. I was also thinking that one element that did nudge us together to do this was what we had observed, what we’d read and seen even in the prior months during spring and summer. In fact, really since Pope Leo was elected to the papacy and understanding his background in science and mathematics.

But also what struck me that I noticed was his knowledge, his ability, as it were, to understand the role of social media in communicating with people. And we noticed that the Vatican was pretty proactive on many social channels. And indeed, Paul Tighe was at one point ⁓ in the Dicastery of Communication, kind of like the Communications Department, in charge of all of this.

So they have a track record, a history, if you will, of knowing how to use social channels to engage with wide audiences, not just the faithful of the church, but broadly a wider audience. And that’s something we observed. And then this document, Antiqua et Nova, I found it an extraordinary document of what it set forth, what it described.

and the focus in particular on that phrase, wisdom of the heart, that resonated very strongly with me. I found it interesting too that the conversations that the Vatican had been having, notably with Paul Tighe, but not only ⁓ Monsignor Tighe, others too, with leaders of Silicon Valley companies, of the big tech firms in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta

We’ve had, you know, we’ve seen more Google, Microsoft, others gathering in a number of instances over the past year or so, ever since Pope Francis’s time to talk about this, where the Vatican was able to introduce this theme, this broader theme of the wisdom of the heart. And it struck me too, that Paul Tighe was quite clear and mentioned the Vatican is not claiming

expertise in AI systems or algorithm design, which by the way, struck me too. We keep talking about the machines. It’s not machines, it’s algorithms we should be worried about. Instead, it offers something that the tech industry and many governments sorely lack. I agree with this completely, a deep concern for long-term consequences you nudged on that point, Silvia, just now, and the consistent voice on the value of human dignity, agency and solidarity. So the wisdom of the heart,

Silvia Cambie (08:09)
Thank

@nevillehobson (08:29)
is a phrase that appears in Antiqua et Nova as part of its final reflections. And it says this: “We must not lose sight of the wisdom of the heart, which reminds us that each person is a unique being of infinite value, and that the future must be shaped with and for people.” And that’s a pretty straightforward message. It’s simple. Perhaps it could be even simpler, actually, but I’ve seen others alluding to this idea of this is about people, not just the tech recently.

So for instance, subsequent to the interview, and this was actually quite recently, about a week or so back, Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote in an essay that we must build AI for people, not to be a person. In other words, AI is not a person. We hear a lot about, and I’ve had conversations with people about this, these so-called personas, the way in which you can create something that’s a duplicate of you almost. It’s like a version of you as a person.

I think that’s crazy to do that, to be frank, because that reinforces everything that we don’t want reinforcing, if you will. But Suleyman makes the case that the real risk we face is not AI suddenly waking up with consciousness, as some people talk about, but people being convinced that it has, because it’s not sentient. That’s a firm belief that I have. These are electronic devices and tools, not actual

versions of people. We’re not there yet. That’s quite a way away, I would say, if ever. But Suleyman goes on to say, this is the interesting bit to me, I want to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another and strengthens our connections to the real world. We won’t always get it right. But this humanist frame provides us with a clear North Star to keep working towards. I mean, that couldn’t be simpler either, could it? And this is the head.

of a division of one of the biggest technology companies on the planet, Microsoft, saying that. And I’ve seen others in the industry saying similar things recently. So maybe this is beginning to get attention. And I can’t say, of course, that it’s a direct result only what the Vatican has been talking about, but that surely must be having an influence. So I summarized all this just for me. Quite simply, emotional, moral and ethical intelligence must guide communicators response to AI.

The big question is how,

Silvia Cambie (10:50)
Yes, indeed. And I also liked very much the article by Mustafa Suleyman because I think it’s, as you said, he pointed out the real danger, not that the machines are going to wake up and, you know, kind of take over the world and pretend they’re conscious. It’s more that they are that people.

@nevillehobson (11:06)
Take over the world.

Silvia Cambie (11:14)
will get used to interacting with them and will expect really kind of seek that human aspect in the machines and will also kind of seek approval from AI, from algorithms. That’s also something that Suleyman is cautioning us against. also, so that can create psychosis, stress, anxiety,

people being disenfranchised at work. And I think that there is a quote by UNESCO that I really like, and I have used it in the article I wrote for Strategic, the online platform for communicators. It says that ⁓ AI is about anthropological disruption, right? It’s not only how the…

@nevillehobson (11:48)
Hmm.

Silvia Cambie (12:04)
machines, the algorithms function, it’s how humans react to it. And to answer your question about what communicators can do, because indeed we are at the forefronts, we talk to people, we hear about their needs, about their anxieties and worries at work. So I think there are lot of attempts at the moment to

⁓ wrap some governance around AI, AI applications, rollouts. And what I’ve seen is, know, centers of excellence being created in companies. Those centers of excellence oversee AI pilots, for instance, the progress. So, and have, you know, the usual suspects sitting on them, which are, you know, people from IT, developers.

But I think it’s very important that communicators and change managers become part of those fora because communicators know how to talk to people. Again, they’ve been doing that for forever. That’s their bread and butter. Also, they can relate to previous tech rollouts, you know, like a workplace technology and how people had reacted to that. So there is all that.

institutional knowledge that is needed now because this shift is so unprecedented. So I kind of cringe every time people show me a COE and AI COE made up only of IT people and developers because that’s not the way to go about it. I really like a start,

statue mentioned a fact you mentioned you and Shel mentioned in a previous FIR episode that I think you were quoting ⁓ studies by MIT and HR dive which says that people are expected to use AI in their daily work but they are not receiving proper training so they are kind of very confused about you know what

you know, this is going to hit my performance indicators. What am I supposed to do? They’re not training me. How am I going to use Co-Pilot? I’m going to download Chat GPT and do my own thing and show that I’m doing something and that hopefully will be enough for my company. So all that needs to be structured. And again, communicators have the knowledge. They have the institutional memory. They have the means and also

they know where the different voices sit in a company. Like when we do research before rolling out AI, we create workshops, we’re representatives from different parts of the company. So in that case, communicators know how to spot those voices because we have worked on on rollout projects before.

@nevillehobson (15:03)
Hmm.

Silvia Cambie (15:07)
how people react, where pockets of resistance might be found in the enterprise. So I think that it is paramount that we allow communicators and change managers to participate in those bodies that are being created for AI governance. And obviously that’s also a way

to kind of channel what you were saying Neville, you know, the human aspect, what makes us human. It’s the ability to relate to other people. is insight, it is emotional intelligence. And it’s all things that are really needed these days because of this shift. And it’s kind of, you know, a paradox that we are so focused on the technology now, but at the same time,

we would need to focus even more on the human aspect because this challenge is so huge that people are just not prepared for it. And we really need to focus on the human aspect, their abilities, what makes us human in order to enable people to deal with it, right? In order to enable the training, in order to make people feel that they are equipped

@nevillehobson (16:24)
Thank

Silvia Cambie (16:26)
sufficiently equipped for it. So I also would like to, there is a quote by Pope Francis that I really like, late Pope Francis. He said, this is not an era of change. This is a change of an era. And I firmly believe in that, you know, everything we’ve been saying Neville in, also in our interview with Paul Tighe leads to that.

But I think that in order, so because this change is so huge, we really have to empower people in an unprecedented way and communicators are very well positioned for that.

@nevillehobson (17:06)
Absolutely agree with that. I think you mentioned training indeed, Shel and I discussed that topic in that recent episode of FIR where people feel they’re not getting training on the one hand and on the other hand, there are companies that just aren’t provided because they don’t think it’s worthwhile. There are others though that are doing it quite well. So it’s very, very patchy. It’s not universal. But I think

The role of the communicator then is to develop and deliver that but there’s also another aspect which to me is the it touches directly on on what we’re currently discussing, i.e. the human or the humanity element, if you will, that, you know, organizations are looking at adopting AI to improve their efficiency to ⁓ improve their productivity and they will enter scale more without looking at

this aspect? Are they asking the human questions? And that’s the role, in my opinion, of the communicator well placed to do that. So three questions I wrote down that could be where communicators are able to introduce this element in their conversation. Does this technology help deepen trust and empathy? Or does it risk eroding them? That’s a valid question, in my view.

Are we building systems that reintroduce conscience, care and context into conversations, or are we defaulting only to efficiency and output? And the third one, are we ensuring that AI strengthens our connection to each other rather than replacing those with illusions? And I think there are undoubtedly at least a dozen more, but to me, those are great ones to start with that, in a sense, force attention on this rather than just those technically

valid, yet ⁓ stale approaches to all of this. It dehumanizes, if you like. And I think the, just briefly going back to Mustafa Suleyman’s North Star, as he references quite clearly, and the Vatican’s wisdom of the heart, there’s an essential reminder in all of that, to me, which is quite simple to grasp.

To stay human in the age of AI is to place empathy, dignity and care at the heart of design and use, not simply efficiency or the ways algorithms shape our actions. Suleyman directly references that in his essay. And he’s the first technology leader I’ve seen publicly doing that the way he did. It was very clear and is a long essay, by the way, very long, worth reading. So that’s encouraging to see that and it’s worth.

Silvia Cambie (19:07)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

@nevillehobson (19:30)
I think communicators looking for a kind of a something to hang a hook on. This is it in my view for communicators to do that. that, and I think quite clearly is how to address the question we’ve been asking ourselves. How can communicators help democratize the conversation side of organizations? This is one way to go about it, I think.

Silvia Cambie (19:51)
Yeah, indeed. You know, conscience, care and context. Those are very important aspects when you are rolling out rolling out AI and dealing with people’s reactions. And I think those questions you asked are very powerful and they are a good start for communicators to kind of make people think, right? This isn’t just about the tech.

This isn’t just about the efficiencies this app is going to create. You’re still dealing with people. Your employees are people, your clients are people, your regulators are people. So you’re still dealing with them. And I think that it’s about empowering people to ask the right questions, right?

So I was referencing before to those COEs that are being created to monitor AI pilots in companies. Well, the conversations there tend to be very technical and always focused on the tech, know, the rollout, the different waves of the rollout. And I think, again, communicators can bring back the human aspect. How are people reacting to this?

Is this making them more happier in their work or is this making them more insecure? As you were saying before, lot of companies are not providing training or not providing the right training. So that makes them insecure. Are they getting more and more confused in the way they are ⁓ dealing with their clients and customers? Because if you have AI that takes

over part of that relationship, what is left for them to do? So there is, it’s a very complex scenario that has to be considered from different aspects. And again, you you mentioned the Suleyman’s North Star and the Wisdom of the Heart ⁓ mentioned by Monsignor Tighe. I think these are kind of, sort of, these,

thoughts can inspire communicators, can inspire people who work in AI governance and make them pause and think that it’s important to focus on these aspects, to focus on what Suleyman was saying, the fact that people might expect AI ⁓ to be, might think that AI is conscious and they might.

establish, you know, develop a relationship of a certain kind with it so that they end up depending from the algorithm, depending from, you know, expecting approval. And so I think that now is the time to stop and think and introduce those thoughts into the conversations that are going on in companies about AI. And I think

@nevillehobson (22:33)
Hmm.

Silvia Cambie (22:51)
It’s kind of, we’ve got to be brave. We have to do it. I know that often, as I was saying before, know, technology and technical aspects are basically overriding other aspects just because of the pace of ⁓ the project, just because of the pressures that people are under. But I think it’s very important to introduce these thoughts.

into the conversation. And again, you know, it’s a moving target, right? We will continue to look for voices like Monsignor Tighe, like Mustafa Suleyman I’m sure as we progress, there will be others and there will be other aspects. But I think that it’s just this…

@nevillehobson (23:17)
Mm.

Silvia Cambie (23:37)
human aspect and the interaction between ⁓ humans and AI seen from the point of view of humans that is important. And we have collected a voice from the faith community. ⁓ We have looked at the paper that Suleyman published, which is really very thought provoking. so, and we will be looking for our voices going forward.

@nevillehobson (23:52)
Mm-hmm.

Silvia Cambie (24:04)
But I think for communicators, it’s very important to continue to be open to these voices, right? It’s also a way for us to get backup and support when we need to shift the conversation in a company towards the user, towards the rights of the user, towards the dignity of the user and not just

about the technologies. then, you know, these are all tools that we can use to make our point and to make our point ⁓ stick. So I think, as I said, this is a lot of, know, the target, this is a moving target. We’ll have to do a lot more work on this, but it is fascinating for communicators because

You know, I get off often, I get asked by people in comms. So, you know, how do I shift to tech and I am not a developer and I don’t have the right knowledge in AI and I don’t know how to build an LLM. I, my answer is, is basically this, right? Make sure, bring the human voice into the conversation. do you know how to talk to the base?

you know how to collect their voices, or you know how to collect their views, make sure that they are heard, because it is important as we go forward. So I think that is what communicators can do. And that is a very important role indeed at the moment.

@nevillehobson (25:37)
Yeah, I agree with you. Now, that’s very good, Silvia. And I think just to add one final thing to this, in a sense of parallel development that is very much a part of all of this is what I’m calling the end of AI universalism, where currently we’ve got ⁓ an environment, if you will, and an assumption, let’s say that that one or two global platforms will serve the world. And we’re talking about the

tech tools, the chatbots, the means by which people connect with others and discover things themselves. And it’s Silicon Valley based and tends to be in English more than the other language. But we’re seeing some interesting things happening. Latin America. Peru is leading the charge on building a Spanish language chatbot that serves communities throughout Latin America, taking into account

cultural nuances, language differences, and the values that are unique to those communities in that part of the world that are very much not global North style environments, if you like. We’ve got what the Vatican is doing that we’ve just been discussing from that interview with Monsignor Tighe calling for an AI shaped by human dignity. And then just literally yesterday,

this this this a few days ago this past week. Saudi Arabia is asserting its cultural sovereignty, let’s put it that way in digital form, with the launch of an Arabic language chat bot called HUMAIN Chat. And it’s based on a large language model that’s Arabic, the largest in the Arabic speaking world, the developer says. And that’s intended to be

targeted at people of the Islamic faith globally, that’s two billion or so, Arabic speakers throughout the world, 400 million or so of them. At the moment, it’s just in Saudi Arabia. I’ve seen quite a bit of buzz building up about this over the past week, mostly focused on the tech, because it is quite new. The point I’m making though, is that with HUMAIN Chat and the others,

These are signs that the future of AI will not be written in only one language or framed by just one set of values. And that’s something I think we should all be paying very close attention to. And it enables, I think, some, it broadens out, if you will, the part of bringing the human element into the conversation, where you’ve got tools that can be a great help in that goal, in bringing that human part into it. So

These I find very interesting, Silvia, the are we looking at fragmentation of, of AI universalism could be enrichment, I see it. So that’s part of the picture, too. So the human element is essential to all of this. And these are all parts of the jigsaw that’s that’s rapidly being being completed, if you will.

Silvia Cambie (28:21)
Indeed.

@nevillehobson (28:32)
Are we seeing the potential risk of creating parallel AI worlds where cultural and political divides are reinforced, not bridged? That’s a risk in my view. But the humans can prevent that happening, I would say, assuming everyone’s on the same page. And as people were talking about, that is not the case, right? So it’s an interesting time. I think it’s a fascinating time to be a communicator with all this going on. Because as you pointed out, Silvia, earlier, there are

communicators who are fearful of this, who don’t know what to do about this because not getting trained. I would say that this is easy to say this and maybe not easy to actually do for some people. But grasp the nettle, as it were, as the saying goes, get to know these technology tools and how you can, in a sense, leverage them to take your humanist message to others in your organization, particularly the leadership, to bring that human voice into the conversation about deploying AI.

Silvia Cambie (29:11)
Yeah.

@nevillehobson (29:27)
and helping people understand what’s really, really, really important is to bring that human voice into it. It’s not just about efficiency, ⁓ you know, and all that stuff and speed of doing it all. It’s also about what people believe what’s in it for people, what’s the value to individuals in understanding and accepting their role and their values in something like this that’s happening. So it gives us all food for thought, right?

Silvia Cambie (29:35)
profitability.

Yeah.

Yeah, indeed. I really, I was really very happy to see those developments. And you shared with me an article a few days back that the UN, ⁓ something coming out of the UN, UN was saying that, you know, AI is too Western centric, it’s too focused on the global north and the global south is, you know, bound to suffer from that.

@nevillehobson (30:14)
Mmm.

Silvia Cambie (30:18)
Well, you and I have lived in different countries, lived in, you know, have worked in different countries and we know how important culture and diversity of points of view is. And that I think it’s very healthy to have new approaches to AI that are going to challenge the main narrative, i.e. the Silicon Valley narrative. Also, because sometimes, you know, the

messages we get out of Silicon Valley are kind of the big brother, we have the, you know, we are reaching a, a GI, no, we’re not reaching it. Well, we’ve reached it. I don’t know. So it’s kind of, you know, very strange and, and very sort of big brother. I’m going to tell you when I, when I think it’s right, but you know, at the moment I’m not telling you the truth. So I think those,

points of focus of those alternative approaches. You mentioned Latin America, you mentioned the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think it’s very interesting because in that way there will be kind of competition, quote unquote, to Silicon Valley. There will also be more transparency, but also there will be an awareness of the fact.

that as Monsignor Tighe said, technology is never neutral. Technology reflects the mentality of those who create and develop it. So we want diversity of cultures, diversity of points of view. We have to make sure that we collect different voices.

and we channel those into the development and the creation of AI and AI applications. So I think this is a very exciting development, particularly the one from Saudi Arabia. I worked a while ago with Saudi.

developers and communicators on social media and social media campaigns. And they’re very, very creative and they were the forefront of social media. So I am expecting something really interesting and sophisticated from Saudi Arabia. so, yeah, so this is a very good development all in all. And also it’s a good development for communicators, right? Because communicators, a lot of our

colleagues are involved in cross-cultural communication. They work for multinationals, they have to spot those voices and bring them to the forefront. So this will be inspirational for them, right? They will be able to tell their bosses, their board, look, it’s not just this AI application that comes out of Silicon Valley that you can use. There is an AI application in Peru.

@nevillehobson (32:44)
Yes, absolutely.

Silvia Cambie (33:08)
that has a lot of users and is very efficient and effective. And why not using that for our operations in Latin America? So that gives us tools and ammunition to challenge the narrative.

@nevillehobson (33:26)
Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s very true. This has been a great conversation, Silvia. And I think the wrap up, as it were, the extension from the interview, just sharing these additional thoughts, hopefully our listeners will find that complimentary to having listened to the interview. And listeners, have, haven’t you, right? Haven’t you? You have listened to it. If not, ⁓ yeah, yeah, if you haven’t, there’ll be a link to the episode show notes in the show notes for this episode.

Silvia Cambie (33:44)
Yeah, I have, I have, absolutely.

@nevillehobson (33:54)
And indeed, much of what we discussed in this episode, there’ll be links to some of those topics in the show notes as well. So let me conclude by saying Silvia, it’s been a pleasure having you as guest co-host on this episode. So thank you very much for joining in.

Silvia Cambie (34:08)
Thank you for having me, Neville.

@nevillehobson (34:12)
So this episode is, like I said, the link to the interview with Monsignor Paul Tighe will be in the show notes. If you have any comments you’d like to share about what Silvia and I have talked about, then please do. You could do that through the usual channels that we mentioned. But particularly, you could send us a voicemail. There’s a way to do that on the FIR website.

You can send us email fircomments at gmail.com. Increasingly, we’re noticing we’re getting comments quite significantly on LinkedIn. People aren’t actually sending us directly comments anymore. That seems to have fallen out of favor. But conversations build on LinkedIn. FIR doesn’t have its own page on LinkedIn. So you’ll find those comments typically on posts from Shel or I under our own names. But increasingly, others are posting about what they heard in FIR.

So you’ll find lots there. On other social channels, we have a community page on Facebook. And we’re also we have a handle for FIR on Bluesky. And then there’s our individual ones too.

So thanks, everyone, for listening. And if Shel were here, he’d wrap this up by saying, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #480: Reflections on AI, Ethics, and the Role of Communicators appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Posts and videos featuring Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) hacks and formulas are flooding the web. We reported recently on one such hack focusing on press releases. But when you consider the kind of content on which the AI models rely for their answers, it may be more efficient to revert to good, old-fashioned PR and marketing.

Links from this episode:

- 2025 Report Reveals Average B2B Content Volume Triples: Budgets Barely Budge
- ChatGPT is sending less traffic to websites – down 52% in a month
- How a content brand became a trusted resource for LLMs
- Networks, Not AI or Search, Are the #1 Trusted Source Amid Information Overload
- Many are sharing charts about Reddit and Wikipedia dominating AI search mentions, desperately trying to crack the code
- AI-Powered Search: Adapting Your SEO Strategy
- How AI is reshaping SEO: Challenges, opportunities, and brand strategies for 2025
- 2025 AI SERP Changes: New Strategies To Gain Local Search Visibility
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
- AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 479. I’m Neville Hobson.

And I’m Shel Holtz on Thursday Neville, you and I are going to interview Stephanie Grover, who is the marketing and PR director at Horowitz Agency. This is a marketing agency that works with law firms, production companies, and other professional service providers in the US and Canada.

And we’re going to talk, be talking about GEO generative. Optimization, generative engine optimization. I’m not altogether sure, but it’s a hot topic and I thought I would take today’s episode to set the stage for that because we’ve all seen the headlines recently. Chat, GPT, traffic referrals to websites plummeted more than 50% in a single month.

This summer, and that’s not a blip. It’s a structural change in how these large language models are surfacing content. [00:01:00] OpenAI tweaked its ranking and suddenly chat GPT Beca became began citing fewer sources, leaning more heavily on places like Wikipedia and Reddit. Useful for users. Yeah. But if you’re a brand counting on visibility, it’s a gut punch.

And meanwhile, the volume of content keeps exploding. A new B2B study found content production has tripled year over year, which could be partly attributable marketers flooding the zone with content in the hopes. LLMs will hoover it up and they’ll show up in AI search results. Interestingly, that tripling of content volume has not been accompanied by commensurate budget increases.

Mm-hmm. But we’re producing more content than ever but it’s not necessarily better content or content that LLMs are actually going to use. So no surprise that there’s a scramble for the supposed hack that will unlock, sorry. Unlock. Okay. Unlock [00:02:00] rhymes with hack. What can I say? So no surprise that there’s a scramble for the supposed hack that will unlock generative engine optimization.

GEO. Some companies are starting to figure out that it’s not about gaming the algorithm, though. It’s about trust. Sylvia la this chief marketing officer at Kenji shared a fascinating case study on LinkedIn. Her team created the sequence, it’s a standalone content brand with its own domain separate from the corporate site.

The idea was simple. Create a community driven media hub. Human high quality, free of fluff. The unexpected bonus that came from this is that LLM started treating the sequence as an external authority. When asked about can g chat, GPT doesn’t just reference the company, it references the sequence. In other words, by building a trusted resource that stands on its own apart from the central [00:03:00] brand site, they built credibility, not just with their human audience.

But with the algorithms too that aligns perfectly with something else I saw from Liza Adams, another CMO. Who pointed out that the reason Wikipedia and Reddit dominate AI citations isn’t mysterious, it’s because they directly answer real questions using the same plain language. Real people use Adams contrasts two types of marketing teams, the ones who do the hard work of auditing their content, listening to customer language, and creating genuinely helpful answers.

The ones chasing quick fixes and shortcuts. Her takeaway is that there is no algorithm hack AI amplifies what’s already there. If your content is genuinely useful, trustworthy, and present in the watering holes your customers rely on, the algorithms will pick it up. If it’s not, there’s no trick. That’ll save you.

Now, add one more layer to this. What people themselves actually trust according [00:04:00] to new LinkedIn research networks, our peers, our colleagues, people we know still rank as the number one trusted source of information far ahead of. AI searches or even traditional search engines. In fact, 43% of professionals say their network is their first stop when they need advice at work and new.

Nearly two thirds say colleagues help them make decisions more confidently Now. Think about that for a second while marketers obsess over how to get cited by chat, EPT, or Gemini, the real influence continues to live in trusted human connections. That’s also changing how brands approach content. LinkedIn reports that 80% of B2B marketers are increasing investment in community driven content.

Bringing in creators, employees, and subject matter experts, they understand that credibility doesn’t come from corporate channels alone. It comes from trusted voices. People want to hear from. So where’s that leave us in? A [00:05:00] messy transition is where that leaves us. Generative AI referrals are volatile.

Content volume is ballooning. Everyone’s chasing GEO or a EO or A-I-S-E-O or whatever acronym you want to use, but the truth is the winning strategies are old school in the best sense. Build trust, answer real questions, and put your content where your community is already paying attention. Kenji’s story shows that if you can create a true content brand, it can earn authority with humans and with machines.

Liza Adams reminds us that shortcuts don’t work answering real questions and real language does. And LinkedIn’s research makes it clear that even in the age of AI are human networks still shape the bulk of decisions. So stop chasing algorithms, earn trust. That’s the real path to visibility in a generative search world.

Good. Good assessment there. Shell, I [00:06:00] think we’ve talked about this a lot on recent episodes of this podcast. One that comes to mind recently, which is in this kind of area, was the episode in which we talked about the, new form of press release that some people are discussing that is aimed at algorithms, not humans.

And this to me is in the same kind of territory in that context. It’s a hack. So you, yeah, you call it that if you like, but I see it more as this is the direction of travel and the critics who say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not gonna take off it. Trust me. It really is. We’re seeing signs everywhere that this is, a really good sorry, not Google. It was Pew Research at the end of July. Had a quick survey results. Again, we’ve talked about this stuff on this podcast. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. That’s been a kind of recurring topic, what a communicator’s gonna do about that.

It’s not about, well, it’s not what? It’s [00:07:00] not about. What it is about is making your content discoverable more than it currently is in light of this trend that is happening. That means you’ve gotta rethink your approach to such and that kind of acronym soup that you reeled off just now. She maybe think of, oh, McDonald had a farm, right?

E-I-E-I-O, right? You remember that? Search engine optimization and generative engine optimization seems to be the latter seems to be the common descriptor of all that I have seen particularly when I was looking into this area. But the reality is that. Change is underway. So, SEO if I contrast it this way, SEO’s the purpose of SEO, if you like, is to improve a website so that it ranks higher in search engine results.

That’s essentially what SEO’s all about. GEO on the other hand, is this new idea, and as you mentioned it shaped by the rise of generative AI tools like Chat, GPT, et cetera, that instead of optimizing for search engines and websites, it’s. [00:08:00] GEO is about making content more discoverable and usable by AI systems that generate answers now.

That to me, therein lies exactly the threat, if you will, if you wanna see it as a threat. I see it as evolution, and I see it as opportunity for those looking for. Angles looking for leverage, looking for an opening that you know, if your content is gonna be more discoverable and usable by AI systems that generate answers, you are on a winning streak in that case, because this is the definite trend.

So it means you’ve gotta structure information ways AI models can easily interpret and cite. Almost that same phrase was used in that topic I mentioned that we discussed on a previous episode about the kind of evolutionary press release that’s emerging for the AI era to coin to nearly coin an already coined phrase.

This is, in my view, this is the trend that’s going to knock the existing model sideways. And if you are not. [00:09:00] Looking into how you need to be part of this. You’ve got hard work ahead if you are able to catch up with people who are doing that. Key differences this is quite simple. SEO attracts people by clicking on links.

That’s the point of it. GEO AI engines to ensure your content is included in the answers it generates. Think about that. And that’s outside your control in the sense of the generation, but it’s totally within your control to make your content discoverable. So that is included in those generated answers.

So the format SEO uses see a rank list of websites. GEO people see a synthesized. Without clicking through to the original site that’s, you’re not gonna change that. It’s interesting, there are many similarities and this is this is a kind of paradox. Both aim to increase visibility of your content.

Both rely on credibility. Both evolve constantly as the technology changes and both can affect reputation. If you’re doing badly, like keyword stuffing for SEO [00:10:00] or gaming AI for GEO, you risk undermining trust, and that’s the underlying point of it all. So. I think I’m looking forward to this discussion with Stephanie on, on Thursday, by the way, because I’ve seen when I did a little quick lookup knowing we’re gonna talk Stephanie on, on what she was gonna talk to us about.

I see a lot of criticism of geo. Some people call it snake oil. This is not genuine, it’s not authentic. ’cause there’s no, this is definitely not what you should be doing. I’m thinking deja vu in the sense of what I’ve seen in the past when something new appears in the PR realm, if you like. I think it is something definitely to pay attention to.

I think what you mentioned and the links that will include in the show notes indicates that SEO is not gonna suddenly drop dead. Not at all. But the future is not. Links on websites at all? Not really. I don’t believe. I can see, we’ve talked about this again on the previous episodes about a IO reviews from Google that I see conflicting stories, and I think you might have referenced something in [00:11:00] the beginning shell that trafficked on in that era is diminishing recently according to sub reports.

But the truth of the matter is that, that ask almost anyone, there are surveys saying this, people prefer that. Users, let’s call them that, right? Customers or whoever you call looking for something, there’s a result. You see what you need in that little box on the right hand side of your screen. And that’s as far as you go.

You don’t click on anything necessarily. And that’s people’s preferences. Why are you gonna go to a website when hist history shows you that it’s not? Much you can trust. So you’re looking, for instance, and I’ve used this example before. You’re looking for electric cars ’cause that’s a hot topic.

And here in the UK the government just announced a rebate. To stimulate people buying electric cars. So you go online to look at what are the deals in electric cars who’s got this particular model. And as you do a traditional search the chances are high that amongst the results you’re gonna get in that list are gonna be [00:12:00] car dealers and sponsors.

There’s all, that word appears everywhere. I wouldn’t go there at all, not knowing that there’s now this. Far more trustworthy alternative that’s likely to give me what I want without the feeling that you’re being manipulated by an algorithm because they’ve paid money to have their listing appear.

This is where we’re at in the territory it seems to me show. So I, again, Stephanie, looking forward to hearing how can she put this forward as a good explainer for communicators? And this is the message we mentioned before, is that, you’ve got about, you’ve gotta really make sure your content is clear, credible, and discoverable.

That’s not a new thing. You’ve always had to do that, right? But now it’s becoming more likely that if it’s not, you’ll be ignored, and that’s not good if you’re a brand. No. And you said SEO’s not dead. And it’s not gonna die anytime soon. Maybe it’s, well, it’s received a diagnosis and it’s physicians are trying to figure out if there’s anything they can do [00:13:00] to save it, but it’s has time yet to enjoy what’s left of its life.

They I’ve heard people talking about the notion that one day the web is going to be designed for bots that is going to be bots, that are going to be visiting websites and gathering information and fueling the research and the searching. That humans do? I don’t think that’s accurate.

I think there’s always going to be reasons people want to visit websites. I mean, is the Onion website really just there for bots to hoover up? Its content. No. People wanna go have a laugh. People wanna go watch videos on YouTube. There are reasons that people are going to want to go visit some kinds of websites.

But, look at that. That item that we reported on about a new type of press release to accommodate the algorithms. And the more I think about that, the more I believe that if you need to revise the approach you take to press [00:14:00] releases to accommodate large language models, then the old approach you were taking to press releases probably sucked because what is it that appeals.

To the large language models well, first of all, they’re not sharing their algorithms with us. When Google makes a change to Google, they write papers about it. They give the new update a name and all the SEO companies gobble up this information and make s. Changes to their work in order to accommodate the changes that Google’s made.

What? OpenAI and Google Gemini, Google DeepMind, and the other players in this space what their algorithms are is a black box. We don’t know. So if you’re trying to game the algorithm let’s face it, you’re guessing. What we do know is roughly how. These models work not in any great detail.

Even the people [00:15:00] who built them don’t understand how they work in any great detail. But we know that the knowledge that is collected in the training and in the continuous training that goes on through adding the new stuff that is posted, that the bots are all out gathering is all stored in cells and neuro net.

In neurons in a neural network. And it’s the association between the neurons, just like in our own brains that produce the next token, the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph in the results that you see. And we do know that a lot of these results are coming from Reddit and from Wikipedia, and we do know, or at least it is a.

Very strong strongly supported, bit of surmising that it’s because they talk in plain language and answer questions that people wanna know about. So if you if you consider that website that [00:16:00] the brand Cange came up with that was a content driven site separate from the brand that was community driven.

It worked. It satisfied both the need to build trust and interest among your community. And the LLMs liked it and started citing it when people asked about Cange. So it seems to me that rather than try to do something different, the only thing different you should be doing is if you’ve been doing it wrong up till now.

You should go get yourself a good primer on marketing and a good primer on public relations from maybe the last 10 years and read that and do that because that’s what the l lms, like, I don’t think there is a magic bullet. I think that what we are good at when we do it the best that it [00:17:00] can be done.

That’s what works. And that’s the direction we need to head. I agree. I totally agree. I think part of the problem though, for communicator certainly is the how bit, how you can do that. So, so one question I have, given the shift that’s underway, it is SEO is about ranking in a list of links.

GEO is about surfacing in AI generated summaries where the links may be secondary. So for communicators, how do communicators adapt when fewer people click to the source? No matter what the reasons might be, that’s the question, how do you do this? So it’s a how we need to help them, help ’em understand. And I don’t have the answer to the how myself either.

Well, I think the answer goes back to basic strategic planning, right? It’s Sure. What is your goal in the first place, and what strategy are you going to employ in order to achieve that? Goal. And if the old strategy of SEO doesn’t work, if the old even older strategy of having a website doesn’t do the trick anymore, what else do you do?

[00:18:00] You know, back to the drawing board. But that’s what we do. It is true and we’ve mentioned this before, so for instance uh, you know, AI models are more likely to size sources with consistent metadata, explicit effects breach. That’s common sense, I think. But publishers and brands worry. If AI provides the answer directly, what incentive is there to visit the source?

So this is a circular point. Go back to the other one. How to communicate adapt when fewer people click through to the source. Uh, like all things, you need a plan, but what is certainly clear, and I think that point I just mentioned, that would undermine ad advertising based revenue models, right? It doesn’t mean that next week is all gonna collapse.

Not at all. But that’s. You can see the writing on the wall. I’m sure I can certainly see writing on the wall about this, and I’m kind of a bit nonplussed by deniers. May maybe the, the VX people too. Deny all that. I, I don’t know, but I mean, it just seems to me crazy. You can see the changes right in front of your eyes, whether you like it or not.

So I think you mentioned [00:19:00] your gaming, uh, as I mentioned in my early combat gaming. You know, gave me the content for LLMs you know, AI friendly, but misleading content. I think that is still a, a big issue to be concerned about given how that is already going on. And, uh, we already, you know, we already hear the kind of worry signs about and these are the things that are in the realm of, you know, what happens if the robots do take over all gonna die, et cetera.

But it means that if. AI generated content is prompted by people with bad in. Now, these, these famous bad actors we hear about all the time, and the output is based on that bad input. And then others reference that over time. Uh, what is that giving us? Bullshit. Basically misinformation, disinformation how can we trust anything?

And we’re already seeing this demonstrated, and we talked about this in a recent episode in Wikipedia, where they are battling the [00:20:00] reality. Of the influx of misinformation and disinformation in content written by others that is faster to appear than the moderation system can handle it. So they’re now coming out with a quick delete methodology that is the short-term solution.

I dunno what the long-term one is for Wikipedia, but that directly impacts trust. And I think if, if that happens, then we’re in real trouble. But we’re seeing this, I, I see this daily here. The, the BBC is very much at the front. Page on this and a number of other media companies in the uk the verification team there.

There’s, I gather, there’s now like a hundred people on this team. I’m not sure where I, where I saw that, but, uh, it may not be true in that case, but it’s a lot of people who literally analyze everything. Uh, there was a, a story I saw this morning analyzing all this stuff over the weekend. I’m sure you saw it about.

Has Trump died? Is he still around? Is he still alive? Uh, and that’s been looked into to get to the source of where that started. I’ve not seen the [00:21:00] conclusion of that research, but Wikipedia’s definitely in the frame. Reddit I saw mentioned earlier, and, uh, every time I go to Reddit and I use Reddit a lot ’cause of things I’m interested in.

Uh, and it’s full of, opinion. And then the counter opinion, and then you get rabbit holes everywhere about, well, I heard it was this and that’s not true. Worse is the ones who say, with authorities of sounding words, that X it is so and so without any verification. People believe that stuff there is part of the problem too.

Humans are too trustworthy in that regard. We’re, it’s a mess. And how do we, again, how do communicators adapt when fewer people click through? The source is a kind of umbrella question to it all. Uh, it’s a difficult one. Well, I think the fact that fewer people are clicking to a source means that the, the purpose of the source needs to change.

You need it there because that’s what the LLMs grab in, in, in their training sets. So you. [00:22:00] Want to continually be working on that content. And there may come a day where you won’t care if a single human sees it, as long as it’s delivering the AI results that you need it to. Perhaps website design is going to diminish only the sites that people actually do want to visit for whatever reason will get high quality design.

The rest will be, you know, mark more markup language. So, uh. That it’s even easier for the LLMs to grab. I don’t know where that’s headed. We’ll see. No, uh, because I’m sure that that will follow whatever ends up working. But the idea that you won’t need a website anymore is absurd if you are generating revenue off of that website through advertising.

You’re probably gonna need to switch to something more community driven. Right? Because people will continue to go to community sites. Yeah. Uh, because a AI can’t replicate that. They can’t deliver that for you. No, [00:23:00] I, I, I agree. And I don’t see websites dying away, even if, uh, some people say they will. ’cause like you said, people will always want to do certain things that might well diminish nevertheless.

But in all of that, you mentioned the point earlier, and you’ve mentioned this the other day, I think in, in, uh, in some of your recent experiences that, already there are tools that, uh, let’s call them AI agents, even though I don’t think they really are yet that will go out to YouTube and find these, take these 17 videos on this topic that you are really interested in.

Summarize it all from the, uh, from the transcript and present to you a summary of what it’s all about with some actionable items for you to do, depending on what you’ve asked it to do for you. So that to me, I, I can see more likely I speak of myself here, uh, and I, I’ve kind of. Scroll through YouTube looking for stuff myself, that would be far more appealing than me going to the website.

Well, I’ve actually created a, a, a tool that does, so I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do that. And I, I, I would imagine a lot of people would prefer to do that than go themselves to [00:24:00] the onions. An example you made, have someone give you the list of, this is what this is all about. I’ve done that.

I’ve, uh, used, uh, Google’s opal tool, uh, to create a workflow where I enter the URL of a YouTube video. I say, this is a video that gives instructions on how to do x go to the transcript and just give me the steps to, to do it. Yeah. I, I. I chose that video because I watched it and it has the steps I want.

What I don’t wanna have to do is continually rewind, uh, as I’m going through these steps. So once I’ve seen it, I just wanna see the steps articulated. And it works real well. I used it a few times. Then I got the comment browser from Perplexity, which I can just do that as a prompt. Now, uh, I, I don’t need a workflow, so I, I just got that over the weekend as my, you know, congratulations.

You’re now in the trial, blah, blah. I’ve installed it, but I’ve not, uh, tried it yet, but it’s on my to-do list to do. I see like you watch a couple of YouTube videos [00:25:00] to see everything you can do with it, because there’re, I’m gonna try, you’re not obvious. Try. I’ll try it with that. I, I suspect so, so this adds to the, to what’s happening in the development phase of what’s going on in that wide world out there.

Uh uh, and the pressure is definitely on to find. Better ways, more effective ways to, uh, to get the answers to what you are looking for that are far more, uh, uh, appealing to users. This is really what it comes about. Yeah. What do you prefer to use? And you will ignore lists of links in the future ’cause they’re not.

Sufficient information for you without more work. So I find a development in, in tools like chat, GBT with the recent models where they now do what Perplexity started doing quite a while ago, which is giving you the list of sources. So I did something the other on a research project that I’m working on right at the moment that I, I, I told chat GBT to give the full list of sources, [00:26:00] which it did.

Citation linked to the appropriate passages. Made life a lot easier. A lot easier. Not as good as perplexity, but it’s getting there and didn’t do it until not long ago. Plexity, I, I use occasionally, but chat gpt is my go-to for all these kinds of things. Uh, particularly model five. Initially skeptical that as I was, but the thinking mode is really quite good.

A bit slow though, I have found. So, um, this is part of the, the deal. Right. Again, like I said, I’m looking forward to this conversation in the FIA interview we’ve got scheduled for Thursday. Might, uh, might enlighten us a bit more. Looking forward to it myself and until then, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #479: Hacking AI Optimization vs. Doing the Hard Work appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For a while, businesses were flexing their social responsibility muscles, weighing in on public policy matters that affected them or their stakeholders. These days, not so much, with leaders fearing reprisal for speaking out. But silence can have its own consequences. Also in this episode: The gap between AI expectations and reality; rent-a-mob services damage the fragile reputation of the public relations profession; too many people think AI is conscious, so we have to devise ways to reinforce among users that it’s not; Denmark is dealing with deepfakes by assigning citizens the copyright to their own likenesses; crediting photographers for the work you copied from the web won’t protect you from lawsuits for unauthorized use. In Dan York’s Tech Report, Dan shares updates on Mastodon’ (at last) introducing quote posts, and Bluesky’s response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Mississippi’s law making full access to Bluesky (and other services) contingent upon an age check.

Links from this episode:

So far, AI Isn’t Taking Jobs or Generating Profit
Companies Are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off.
Seizing the agentic AI advantage
Not today, AI: Despite corporate hype, few signs that the tech is taking jobs — yet
1 in 6 workers pretend to use AI amid workplace pressures, survey finds
We must build AI for people; not to be a person
FIR Interview: Monsignor Paul Tighe on AI and Humanity
The Wisdom of the Heart (Neville’s post on Monsignor Tighe’s remarks)
As Rent-A-Mob “Protests” Rage, PRSA’s “Ethics” Board is AWOL
Boom times for rent-a-mobs
Fox News’ Lawrence Jones Presses Rent-A-Mob Company CEO Over Protests
Denmark Aims to Use Copyright Law to Protect People From Deepfakes
Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features
When Does Corporate Silence Backfire?
Home Depot keeps quiet on immigration raids outside its doors
Facebook post on crediting photographers when you don’t have permission to use their content
Unmasking the Copyright Traip: The Dark Side of AI Bots

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Quote Posts Coming to Mastodon
Our Response to Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law – Bluesky

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)
Hello everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Release. This is episode 478, the monthly long-form edition for August 2025. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:14)
And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six reports for you today. Hope you find them illuminating. And if you find any of them worthy of comment, I would hope that you would comment on them. There are a number of ways to comment on the content that you hear on for immediate release. You can send us an email to fircomments at gmail.com and attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file.

On the FIR website, there’s a tab on the right-hand corner. It says record voicemail and you can record up to 90 seconds. You can record more than one. We know how to edit those things together. So send us your audio comments, but you can also leave comments on the show notes at FIRpodcastnetwork.com.

on the posts we make at LinkedIn and Facebook and threads and blue sky and mastodon. You can comment on the FIR community on Facebook. There are lots of ways that you can share your opinion with us so that we can bake those into the show. And we also appreciate your ratings and reviews. So with those comment mechanisms out of the way Neville, let’s.

hear about the episodes that we have recorded since our last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:33)
We did five since then. Actually, it was four plus the last monthly. So we’ll start with that one. It’s episode four, 74 for July, the long-form episode. That one ran one hour, 33 minutes. So a bit shorter than we usually do for the month, which is about hefty, hefty but good, as Donna would say. Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz (01:52)
We were terse.

@nevillehobson (01:55)
So we covered a number of topics related to AI, was how we titled the episode Show Notes. AI is redefining public relations, driving a change in the way we craft press releases, PR is at the heart of AI optimization and more. Good discussion. had lots of topics. The links are brilliant. Lots of content we linked to in that episode.

Then we followed that. That was on the 28th of July that was published. On the 29th, the day after that, we published an FIR interview with Monsignor Paul Tai of the Vatican. That was on AI ethics and the role of humanity. It’s actually an intriguing topic. We dove into a document called Antiqua et Nova that was really the anchor point for the conversation that talked about

the comparison of human intelligence with artificial intelligence and that drove that discussion. He was a great guest on the show, Shell, and it’s intriguing. There’s more coming about that in the coming weeks, the way, because I’ve been posting follow-ups to that in little video clips from that interview and there’s more of that kind of thing coming soon. So we have a comment, right?

Shel Holtz (03:06)
Every do.

We do, from Mary Hills out of Chicago. She’s an IABC fellow who says, insightful and stimulating discussion. Thank you for the extraordinary host team for making this happen and Monsignor Tai for sharing his insights. To the question, my view as a ComPro is to build bridges to discover options to move forward and choose the best way. Think discursive techniques, sociopositive climates, and our ability to synthesize data and information.

It taps into those intangible assets we bring to our work and are inherently in us.

@nevillehobson (03:45)
Good comment. Reminds me, the way, related to what you talking about, how to comment before we started this, is most of the comments we seem to get, certainly in the last six months, if not more, have been on LinkedIn. It’s a great place for discussion, but that’s a business network. You need to be a member to see them. So if you’re not a member and you want to comment, join LinkedIn, otherwise you won’t be able to.

Shel Holtz (03:56)
Mm-hmm.

It’s free.

@nevillehobson (04:07)
Yeah, it is. So then next, well, you’ve got a paid option, but generally it’s free unless you take out the paid option. I’ve got the paid option too, just as a little aside there. So we followed that on the 4th of August, episode 475, title of the post, algorithms got you down, get retro with RSS. The rise of social media news feeds had rendered RSS useful for many people, said, and declining usage led Google to sunset it.

Shel Holtz (04:09)
Not for me, I pay for mine, but.

Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

@nevillehobson (04:34)
But RSS feeds never went away. And we explored that a bit. Most people don’t know that all the newsletters they subscribe to, the sub-stacks or whatever publication it is, RSS is driving a lot of how they get the content that they include in those publications. So it’s part of the plumbing. And it always has been. even now, people don’t think about this. But we had an interesting perspective on that, on how to use RSS afresh in a slightly different way.

476 on the 12th of August rewiring the consulting business for AI. We reviewed the actions of several firms and agencies and discussed what might come next for consultants. There’s been a change, almost literally changing business models with the rise of AI, agentic AI in particular. So we explored that, a good conversation. And finally, 477 on the 18th of August, de-sloppifying Wikipedia. That’s a heck of a.

descriptor you put in the headline that’s de-sloppifying. Wikipedia introduced a speedy deletion policy for AI slop articles. It’s actually a bigger deal than most of us would realize if we ever thought about. Wikipedia, the user generated content encyclopedia is running or rather is addressing or has been trying to address for a while.

Shel Holtz (05:30)
I’m glad you liked it.

@nevillehobson (05:51)
the rise of AI generated content that makes it very difficult in a collaborative editing environment with volunteer editors that is all about consensual agreement to change or addition. That takes a while. This is at light speed by comparison to that procedure. They’re coming up with a speedy deletion policy and that’s getting some discussion too. But Wikipedia,

is an important place online. It has been for long time, a kind of a natural first place that shows up when you’re looking for information about a company, an individual, whatever it might be, a subject of some type. so trust is key to what you see there. So we’ve had quite a bit of a conversation on that. that wraps up what we’ve been doing since the last episode.

Shel Holtz (06:42)
We did have a comment on 477, this from Mark Hillary, who says, got to say I’m not familiar with Trust Cafe.

@nevillehobson (06:44)
Oh, we did. You’re right. We did. Yes. Yep.

Okay, good comment.

No, me neither. That was Mark Henry. I’m surprised I didn’t leave a comment in reply to him because I know him, but obviously I didn’t see the comments at the time.

Shel Holtz (07:02)
Now have to go look that up.

Well, it’s waiting. It won’t go anywhere. We also, in the last week, recorded the most recent episode of Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with four fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. This was episode 119 of this monthly panel discussion, and it was on sustainability, communicating sustainability.

@nevillehobson (07:15)
Yeah. Okay.

Shel Holtz (07:37)
The panel included Zora Artis from Australia, Bonnie Kaver from Texas, Brent Carey from Toronto, and Martha Muzyczka from the Far East of Canada. The next circle of fellows is scheduled for September 18th at 10 a.m. I tell you all of this because you can watch it in real time and participate in the conversation. This is going to be about hybrid communications and hybrid workplaces.

This will be moderated by Brad Whitworth and three of the four panelists have been identified so far, Priya Bates, Andrea Greenhouse and Ritzy Ronquillo. So, so far, Brad, the moderator is the only American on that panel. Priya from Toronto, ⁓ Andrea from Toronto and Ritzy from the Philippines. So it’ll be a good international discussion on hybrid and.

That will lead us into our reports for this month, right after this.

But one of the biggest workplace stories right now is the widening gap between the promise of AI and the reality employees are living day to day. The headlines have been flooding the zone lately. MIT researchers report that 95 % of generative AI pilots in companies are failing. The New York Times recently noted that businesses have poured billions into AI without seeing the payoff.

And Gartner’s latest hype cycle has generative AI sliding into the famous trough of disillusionment. By the way, that MIT report is worth a healthy dose of skepticism. They interviewed something like 50 people to draw those conclusions. But the trend is pretty clear. The number of pilots that are succeeding in companies is definitely on the low end. But while companies wrestle with ROI, employees are wrestling with something more personal.

uncertainty.

Few research found that more than half of US workers worry about AI’s impact on their jobs, while most actually haven’t actually used AI at work much yet. NBC reported that despite the hype, there’s little evidence of widespread job loss so far. Still, the fears are real, and they’re being compounded by mixed signals inside organizations. Here’s one example I read about. A sales team was told to make AI part of every proposal.

but they weren’t offered any guidance, any training, any process change. As a result, some team members just kind of quietly opened ChatGPT and used it to generate some bullet points. Others copied old proposals and slapped on an AI enhanced label. A few admitted they just pretended to use AI to avoid looking like they were behind the curve, which by the way, lines up with a finding from HR Dive that one in six workers say they pretend to use AI because of workplace pressure.

That’s not innovation, that’s performance theater. This is where communicators need to step in. Employees don’t need more hype, they need transparency. They need to hear that most pilots fail before they succeed. They need clarity about how AI will really fit into their workflows and they need reassurance that the company has a plan for reskilling, not just replacing its people.

So for managers, and I am a firm believer that we need to work with managers to help them communicate with their employees, here’s a simple talk track you can put in their hands right away. So share this with managers on your teams. First, AI is a tool we’re still figuring out your input on what works and what doesn’t is critical. Second, we’re not expecting you to be experts overnight. Training and support will come before requirements. And third,

Your job isn’t disappearing tomorrow. Let’s focus on how these tools can take that busy work off your plate. And for communicators thinking about the next 30 days, consider a quick communication action plan. On week one, launch a listening tour. Ask employees how they feel about AI and where they see potential. Week two, share those findings in plain language, including what employees are worried about. Week three,

Host AI office hours with your IT team or HR partners to answer real questions. And on week four, publish a simple playbook. What’s okay, what’s not? How employees will be supported as the tech evolves. That should help you cut through the hype while keeping employees engaged. The technology may still be finding its footing, but if communicators help employees feel informed, supported, and included,

The organization will be in a far better position to capture real value when AI does start delivering on its promises at the enterprise level.

@nevillehobson (12:22)
Interesting statistics there, Shell. Listening to that advice you gave, just made me think straight away that, and indeed looking at the HR dive reports in particular with what they’re talking about, 75 % of workers said they’re expected to use AI at work, they say, whether officially or unofficially. That’s a bit alarming, I think.

Some people said they feel pressured and uncomfortable, and some said they pretend to use it rather than push back. So that’s part of the landscape. And that seems to me to be what needs addressing first and foremost, because if that is the situation in some organizations, then communications got a real uphill struggle to persuade employees to do all the things that you mentioned.

So, you know, the comms team could do all those things. Week one, we do this. Week two. But unless you get the engagement from employees that makes it worthwhile doing that is not worthwhile doing, if the culture in the organization says that you’re not really seeing the right support from leaders. So that is probably the fundamental that needs addressing. It’s a sad fact, isn’t it? If that is the climate still that leads to this kind of reporting.

I don’t hear similar in the UK, but then again, there’s not so much, I don’t think so much kind of research going on as there is in the US, plus the numbers are smaller here. This is very US centric. This one in HR Dive is a thousand people they talk to. Nearly 60 % said they use AI daily. I’m surprised that might be higher than that. So that’s all part of the picture there. That makes it a real struggle to implement what you’ve suggested.

What do you think? it a real hurdle?

Shel Holtz (14:08)
⁓ I think it is a real hurdle. And I think one of the things that we need to acknowledge is that leaders in organizations who are driving the adoption of AI, let’s be clear. It’s not IT behind the AI push. It’s leaders who see the potential for doing more with less and earning more and everything else that AI has promised are jamming it down the organization’s throats.

I have mentioned before on the show that I recently read a book called How Big Things Get Done. It’s mainly about building. It’s written by a Danish engineer professor who has the world’s largest database of mega projects. But the conclusion that he draws is that projects that succeed are the ones where they put all of the time into the planning upfront. If you jump right into the building, you get

disasters like the California high speed rail and the Sydney Opera House, which I didn’t realize was a disaster until I read about it. But my God, what a disaster. And the ones that succeed are the ones that spend the time on the planning. The Empire State Building went up in I don’t remember if it was two years. I mean, it was it was fast, but they put a lot of time into what we call pre-construction. And I think that’s not happening with AI.

in the enterprise right now. think there are leaders who are saying we have to be AI first. We have to lean into AI. We need to start generating revenue and cutting headcount. So let’s just make it happen. And there’s no planning. There’s no setting the environment for employees. There’s very little training. Although I do see that there is a shift in.

the dollars that are being invested in AI moving to the employee side and away from the tool side, which is heartening. employees are concerned about this because they’re not getting the training. They’re not getting the guidance. They’re not seeing the plan. All they’re hearing is, we got to start using this. And I think that would leave people concerned. think that explains a lot of the angst that we’re hearing about.

among employees.

@nevillehobson (16:19)
Yeah, that makes sense. mean, again, just glancing through these statistics in the HR Dive Report, interesting, the contrast that I’m reading. It says 84 % of workers said they feel more productive using AI. 71 % said they know how to use it efficiently. They report less burnout, less work stress, better job satisfaction. Nearly a third said they feel less lonely.

Shel Holtz (16:33)
that would be me, by the way.

@nevillehobson (16:43)
Those are the ones who’ve developed a relationship with CHAP GPT, I know. And a quarter said they collaborate more. Four in particular, I was right there, I tell you. But then in contrast, some workers said they’re struggling to keep up. One in four feeling often or always overwhelmed with AI developments. And the third said that learning, using, and checking AI takes as much time as their previous approach to work. So 25 % of those expected to use AI at work said they have received no training.

Shel Holtz (16:47)
Yeah, the 4.0 in particular,

@nevillehobson (17:11)
Another 25 % said they did receive training, and a third were given dedicated time at work to learn AI skills. So it’s not all bad. That’s a fact. But it goes on, they’re some people in Deloitte about AI development. Disconnect has emerged, where some people are pretending to understand the tech and others declined to prioritize it. So you’ve got a real mixed bag of landscapes, if you like, that need, well.

To me, seems that you need to identify this and figure out how you’re to address it. Because the conflict, well, the contrast of diet seems to me, you’ve got high percentage of them saying they’re more productive. Others struggling to keep up. Others don’t get any training at all. You mentioned those examples you gave of construction examples, like the Empire State Building going up real fast.

The reality with AI is that this is, I mean, to coin a corny phrase again, I suppose, is things are developing at light speed, things are happening so fast that it is hard to keep up with it. So the pressure is there, particularly in the kind of more relaxed environments today, more informality, less formality, where you can’t, the control has vanished from top down.

and that anyone can get access to information about literally anything, just go online. And so people are finding out about these things. They’re exposed to, this is the latest AI, look at this one, and they hear from their peers and so forth. And unless you’ve got a credible resource that is appealing to people, they’re going to do their own thing. Particularly, they don’t feel they’re getting any kind of support on how to implement all this stuff. So this is quite a

a challenge for communicators. But I think it’s a bigger challenge organizationally in leadership where you’ve got this challenge that doesn’t seem to being addressed by many companies. And I would stress that this is not widespread. I don’t see anything in here that tells me this is the majority overall in in organization in the US, in spite of some of these percentages that suggest otherwise. But it is a it is definitely a situation that is not good for the organization. And surely

that must be apparent to everyone, I suppose.

Shel Holtz (19:32)
You know, I would hope, but I would also hope that communicators step up and start documenting what’s going on in their organizations and feeding that back up, uh, representing the employee voice to the leadership of the organization. So maybe that they’ll start taking a step back and thinking about how we do this strategically, because it hasn’t been strategic to this point. As employees read about these claims of 95 % pilot failure.

Those who are not really enthusiastic about AI will be able to use that as an excuse for not embracing it. Well, it doesn’t work anyway, and it’s not really making a difference, and companies aren’t achieving any ROI. So why should I spend time on this? It’s probably going to be gone in six months, right? And I was listening to an interview with Demis Asabas, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

And this is on the Lex Friedman podcast, long two and a half hour interview, but great. one of the things that he talked about is, and as Lex Friedman brought it up, he said, I have a friend who studies cuneiform, ancient images carved on stone, right? And he didn’t know a thing about AI. He barely heard about it. And…

@nevillehobson (20:41)
Chip show.

Shel Holtz (20:48)
It was a sabbath who made the point. said, you know, there are a lot of us who are talking about this and enthusiastic and you know, if you spend time on X, for example, everything is AI all the time and we lose sight of the fact that there is a huge part of the population that is blissfully unaware of all of this still. So there’s that to deal with too.

@nevillehobson (21:10)
challenge without doubt.

Okay, so speaking of AI, one of the big AI stories this month comes from Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. He’s written a long essay with a striking title, We Must Build AI for People, Not to Be a Person. In it, he raises a concern about what he calls seemingly conscious AI. These are systems that won’t actually be conscious, but will be so convincing.

Shel Holtz (21:16)
Are we?

@nevillehobson (21:40)
that people will start to treat them as if they are. He argues that this isn’t a distant science fiction scenario. With today’s models, long-term memory, and the ability to generate distinct personalities, it could arrive in just a few years. Already some people project feelings onto their chatbots, seeing them as partners, friends, or even divine beings. We’ve been hearing a lot about that recently. I’ll hold my hand up. I had a great relationship with my good friend and assistant, ChatGPT 4.0.

I was not happy with the move to chat GPT-5, which ditched all of that. And I felt like I was talking to someone I didn’t know at all or who didn’t know me. So I get that. But Suleiman in his essay warns that this trend could escalate into campaigns for AI rights or AI citizenship, which would be a dangerous distraction, he says. Consciousness, he points out, is at the core of human dignity and legal personhood, confusing this by attributing it to machines.

risks creating new forms of polarization and deep social destruction. But what stood out most for me wasn’t the alarm over AI psychosis that some commentators have picked up on. It was Suleiman’s North Star. He says his goal is to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another and strengthens our connections to the real world. He describes Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, Copilot, as a case study.

millions of positive, even life-changing interactions every day, carefully designed to avoid overstepping into false claims of consciousness or emotion. He argues that companies need to build guardrails into their systems so that users are gently reminded of AI’s boundaries, that it doesn’t actually feel, suffer, or have desires. This is all about making AI supportive, useful, and empowering without crossing into the illusion of personhood.

Now this resonates strongly in my mind with our recent FIR interview with Monseigneur Paul Tai from the Vatican. He too emphasized that AI must be in service of humanity, not replacing or competing with it, but reinforcing dignity, ethics and responsibility. And it echoes strongly something I wrote following the publication of the FIR interview about the wisdom of the heart, the core idea that we should keep empathy, values and human connection.

the center of AI adoption. It’s a central concept in Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican’s paper published earlier this year, comparing artificial intelligence and human intelligence. So while the headline debate might be about whether AI can seem conscious, the bigger conversation, and the one I think we really should have, is how we ensure that AI is built in ways that help us be more human, not less. What strikes me is how Suleiman pulled tie in even our own conversations.

all point in the same direction. AI should serve people, not imitate them. But in practical terms, how do we embed that principle in the way businesses and communicators talk about AI? Thoughts?

Shel Holtz (24:43)
It’s an interesting conundrum, largely because we are told by experts like Ethan Molluck, the professor out of the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, who is one of the leading posters on LinkedIn about AI and AI research, that the best way to get great results from AI is to treat it like a human, engage in conversation with it, and

I find that to be true. find that giving it a prompt and getting a response and letting it go with that is not nearly as good as a conversation, ⁓ a back and forth, asking for refinements and additions and posing questions and the like. And the more we have conversations with it and treat it like a human, the easier it’s going to be to slide down that slope into perceiving it.

to be a person. I think that’s, we’re hearing a lot of people who do believe that it’s conscious already. I mean, not among the AI engineering community, but you hear tales of people who are convinced that there is a consciousness there and there is absolutely not. But it mimics humanity pretty well and is gonna get much, much better at it.

As as Malik said, at any point, the the tool that you’re using today is the worst one you’ll ever use because they’re just going to continue to get better. So getting people to not see them as conscious, I think is going to be a challenge. And it’s not one that I think a lot of people are thinking about much. Looking at the.

productivity gains and other dimensions of this. Certainly looking at the harm, I mean, there’s a lot of conversation out there among the do-mers as they’re called and what kind of safety measures are being considered as these models are evolving. But specifically this issue of treating it like a human thinking of it.

as a person with a consciousness, I don’t think there’s a lot of attention being paid to that and what the steps are going to be to mitigate it.

@nevillehobson (26:52)
Yeah, interesting. think I have great respect for Ethan Molyke, I must admit. I read a lot of what he says, but I utterly disagree entirely with this whole point about you must treat it as if it is a person. That’s completely and utterly counter to the whole notion of the wisdom of the heart, which I think is a magnificent way to look at this.

aware and all your thinking the new dignity of the human being is at the center of what we do with AI. So we do not pretend it’s like a human at all. It is a tool that we can build a relationship with, but we don’t consider it to be like a person at all. but it’s not about how it develops. The point is, how do we develop

Shel Holtz (27:33)
sure, difference between considering it

@nevillehobson (27:41)
in how we use this, not how it’s developing, because we are the ones who are enabling it to develop through all the tools and activities we go on. And the missing piece in all of that is what about the people? What about the humanity here? Where everyone who talks about this, and Ethan Molyk seems to one of those too, it’s about the benefits we get from using an AI. It’ll make more money. It gives us better market share.

We enable people to do these things better, et cetera, et cetera. And yet, reflecting on your report just prior to this, there are many people in organizations who feel ignored, who feel overwhelmed, who are unhappy with this. There’s not enough explanation of what the benefits are. And those tend to be couched in. These are the benefits for the organization and the employees who work there and the customers who buy our products and so forth. So I think.

we have to develop a way of thinking that gives a different focus to this than we are being pressured to accept, I suppose you could argue. There are strong voices arguing this. I get that. And like you said, to which I truly find it extraordinary that there are people who say, yeah, they’re sentient. These are like humans. Not at all. They’re algorithms, a bit of software. That’s it. So…

This is not about a Luddite approach to technology at all. It’s not about thinking out, it’s like the Terminator and Skynet and all that kind of stuff. No, not at all. It’s the moral and philosophical lens that is missing from all of this. And so that is what we need to develop into our conversations about this is that element of it that is missing largely everywhere you look.

Shel Holtz (29:27)
It is. I still think that most of the time I’m engaging with a model, I’m having a conversation with it. I if I’m looking for a simple fact, I’ll go to perplexity and get my answer. But if I’m developing a strategy, for example, which is something that I use AI to help me with, I’ll tell you, I have created a custom GPT that is a senior communication consultant. took me about four hours.

to build this out with all of the instruction set. I don’t have the budget to work with a consulting organization and there’s nobody who is higher in the hierarchy than me in communications where I work. So if I wanna bounce my ideas off a senior communications professional, I had to create one. So I did.

And I didn’t give it a name. I know Steve Crescenzo has one, he named Ernie after Ernest Hemingway, but I didn’t name mine, but I’ll go have conversations with it about the strategy that I am considering. And it works really well and it works best when I treat it like a consultant, when I have that conversation. That’s what I coded it to be. I didn’t code it, I gave it the instructions. And I think it’s this behavior on top of the fact that you have character AI and you have…

@nevillehobson (30:33)
Right.

Shel Holtz (30:40)
Facebook and Metta introducing characters that you can engage with that are designed to be people. And you have the therapists now that are coming, AI therapists, and they’re all designed to behave and engage with you like people. And I don’t have a problem with that. This is a tool and this is one of the things that it does well, but how do we keep front of mind among people?

that while you’re doing this, you need to remember that it is not ⁓ a person and it is not conscious. I just want to say that in our intranet, when I sign onto our network in the morning, I have to click OK on a legal disclaimer. Every single time I turn my company laptop on, shouldn’t we have something like perhaps a disclaimer before you start interacting with these that this is a very lifelike, human-like experience that you’re about to have? Keep in mind, it’s not.

@nevillehobson (31:10)
Well, that’s the whole point.

No, absolutely. I think I do the same show. I’ve talked about this a lot over the last couple of years on this show elsewhere. I treat my chat GPT assistant like a person, but I do not. call it I have a name. Jane is what I call the chat GPT one. I don’t see it as a real person at all. Far from it. I’m astonished, frankly, that some people would think this is a person I’m talking to. And come on, for Christ’s sake, it’s an algorithm.

So yet it enables me to have a better interaction with that AI assistant if I can talk to it the way I do, which is like I’m talking to you now almost almost the same. But the bit that’s missing, and I think this is the heart of what Paul Tai was talking about, quoting from Antiqua et Nova, and I think this is the core part of the reflection of all this. must not lose sight of the wisdom of the heart.

which reminds us that each person is a unique being of infinite value and that the future must be shaped with and for people. And that has got to underpin everything that we do. And as I noted in my kind of rambling post I did write, it was actually better than the one I did the first draft, I must admit. It’s not a poetic flourish, it’s a framing. That’s the thing that we’re missing. We mustn’t see

AI is a neutral tool. It’s not really because we shape it and we need to encourage critical reflection on that human dignity. Wisdom can’t be reduced to data. The Vatican says that ethical judgment comes from human experience, not machine reasoning. Totally agree with that. So, I mean, this is to me the start of this conversation, really. And I think the kind of wisdom

or the thinking, certainly not wisdom, seems to me, the thinking that is the counter to that, such as what you outlined, is very powerful, is embedded almost everywhere you look. So I looked at this myself and think, OK, fine, I’m not going to evangelize this to anyone at all. I know what I’m going to do as far as I’m concerned. And that made me feel very comfortable that I’m going to follow the principles of this myself, which I have been doing for a while now, that is, in a sense, reflective in the world of algorithms and automation. What does it mean to remain human?

So I’ve changed how I use the AIs, I must have, and maybe chat GPT-5 happened at the time I started making that change. That is something I’ve started talking to people about. Did you think about this? How do you feel about that? And seeing what others think. And I’ve yet to encounter anyone who would say, this is amazing. What that’s saying, it makes total sense to me, let’s do this. No one’s saying that that I’ve talked to. So.

It’s something that I think interviews, the interview we did, others that Paul Tai is doing, and what I’m seeing increasingly other people starting to talk about, is the framing of it within this context. That’s where I think we need to go. We need to bring this into organizations. So ⁓ an invitation to reflect, let’s say, that, yes, this is great, what’s going on, and you’re doing this, you need to also pause and think about it from this perspective as well. That’s what I think.

Shel Holtz (34:34)
Mm-hmm.

I would not disagree. And a lot of the development that’s happening in AI is focused on benefiting humanity. I’m looking at the scientific and medical research that it’s able to do. mean, just the alpha fold, which won the Nobel Prize for Demisys Abis is to benefit people. Where it’s probably benefiting people less is in business.

@nevillehobson (34:59)
Thank

Shel Holtz (35:06)
Because as you say that it needs to benefit people, think most business leaders think it needs to benefit profitability. And that could be at the expense of people.

@nevillehobson (35:16)
Well, it’s actually not about

benefiting people in that sense, because yes, it is. It’s about reintroducing, in a sense, conscience, care and context into thinking about what AI can do that is related to efficiency scale and all those business benefits. That’s not people oriented at all. No matter how they dress it up, saying, well, you employees are going to be more effective. No, it means that our share price will go up from a public listed company, we’ll get paid more money and all that kind of stuff. That’s what drives all of that, seems to

Shel Holtz (35:35)
Mm-hmm.

@nevillehobson (35:45)
And I’m not saying it’s wrong, not by any means. In a capitalistic economy, for instance, as we’re all in, it isn’t wrong. But it’s missing this part of the jigsaw puzzle. And it’s hard to quantify it. And I know one person had a conversation with someone who give me the ROI on this. thought, whoa, you’re right there with the wrong way to think about this. But we have to. And I think this is really just, I would say to me, an invitation to reflect on how you’re thinking about this, not necessarily to…

change it but reflect on it bring into this what does it mean to remain human in this world of algorithms and automation where things move so fast and the the ROI acronym is right there in the middle of

Shel Holtz (36:26)
Yeah, it reminds me of the late great shell Israel asking, what’s the ROI of my pants? Remember that?

Does we do we need ROI on everything?

@nevillehobson (36:35)
He would have loved the wisdom of the heart,

I tell you, he would.

Shel Holtz (36:39)
Yeah,

yeah, he was very skeptical of the need for ROI for everything. Hence, what’s the ROI of my pants? Of course, somebody came up with the ROI of pants. I remember that too. Insofar as determining what would happen if he went to work without wearing any versus the cost of pants for a year. ⁓ Yeah. All right, well, let’s away from.

@nevillehobson (36:50)
It’s super.

There’s some are away there, that’s a fact, yeah. Cool. Yep.

Shel Holtz (37:03)
AI and talk about more traditional public relations matters. The term rent-a-mob gets thrown around a lot in political discourse, usually as a way to delegitimize real opposition. But behind the rhetoric, there’s a very real, very troubling practice of paying people to pose as protesters to create the illusion of grassroots support.

And that practice is alive and well, and some firms, including companies that present themselves as PR or advocacy agencies, provide it openly. Crowds on demand, for example, has made no secret that it will recruit and script protesters calling the service advocacy campaigns or event management. I thought event management was like hiring the band and making sure the valet people showed up on time.

If all this sounds like a modern twist on an old tactic, it is for sure. From free whiskey and George Washington’s day to front groups created by big tobacco in the 90s, engineered public opinion has a long history. What’s new is the professionalization of the practice. Today, you can literally hire a firm to stage a rally, a counter protest, or a city council hearing appearance. It’s a service for sale and the bill goes to the client. Legally,

This all sits in a very gray zone. U.S. law requires disclosure for campaign advertising, for paid lobbying, but there’s no equivalent requirement for paid protesters. If you buy a TV ad, you have to disclose who paid for it. If you hire lobbyists, they have to disclose who they’re working for. But if you pay 200 people to show up at City Hall and protest, there’s no federal law that requires anyone to disclose that fact. That’s the protest loophole. Ethically, though,

There is no gray area whatsoever. PRSA’s code of ethics is clear. Honesty, disclosure, and transparency are non-negotiable. The code explicitly calls out deceptive practices like undisclosed sponsorships and front groups. IABC’s code says much the same. Accuracy, honesty, respect for audiences. Paying people to pretend to care about a cause or policy fails those tests.

The fact that it’s not illegal doesn’t make it acceptable. It just makes it a bigger risk for the profession because when the practice is exposed, as it inevitably is, the credibility of public relations is what takes the hit. And it does get exposed. In one case, retirees were recruited to hold signs at a protest they didn’t understand. In another, college students were promised easy money to show up and chant at a rally.

These are not grassroots activists. They’re actors in somebody else’s play. And when the story surfaces in the press, it’s not just the client who looks bad. It’s the agency and then by extension, the rest of the industry. So let’s be clear. Rent-a-mob tactics are not clever. They’re not innovative and they’re not public relations. They are deception. They turn authentic public expression into a commodity and they undermine democracy itself.

If our job is to build trust between organizations and their publics, this is the opposite of that. Here’s the call to action. PR professionals must refuse this work. Agencies should set policies that forbid it and train staff on how to respond if they’re asked. Use the PRSA code of ethics as your shield and point to IEBC standards as backup. And don’t just say no, educate your clients about why it’s wrong and how badly it can backfire.

because agencies can get pulled into this even without realizing it. A subcontractor or consultant may arrange the crowds, but the agency’s name is still on the campaign. That’s why vigilance is critical. Build those guardrails now. At the end of the day, this comes down to the disconnect between what the law allows and what ethics demands. Just because a tactic falls into a regulatory loophole doesn’t mean we should touch it. The opposite.

is true. It means communicators must hold themselves to the higher standard, because public trust is already fragile. If we let paid actors masquerade as genuine voices, we’ll find we have no real voices left at the end of the day.

@nevillehobson (41:20)
So the word that comes to my mind readily, listen to what you’re saying and then look at some of the links you get is astroturfing. So remember that? I mean, that was a big deal. I remember you and I talking about that a lot in the first few years when we started this podcast from 2005 onwards. A couple of campaigns I remember being run by PR bloggers as was the primary social network at the times to address that.

Shel Holtz (41:29)
sure.

@nevillehobson (41:49)
⁓ So nothing’s really changed. I mean, one of the links you included was from a woman called Mary Beth West, who wrote a post just a couple of days ago, where she’s actually…

Shel Holtz (41:57)
We interviewed

Mary Beth West on the show, by the way. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (42:00)
we did? Okay.

So she criticizing very strongly PRSA in the US primarily, remaining silent on the issue. And she says they are therefore complicit in this quite strong accusation that but

Shel Holtz (42:13)
She is PRSA’s

fiercest critic.

@nevillehobson (42:17)
Right, right, okay. But I just wonder why is it that from a communications perspective, whether it’s PR or another element of communication, that these sort of issues pop up and so forth, and yet they repeat what was going on decades prior. AVE is a great one, advertising value equivalence, that was banned by professional bodies well over 15, maybe two decades ago, and yet people still use it.

So what is it about this that we can’t seem to… it’s like whack-a-mole, something else pops up all the time. So this astroturfing version 6, let’s call it, because there’s got to be at least five versions prior to this, how do we stop it?

Shel Holtz (43:02)
I don’t know other than to demonize it within the industry and to call it out when we see it. The fact that it happens empowers people to accuse legitimate protesters of being rent-a-mobs. The protesters show up, they demonstrate, it gets news coverage and the opposition says, they were all just paid. They have no evidence to support that. But because

people in their audience know that this actually does happen, they at least suspect that it might be true. So it makes it really easy to dismiss the voice of one segment of society that has chosen to take to the streets or to come to the city council meeting or whatever in order to express themselves and be heard. And I think as…

some of these reports say that’s very, very dangerous for democracy. So there are a number of reasons that we need to call this out as inappropriate as a profession and to disassociate this practice from the practice of public relations.

@nevillehobson (44:12)
So who should take the lead on that?

Shel Holtz (44:16)
Well, I don’t know that they well, but PRSA and IEBC, CPRS, CIPR, all should, Global Alliance, the professional bodies need to be pushing this hard, I think.

@nevillehobson (44:23)
professional bodies.

I agree. I agree.

So CTA for the professional bodies, I think, you need to pay attention to this. We’d love to hear from anyone on any of those bodies you mentioned, offer a comment on what do they think about all this and what should they be doing? Is it their call? How do we persuade members of those organizations to consider this and pay attention to this issue? Call to action then.

Shel Holtz (45:00)
Thank you, Dan. Great report. I think the approach Mastodon is taking to quote posts is interesting. I’m not sure I am a big fan of the user control concept. It seems to me that that is a bit of censorship. If I say something in public, anybody is welcome and free in a free society anyway, to riff on that.

to disagree with it, to pull my quote and say, look what this idiot said, you know? And to put it in the hands of the person who created the quote to determine whether somebody can do that on a social platform. I’m not sure I’m a big fan of that. I’m gonna need to give that one more thought and read more about Mastodon’s rationale. So I’ll be reading the links that you shared, Dan, but thank you, great report.

@nevillehobson (45:54)
So there’s a fascinating and pioneering move happening in Denmark right now. The government there has proposed changing copyright law so that every citizen has the right to their own likeness, their body, their face, and their voice. In practice, this would mean that if someone creates a deepfake of you and posts it online without your consent, you could demand that the platform takes it down. The idea is to use copyright as a new line of defense against the spread of deepfakes.

Unlike existing laws that focus on specific harms, such as non-consensual pornography or fraud, Denmark’s approach is much broader. It treats the very act of copying a person’s features without permission as a violation of rights. Culture Minister Jakob Engels-Schmidt put it bluntly, human beings can be run through the digital copy machine, be misused for all sorts of purposes, and are not willing to accept that. The law, which has broad political support and is widely expected to pass,

would cover realistic digital imitations, including performances, and allow for compensation if someone’s likeness is misused. Importantly, it carves out protections for satire and parody. So it’s not about shutting down free expression, but about addressing digital forgery head on. Supporters see this as a proactive step, a way of getting ahead of technology that’s advancing far faster than existing rules. But here’s the catch.

Copyright law is a national law. Denmark can only enforce this within its own borders. Malicious actors creating deepfakes may be operating anywhere in the world, well outside the reach of Danish courts. Enforcement will depend heavily on cooperation from platforms like TikTok, Instagram or YouTube. And if they don’t comply, Denmark says it will seek severe fines or raise the matter at the EU level. That’s why some observers compare this to GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation.

a landmark idea that set the tone for digital rights, but struggled in practice with uneven performance and global scope. Denmark is small, but with its six months presidency of the European Union that it assumed on the 1st of July, it hopes to push the conversation across Europe. Still, the reality is that this measure will start as Danish law only, and its effectiveness will hinge on whether others adopt similar approaches. So we’re looking at a bold test case here. Can copyright law

with all its jurisdictional limits really become the tool that protects people from the misuse of their identities in the age of AI.

Shel Holtz (48:24)
Maybe. It kind of worked with Creative Commons, didn’t it? The whole idea there was that the Creative Commons license had to be defensible in any country. So they worked to make sure that it would…

qualify under every country’s law. And the first test, as I recall, was actually Adam Curry, had something that he, I think he’s something he created was used by an advertiser in a bus stop poster in the Netherlands. That could be. ⁓ And he took it to court and won on the Creative Commons license. So maybe

@nevillehobson (48:48)
He was.

I think it was a photo of his daughter or one of his children. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (49:09)
A broader approach like that as opposed to country by country would be the way to use copyright to deal with this. Otherwise, you’re looking at every country implementing their own laws and many won’t.

@nevillehobson (49:17)
Yeah.

The trouble with critic comments, is that you’ve got the license. That’s A, it’s voluntary, apart from anything else. B, it still requires the national legal structure in a particular country to adhere a case that’s presented to it. So that’s no different to as if it were the national law. And in Curry’s case, he didn’t get any money out of it. He got a victory, almost a Pyrrhic victory, but didn’t get any compensation.

But there are very few and far between the examples of success with Creative Commons. And I think part of the problem actually is that it’s still relatively rare. I’ll find anyone who knows what Creative Commons is. I mean, we’ve had little badges on our blogs and websites for 20 plus years. And, you know, I don’t see it on businesses, on media sites, nothing. I don’t see it at all anywhere other than people who are kind of involved in all this right at the start.

So it’s a challenge to do this. And I think the key is, would it get adopted by others? And I think it’s going to require a huge lift to make that happen. And maybe the example of Denmark might be good if they were able to show some successes in short order addressing this specific issue about deepfakes in particular.

So it’s a great initiative and I really hope it does go well. It’s not law yet, but it probably will become, from what I’ve been reading, the expectation is extremely high it will become law. And if they’re running, if they’re leading the EU in this next six months, the rest of the year, then they’ve got a good opportunity to make the case within the EU for others to do this. So it wouldn’t surprise me if one or two more countries might adopt this as a trial. Then which is you think of three doing it, let’s say they do.

Will it make any difference? Let’s see. Don’t write it off at all. GDPR has been held up as the kind of the exemplar regulation, ⁓ state regulation on data protection. And whether it’s had uneven enforcement and global scope, I agree. And the penalties against it, no one’s collecting money. It’s a huge deal to do that. But it’s still in place and it does have

an effect on other countries. The US in particular has all sorts of things about, you know, if you’re doing business in the EU, you need to pay attention to this and do all that kind of thing. You don’t have the freedom to do things as you did before. So it’s generally seen, I believe, as a good thing that it happened. But, you know, we’re at that stage where technology is enabling people to do not good things like deepfakes.

And so there is no real protection against that, it seems to me. I think the real trick will be is the compliance by social media platforms. If they are found culpable of hosting imaging or a video or whatever, not taking it down when they’re notified, they’ll get severe fines. I’m not sure what that means, but we need to see an example being made of someone. Haven’t seen that yet anywhere.

Shel Holtz (52:24)
No, we haven’t. And this is all part of the broader topic of disinformation. And we just had Hurricane Aaron. And there were actually warnings on some of the news sites I saw that there were deep fakes of the storm that were leading people to make bad decisions about what to do for their safety. So.

@nevillehobson (52:24)
a struggle.

Here too.

Shel Holtz (52:48)
You know, this is happening faster than organizations, media outlets and political organizations and the like are able to figure out how to deal with it. And you can have fatal consequences down the road. There was, I guess I heard there was one image, I didn’t see it, but somebody told me about it, about a massive wave breaking over a road with cars trying to get out of town and a whale coming out of that wave. That’s sort of what gives it away at the end, but.

@nevillehobson (53:00)
We can, we can.

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (53:15)
⁓

@nevillehobson (53:16)
Yeah,

you’ve got to be vigilant yourself. And I think in light of this and realities of this, you have to be vigilant. It’s easy to say what does that actually mean? How can you be really vigilant? Good example. I’m sure you’ve seen this show, the meeting on Monday last week between Trump and the leaders of the EU and Zelensky from Ukraine. It shows an image that was posted many places online.

US media in particular and social networks, X notably, showing like a photo, all the European leaders sitting in chairs in a kind of hallway outside Trump’s office waiting to see him, being called in to see him. And stories I read about this is how they were treated. Yet you don’t need to even look too closely at the image. Giveaways like the second person along has got three legs. And the linoleum pattern on the floor.

Shel Holtz (54:08)
No, no, no, he really does, you know.

@nevillehobson (54:09)
Yeah, the pattern on the carpet or the learning on the floor, as it got further from your vision, it got a bit blurred and the lines were not so wrong with it, you know. That surely would give you pause, but no, people were sharing this all over the place. shows you people don’t really pay attention too closely. They look at the hit factor for them. I’ve shared something cool and 50,000 people go and view it.

That’s a cultural thing that isn’t going to change anytime soon, unless changes happen to how we do all these things. So this is just another element in this hugely disruptive environment we’re all living in with technology, enabling us to do all these things that are nice until the bad guys start doing them. And that’s just human nature. Sorry, that’s how it is. So before you click and share this thing, this is now logic talking to reasonable people.

Just be sure that you’re sharing something real. I shared something recently that I forgot what it was now, but I deleted the post about 10 minutes after I sent it on Blue Sky. And I then wrote another post saying I had done that because I was taken in by something I saw and I should have known better because I normally don’t do this, but I just shared it. I don’t know why I did that even. I was having my morning coffee and I wasn’t paying attention too closely. So that’s the kind of thing that could trip people up.

This is what’s going on out there. So I think this thing that Denmark’s trying to do is brave and very bold and I hope they get success with it.

Shel Holtz (55:38)
or at least it leads to other ideas that work.

@nevillehobson (55:41)
Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz (55:44)
Well, the pendulum always swings. One of the hardest questions communicators are facing today is whether their company or client should speak out on a contentious issue or stay silent. Silence was the default once upon a time, but research shows that in many cases, silence carries its own risk. Horton Research, ⁓ published just this month, found that silence backfires most when people expect

a company to speak and believe it has a responsibility to do so, which let’s face it, this is why we were advocating for companies to take positions on certain issues under certain circumstances for ⁓ many years supported by research like the Edelman Trust Barometer. A separate Temple University study of the Blackout Tuesday movement showed that companies that stayed quiet faced real backlash on social media, but the consequences aren’t uniform.

Sometimes silence has little visible effect, at least in the short term. Take Home Depot. Just last week, immigration raids targeting day laborers took place outside stores in California. Reporters reached out to Home Depot for comment. Home Depot chose not to respond. So far, investors don’t seem to care, and the stock hasn’t suffered. But employees, activists, and customers who see this issue as central to the company’s identity

Well, they may feel differently. Silence can create space for others to define your values for you. This tension between internal and external audiences is critical. Employees are often the first to expect their employer to speak out, especially on issues that touch human rights, diversity, or workplace fairness. Silence can erode engagement and retention. Externally, it’s more complicated. Some customers or policymakers may punish a company for taking a stand,

Others may punish it for not taking one. And I’m thinking now of it was Coors Light with the one can that they made for the trans activist and that created polarization. People who said, we’re going to go out and buy Coors no matter how bad it is, just to offset the people on the right who are boycotting it.

In Europe, where stakeholder governance is stronger, there’s often a higher expectation that companies will weigh in. In the U.S., polarization makes every move fraught. Either way, communicators can’t afford to pretend that silence is neutral. It’s a choice, and it has consequences. So the question is, how do you decide? Well, here’s a simple decision framework. Start with expectations. Do you have stakeholders who believe your company should have a voice here?

Next, consider the business nexus. Does the issue intersect directly with your operations, employees, or customers? Timing is important. Is there an urgent moment where absence will be noticed, or is this more of a slow burn? Authenticity matters. Do you have a track record that supports what you’d say, or would a statement ring hollow? Then look at consistency. Have you spoken on similar issues before? If you break the pattern, can you explain why? people notice?

And finally, consider risk tolerance. How much reputational risk can the organization realistically absorb? Sometimes after applying this framework, silence might still make sense, but there’s a way to be silent well. It starts with transparency inside the organization. Explain to employees why the company isn’t taking a public stance. Reinforce the company’s values in operational ways through hiring practices, supplier standards, community investments.

brief key stakeholders privately so they’re not blindsided, and set monitoring targets so you can pivot if the situation escalates. For communicators, here’s a quick checklist to keep handy. Map stakeholder expectations, test the business nexus, pressure test your authenticity and consistency, advise on operational actions that back up values, and plan both the statement and the silence. Corporate silence

doesn’t have to mean cowardice and speaking out isn’t always virtuous, but both are strategic choices and both can have lasting impact on trust. Communicators are the ones who can help leaders cut through the noise, weigh the risks and make sure that whichever choice they make, voice or silence, it’s intentional, transparent and aligned with the values the company claims to hold.

@nevillehobson (1:00:22)
Yeah, it’s a complicated story, think, Shell. I think actually paying attention to one of the links you put in our Slack channel about Home Depot, that is quite staggering what I’m reading in this report from NPR talking about this. It goes into some detail in describing the customer base. They talk about day laborers. Now, I don’t know what that term means. We don’t have that term. Does that mean you’ve hired someone

Shel Holtz (1:00:46)
well, let me explain.

@nevillehobson (1:00:48)
Okay.

Shel Holtz (1:00:48)
Yeah, they hang out in the parking lot by the driveway and you have a home project and you need some help. So as you’re pulling out of the parking lot with all of the stuff that you’ve bought, you’ll say three of you and they’ll hop in the car and come home with you and do the work that you direct them to do and you pay them cash. And that’s how they make a living. That’s day labor.

@nevillehobson (1:01:11)
So cash-based, you have no idea who they are, you let them into your home. A bit risky, I would say. I mean, we have a system here which is they then call them day laborers. I don’t think they’re called anything handymen or something like that, DIY help, whatever. Websites, companies set up these things where you post your needs and someone says, yeah, I can do that for you, they give you a quote. And I’ve used someone like that in the past. And indeed, I had that.

Shel Holtz (1:01:39)
Well, I’ve

used TaskRabbit.

@nevillehobson (1:01:41)
I had that person. Yeah,

I know that doesn’t work here at all. TaskRabbit. It exists, but I think in one city only. And there are other equivalents to TaskRabbit, but some of these local websites are really good. But I used someone not long ago where I hired someone to do something and I had them go to the DIY store to pick up the stuff and buy the stuff and all that kind of bit. So I kind of get that. So the NPR piece says day labor sites have sprung up.

as Home Depot grew and it became one of their big customer base, if you like, as a direct result. But this struck me, this piece kind of leapt out at me that talking about this on Reddit, according to NPR, Home Depot workers have begun trading tales of raid impacts. Some claim fewer contractors are visiting and stores are struggling to meet sales goals. Others say it’s business as usual and sales are booming. So it’s a mixed bag.

But that’s going on. That to me will be a huge alarm bell for the company if they kind of button their lip and zip their lip in public and private or internally, and your employees are doing this. So that signifies quite a few things. They quote one example, again, another alarm bell in Los Angeles this time after a raid that happened from the immigration police. This person

talked about the car park. The car parking lot was always full, she said. Right now, though, there’s so many spaces, there’s hardly anyone here. And this woman runs a housekeeping business and usually sends her employees to stock up on cleaning supplies or liquids for a pressure washer. But today, for the first time in a while, she herself was out the Home Depot. Why? Because they’re afraid to come, she said, they’re afraid to be here. That’s not not good at all, that kind of environment. So

If I were Home Depot, I mean, I wonder, tell me what you think, Charmin. They should be paying attention to that, I would have thought.

Shel Holtz (1:03:38)
Well, they should. Their stakeholders have a clear interest here. Their customers are the ones who hire these people as they’re pulling out. It’s become for many folks a service, even though Home Depot doesn’t specifically provide the service. They’ve done nothing to keep it from growing into something that you expect to see at a Home Depot parking lot. it’s part of the ethos now.

their employees care about it. So it gets back to that little framework for deciding whether you’re going to say something about it. Is there an expectation and does it intersect with your business? And in this case, the answer to both those questions is pretty clearly yes. Now, what they would say, I don’t know. Home Depot’s founder was famously very, very right wing on the political spectrum.

@nevillehobson (1:04:11)
Yeah, it does.

Shel Holtz (1:04:31)
And it is my understanding that that political preference continues to be part of the DNA of the leadership of the organization. So they may be fully supportive of immigration raids, but coming right out and saying, yeah, we’re glad to see these people get swept up might not set well with customers who have come to rely on them. So.

@nevillehobson (1:04:50)
Ha

Shel Holtz (1:04:54)
You know, these are things that make me very happy that I’m not doing public relations for Home Depot, but saying nothing, just sitting back and saying nothing seems to me to be a bad choice.

@nevillehobson (1:05:04)
Yeah. And then look at the kind of business imperatives on this. The NPR says in their report, investors so far have shrugged off the immigration spotlight on the company. Home Depot stock price is at its highest since February. So there’s no pressure from that point of view.

Shel Holtz (1:05:22)
Right, well, the article pointed out that this is a short-term response to the silence, not a long-term response. We’ll see. mean, if the people who are posting to Reddit who work in the stores are right that contractors aren’t going there and that the parking lots are not as full as they used to be, you could have longer-term problems arising from this. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (1:05:43)
Well, you got some alarm bells ringing there, I would say,

with that going on. But this just illustrates to me the huge complication on say something or not. If you do, what do you say? If you don’t, what don’t you say? I mean, in a sense, you can’t not say anything, although I guess that’s what they’re doing. That doesn’t seem very healthy for relationships internally, because this kind of thing, from what I observe across the Atlantic here in the UK,

seems to be getting worse in America with these immigration raids, the uncertainty, the cruelty, the awfulness of it all that doesn’t look like it’s going to diminish any time soon. And if anything, it’s going to get even worse than what I’ve been reading.

Shel Holtz (1:06:26)
It is. They have set quotas for the number of seizures and they’re going after anybody for anything. This notion that it’s the worst of the worst, the murders and the rapists and the like is ridiculous. In fact, my friend Sharon McIntosh just shared a photo of somebody being grabbed up by ICE who is a janitor in her church.

Says he’s the neighbor that everybody counts on to come over and help them fix things. He’s a great father and husband. He’s a great member of the community. He has a side hustle business. He is what you want in a member of your community. And yet he was grabbed up by ice. So yeah, there’s a reason that, you know, downtown LA is dead. People are afraid to be out. That’s affecting the people who ⁓ sell them stuff when they come out to do shopping and, and.

live their lives. So this is going to have long-term fallout for sure. And I think that the organizations that are at the heart of this, the fact that they’re saying nothing, I think leads people to see them maybe as cowardly or maybe as complicit. You have to think about the consequences of silence. And that’s what this article that I drew this report from.

makes clear that article from the Wharton School. I quote more from the Wharton School these days. It’s really become a source that it wasn’t when we started this show. But in any case, use a framework. Don’t say, should we say something about this or not? Use a framework to reach a good logical decision.

@nevillehobson (1:07:49)
you

Thank

I think it’s, yeah.

Yeah, and I’m thinking as well, OK, what’s going to happen? Let’s just use Home Depot as an example here. When, not if, when, someone either in the media or in the old media, let’s say, or someone in the new media landscape publicly asks a question of them. What are they going to do about X? You know, what about that guy who was beaten up in the parking lot of your store in LA? What are you going to do about that?

What are they going to say? So I’m wondering, and this is kind of straying into an area of like pre-crisis communication planning perhaps, but have they got a what if scenario plan? I wonder.

Shel Holtz (1:08:46)
Home Depot saying nothing because the media have been calling and they have not been responding and you have to understand two things about the media in a situation like this. One is when you don’t say anything, they’re not going to shrug and go, okay, then we won’t report anything. So you’re going to hear in the media that you did not respond to requests for information. The second thing to be aware of is the fact that

@nevillehobson (1:09:03)
Right.

Yeah, but my point…

Shel Holtz (1:09:13)
the media will go after secondary and tertiary sources of information in the absence of your comment, and that may not be what you want heard.

@nevillehobson (1:09:19)
But my point is

that none of that is happening. So when it does happen, are they ready? None of that’s happening. mean, you say they’re pursuing them, but no one’s talking about that at all. I don’t see any reporting about that. What I would see reporting about is someone with a lot of influence online, as perceived by whoever, frankly, asks a question and that gets amplified widely and gets picked up everywhere that they

This happened in the parking lot at Home Depot. And this is what this person said. And they embed the video, you know, when he recorded what he did. And they’re silent.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Shel Holtz (1:10:00)
Over there and that’s what’s happening.

Yeah, I mean, there are all kinds of videos from people in parking lots and people where these raids are happening. And I’ve heard no comment from the institutions involved. Home Depot being at the top of the list.

@nevillehobson (1:10:22)
that case we’re waiting for that hugely influential person to be in the spotlight. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s a when, not an if, I feel pretty sure. exactly. all right. okay so this I think is our final topic isn’t it in today’s in this is okay so so this one I thought worth exploring.

Shel Holtz (1:10:28)
Yeah, whoever that may be.

Mr. Beast, that’s who needs to do it.

It is.

@nevillehobson (1:10:46)
I saw this quite a lively discussion I saw in the marketing and PR community on Facebook. It highlights an issue that many communicators may think they understand, but often don’t fully appreciate when it comes to using images online. So the post that kicked it off, and by the way, I’m anonymizing it because that’s a private group on Facebook. And unless you’re a member of Facebook and a member of this group, you can’t see the content. But so I’m not going to mention anyone’s names, but the story is quite

interesting. So the poster kicked it off came from someone who had just received an email from PA Images, one of the photo agencies here in the UK, demanding £700 for using one of their photos. The image had appeared in a blog post more than two years ago and the author noted that the photographer had been credited. They thought this counted as fair use and were shocked to discover it didn’t. They’d since removed the image and asked the group whether this was simply an expensive lesson.

or if there was room to negotiate. Well, that prompted a flurry of comments. One person pointed out that the cost of the fine could have paid for multiple original photos, properly licensed for unlimited use. It reminded that investing in photography upfront can save headaches later. Another comment stressed that fair use is an American legal concept. In the UK, what we have is fair dealing. And crucially, it doesn’t apply to photographs in this way. Using a photo without explicit permission or a license is infringement.

At best you might negotiate the charge down to what the license fee would have been. Others shared their own experiences. One person described how AFP, that’s a French news agency, fined their organization £270 for an old image that had been carried over from a previous website. They’d apologized, paid up, and then run copyright training for their team to avoid repeat mistakes. Another said they’d removed an image straight away, but the agency still produced a screenshot of the original post

and pursued them for payment anyway. The practical advice that emerged was fairly consistent. If you don’t have written permission or license, you are liable. Remove the image immediately, apologize, and then try to negotiate. Some suggested starting with a quarter of the asking fee. Keep detailed records of where every image comes from and the terms of its license. There was also a broader ethical undercurrent. Some respondents had little sympathy.

saying that too many people still think photos are fair game online when they aren’t. One even noted that their partner, photographer, often earns more from infringement settlements than from people licensing his images in the first place. So the original poster clarified that their agency normally does hire photographers and pays them fairly. This was an old blog post that predated the agency and they genuinely wanted advice rather than sympathy. Still, they accepted that it was a mistake that would cost them money.

So the takeaway here is clear. Crediting a photographer is not the same as having permission. Unless you have a license or explicit written agreement, you’re exposed to claims. And with agencies increasingly using bots and reverse image search to enforce copyright, the risk of being caught is only growing. For communicators, it’s a sharp reminder that visuals are not free to use simply because they’re online, and that professional practice means treating images with the same respect as written.

Shel Holtz (1:14:03)
Just one more reason to be using AI to generate your images.

@nevillehobson (1:14:08)
Yeah, but I think it all comes down to, doesn’t it? The kind of, it’s so easy, it’s there, people have been doing it for long time, and suddenly this is coming out, the bites bite you in the bum, this will, I tell you.

Shel Holtz (1:14:14)
I’m guilty.

I’m guilty. used to, when I was an independent consultant, which I haven’t been for nearly eight years now, good God, time really does fly. I used to do a email newsletter. It was a wrap of the week’s news in communication and technology. You know, as we continue to do for this show and for blog posts.

@nevillehobson (1:14:39)
I used

to subscribe to your newsletter. I remember it. I remember it.

Shel Holtz (1:14:42)
Yeah, was called the Friday Wrap. And at the top of the Friday

Wrap, I always had an image of something that was wrapped in one way or another just to play off of that whole wrap concept. And I was always out there searching images for something that was wrapped. was trees that were wrapped and buildings that were wrapped and vehicles that were wrapped. And I just grabbed them and put them at the top of my newsletter without giving any thought to where that came from. If I were doing that today, I would definitely have AI

produce an image of something wrapped, because I certainly didn’t have a budget to pay for photography. The only reason I was able to do that was because they were online, but it was not right. Even though most of those images were, I seem to recall using the Creative Commons library of images, which is still available. But… ⁓

@nevillehobson (1:15:31)
Yeah, I I

was similar, Shel, to you. I was doing exactly the same thing, but I always used to credit the source, thinking that was fine. I didn’t feel guilty. And even if a website that I saw a great picture had copyright, blah, blah, all rights reserved, I’d say, well, give them a credit and a link to their website. I’d be OK. I fell foul of that once only back in early days, about 2007, Reuters.

Shel Holtz (1:15:39)
That’s adequate.

@nevillehobson (1:15:57)
wanted me to remove a picture I used from one of their agency reports and a blog post that I’d I too, throwed in a conversation with them and said, and eventually they agreed, okay, fine, but don’t do it again. And I thought, okay, that’s interesting. They were really early in on that. We know it’s not right. And indeed the point here of that first practical advice from the thing, if you don’t have explicit permission or a license,

you are liable. There’s no ifs or buts, there’s no gray areas, black or white. So I tend not to use a lot of AI generated images. I subscribe to Adobe Stock, which is a good library. I use Unsplash. I pay for the premium version that gives you pictures that aren’t to take. I tend to go big on metaphor type pictures, and there’s loads of stuff for that. But I’m always also looking for someone who says,

you know, create a commons for instance, and that’s great. Flickr still a good source. So that, but if you’re like in a large enterprise and you’ve got, you know, multiple stuff, things going on, that’s not really a practical approach. And you’ve probably got a license with Shutterstock or one of the big image licensing firms. So that’s right. But this is, I think for small to medium sized businesses, individual consultants and so forth, this is an easy trap to fall into. And again, it’s just remembering that

key advice point if you don’t have permission or a license you’re liable. So don’t do it.

Shel Holtz (1:17:19)
Yeah, I used to have

a subscription to Dreamstime, a stock photo service, and how people will say, I can tell if something was produced by AI. I can tell if something came from a stock photo service. Those stock photos do tend to have that stock photo stamp on them, you know, that look. come on, the computer key that has the word that is…

@nevillehobson (1:17:32)
Yeah, well it depends.

But I find depends on the image.

You wouldn’t use stuff like that. I certainly don’t. I you see them, the kind of happy smiling group in a business meeting. People are not like that at the workplace. Yeah, yeah. So don’t use those. No, don’t use those.

Shel Holtz (1:17:48)
or the hand writing on the board or the hands raised. Yeah, no,

I use AI to create images. I mean, we’ve changed our internet platform, but the one we changed from required an image for every article, a hero image. And if it was about a project, that was easy. We had photos from projects. But if it was about a more abstract concept,

You know, either it was a stock photo service or we were stuck. But now I can come up with an image that just perfectly conveys the idea that we’re trying to get across. I remember I did one about what goes into developing a proposal, an article on what goes into developing a proposal for a commercial construction project. We’re talking about, you know, two, three, four hundred million dollars of project cost.

And these are big deals and the proposals take weeks, months to put together. And I think there’s a lack of appreciation for what the business development team goes through when they’re putting these together. And for the hero image, I had a group of people who are clearly office workers, not out in the field building. And they’ve got their laptops and their tablets and their phones out. But in the middle of the table, rising out of the table is the building that they’re pitching. It was an ideal image.

Another one that I use this for is our April Fool’s article, which was always about something completely ridiculous. I did an April Fool’s article one year about new sustainable building material of chewed bubble gum that has been scraped off of underneath desks and underneath railings. Not only is it sustainable, but it’s minty fresh, that type of thing.

@nevillehobson (1:19:21)
Thank

Shel Holtz (1:19:30)
And I was able to have a building that was built out of bubble gum that looked real to accompany that article. So I get a lot of use out of generative AI that I can’t get. I mean, if I had a budget for artists and if I had a budget for photographers, I’d be using that. I’d hire photographers. I’d hire graphic designers. I don’t have the budget. So this works. This is a great alternative to.

@nevillehobson (1:19:36)
That’s cool.

Yeah. thing. Yep.

In which case,

so the takeaway from all of this, yeah, so the takeaway from all this is if you don’t have written permission or a license, you are liable. So get permission or a license or use a generative AI approach. Pretty clear.

Shel Holtz (1:19:54)
using what’s not yours.

Works for me. And that will bring us to the end of this episode of For Immediate Release, episode 478, the long form episode for August 2025. Our next long form episode will drop on Monday, September 29th. We’ll be recording that on Saturday, the 27th. And until then, Neville, have a great couple of weeks until we get together for our next short midweek episode.

@nevillehobson (1:20:37)
Absolutely.

The post FIR #478: When Silence Isn’t Golden appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

User-generated content is at a turning point. With generative AI models cranking out tons of slop, content repositories are being polluted with low-quality, often useless material. No website is more vulnerable than Wikipedia, the open-source reference site populated entirely with articles created (and revised) by users. How Wikipedia is handling the issue — in light of its strict governance policies — is worth watching, especially for organizations that also rely on user-generated content.

Links from this episode:

Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles
How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content
From the technology community on Reddit: Volunteers fight to keep ‘AI slop’ off Wikipedia
Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup
Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules
Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act if strictest rules apply to it, says judge

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:00)
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 477 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:08)
And I’m Neville Hobson. Wikipedia has long been held up as one of the internet success stories, a vast collaborative knowledge project that has largely resisted the decline and disorder we’ve seen on so many other platforms. But it’s now facing a new kind of threat, the flood of AI generated content. Editors have a name for it, not just editors by the way, we do as well. It’s called AI slop. And it’s becoming harder to manage as large language models make it easy.

to churn out articles that look convincing on the surface, but are riddled with fabricated citations, clumsy phrasing, or even remnants of chat bot prompts like as a large language model. Until now, the process of removing bad articles from Wikipedia has relied on long discussions within the volunteer editor community to build consensus, sometimes lasting weeks or more. That pace is no match for the volume of junk AI can generate.

So Wikipedia has now introduced a new defense, a speedy deletion policy that lets administrators immediately remove articles if they clearly bear the hallmarks of AI generation and contain bogus references. It’s a pragmatic fix, they say, not perfect, but enough to stem the tide and signal that unreviewed AI content has no place in an encyclopedia built on human verification and trust. This development is more than just an internal housekeeping matter.

It highlights the broader challenge of how open platforms can adapt to the scale and speed of generative AI without losing their integrity. And it comes at a moment when Wikipedia is under pressure from another front, regulation. Just this month, it lost a legal challenge to the UK’s online Safety Act, a ruling that raises concerns about whether its volunteer editors could be exposed to identity checks or new liabilities. The court left some doors open for future challenges, but the signal is clear.

the rights and responsibilities of platforms like Wikipedia are being redrawn in real time. Put together these two stories, the fight against AI slop and the battle with regulators shows us that even the most resilient online communities are entering a period of profound change. And that makes Wikipedia a fascinating case study for what lies ahead for all digital knowledge platforms. For communicators, these developments at Wikipedia matter deeply. They touch on questions of credibility.

how we can trust the information we rely on and share, and on the growing role of regulation in shaping how online platforms operate. And there are other implications too, from reputation risks when organizations are misrepresented, to the lessons in governance that communicators can draw from how Wikipedia responds. So, Shail, there’s a lot here for communicators to grapple with. What do you see as the most pressing for communicators right now?

Shel Holtz (02:52)
Well, I think the most pressing is being able to trust the content that you see is accurate and authentic and able to be used in whatever project you’re using it for. And Wikipedia, we know based on how it’s configured, has always been a good source for accurate information because it is community edited, errors are usually caught.

We have talked about in past episodes, the fact that more obscure articles can have inaccuracies that will sit for a long time because nobody reads it, especially it’s not read by people who would have the right information and correct it. But by and large, it is a self-correcting mechanism based on community, which is great. It does seem that the shoe is on the other foot here because when Wikipedia first launched,

I’m sure you’ll recall that schools and businesses banned it. You can’t use this, you can’t trust it. It’s written by regular people and not professional encyclopedia authors. Therefore, you’re going to be marked down if you use Wikipedia, it’s banned. And they fought that fight for a long time and finally became a recognized authoritative site. And here they are now banning something new.

that we’re still trying to grapple with. We do need to grapple with it. The AI slop issue is certainly an issue. I worry that they’re going to pick up false positives here. Some of the hallmarks of AI writing are also hallmarks of writing. I mean, if I hear one more person say, an dash is absolutely a sign that it was written by AI. I’m gonna throw my computer out the window.

I’ve been using dashes my entire career. I was using dashes back when I was doing part-time typesetting to make extra money when I was in college. And dashes are routine. There is nothing about them that makes them a hallmark of AI. That is ridiculous. But we are going to see some legit articles tossed out with the slop. The other thing is some of the slop may have promise. It may be

the kernel of a good article, and this is a community platform, and wouldn’t people be able to go in and say, wow, this is really badly written, I yeah, yeah, I may have done this, but there’s not an article on this topic yet, so I have expertise, I’m gonna go in and start to clean this up. It’s a conundrum, what are you gonna do at this point? We haven’t had the time to develop the kinds of solutions to this issue that might take root.

And yet the volume of AI slop is huge. The number of people producing it is equally large. And you have to do something. So I think it’s trial and error at this point to see what works. And there will be some negative fallout from some of these actions. But you got to try stuff to take it to the next level and try the next thing.

@nevillehobson (05:52)
Yeah,

I think there’s a what I see is a is a really big issue generally that this highlights and part of it is based on my own experience of editing Wikipedia articles in a couple of cases for an organization working with people like butler inc. Bill Butler has been an interview guest on this podcast a few times, which is

The speed of things, the one memorable thing that stays in my mind about using Wikipedia or trying to progress change or addition is the humongous length of time it takes with the volunteer editor community. The defense typically is, well, they’re volunteers, they’re not full-time, they’re not employees, they’re not dedicated, they say you’ve got to be patient, they’re doing it for their own free will to help things. I get all that, I’m a volunteer myself in many other areas, but…

That’s great. But as they themselves are saying, things are moving at light speed with AI slop generation, you can’t afford to have three to four weeks where you you the the person editing is asked the community, is this good? Are you okay with this? What else? And three weeks go by before you get a reply. And often you don’t you have to nudge and so forth that to get that ain’t going to work today. So it needs something better. They have this

really interesting looking projects called Project AI Cleanup, which is got, it’s well defined in the Wikipedia, on Wikipedia what it is. They’ve also are developing a non AI powered tool called Edit Check. That’s geared towards helping new contributors fall in line with the policies. So part of the problem a lot of the time, I think is the elaborate policies and procedures you’ve got to follow.

It’s not user friendly for people who don’t know all this. And they do have a history of people not welcoming newbies to it readily. So all that’s in the background. But this is quite interesting, EditCheck, towards helping new contributors fall in line with the policies and writing guidelines. They’re also working on adding a paste check to the tool, which will ask users who’ve pasted a large chunk of text into an article whether they’ve actually written it. So it’s kind of helping that kind of focus.

I think I get what you say and I don’t disagree by the way on the discovery of things and you know there might be something good here and all this I get all that and I hope that continues but this is urgent this really does require attention and I think the one of the points in the why this matters to communicate this section is

the big one, think reputation risk. I mean, some of the research I did, this is going back a couple of years now when I was working on a particular project, was the reality that when you, let’s say as a communicator, I think about something related to your employer, your client or some work you’re doing about an organization, the first place you will go to typically is Wikipedia or the first place that shows up in the search results in that old traditional day that we’ve now passed that now, but as it was back then.

You get your, you know, above the fold screen full of results on Google. And the three things that make you feel this is this I will go to would be ideally the the organization’s website first and foremost. And it might have someone else talking about the organization’s maybe a second, the third result is going to be the Wikipedia entry. And then you have a little box on the right hand side, which summarizes everything and that’s taken from the Wikipedia entry.

So if you have not updated your Wikipedia entry or it is inaccurate, that’s what’s going to show up there. So getting this right is good. But unfortunately, that won’t work in the day of AI slot because things change so fast. And just wait till agenting AI gets on the case and you got all these bots creating content as well. I think the point about dashes and so forth, that isn’t going to stop anytime soon, I don’t think. And I believe that.

that presents a big challenge to Wikipedia where you have human verifiers checking things, where this artist has got 15 dashes. Hey, come on, that’s got to be AI generates. So all that kind of thing, they still have to figure out how to do that. I think your point about they got to do something for this. Absolutely. And this is probably the one thing they’re doing, but there’s more they still need to do that.

is likely to be quite a challenge, speed with, because of the speed how this is evolving so fast. So I think it comes down to, suppose, you the information consumer, the user of the stuff you’re finding, you absolutely need to do your own due diligence more than ever you have done before. Don’t just believe Wikipedia because, hey, it’s Wikipedia, it’s a community generated site. I hear all the stories I’m sure you have about that’s the reason why it’s no good.

because it’s community generated. I don’t buy that argument. I’ve rarely had any issues. And one thing I do use a lot myself as part of the verification is the talk pages and the history of editing pages. And you get a feel for, you know, what’s been happening here and so forth. Plus, there are services. Butler has one. There’s another one that’s the name escape me, but it was it’s owned by that that guy we interviewed in Israel who was behind that.

that will, Wiki Alerts, that will notify you whenever a page you’re paying attention to has got changes, tells you what the changes are. So, and Wikipedia itself has some pretty good analytics now and alerts and so forth and so on. So, communicators can help with this as well in reviewing stuff they know about pages and content they know about to make sure that it doesn’t require, it doesn’t have any issues that they should be concerned about. But that’s the regular climate.

You have AI literacy. communicate this need to know literally or need to know how to get help in recognizing AI generated text. There isn’t a single guide. There’s lots of people with opinions out there. Your own common sense will often help you. Pitfalls like fabricated citations, how do you really check those? Responsible use in professional context. This brings that to the forefront again, like it was originally and you mentioned.

organizations, schools, academia banning the use of all this back in the 2000s. Now we’re in the 2020s and this is becoming more urgent it seems to

Shel Holtz (12:05)
Yeah, and you you talked about the difficulty in having action taken when you propose a change to an article. Where I work, I check our Wikipedia entry. The first time I did, I saw that the earnings hadn’t been updated in about six years. So I left a note saying, I can’t make the change. I’m a representative of the company, but these are earnings from six years ago. Here are our most recent. This is the doc.

@nevillehobson (12:21)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (12:32)
I heard crickets. Absolutely nothing. So I wonder if agentic AI might actually be a solution for Wikipedia down the road. When a challenge like that comes up, an agent will go out and find the correct information and maybe send a note to the editor saying I have confirmed this information or I have found this information to be not accurate. Just put that step in there to speed this up.

The other issue that I think is going to be interesting is that the quality of the output is going to only improve. And where you can tell bad writing from a bad prompt right now. Well, first of all, you’re going to have more people learn how to prompt well, which will make it harder to identify that it was done by AI, especially if somebody takes five minutes to go through it and edit it and make a few revisions. the AI is just going to crank out better stuff.

@nevillehobson (13:09)
Thank

Shel Holtz (13:25)
as new models appear because the work that they’re doing is just designed to produce better outputs. That’s going to make it harder to find these things. So again, finding a way to identify it and address it has to be top of mind. And the current process, I think is just a first step, what they’re doing now. It’s not going to scale.

@nevillehobson (13:46)
No, totally. I agree. So that would help. I agree. But they would have to make significant changes to their structure and the whole policies and procedures set up. So one of the things that is at the front of this and you mentioned what you’d found for your company, I’ve come across as many times as well. It’s no good sending them, you you the representative of the company, you’ve disclosed that fact. Great. Doesn’t matter. You’ve sent them information that is not neutral point of view, no matter

Shel Holtz (13:54)
yeah.

@nevillehobson (14:14)
how you see it, if it’s your own website, for instance, you could even send them well, this is what it says on the SEC website as well, that might help, but it needs to be and they explained it in excruciating detail what neutral point of view means and how you can provide reliable verifiable sources by a third by reliable and it was I forgot the other word, but the third party in other words is not it’s a totally neutral.

The famous example I’ve heard so many times is probably in the very early 2000s, a British author asked Wikipedia to correct his entry because his date of birth was wrong. And they said, sorry, you’re not a neutral point of view. We can’t do that. And they refused to make the change. I mean, the absurdity of that struck a lot of people as utterly absurd. But if you actually read the policies on this, it’s not absurd at all.

Shel Holtz (15:03)
No, it’s just what the policy is.

@nevillehobson (15:03)
So what that author needs to do

is find a neutral point of view to him or her, tell Wikipedia and provide the source proving it, which could be, here’s a copy of the birth certificate from Somerset House or whatever it was at the time they do. it’s clear that, and again, in the context of communicators, when the first round of guides for PR people from the CIPR back in 2012.

that the need for this was apparent very, very quickly to educate PR folks particularly who did not grasp that concept of neutrality and neutral point of view. So they’d have to change a lot if ⁓ agentic AI got into the mix there. I think the more pressing realization perhaps is not agentic AI as an ally of you, not at all. It’s a tool for the bad guys to create really questionable content. You’ve never spot that.

And that’s you need another AI to pay attention. So all these things are probably in the mix there somewhere. The tool they’ve got or the project they’ve got the AI cleanup project, as they’re calling it, is advice, editing advice for community members. It’s a little light on the detail, but I haven’t drilled into all the stuff on the menu that you can go to on how to do this is actually very well thought through this.

⁓ where it goes into detail that you wouldn’t think of, know, broken links, how to fix those to make them to not be broken, finding something that does work properly on fixing common mistakes of free images in the Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, there’s copyright issues surrounding that. So all that’s in there too. But what strikes me at the end of it, Shell, is that there are smart people thinking about all of this and it’s great. But I’m not sure that

⁓ humans doing this alone are going to be able to grasp the speed with which this is is upon us. And that’s where I think also AI Genre, whether it’s agentic or not, I don’t know, could be a huge aid in the kind of here’s something that needs reviewing and checking fast, boom, put your AI on it’s not not a human. Although you’ve got to have the human as the kind of

ultimate arbiter or something that’s to be removed or not. So it’s a challenge for the very methodology of Wikipedia, it seems to me, and this reliance on community generated content because the bad guys, and I don’t mean this only in that there are people deliberately doing this, but the bad guys embracing bad agentic AI are moving faster than you can think of. And that’s the bigger threat to Wikipedia, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz (17:39)
One closing thought, and that is that Wikipedia is the poster child for user generated content, but they’re not the only ones. User generated content has been embraced by a lot of organizations. And if yours is one of them, you’re probably facing at a smaller scale, the same issue with people contributing content that they used AI to produce. And some of it may be quite bad. So you might want to keep an eye on what Wikipedia is doing in order to inform your own.

@nevillehobson (17:55)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (18:07)
processes for addressing this problem in your own organization. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (18:11)
Total Sense.

The post FIR #477: Deslopifying Wikipedia appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Swarms of consultants descend on companies that have engaged their firms, racking up billable hours and cranking out PowerPoint presentations that summarize the data they’ve analyzed. That business model is at risk, given the amount of that work that AI can now handle. Recognizing the threat, some consulting firms are actively reengineering their businesses, with McKinsey out in front. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville review the actions of several firms and agencies, and discuss what might come next for consultants.

Links from this episode:

AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’
The AI Revolution in PR: A Wake-Up Call for PR Agencies
Inside the AI boom that’s transforming how consultants work at McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte
EY CEO says AI won’t decrease its 400,000-person workforce — but it might help it double in size
PwC is training junior accountants to be like managers, because AI is going to be doing the entry-level work
How AI is Redefining Strategy Consulting: Insights from McKinsey, BCG, and Bain
Will AI Empower the PR Industry or Create Endless Seas of Spam?
How AI Agents Benefit PR Agencies
Study reveals rising application of AI across communications by the public relations industry
Adapting to Change: The Key Trends Redefining Public Relations Firms
July layoffs up 140% from last year

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to Four immediate release. This is episode 476. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:08)
And I’m Shell Holtz. If you’ve been following the consulting industry lately, or maybe you’re part of it, you’re aware that AI is all the buzz. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that McKinsey & Company, the gold standard in management consulting, is deep in an existential transformation. And if you weren’t watching the video, you didn’t see me make air quotes around existential transformation. It’s their words. ⁓

AI is the catalyst for that transformation and the realization that it can do a lot of what McKinsey’s highly paid human consultants do faster, cheaper, and sometimes just as well. For nearly a century, McKinsey has built into business on armies of bright young consultants, fresh from top universities, synthesizing vast amounts of complex information and advising C-suites on what they ought to do next. But now,

instead of a small battalion of analysts, a project might require just two or three people, along with an assortment of AI agents, tools that write in the classic McKinsey tone, check the logic of arguments, summarize interviews, and crank out PowerPoint decks. McKinsey has rolled out, are you sitting down, 12,000 of these AI agents, and its CEO predicts a not too distant future with one AI agent for every human employee.

And they’re not alone. Boston Consulting Group has Dexter for presentation building in Gene, a conversational assistant. Deloitte has Sidekick and Zora AI. PwC, KPMG, EY, they all have their own fleets of AI helpers. At McKinsey, over 70 % of employees are already using a tool called Lili, which taps into a century’s worth of the firm’s knowledge.

EY is using AI with 80,000 of its tax professionals, and rather than seeing that as a job killer, its CEO says it could actually help them double the firm’s size. And that’s an important point. While AI is eliminating some roles, particularly entry-level repetitive work, it’s also changing the skill mix. For consultants, that means fewer suits with PowerPoints and more partners in the trenches.

co-creating solutions with clients and helping organizations implement change. As one Oliver Wyman executive put it, the age of arrogance of the management consultant is over. Clients don’t want abstract strategy anymore, they want execution, training and transformation. Now for those of us in organizational communication, there’s a clear parallel. AI is already reshaping our own work in much the same way, handling…

media monitoring, sentiment analysis, and first draft content creation. In public relations, agencies like Edelman and Golan are using AI to track reputation, analyze audience sentiment, and even test campaign ideas on synthetic focus groups. The USC Annenberg study on AI and communications found many agency leaders are building cultures of experimentation around AI, seeing it as a way to free their teams for higher value work. But, and this is a big but,

The risks are real. In both consulting and PR, the differentiator going forward won’t be who can use AI. It will be who can layer human judgment, creativity, and trust on top of AI speed and scale. As one McKinsey partner put it, the basic layer of mediocre expertise goes away. The distinctive expertise becomes even more valuable. And that’s a key takeaway for communicators. First, the business model has to adapt.

Just as consulting firms are moving from billable hours to outcome-based fees, agencies are rethinking traditional retainers in favor of value-based pricing, charging for results, not hours. We’ve talked about this on FIR before. Second, the human skills that AI can’t replicate, relationship building, empathy, strategic thinking, become even more critical. And third, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that treat AI as a collaborator, not a threat.

@nevillehobson (04:14)
Thank

Shel Holtz (04:16)
just as McKinsey is doing by pairing agents with experienced human experts. The AI era isn’t all about being replaced. There’s plenty of validity in the augmentation argument. The winners are gonna be the fast learners, the ones who can adapt their craft, rethink their value proposition, and work seamlessly with both humans and machines. But let’s not sugarcoat this. The threat to jobs isn’t hypothetical. According to HR Dive,

US employers cited AI as the reason for over 10,000 job cuts in July alone, and layoffs surged 140 % year over year in that month. In total, more than 800,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year. Now, many of these AI-related layoffs are under-reported or hidden, buried under euphemisms like technological updates or restructuring.

The outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas notes that only 75 layoffs in the first half of the year were explicitly attributed to AI, but they warn the real number is almost certainly higher, much higher. This isn’t theoretical. Across sectors from consulting to communication, the integration of AI doesn’t just augment roles, it reshapes them and in some cases eliminates them entirely.

In any case, the future of consulting and of communication belongs to those who can bring something to the table that no chatbot ever will.

@nevillehobson (05:40)
Yeah, but it’s interesting. It’s quite apparent that this will have a dramatic impact on this. see a lot of articles and opinion pieces published about the kind of tactical use to make of AI. But what you’ve explained in terms of what firms like the consulting firms you mentioned are doing, this is a quite a significant shift that’s happening.

A trigger in my mind ⁓ reminded me of a post I wrote in my own blog in February about the need to change the bill about hours model. As you said, we talked about it in FIR. We actually came up in our interview with Steve Rubell earlier this year as well. And I’ve been trying to do this. This is the catalyst where you can’t ignore this. No one’s going to want to pay a consultant on an hourly retainer basis.

when AI in its various shapes and forms, particularly agentic AI, it’s going to be totally apparent to anyone that that’s doing the grunt work. Your value is kind of like, this is what it means, Mr. Client, or actually more than that, much more than that, in fact, although AI will help you do that. So it will require a rethinking of the whole relationship model between consultants and clients. And I doubt

truly doubt more than 5 % of consultants, which basically are the big ones you’ve mentioned, are ready for that. I don’t think they are. So it doesn’t mean to say that no one’s going to change. It’s going to be a painful process. The ones who I think will benefit from this will be the ones who are already making plans for a shift. And it could be that ⁓

number of organizations already having conversations with clients who are quite happy, quite comfortable with how things currently are and don’t really like the idea of change. That is all to do with human resistance to change more than anything I would say. You could give them the logic about here’s the cost benefits, why we should change, but it’s the emotional bit you need to bring into this, which I think is an opportunity for consultants to

kind of, as you mentioned in your narrative, to position you, the consultant, as the critical addition to the mix that blends the value of the agentic AI and other aspects of artificial intelligence with your irreplaceable skill in literally bringing that to the table to illustrate to the client.

what it means for what they’re trying to achieve and the role that these tools will have. This is not new at all in the sense of suddenly we’re talking about it. We’ve been talking about this in different ways for quite a while. I think though what I’ve seen most of the conversations tend to be at a really high level and very technically focused. So this needs conversations on a far more emotional level that so that people can grasp quite clearly what the benefits are.

PRSA had a report just a month ago in June about how AI is driving PR innovation. It’s not about the main topic here, but it’s absolutely connected to it, because that’s exactly how you’re going to be able to use a word I dislike intensely, but it’s apt to harness the power of this that enables you to do the things that the PRSA mentions in their report, hyper-personalized media pictures they talk about, predictive crisis simulation.

real-time event adaptation, visual storytelling, and cross-cultural adaptation, that one’s most interesting. So you’re seeing these are the kind of outcomes that you would get when you harness all this intelligence, combining yours with the, ⁓ well, the algorithmic intelligence of artificial intelligence. So it’s an exciting time, although I fear that many people

Will not do well out of this change that’s coming

Shel Holtz (10:06)
Undoubtedly not. It reminds me a lot of this notion that I shared in the early days of the net and basically the computer revolution in business, which you and I have both been around for. mean, you and I both worked in days where we had typewriters and typewriters and fax machines, absolutely. And it was…

@nevillehobson (10:28)
Fax machines, yeah, true, after that fax machine.

Shel Holtz (10:34)
Something, I don’t remember if I heard this or just observed it, but the first thing we tend to do with a new technology is stuff that we were doing with the old technology. The first thing we did with computers was type. Word processors, right? It was WordStar and WordPress. And it was just a replacement for a typewriter. And instead of a ledger, we had Excel for…

@nevillehobson (10:49)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (11:01)
keeping our numbers. It was the same job we were doing before we had just found this technology that allowed us to do it better and faster and easier. But it was stuff that we were already doing. And even with that list that you read from the PRSA report, the things that they have figured out how to get AI to do are things that we are already doing. Where technology gets interesting is

After you move beyond that, say, okay, we’ve adapted this technology so that it makes our lives easier with all of these tasks that we had to perform in a more manual way before. What else can we do with this? That’s where it gets interesting is where you start to see what these things can do that you hadn’t imagined and that you weren’t already doing that benefit your life and your organization. And when you look at this idea of reshaping

the business. I don’t think most businesses of any kind, consulting or anything else, are there yet. They’re still at the, how can we do what we’re already doing better, faster, cheaper than we were doing before with, by using AI and not how can we rethink the way this business operates.

And McKinsey, think, is already heading there. They’re already saying, look, rather than sending a pod of 30 consultants out to the client and taking over 10 offices on site and having this presence and cranking out PowerPoints and crunching all of this data, we’re just gonna have some people in the trenches there working with them. The AI will come up with

@nevillehobson (12:24)
Thank

Shel Holtz (12:50)
the data analysis and all of those things that it’s good at. We’re going to be with the client figuring out how to bring this into the workplace, how we’re going to synthesize this into their operations, and how we’re going to train them and prepare them and guide them through this shift, whatever it may be, whatever they brought us in to consult with them about.

@nevillehobson (13:01)
and

Shel Holtz (13:17)
So they’re rethinking what their business is all about, how they’re going to execute it. And it doesn’t look a lot like what it looked like before, but to their credit, they’re ahead of it. They’re not waiting the way so many industries did in the world of Web 1.0, Internet 1.0, where newspapers started to suffer because they didn’t see the writing on the wall and figure out a better way or a different way to…

fulfill their fundamental mission, which is getting news and information into the hands of the people in the communities that they serve. So it’s good to see McKinsey doing this. It’s worrisome that we ⁓ don’t yet see other organizations, many other organizations, that they’re still in that phase of how can this replace the tactical work that we do or augment the tactical work that we do, not how does it reshape how we get our work

what our business is all about and how we do it.

@nevillehobson (14:19)
Yeah, I think there’s also another element here that you’re talking about, know, McKinsey, Ernst & Young, and these these mega big consulting firms with typically huge enterprise level clients in different countries all over the world. And that’s great, because they will lead the way for that level of relationship building with clients of who have needs very different to

the small to medium enterprise, the small consulting firm, mid-size consulting firms, for that matter, ⁓ who aren’t going to be about changing the whole business model. They’re going to be about what can they deliver to the client that makes absolute sense to where that client’s at on this journey that we’re all on. So it could well be that you’re going to see, you won’t see uniformity in this at all. What we’ll see, which is most welcome,

is the McKinsey’s and the Ernst & Young’s taking the strongest lead to reinvent the businesses of consulting, if you like. And that’ll filter out, gradually. It’ll be very uneven. And some won’t do it, in which case they may not survive or they may not evolve. Who knows what’s going to happen in that sense. But that’s good, in my opinion, because the kind of

Let’s look at how AI will help us reshape entirely our business model. It’s for everyone right now. If you’ve got a 10 person consulting practice, that’s not for you, I would think, or you could argue, well, actually, it might be, it should be easier because you’re smaller and more nimble. We don’t know really what this is going to look like. But what I see, though, is a two-way pressure stream where clients are going to be pressuring their agencies, their consulting partners, if you will.

I’m hearing about this, let’s talk about this. We want to do X. You then got an opportunity to say, let’s talk about that because I’ve got three ideas that could work that are absolutely on this avenue. But it’s not going to happen quickly and it isn’t going to be for most businesses, I would argue, not yet. ⁓ For the big ones where there’s a lot at stake and they need to do things like, hey, we’re not going to send 100 consultants out this client at

X hundred dollars per hour or whatever it might be, we’re going to work out a deal where the outcomes are really what we’re going to be judged upon. And yes, we’ll have a hundred agentic consultants and there’ll be three human beings who lead them. Or as we have discussed on F.I.R. Shell, one of the leaders may well be another AI. So but that’s not for everyone. These are this kind of big picture ideas that scares the hell out of a lot of people, I have to say. So this is uneven.

It’s exciting or a nightmare depending on your point of view. I think it’s exciting personally. I could see for instance, independent consultants are the ones who are probably most at risk, where you’ve got a nice gig going with a handful of clients, you all like each other, they know you. But as an individual, you just absolutely cannot deliver what they need without partnering with someone else.

be a big shake up, I would say in this, but it’s going to take a while and by a while, I don’t mean 10 years, you’re looking at two to three years before you see an impact in this I would venture. So interesting times ahead, as someone said recently.

Shel Holtz (17:45)
Yeah,

it’s definitely the fastest growing technology we’ve ever seen, which is a conundrum because we tend to adapt at the same pace that we always have, regardless of the fact that this technology is growing by leaps and bounds. And for those…

smaller consulting firms that maybe now is not the time, I would worry about that because if I get an assignment and I go into a client and I’m presenting them with a monthly invoice showing hours burned on this client’s work and I’ve got 15 people taking four months to do this assignment and I’m hearing through my network about colleagues that are working with other consulting firms that are getting it done.

in three weeks with a team of two consultants and getting great outcomes and spending less, then I am going to worry about my client wanting to work with them because they’re more efficient at it.

@nevillehobson (18:48)
Yeah,

I agree, but that’s not really what I’m talking about because not everyone is going to be impacted by this yet, not at all. And in fact, I don’t believe it’s feasible to say everyone suddenly has got to change right now. Get rid of the billable hours model. ⁓ indeed, indeed, many are not. You’re right. They ought to start thinking about it. You’re not going to see the kind of horrific outcome suddenly that this nice little consulting firm

Shel Holtz (19:04)
I think everybody needs to start thinking about it right now.

@nevillehobson (19:18)
suddenly lost all the clients because they can’t deliver the AI content that they need to do. Some will argue, yeah, we’ll use AI models and we know how to do that and we can deliver what’s right for this client where the role of AI ⁓ is important in the fit with humans. But the conversations about how it’s going to replace your employees and they’re going to be agents all over the place isn’t realistic in the way most people are talking about it, it seems to me.

So I think you’re right, and I don’t disagree at all that everyone needs to be cognizant of what’s coming down the track in one way or another. And so people who are talking about it, people who are writing about it or whatever it might be, or demonstrating how this all works, pay attention to that. I’ve attended good probably four, yes, four webinars in the last month on this not exact topic, but in this area of working with

the new ⁓ elements of artificial intelligence are coming into the workplace. And they’re all useful, slightly different. I learn something new from all of this that shapes my thinking, if you like. So it is a time to be aware that this is happening. And that’s where paying attention to McKinsey’s and so forth is really important.

Shel Holtz (20:38)
Yeah, I think if you’re a consulting firm, especially a smaller one, it’s time to start considering what differentiates you from your competition? What are your genuine strengths? What do you bring to the table that an AI chatbot can’t? What do your clients really appreciate about you? And to start thinking about how do we leverage those things

that can’t be commoditized with artificial intelligence that all of the consulting firms are gonna be using in roughly the same ways. ⁓ I think that differentiator is going to be critical ⁓ in the early thought process on all of this.

@nevillehobson (21:25)
Yeah, you’re right. And I’m just thinking, I’m looking at what we discussed with Steve Rebell back in the early part of this year, early February. So that’s seven months ago. A lot has changed in seven months already. But what Steve says, I think is still the case. He says, you know, we know this. is not a substitute for PR professionals. It’s a force multiplier, he says. AI can analyze trends, detect patterns and all that. It still requires human intelligence.

to interpret, contextualize and act on these insights. That I totally agree is still true. I would add that for how long though I wonder, where’s only the humans who can do that. But it is a significant value of PR as Steve points out. And he talks about ⁓ who’s gonna survive, who’s gonna thrive in this era that’s coming. Well, in simple terms, those who embrace AI as an augmentation tool rather than resist its impact. You know what? That conversation was common.

just seven months ago. Now, though, I don’t believe it has the same, well, impact, frankly, where you talk about if you don’t do this, you won’t thrive, you resist, it’s going to happen no matter what. We’ve moved to the how rather than the what in that conversation, it seems to me, even those skeptics who don’t see this. So strategic advisory roles rather than commoditized execution work is what humans need to be thinking about, according to Steve. I don’t disagree with that.

Shel Holtz (22:53)
Not at all. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #476: Rewiring the Consulting Business for AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It has been 12 years since Google shut down Google Reader, its popular RSS news reader. The rise of social media newsfeeds had rendered RSS useless for many people, and declining usage led Google to sunset it.

But RSS feeds never went away. Many websites still make them available; they’re baked into most blogging utilities; and podcasting relies heavily on RSS feeds for distribution of audio and video files.

As algorithms determine what you see in social networks, and newsletter subscriptions require visits to your inbox, where your newsletters are mixed in with all your other emails, RSS news readers are making a comeback. New news readers are emerging, and older ones are making improvements with a range of features, including the incorporation of AI to assist with sorting and other tasks.

In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore the benefits of RSS, examine some of the features of the latest crop of readers, and discuss how an RSS resurgence can benefit communicators.

Links from this episode:

Curate your own newspaper with RSS
Reddit RSS discussion
Why RSS Feeds Are Still Relevant in 2025

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 475 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:09)
and I’m Neville Hobson. At the dawn of blogging 25 years ago, RSS was a quiet revolution. It let anyone subscribe to a blog or a podcast and receive updates instantly. No gatekeepers, no ads, no algorithms deciding what you should see. Just a simple feed, delivering content directly to your reader of choice. Fast forward to today and the digital landscape could hardly be more different. Our online experiences are now shaped by social media algorithms.

filtered through engagement metrics and interrupted by endless distractions. Many people have never even heard of RSS and those who do often assume it’s long gone. But here’s the twist, it never went away. And according to writer and technologist Molly White, best known for her clear-eyed critiques of Web3 and crypto hype, RSS may be due for a comeback. We’ll take a look at this right after this message.

In a recent long form post titled Curate Your Own Newspaper with RSS, Molly makes the case for reclaiming this overlooked piece of internet plumbing. It’s part how-to guide, part manifesto. She walks through setting up a modern feed reader, finding hidden RSS feeds, and building a curated stream of blogs, news and newsletters that reflect your actual interests, not what some platform thinks will keep you scrolling. She even shares how she structures her own reading habits.

offering a kind of digital self-care routine for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the flood of content today. Reading it, I was struck by how radical RSS now feels, not because it’s new, but because it puts the user back in charge. It reminded me of the early blogosphere when independent voices flourished and content was shared freely through syndication. That original spirit of openness and autonomy is still there, waiting to be rediscovered. People are talking about an RSS comeback.

driven by digital fatigue and a yearning for direct ad-free content. The Reddit RSS subreddit remains active, with users debating RSS’s survival and sharing workarounds where publishers drop support. Worries persist, though, especially about publishers de-prioritizing RSS or hiding feeds. And tech ecosystems like podcasting and the Fediverse continue to depend on feed standards.

In a world increasingly centralized, RSS is decentralized. In a world designed to grab attention, it respects your time. And in the world of world gardens, keeps the door open. And here’s a great comment on Hacker News. We’ve been fed algorithmic garbage for so long, people are rediscovering how good a hand-picked feed of trusted sources can feel. So here’s a question for us to explore. What role could RSS play in communication today?

Could it help rebuild trust in a media environment dominated by algorithms? Could communicators use it to deliver information more transparently or to reconnect with audiences looking for more intentional, less manipulative content? And for internal communication, other ways to syndicate updates, insights, or thought leadership that sidestep the noisy channels employees often tune out. That’s one for you, Cheryl.

Shel Holtz (03:26)
I would love to see a resurgence of RSS. I was listening to a podcast interview over the weekend. It was all about the shift of journalism to Substack in particular, but they were also talking about, think it’s ⁓ Beekeeper is another one that, Beehive, right? And what they were talking about was the ability to get right into the user’s inbox without

@nevillehobson (03:44)
Beehives, beehives. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (03:55)
the intermediary of the algorithm getting in the way. And RSS does largely the same thing. And I think a lot of these people who are looking at subscription through newsletters might also consider ⁓ RSS feeds. There have been ongoing developments in RSS. One of the more exciting is how it’s being paired with artificial intelligence to make your feeds even smarter and more useful.

know, RSS typically just shows you the newest articles from your favorite sources and the order they were published. But now researchers and developers are combining RSS and large language models to help you discover the most relevant content in your feed without losing that control and privacy that makes RSS appealing in the first place. So instead of having to scroll endlessly through everything, your reader might highlight just a few items most relevant to your interests.

even if you’re new and haven’t given it much to go on. Another interesting development is what’s called content enrichment. Some of the new RSS readers are going beyond the bare minimum that RSS feeds typically deliver, which is a headline, link, and maybe a short blurb. Now, AI can step in and fill in the gaps. It can pull in the complete article text. It can pull in images. It can categorize topics. It can even write summaries for you.

So your RSS reader can give you something that looks and feels a lot more like a personalized news briefing. So these advances, I think, are really turning it into a more modern, intelligent way to stay informed on your terms without the algorithms. So if people can discover these new RSS news readers that really go…

beyond what we were accustomed to with the readers. mean, even thinking of ⁓ the Google News reader, the late lamented ⁓ Google News reader, which a lot of people said was going to kill RSS. Of course, that’s silly. RSS drives podcasting. So it’s not going anywhere. It really is plumbing. And I also found one site called RSS.app. Have you seen this? Yeah, I think it’s great. There are people who are worried

that the feeds are going away, that sites that offer them are going to stop offering them for one reason or another. But RSS app lets you create a feed for any site that’s publicly available. So if you want to add it to your news reader and it doesn’t have a news feed, RSS.app will fix that for you and give you an RSS feed from that site. So Edge and Chrome let you follow.

RSS feeds, ⁓ readers are evolving. I’m hopeful that this can just come back from the dead in a new, more modern iteration that solves a lot of problems for people.

@nevillehobson (06:58)
Yeah, I the RSS.app site, I tried it out about a year or so back and it was okay but I didn’t like the fact that to do anything meaningful you had to take the paid option and I didn’t feel I wanted to do that at all. So it’s not really didn’t ring any bells for me at all. But you know the interesting thing, Shell, think, listening to what you’re saying, going back, you know, back in the day, 25 years ago,

we were all talking about RSS. it was kind of like ⁓ it’s a jargony word. It’s very tech oriented and trying to explain to people. I remember conversations a lot ⁓ to look at the, you know, there’s no single definition of what the letters stand for. Really simple syndication was the one that stuck out. I would suggest if anyone listening doesn’t know what it go to Wikipedia and look it up on RSS. The page is

not well written, it’ll tell you what it is. Today, ⁓ most people who ⁓ I would argue most is the right word, haven’t heard of RSS, what they do, they could care less what it is. But you mentioned something which I think is quite significant, which is indeed what Molly White mentioned, the internet plumbing. This is part of the plumbing. Newsletters.

podcasts, videos, you name it, that people subscribe to. They get it in their feed, in their ⁓ player on their mobile phone or whatever it is. RSS plays a big role in getting that content to them. So the interesting thing to me, certainly, is that we don’t talk about RSS. Yeah, it’s there. It’s the plumbing, like electricity. So I found it interesting what you said about AI, because therein, to me, lies the key to this.

which is that ⁓ we aren’t going to talk or sell the idea to anyone about AI is going to sort out your RSS fee. No, no, no, no. AI is going to be part of the solution getting you the content you want when you want it or however you happen to what you want to do with it, distribute it or whatever it is. And don’t worry about what it’s called. And that’s where we didn’t go the right way with all this back in the original days because people got so wrapped up in the tech.

that the glazed eye syndrome was huge in organization. We tried to explain to them, hey, we should do RSS. mean, no one’s going to say that now. But that could well be the route for this. ⁓ Although I’m just thinking, what is the unique thing about this? You mentioned, I mean, the tech concept of RSS in how it enables things like enclosures, which is the MP3 file for a podcast, instance.

How would that work, I wonder? Is there anything that would need to be changed in how it does what it does if AI is playing a role? I can’t see how that would be changed because it’s not changing the technology per se. It’s actually automating the process for you. Is that the route? Molly doesn’t mention that in a big way in her article, but this I think is worth exploring. What role could RSS play in communication today?

And maybe that’s not the right question, actually. Maybe that’s not it. ⁓ Does it offer something today? And this is a question. I don’t have the answer to this. That anything else that’s in use today to deliver content to people can’t do as well as RSS can. I don’t know the answer to that, but I doubt that would be the case. So I stopped using a dedicated RSS reader a long time ago because ⁓ I’ve actually switched largely.

to subscribing to content I like by newsletter more than any other means. So I used to use a really good reader called InnoReader, which has a free version and a paid one. I used a paid one for some years, but it then got for me, certainly, a little too much, too much, too many bells and whistles. All I wanted was something quite simple. I’ve got that now, for instance, with ⁓ Raindrop, which is the replacement to Pocket.

the read it later tool really, really useful. I find raindrop make sure I got the name right. It is raindrop, isn’t it? Yeah, raindrop.io. Excellent. They’ve got a free version and a paid version. And I’m on the free because I don’t need the page because the features on free are really, really good. You can use it adding as much or as little as you want. You can tag it, you can add descriptions, you can categorize it.

I don’t do any of that because I have literally a handful of tags I use for everything I save there. And it’s really, really good. It got me thinking, how does that deliver the content? I bet you RSS is in there somewhere. So there are tools around if you want to think about subscribing in that kind of manual way and it’s using RSS. I’m not sure that’s how we should as communicators be pitching this idea to anyone. So ⁓ yeah, so the idea of AI.

Shel Holtz (12:06)
no. ⁓

@nevillehobson (12:10)
So AI agents, for instance, you’ll have an agent whose job is to sort this out, to organize this in the best way possible to get that piece of content or whatever it might be to this audience in your organization, whether it’s employees, whether it’s customers, doesn’t matter. And if it uses RSS to do it, great. But if it doesn’t, who cares? As long as you get your content. I mean, is that being too radical, do you think?

Shel Holtz (12:34)
Well, yeah, I think there’s a real conundrum here for anybody who wants to try to capture this market. The readers that are emerging with these new features and ⁓ designed to appeal to a new audience, they have names like RSS Guard and quite RSS. And then there’s RSS.app and

@nevillehobson (12:39)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (12:58)
they’ve got RSS in the name and that’s going to be a turnoff to a lot of people. But for people who are looking for an RSS news reader, that’s what they’re looking for. So how do you attract a whole new audience to something that doesn’t care? I mean, the audience doesn’t care about RSS or this technology. You’re off. There’s a value proposition. So there needs to be a way for somebody who has one of these great tools to market it so that people.

start talking about it as this alternative to scrolling through social media where I’m being controlled by the algorithm and being manipulated to doom scroll and stay on their platform as opposed to seeing content that I really want to see because I subscribe to it. So I think that’s the challenge. ⁓ It’s not like there’s no feeds out there. There are plenty of sites to still maintain feeds. Even in the U.S. government, I was reading that NASA

@nevillehobson (13:46)
Yeah, I agree.

Shel Holtz (13:56)
and the US Department of Agriculture still offer RSS feeds. I know that there are plenty of them out there for trade publications because I use an RSS feed to pull in construction headlines on our internal communications. It’s all RSS. I think I’m using construction dives, RSS feed. So they’re out there and you have the ability to make them where they don’t exist. I think it’s a matter of

somebody really enticing the public to start using this as a way to get the content that they’re interested in and not mention what the technology is or how it works. Because if people had, and I use this analogy way too often,

But if everybody had to know what the name of everything that makes their cargo was and how it works, nobody get in their cars. We don’t need that understanding of the technology in order to drive from point A to point B.

@nevillehobson (14:58)
is true.

I agree. I’m not sure myself that this is even the right argument to be discussing about should we, know, is RSS going to have a comeback? In the sense of how Molly White writes her long form article, that’s very much geared to ⁓ the folks who want to know about the technology per se. Normal people don’t want to do that.

not being disparaging here. That’s a reality. So maybe the route to explore thinking of this now from the communicator’s point of view, whether it’s internal or external matter, is not about how do we bring RSS back and what role could RSS play. That’s not the key argument. That’s part of the secondary argument once you’ve defined the role that you want whatever the technology you’re to use to help you achieve the goal you’ve set.

That to me is very much in the area of an artificial intelligence agent to do that. I haven’t really started experimenting with agents, mainly because most of the tools that offer them are only literally now become, you can start using them here in the UK. So, ChatGPT’s agents just become available in the last couple of weeks. I’ve got it in my thing. I’ve just not had time to do anything with it yet, other than read up about it. But I’m wondering, I might do an experiment.

mainly to help me decide is this worth spending any time on which is to tell it to create something where RSS plays a role and see what it does. Don’t know how I’m going to do that yet but I’ll get to it.

Shel Holtz (16:39)
You could even vibe code your own R-Accessorator that does exactly what you want it to. No reason why not these days. By the way, I did use an agent, the ChatGPT agent that has been available here for a little while. I told it to go to my company’s website and look at the markets where we work, study our areas of subject matter expertise, get a good sense of who we are.

@nevillehobson (16:43)
Right, I might get into that. No.

It has, yeah.

Shel Holtz (17:05)
Then go find all of the podcasts in the construction industry, architecture, engineering, and also in the markets that we serve, like healthcare and aviation, for example, to find those podcasts where we would have the opportunity to pitch our subject matter experts and then find out if on their website they have any information about pitching interview guests.

and then create a spreadsheet that categorizes these podcasts based on industry or market and include in the spreadsheet the name of the podcast, its URL, which focus it has, and what information they were able to extract on pitching guests. And I just sat back and watched while it did all of this. It stopped and asked me a question once.

I don’t remember what question, but once it asked me a question and then it went off on its merry way until there was a spreadsheet with about 25 podcasts listed on it. That would have taken an intern two days.

@nevillehobson (18:08)
Yeah, that’s interesting. mean, that’s exactly the kind of thing I think that, again, to our point about what role could RSS play in communication for the communicates, what would you use this for? That’s not the right question. So ⁓ unless it’s important to you or your audience that they know it’s RSS doing something in there, but I don’t think that won’t be common. ⁓ How could this play a role for those who need to know that?

And I think that’s the right question to be asking.

Shel Holtz (18:39)
Yeah, I think the thing for communicators to do at this point is lobby to maintain RSS feeds on their websites or lobby to establish them if they’re not there and keep an eye on this. And if you see developments in RSS that warrant more of your attention, whether that’s making your feeds ⁓ more visible on your website and promoting their availability or

pitching a particular reader to people because it benefits your content in a good way. ⁓ Just keep an eye on it because there seems to be something happening here. Neville, when you shared on our Slack channel that this was the topic for the day, I went and did some search on new developments in RSS. And there’s a ton. There is a ton of material out there on this. So something is afoot.

@nevillehobson (19:35)
So then in that case, the answer to that question, the first answer to that question is what you’ve just said. Be aware of what’s going on, find out how this is evolving, and that’s understanding how the landscape is developing. And from there, you can determine what your next steps might be. But that seems to me to be good starting point.

Shel Holtz (19:55)
And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release

The post FIR #475: Algorithms Got You Down? Get Retro with RSS! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“Artificial intelligence will not save us. But it might help us understand who we are.” – Monsignor Paul Tighe

In one of our most thought-provoking FIR Interviews to date, we speak with Monsignor Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Section of Culture of the Dicastery for Culture and Education at The Vatican, about the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence and the role of the Church in shaping global conversations around technology.

As AI continues its rapid development and deployment across all sectors of society, the question of how we use it – and why – has never been more important. From concerns about algorithmic dehumanisation to the challenge of building ethical cultures inside corporations, Msgr. Tighe brings a unique voice of moral clarity and practical insight to the discussion.

In this wide-ranging conversation with FIR co-hosts Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, and guest co-host Silvia Cambié, Msgr. Tighe addresses:

Why the Vatican published Antiqua et Nova, a foundational text on the relationship between AI and human intelligence, in January 2025.
How AI challenges our definitions of intelligence, decision-making, and moral responsibility.
The dignity of work in an age of automation and algorithmic management.
How corporate communicators can foster trust, transparency, and ethical accountability in their organisations.
The moral obligations of companies developing AI, and the limitations of relying solely on regulation or benevolence.
Why global conversations on AI ethics must include voices beyond technologists and ethicists – including religious, cultural, and social communities.

From practical reflections on professional identity and solidarity to broader insights on how we can avoid becoming de-skilled or ethically numb in a machine-paced world, Msgr Tighe offers a balanced view: not alarmist, but clear-eyed about both risks and opportunities.

He reminds us that technology reflects the mindset of its makers – and that responsibility must remain human.

“We must not become blindly dependent on technology. We must cultivate the wisdom of the heart.”

Why This MattersFor communicators, business leaders, technologists, and policymakers alike, this interview is a compelling call to think more deeply – and act more responsibly – in shaping the future of AI. The conversation offers rare insight into how values like dignity, trust, and ethical discernment can and must coexist with innovation.

Whether you’re navigating the rollout of AI in your organisation or simply grappling with its broader societal implications, this is a conversation worth hearing – and sharing.

Listen now, read the transcript (below) or watch the video version, and be part of a vital global dialogue.

About Our Conversation PartnerA native of Navan, County Meath in the Republic of Ireland, Monsignor Paul Tighe was ordained a priest of the Dublin Diocese in 1983. After post-graduate studies in Rome, he was appointed as a lecturer in Moral Theology in the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin, where he was appointed head of the Theology department in 2000.

In 2007, he was appointed as Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. In that capacity, he was involved in promoting Church reflection on the importance of digital culture and in the launch of some of the social media initiatives of the Holy See.

In 2015, he was nominated to the Pontifical Council for Culture and as titular Bishop of Drivastum. At the Council, he followed questions related to digital culture and technology.

In October 2022, he was appointed as Secretary of the newly established Dicastery for Culture and Education, where he has particular responsibility for the Culture section. In January 2025, that Dicastery, together with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published ‘ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.’

Paul Tighe Wikipedia entry

Links from this Interview:

Dicastery for Culture and Education at The Vatican
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith
ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence

Transcript of the Audio PodcastBased on the audio recording of the FIR Interview recorded on 22 July 2025. Lightly edited for clarity and syntax, and formatted for the reader experience.

Neville Hobson

As artificial intelligence transforms society, who speaks for humanity? In this FIR interview, The Vatican’s Monsignor Paul Tighe shares why the Church is stepping forward in the global tech debate, exploring how dignity and ethical responsibility must lead the way.

V/o and intro music

This is For Immediate Release, the podcast for communicators.

Shel Holtz

Welcome everyone to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz in the US and I’m joined today by my co-host Neville Hobson in the UK and our guest co-host Silvia Cambié in Italy. And I’m very pleased to welcome our interview guest Monsignor Paul Tighe, who is secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education at The Vatican, responsible for the Culture section.

In January of this year, the Dicastery for Culture and Education, along with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published Antiqua et Nova, a “Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.” Given our interest in AI on FIR, we’ve been intrigued by and even reported on both Pope Francis’ and now Pope Leo’s focus on AI and humanity.

Monsignor, we’re very pleased to welcome you to FIR. Thank you for joining us.

Paul Tighe

Thank you. I’m very happy to be with you and I look forward to our conversation.

Shel Holtz

I wonder if you might share with us, before we jump into artificial intelligence, a little bit of your background.

Paul Tighe

My own background, originally, 100 years ago, I studied law in Ireland, civil law, subsequently studied theology here in Rome, and eventually ended up teaching a kind of combination in the field of ethics, the relationship between law and morality and public policy and those issues.

When I came to work in Rome about 20 years ago, more or less, I worked in the communications department where we were working on the integration of digital technologies into the Holy See. And what really began to fascinate me at that stage was how digital technologies were really impacting culture in general, how we behave as individuals, how we form community, how we learn from each other, how we communicate, how every aspect of life has been transformed.

And I think that led me into the area of reflecting on AI as something that has an extraordinary potential to impact how we as human beings live as individuals and in community.

Silvia Cambié

I think we can get started then with a few questions we have, Monsignor Tighe. And if I may, on the first end, I would like to refer to Antiqua et Nova. And in it, the Church highlights some dimensions of human intelligence, the relational dimension, the spiritual dimension, the embodied dimension.

There is, however, a school of thought out there which says that that artificial intelligence is helping us to truly understand what makes us human. Because artificial intelligence helps us with repetitive tasks, with pedestrian tasks, it actually gives us the time to focus on different abilities that we have as humans, like spiritual self-respect, empathy, insight.

What do you say to that?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly AI has the potential to facilitate a lot of human reflection and human thought. It’s interesting, one of the earlier terms that was used before artificial intelligence really won the round was to talk about augmented intelligence. AI is something that we can work with, that we can use to increase our own capacities, to expand our own capacities in certain fields. But I think the limitation would be is that those fields are of necessity somewhat limited.

One of the things that we were very interested in questioning and maybe it’s AI that has forced us to think about this is what do we mean by intelligence? What is it that we really qualify as a human intelligence?

AI is extraordinarily good at certain types of tasks to which we would give the title intelligence, calculation, analysis, pattern spotting, processing of more and more data, extraordinarily capable in those arenas.

But there are other issues that I think are questions for human intelligence, too, which are the questions, well, what should we do with these new potentials, with these new capacities, and how do we ensure that they actually serve the true good of human beings? And that’s a type of intelligence, I think, that we still have to maintain a certain agency over and a certain responsibility for.

Shel Holtz

Monsignor, The Vatican has warned that while AI systems are able to make decisions – and I’ve seen research that says particularly among Gen Z – a lot of people are turning to AI to make day-to-day decisions for them that they used to have to make for themselves. These AI systems don’t bear any moral responsibility. That’s on us.

Now, just this week, OpenAI has released ChatGPT Agents. We have seen some early agents, but now anybody can, if they have the right account, and more accounts are going to be coming online soon for OpenAI’s customers and even free users, able to use agents that I just read Ethan Mollick today saying, really for the first time, does that analogy of an intern working beside you feel apt?

With this coming, and I know that one of the things I’ve been focused on is how managers are going to need to help their employees through this transition to an age where we’re working alongside AI employees. For what it’s worth, that’s basically what they’re going to be.

What do you think are the implications of this in terms of the dignity of workers and the humanity of work?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I think there’s a whole range of issues you’ve raised there, you know, and the idea that people might hand over decision making to some sort of an AI program, even relating to personal questions. You know, I hope they would be vigilant about the kind of replies that we’re going to get.

And I think we also have to recognize in the past, people might have been going to fortune tellers or to horoscopes looking for advice on how to spend their lives. So one has to be recognized.

I mean, there are certain tasks which I think you would ask an AI platform to undertake. There are certain types of scoping exercises you might ask them to work on. But I think one of the things one has to be able to retain is something of your capacity to recognize, to be able to critically engage with the results you’re getting, to understand those results. And even at times to have an intuition that this may be something that’s somehow not in the right line or is a hallucination of some sort or other.

So I think of… for example, I belong to a generation that grew up with the very first calculators that could do speedy mathematics. And as we were coming to our final examinations at school, one of the issues, could you bring the calculator into the exam with you? And one of the things people said was you needed to keep your own certain numeracy and ability with numeracy that you could spot a gross error at least immediately.

And I think that’s one of things that we need to keep a sense of tuning our own capacities, not becoming de-skilled. My worry would be we would become de-skilled and we’d become blindly attentive or dependent on a technology.

I mean, another analogy I would choose sometimes is I think we’ve all got a little lazy about using GPS systems and different navigation systems as we drive; when they don’t work or when we suddenly find ourselves without a signal, sometimes we find some of our abilities have been lost.

That ability to navigate, to to map read, to find our way around, I use that as an analogy for life. We have to keep that, our own ability to ask the right questions and to know what are more likely to be the dependable capital questions.

I think the area of obviously the introductions of having an intern working beside you in the form of a platform. That’s another issue though, but it’s an issue that will become important about the impact of that on how people work and on the amount of jobs that may or may not be available in the future and how we think about issues about that.

Silvia Cambié

I have another question about Antiqua et Nova, and in it there is a very powerful observation about the fact that AI often forces workers to adjust to the pace and demands of machines rather than machines having to adjust to the needs of humans. And when I read that, that really resonated with me.

I’ve worked in managed services throughout my career, so I know the pain of having to adjust to that pace and the anxiety. So I would like to ask you, what do you think societies and employers can do to make sure that AI respects the needs of workers, particularly those workers in vulnerable and outsourced roles in the Global South?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, I think that you’ve hit a hugely important issues. One of the things I think when we think about AI, we have to think about AI as something that will be an accelerator and a multiplier of existing practices. And one of the things we have to recognize, there are many contexts in which human work is not valued, in which the dignity of workers is already not valued.

And the risk is that AI in certain ways could exacerbate that, where people will see AI as something that can displace workers, that can work all hours. This is becoming some… as you know, there’s been some talk about unshoring employment into the first world again. But a lot of that unshoring is likely to be handed to machines rather than human beings.

And we’ve already seen anecdotally and in literary examples I’ve been reading about, something about workers in an Amazon warehouse, or in any warehouse you care to mention, where there are logistical processes that have been directed by algorithmic concerns and that somehow the humanity of the worker is lost.

There was an extraordinary article in the New Yorker magazine or the New York magazine looking at food delivery operators in New York who essentially are driven into competition with each other by an algorithm that will give work to those who are the speediest in their delivery tasks. And therefore dehumanizing and also creating competition between people who might previously have been seen as working together.

So I think we need to reflect and to be not complacent about how this could impact. At another level, there are ways in which it may displace certain types of work that are already meaningless, and maybe less than worthy of human dignity.

So I think it’s in the balance, my worry would be, and this is a thing that Pope Francis often brought out: it’s not just about the technology that’s there and it can be used for good or it could be used for bad. It’s that the technology is born out of a certain mentality.

And if the mentality, the commercial mindset that is giving birth to the technology has at its heart exclusively values about efficiency and profitability, then the chances are that the dignity and worth of individuals will not be respected.

Whether you blame that on the AI or on the commercial mentality is probably we need to be careful not to do that.

The other example, if I may, that struck me because we talked, it links with something Shel said earlier, which is the one is like people are saying AI can liberate us from some of the more menial or less important tasks and allow us to come in at the specifically human level.

And an example of that was in the field of medicine where AIs and AI platforms will be able to process enormous amount of diagnostic materials, do comparisons with other X-rays, prescribe individual drug regimes relating to the genetic makeup of the individual.

And some doctors began to say, this is great. This will allow us to recover what is the essence, what is at the core of our being as doctors, which is that we aren’t able to give time and care and attention to our patients. And that was a very kind of positive view and understanding of the role.

Other doctors kicked back and said, in reality, we wouldn’t be so complacent because the real risk is that we will now be expected to see more patients and to see them more speedily rather than giving them more time and giving them more individualized attention. They said that was for two reasons. One, an obvious one, is that so much of health care is commercially driven and there are drug companies and other investors requiring a certain throughput.

But they said more subtly was that an AI can measure the amount of time you spend with a patient. It can measure how many patients you see, but it can’t necessarily quantify the quality of the interaction. So therefore, the quality of the care, the attentiveness of the communication gets lost because it’s not capable of being measured. So one of the dangers with the AI thing that we suddenly have to fit into a world where everything has to be measured and where some of our most important human tasks and human achievements are not necessarily capable of pure measurement or external measurement.

Silvia Cambié

So if I may, Neville, very quickly, I’ve got a follow up question. So, you know, those roles being dehumanized, as you described, that’s definitely an issue, again, going back to my experience in managed services. But often, you know, when someone works in that environment, as you say, that’s the culture, right? You have to deliver.

You participate in a lot of international discussions and you sit on different fora. Is there a serious effort to counter that mentality?

Paul Tighe

What I’ve found is sometimes an attentiveness of some of the people from the tech side, being very attentive to say, well, we will be benevolent towards those who are displaced. And we need to look at the possibility of having a system of a universal social benefit or some sort of a universal income that we will share with people that will compensate them for the work that they lose.

What we would be bringing to some of those discussions is a sense that, yeah, but work isn’t just about economic reward. Work is where I express my creativity. It’s where I express my identity. It’s where often I socialize. So in terms of some of the costs of loss of employment, it’s not simply about an economic argument. It’s back to more qualitative issues about what it means to be human.

Neville Hobson

Before I get to my specific question, it’s interesting, this topic, by the way, I find very interesting indeed, this particular segment of our conversation.

I guess my question is quite a broad one as a follow up to this broad topic, which is, if we’re talking about deploying AI efficiently, showing that it uplifts people rather than displaces people, I wonder in today’s climate, where morality seems to be absent in many organizations in terms of how they’re approaching their business and the treatment of employees, I guess the question I wanted to ask you is, what do you see as the moral obligation of companies and other organizations developing or deploying AI? What would you say to that?

Paul Tighe

Well, in a previous life, I used to teach business ethics. So I’m back to that famous article that’s saying that the business of business is to produce profits, but I think one of the things we’re all becoming much more aware of is that need to breach the corporate veil in terms of commercial activities that we ensure that corporations don’t somehow level down people’s sense of ethical responsibility.

So one of the issues that we would be kind of promoting is if you look at the area, the future of governance in the broader sense of this area, there’s the kind of governmental and multi-government multinational regulation that may be needed. Many of the companies talk about their commitment to establishing their own ethical practices.

But in the middle of that, I would also want to maintain something about the individual, the responsibility of the individuals who make up those companies. And our history in the world of treating whistleblowers is not great. They might get a wonderful film made about their life 30 years later after everything has fallen apart.

But it’s about somehow creating environments in which people feel they have a freedom to look beyond the simple tech moment of their task and to reflect on the broader human impact of what they’re doing. The language of many of the companies pays tribute to that, but it’s how do you change the culture of a corporation to ensure that the high and noble ethical standards that they often hold are in fact effective in day-to-day happenings.

There’s that old statement that, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So what is the culture of a group? I can have a lovely set of ethical principles, but I may be learning in my day-to-day work that all my boss is interested in is expediency and quick turnaround, and that we’re ahead of the competition in what we’re working on. So one of the challenges here is to try and get, which is again, precedes and will continue to be an issue, precedes AI is that issue about how do we create environments where ethics are important.

And one of the hopeful things I see in that area is that you see something like professional associations trying to articulate for their own members standards that they would hold to. So the IEEE, the electrical engineering groups, have been very good on kind of articulating standards that they will work to.

So I think it’s… we did a small thing with the Santa Clara University, which sits in Silicon Valley, who produced a handbook on how a corporation could intentionally create an ethical culture where individuals will be empowered to actually take seriously the high ethical standards that the companies may be trying to hold for themselves.

But I wouldn’t want to exaggerate or be naive in that matter. I think competition is driving a lot of what’s happening at the moment. The next standard is to get the next standards in. You know, there’s a small, relatively small number of companies who are in competition with each other to get ahead of the game on AI.

There’s a huge amount of money invested in it. And then there’s the geopolitical desire to keep one’s country ahead of any other country. So it’s complex and just in necessity, the environment to the broader sense is not necessarily conducive to the best ethical thinking and reflection.

Neville Hobson

Yeah. Ok. You’ve described the need for a wisdom of the heart in shaping AI’s future. And Antiqua et Nova mentions how a technological product tends to reflect the worldviews of developers, owners, users, and regulators. And in fact, this fits very nicely to an extension of what we’ve just been discussing. Because my question specifically is, what would be your advice to a corporate communicator trying to create a culture respectful of the dignity of technology users in their company.

Paul Tighe

Yes… I’m thinking here now! I would say that, I mean, I think the communicators, those who communicate on behalf of companies have a particular responsibility, which is to go beyond simply selling of their own product, of their own platforms.

I think on that area that I think there’s something at stake here that if I’m trying to get traction with the corporate world, it’s somehow about issues about trust and about risk. If companies behave in such ways that they destroy the trust that people should have on them, they will pay the price of that ultimately.

Maybe not immediately, but ultimately I’d like to think they will pay the price of that. And we’re beginning to see it with people being much less… people becoming even more suspicious and I think rightly so, more critical of the big companies and the platforms. I think people are becoming much more alert to the business models of companies… are becoming more alert to use that idea if the product is free, you’re the product. And I think cultivating that kind of sense of responsibility.

So if I was talking to the communicators of the companies, I think I would try and imagine that I am trying to create ultimately a public that is more educated, more alert, and more capable of being critical of what I am presenting rather than trying to bamboozle or to simply, I think even the long term, I will lose trust, yeah.

Neville Hobson

I think a kind of mini follow up to that would be given the reality of societies generally, particularly in the developed world, the Global North, if you will, fast moving, it’s fragmented, there’s so much disagreement and different opinions. Ethics doesn’t seem to get much of a look in, it seems to me. I don’t mean in terms of behavior and how people demonstrate ethics but conversations about ethics.

So my question to you on that then is how do we encourage deeper conversations about ethics, particularly in organizations? What’s your thinking on that?

Paul Tighe

My own thinking on that one is as somebody who’s worked in ethics over the years and we’re to recognize that sometimes we’re inclined to privatize ethics. We’re inclined to say, look, that’s somebody’s own view and just leave it to them. And that there’s a fear almost of entering.

But I think we need to empower people to ask questions about the choices that we make as individuals and that we make as a society. Which choices and which developments and which attitudes are actually conducive to what the Greeks would have called human flourishing, meaning human flourishing in terms of my individual sense of wellbeing, but also the wellbeing of the society in which I live.

And I’m conscious that the task of ethics, particularly around issues around AI, becomes complicated because we’re living in a very fractured world with different political systems, different religious beliefs, different philosophical commitments, different value systems.

But ultimately, I believe that there is something about being a human – and maybe this is back to the wisdom of the heart – that it is possible for human beings to discern together on what are the types of choices, developments, attitudes that actually promote a sense of well-being? And maybe more easy to get agreement on what are the attitudes and approaches that are certainly not conducive to well-being?

And in terms of thickening out an ethics dialogue and empowering people, one thing sometimes, I remember doing this for many years, I would have been invited into different professional associations to talk to them about ethics. And you had to remind them, you’re the experts, not me. I can teach you a method and a way of thinking and a way of analysis that is ethical. But ultimately, you’re the person who needs to think, reflect of what it is that gives value, worth and purpose to your life and to the life of people around you.

And that’s even in terms of some of the issues we had in one interesting dialogue with some people from China. And the issue that came in that discussion was a little bit like the Chinese were quite critical of the Western approach to ethics, which is highly individualistic. We were starting out being a little bit critical of AI in China and totalitarianism.

But what we began to perceive was maybe there was a corrective in the middle in how we think of what it is to be human. And to be human is to live in society with others. So even if we begin to think about how the decisions, the choices I make are not just impacting me, but others, and in the broader sense, the whole human family, then I think we get a possibility of finding coherence.

That’s not going to be easy, but I think I look at, I think, and in that one, I think it’ll be very much people coming from the humanities will help us there. Writers who can kind of get us thinking more critically.

I’ve read some novels by David Eggers. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Circle and The Every. I wouldn’t say they’re great novels, but they do capture something about a tendency in human beings, particularly in the Western world, to be willing to exchange their privacy, their own autonomy for convenience. He’s looking at that in terms of the world of social media. I think that will be even more so in the world of AI.

Are people going to be looking for convenience and ease and their own personal immediate satisfaction? Or will it be a capacity to think and reflect on a more grounded experience of what it is that really makes life worthwhile?

So I do think AI in its own ways – and Silvia, this back to you – is forcing us to open up some of those more limited questions about what it is to be human, what it is that gives us satisfaction in life, what is it that makes life worthwhile?

And I think the hope we had in producing Antiqua et Nova was kind of to say, look, here are our perceptions, here are some ideas we have, but this has to be a truly global debate involving people from different traditions and different perspectives, and we cannot be left either to the so-called ethical experts or to the so-called technical experts.

Shel Holtz

We have some time left and I’d love to follow up with a question on that global ethical debate. I know that The Vatican has supported the Rome Call for AI Ethics and has advocated UN level treaties of various types. Just recently we had Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would not sign on to the EU framework for AI ethics and I would have to characterize the US government’s approach to this as all gas no brakes.

Do you think that a global consensus is realistic and I’m wondering what role you think religious institutions should play and how that would work with input and dialogue from other types of institutions?

Paul Tighe

Yeah, no, think, I mean, at a time… one of the sad realities is a time when the world needs some form of global governance or agreed standards and agreed attitudes and some of those institutions have never been so weak. What I think, certainly, part of our Catholic social teaching tradition has always been to insist on the need for attempts to develop international… to strengthen the international organizations so that we have some sort of a global input into the thinking about our future.

I’m not trying to be naive here. I probably don’t want to become either despondent or to give up on it, but I mean, it’s been quite disappointing as you mentioned, you referenced the AI Act for the European Union, which was a relatively limited initial first step, which was beginning to get a little bit of traction until political considerations, I think, empowered the companies to feel that they don’t need to take it as seriously as I would have hoped they would.

So I was at the AI Summit in Paris at the end of January, beginning of February this year which was certainly disappointing in terms of the kind of reluctance to establish any overall governance standards and to somehow the geopolitical considerations of keeping one’s country to the forefront and therefore supporting the companies who are doing that was quite considerable. Yeah.

But I do think at the same time where I would build back and say, it’s not any one religion. And one of the interesting things is trying to develop kind of a community of religious voices who may have perspectives to offer on it, and who more particularly may through their own interaction with people who are working in the industry might be able to have an influence.

So one of the ones I mentioned, the document we worked on with the people from Santa Clara University and with people who work in Silicon Valley, many of whom were self-declared Catholics, who say I want to somehow find a harmony between my professional work and my actual religious convictions, my human convictions.

But I want to do that in a way that I can engage other people within my company who share the same ethical and moral concerns, may not have the religious beliefs or the religious vocabulary, but are no less committed to trying to ensure that we are attentive to the impact of what we’re doing in the broader sense on society.

So I think it’s… I have great hope in what individuals will do, and we’ve seen that in some situations where people have been willing to sacrifice their own jobs rather than doing something that they’re uncomfortable with.

Silvia Cambié

I had a follow-up question, Monsignor Tighe, about that need to find a balance between one’s professional obligations and one’s religious beliefs. So that’s something that in these days in tech, I kind of struggle with. And I encounter people in delivery jobs in tech who just have to roll out tech and do what they are told and basically meet their targets. But they are also struggling because of the privacy issues, because of the data issues. So what would be your advice to them?

Paul Tighe

Certainly, Silvia, I don’t want to be simplistic on this one, but I often, when I’m talking with people like that, I remind them that the, you know, what is a profession? Profession actually begins with a kind of a religious etymology, that it was standing for something. I profess something. And the skills I have as an engineer, the skills I have, the capacities I have as a doctor, enable me to almost intrinsically stand for certain values.

So the important issues that emerge there for me, I think, is to enable people to have that. What do you stand for? What are the limits of what you’re going to do? And how do you think about your own ethical and moral responsibility? That, again, in the professional issue here would be that is often achieved better when we can do it cooperatively with others when we take a stance together and professions traditionally limited entrance, they decide who’s qualified to have this term, whose behavior means we exclude them from the profession.

So that if a profession and people who work together can find a way of working in solidarity with each other and collaboratively to defend certain values rather than being picked off one by one and forced into things that they’re not comfortable.

Shel Holtz

Monsignor, looking back at the digital communication work that you have done and in looking at your background, it’s considerable media transformation at The Vatican, you’ve been involved with the Internet Governance Forum, South by Southwest panels.

I wonder… I’d love to get your views on what kind of communication strategies we in the communication profession should be looking at that, based on your experience, would best translate the ethical complexities about AI to our audiences, whether it’s employees inside our organizations or to the publics our organizations engage with.

Paul Tighe

Yeah, one of the things, Shel, I’ve done a lot of is peering in unlikely venues, dressed like this and all that goes with that. At least I don’t have to introduce myself. one thing that I’ve learned and I think I have no formal qualifications in communications.

What I learned, though, was what I call an insecure teacher, which is the insecure, the lecturer gives the lecture and if the student doesn’t understand, that’s his or her fault. The insecure teacher is the one who’s watching around the classroom to see, do they understand what I’m saying? Where I feel a responsibility not simply for the transmission but for the reception of a message.

So one of the things that I would say that for any people working in communications is to try and test effectively what people who are hearing you and listening to you are taking from what you’re saying. So that you try and close out that loop. If there’s a gap in the communication, I think it’s the communicator’s fault.

And I say that as I say the insecure teacher who had to correct examinations and could see these horrible answers that were coming back from people whose interest was to as accurately repeat what you had said as possible. I saw the mistakes.

So what I learned was to know your audience, know who you’re talking to, know their mentality and find a language that can bridge between you and them. So for people working communications in the tech standard, one of the things I would do is try and do whatever your communication is to bring people along so that they acquire enough understanding to maybe become more difficult and more awkward and ask harder questions, but to commit to empower them through your communication.

Neville Hobson

That’s a good response, I think.

We’re approaching the end of our time today, Monsignor, and we always ask this question in our interviews with interesting guests, such as you, for instance. I think we’ve covered a great deal on this fascinating topic that is very much at the heart of all the conversations we have had in episodes of this podcast over the last year or two about artificial intelligence that’s business focused.

And it’s terrific to get your insights on all of that. But I guess the concluding question we would have would be to say, if there’s a question you wish we had asked, but we haven’t asked it, what would that be?

Paul Tighe

I’m always nervous that I don’t get to speak enough about the potential and the good potential of the AI platforms. And I think properly developed and with adequate human buy-in, I think they will have extraordinary and positive transformative effects.

And I think of the area particularly of medicine. It won’t happen automatically because our medical systems are already just orientated towards the rich and not necessarily fully in keeping, but there is extraordinary potential there to offer new diagnostic tools, new pathways. That I would… there are the sort of things I would always want to say.

At the same time, back to the wisdom of the heart, I think it’s about… even there, we have to avoid the seduction of a technology that’s going to save us and get back to healthy practices in ways of living our life. And maybe AIs can become a kind of a way of tracking how we’re living, what we’re doing with our time, how we’re, I think it has a potential to make us more alert to who we are and what we’re doing and maybe therefore making healthier choices.

Shel Holtz

Excellent. Well, Monsignor, thank you very much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and we’re very grateful that you carved out the time to spend with us today.

Paul Tighe

No, thank you very much. Thank you. And look forward to seeing you all again sometime. Thank you.

Shel Holtz

It would be interesting to catch up again in a couple of years.

Silvia Cambié

Thank you.

Neville Hobson

Thank you.

Paul Tighe

Bye bye. Thank you. Or my avatar will do it. Cheers. bye. Thank you. Thank you.

Silvia Cambié

Thank you.

Neville Hobson

Thank you.

Fade in outro music, Neville Hobson pre-recorded narrative

You’ve been listening to an FIR interview podcast. FIR Interviews are just one of the podcasts you’ll find on the FIR Podcast Network, which is anchored by For Immediate Release, a monthly show hosted by Neville Hobson and Shel Holz, with tech reports from Dan York.

Neville and Shel also host short-form episodes during the working week.

Visit us at FIR Podcast Network dot com to find all the public relations and organizational communication podcasts available for listening and following.

The post FIR Interview: Monsignor Paul Tighe on AI, Ethics, and the Role of Humanity appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In multiple ways, Artificial Intelligence is redefining the role of the public relations professional. Some of that change is the result of new tools that automate processes that once consumed copious amounts of time. One such tool reviews services that solicit expert commentary at journalists’ requests, then crafts responses. The marketing of this tool, dubbed Synapse by its Lithuanian founders, has sparked a considerable amount of controversy over ethical considerations. Neville and Shel discuss the pros and cons in this long-form FIR episode for July 2025.

Communicators are now also supposed to be able to detect phishing attacks disguised as media inquiries, to abandon age-old metrics in favor of meaningful outcomes, and overcome old tropes, like one wheeled out by former communicator Melinda French Gates, who claimed without evidence that tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg have aligned themselves with the Donald Trump Administration only at the behest of their communication teams.

Also in this episode:

AI is driving a change in the way we craft press releases, drawing the Social Media Press Release to mind.
PR is at the heart of AI optimization, since third-party sources are a vital factor in determining what finds its way into AI answers.
Social media has transformed from a means of connecting with others to a platform for streaming entertainment. What are the implications for brands?
More and more brands are launching Substack newsletters as a way to control the message and engage directly with customers.
In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on media companies erecting paywalls to prevent AI models from harvesting their content. The consequences could be enormous.

Links from this episode:

PR agency sells AI tool which sends out automated expert comment to journalists
HOLY MOLY: a PR firm just introduced an AI tool which sends out automated expert comments to journalist requests.
Wellstone Public Relations
PR pros face new wave of phishing attacks from fake journalists
No, Modern PR Does NOT demand another metric
Melinda French Gates says some tech titans siding with Trump are doing ‘what some comms person’ tells them instead of living by their values
Sarah Evans on the New Way to Write Press Releases in the Generative AI Age
What is a social media press release and why should you use it (a bit of nostalgia)
Why PR is becoming more essential for AI search visibility
How You Can Track Brand Authority For AI Search
In the Age of AI Search, PR Holds the Keys to Visibility
AI search is upending the PR industry—how brands and agencies need to adapt
How AI Is Reshaping SEO: Insights from Search Engine Land and Fractl
Why PR Is Your Brand’s Best Defense in the AI Search Era
How to Optimize Your Press Releases for AI Search
What’s Really Changing with Social Media? Start with These 10 Trends
Social Media is Dead. Here’s What’s Next: Mark Zuckerberg Unleases His Vision for the Future of Human Connection Online
Welcome to the brand newsletter era
Why More Brands Should Bet on Substack
5+ Best Practices for Award-Winning Brand Newsletters
Extra! Extra! Brand Newsletters Educate and Entertain

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

How Google’s A.I. Search May Kill News Dead
AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?
What happens to the news business when people stop clicking?
The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived
Tea App Hacked: 13,000 photos leaked after 4chan call to action
Archive Today

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:02)
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 474 of For Immediate Release. This is our long-form monthly episode. For July 2025, I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

@nevillehobson (00:15)
and I’m Neville Hobson at Somerset in England.

Shel Holtz (00:19)
And as always, we have six really fascinating reports for you addressing the intersection of communication and technology. Dan York is here with a terrific report on the growing number of paywalls and what the impact of that will be on news on the internet. And before we get to all of that, as always, we do have some housekeeping to take care of.

Starting with a review of the episodes since our last monthly. Neville, you want to give us that rundown?

@nevillehobson (00:50)
Yeah.

Yeah. So starting with the last monthly, 469 on the 23rd of June, the story that featured in the show notes was, is internal communication failing? And that topic was on a growing body of research suggesting that employees are more disconnected than ever. It was a good discussion. Other topics?

of the of the six we covered included social media has overtaken television as Americans primary source of news. And Pope Leo the 14th has called for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathered at the Vatican. That’s a significant topic, which will become clearer in the next few days, I would say I’ll talk more about that in a second. But we’ve got a comment there too, don’t we, Sean?

Shel Holtz (01:38)
We do, and that comment is from Sylvia Camby in Italy. Sylvia is our guest co-host on a FIR interview that you’re going to talk about in a little bit. But in response to ⁓ episode 469, Sylvia writes, great episode, a very thought provoking discussion. Neville, I read that Pope Francis has remarked that even if we now have AI and can predict human behavior, we should not be tricked into thinking that we can understand humans.

This is a crucial point for the communications profession. Comms people operate at the intersection of tech and user behaviors. There’s a danger here. We might start convincing ourselves that just because we can predict reactions with AI, it’s all right to use predictive analytics to manipulate the employees we are communicating to. And I am totally with you as to the need to frame AI, not as a product, but as a public conversation, particularly about the human dignity of the users. It is indeed exciting to have a pope.

so well versed in tech and math.

@nevillehobson (02:39)
Great comment, Sylvia, that was, I have to say. Now, it’s a big topic without question. The first episode after that monthly, 470, was published on the 30th of June, and that was about creative comments, proposing an AI copyright solution. We examined that proposal and the role communicators can play in shaping its final form. There’s a comment too on that one, shall I think?

Shel Holtz (03:02)
Yes, listener named Andy Green said, it’s a good idea with many challenges managing the complexity of creative interpretation.

@nevillehobson (03:13)
Well, that’s great. I know Andy, actually, that’s actually not a bad comment. Yeah, it’s interesting. This, you know, in describing it as briefly as as I have in this intro, it’s actually quite significant what they’re proposing. Creative Commons, as many of you know, listening are behind the Creative Commons copyright solution that enables you to make it clear what rights you are granting people who use your content with your permission.

Shel Holtz (03:16)
⁓ okay, good.

@nevillehobson (03:38)
If they follow the terms and conditions of that license, they’re good to go in a sense. And they did that 20 plus years ago. So here they are now in the, let’s call it the AI era. I that phrase used a lot now, coming up with this idea. So they’re seeking input from communicators and others. So it’s a good step they’ve taken. In 471 on the 7th of June.

Can you be influential and anonymous at the same time? We asked. There’s a new brand of influencer. We explained faceless creators who wield their influence while never appearing on camera. Look at the pros and cons as we did. And there’s a comment on that one too, Shel.

Shel Holtz (04:22)
Actually, a few. Starting with Jeff Harrington, an old friend from IABC and a terrific writer and writing coach, says less focus on me means more focus on the message, especially critical for those over 50 who, sad to say, confront ageism in the workplace more and more. For example, I recently commented on a post here. The poster replied, well, that would be a typical boomer response.

@nevillehobson (04:23)
great.

Shel Holtz (04:46)
Others confirmed to me my comment was as generational neutral as it could be. So what would have prompted him to reply in such a way? Why, the profile photo that accompanied my comment, of course. And then Mike Klein said, I’m very curious to know what the pros of this are. And Mike Holden, replying to Mike, said a few from my perspective, income and influence without having to put your name and face out there.

It also allows for faster production in some cases too, if you don’t have to put your face on camera and worry about lighting, camera quality, audio, et cetera. And that’s pretty much what we said in the episode too, in terms of why people are doing this. They have a full-time job in a lot of cases, and this is a side hustle and they really don’t want their name in their face out there. So they come up with…

another approach to being an influencer, often through an animated figure, which has gotten a lot easier to do these days, thanks to AI.

@nevillehobson (05:47)
Yeah, so that’s a term worth paying attention to, faceless creatives. You’re going to see more of that in the future.

Shel Holtz (05:54)
And VTubers was the other label. These are the people doing this, particularly on YouTube.

@nevillehobson (05:57)
Yeah, VTubers, yep.

Yeah. All part of the change. So 472 on the 16th of July, that was about the evolution of trust. We talked about new research that reveals that B2B decision makers have increasingly recognized the importance of trust. And I must say, Cheryl, we did make the comment ourselves, are they still?

talking about this thing as if it’s a new thing. It does surprise me so many times when I see that. But we analyzed the data and explored some of the opportunities for communicators to enhance organizational trust. We have a comment, right?

Shel Holtz (06:33)
We do from Sarah Heard, who is just a brilliant content marketer here in the greater Bay Area, who says, huge thanks for this incredibly insightful podcast on the critical role of trust in business as a true driver of success and revenue. I couldn’t agree more that marketers and communicators are uniquely positioned to cultivate this trust. We’re not just shaping perceptions, we’re building relationships. There are concrete steps we can take to create a foundation of trust.

from transparent communication and authentic storytelling to consistent branding and content that delivers on its promise that can genuinely create customer confidence and loyalty.

@nevillehobson (07:13)
good one. That’s a good one. And finally, the episode immediately prior to this episode 473 that we published on the 22nd of July, we asked who should own the digital employee experience or Dex, D-E-X. We explore the case for internal communicators taking the lead, not IT. I haven’t seen any comments on that yet, Shell, but it’s a great, it’s a great topic, I have to admit.

Shel Holtz (07:33)
Not from that one yet. ⁓

A fascinating one and had a long discussion about it with a colleague at work. This goes back to this notion, I think, of message mission control, which I first heard from Pitney Bowes probably 22, 23 years ago. And it’s all about this notion that there are elements of the technology experience that really aren’t in IT’s wheelhouse.

@nevillehobson (07:52)
.

Shel Holtz (08:07)
I remember this was when I had just started consulting. I was talking to the head of IT at a tech company and he said, if anybody distributes an email to the pound all, so it goes to every employee, it has to be approved by him, the chief information officer. And my response, and I blurted this out to a client, right? Without even thinking how offensive it would sound first.

I said, really, does your printer approve everything that goes out to all employees as a printed memo? So, yeah, it’s a fascinating topic and one I actually agree with. I’m not 100 % convinced that it should belong in internal comms. I think maybe an ad hoc committee, an ad hoc task force that includes IT and comms and maybe a couple of others.

maybe users, but absolutely, internal comms should have a seat at that table.

@nevillehobson (09:01)
Okay, so that was that. I mentioned earlier that we have a new interview coming. just to mention that this drops on Tuesday, the 29th of July. And this interview is truly an extraordinary conversation we had with a senior, the equivalent of an executive, I suppose you could say, at the Vatican, Paul Tai, or Monseigneur Paul Tai, I should say, the broad

headline, I suppose, that gathers it all together as AI and human dignity. But it was quite a conversation we had. So you, I, you and me, plus, as you mentioned, Sylvia Cambier as our guest co-host, Sylvia was instrumental in securing this interview for FIR. And over a period of 40, 40 or so minutes, we talked with Monseigneur Tai that was centered around a document that the Vatican published earlier this year.

It was called Antiqua et Nova, and it is a reflection, if you will, on AI, in contrast to comparing it to human intelligence. And it focuses very strongly on ethical responsibilities tied to technological development and the Church’s mission to guide AI towards the common good. That’s summarizing it very, very simply.

But lots of topics within the broad subject matter. What makes human intelligence distinct in the age of machines and algorithms was one of the points we touched on the ethical responsibilities of those designing and deploying AI. Where does that sit? The impact of AI and dignity justice on the workplace. We had quite a few questions about the workplace, by the way, that are very pertinent as this, you know,

this technology, if you like, gets deployed throughout more organizations. And also, I guess, a point of helping understand why the church is involved in this, unique role in the global conversation on technology and humanity. So it’s not all about the tech, what about the people? So that was a really, really good conversation. So that will be published on Tuesday in around about 830am.

UK time, so that’s GMT plus one. And it’s definitely worth a listen, so make sure you do not miss that.

Shel Holtz (11:15)
It was a terrific conversation. Also had a great conversation on the last episode of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion with fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators and the July episode addressed leading the communications function, whether we’re talking about a chief communications officer or just a manager of communications.

maybe three levels down, which we certainly have in larger organizations, people leading teams, but also reporting up through the communications function. So that featured Russell Grossman from the UK, Sue Heumann from Canada, Mike Klein from Iceland and Robin McCaslin from here in the U.S. Great conversation. It’s up on the FIR Podcast Network right now. The next episode of Circle of Fellows is going to take place at

4 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 21st. The topic is on sustaining sustainability. How do we keep it front and center in our organizations? The panelists for that one will be Zora Artis from Australia, Brent Carey from Canada, Bonnie Kaver from the U.S., and Martha Muzyczka from Canada.

So that’ll be a fascinating conversation. There are definitely headwinds on the whole sustainability front and the whole corporate social responsibility front. So looking forward to that one. And now that we have addressed all of our housekeeping issues, it’s time to jump into our reports right

@nevillehobson (12:50)
Let’s start with a provocative development from the world of media relations, one that’s raised eyebrows in both PR and journalism circles. A Lithuania-based PR agency called Wellstone has launched a tool called Synapse, which uses AI to respond to journalist queries on services like Harrow, Quoted, or ResponseSource. Synapse shouldn’t be confused with UK-based PR pitching platform Synapse Media, a separate business.

Synapse Media has said it has instructed its lawyers to take action against Wellstone. So you get a sense of where that’s all going to go. But here’s how Synapse works. It reads a journalist’s request for comment, scours online sources, including books, reports and podcasts, and then uses generative AI to create two plausible, personal sounding responses. These include quotes and even made up anecdotes, all written to sound like they came from a real human expert. The PR professional,

simply chooses the version they prefer and copies it into an email. Wellstone claims this approach can quadruple output. They say one person can now do the work of five. The tool has been marketed with a one-time purchase price of $2,500. And while it’s still early days with no known customers, the ethical alarm bells are already ringing. Critics have called it unprofessional and deceptive. Alastair McCapra, CEO of the CIPR,

when so far as to say Synapse represents the very definition of unprofessional conduct. And in a comment on the press gazette supporting about this, Harrow owner Brent Farmelo said, every query on Harrow goes through AI detection and we permanently ban users who rely solely on AI to generate responses. The concern is that Synapse undermines trust, both in PR and journalism, by introducing fictionalized AI generated content

into a process that relies on authenticity and credibility. What’s more, it risks creating a layer of misinformation. If AI generated quotes are published as if they came from real people without fact checking or disclosure, the implications for journalism, public discourse, and the integrity of media coverage are quite serious. So the big question is this, as generative AI becomes more capable and more accessible,

Should PR professionals lean into automation for efficiency or are we crossing a line where convenience erodes trust?

Shel Holtz (15:16)
Oh, we interviewed Aaron Quitkin, the founder of Profit PR, both in caps. So it’s public relations, Profit. And it was using AI before OpenAI released the Chachi PT. It was at 2.5 to the public back in November of 2022. And it automates the process.

@nevillehobson (15:17)
Ha ha ha!

We did, a couple of years ago.

Shel Holtz (15:44)
And I didn’t hear anybody sounding any alarm bells over that. For those who don’t recall or weren’t aware, the way Profit works is that if you have a press release or a pitch, it will find all of the journalists who write about that topic and then tailor a pitch to each journalist based on the approaches they’ve taken to the topic. It’ll actually read

what they have written and tailor a pitch. then same as with Synapse, it will allow you to copy and paste that pitch and send it to that journalist. This is automating a process. It improves your productivity and your output and nobody complained about it. I can see some of the concerns around Synapse, but on the other hand, we talked about Harrow, which

Peter Shankman started and then sold. He’s got another one that he has started because he didn’t like what happened to Harrow. But in any case, they’re banning people who purely use AI. Well, if you’re a PR person copying and pasting the output from Synapse and simply sending it, then being banned is on you. You should never do that with any output from AI, whether it’s a…

an email you’re having at Help You Write or an article you’re having at Help You Write, whatever you want to go through and at the very least heavily edit that to make sure it sounds like you, to make sure it says what you want it to, to add anything that’s missing, to delete anything that you don’t want going out. You would do this with an intern, right? You wouldn’t just send what an intern gave you. So I think that’s, I think bad PR practitioners.

@nevillehobson (17:21)
.

Shel Holtz (17:27)
are the ones who are going to simply copy and paste that. But is it fictionalized? Somebody said you’re fictionalized, but where is AI getting its information from? It’s getting it from what was in its training set. And there’s not a lot of fiction in there. It’s mostly knowledge that has been culled from the worldwide web.

And again, if you’re editing it to make sure that it does represent what you want to pitch, it should be fine. The one part of your report that made me sit up though is what they’re charging. Was that $2,500 a month?

@nevillehobson (18:05)
just a one-time purchase price.

Shel Holtz (18:07)
a one-time fee. still, you know, OpenAI has released its first publicly accessible agent. And listening to the process here, I honestly don’t think that there is any way that this is a sustainable business because I think I can create that. I can reproduce that for free with OpenAI’s agent capabilities.

@nevillehobson (18:28)
So

perhaps this is hence the, you know, hurry, hurry, this is a short term one time deal, get it now before he goes away type of approach. Interesting what you said. I thought about profit in passing, but didn’t really give it any. No, this is not the same thing I said to myself, but you’ve introduced it. So.

What I heard what you were saying was that this is the same thing as profit. I don’t think it is.

Shel Holtz (18:53)
no, no,

it’s not the same thing as profit, but it’s automating a PR process and.

@nevillehobson (18:58)
Right. But that this doesn’t look the same to me at all or similar. So just bear with me while I kind of think this through a little bit. You’re right. Profit came up this I think it was 2023. It have been 2022 we interviewed Aaron. That automates the process. So you tell it what you want and it gives you the text and the content and you can copy and paste into an email and just send it out.

without anything else, which is what this can do as well. This can also do, where you can edit it stuff if you want to, but it’s actually being pitched as you do not need to do that at all. And it’s being pitched as this little quadruple output, output. One person can now do the work of five. Ergo, you don’t need those other four people, right? Get rid of them, that’s save money. So I sense, I see the alarm centered around that. I’m not sure I agree with the criticisms about

basically saying this is unethical and we should not allow this to happen, et cetera, because, wait a minute, is profit like that? And I believe they are an ethical business. We interviewed the founder and have a high regard for him. I keep an eye on what developments are happening with profit. So I know a number of people who use that service. This is not the same thing it seems to me. Yet, your dismissal of it, if you like, is a valid point to make, I think, in this time, because

Things are moving so darn fast with AI that what you described with something like a chat GPT AI agent or whatever else is next around the corner is going to challenge this like nobody’s business. So who is the market for this? I wonder the company’s based in Lithuania. According to the press gazette, they’ve been on an email blitz around the agency world in London seeking sales, effectively the sales pitch emails.

The writer at PR Press Gazette got hold of one of those and the report, which is linked in the show notes, dissects that quite severely. So I can understand Alastair McCapper at the CIPR that saying this represents a very definition of unprofessional conduct. I wonder what Alastair would say about profit. I’m not challenging Alastair for anything at all, just wondering out loud in light of what you and I are just discussing.

Critics say this is unprofessional and deceptive. If the similarity with tools like profit are such that you give it the prompt, as we now call it, you prompt the tool and it gives you a response. You copy that and stick it in the email and send it out. So is that unprofessional and deceptive? To me, this is the heart of the wider debate about this, that embraces using generative AI.

write content and should you disclose it and stuff like that. I struggle in understanding those criticisms, frankly, because what’s the difference between a prompt to chat GPT and getting a response, then let’s call it a prompt to your contractor or your intern or your colleague. Hey, Jim, can you draft a first draft press release on this subject in this five bullet points? What’s the difference?

you’re using someone as a tool to assist you. And in the sense of this, you’re using this tool as a means to assist you in achieving your goal. That said, equally can see why it attracts such powerful emotive responses, because this is after all, all part of the wider picture about the robots are taking over, am I gonna lose my job and all those kinds of things. So I get that entirely.

And you can’t pacify that sort of worry by saying, this is a tool, that’s all. And it’s nothing to do with deceptive practice, because that’s not the perception that people might have. So I don’t know where this will go. Are we crossing a line where convenience erodes trust? And to many, the answer to that is yes. To others, maybe not. So I don’t know where this leaves its shell, to be honest.

Shel Holtz (22:58)
Well, you know, I think we’re seeing a lot of reactionary behavior when it comes to new AI tools. But in 10 years, God knows how much this will have advanced and we will be using these just as a matter of routine. I really don’t see step by step with Synapse where there’s a problem. I mean,

People can use tools deceptively and it doesn’t please me to know that they’re marketing it based on your ability to use it deceptively, but you don’t have to, right? You can abide by the code of ethics from PRSA or IBC or CIPR or what have you and use this ethically, but what is it doing really? I mean, I get Peter Shankman’s new version of Harrow. I subscribe to that.

So this would just read it for me. I do this with a service called Drip with all the AI focused newsletters that I subscribe to. I don’t have the time to read them all. So I have Drip get the subscription and I get a daily summary of everything that’s in them. That’s essentially what this is doing is going through these services and identifying journalists looking for quotes or interviews.

from something related to your client base or your organization. I’m looking for something where I can get our construction subject matter experts and thought leaders into the press. you know, occasionally something shows up. It just reads it for me. And then it goes out and it finds information that we can use to pitch that. Now I’m going to align that if I find it, if I were using something like Synapse.

I’m going to align that with our area of subject matter expertise and the work that we have done and the people that I would reach out to to be the interviewer, the source of the quote. All it’s doing is streamlining. And is it maybe going to lead to the need for fewer low level PR people to do all of this work? Maybe that’s where we’re headed with this. I think we have to deal with that and and associated with that, by the way.

we have to deal with how are we going to bring people into this profession if the entry level work is being shoved off to AI. But I absolutely see it. I I’ve used the OpenAI agent to identify podcasts that I should be pitching, recognizing the importance of that in AI optimization. I want to get our subject matter experts onto podcasts. So I said, go to our website.

understand our markets, understand our areas of specialization, then go find podcasts related to construction, to the AEC industry, and to the markets that we serve, and visit their websites for those podcasts, find out if they have a policy or a process for pitching guests, and then put it all in a spreadsheet for me. And I just sat back and watched while it did it.

@nevillehobson (25:55)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (25:56)
You

know, that’s something that I would have given to a lower level employee at some point in my career. Now I type a prompt. So deal with it. This is coming.

@nevillehobson (26:04)
Yeah,

it is. I think, though, there’s a couple of clues in the press gazette’s report, which I which I use primarily to come up with my own thoughts on this, particularly the part where I said in response to what I what I found out if I generated quotes are published as if they came from real people without fact checking or disclosure, then there are serious implications. Well, yes, but that applies to

everything you see out there if people do that. They take something generated or worse, someone else wrote it and let’s pass it off as their own. What’s the difference between that and an AI doing it? So that’s down to people’s behavior. The concern that Synapse undermines trust, as Press Gazette’s report talks about, by introducing fictionalized AI-generated content into a process that relies on authenticity and credibility. I stopped myself when I read what

they were saying and what the Lithuanian PR agency was saying too, that in fictionalized AI generated content, I don’t think that’s what people would be doing fictionalized, meaning it’s not fact, it’s fiction. I’m not sure what that looks like.

Shel Holtz (27:13)
Again, where

is the AI getting its information from? It’s from the training set.

@nevillehobson (27:17)
Right. it could be.

Yeah, exactly. there’s a lot of questions about this. Yeah, I do understand that the alarm bells that is ringing nevertheless. So how would how would they address that? I don’t know. think you PR professionals need to be very clear on what resources they’re using to do this. Follow those codes of conduct that you referenced. But this surely does come down to

belief in you’re doing the right thing, are you not? Or are you doing what people are alarmed about? Just copying and pasting and passing it off as genuine. That is in that case, you’re not a professional at all. So this is this is part of the shifts that are happening show that alarm the hell out of a lot of people. Yet this is the landscape, we have to figure it out.

Shel Holtz (28:06)
Well, let’s consider who’s actually going to use this unethically. And it’s the PR people that we have talked about on this show since it launched 21 years ago. It’s those who don’t align themselves with best practices in public relations. It’s people who hang out a shingle and say, do PR without having necessarily gotten a degree in it, without having

joined a professional association without having signed on to a code of ethics. And they do whatever they think they have to in order to produce results for a client, regardless of how unethical it is. And they’re the ones who are going to use this the way Synapse is pitching it. So this is a broader problem. The rest of us can use these tools, you know, sign on to the Venice Pledge, the…

the pledge that was developed by the Global Alliance around ethical use of AI by public relations practitioners and communicators. Pay attention to your own code of ethics and use these tools ethically. But I don’t see a problem with what Synapse is doing. I see a problem with the way they’re pitching it, but I don’t see a problem with the technology. I don’t see a problem with using this in an ethical way.

@nevillehobson (29:20)
Well, listeners, we’d love to hear your thoughts on that, so do share them with us, please.

Shel Holtz (29:25)
But we’ve been talking about this one issue facing PR agencies and the issue as it’s boiled down is it’s unprofessional for PR people to do it and it erodes trust that journalists may have in the PR practitioners that they’re connected with. Well, let’s talk about some other risks and missteps that PR professionals are navigating right now, even as their craft becomes

more critical and I’m going to talk about that a little bit more later in the show. But let’s start with phishing attacks from fake journalists. Yeah, you heard that right. Recent reporting from Axios confirms rising incidents where criminals impersonate reporters. They send what seem like legitimate interview requests or pitches to PR pros and clients alike. These scams jumped around 17 % since last September fueled by AI’s ability to assemble credible sounding emails.

using personal and outlet-specific details. These journalist phishing emails are not mass spam. They’re highly targeted, AI-generated messages that lure PR professionals or executives into revealing sensitive information or clicking links. In one case, attackers impersonated major outlets to pitch exclusive coverage, weaponizing publicly available data, like publication history and colleague names, to appear legitimate.

Now, the result of this is that PR teams are having to act as security filters as much as media liaisons. As experts advise, when a suspicious DM or email arrives claiming to be a journalist, the best defense is polite paranoia. Don’t click, don’t respond directly, forward it to your media relations team for vetting and verify the pitch through trusted context. Beyond phishing, PR professionals are also debating measurement frameworks.

and facing pushback on yet another measurement metric. Katie Payne, the industry’s measurement queen and a longtime friend, I got to know Katie really well through my involvement with the Society for New Communication organization. You and I were both fellows. right, Society for New Communication Research. Katie was heavily involved.

@nevillehobson (31:31)
research.

Shel Holtz (31:36)
Her message is that PR does not need another fancy metric. It needs better insight into what audiences actually care about, trust, and act on. Too many organizations still cling to vanity metrics like impression counts, circulation numbers, advertising value equivalencies. Katie argues that these are distractions. PR has to measure impact, not just volume, like shifts in trust perception, share of voice, or qualified engagement tied to business outcomes.

This critique resonates with ongoing efforts to move past outdated PR metrics. A group of major agencies recently announced they’re ditching impression metrics entirely in favor of readership-based analytics, thanks to platforms like Memo, which track actual article consumption and engagement across 10,000 publications. But this transformation requires education. Clients and executives are used to big numbers, even if those numbers don’t reflect meaningful impact.

Making the case for smarter outcome-driven communication means resetting expectations and elevating conversations beyond clicks or column inches. Anybody actually still measuring column inches? Finally, let’s touch on reputation fallout from misaligned values. Melinda French Gates, the ex-wife of Bill Gates and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

⁓ recently called out tech leaders who publicly support public political figures. And what she did was she claimed that they’re following advice from their communication teams. Now, when someone with that kind of stature starts reinforcing old tropes about PR, it just amplifies the perception. And it was particularly shocking considering that she worked in communications before she met and married Bill Gates.

So the third headwind PR pros now face involves values misalignment and reputational risk in high stakes public discourse. Melinda Gates, she’s a billionaire philanthropist now, recently criticized tech CEOs who have publicly aligned with former president Trump. This would be Mark Zuckerberg, for example. Her point is that some leaders appear to be pivoting away from their values not out of conviction,

but because a communication advisor told him it was the right thing to do. Here’s what she said in a podcast interview, word for word, we have all time should be living these values out and not pivoting to what some comms person tells us. Now this statement lands as a rebuke and caution for PR professionals. Authenticity matters more than it ever has. If executives act in a way that contradict their stated beliefs because it’s convenient or media safe,

That gap is increasingly noticed. Crisis communications today can become long-tail reputation erosion, but it’s also a reinforcement of an old negative PR trope. And when someone of Melinda Gates’s stature says it, it amplifies it tremendously and it doesn’t do us any good. So just to recap, we got to look out for phishing attacks that are aimed at PR people. We have to look at the measurement.

that we’re using because increasingly the old metrics don’t work. And we have to watch for these claims of what PR is doing that is harming society, which is I just can’t believe that a PR person is out there counseling their CEOs to align themselves with any political figure in particular.

So taken together, these trends suggest that PR’s future is just about placements. It’s about credibility, ethics, and strategic integrity.

@nevillehobson (35:16)
Yeah, a great collection of themes, I suppose, under the broad heading, you’ve got their shell and links to all those articles you could from the show notes. I guess the one that really struck me ⁓ was the phishing as reported in Axios. We’re seeing warnings almost daily from

certainly here in the UK from the the cyber security folks in the government, the government agencies who address this, particularly in light of awareness is high now. Following the cyber attack on Marks & Spencer, the big retailer that took them off that took the literature, the website down for ordering for three months, it’s cost of serious money. And it’s had a massive impact on their credibility to the extent that

latest league table show they’ve fallen from the top spot as the most respected retailer in the UK. For years, they’ve held that position. They’ve now dropped. So Waitrose or John Lewis, another big retailer, their supermarket Waitrose. So they usually be jockeying a position like this between the two and they’ve now taken the helm. And their troubles, by the way, are still not concluded. But this is interesting. Fishing in temperature on the rise,

Shel Holtz (36:14)
Who’s number one now?

@nevillehobson (36:31)
pointed that out more than 17 % since last September. 83 % of fishing males used AI and it’s hard to spot some of them. I’ve been hit with something recently that I did spot because it was just ridiculous, which was so, in fact, this actually slots more into the impersonation topic of someone claiming to represent a company.

just a quick bit of research made me even more suspicious. So I did nothing with it, but I’ve now learned that that was a phishing attempt. So you got to be on the ball with this. And I think tying it all up is this with the others you mentioned, and particularly the I did this because a commerce person told me to you think we in the profession need to get a grip on these issues. Is it do you think

Do we need just more training of people with that kind of thing? Certainly with phishing, this requires, I think, more than the profession is currently doing to alert people from two perspectives. One, the communicator as the counselor and advisor to the organization what to do about these things. But also as the more proactive role in helping probably more senior people, but probably everyone in the organization to

know what to have, what to do if you think you’ve been the victim here. And I’m not talking about these kind of slick, animated videos that a lot of companies tout and push out when when you they want you to do this, you know, online training and get awareness and learning about how to recognize these things. They I often wonder what true value do they have in helping people understand this issue of what to do.

So there’s that opportunity for communicators. But I do wonder though, with this, the other things you’ve talked about, that do we have the right skills in the profession, in the profession, to help communicators truly know what to do in these situations, or not? I wonder.

Shel Holtz (38:35)
I think it’s something that we have to learn if we don’t already know it. Cybersecurity, especially from an internal communications perspective, is becoming a routine and really important topic for communication. It is something that is extraneous to the work that most of our employees do. So getting their attention with it is hard. Where I work, we do

require people to do annual online training. And I think the good that it does is at least it creates some awareness for a while, but it’s a requirement. We can monitor who has taken it and not and reach out to the people who haven’t to say, you you need to take this. And then if they still don’t, we can reach out to their managers and say, you have people who haven’t completed the training. We do this around safety and workplace violence and workplace harassment too.

But it’s not enough. You need to keep a drum beat up. First of all, as new techniques emerge that we are aware of, we communicate those very short little articles and we get them out through multiple channels. We have our executives talk about it at the all hands meeting. We bring it up occasionally at the monthly operations meetings. And with all of this, even digital signage, really quick hit awareness.

campaigns. Even with all of this, there are employees who are not going to hear it. One thing that we’re doing to try to make people pay more attention is to say, everything that we’re talking to you about that can affect us here at our company can affect you at home too. So the same techniques are being used to get credentials from your personal accounts. so pay attention to this because it could save your

personal life, not just our company. So yeah, you’re right. We have to become conversant in cybersecurity and stay up to date on the latest trends, the latest data, the latest techniques, and find ways to break through the noise and to capture the attention of our audiences to make sure that they know about this. I have not seen IABC PRSA, PR Week, or anybody else talk about this.

fishing yet. This was an Axios report where I found it. So we need to get the word out.

@nevillehobson (40:53)
work to do. so continuing our theme of PR AI connectivity or disconnectivity, it depends on the topic and how see it. I’m going to shift to something that’s more subtle, but potentially transformative. How we write press releases in the age of AI. ⁓ So you have to kind of

Shel Holtz (41:10)
Are we still writing press releases? Yes, of course we are.

@nevillehobson (41:16)
bear with me on this while I introduce this topic with a throwback to something a few years back that some of some of you might remember, many of you probably would never have heard of it, but just bear with it. So let’s start with communicator and strategist Sarah Evans, who shared on her LinkedIn feed an emerging approach that positions the press release, not just as a tool for reaching journalists.

but as content designed for AI systems. Her argument is straightforward. Press releases today serve two audiences, she says, traditional media and generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. That means a press release isn’t just a story, it’s training data. It needs to inform and persuade not only human journalists, but also algorithms that summarize, reinterpret, and surface that content in response to user queries.

And for that to work effectively, releases need to follow a structure that’s both human readable and machine digestible. Evans suggests that the modern press release should still follow journalistic standards. For instance, AP style, clear sourcing and strong headlines, but also include structured formatting, clear language and trust signals that help AI tools understand and elevate the content.

On the points of style, by the way, if you’re in the UK, you’ll likely be using the Oxford Guide to Style, formerly known as Hart’s Rules rather than the AP Style Guide. Doesn’t matter actually, as long as you’re using one of those, that’s good. That might mean including prompt-like phrasing, definitive outcomes, and text that aligns with how AI systems pass authority and relevance. This approach recalls an earlier experiment. I mentioned this is coming at the beginning here.

The social media press release, the template introduced by Todd Deferin back in 2006, it reimagined the press release for the Web 2.0 era. Multimedia, bullet points and links instead of dense paragraphs. That idea didn’t gain as much traction as many hoped it would, perhaps because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. But in 2025, the infrastructure most definitely is, says Evans. AI tools are reshaping.

how people find, consume and trust information. Search engines are incorporating AI generators, summaries, news aggregators and research platforms use LLMs, large language models. If your press release isn’t visible to AI or isn’t written in a way that helps its surface, it might as well not exist, she says. So the conversation now is this, should we be writing for the journalists and the algorithm? And how do we do that while still maintaining journalistic integrity

clarity and credibility. There are challenges. Here are three. Lack of standards. There’s no defined schema for AI ready press releases yet. No equivalent of schema.org for PR. AI system opacity. We don’t fully know how LLMs weigh or interpret content from wire releases. And skepticism. As with social media press releases, some PR pros may dismiss this as overkill or gimmicky without clearer benefits or just

don’t care about it at all. So is it time communicators embraced this dual purpose writing style, or is it just another passing trend? Shell, what do you think?

Shel Holtz (44:38)
it is definitely time that we embrace this writing style. I think that it is incumbent upon the industry to come up with a schema and to share it. If there are people who don’t want to adopt this, that’s fine. And we’ll see how much their content shows up in AI outputs. It’s not just the press release, though. It is who carries the press release.

We’re going to talk about this in much greater detail in the next report, but just to telegraph that a little bit, what AI training sets look at and find credible is third-party reports, not what you publish on your own website. Most companies do have a repository of their press releases, we do, and it goes out on the wire from you, but what the AI looks at for

the sake of credibility is what publications have picked up that press release and written about it. And of course there are publications that will just publish your press release the way it is. They’re just looking to fill space and have stuff on their outlet. But the good ones are going to use it as a basis for original reporting. So it needs to be a good enough press release to entice that type of reporting. ⁓ For those who

just publish the press release the way it is, it’ll be really important for that press release to take a different approach to the point of your report. ⁓ One of the things that I understand AI looks for, the LLMs when they’re extracting the press releases and the content that the press releases were used to create from the media outlets,

What they’re looking for is less of the what we do and what we sell and what our products are and what our services are and more of the how, more process. So I think that’s a shift that we have to make in the angle that we’re taking when we’re crafting press releases. And I think that AI and this whole direction that we’re going,

has reinvigorated the press release. mean, people have over the last few years been talking about it as a relic and why are you doing this? You need to be using influencers and you need to be doing content marketing and press releases are so 50 years ago. AI has reinvigorated the value of the press release for just this reason.

@nevillehobson (47:06)
Yeah, I think that probably leads straight into the next topic, if you want to go straight to that shell, because what you say makes complete sense. And I’m glad you agree that we do need to pay attention to this as communicators and how we structure the information that we prepare for who we prepare it for primarily. Yes, the media. But that words, those two words actually have a different meaning today than they did even 20 years ago. Now we have this

complimentary thing called the algorithm that we need to create content for. And Sarah Evans actually included in her LinkedIn post, a rather neat LinkedIn style slide deck, you can’t download it or grab it, you can only scroll through it. That showed the schema structures that she proposes that could be where we go next with this to make it usable by AI systems. And I think that’s

That’s the bit that is key to this, is key to understanding the possibilities of this. So, and I like what you said earlier too, that the profession’s responsibility is to develop the schema for this. And that could be a great opportunity for professional associations to take a lead on something like that or one in particular. So that you have something that’s universal. And once you’ve got that, which I guess supports my feeling that

social media press release one of the reasons and may not be the most significant reason why it didn’t take off is there was no infrastructure to support it or making it easy for people to adopt it. I remember seeing back then version 2.0 of the template it didn’t get beyond 2.0 but when I saw 1.5 I then saw variations of that all over the place as people were adapting it to the knees then sharing what they did so utter confusion everywhere as to which was the valid one to use.

That I don’t think is likely to happen with this. The landscape’s completely different apart from anything else, but maybe the timing’s right.

Shel Holtz (49:00)
No, this is…

You don’t need infrastructure for this. All you need is a different approach to what you’re writing. You don’t need to create sections and have links to things that are uploaded. I remember Jason Keith, think his name is, had a press release distribution service that was focused on the social media press release. I don’t think it’s still around, but this is just the way you write it. It’s not a different…

@nevillehobson (49:07)
Right.

Shel Holtz (49:28)
infrastructure type approach to a press still self-contained narrative text. It just needs to accommodate AI optimization. So we will jump into my report on that. But first, we have a report from Dan York.

@nevillehobson (49:43)
Thanks, Dan. Great report on your topic about bypassing paywalls. That was really interesting. There’s another one to add to the ones you mentioned. I use this one. I use it for some time. It’s called Archive Today. Website address is archive.ph. And that lets me access a wide range of publications in the mainstream media. Financial Times, Wall Street Journal.

many, many others, New York Times, although I got a subscription to that, but I could do this if I wanted to. The only thing the only one it doesn’t work with that I discovered is PR week, I have no idea why this cannot get into that one. they are pretty good at it, at stopping people bypassing the paywall. But it’s a very interesting one. And it works all the time. It works flawlessly. Most of the other time. Also to mention you when you talked about

the Online Safety Act in the UK and verifying age to protect children from pornographic content. The UK communication regulator published a pretty neat explainer on how age checking works in the UK. It’s worth a look at. I’ve noticed a lot of comment in the last few days about people saying how easy it is to bypass this verification check. And so if that’s the case, they got to step up and fix that. Blue Sky,

introduced this this past week in the UK as part of this law. So the other day when I logged in in the morning, I was got a pop-up say I had to verify my age. My first thought was, well, you know a lot about me and I’m verified with you, so you know my age, but I get it. They have to go through this process. The third party provider that does it. You’ve got to photograph your driver’s license or a passport or some other government ID.

upload that file. And then the next step in the verification is either a really call it a picture of you that you share or check on a credit card. I chose the latter because that was the easiest one to do. And so I’m verified in that sense. I just wonder though, how, how truly robust that is in light of the criticisms. But it’s good that you had the topic in your report.

Shel Holtz (51:56)
Yeah, I have the same questions about age verification. The state of Texas here in the U.S. passed a law that it would be required for access to pornography sites, and it was challenged on First Amendment free speech rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas’s law. So it will be going into effect at some point in the relatively near future. So I don’t know what the mechanism is that they plan to use, but it wouldn’t affect

blue sky. It’s just for Pornhub and other porn sites. But it’ll be interesting to see how easy it is to get around those checks. So, I mean, you know.

@nevillehobson (52:35)
Yeah, that’s actually

an interesting point to make because in the UK, the UK online safety isn’t just about porn sites. It’s related to any content that’s age restricted according to the new law that’s been passed. So there is that difference in that case.

Shel Holtz (52:49)
Yeah, and I agree with Dan 100 % about paywalls in general. Now, I absolutely agree that media outlets need to make money. They can’t afford to hire reporters to go out and do this work, this vital work without revenue. Yet most of these sites, I use just…

Occasionally, something will show up in a feed and I want to read that article maybe because I want to write about it. Maybe I want to include it as a topic on FIR. And I can’t get to it because of a paywall. I like the sites that give you five or 10 free articles a month before the paywall kicks in, because that would be enough for me for the Financial Times, where I get maybe two or three articles a month that cross my feeds that I want to go.

take a look at so that I might incorporate that information into a report or even alert my leadership at the company I work for to this information. So I think this rush to paywall everything is, I understand it, but I don’t think it’s well considered the approach that’s been taken so far.

@nevillehobson (53:57)
I agree.

Shel Holtz (53:58)
Yeah. Well, let’s continue the theme from your last report, Neville, because public relations has become the linchpin of brand visibility in the age of generative AI search. Let’s start with a simple observation, ⁓ one that reiterates what you talked about just a couple of minutes ago. Generative AI systems, ChachiPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok,

Don’t just link to your content anymore. They generate answers that borrow authority from trusted sources. And who’s always built trust at scale online? That would be us, PR and communications professionals. Research from Search Engine Land underscores that AI-powered search engines increasingly rely on brand mentions, reputation, and authority signals retrieved from across the web.

That means that when AI answers replace blue links, it’s not keyword density or meta tags doing the heavy lifting. It’s earned media mentions and narrative consistency. Ginny Jitrich wrote about this, and she puts it bluntly, PR has always been about building trust and carrying that trust into every story or quote your brand participates in. Today, when AI synthesizes answers, it looks for those signals. And as she writes,

We’re telling the same clear story everywhere, so AI can’t miss it. That’s why disciplines like GEO, that’s Generative Engine Optimization, and AEO, that’s Answer Engine Optimization, are emerging. GEO aims to ensure your content actually gets cited to become part of the AI’s answer. AEO focuses on structuring content in a conversational, Q &A-friendly way so that AI can…

easily use it. And this is probably what’s going to find its way into a schema if a professional association gets around to sharing that. But no matter how well designed your website is, AI models still prioritize third party editorial sources. And of course, as I mentioned before, a lot of people who get a press release are going to use it as a foundation for their own original reporting. Muckrax 2025 report.

highlights that over 95 % of AI-cited links are from earned media, not owned or paid content. And these citations actually reshape the entire answer AI gives. If your PR team isn’t securing coverage across high-quality publications, journalistic outlets, podcasts, analyst quotes, your brand won’t surface in those AI-generated answers, no matter how much of it you’ve published on your own sites. For example, when people ask generative AI something like,

best web design firm in Chicago, what really makes Orbit Media or others show up is repeated brand coherent mentions in reputable publications written by journalists consistent in message, quoted accurately. That’s what we do. And it’s the accelerator for AI visibility. So I’m increasingly seeing PR agencies evolving from just earned coverage into source engineering, designing narratives and placements that feed the machine.

As a recent piece puts it, strategic PR teams are no longer just telling stories, they’re engineering the data that AI models pull from. In practical terms, here’s what working PR teams are doing differently in 2025. First, they’re prioritizing earned media in authoritative outlets, not just for backlinks, but because AI is trained more heavily on sources like AP, Reuters, respected trade publications, industry podcasts. That placement leads directly into AI visibility.

Second, they’re applying semantic consistency across channels. The brand name, executive titles, and narrative themes are repeated. Third, they’re auditing the machine’s brand view, monitoring not just media coverage, but what AI knows about your brand and its outputs and adjusting messaging accordingly. Fourth, they’re structuring content for both people and algorithms. Clear metadata, Q &A formats, concise summaries that serve both readers and AI ingest pipelines,

And fifth, they’re geographically targeting their public relations for local news placements that can lift visibility and AI answers for place-based queries. For local businesses, this is a powerful, though under-leveraged lever. Meanwhile, TechRadar and others report that younger audiences rely on AI chat or conversational interfaces instead of Google, undercutting traditional SEO and forcing a rethink of discoverability strategies.

Brands now need structured, accurate, and syndicated data, often via knowledge graphs, to feed AI systems and prevent misinformation or omission. Startups like Profound, Athena, and Scrunch AI, got to love some of these names, have emerged to monitor and influence brand visibility inside large language model outputs, an entirely new tech niche built around this shift. And yes, PR agencies still matter, even with AI tools that can draft press releases,

because AI can’t build journalist relationships, craft narratives for trusted outlets, or manage timing and nuance the way humans do. Again, you gotta have the human in the loop. It’s just that AI lets you focus on these things. As one article put it, while AI can help with execution, it lacks the insight and relational intelligence that PR professionals provide. In short, public relations is no longer just a support for marketing. It’s the foundation of visibility in AI search.

@nevillehobson (59:33)
Interesting. There’s a lot to absorb in what you’ve been outlining, Shell. I was actually was reading Jeannie Dietrich’s piece. Very interesting what she lengthy assessment of breakdown of the topic. But a couple of things she mentioned really stood out. And these are dead simple things. We know this under the heading. This is PR’s moment. I love that a lot. We don’t need to pivot, she says. We need to step up. And she’s absolutely right.

So she mentions that how AI is rewriting how attention, reputation, discoverability work, but the fundamentals haven’t changed at all. Trust matters, relevance matters, authority matters. These are the currencies of the AI era, she says, and they are the currencies of PR. She also mentions, and I was glad to see this, the PESO model in the context of all of this. I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism in recent months about PESO and how it hasn’t…

adapted to the changes we’re seeing in all this. I don’t agree with that, but I’ve not looked into it in depth, the comments that I’ve seen. But Jeannie notes that the Pace and Model campaigns are designed for human audiences and for LLMs to find, interpret and share accurately. So you don’t have to imagine for long, it’s already happening, she says, if you were wondering what is actually going on. AI is the interface through which people get information.

PR becomes the operating system that powers accurate brand aligned answers. Great visualization of that. can see that actually. Those who understand how to feed the system through trust, relevance, and strategic visibility will lead. So I think that’s a good take on the changes that we’re seeing happening in front of our eyes almost daily, that what actually matters. And it’s not about pivoting either. We just need to step up.

Shel Holtz (1:01:20)
Yeah, absolutely. And this is the type of thing where we need to get educated. And again, you know, who’s responsible for that? At some level, we have to be accountable to ourselves, but that requires awareness. And I think generating awareness, again, among those many PR people who just show up for work in the morning and go home at night and they do their jobs and they’re not reading trade publications and they’re not participating in webinars.

They’re not reading what their professional associations are sharing. Somehow we have to get this information to people or, you know, frankly, what’s probably more realistic is that the people who do pay attention will succeed and those who don’t will fail and just fall off the tree.

@nevillehobson (1:02:06)
That applies to so many things, doesn’t it? So really good analysis there. Let’s take a look now at what’s really changing in social media with a shift in purpose, according to two reports I read this week. Social media has entered what may be its most profound period of change since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, they say. What’s happening isn’t just about new platforms or features.

is about a shift in what social media is fundamentally for. Take Metta’s recent positioning. Mark Zuckerberg now describes Facebook and Instagram not as social networks, but as platforms for discovery, expression and entertainment. Kind of trips off the tongue, it? DEE, discovery and expression and entertainment. The implication is clear. Yeah, DEE, yeah. The implication is clear, reported French.

Shel Holtz (1:02:50)
D.

@nevillehobson (1:02:55)
Tech media outlet Rude Baguette, I just love the name of this publication show, I really do. They publish really good content though, I have to say in English and in French. According to Rude Baguette, these are no longer places to connect with friends or share personal updates. In fact, meta says only 17 % of content on Facebook and just 7 % on Instagram comes from people who users actually know. The rest is AI curated, creator driven.

and algorithmically optimised to keep people scrolling. This represents a huge cultural pivot they say. Social platforms are now more like streaming services than networks. People use them not to connect, but to consume. And from a communication perspective, that changes everything. This shift is reflected in emerging trends identified by the drum and others. Brands are posting less, but focusing more on quality, short form video, strong storytelling and emotional tone.

There’s growing emphasis on social search. Users now search TikTok, Reddit or chat GPT before turning to Google, if they even do. Private communities are gaining ground. Places like Discord, Telegram and closed groups like LinkedIn offer engagement where the feed no longer delivers. And authenticity, or at least a performative version of it, is winning. Think of Duolingo’s chaotic TikTok presence when they killed off their owl logo.

didn’t phase anyone and their ⁓ presence on TikTok is in the millions following that, that didn’t decline at all. Think about the irreverent tone of Ryanair’s social media team. We’ve talked about Ryanair on this podcast before, Shell, and they insult customers, they do all this stuff and people love it. So their presence across social networks is increasing literally day by day. So that is a shift where you

normally would expect you to be totally aware of treating with the customer. The customer is always right. And those kind of differential relationships, not anymore. And people seem to like this. And there are two brands who are gaining from that. So this is not simply evolution. It’s reinvention. The feed is no longer a channel for personal expression or connection. It’s a content platform. For communicators, that means rethinking everything from platform strategy and influence selection.

to brand voice and metrics of success. So the question is this, if social media is no longer about being social, what is the role of communication professionals in shaping visibility, trust and conversation in the new landscape? Or put it another way, if social media is now more like Netflix than a network, what does that mean for how brands and communicators show up?

Shel Holtz (1:05:41)
It’s a great question because communicators, public relations in particular, is historically late to the game with new technologies. So how good are we at identifying and managing these shifts and adapting to them? First of all, I just want to say that I think the worst prediction that a lot of us made

was that social media was going to be a wonderful thing. The public commons giving everybody a voice. Boy, were we wrong. Were we naive about that? We did not anticipate the algorithm and getting people to doom scroll for every spare minute they have and even some minutes that aren’t spare. You see people at their desks at work doing that. So.

@nevillehobson (1:06:13)
Yeah. ⁓

Shel Holtz (1:06:26)
It was just a wrong prediction and I’m sorry I made it. But it’s true. It has become a streaming service. It is as Mitch Joel would say along with and not instead of because I still use social media for personal connection and the people that I am connecting with are doing it too. But as you noted, that’s just 17 % of what’s happening out there.

And yeah, when I do go to my feeds, interjected amidst those people that I do see whose comments to me or a post about something I’m genuinely interested in in their lives because of that personal connection, intermingled with all of that is what you said somebody characterized as the equivalent of streaming media. And how many videos do I end up watching because of that?

It is something where we need to make that adjustment and it requires being on top of the trends. And this trend isn’t going to last forever, forever either. I mean, nothing does. So especially with the shifts we’re seeing in media. So it is incumbent upon us to stay on top of these changes, even though, you know, I mean, this has been this has been occurring over time. This isn’t something that was a sudden

veering of the approach that the social media outlets have taken. This has been a very gradual shift that we now find ourselves at. I don’t want to say the end of it because it is probably an ongoing change, but we find ourselves where we are. And if we want to produce the kind of outcomes that our clients and our employers expect of us, we have to accommodate them. Otherwise, we’re just talking to ourselves out there.

@nevillehobson (1:08:08)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it got me thinking, I have to admit, that final question, because I’ve been thinking about that. what does it mean for how brands and communicators show up if social media is now more like Netflix? And add to that the shifts, examples I mentioned about Duolingo and the chaotic TikTok presence or the tone of Ryanair’s social media team on their activity on social networks.

not everyone else does like that, but they’re benefiting from it in their niche with their type of audience. mean, there multiple questions arise from that. it ethically right thing to do? What about others in the organization? How do the employees feel about it and things like that? So I think it would be difficult to say, to answer the questions, what does this mean for our brands and communicators show up, show up, get to understand how it works and

what you’re going to do about it, what it means to you and your brand. I mean, I can’t think of a simpler way of saying that. And certainly not going to sit here and try and say, here’s a detailed assessment of what you should be doing. You need to understand the shifts that are happening. You need to realize that this is transitional and this is not permanent in the detail. But the fact of this is likely to be long term. The old days that you described

with fondness of the past where everyone did engage and we welcomed it. We evangelized it 20 years ago. We wanted everyone to be online and sharing their lives. And like you said, Cheryl, I sometimes slap my forehead and think, what have we done? So it’s actually influenced me hugely in where I’m no longer online. And where I am online, what am I doing there that’s

very, very different to what I was doing 10 years ago, even five for that matter. So things are shifting. I’m an observer more than an active protagonist on this stage, simply because my interests and needs have changed from what they were five years ago. But I look at developments like this, I find this one quite fascinating as another step in the evolutionary movement we’re at. I think

The only thing I could say is precisely that. Understand how this is. Figure out how you’re going to behave in this and get to it.

Shel Holtz (1:10:37)
There is a blurring line between public relations and content marketing now, because content marketing’s approach to things is what we need to be looking at on a lot of these social networks. Now, it used to be about building relationships, which is strictly a PR activity. But now it’s because it’s streaming. Essentially, we need to be creating great content.

that fits the ethos of each of those networks where we’re participating. So it’s incumbent upon communicators to understand the content marketing component of their job. Part of that is perhaps moving away from social media or adding non-social media channels to the mix. So…

Picture the CMO, the chief marketing officer of a major fashion brand flipping through Instagram and thinking, is this really how I’m supposed to build a loyal relationship with Gen Z? So instead, she launches a newsletter on Substack and suddenly she has a sent to inbox channel where real conversation is possible. Brands are increasingly turning to Substack, not just email newsletters, but Substack in particular.

Not because it’s just another email tool, because it offers control, community, and credibility. According to Marketing Brew, in mid-2025, brands such as Madewell, Tory Burch, American Eagle, Rare Beauty, and The Real Deal launched newsletters on Substack. These aren’t boring corporate updates. They’re cultural briefs, contributor channels, founder stories, and stylist features that appeal to audiences in ways that social media can’t replicate these days. For example,

American Eagles Off the Cuff is designed like a group chat with Gen Z, culturally tuned in, conversation driven, and not overly transactional. Within six weeks, it hit over 2,000 subscribers, even though most of the content was not product focused. Now, you may wonder why Substack? Morning Consult found that Substack users tend to be heavy news readers, younger, they’re Gen Z and millennials by and large.

They’re highly engaged and more likely to trust brand communication delivered via newsletter than via social media threads. Substack delivers a clean, distraction-free experience and a built-in discovery feed encouraging deeper engagement. So let’s look at Rare Beauty. This is Selena Gomez’s brand, and it created Rare Beauty Secrets on Substack, offering behind-the-scenes stories from product development to mental health summits. It’s less about selling lipstick

more about sharing values. The newsletter is clearly resonating with high open rates and a Discovery Feed subscriber rate growth around 17%. Brands like Hinge are also experimenting with immersive narrative series like No Ordinary Love, a five-part literary series that tells moving stories tied to their dating app mission. The key is compelling content, again, content marketing that feels human and original rather than promotional.

So what are PR and communication pros learning from this wave? Well, the Content Marketing Institute lays out best practices that fit neatly with public relations instincts, establish a consistent cadence, use authentic storytelling, design for readability, integrate content contributors, and above all, make the content about value, not selling, first. Additional analysis underscores a few crucial points.

You can’t treat Substack like a traditional newsletter tool. It’s a community platform intended for editorial quality, not emails disguised as ads. Partnerships matter. American Eagle brought on Casey Lewis, author of After School, as a guest editor that cross-pollinated subscribers and raised credibility for their off-the-cuff newsletter. And founders have to be voices in these newsletters. Brands with strong founder voices. Schoolhouse, Gia and others.

They’re using Substack to create intimate access and narrative continuity. It works particularly well when a founder or a key personality leads the newsletter, though always anchored under the brand’s umbrella. There’s even an editorial economics side to this. While brands generally keep their Substack’s newsletters free for now as part of building trust, platforms like Substack are pushing tools to help creators monetize, and brands might explore premium options down the road.

For independent writers, ad revenue is already a growing part of platform economics, but most brands are focused on nurturing audience relationships first. Substack itself continues to evolve. As of early 2025, it surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions, and it’s doubled down on audio, video, and community features like chat threads, making it more than a newsletter tool, but a branded content environment. From a PR lens,

You got to consider that newsletters reinforce brand voices and values. They let you lean into storytelling purpose and humanity. They give you control. There’s no algorithm deciding how far they’re going to boost it up. No reach penalties. And your subscriber list is yours. It’s discovery driven. Readers come via Substax ecosystem, not just your current audience. It complements earned media. You can fund earned coverage insights into newsletter narratives.

deepen stories and convert that attention into subscriber trust, and it builds owned engagement. Comments, replies, feedback loops that signal two-way connection. It’s not just broadcast. Now, of course, there are alternatives to Substack. is one, and there are reasons to consider them, but Substack does have first mover advantage in a suite of tool that seems to be resonating with important stakeholder audiences. For PR professionals, brand newsletters on Substack

represent a return to relationship based communication that these changes in social media that we were just talking about have led to. So if you haven’t reconsidered your newsletter or whether Substack fits your audiences, you should. It’s not just for essays or creators anymore. It’s increasingly home base for brands that want to be heard, not just seen.

@nevillehobson (1:16:53)
Yeah, that’s a good analysis. It is interesting. I’m on Ghost that offers a newsletter. I phrase it that way because the primary thing isn’t the newsletter for me, it’s the blog basically. But it’s given me insight into the content that people read from the newsletter. So I’ve picked up subscribers, which I have five times as many more as I had on WordPress. I never did anything.

WordPress to motor but that was a different platform. didn’t didn’t kind of accentuate that. I, I find from what I’ve researched myself even that the the you mentioned. Substack has first mover advantage. Yes, they did. But I’ve noticed that there’s a differentiator has emerged between places like Substack beehive is another one, and ghost of the type of person and what they talk about.

is attuned to one or other of the platform. Substack went through a phase early this year or late last year, I think, when they were accused of being anti-Semitic and they were hosting neo-Nazis and all this kind of stuff. People left them in droves. Many went to ghost. They probably recovered from that. But maybe that’s got a stigma that still surrounds them a bit, perhaps. find the thing that I find interesting too, Shell, about this in the bigger picture sense,

is this to me is like an evolution of blogging, of personal blogging that we had back in the day when CEOs didn’t do this really. And when one did, that was a big headline, when Richard Edelman stepped up. So the CEO of the Edelman PR firm and many others, this fulfilled something similar.

Shel Holtz (1:18:28)
Bill Marriott, remember,

Bill Marriott, remember, had a great blog.

@nevillehobson (1:18:32)
Bill

Merritt, absolutely. And of course, way before that, Bill, Bob Lutz, wasn’t it? Bill Lutz, Bob Lutz, General Motors, who was the kind of star writer in the very early days of blogging. The small block engineer used to write about a lot. I remember that. So, but I think the interest in this is the community building, you mentioned. This is not just something you send out, it’s designed to foster community.

And just speaking in my case, as a very tiny example as an individual blogger, I’ve noticed that with the newsletter that has fostered more engagement with readers. for me, what’s interesting is that’s happening more in direct personal feedback from a reader rather than the reader leaving a comment on the site via the newsletter, which is what you’d expect them to do.

I just haven’t figured out why that is yet, but I’m not too concerned because I offer a free newsletter is not a not a monetizable one. I’m not interested in doing that. And I’m gives me insights into the content. The point more than anything, though, is that this is a platform that is attracting more and more people like sub stackers, who traditionally would have potentially not shared stuff or if they did, it was via a blog or on LinkedIn or some other

closed group. Suddenly they are now controlling this on their own domain and building community on their own domain, which I think is an important element in all of this. Even some, I noticed some of the ones that are the handful I pay for. I look at some of the techniques they’re using to monetize, where they’ll offer something that is for paid subscribers only, and they’ll give you like 20 % of it, and you need to sign up to see the rest. Personally, I don’t like gimmicks like that at all.

But nevertheless, I get this is a different landscape than it was back then. So it’s good to see this. I have to say the growth of newsletters that are to do with building community, not just like you mentioned, just sending out an email as a marketing text. These are personal, engaging stories told by people who have a story to tell and do it in a way that people like and they’re willing to sign up for and in some cases pay for it. So I say.

more of this please on any of those platforms because this is what engagement really is about in my book.

Shel Holtz (1:20:52)
Yeah, of course, these are delivered to your email inbox. And I remember, what, about maybe 10 or 12 years ago, there were a lot of people predicting the death of email. had better channels with, I mean, internally, things like Slack and Teams are far better than email for a variety of reasons I won’t go into.

@nevillehobson (1:21:04)
Yes.

Shel Holtz (1:21:13)
We talk about email being a 60 year old technology now that has seen its best days. there were a lot of them. Remember there were companies that were going no email except for dealing with outside like clients and vendors and the like who relied on it. But no internal email was allowed anymore. And there were companies doing no email Fridays. They were gearing themselves to prepare for an email list.

@nevillehobson (1:21:26)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:21:41)
future. And that has gone right out the window. ⁓ Email is as important and alive as it ever was.

@nevillehobson (1:21:51)
That’s true. So we’ve talked about a lot of interesting stuff in this episode, Shell, and I hope listeners will share their thoughts on anything we talked about.

Shel Holtz (1:22:00)
And there are many channels available to you to do that. The one that we are getting most of our comments from these days is LinkedIn, where we share the dropping of new episodes, give you a little information about what it’s about and a link to it. And people are leaving their comments there. So please feel free to do that. We also share on other social media channels and we check those for your comments.

@nevillehobson (1:22:04)
Emo!

Shel Holtz (1:22:29)
We have our show notes on the FIR website at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. You can leave a comment there directly. We also have the FIR community on Facebook, which right now isn’t much of a community, but it is a place where we’re sharing new episodes. And some people occasionally will leave a comment there. We also hope that you will rate and review the show. You can also, by the way, send us an email to FIRcomments.

at gmail.com and we would love to play an audio comment if anybody would ever send us one again. We used to get a lot of those.

@nevillehobson (1:23:05)
did. Chris Hanson do come back please. Yeah she did.

Shel Holtz (1:23:08)
Yeah, she retired, so I don’t know how much

she’s interested in what we talk about anymore. Mostly Star Trek these days with Chris. Our next long form episode for August will drop on Monday, August 25th. So keep an eye out for that. But we will have short midweek episodes between now and then.

@nevillehobson (1:23:15)
Ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz (1:23:29)
And don’t forget the interview with Monsignor Paltai, which will drop this Tuesday the 29th. And that will be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

The post FIR #474: AI is Redefining Public Relations appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It has been more than 60 years since Marshall McLuhan told us that the medium is the message. The decades that have passed since then have done nothing to diminish the truth of McLuhan’s prescient statement. For today’s employees, the medium for most information is the digital interfaces the company provides. There’s an interface for the intranet, for email, for internal social networking and collaboration, for emergency alerts, for calendaring, and for all manner of resources employees need to get their work done.

What message do these interfaces send to employees? If they’re unified, consumer-grade, and make it easy to do the job, the message is one of caring. If they’re confusing, difficult to navigate, and result in frustration, employees can perceive that message as one of dismissal or even contempt. It certainly signals that the company doesn’t care.

Who should own the digital employee experience (DEX)? A number of recent commentaries have argued that internal communication should be at the helm, which may be counterintuitive in many organizations where anything digital is IT’s responsibility. We explore the case for internal communication’s DEX role in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode

From Baby Bottles to Employee Portals: Catching Up on the Internal Comms Shift Toward DEX
‘Employees feel capable and connected’: the vital role played by good technology in job satisfaction
Digital employee experience: why internal communications should care
Driving Employee Experience: The critical role of internal communications
5 Core Components of a Stellar Digital Employee Experience (DEX)
How to Build a Winning Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Strategy
7 Steps to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience (DEX)
A Blueprint That Binds: The First Principle of Digital Employee Experience

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Release. This is episode 473. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:07)
And I’m Shell Holtz. In the mid-90s, when intranets were still a novelty, I remember being asked by clients, shouldn’t IT own the intranet? I mean, it’s the technology. It’s sitting on servers, right? And my answer then is the same I’d give today if someone asked whether IT should own the digital employee experience. No, it shouldn’t. And here’s why. Digital experience, DEX, isn’t a text function. It’s a people function.

And that makes it a communication function. And I’ll explain in more detail right after this. So what do we mean by DEX exactly? The folks at Step 2 define it as the sum total of digital interactions within an employee’s work environment. That includes the tools they use, the systems they navigate, and the way those tools make them feel. Frustrated, empowered, ignored, engaged. The emotional response to the digital workplace matters.

A report from the Guardians Digital Workspace Reimagined series points to research showing that when technology works seamlessly, employees feel more capable, more connected, and more engaged. But when it doesn’t, when systems are confusing, slow, or fragmented, it undermines productivity, it increases burnout, and erodes trust. In other words, all that stuff internal communicators are supposed to be helping to prevent.

For years, we’ve treated tech as the exclusive domain of IT and experience as the domain of HR. DEX occupies a space that’s weirdly in between, but the tools themselves don’t create the experience. It’s the communication that does. As NextThink notes in its blueprint for DEX strategy, digital friction is often the result of inconsistent onboarding, poor internal messaging, or an absence of user feedback.

you know, things that communicators deal with all the time. Let’s consider just a few of the moments internal communicators already touch. Tool rollouts, you teams migration drama, that was all on us, right? Crisis response platforms, knowledge hubs, portals, intranets, resource centers, company-wide surveys, training and onboarding flows, and every digital touch point where an employee needs to find, understand, and act on information.

Those aren’t IT problems, they’re communication problems. And the solution isn’t just better user interface, it’s better communications design. The digital experience is the employee experience these days. Haystack’s research on DEX found that poor search, slow load times, confusing navigation, and content irrelevance are among the top frustrations employees have with their digital tools.

But it’s not the existence of those problems that should concern us. It’s the absence of a communication strategy to fix them. A lot of organizations still treat digital like a delivery mechanism. It isn’t. It’s the environment itself. In a LinkedIn essay, a fellow named Richard Aze, and I hope I’m pronouncing that right. It’s spelled A-Z-Z-A-E, wrote this. said, and by the way, the name of his essay was from baby bottles to employee portals.

He said the communicators need to think like experienced designers. That means looking at every step of a user’s journey, from logging in to locating critical tools and asking, does this build confidence, trust, and clarity? If it doesn’t, it’s not just a bad experience, it’s bad communication. So what do we do about it? Let me run through five quick things that communicators can do to step up and take ownership, or at least partnership, in DEX.

And the first is to get a seat at the DEX strategy table. That means partnering with, collaborating with IT, HR, facilities, and ops to advocate for employee needs. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to know how people feel. Second, conduct experience audits, not just content audits. Where are people getting stuck? What’s hard to find? What confuses them? Look at journeys, not just assets.

Push for user-centric intranet and app design. That means fewer org chart-driven pages and more task-driven layouts. Nobody should need to have to figure out where to go to find the information they need. It should be intuitive. Advocate for feedback loops. ScreenCloud and Populo both stress this. DEX isn’t static. User analytics, sentiment analysis, and real-time feedback are necessary to continually refine the digital experience.

@nevillehobson (04:33)
You

Shel Holtz (04:49)
And finally, make DEX a KPI. If your team isn’t being measured on the usability and impact of digital tools, you’re flying blind. Start tying your work to adoption, retention, and satisfaction metrics. I remember an HPR article from maybe 15 years ago. was something like the 10 IT decisions IT shouldn’t be allowed to make. In this case, think collaboration with IT is the key.

But turning this over entirely to IT-Nevel, it strikes me as being no different than turning the design of a magazine over to your printer, which nobody would do.

@nevillehobson (05:31)
No, I agree. But I mean, what you’ve outlined, I remember those days too, back in the 90s, as it would have been actually, even starting in with the 80s. I can remember a conversation when I worked at Mercer in the late 80s with the IT department, who objected strenuously to the introduction of Mac computers into the office for desktop publishing. So control freakery continued. To be fair to IT, though, I would say that they are an invaluable partner.

in the implementation of this successfully in an organization. And the Guardian has a good article that you had in the links, that’ll be in the show notes actually, talking about how employees feel capable and connected due to good technology and job satisfaction. And so having the right tech. And by the way, your explainer of what is DEX is great. But if you’re in…

the computing industry in some form. If you’re in mobile tech, if you’re in IT, DEX, typically the first thing you see if you search on the term is Samsung DEX, which is, ⁓ no, I’m just looking at it. It’s actually digital experience, sorry, desktop experience. And it’s getting a lot of traction, a lot of visibility at the moment because of the release of all the new

Shel Holtz (06:37)
Digital exchange, isn’t it? No?

@nevillehobson (06:50)
mobile devices, notably the Z series fold and flip, that give you this DEX integration with your desktop. And it’s a big deal. It gives you all sorts of features on a mobile device that you didn’t have before now. So that’s a big thing. It also has a specific meaning in the crypto industry. DEX stands for decentralized exchange. So I guess the cautionary note here is not to assume

that everyone will know that it means a digital employee experience without an explainer, a clarity there to avoid anyone being confused. Say, I thought this was Samsung Dex. Hey, I’ve got crypto. It means this. So just for clarity of meaning. But that’s by the way, it’s a very interesting topic. And I think you set out a good assessment of it and the benefits of it. And I would agree with you. I think though.

I suppose my thought is focused on two things. One is it’s the employee experience. That’s the key part. This enables that to happen. The tech enables it to happen. But it’s not about the tech. To me, said similarly, and we’ve talked about this before, is you know, turn on lights, which are the electricity that lets you do all this stuff. The electricity is not the important thing to you. Might be to the attrition, but not to you. So this sort of

falls in that area, I think. But I would also say that, like many things in employee communication and other elements of organization communication, none of this is done in isolation. It requires the kind of connectivity between different parts of an organization to make it successful. But this is people we’re talking about. So you’re going to get people jockeying for control and all this kind of stuff. That’s inevitable, I suppose. And if you’re really, really lucky,

you will have an IT department to truly understands and recognizes their role is to enable you to do these things for the employees. So I remember, unfortunately, as I suspect you might too, too many that don’t do that. It’s a battle. But this is great. I mean, I think the some of the things in the Guardian pieces was what is in my mind, talk about the obvious things much of what you set out.

You know, it enhances engagement, performance and retention. I those things are the kind of common sense things that you think about. Although the flip to that would be that that requires investment in DEX tools and staff training. And so that’s got to be factored into this thing, too, which I suspect is at the heart of some of the issues where, you know, employee communicators set out a plan that sets up we want to do all this. They didn’t talk to the IT department who would have told them.

To do that, you need these six things and there’s a hundred thousand dollar budget required for that. So you need to talk to each other. Each party needs to be open with each other about plans and not focused only on, don’t want those guys interfering. This is my domain and I’m going to make sure I control that, which is what happens. So I think the pros and cons of this, or the pros in particular, are pretty self evident. You’ve outlined most of them, think, Shell. So it’s an interesting thing that

this gap between the tech side and the employee communications, I still seems to exist in organizations today. And I find that really disappointing.

Shel Holtz (09:56)
Yeah, think I hear about the acrimony between IT and communications from colleagues in other companies. I’m not suggesting that IT is an adversary here. In fact, they are your partner. They are absolutely essential. As printers were back in the day when that was our only means of getting content out.

@nevillehobson (10:09)
Good. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (10:19)
to employees and to a lot of other audiences and graphic designers too. I think it is really just a question of sitting down and hammering out who’s responsible for what in that partnership. again, I see a lot of communications departments that simply abdicate the interface for all of this to IT and IT in many cases abdicates that to the vendor.

It’s just the interface that we’re getting. And the fact that it makes it difficult for employees to find and use information is absolutely problematic. And I think that’s a communication challenge. That’s a communication issue. As I say, we controlled the design of the print publications. We, in most cases, controlled the design of websites.

as we created those for our organizations. The service certainly didn’t do the design for you. Some of them may have had contractors that they worked with who would do it for a fee, but they understood that a designer was necessary for that. And I think it’s just defaulting to IT to create the interface for the various

digital tools that employees use to access and use information. And I really think that a partnership with communication would improve that. And most of what I’m seeing in the research and this surge of content about DEX and the communicator’s role in it seems to support that. So I guess what I’m suggesting isn’t that you go to war with your IT department. It’s that you…

@nevillehobson (11:55)
No, no.

Shel Holtz (11:56)
take responsibility for this and start working very carefully and closely with them.

@nevillehobson (12:03)
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And that’s exactly what I would say as well. It causes easier to do that now. So for instance, you probably you need to look at this way, in my view, that you need to think you’ve got to make a case to the IT department for what you’re doing. That’s not about you ask for their approval. That’s not that’s not what it means. It’s being very transparent. This is what we have in mind. And you’re not going to be saying this is what we’re going to do. This is we have in mind. And you lay out what your plan is. And you have tools that will help you know

to present that and what to ask your IT colleagues. ChatGPT will be a great tool to use for this to construct your case that you make to discuss with them and you have a discussion with them. And if you’re lucky, you’ve got a colleague on the IT side who has similar mindset thinking of how to go about this and you’ll coincide and things should be quite smooth, right?

Shel Holtz (12:51)
Yeah. and it’s the same with rolling out new IT tools. I’ve worked with organizations where communicators didn’t even know a new tool was coming. And IT just rolled it out. They flipped a switch and said, here it is, everybody. This is the new tool. Here’s a link to the user manual. And that was about it. As opposed to a marketing campaign to drive adoption and support and help people understand why the change has been made, you know, that’s marketing, that’s communication.

@nevillehobson (13:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Shel Holtz (13:17)
That’s why partnership is so

@nevillehobson (13:20)
Exactly. So you both sides need to have clarity there. That would avoid that kind of thing. One other point to mention that the Guardian piece talks about, and I agree with this, I remember this being a kind of a matter to be sure you address on every single bit of involvement I’ve ever had with introducing technology to organizations over last 20 years or so, which is the simple reality today, employees expect work tech to match the quality of their personal tools.

And that too often isn’t the case. mean, I remember not recently, within the last year, let’s being in a company talking about a project we were working together on, they just happened to observe looking around their office and everyone had these clunky old, I you could tell the thick laptops with huge like two inch bezels all around them. I mean, that’s late 90s even, you know, it’s really ancient technology.

And people always complained there about these slow networks and getting IT support was a nightmare. So they had a big problem with that, which is where you get people doing things that, you know, they’ll wait till they get home to work on documents because they got a better computer at home. And now, of course, that isn’t the case. There’s no there’s no but but nevertheless, that’s still a big expectation of people that they expect the tech to match the quality of their personal tools because most people have good quality personal tools.

Shel Holtz (14:34)
Absolutely. And in fact, where I work, we just recently migrated from the internet platform that was in place when I started there back in 2017, which had a clunky interface and their mobile solution was just awful. It was almost an afterthought. And how important mobile is in the internal communication space these days. And we have migrated a new tool that has a consumer grade.

mobile app. now we’re in the process of driving adoption of it because people aren’t in the habit of checking mobile for their internal communication needs other than maybe email. But the people who start using it have reported really liking it. And it’s because it’s as good as what they’re accustomed to using for external purposes. So it really does matter. That’s part of that digital employee experience.

@nevillehobson (15:23)
It does. It matters a great deal.

Yeah, DX.

Shel Holtz (15:28)
Yep, that particular DEX and that will be a 30 for this particular episode of for immediate release.

The post FIR #473: The Digital Employee Experience is the Message appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

New research reveals that B2B decision-makers have increasingly recognized the importance of trust. The study also showed that companies that measure trust as a board-level KPI are over three times more likely to report more substantial profits than those that don’t, yet only 22% of companies state that trust is a board-level KPI.

In this brief midweek episode, Neville and Shel analyze the data and explore opportunities for communicators to enhance organizational trust.

Links from this episode:

IPA | New IPA/FT global study reveals trust is a powerful business driver
2025 Edelman Trust Barometer

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 472 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:08)
And I’m Neville Hobson. A new study from the Financial Times and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the IPA, explores trust, not as a vague ideal, but as a measurable strategic asset. And their findings are quite compelling. Trust, the report shows, is now one of the most powerful drivers of profit, customer acquisition, brand strength, second only to product or service quality. But alongside this, the research highlights a growing trust gap.

the space between what customers, clients and partners expect from brands and what those businesses are actually delivering. That gap has real commercial consequences, reduced loyalty, slower growth, weaker brand equity and ultimately lost revenue. So what can businesses do about it? The report outlines five key pillars of trust, competence, reliability, integrity, intent and communication, all of which can be measured and managed. It encourages businesses to treat trust

as a board level priority, not an afterthought. What’s interesting is that these pillars combine both rational and emotional dimensions. Trust, after all, is as much about how people feel as it is about what they know. And in B2B settings, where buying decisions are complex, involve multiple stakeholders, and carry career level risk, trust becomes a critical shortcut to action. There are clear parallels here with Edelman’s 2025 trust barometer.

which painted a similarly stark picture of declining institutional trust, anxiety about misinformation and widespread concern over AI. In fact, Edelman reported that 85 % of respondents to their survey worry about losing their jobs to AI. The FT and IPA report picks up that thread and takes it further, showing that while many companies are adopting AI, very few business decision makers actually trust the content it generates.

Just 9 % of those surveyed said they trusted generative AI. And 92 % said that if a company misuses AI, would have a profound negative impact on their trust. What emerges is a strong case of putting trust back at the center of how we plan, communicate, and lead. For communicators, that means treating trust not as a reputational buffer, but as a long-term asset, something to measure, manage, and embed across every part of the brand experience.

When I first looked at this report’s findings, I thought that surely there cannot still be such a trust gap as we’ve been talking about trust gaps for years. Clearly there’s still work to do and questions to answer. Here are two. What role should communicators and marketers play in closing the trust gap? And how can we align intent and action in a way that actually strengthens trust rather than erodes it? Shell, thoughts?

Shel Holtz (02:57)
tons of them. First, I’m just stunned that we’re still talking about this. We’ve been talking about this on the show for as long as we’ve been doing the show, but it predates that. I I remember when the IEBC Research Foundation produced one of those academic level studies on trust. And that was supposed to be a catalyst for everybody to be able to resolve all of this in their organizations. And here we are.

@nevillehobson (03:06)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (03:22)
Yeah, there are certainly a lot of reasons that trust remains an issue. think people don’t trust each other if they are on opposite sides of a polarized political equation, for example. I think, as you mentioned, not being able to trust the authenticity of content that you see or even people that you see is problematic. So, yeah, I think…

For communicators, there is a lot that we can do. And in fact, we may be the drivers of this in some organizations where it’s not already being taken seriously. And I have to tell you where I work, it’s already a board level issue. And there are task forces and committees that have been convened.

by people at the highest levels of this organization to identify the things that drive trust, both internally and externally. There are actually separate committees looking at each of those. There have been surveys and studies, and it is based on the recognition that trust is a driver of business. There are jobs that we win that we are convinced that we are winning, not only because we submitted a great proposal.

but because we have worked with a client before and we built trust on the previous engagements. And that’s why we tend to hammer this idea of every opportunity you have to build trust with a client on a project, you do that because that’s going to help us maintain that client and get that repeat business. But if you’re in an organization that’s not taking that approach, that is not

dealing with trust at that board level, I think it’s up to the communicator to point out why it should be a board level issue or an executive committee level initiative to connect the dots between that trust gap, which can also be looked at as an integrity gap. If you look at the definitions, I what is the definition of trust? I remember in that IEBC Research Foundation study,

I think they said that the simplest definition of trust is the belief that somebody will do what they say they will do. Comes down to that. What is integrity? It’s that say do gap, right? I say one thing and do something different. If there’s no integrity, there’s no trust. So I think elevating this issue to that senior leadership level so that they start to see it as a strategic imperative and as an asset.

an intangible asset. We’ve had intangible assets before, reputation and goodwill have both been counted as intangible corporate assets that are factored into a value of an organization, say during an acquisition. So yeah, the start is making sure that the leadership of the organization takes it seriously and then it’s driving it into the organization, sharing examples, making sure that

People understand when you won business the role that trust played in winning that business and in equipping employees with the information, the knowledge, the tools, and the resources that they need to understand how to build trust both internally and externally. This should be top of mind for every communicator and every organization.

@nevillehobson (06:46)
sense. You mentioned your company has trust aboard level attention to KPI, let’s say. That’s interesting because take a look at some of the findings of this survey. That’s a big one. It says that companies that make trust aboard level KPI are three times more likely to report strong profits, 75 % more likely to gain competitive advantage.

But only 22 % of the companies surveyed for this particular port track trust at a board level, only 22%. There’s some other really interesting elements just to mention in the context of what you were saying there, Sheld. The trust gap is widening is one that struck me as kind of interesting. Particularly industries they cite, finance, insurance, tech, cybersecurity and property show the largest gaps between expected and delivered trust.

business news media ranked highest for trust outperforming all other sectors, including retail and utilities. Trust is a critical commercial advantage. We discussed that right at the outset here. It ranks as the second most important factor after product or service quality, driving business performance, sales, profit and acquisition. It’s now used as a marketing effectiveness metric in the IPA’s effectiveness data bank, having climbed from sixth to second place.

over 20 years. There’s others. Human connection still matters. This I found most interesting. 69 % disagree that trusting technology is the same as trusting a human. That’s an interesting one. Only 9 % of the respondents said they trust content generated by generative AI. 92 % said misuse of AI would profoundly impact trust. Those were highlight numbers that I mentioned in the introduction earlier.

I could kind of riff on this for quite a long time, Shell. some really interesting stuff here. Media context affects brand trust. I found that finding quite interesting. Gatekeeper media, as they describe it, example, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, significantly boost perceived trustworthiness of advertisers. That makes complete sense to me. Trustworthy. 60 % said they are now more likely to trust a brand when advertised in trusted media.

only 14 % trust UGC platforms with their personal data versus 75 % for FT. That is most interesting to me because they more likely trust a brand when advertised in trusted media. So that would say, I would say if you’re looking there at social network platforms that are jockeying for attention, dollars and growth compared to traditional media, puts those in the distrusted media bucket straight away by that definition.

X being the prime candidate. I mean, you look at this, you can see some clear signs of where you need to pay attention to. And this overall picture of trust, I think the interesting thing is, and this to me is linked to the board level KPI interest of what trust means to them. We are in a climate, a huge climate of exceptionally big distrust and indeed mistrust.

exemplified by which you see across every aspect of science of human society, of those in positions of power and influence to set the examples are not doing that. And we can think of a handful of business people who we could say, you know, no wonder trust is down the toilet with people like you in charge of things. Your behavior is affecting that.

So trust is multi-dimensional, it goes on to say. Again, there’s lots more here, but I think in terms of what communicators need to do, the report talks a lot about what businesses can do. And indeed, that’s quite appropriate in the level of detail they go into. Our interest is really on the audience for this podcast, the communicators, and what they need to do. So

It’s something that this report concludes by saying, treat trust as a core competence, we’ve kind of checked that one, some companies doing your company being an example, prioritizing. Right, right.

Shel Holtz (10:52)
It’s a core value. one of our five core values in addition to

being a plank of the strategic plan. So I mean, don’t know how much more seriously you can take it.

@nevillehobson (10:59)
Right. Well,

you got it. And so you’re you’re a standout example. No question. Prioritize ethical, reliable communication. And that I don’t know why people struggle with that, Shel. I sense many, many people, many communicators struggle with that because it’s not kind of enshrined in what the company says they’re about. But that doesn’t matter. You know what you need to do in that context. I think that’s how I would see it. Choose trusted media strategically.

Embrace AI responsibly with clarity, measure trust and the game measurement. We talked to Richard Bagnell a couple of weeks ago in an interview about the Barcelona Principles 4.0 and this whole area of measurement and evaluation of communication. And there you have something there. Measure trust and act on what it tells you. that, yeah, I mean, what more can you say to that? So there’s

I think much clarity here in the level of detail the supports go into to dig out the nuggets of things that are quite easy to say, OK, fine, here’s my list of takeaways I want from this, and this is how I’m going to execute on this. And that, to me, is a good way to start if you’re not doing it already.

Shel Holtz (12:10)
Well, measuring trust is important, but so is reporting the results of those to your employees because they’re not going to be able to move the needle if they don’t see where the needle is. being proactive about trust, I think, is vital. We need to talk with employees in particular about the consequences of failing to build trust. it kind of comes down to this idea of building a culture of trust.

@nevillehobson (12:12)
Right.

Shel Holtz (12:36)
And I know yet you’re also building a culture of respect and a culture of recognition and all the cultures of that we have in the organization, but they weave together to create this common culture. But if we have a culture of trust in the organization, I think it becomes a lot easier to do things like the steps that you’re gonna wanna take in order for people to feel confident that the generative AI

outputs that you are creating for say your advertising or your marketing or other communications are authentic and trustworthy. I’m not gonna suggest the tactics for that. It would be different for different organizations and based on the kinds of outputs that you’re producing. But having that culture of trust would say, okay, we need to come up with a way that will serve our audience as they are evaluating

the trustworthiness of this content. And yeah, it could be just the long-term building of trust that you’ve undertaken. It could be resources that you point people to where they can see how this is done. And of course, the better you get it using generative AI, the harder it’s going to be for people to say, hey, that’s generative AI. I don’t trust that. I have this conversation all the time. If you can tell it was written by AI, was

poorly prompted and inadequately edited after that.

@nevillehobson (13:55)
Yeah.

There’s a lot to take away from the Shell, think. A to pay

attention to. There’s lots of communicators who can grab at here that are easy to understand and digest. And I would argue not that difficult to see how you could execute on something from this report as part of your own approach to creating a climate trust in your organization.

Shel Holtz (14:20)
Yeah, and there are books on this. I think there’s one called Business at the Speed of Trust that I read during a management training program that was excellent. And even though it predates a lot of the technologies, the principles are very sound and transfer very nicely to the modern business environment. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #472: The Evolution of Trust appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

There’s a new brand of influencer. Faceless creators wield their influence while never appearing on camera, while VTubers — virtual YouTubers — employ AI-generated avatars instead of showing their faces. This is no flash-in-the-pan trend. One network of faceless creators grew from 5,000 to 21,000 creators in just three months, with some raking in as much as $40,000 per month from brands eager to add their content to the mix. There are numerous reasons this shift is happening, from social networks like TikTok elevating its algorithm over follower counts (enabling someone with few followers to see a post go viral) to the ability for brands to pay for performance instead of impressions. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at the pros and cons of faceless creators.

Links from this episode:

WTF is behind the explosion of faceless creators?
Faceless creators and VTubers are reshaping influencer marketing
There’s a Rise of Six-Figure Faceless Creators
The Rise of Faceless Creators: How AI Avatars Are Redefining Digital Storytelling
Faceless influencers are becoming famous online
10 Best Faceless YouTube Niches to Start in 2025
5X: The five seismic shifts that will reshape communications and marketing over the next five years
Influencing Without the Influencers
Liquid Death Commercial Made with AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 471. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:07)
And I’m Shel Holtz in the U.S. And there is something going on that’s quietly shifting how brands reach audiences. Faceless creators, social media influencers building massive reach without ever showing their faces. This isn’t just another social media trend. This is a fundamental change in content creation and monetization. And we’ll dig into it right after this.

So let’s start with what we’re actually talking about. Faceless creators publish videos and clips without appearing on camera. Affiliate network grew from 5,000 to 21,000 faceless creators in just three months. Top performers are pulling in 30,000 to $40,000 a month from brand deals. Man, I’m in the wrong line of work.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Many of these faceless creators are students or part-timers running multiple accounts, posting hundreds of pieces daily, some of them posting as many as a thousand posts per day. They’ve cracked the code, if you will, on algorithmic discovery, understanding that in the attention economy, volume and optimization often trump polish and personality.

Three forces created this explosion. First, have platforms like TikTok that have deprioritized follower counts. Algorithmic feeds boost engaging content regardless of creator size. A faceless account with zero followers can reach millions of people. Second, AI democratized production. You can call it AI slop, but text to video bots, AI thumbnails, multilingual dubbing, mass content production is now scalable by one

person who’s got the right tools. Third, performance-based compensation. Creators are getting paid on views and conversions, not flat fees. Brands can experiment at scale without upfront investment. VTubers, virtual YouTubers, use AI avatars and motion capture to create remarkably human personalities. Blue, and it’s spelled B-L-O-O, has millions of subscribers and seven-figure revenue.

It editing, thumbnails, and multi-language dubbing.

Brands aren’t just attracted to the novelty. They want autonomy, cost efficiency, and creative control. No scheduling conflicts, no scandals, no contract renegotiations, just consistent on-brand content at machine speed. This isn’t just about marketing. It’s also organizational communication. Scalability and ROI are becoming non-negotiable, but authenticity trade-offs are real. The lack of a human presence raises questions about trust in

and alignment. Best practice is emerging though, and that’s to blend human content with virtual elements, have virtual influencers interact with real people, or introduce faithless content through recognizable human voices. The most successful organizations embrace new formats without abandoning the human elements that build trust.

Mass production can border on manipulation. AI generated content poses authenticity challenges we’re only beginning to understand. When virtual influencers promote products, are consumers aware they’re engaging with AI? What transparency is required? These aren’t abstract questions. They’re practical challenges communicators have to address now before regulators step in with solutions that could stifle innovation. So what does this mean for organizational communicators? First,

First,

experiment, but do it strategically. Explore faceless formats and AI-assisted production, but anchor everything in your organization’s values. Second, maintain trust. Use hybrid models, faceless clips introduced by named team members. Embed real testimonials and human voices. Third, measure performance. Shift towards CPC, leads, click-throughs. Test faceless versus traditional content to understand what works in your niche.

And finally, lead on transparency. Disclose AI-generated content, avoid misleading impressions. In a landscape where trust is fragile, transparency isn’t just good ethics, it’s good business. Now, the bottom line here is that the rise of faceless creators signals content as productive, scalable, and detached from identifiable faces. This isn’t replacing human storytelling, it’s complementing it. The organizations that will thrive will blend deficiency with authenticity,

scale with soul. Whether your voice is faceless, virtual, or distinctly human, it needs strategic alignment and authentic connection. The question isn’t whether to embrace these formats, it’s how quickly you can use to learn them effectively while maintaining the trust that great communication requires. And by the way, Neville, just yesterday I read an article that didn’t specifically call out faceless creators, but it made a point that this type of content that the faceless creators are

producing is something that you actually don’t need a creator to do. You can do it in-house and a lot of companies are starting to bring some of that work back in-house. So an interesting trend.

@nevillehobson (05:26)
Yeah, there’s lots, lots about this that I find fascinating. By the way, you mentioned Blue, a virtual persona, and you spelt it out B-L-O-O. That’s actually the name of a toilet cleaner here in the UK, spelt like that. So I just sort of mentioned that as a just saying kind of thing. Yeah, so I was reading through the eMarketer report on this. It’s quite interesting, their take. One thing they said struck me as an obvious that

Shel Holtz (05:39)
Ha!

@nevillehobson (05:56)
some may grasp, I certainly did. AI slop, more of it now because of this. But they do qualify that. They say concerns are definitely valid, more AI slop, but the creative shift is equally very clear indeed. Production is being automated and value now lies in ideas and execution. Yeah, you could see that. I find it interesting the trend away from influencer identity, i.e.

promoting the individual who is the creator through to promoting what has been created. So if it’s about a brand or it’s a theme or something topical, that’s what you see and hear, not a talking head or some person who’s the prominent focus. It’s the actual message. That’s the thing. So that’s one of the reports I read say that is emulating TikTok.

to a certain extent. And I think fine, if this is a trend, then this does add a new dimension to the content that you will encounter in various places online. You mentioned the Vtube. I think it’s great. Vtube, the virtual tube. it’s super. Faces, creators and Vtubers. E-Marketer says they’re redefining the creative space. I can see it.

My only worry is is precisely going back to concerns about AI slop is that this therefore makes it easier to to literally deluge everything with slop. But you have to also accept, as I do, that one man’s slop is another man’s venison steak or whatever you might want to describe it as. So it’s like all things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just think, though, that this is likely to open the floodgates to

to AI generated content of dubious quality. It’s a bit like whenever I turn the TV on during the daytime, which sometimes happens at lunchtime, I want to see the TV news and rather than see it all online all the time. That’s when it seems to me in the UK that it’s poor quality slop all over TV at that time in terms of advertising. The ads you see,

are usually about cremation services, pet insurance, or other things that niche audiences might want. Insurance for seniors, how to pay for your funeral ahead of time, all that kind of stuff. That scripting is dire. Clearly, I’m not the target audience, although I’m probably in the right age bracket for that. But you’re now seeing this likely to be the case online too. I think, though, you mentioned something quite interesting, that it opens equally another avenue.

to user generated content within organizations. So VO, you mentioned VO3. But again, I raise the question to myself more than anything that does that mean we’re gonna see more dubious quality content coming at us in waves that you can’t ignore it everywhere? I noticed things a lot on LinkedIn, Facebook in particular, and luckily they have a way to say, us about this ad.

And I said, don’t want to see that anymore. It’s just dreadful. And it goes away. I think I can’t see that lasting that long, to be honest. your exposure is diminishing in quality. And this will accelerate that because it’s already diminishing in quality, arguably, certainly on LinkedIn. So will this also kickstart, perhaps, explorations and experimenting by real influencers online into niche communities?

away from the slop. Who knows? But nevertheless, I agree with eMarketer in particular, because they mentioned quite clearly, this is absolutely a trend. It’s gaining momentum. It’s been around a while. Now seems to be the time for this to pick up steam. One of the other links you shared from Axios, an interview with Jim O’Leary, the CEO in North America of Weber Shandwick, the big ad agency.

that he says, he talks about five things, the attention economy, creator economy, stakeholder economy, experience economy, intelligence economy. I mean, these are all great things, but they’re all being not led, but pushed along fast by influences and influence. So this then is taking that in a different direction. So

Basically, what I see from all of this and from the links, the reports that you shared, and your own assessment of it all, is that this is upon us. You could say if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re going to be overtaken by those who do and that probably is a valid point to make. I would argue too, though, that you only need to pay attention to it if this is something is value to you, your brand, your messaging, everything. That said, though, if you say no, it’s not, then you do risk being overtaken because

I don’t think you can say no it’s not. You have to explore how it is and realize that this is upon us. So it is an interesting time. I just hope we are not overwhelmed with the slop though.

Shel Holtz (10:48)
Yeah, Jim O’Leary says that creators are no longer just a media channel, their culture itself, their content consistently outperforms brand owned content because audiences trust them more. The new reality is that brands must co-create with those who shape culture, measuring actual influence over vanity metrics. And it’s important because creators increasingly drive earned strategies, capturing attention that attracts traditional media coverage and fuels broader cultural conversation. I think he’s absolutely right. ⁓

about

that. In terms of the AI slop, I think we’re going to be experiencing a deluge of that whether there are faceless creators or not. On the one hand, you hear about the one creator who’s cranking out a thousand pieces a day. On the other hand, if you’re get paid for this, you’re gonna have to get impressions. And that means it has to be something that people are gonna wanna look at. And I don’t wanna minimize

@nevillehobson (11:28)
Exactly.

Shel Holtz (11:45)
the problem that is posed by AI slop. But there’s also a lot of really good content being produced with this. I just saw yesterday a speculative TV commercial. It’s not really being aired, but it’s for a real product. It’s for Liquid Death, which is a canned water product. I don’t know if they have it in the UK, but it’s popular here.

@nevillehobson (12:07)
We’ll see that.

Shel Holtz (12:08)
know, skull and crossbones type of logo. But it’s a guy being pulled over on a highway by a sheriff type who walks up and says, do you know why I pulled you over? And the sketchy type in the car says, is it because of my busted taillight? And the cop says, no. He goes, is it because of the human trafficking? And he’s showing the family that he’s got tied up in the back. And the cop goes, And they just keep going through.

@nevillehobson (12:12)
Listen.

Shel Holtz (12:35)
these different scenarios of really horrible crimes that he’s committed and the cop says, no, it’s because it’s your birthday, And gives him a cake.

And they tell you that the entire commercial, which looks incredibly professional, was made with Google’s VO3, the entire thing. So it is very likely that we’re going to see high quality content coming out of this space. It’s not all slop just because it’s coming from AI.

@nevillehobson (13:01)
No, it’s

not. I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s not all slop. Of course it’s not. That’s absolutely right. I agree with you that it’s likely to be that way. So this is upon us. There will be good things amongst all the slop, but we’ll see more slop. There’s no question about that. I just wonder, though, you mentioned the guy who’s cranking out a thousand pieces of content every day. I’m reminded of our conversation with Craig Silverman recently about

people who do that in the mobile phone farms out in Southeast Asia with workarounds to get around the limits imposed by platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook to limit you to a certain number of posts. This breaks all those limits. So I doubt respectable agencies like Web of Shamwick are going to be doing that kind of thing. But nevertheless, that’s going to be part of the landscape too, because therefore you’re going to have people breaking all the current rules. If your brand is associated with a rule break,

don’t think you want to go there. So it may force some changes there, I suspect. So it would be a good thing, I’m sure.

Shel Holtz (14:03)
Yeah, if they’re in fact breaking rules as opposed to dishing this out to multiple brands who are pushing it out through different accounts if you’re just the creator.

@nevillehobson (14:08)
They seem to be.

the argument then is it may be legal, but is it moral? mean, that’s how the argument’s going to go, or ethical, know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, it’s an interesting development.

Shel Holtz (14:19)
Well, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. I’d need to know more about

what that that creator is doing. But yeah, I find it fascinating and certainly something worth paying attention to as this landscape just continues to shift. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of for immediate release.

The post FIR #471: Can You Be Influential and Anonymous at the Same Time? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Copyright challenges and intellectual property issues are consistently recognized as a serious, top-tier concern when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI). It may not be the top concern — that’s usually related to fake news and the trustworthiness of content, followed by privacy concerns — but many creators are upset and worried about the integrity of their work when it’s used as fodder for new training models. The courts will inevitably weigh in — in fact, one already has, with a federal court ruling in Anthropic’s favor, asserting that its use of authors’ books without compensation constitutes fair use due to the transformative nature of what Claude, Anthropic’s LLM, does with them.

More lawsuits and more rulings are indeed coming, and legislation and regulation are also likely. However, Creative Commons has always preferred a voluntary compliance approach, grounded in a logical framework. In 2004, Creative Commons (under the guidance of Lawrence Lessig, a prominent American academic, attorney, and political activist known for his work on intellectual property law, campaign finance reform, and the social and legal implications of technology) developed such a framework that allowed people publishing on the web to designage how others could use their content. (This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license.)

Now, Creative Commons is proposing a similar approach to AI, with a framework that would empower creators to signal their preferences for how their content is used and reused. The nascent framework is currently open for public comment. In this brief, midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the proposal and the role communicators can play in shaping its final form.

Links from this episode:

CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
Creative Commons debuts CC signals, a framework for an open AI ecosystem | TechCrunch
CC Signals on GitHub
The Venice Pledge from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management
“Human Authored Certification” from the Author’s Guild
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, from the U.S. Copyright Office
Authors Call on Publishers to Limit Their Use of AI
AI Watch: Global Regulatory Tracker

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 470 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:08)
And I’m Neville Hobson. In this short form episode of For Immediate Release, we’re looking at a new development from Creative Commons that’s aimed squarely at the intersection of AI, copyright and open knowledge. It’s called CC Signals, and it could become a defining tool for how content is treated in the AI era. Creative Commons is the nonprofit behind the well-known Creative Commons copyright licenses.

that enable creators to share their work and use that of others legally and openly. This new project is their response to the rise of AI and the vast amount of public web data being used to train AI models, often without clear rules or consent. We’ll explore CC signals in lay terms and what it means for communicators right after this.

For more than 20 years, Creative Commons has enabled millions of creators to share their work while retaining rights through open licenses. But now with AI models scraping the internet at scale, there’s a new challenge. How can content owners set clear expectations for whether and how their work should be reused by algorithms training AI models? That’s where CC signals comes in. It’s a proposed framework that lets data set holders express preferences

for how their content can be reused, for example, in training AI based on legal, technical, and ethical guidelines. In simple terms, dataset holders means any individual organization or platform that owns, manages, or has control over a collection of data that could be used to train AI models. Rather than locking everything down behind paywalls or blocking bots entirely, CC Signals offers a middle path, a way to sustain the open web

by encouraging responsible AI use. It’s built on values like recognition, reciprocity, and sustainability, echoing the same ethos that shaped creative comments copyright licenses two decades ago. For communicators, this matters. First, it’s a story about the governance of knowledge, how it’s shared, who benefits, and what kind of AI future we want to support. Second, it’s an opportunity to engage with new norms to advise organizations on data sharing policies

and to help shape a framework that could become foundational in the age of machine learning. CC signals is not just a technical tool, it’s also a social contract built on fairness and the shared benefit of respect for creators, clearer norms for AI developers, and more sustainable access to open data for all. The framework is currently in very early development. Creative Commons is gathering public feedback and input now, aiming for an alpha launch in November 2025.

We’ll have a link to the website in the show notes. So, Shell, I think this is worth taking part in shaping and developing new tools, new norms, and new forms of cooperation for the age of AI.

Shel Holtz (03:07)
As long as there’s something like an open comment period, think anybody who has an interest in this should certainly participate. Creative Commons has the credentials to undertake this. I’ve been using Creative Commons licenses since they first became available. My blog is on a Creative Commons license. Virtually every presentation I deliver uses an attribution license. This podcast.

is licensed under Creative Commons. So I think they do really good work. Remember, the core principle behind the Creative Commons concept was that it has to be a defensible case in court. You can’t just say this is a thing and then have somebody violate your license, take them to court and have it thrown out. This is valid legal underpinnings that they have.

with the work that they do. So I’m really happy to see them doing this. Of course, it’s not the only initiative of its kind out there right now. The Authors Guild has one called Human Authored Certification. It’s supposedly a certification system for authors and publishers to label books and other written works as human authored. There’s a U.S. Copyright Office initiative on AI. There’s an open letter from authors to publishers.

and various licensing and regulation proposals, probably the most interesting recent development in all of this is Barts versus Anthropic. This was a case in the US where a judge granted summary judgment in favor of Anthropic over the question about whether using copyrighted books to train its large language model constitutes fair use. And the court said, yup, it does. It’s quintessentially transformative.

offering a potential shield for AI companies facing similar copyright challenges. So the legal system is already weighing in and how owners of content in a system. And I think it’s really fascinating that Creative Commons acknowledges that AI needs this content, that AI needs access to all of this material in the open web and copyright.

needs rethinking in order to accommodate this. What did they say? think I wrote it down. Ideas, facts and other building blocks of knowledge cannot be owned. Expanding copyright to control AI training risks stifling innovation and access to knowledge. The future depends on shared expectations and responsible use. And then they go on to say, of course, that any viable solution needs to be legally grounded, technically interoperable and backed by the collective action of humans.

@nevillehobson (05:44)
Thank

Shel Holtz (05:58)
So I think this is a great initiative. I hope it goes somewhere. Even the original Creative Commons never really took off the way I was hoping it would. It works for those who use it, but I don’t know how many people out there creating content even know it exists. Yet we need these conversations, we need these options, and you never know, given their track record in producing a quality product.

This might be the answer for a lot of people. We’ll have to see how it shakes out. But you’re absolutely right. Way in.

@nevillehobson (06:33)
Yeah, I mean, they are soliciting ⁓ feedback from anyone and everyone who has an opinion. OK, as I mentioned earlier, this is very early stage development. So much of the feedback I’m seeing on the GitHub and there’s a link to that in the show notes ⁓ is early stage feedback from very technical people. It’s focused a lot on that. So persevere. The point of, I guess, talking about this in the way we are is this is look beyond the technicalities. ⁓

they, Creative Commons has published a project page that summarizes it all. They say for the technical detail, click here, as it were, and you can then go to some and really get down a rabbit hole in the technical aspects of this. But for us normal folk, communicators, we need to understand it more simply. And this is why it’s worth having this conversation today about this, I think, to kind of say, you said something interesting because this might be in my view throughout too. I started using Creative Commons myself back in 2004.

literally when they started. And like you, everything I share publicly with anyone that I’ve added my intellectual property to carries a Creative Commons license. One of the beauties of CC licenses is that the thing you normally confront straight away when you come across one is written in plain English, literally no legalese. It’s at pains to point out quite clearly that that’s not the contract. You need to read the legal one.

And they have published a variety of different types of contract back by legal definitions of the terms they’re using and how it all is supposed to work that are valid in different legal jurisdictions. So it’s not limited to one jurisdiction. Like you mentioned, what’s going on in the US, that’s US law only. This is valid in many other countries. In fact, the one I use is an international license that is valid in multiple countries. So if…

This leads to something like that. That, I think, would make it very attractive. But the simpler it is to understand and use, the more likely it is that it will get pick up. Like you, I’m disappointed that Creative Commons copyright licenses never really rocketed into the stratosphere as it seemed they might. There were some notable lawsuits, legal challenges, 2000s.

that ⁓ didn’t really kind of gain the headlines that it might have done, I suppose. But it showed that these test cases that you could, it did have the legal teeth behind it all. So this though, like I said, this is ⁓ in the development stage and it does present, I believe, a great opportunity for communicators to help shape the development of this. So not all the techies are in there, it needs that.

And that’s where we step into the thing too, because you can help shape the framework that could become that foundation that I mentioned earlier. So it’s a great opportunity.

Shel Holtz (09:34)
It is. And a couple of thoughts. One is ⁓ one of those test cases with the Creative Commons involved Adam Curry. In fact, I think it was the first one, the pod father. Yeah, he had a photo that was ⁓ licensed under Creative Commons. Somebody used it in a way that violated that license. He took them to court. I believe it was in the Netherlands and won. ⁓ He won. So that was the first test case. The.

@nevillehobson (09:42)
the famous one actually the famous one.

Yeah, that’s right.

In Amsterdam, yeah. He won it.

Shel Holtz (10:03)
The plain language behind the Creative Commons, think, is important. And they also use visual cues. They have different icons for the different licenses. So they go to great pains to make it easy to understand these things at various tiers. In terms of communicators getting involved, I absolutely agree that we should. The question is how? ⁓

beyond commenting, is it possible to band together? I’m thinking of the Venice pledge that came out of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications. This is the umbrella organization that represents most of the communication associations in the world, IEBC, PRSA, CIPR, CPRS.

all of those ⁓ organizations belong to the Global Alliance. And they just a couple of weeks ago released the Venice Pledge, is there, and they’re asking communications professionals and companies in fact, to sign onto the pledge. And it’s a set of principles around ethical use of AI. So I’m wondering, is it possible for the Global Alliance to weigh in on this representing?

⁓ all of the communicators out there as opposed to or in addition to everybody going in and sharing their own comments.

@nevillehobson (11:28)
In addition to in addition

to so so so they totally could do that. Someone representing that global alliance goes there, clicks that link, starts a conversation there. But I think you’re absolutely right. And that bring it back to the Creative Commons Copyright Alliance is maybe that was one of the issues behind its lack of mega stardom, as it were, that there wasn’t this kind of thing going on at the time. But that was a different era here. Everything’s online and everywhere. When this is huge about what the

pros and cons are of all this. So ⁓ they would be a good candidate in light of the Venice principles, which I think you discussed that in a previous episode, A monthly, I think you raised that. So, right. So ⁓ that must be relevant to this. ⁓ So this is definitely the moment for this because it’s early stage. They’re looking for feedback. They want suggestions. They want input from anyone who cares to suggest these things.

Shel Holtz (12:08)
I think the Venice Pledge, yeah, and the principles in the pledge.

@nevillehobson (12:28)
This is the time for this.

Shel Holtz (12:29)
Well, I happen to know a couple of members of the Global Alliance Board, so I think I’ll pass this along to them. Well, I think a couple of them listen anyway. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (12:33)
Give them the link to the podcast.

The post FIR #470: Creative Commons Proposes an AI Copyright Solution appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A growing body of research suggests employees are more disconnected than ever. What are internal communication teams getting wrong? Also in this long-form monthly episode for June 2025:

Buzzstream interviewed over 150 digital PR pros to assess the state of digital PR. It looks a lot like it did five years ago.
Social media has overtaken television as Americans’ primary source of news.
Chief Communication Officers are in a precarious position, expected to anticipate and address political and societal upheaval, often sharing information executives don’t want to hear.
Pope Leo XIV has called for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathering at the Vatican.

In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at Mastodon’s updated terms prohibiting AI model training, announcements from TwitchCon, and the impact of Texas’s mandatory age verification law on Internet privacy and security.

Links from this episode:

State of Digital PR Report (2025)
Social media overtakes TV as main source of news in US, analysis finds
Study: CCOs Take On Growing Political Risk
Pope Leo calls for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathering at the Vatican
Pope Leo Takes on AI: Communicators Should Pay Attention
Pope Leo Takes On AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity
Employees lose over a month each year dealing with ineffective internal communication
Frontline workers feel so disconnected, nearly half don’t know who their CEO is
Gen Z is killing office small talk— with 74% of employees struggling to speak to coworkers
Work Schedules Fail Millions of U.S. Employees
Breaking Down the Infinite Workday
Creators Turn to Agentic AI to Manage Fan Engagement

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training | TechCrunch
Ten Years of TwitchCon: Here’s What We Announced in Rotterdam
Age Verification Law Weakens Internet Privacy and Security

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 469 of Four Immediate Release, the monthly long form episode for June 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:13)
I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California in the U.S. We’re very happy that you have joined us for our monthly review of what’s going on in the communications slash technology space. And there is always a lot going on, always. And I heard about a lot of it recently. I was at the IABC World Conference in Vancouver, small conference, only about 600 people, I think. There are…

Definitely some challenges facing the world of associations in general and IABC in particular. But as usual, the content at the conference was excellent. There were some really good sessions on things like driving AI adoption in the organization presented by ProSci, the change management research organization with some really revealing data, some very interesting stuff. For example, Neville, the

number one driver of adoption of AI in an organization is the very visible and vocal support from the most senior leadership of the organization. That’s the top factor. And in a lot of organizations, those guys don’t have a clue what this is or how it

@nevillehobson (01:18)
big surprise there.

Opportunity for communicators, would say that signifies Shell.

Shel Holtz (01:29)
It absolutely is. So we have these topics that we are going to jump into here shortly, but Neville, first, why don’t you remind everybody what we have already posted since our last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:43)
Indeed, some good discussion we had on a handful of topics since the last month of show that was 466 on published on May the 26th. And we led in that one gain AI features. No surprise to anyone, I suppose, in every single episode we’ve been doing throughout this year, I think really.

But we started with the topic on AI. Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating, we said by some accounts it’s getting worse. And we had a conversation about LLMs and hallucinating and so forth also in that episode. A handful of other topics too, including one I’ve been reading even a more about in the past week or so. So Google’s new tool for making AI videos with sound following the one with text, that’s VO3.

these seem to be coming out of the woodwork from a variety of players mid journey, most recently this past few days. So expect to hear us talking about it on FIR during the course of July, I think.

Shel Holtz (02:37)
Yeah, I don’t know if you’re aware, I was hearing about this on another podcast that these VO videos are being strung together with themes and shared on TikTok and they’re going viral. I can’t remember what the themes are, but they’re kind of silly and fun. But yeah, the VO3 has really led to this explosion of these videos being shared.

@nevillehobson (02:51)
Yeah, there’s a of that. A lot of that.

Yeah.

There’s around a dozen such tools currently, according to who was at the verge, if I recall correctly. And I’ve heard of half of them. So new things are appearing left, right and center. The mid journey one just a quick aside, I coughed up some money just so could try it. Blimey, I tell you, this is extraordinary. That you upload a static image and it creates a five second video from that you just prompted a bit.

or not as you as you prefer it’ll do something. And I’ve done a poor about half a dozen of these that I’m going to stretch together into a single video I saw a couple on LinkedIn to people doing similar things. So for 10 bucks a month, it’s worth it to discover what this can do. So expect to see lots of silly stuff out there. But there’s a great learning for what everyone else is doing. So it’s definitely another phase in these tools.

Shel Holtz (03:43)
Yeah.

I have a Mid Journey account. haven’t tried that yet, but you’ve been able to do that on PyCo, which I’ve been paying for for a while. So it’d be interesting to see how it works on Mid Journey. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (03:50)
Give it a shot.

Sure, there are a number of tools that you could do that.

This one I’m seeing in the tech press is saying, wow, over this particular one. So it’s offering something, I suppose. Go and give it a shot. So we also talked in this episode, this is a bit of a kind of a roundabout way to get to what we talked about in the last monthly. We talked about a new global alliance report on lack of strategic leadership about AI’s ethical use. AI again.

Shel Holtz (04:01)
Yeah, I’ll have to go give it a try.

@nevillehobson (04:18)
and a few other topics, plus Dan York’s tech report about a number of services online shutting down and other new ones starting up. So pretty full episode that came in at 104 minutes. No, wait, one hour 43. What’s that? Yeah, 100 and whatever. Anyway, one hour 43. So nearly an hour and three quarters. Yeah. No, it’s not an hour and three quarters almost. So that’s a hefty but good one, Donna. Thank you for that. So

Shel Holtz (04:33)
Yeah. We’re communicators. Math is not our strong suit.

@nevillehobson (04:45)
But that was that one. Since then, we talked in 467, June the 5th, that was Mary Meeker’s Trends Report on AI. Mary Meeker, many of you will know this, venture capitalist, and former Wall Street securities analyst, best known for the annual Internet Trends Reports that she used to publish a decade ago and going back into the 2000s. Serious credibility. But she released a new one.

dedicated entirely to AI, 304 slides, not the most slides she’s had as a deck. One of her internet ones was 600 slides, substantial content. But this is worth a read. We talked about it. She has credibility, as we said in the show, credibility as strong as hers is likely that this report will become the defining source of truth about the state of AI. So it’s definitely worth taking a look at the report and

listen to that episode to get our take in what she had to say. And then finally, 468 published June 17th, new threats to reputation. We said, while a company’s reputation doesn’t appear as a line item on a profit and loss statement on a balance sheet, it is nevertheless a critical intangible asset that significantly influences financial performance and long term success. So in this episode, we looked at some recent research.

and reports to zero in on the newest reputation challenges and how communicators should face them. So you’re up to date now with that little wrap up.

Shel Holtz (06:12)
We also had an interview drop.

@nevillehobson (06:15)
We did. Yes, we did. That was a really good conversation we had with Craig Silverman. We’ve interviewed Craig twice before on this episode, but you’ve got to go back to 2008, 2012 to get those interviews. So well over a decade ago. And here’s Craig. We talked to him about Indicator, his new venture that is all to do with fighting digital deception.

and he explains how he does all that. He explained how indicator came to be the challenge of launching a media startup and what kind of impact he hopes to achieve. He also shares practical insights for communicators facing the growing threat of coordinated inauthentic behavior, fake reviews, and AI generated information very timely. That was a good conversation. Almost three quarters of an hour, we talked to Craig about that and it was some really good insights he shared. So very much worth a listen.

Shel Holtz (07:10)
could have gone on longer. I had questions when we wrapped up. But yeah, Craig is a journalist, trained journalist, and had spent five years at ProPublica reporting on disinformation and misinformation. So was a logical step to move into this independent journalism that he’s doing with his partner. So yeah, definitely worth a listen.

@nevillehobson (07:12)
It could have. Me too.

Right. And you might,

if you know of Craig, you might remember back 15 years ago, he published a website that was called Regret the Error, pointing out errors made in media reporting that led to a book deal. And I’ve got the book. It’s nice, a nice look back in time to see what that was all about. But that was a good conversation we have with Craig, must admit.

Shel Holtz (07:47)
Me too.

Yeah

Also published since last month is episode 117 of Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with IABC fellows and a moderator, also a fellow, usually me, sometimes Brad Whitworth, talking about a topic of interest to communicators. This one was different. We did this one live at the IABC World Conference. We had…

three of the five new fellows up on stage. The other two weren’t able to make it. And then we had eight fellows in the front row of the audience. So we had a camera aimed at the stage. I was at the lectern and the three fellows in chairs. And then Brad was out in the audience with a microphone and his wife, Peg Champion, was following him around with a camera.

And all of this was feeding into StreamYard, which we used to do Circle of Fellows. And I was able to do the camera switching seamlessly. And this was all questions from the audience. So it wasn’t on a single topic. We went an hour talking about issues that were on the minds of communicators. It’s really interesting episodes. So that’s available both as a podcast and a YouTube video.

We’re also preparing for episode number 118, returning to the usual format. This one’s on communication leadership. The panelists include one of our brand new fellows, Mike Klein, along with Robin McCaslin, Sue Heumann, and Russell Grossman. This will be at noon Eastern time on Thursday, July 17th. So if you’re interested in hearing the perspectives of some senior communicators on leadership and communication,

Tune into that or catch the video or audio replay later. And with that, it’s time to turn to our reports as soon as we pay these bills.

There was a time when digital was something you bolted on to your PR efforts. Neville, you undoubtedly remember those times where should we do something digital? Should we have a website to go with this? I remember when TV commercials had URLs appearing at the bottom and it was, wow, look at that. They’re showing their URL on a TV commercial. PR now is digital. mean, calling it digital PR is almost ridiculous.

It’s just at the center of how we communicate. And BuzzStream’s latest state of digital PR survey is out. And if you’re wondering where the industry is headed, this year’s survey pulled in answers from 150 digital PR pros across the globe. I guess that means there are PR pros who are not digital PR pros, which is a little worrisome, but there’s a lot of food for thought here. So let’s start with the basics.

What’s working in digital PR these days? The clear winners are data-driven hero campaigns and good old fashioned expert commentary. It turns out about 95 % of the professionals out there lean on these two tactics. You need both the big attention grabbing home run campaigns and the steady reliable singles. And Neville, I apologize for the baseball metaphors. I don’t know the equivalence in cricket. ⁓

@nevillehobson (11:14)
No, that’s okay still because I probably don’t either, so that’s fine.

Shel Holtz (11:18)
Okay, I should have gone for football so you could have done rugby, right? It’s always nice though to see that stats back up what so many of us already are doing and just feel intuitively is the approach that works. Almost half of respondents say digital PR is actually more effective than it was a year ago. More links, more visibility, better results. But, there’s always a but.

72 % also say it’s gotten more challenging at the same time. If that feels like a paradox, it is. Blame it on everything from industry layoffs to Google’s never-ending algorithm updates to the growing army of competitors in the digital space. Basically, the pressure cooker has been turned up to 11. Now, what about budgets? It’s not exactly a free-spending landscape. Most digital PR teams are working with less than $10,000 a month and

Only a handful, about 4%, have more than $20,000 to play with. The cost per link, which is how a lot of these teams still measure value, typically stays under $750. Here’s something interesting. A full quarter of respondents are generating 40 or more links per month. If you’re into link building, that’s a pretty solid haul for your money. And interestingly,

link building is still at the heart of most of these digital PR campaigns. So what does success look like in digital PR? It is still all about the links. Not just any links, quality links are more important than they’ve ever been with 87 % of PR pros saying that’s their number one metric. Tools like RF’s domain rating and Moz’s domain authority are the go-to yardsticks for measuring those links.

And when it comes to relevance, two thirds of practitioners say they check the page title when the link appears. Little detail, sure, but one that says a lot about the evolution of the craft. Patience remains a virtue. Around half of those surveyed say it takes three to six months to see meaningful results from a digital PR campaign. For some, it’s even longer, think six to eight months before you really start to notice the uptick in authority or referral traffic. If you’re in a hurry,

Digital PR probably isn’t for you. Follow-up emails deserve a quick mention here. A massive 98 % of respondents say they send at least one follow-up, and the data shows that it pays off. Sending a follow-up boosts your reply rate by 85%. So consider that a best practice. The best results come when you follow up within a day. Open and reply rates both peak right after the first message. Now here’s why all this matters.

Digital PR isn’t just about backlinks anymore. It’s about driving organic traffic, raising brand visibility, sparking social buzz, and even helping organizations weather a crisis. Done right, digital PR delivers a kind of surround sound effect for your organization. One campaign, multiple touch points. The big takeaway in 2025 is that digital PR is harder than ever, but also more rewarding.

It’s also about mixing hero campaigns and expert commentary, following up quickly, measuring what matters and above all, being patient. Because if there’s one thing this year survey makes clear, it’s that digital PR is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. The other thing that occurs to me, Neville, and I think where we’re probably going to end up talking, is it’s all still about referral traffic to drive folks to a website. And we know that’s on the decline because of AI. And I was…

really struck that they’re still talking about success in terms of backlinks and not a word about showing up in AI search results. So Neville, what was your take on this study?

@nevillehobson (15:15)
probably mirrors much of what you’ve said, although I have to say I got really down a rabbit hole at the very start where it’s saying where I’m saying, why are we calling it digital PR, particularly if the definition that I’ve seen all over the place, including an organization called Digital Marketing Institute, that

It’s PR, right? And you talk about digital channels, isn’t that a bit of a misnomer now, because everything’s digital. If it’s defined by the channel, that makes less sense to me, even more so. So I think in the report early on, they asked, they have a little section called expert opinions, a little drop down, where one of the questions at the start was, how does digital PR compare to traditional PR?

And the quote I liked, and you’ll understand why in a second, is from Will Hobson, hi Will, US VP of PR, Rise at Seven. He says, the lines are getting more blurred, but in my opinion, digital PR is just PR. Our activity needs to be brand relevant, but also culturally relevant while being closely tied to business objectives. Now, you can apply that to PR, and I agree. So we haven’t moved on from…

not calling it digital PR, which emerged when all this was kind of new about 15 or so years ago, where we had digital PR. And I always had a problem as well with digital marketing, where you slap the word digital in front of a job description or a job title or some kind of activity, and it sounds super cool and new and fresh and amazing. We need to stop doing that, because if you then look at these definitions, so the Digital Marketing Institute says,

Digital public relations is a strategy used to increase awareness and visibility of your brand using online channels. That’s the first part of it, to which I would say, but isn’t that what PR does? Let’s call it traditional PR for differentiation. Isn’t that what PR does? Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, they say, but it offers the opportunity to reach more people in a measurable and targeted way. I don’t know what that means, but that doesn’t make sense to me either.

I’m not going hang up on this because I’m not, but it just struck me is that we’ve to stop calling it digital PR. I think your point, though, to kind of focus on this major issue is that exact one about links driving traffic to websites and so forth. I did think that they had the report show some interesting aspects related to SEO that are very much in the the dane of

domain of this is how we’ve always been doing this. This is not new. So that makes sense to me. The syndication, no follow, I found interesting. But I guess the main point is, though, if we’re going to call it Digital PR for the purposes of this article, I’m OK with that. When you get into some of the kind of slicing and dicing of what they came up with, which teams do you work with more closely if you’re in Digital PR?

And that I didn’t find surprising that the number one by huge number was SEO, the folks who do SEO, followed by marketing and then PR. So traditional PR is third on your list of people you work closely with. Surprised me a bit to see in this result that strategy was way down the list. And I would have thought that if you’re gonna, know, surely we’re talking about being strategic.

to, well, not to coin a phrase, of course, but I hear that all the time. But I would have thought that would have been higher. And it, you know, I could slice and dice this, but I don’t think that would add to our conversation. I think there are things we can learn from this survey, without doubt. But to me, it was obscured by this thing about digital marketing. And I think things are moving so fast that the kind of feeling I get from some of this

is that this is not on top of these changes that are moving fast. And I’m thinking in particular about what you and I have talked about in a variety of episodes of this podcast over the course of this year on things like Google Overviews, the role of AI in all of this that is going to interfere with all of these traditional sounding plans, it seems to me. So the future, according to this, to my mind, doesn’t look very rosy as changes upon us. And this doesn’t look like it’s addressing change.

Shel Holtz (19:18)
Yeah, I don’t see them making any pivots here to get ahead of this. And one of the things that one of the speakers at the IABC conference said, I mean, it’s an old line. He just sort of changed the words. He said, when change is coming at you, the best companies start running. And you don’t have to be faster than the change. You just have to be faster than your competitors.

The old line being when the bear is coming at you, you run, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers, right? ⁓ But as I think about the term digital PR, I guess I can see the distinction in the respect of PR as being a reputation management and relationship building activity.

@nevillehobson (19:47)
Ha ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz (20:06)
I spend a lot of time on the phone with people, which is not digital. There are PR people, chief communication officers, for example, executive communicators who are coaching their leaders to prepare them for delivering testimony before Congress or preparing them to make a pitch to a city council or a zoning board. There’s a lot of PR that goes on that isn’t digital.

I think what we’re talking about with this is outreach, right? And when we’re trying to get our message out, so PR messaging is all digital these days, but there’s a lot of relationship building and reputation building that doesn’t happen online. It happens over the phone, it happens face to face. So I guess we could say that’s the distinction.

@nevillehobson (20:57)
Yeah, but you got to bear in mind one thing. So if you’re a smartphone, which is digital, then this digital PR, okay, digital outreach is what you’re doing. No, I mean, seriously, this one of the numbers here, again, not to belabor this point, because this could be a whole separate discussion all by itself. But the number one tactic in the in the in the report that we’re discussing, which of the following tactics you consider to be part of digital PR?

Shel Holtz (21:03)
Yeah

@nevillehobson (21:21)
The number one, 99.4 % of people said, pitching data-led content. So it got me thinking. But that to me is crazy because whatever you’re doing in public relations, when you slap a word like traditional or digital in front of it, you are invariably going to be pitching data-led content or data-driven content, whatever. You’ve used data, or rather you have data, and you have used tools to extract meaning from that data.

leaves your pitch. So these kind of narrow definitions to me are obscuring the value of these activities and dressing them up with a word that is wholly unnecessary. So Will Hobson’s got my vote where he says he doesn’t think this is, we should not call it that, we just call it PR.

Shel Holtz (22:05)
Yeah,

I don’t disagree. I am thinking back to an old, old case study. This was when, I can’t remember who was behind it, but there was a call to boycott the tuna industry, the canned tuna, because of the inadvertent dolphin catch that was happening. were scooping up dolphins in the nets and dolphins were dying.

@nevillehobson (22:10)
Ha ha ha!

Shel Holtz (22:30)
and they were just throwing them overboard because all they wanted was the tuna. And StarKissed objected, and I think it was Burson Marsteller that they hired. And Burson Marsteller got the StarKissed people together with the people who were behind the boycott. And StarKissed said, look, we’re already doing all kinds of things to prevent dolphins from being caught up.

in the sweep of tuna. Look at our numbers, look at our tactics, the things that we have implemented as procedures to avoid this. And the group came back and said, okay, yeah. And they went out and said, boycott tuna, except StarKiss, they’re already good guys. That was negotiation. That was getting people at the table. So today, communicating the outcome of that would clearly be digital, but the actual effort

@nevillehobson (23:12)
You

Shel Holtz (23:21)
was getting people together at a table to hash things out. That’s still PR.

@nevillehobson (23:27)
So you just defined why we shouldn’t be differentiating it, because that sounds totally confusion to the activity. It’s all just PR, it’s relationship building. These are methods you use to get your message out or engage with someone or whatever it might be. It doesn’t define the activity itself. Indeed, it talks about which channel. it channel if you wanted to say it’s that?

Shel Holtz (23:33)
It’s all just PR.

@nevillehobson (23:51)
But it doesn’t help any at all, in my opinion. I would argue that you could apply the digital advertising, digital marketing, digital whatever. It is not helpful. So I’m we agree on that, Shell. And I thank Will Hobson for prompting this part of our discussion on this podcast. Hope you’re a listener, So let’s see. This is a good digital story, this one, Shell Ethic.

Social media overtakes TV as the main source of news in the US.

Shel Holtz (24:16)
Do we need to call

it social media? It’s all just media. ⁓ just…

@nevillehobson (24:19)
Well, this is another conversation,

right? I I’m as guilty as everyone for calling it social media. Indeed, I often talk about social media marketing. So, is it just marketing? mean, it’s okay. my God. Yes, absolutely. So this story I’m going to share is actually kind of a subset of a huge report from the Reuters Institute, the latest global report that was published actually just literally a week or so ago.

Shel Holtz (24:30)
Every company is a media company.

@nevillehobson (24:47)
in June. But one of the clearest signs of how radically the news ecosystem is changing comes from that report. And that’s a bit I want to talk about. For the first time, social media has overtaken television as the main source of news in the US. And by the way, there we have to use the word social to differentiate it from just general media, right? According to Reuters, 54 % of Americans now get their news from platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

compared to 50 % who still rely on TV. Now, I’ve been hearing for a long time that, you know, more Americans get the news online than anywhere else. This seems to provide clear evidence of that perspective. And it comes from a highly credible source at the Reuters Institute. I found the reporting, which I’m referencing by the Guardian was really good at summarizing the whole thing in a way that helps me discuss it with you rather than all the huge chunks of data that’s in Reuters report.

But this isn’t just a shift in platforms, it’s a shift in power, according to The Guardian. Influencers and podcasters, not journalists, are increasingly shaping what news gets seen and heard. Joe Rogan, the famous American podcaster, alone reached more than a fifth of Americans in the days after Trump’s reelection. mean, a fifth of Americans? That’s got to be in the least, what, close to 100 million, if not more, people.

especially among younger men, a demographic traditional media often fails to reach. That shift brings both opportunities and deep concerns. Trust and transparency are now front and center, as news increasingly comes from personalities rather than publications. AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are starting to become news sources themselves, particularly among under 35s, yet users are already questioning their accuracy and reliability. There’s also a darker undercurrent.

Globally, news avoidance is rising fast. In the UK, nearly half the population say they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether. And I tell you, I’m in that group. It’s the highest figure in the study, that UK statistic. Many feel overwhelmed by negativity or simply tune out from what they see as repetitive or irrelevant coverage. In my case, it’s both in this context.

So as a center of gravity shifts from institutions to individuals and from owned newsrooms to algorithm driven feeds, what does this mean for trust, for civic awareness and for the role that communicators like us still have to place to play? What do you reckon, Cheryl?

Shel Holtz (27:16)
there

is so much to unpack here. Let’s start with the fact that people are avoiding the news. I just heard an interview Kara Swisher interviewed Nicole Wallace on her podcast, On with Kara Swisher. For those who don’t know Nicole Wallace, she was the press secretary for President George W. Bush. She worked in the upper echelon of the John McCain presidential campaign.

@nevillehobson (27:18)
Mmm. ⁓

Shel Holtz (27:41)
She grew disillusioned with the Republican Party and has voted with the Democrats in the last couple of elections. And she is the host of Deadline White House, which is a two hour Monday through Friday news program on MSNBC. And she told Kara Swisher that she understands why people are avoiding the news. It’s relentless. You watch an hour block.

of news on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, wherever you prefer to go. And it’s an assault of nonstop distressing stuff. She has, Nicole Wallace, started a new podcast through MSNBC. And it’s not 100 % news. It’s interviews with A-listers just about whatever they want to talk about. She said it always…

finds its way to some news, but it’s not news from beginning to end. And people are hungry for that. And that’s one of the reasons they’re turning off the relentless assault of news and opting for either something that has less of it, is more entertaining and soothing and comforting, or presents the news through a filter that is equally comforting in their bubble.

Interestingly, as you mentioned, a fifth of Americans listen to or watch Joe Rogan. I was reading that he is turning away from Trump lately in his commentary in the episodes where he is political because he’s not always, but that’s going to be an interesting thing to watch to see if he wields the kind of influence that can sink the poll numbers even lower than they are.

But you mentioned using AI tools for the news. I do that, not exclusively, but ChatGPT has the ability to set up tasks. And I have set up tasks to get the latest news on trends in elements of the industry where I work. And every day I check and every now and then I find something really, really interesting and good out of that.

@nevillehobson (29:48)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (29:51)
It supplements my other monitoring of the media environment. So it’s just one more source and occasionally it reveals something that I wasn’t aware of. But fundamentally what worries me most about this is the selectivity that people may not be aware they’re being subjected to if they…

go to these other sources for news. And frankly, know, watching MSNBC or CNN or Fox is the same. The only way I find out what’s going on in the rest of the world is to watch the BBC. That’s where I find out what’s going on in the Sudan, for example, or in Colombia, because they don’t cover that on the cable news stations in the US. They’re laser focused on

the four or five stories that are going to gin up the most outrage among the audience right now. So it’s all the current politics and that’s what’s turning people off. And I think if the media wants to maintain an audience, they’ve got to figure out how to bring people back, how to make these more palatable because what’s missing is the gatekeeper. And I understand that people don’t like the idea of the gatekeeper. I can pick for myself what I’m interested in.

But if somebody isn’t saying this is important and you need to know about this, this is what was great about reading a newspaper, the old fashioned newspaper is even if you weren’t that interested in the story, you saw the headline and you knew what was going on. Maybe you read the lead and now you knew what was happening in that part of the world that could have an influence on you and your life at some point in the future. Because when you are curating the news,

by following the TikToker who presents the stuff in a style that entertains you, what aren’t you hearing about that you should be hearing about? And somehow we need to get back to having somebody who can curate what’s important. So at least you have a superficial knowledge of what’s going on beyond what’s in that bubble.

@nevillehobson (31:54)
Yeah, that makes sense. Although I argue you could say that particularly the younger generations who are getting the news at such a TikTok, they it’s like they don’t care what they don’t know. And they don’t want someone telling them you should know this. that that that’s a trend without any doubt. In which case, the way you address that, then, is to find a gatekeeper if you like a source that would be trustworthy enough for them to pay attention to. And that’s what needs to happen.

Shel Holtz (32:07)
And that’s worrisome.

Well, exactly.

@nevillehobson (32:20)
I mean, there’s some other metrics that pop out of the kind of a big picture we’ve just kind of discussed that I think, yeah, we need to be really cognizant of what the changes are that are happening here. So the rise of news influencers, we touched on that. And we’ve talked about this a lot in recent episodes. We podcasts, there’s YouTube, there’s TikTok creators. I hear the word creator a lot, influencer a lot in this context as well, particularly among the younger demographics.

So Joe Rogan, as I mentioned, according to this report, he reached 22 % of Americans that week, as I mentioned after Trump’s inauguration. But I’ve read also separately, he himself has been critical of some of the people out there who are so-called sharing news and stuff like that. So is this a generational thing that I say to myself? I suspect it is largely. But the challenge for

or for all of us, I suppose, are the shifts in the platforms. So there’s some statistics from Reuters, YouTube at 30%, Instagram and WhatsApp at around 20%, TikTok 16 % are major players in news dissemination. X is losing liberal users and gaining right leaning ones. There’s no surprise there. But that again, that that has a big impact on this big picture. The challenges of publishers, according to Reuters,

struggling to adapt to video-driven and personality-led content, struggling to adapt to it, not dismissing it or combating it. They’re really struggling with that. Losing commercial value and visibility on platforms they don’t control. Facing a bypass of scrutiny as populist politicians speak directly to people through influencers. Now, that is definitely something that we’re seeing a lot happening over here in Europe, certainly.

News avoidance, we just discussed that, is rising. 40 % globally, at least sometimes, are avoiding it. That’s up from 29 % in 2017. So in five years, 29 % to 40%. That’s a big rise. So the interesting thing I find about the emerging role of AI, to your point, you mentioned that younger users are turning to chat bots like GPT, chat, GPT, Gemini, forgetting the news, not setting up a program that delivers a news to you.

but actually getting the news from those chatbots. I do that occasionally, but I don’t say, I’m done, I’ve got my newsfeed. No, no, no, I’ll do it for something specific where I want the benefit of either perplexity, which was good at this, or I’m not using that so much anymore. Gemini’s most interesting how it’s doing this is finding stuff that I know enough about my own use of those platforms that generally speaking, and this is a very general comment,

I trust what chat GPD tells me, not blindly. Let me tell you that I check most things, not every single thing. But if I’m getting something that I’m going to make use of in some form, I will double check it myself. And I have encountered recently a couple of things where it’s made a mistake. So what do we call that hallucination or whatever? And I’ve challenged it and said, you’re absolutely right. Thank you for pointing that out. I made a mistake. I get that just like a human being might do. So that’s how I tend to regard it.

But this is something that…

Shel Holtz (35:26)
Well, the data says that these days they’re making

fewer mistakes than humans undertaking the same task would make. They’re not perfect, but they’re better than we are.

@nevillehobson (35:35)
But

well, that’s probably true. So I think that’s a that’s a good way to approach it that many of the critics I see about chat GPT notably don’t seem to do it this way, which is to be literally you think of your AI assistant as a person as a colleague you’re working with, and you’re asking it to do a task as you would a colleague to do or a hired contract or whatever it is that you’re doing. Don’t just say to yourself, this is just a program doing stuff. Think of it that way.

And when you challenge it, don’t worry too much about, you know, working for hours on getting a prompt, talk to it conversationally. I do that all the time. And it works well, I find. But this is, this is a useful report. And the reporting I’ve seen not just in the Guardian, but elsewhere that zero in on particular aspects of this are worth paying attention to. And I think the one thing I would say that

you could argue is not emerging anymore. It’s kind of with us. There’s concerns that persist about the accuracy, trust, and transparency in AI-generated news. And that’s something we need to pay close attention to, not to circumvent it or think, now, no, it’s there. That is part of the landscape. So if the younger users, according to surveys like this one, are turning to this, we’ve got to understand that.

and make changes according to our planning and be part of the changes that are happening and the shifts that we are seeing right in front of our eyes. That’s what we need to do.

Shel Holtz (37:01)
Yeah, so there’s two angles on this. One is the mainstream media, the TV news media needs to figure out a way to bring people back, those who are avoiding the news to make it desirable to want to watch this. I don’t know if it’s changes in formats or what. We as communicators need to understand how to get the news into the heads of the people who we want to hear this.

And that means identifying the influencers, the podcasters, getting stuff on YouTube so that people will find it, making it easier for people to find. And getting into those AI-generated search results. Interestingly, I’ve heard recently that the AI-generated search results, particularly the Gemini overviews or the Google overviews, are heavily dependent on Reddit and Quora.

both of which are other sources that people are going to for news. And these are not places where you can just post your news. You have to go in there and engage. So another opportunity for a strategic shift in the communications department.

@nevillehobson (38:10)
Lots to pay attention to I think.

Shel Holtz (38:12)
Yep. Well, there’s another major shift happening right before our eyes in the role of the chief communication officer, a shift that’s only accelerating as political risk becomes business risk. A new study by United Minds that was reported on Provoke Media shows that CEOs, I’m sorry, CCOs are no longer merely putting out fires, providing executive counsel and developing…

basic PR strategies, they’re expected to anticipate political and cultural turbulence and shape organizational strategy accordingly. The study makes it clear that CCOs are now business drivers, not just messengers. In volatile contexts, think fractured politics, rising cultural tensions, corporate affairs leaders are being brought into the room to offer strategic counsel. They’re expected to flag risk.

convene cross-functional war rooms and guide public positions. As Ben Kalovich from United Mains puts it, with an audience of one in DC that can and will quickly strike, CCOs need to lead their organizations to make the right decisions. That’s a weighty responsibility and one that requires a shift from reactive communications to proactive leadership.

In companies that embrace this new model, the CCO serves as a kind of stabilizing board voice, a steady hand while other leaders overreact to daily political noise. Interestingly, that’s kind of what the Melbourne mandate called for, what, 13 years ago from the Global Alliance. They called for PR to be at the center of maintaining that steady guidance through political turbulence and social turbulence.

Anyway, the organizations set up frameworks, monitoring political signals, introducing decision protocols, and convening diverse teams early. And the result of this is anticipation of contentious issues like DEI or AI regulation and the ability to respond with unity and credibility rather than scrambling under pressure.

Not every organization is embracing this shift, though. In more traditional companies, communications is still seen as downstream messaging. Boards and CEOs may say they want early risk warning, but when the CCO raises a flag, they end up getting marginalized. As Dave Tovar of Grubhub noted, CCOs are caught between expectations, knowing they should warn but lacking authority to influence outcomes. Picture it.

telling the company the winds are shifting but not being allowed to change course. This tension between leadership resistance and expectations creates a double bind. Leaders may resist expanding CCOs remit, preferring to keep them in a PR silo, but then when political or reputational risk escalates, they demand answers. The CCO is stuck, expected to prevent or manage a crisis but without the platform or agency to do it.

That gap undermines both credibility and governance and risks turning strategic warning into a career killer if leadership ignores it. We’ve seen indicators that the pressure on CCOs is rising. A recent Axios survey reported a 10.5 % turnover rate among global CCO roles in 2024. That’s up from 8 % the year before. Why? Because these roles are expanding and not every executive ready or empowered

to lead with that level of complexity. A lot of these folks are hired for the moment and then find themselves lacking when volatility demands broader strategic competence. That signals a growing divide between what companies want and what communicators are equipped or intend or invited to deliver. So for CCOs navigating this evolving role, there are a few paths forward. One, step into the advisory space.

Build political risk frameworks and cross-functional coalitions before these crisis emerge. Second, map your internal networks. Engage peers in legal, government affairs, HR, trust and influence are built pre-crisis. And finally, translate your role. Reframe your value not as PR, but as strategic insight, especially to boards and CEOs. But if none of this sticks, leadership…

both expects and empowers, reducing resistance has got to be an area of focus.

@nevillehobson (42:47)
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a complicated picture you’ve outlined there, Cheryl, I think. But it makes sense for the Chief Communications Officer, in particular that role, to be truly strategic as a valued advisor, a counselor, more than just the words that we see banded about about what the role of a communication professional is. he’s a counselor or advisor to senior leadership.

This goes much, much deeper than that. And I think it’s not new, the depth of this, but in the context of where we’re at today with all the things that are going on in the world that could, well, not so much could impact us, but that we ought to be paying attention to because this is the world in which we are doing business and living. Political risk is a business, is a valuable…

attribute for somebody to be able to provide guidance and insight to leadership on in a way that they are trusted by those leaders to do that. So if you want to get a seat at that table that we hear about as a trusted advisor, this is a route. But it’s complicated, really is high risk and what you outlined the reality of human behaviors and the ways in which we engage with others in a work environment.

be marginalized, you’ll be sidelined, you will not be supported, you’ll be sabotaged, all that stuff, if you don’t do it right. And that sounds a pretty trite way to say it because it’s wider than that. But you need to have all your ducks lined up. You’ve got to have support. You need to have that network to support you. And you need to show your value in supporting others. I this is a diplomat’s role as well. I think I don’t know anyone. Just going through my mind, I know a number of

people with the CCO title in large corporations as well, but not anyone I could think of who I could say, yeah, this person will be a role model for this kind of role. doesn’t mean to there aren’t any, I just don’t know any at the moment. But I think this is a natural evolutionary step for a CCO in a large enterprise in particular, particularly in a, let’s say controversial to some industry, pharmaceuticals comes to mind, actually armaments comes to mind, although that’s probably a…

a hot one to be in that right now in that you don’t need to try and persuade customers to buy your products. But the way in which you are able to navigate the political risk is key. you know, I couldn’t offer more than what I just said, Shell. I think it is a it is a fascinating topic to be discussing, given the context of where we’re at in the world.

Shel Holtz (45:08)
Yeah, the report didn’t list industries that are struggling with this more or less than others, but I suspect one of the toughest places to be a CCO right now is in big tech because you have CEOs, many of them, I’m not going to say all of them, but many of them now see themselves as entitled to rule the world. And are they going to listen to a CCO who says this particular cultural issue

is going to affect us negatively if we don’t get on the right side of it or if we don’t communicate it effectively with key stakeholder audiences, they’re going to do what they want to do. And I imagine that’s a tough place to want to be strategic in terms of what this report is talking about.

@nevillehobson (45:53)
I agree, to which so that adds even greater urgency to one element of the CCO’s activities, which is building strong alliances with senior people in the organization. So it’s not just he or she alone going to the CEO saying, this is what we need to do. He or she’s got the backing of many people that also have an influence with that CEO. It’s easy to discuss this. And I realize that it probably isn’t easy actually in real life to put this into practice.

But that’s what you’re probably going to have to do, I would say.

Do you to say thanks to Dan? I see, I should just notice he’s uploaded it now to…

Shel Holtz (46:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

I’ve already downloaded it, but clearly I haven’t listened to it.

You’re up next. Do you want to say? no, I’ll do it. then then we’ll.

@nevillehobson (46:44)
No, can, you think, Dan, yeah.

Shel Holtz (46:53)
Hang on, just need a time code.

Thanks for that report, And also, Dan, congratulations on your job change. I don’t know, Neville, if you heard about this, but Dan is now the chief of staff to the head of the Internet Society. So just big shout out. That’s a tremendous move and congratulations on that.

@nevillehobson (47:10)
indeed I did. I saw Dan posting about it.

So let’s talk about something unusual and increasingly important that’s happening at the intersection of faith, ethics, and technology. At the second annual Rome conference on AI held last week at the Vatican, attended by executives from Google, OpenAI, Meta, and more, Pope Leo XIV made a bold call. AI must be developed within an ethical framework that upholds human dignity, not just innovation for its own sake.

He’s positioning AI ethics as a signature issue of his papacy, something that’s been widely reported in some of the mainstream media, notably the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago. He’s doing this in the same way Pope Leo XIII, so one number less than what Pope Leo XIV is and some hundred years in between, once defended factory workers during the Industrial Revolution.

But this time it’s not about wages or working hours, it’s about what it means to be human in an age of intelligent machines. Crucially, he’s not rejecting technology, he’s confronting its unregulated ambition, warning against the illusion that access to data equals wisdom, and calling attention to the risks to children’s development, justice, and even spiritual well-being. What stands out is how Pope Leo is reframing AI, not as a technical or economic issue, but as a spiritual and societal one.

He’s using the church’s global moral influence to challenge the Silicon Valley narrative, especially the idea that salvation might one day come from code rather than grace. And this brings us as communicators into the frame. As I explored last week in a post on my blog, referencing a deeply analytical report by the Wall Street Journal, we have a strategic role to play here, not just translating complex technologies, but interpreting what they mean for people and society.

We’re often the ones asking the hard questions about trust power and impact inside organizations. So when the Vatican calls for ethical restraint in the face of AI’s rise, it’s not just a headline, it’s a reminder that we too need to help shape the values that drive technological progress. The church is offering one model of how to do that through moral clarity, digital diplomacy, and deep reflection on human dignity. This is not just a church versus tech story.

It’s a lesson in how moral authority, strategic dialogue, and long-term vision can influence how the world adopts powerful technologies. Communicators can draw on this in multiple ways, elevate ethical concerns internally, lead with principles, not just performance, and frame AI not as a product, but as a public conversation about who we are becoming. The Vatican is showing that digital diplomacy doesn’t require dominance. It requires clarity, conviction, and credible values.

Shel Holtz (49:53)
.

@nevillehobson (50:09)
That’s a strategy worth studying, I think.

Shel Holtz (50:12)
It is, and this is going to be an interesting dynamic as Pope Leo makes this the centerpiece of his papacy, at least in the early days, because it is at odds with at least the US government, the current administration’s position on AI, which is all gas, no break. They think that we need to accelerate development and adopt the Zuckerberg philosophy of

@nevillehobson (50:19)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (50:38)
go fast and break things. And it’s troubling. And it’s good to have that voice out there, but then you have JD Vance, the vice president of the United States, who is a Catholic. I believe he’s a convert to Catholicism. And he’s out there saying, go, go. It’s build, build, build. Get this stuff way out ahead of what every other country is able to do.

@nevillehobson (50:52)
Yeah, I read that.

Shel Holtz (51:03)
The Pope interestingly has some allies and it would be interesting to see if the church does ally itself with some other institutions that are promoting the same message. One of these is the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management. This is the umbrella organization. In fact, we’ve mentioned them, I think a couple of times so far in this episode. They’re the organization

that represents the world’s public relations and communications associations. They represent close to 400,000 communicators worldwide. IEBC is a member, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is a member, most of the world’s associations are members. And they have just released the Venice Pledge, so-called because it was hammered out.

in Venice. In fact, they say it’s result of a collaborative AI symposium workshop session held in Venice, Italy, hosted by the Global Alliances European Regional Council in partnership with Therpy, the Italian Federation of Public Relations as part of the Global Alliances Technology Trends and Communication Transformation Month in May. This was signed by the board, passed by the board in July.

Let me read this just so everybody can understand what they’re saying here and see how it aligns with what Pope Leo is saying. The Global Alliance defines responsible AI as the ethical, transparent, and human-centered development and application of artificial intelligence strategically deployed to support, not replace, human judgment, creativity, and communication. It emphasizes accountability, fairness, and accuracy while minimizing

bias, misinformation, and harm. Responsible AI upholds privacy and data protection, reflects professional and organizational values, and ensures proper attribution, governance, and human oversight to maintain trust, integrity, and societal well-being. The seven responsible AI guiding principles are ethics first, human-led governance, personal and organizational responsibility, awareness, openness, and transparency, education and professional development,

active global voice and human centered AI for the common good. And they are asking communicators to sign the pledge. We will have a link to this in the show notes. And if this is something that you agree with, by all means, give it a click and sign the pledge. It’s fairly benign. I don’t see anything particularly controversial there. It is though, think entirely aligned with what Pope Leo is saying and very much at odds.

with the US government’s approach to AI, along with the approach being taken by most of the big players in the industry.

@nevillehobson (53:52)
So I just want to go back to Leo, actually, because this is not an agenda we’ve got yet. So pledges and so forth, I believe, are way too soon for that kind of thing. But I get what the Global Alliance is doing. What this story is about, really, is about the change that is happening, the way in which the Catholic Church is engaging with

hitherto people who are highly critical of what they are saying. So big tech in particular and continuance of a let’s call it digital diplomacy that started around 2020. So five, five years ago under Pope Francis that has led to meetings with the leaders of all the big tech companies that the big six, I suppose you could argue if not including some others, I’m sure.

And this meeting recently that I mentioned is another step forward in that journey where they’re looking to, I guess, illustrate the value of principle dialogue. Although I think it also highlights the limits of voluntary codes and the need for firm accountable governance. And that’s the bit that I think is going to be the critical one. Can Leo as the head of the Catholic Church?

move the needle on that, where we have a lot of talk around the world about regulation, for want of another word, and various things happening, but that hasn’t really moved any needles yet. But I think Pope Leo is going to be a far more tech savvy, regulation minded voice than his predecessor, who was not.

as informed. Both pontiffs shared a deep concern that I’ve read a lot about that, that innovation without ethics risks eroding the very dignity it promises to enhance, and that’s their starting point. So communicate, as you and me and all the others listening to this can help bridge that gap to increase the understanding of that. But I think the fact that the Vatican is

is taking this, it’s certainly not news headline making everywhere, but increasingly I’m seeing reporting on these steps that the Vatican is taking. So as I mentioned over the past decade, actually, they’ve held private meetings with tech leaders. So Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Brad Smith, Eric Schmidt, and others more recently. Many took place under the umbrella of the Minerva dialogues. That’s another grouping of meetings that took place privately.

convened by a number of very influential voices, senior church leaders in the Vatican, and they’re continuing. And they moved from, reportedly, from enthusiasm about connectivity to deeper concerns about AI. So you’re seeing a convergence meeting of minds on certain aspects of this. So concerns about AI, misinformation, polarization, and this phrase I plucked from a Vatican report, the nature of truth.

I thought, they should get Donald Trump in there then if you want to talk about the nature of truth. Vance would do, I suspect. But the point to me, though, is that I think this is a massive shift in possibilities over this broad topic that everyone in the whole world seems to be struggling with. And yes, we can have pledges. Like you, I think from what you said, I’ve not read it myself, it doesn’t seem to be anything in there that would cause a conflict to anyone.

you’re pledging that you would follow these things and you are likely, in fact, I can’t imagine anyone is going to say no to that. Anyone you’re to take seriously and say, no, I’m not going to follow these things. Of course you are. But that’s not, well, he’s not a person in our circle of conversational focus even. But I think what we’re talking about here is a sea change that is only just emerging into the public space. And it’s

Shel Holtz (57:17)
Elon Musk wouldn’t sign on to that pledge.

@nevillehobson (57:34)
early days yet. mean, Pope Leo has only been in the role for what, two months, less than that even. But we’ve got the moves the Catholic Church make. And the reason why I think it’s so significant is they’re engaging with Silicon Valley on the one hand. They are now promoting quite strongly the ethical frameworks that they have had discussions with various people on. So another one, the Rome call for AI ethics, this body in the Vatican called the Pontifical Academy for Life.

That’s a pledge that Microsoft, IBM and Cisco have signed and that was launched in 2020. That laid out the principles of transparency, inclusion and responsibility. But one thing I found interesting, Charles, Google and OpenAI have not signed it, not yet. So that highlights the unresolved tension between tech autonomy and ethical oversight. So there’s a hurdle to get over at some point. But shaping global discourse.

This is something I remember this Pope Francis, he spoke at the 2024 G7 summit warning of a technological dictatorship and calling for legally binding treaty on AI governance. The 2025 G7 meeting in Canada has just happened. No news about that. But I think Pope Leo undoubtedly is going to carry that mission forward. But here’s the thing. Firmer, more technically informed posture. He’s going to talk like he knows the topic he’s talking about.

So these to me are converging into something quite interesting. Symbolic and narrative power is another one. And this pope is very savvy on all of this. So for instance, referring back, you remember this, I’m sure you will. AI generated image of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat went viral in 2023. It exposed the public’s vulnerability to deep fakes and the church’s symbolic visibility in digital culture. But rather than dismiss it as a joke,

Pope Francis used the moment to amplify concerns about truth, trust, and the limits of data, which is an example of value-led narrative shaping. So all these elements are happening. So I think Pledge is great. And I think it’d be good for other professional bodies to either support this as a single initiative or come out with their own. Where is the harm in doing this? It’s not affecting anything that’s going on here. think it’s, let’s not forget.

This is aimed at a wider societal grouping as opposed to narrow demographics, let’s say. But this to me is a very interesting time and we are seeing the possibility, I believe, and there’s me with my always my glass half full view of a big change happening that can only be a good thing.

Shel Holtz (1:00:10)
Yeah, and I don’t disagree with the thing that you said. I think you asked if this is moving the needle. And my answer is the likelihood of this moving the needle increases with alliances, if you can bring more people into this fold. And I think if you look at what the Global Alliance is doing and put the request to sign the pledge aside, just saying this is our code of ethics when it comes to

@nevillehobson (1:00:13)
Okay.

Shel Holtz (1:00:36)
dealing with AI and we are asking communicators to abide by this. That is entirely consistent with what is, I mean.

@nevillehobson (1:00:42)
So do you remember conversations

we had a year or so back about, we don’t need code of ethics for AI because we’ve got a code of ethics. And I think this illustrates actually why we do need something specific for AI. ⁓ Exactly.

Shel Holtz (1:00:53)
Yeah, I think they’ll come together at some point when AI has become

so routine and is just a part of life. But right now, yeah, I agree, especially because of the risks that we’re seeing. I still in my heart believe that if you read IEBC’s code of ethics, PRSA, CIPRs, it’s all covered there, but it’s not explicit, it’s implicit. And right now what we need is for things to be explicit.

@nevillehobson (1:01:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So there’s lots for communicators to absorb in all of this. So if you’re interested in the devil being in the detail, there’s the we’ll have links or there are links in the show notes for this episode for that Wall Street Journal piece I mentioned, it’s lengthy, extremely deeply analytical. It’s behind a paywall, unfortunately, but there are probably ways you can get into it.

There’s also a linked article I wrote about my blog, which I found rather fascinating. It was from the Catholic Health. I’m not a sudden conversion to reading religious publications, by the way, but in the focus of my interest, I’m encountering these stories. But they had an interesting analysis of transhumanism. Now, I have a number of deeply Catholic friends whose eyes rolled when I told them about this story, because this to me is a major issue for the Pope to grapple.

grapple with where transhumanism, if I understand it correctly, is all about. It’s not salvation you’re going to get from a God when you die. It’s likely to be from computer software and software engineers or the new priests. mean, that’s the take I’m reading from the Catholic Herald’s article. I don’t agree in any shape or form with that. But it’s nevertheless, it’s a point of view. And that’s part of the conversation too. So you got to take care of that. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes if you want to read it. But

Wall Street Journal piece, this piece, CNN article, which is talking about the meeting that just happened this past few days. And then of course, there’s our conversation. there’s a lot to unpack from this. And if you have comments to share, we definitely want to hear what you think.

Shel Holtz (1:02:48)
Yeah, and you know, we’ve been talking about this for years and years, but now it’s coming to pass. I just read in the New York Times about a guy who has about two months left to live and is working with his son to create a digital version of himself that the family can continue to interact with after he’s gone. So, you know, this is something that we anticipated. It’s here. So what does that do to the idea of mortality?

@nevillehobson (1:03:06)
Well, boy.

That’s right. You’re absolutely right.

Shel Holtz (1:03:15)
There’s so many philosophical issues to address. I’m concerned about internal communications. Internal communications is where I spend most of my time. It is what I’m most passionate about in the communication space. And you hear a lot these days about how internal comms star has risen. It was the pandemic that…

@nevillehobson (1:03:16)
Well.

goodness.

Shel Holtz (1:03:39)
It was the catalyst for that as communications became more important to senior leadership. And now we’re more strategic and we have the seat at the table and blah, blah, blah. And all of the data that we’re seeing about problems with connection in the workplace suggest that we’re not doing as good a job as we’re giving ourselves credit for. This growing disconnect inside the work

place is sapping productivity, its undermining culture, and frankly costing companies a lot more than they realize. So let’s talk for a couple of minutes about the hidden costs of internal disconnection and what smart strategic internal comms leaders can do to close these gaps. Let’s start with a stat that jumped out at me from a recent Axios HQ report, a stat that gets right to the heart of one of the biggest problems I see with what internal communicators do every day.

The data says employees lose more than a month of work every year just trying to find information. Clarifying confusing updates or waiting on other people to respond. We’re talking about 41 work days per year per person. Do the math and that’s about $20,000 in lost productivity for every employee. All that time chasing down answers or trying to interpret vague emails adds up.

And let’s be honest, this is not just a minor nuisance. For most organizations, it’s a massive silent drain on resources and much of it’s preventable. So what’s the fix? It starts with clarity and consistency. We need to deliver the right information at the right time in the right way. That might mean tighter, more concise updates. Maybe it’s a centralized digital hub where people know they’ll find what they need.

Maybe it’s just making sure leaders are trained to write and speak with a little more empathy and a lot less jargon. But it also means that internal communicators absolutely must start devoting some of their attention to how communication happens within the organization between other people and between departments and functions, not just the formal messaging between leadership and employees. When was the last time a communicator that you knew did a process audit to see what messages are being sent?

by processes. This ought to become a key area of focus. Now, the same Axios report had another stat that’s alarming. Eight out of 10 employees say the quality of internal communication affects how well they understand company goals. But only about 9%, that’s just one out of every 10, feel they’re fully aligned with those goals. That’s not just an internal comms problem, that’s a business problem.

If people aren’t clear on where the organization is headed or why it matters, how can we expect them to bring their best to the table? And if internal comms isn’t about alignment, I don’t know what it’s about. Here’s where internal communicators can make a real difference. And I’m not talking about an all hands meeting or a CEO memo. Short frequent touch points from leadership, weekly what’s important notes, town halls that actually allow employees to ask questions.

And maybe most important, managers translating those big picture goals into the realities that their teams face every day. Now let’s talk about frontline workers, people in retail, healthcare, logistics. Fast Company shared some eye-opening findings from a WorkVivo study. Nearly half of frontline employees don’t even know who their CEO is. This is just staggering to me, although based on a personal experience, it’s not all that surprising.

When I was running communications at Mattel, we did quarterly CEO town halls, but only for manager and above because we didn’t have a space big enough for everybody. And I convinced leadership that let’s do a second one. And they said, okay, we’ll bring all the people from below manager into the other one. So they weren’t going to be mixed groups, which is what I had in mind. And so they had the second town hall.

The CEO got up, did his dog and pony show, same thing he had done for managers and above. And afterwards, a group of admins walked up to him and they were just so effusive. They said, this is so wonderful. It’s so great to be included. We never get to hear this stuff. We understand so much more of what we’re hearing about. Now we just have one question. Who are you? He didn’t introduce himself. He assumed.

@nevillehobson (1:08:09)
You

Shel Holtz (1:08:15)
Now, I’m the CEO, of course everyone knows who they are. And at the front line, that’s one hell of an assumption. So even more employees in this research say the broader company culture doesn’t really apply to them. And only 9 % are truly satisfied with internal communication. If that doesn’t sound like a crisis for communication, I don’t know what does.

So what can communicators do? Well, for starters, we have to get creative about reaching people who aren’t sitting at a desk all day. More mobile friendly platforms, digital signage, even a quick weekly video from the CEO specifically for the frontline. And crucially, two-way communication channels, places where frontline employees can get, ask questions and get real answers. Now,

Here’s a twist, and I apologize, I know this is a longer report, but there’s a lot of this stuff happening out there. According to a recent piece from the New York Post, Gen Z employees, those just starting their careers, are shying away from office small talk. In fact, three out of four say they struggle to strike up conversations with coworkers. It might be tempting to chalk this up to generational differences or social anxiety. I think it’s deeper than that.

As more work moves online and hybrid, those water cooler moments, as we’ve talked about frequently in the past, aren’t happening organically. And that’s a problem because informal interactions is where trust is built and where silos are broken down. Internal comms can help here too. Can’t force small talk, but we can create spaces for it. Slack channels for non-work chat, virtual coffee breaks or interest groups, let people connect over something other than deadlines.

We just launched a new intranet. It has communities, and I made a point of setting up some communities that are not work related. Share pictures of your pets. We have one that somebody set up about video gaming, and this is where you’re going to have the opportunity for those kinds of interactions and for people to meet. Then there’s the infinite work day. This is a term that came out of Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, and it describes a world where work bleeds into evenings and weekends.

especially for remote and hybrid teams, Gallup reports that millions of employees are stuck with unpredictable schedules, making it hard to find work-life balance or plan family time. Role here for internal communicators too. We can model and promote boundaries, publicly acknowledging that it’s okay to log off at a reasonable hour and celebrating leaders who actually do it.

We can make sure employees know about resources for mental health and wellbeing and check in regularly through pulse surveys or just simple, are you doing moments. And we can recognize how different employees from different generations perceive this issue, especially given the micro targeting of employees that’s increasingly possible with AI. For example, I learned at the IAVC World Conference that Gen Z is not millennial 2.0.

They’re not interested in work-life balance. They’re interested in work-life blend. That seems to me to necessitate a different messaging to millennials than we’re sending to Gen Z. So all of these issues share in common symptoms of disconnection to information, to leadership, to each other, to the mission of the company. That’s why internal comms isn’t just a nice to have and why we have to stop resting on our laurels.

We are the nervous system of the organization and when it breaks down, everything suffers, productivity, culture, retention. So my challenge to communicators who work in the internal comm space, audit your channels and messages, who’s being reached, who isn’t, and what’s getting lost in translation. Design your strategy for real inclusion, not just efficiency.

make it two-way and make sure that the voices of the frontline and Gen Z and everyone in between are actually being heard and measure your impact. It’s not about how many emails you send, it’s about how much time and confusion you save.

@nevillehobson (1:12:27)
quite a story, Here we are in 2025, and you’ve outlined stuff. I remember hearing about all this stuff in the early 90s. And the bit about not knowing who the CEO is is truly staggering, I have to admit. So if that’s a picture that is part of the bigger picture, let’s say, then that doesn’t look good for communicators, I must admit. To throw into this mix,

The question my mind listened to was, OK, fine, this is all great. What do you do? How do you do this in a hybrid workplace? Meaning work from home sometimes, work in the office other times, or as we hear occasionally, there’s some companies where some people don’t go in at all, others where the climate is forcing people to go in, so the environment is not a good place. I read on LinkedIn and I didn’t bookmark the person who posted this, unfortunately.

But Mark Reed, the CEO of WPP, the advertising agency speaking at South by Southwest in London last week, said, he talked about hybrid working in the future of the workforce with AI, blah, blah, essentially said people are happy when they’re in the office. Which, which which I’ve seen people commenting. I’ve seen people commenting on what I mean, are you nuts? Are you stupid? Or what? You know, is it without any any any explainer, as I understand it, nothing to say here’s the data that supports that view.

Shel Holtz (1:13:34)
That’s just not true. The data says that’s not true.

@nevillehobson (1:13:48)
But if you’ve got a CEO saying stuff like that, then that doesn’t look good at all for being able to achieve some of the things you outlined in your call to communicate or call to internal communicators. But it’s right.

Shel Holtz (1:14:02)
It’s another disconnect, those employees in the office going,

what, are you nuts? How’s it possible to align with your CEO when your CEO is making statements like that?

@nevillehobson (1:14:07)
Right.

Yeah, yeah. mean, PR week has a good thing about it. If you subscribe, it’s behind the paywall. And the link in the LinkedIn piece that I saw wasn’t to that. It was to something else, but I’ve not been able to find it. I’ll see if I can. But the fact disconnect is the right word because everything you talked about is about disconnects. And if we sort of know what they are, surely it’s fixable, right?

Shel Holtz (1:14:33)
I would hope, you know, I heard the theme of this year’s IABC conference was connect. And I heard some people making fun of that. Everything is called connect. Hell, my intranet is called connect. But I think it’s an apt theme for this year, considering disconnect is one of the primary issues that we’re dealing with. People are disconnecting from the news. People are disconnecting from their organizations.

They are disconnected from things they want to be connected to because they’re not being provided with the information, the data, the resources to be connected. This is serious connection really needs to be a focus for communicators right now.

@nevillehobson (1:15:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, and that plays into everything we’ve talked about over the last months, particularly starting with Edelman’s trust barometer, trust in organizations, trust in leaders of organizations diminishing. And this adds to that, particularly if, I mean, I can picture it, Shell, a large organization that has people out in the field or in factories or whatever it is, they’re not at a desk, so they’re not going to be exposed to easy communication.

you need to build that in. It reminds me of something I did when I was working at Mercer in the early 90s with a client. It was a company called Marion Merrell Dow that was in the pharma business. They had a sales force who were completely not getting any of communication that employees got. So we developed a kind of radio station for them and recorded stuff that was mailed to them on cassette tapes. Because these are sales guys in cars, they could put the cassette tape in the cassette player in the car.

That’s analog stuff for you. But surprisingly, to me, I recall highly effective communication based on surveys that we did. But that idea was bold at that time for that company, the industry they were in. It requires, in my view, just using that as purely as an illustrative example, requires boldness to change these things in an organization. That to me is something that is squarely within the realm.

of a communicator to do something about it seems to me. there’s, you know, there’s a not a roadmap exactly, but there’s a plan that you could see what you need to do. So why not do it? Easy as pie, right, Shell?

Shel Holtz (1:16:53)
That’s why everybody’s doing it already.

@nevillehobson (1:16:55)
You got it. So let’s talk about AI again, actually. And this story of Anquod interesting in Digiday. They talk about a new way of automation is quietly reshaping how content creators engage with their audiences. That’s forcing communicators and marketers to think differently about trust control and what authentic really means. So Digiday’s report that was published on the 20th of June.

highlights the growing use of agentic AI by influencers. We’ve talked about agentic AI before, but just briefly, agentic AI is AI systems that don’t just respond to prompts, but acts with autonomy, engaging people in comments and DMs using the creators voice tone and even catchphrases related to this particular story. The result is that creators are seeing real gains, less burnout, more responsiveness, and deeper fan engagement. Agentic AI is redefining online interaction.

helping creators stay present without being overwhelmed. But says Digiday, there’s a cost. Advertisers are growing cautious with some now adding clauses to influence a contracts to ban AI generated content altogether. The concern is that AI, no matter how well trained, could undermine the authenticity of the relationship between creator and audience or even misrepresent the creator, especially in sensitive brand context. And then there’s the ethical dimension.

As agentic AI starts to simulate personality and build relationships, how should we think about its role? What happens when fans form connections with a chatbot, even if it sounds just like the person they follow? Despite concerns, creators argue that AI interaction has improved their relationships with fans, made them more responsive and enhanced engagement metrics, qualities brands still value. Still, communicators are now in new territory, navigating contracts, brand trust,

and audience expectations all at once. It’s no longer just about producing content. It’s about managing relationships that may now be co-authored by machines. Which brings us to the larger point. As AI becomes a co-pilot in content and conversation, how do we define authenticity? How should brands and communicators navigate this new hybrid territory? What do you make of that show?

Shel Holtz (1:19:09)
You make sure that there’s still a human in the loop providing that oversight. mean, you tell me whether you think this is an apt analogy, but there was a time when animation was done by hand. Each cell was drawn and painted. There were the people who did the main illustration and then the inkers who filled everything in. My dad worked for Disney. So I used to…

@nevillehobson (1:19:12)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:19:33)
get to see some of these. even have some cells. I have a cell from 101 Dalmatians, which was a hand drawn, hand painted motion picture. And then along comes computers and suddenly it’s all coding that’s going into this. You look at anything that Pixar has done and everybody of course sings the praises of the genius of Pixar. And it’s the new way to deliver.

@nevillehobson (1:19:38)
Ha

Shel Holtz (1:19:59)
animation. mean, how much does that take the humanity or the authenticity out of the equation or the creativity? And I got to tell you, Michelle and I, we were feeling like we just needed to turn our brains off. And we saw on one of the streaming channels that there was a full length Looney Tunes movie and it starred Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. And the description

said it was 100 % hand drawn in the old Warner Brothers style, the Fritz Freling, Chuck Jones style of animation. And we said, cool. And we watched it for about a half an hour and we looked at each other and we said, the animation is incredible. It is just like it was in the 40s and the 50s. And it is just amazing. The movie is terrible. It’s not.

funny, it’s stupid, it doesn’t have any of the wit and charm that, or the grown-up humor that you turn to Warner Brothers cartoons for. Does doing it the old way guarantee that it’s going to be authentic and credible? No, I think human creativity exhibits itself in the output, regardless of the tools that you are using.

@nevillehobson (1:21:11)
Thanks

Shel Holtz (1:21:18)
So if you are using agentic AI as a tool, how you use it and the controls that you exercise over it and how you partner with it as opposed to simply abdicating everything to it is going to determine whether the output is authentic and credible and clearly something that was driven by a creator as opposed to, you know, the slop that we’re seeing.

filling TikTok and YouTube these days.

@nevillehobson (1:21:52)
That’s a good, that’s a good argument you’ve made. I’m going to think about that. But I tend to agree with what you’re saying. Add another dimension, which we touched on at the beginning of this show, which is what we’re seeing with these newer tools coming out now with text to video, text to video, literally. The one I mentioned from Mid Journey, to my mind is still spinning with what I did with single photographs of two things in particular. One was a selfie of me.

and the other one was a cartoon, very aimed at young toddlers type of style of a bunny rabbit. And I didn’t really tell it to do much, but I was blown away by what it came back with. So imagine that being employed with something like this. In fact, it’s mind boggling to think that through because that is what’s going to happen actually. So, right.

Shel Holtz (1:22:49)
sure, but it’s just a tool like computerized

@nevillehobson (1:22:52)
Right. Right.

Shel Holtz (1:22:52)
animation that makes it easier for you to realize your human vision.

@nevillehobson (1:22:57)
Right, but you mentioned AI slop. And again, this now does it not come back to the beauty in the eye of beholder? One man’s slop is another man’s art, I would argue. We’re going to see a lot of that.

Shel Holtz (1:23:07)
we absolutely are. But I think we’re going to also see a lot of remarkable creative stuff that where these tools helped the creator achieve their vision. So I don’t care what tools somebody uses if it comes out as what they had envisioned. I want to see what they envisioned, regardless of whether they drew it by hand or used AI agents. I don’t care.

@nevillehobson (1:23:12)
Agree, agree.

Right.

with you 100 % on that. I think exciting times are coming, Shil.

Shel Holtz (1:23:35)
Exciting times are coming indeed. And we’ll have to wait till next month to see what exciting times have transpired between now and then. Actually, we’re going to be doing a few midweek episodes between now and our next episode, which we’re going to record on July 26th. It’ll drop on Monday, July 28th. So look forward to that. Keep an eye out for the…

@nevillehobson (1:23:37)
you

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:23:59)
midweek episodes. Also keep an eye out for an interview that we are planning to record this coming Thursday with Richard Bagnell, who is the volunteer head of Amec, that’s the International Association for the Measurement of Public Relations and Communications. And they have just come out with their most recent update to the Barcelona principles. This is essentially a code of ethics for measurement.

I remember the original Barcelona principles, which was the first time we saw an official body say AVEs are bad, no advertising value equivalencies. And that’s something I intend to ask him. Yeah, there are public relations agencies that still offer them. And when I asked the president of one of them, he said, our clients want them.

@nevillehobson (1:24:29)
Yep, we talked about it.

And they’re still with us.

He’s still using it.

Shel Holtz (1:24:49)
So rather than educate the clients about why they’re bad and why they’re better metrics, the clients want it, so we’re going to keep giving it to them, right? One of the questions I will undoubtedly ask. So that’ll be coming up within the next month too. In the meantime, we hope that you’ll leave a comment somewhere about something that you have heard here or something that you would like to share. We had no comments this past month. Send a comment to fircomments at gmail.com, include up to a three minute audio.

@nevillehobson (1:25:06)
That nice.

Shel Holtz (1:25:16)
comment, record that audio comment on our website. Just click the send voicemail link over on the right hand side of the page and you can record up to 90 seconds. You can record as many of those 90 second clips as you want. You can leave comments on the show notes. You can leave comments where we share the announcements that an episode has dropped on LinkedIn, Facebook, threads, Mastodon, Blue Sky. We’re pretty much everywhere except X.

Which is interesting because I have been hearing more and more that the AI community, and I’m talking about the CEOs and the AI engineers and the strategists, they’re mainly on X. Most of the communication between these people is happening on X. And that’s what the AI podcast ends up saying is, know, the CEO of Anthropics said this on X and Sam Altman said that on X.

I may need to go back to X just to be able to stay up to date with what’s happening in AI.

@nevillehobson (1:26:13)
If only you mentioned that just as a quick aside, that’s been going through my mind a lot because some things I’m interested in, mostly from a personal point of view, I tend to, when I’m researching, find links or insights on X more than any other platform. And that feels, gives me a major dilemma because I quit X, we all did. Are I going to go back? I don’t know, but that’s, yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

Shel Holtz (1:26:29)
Yeah, it really, really does.

I’m gonna have to

find a way to curate so that what I’m seeing is the AI stuff and avoiding however that algorithm pushes that vile stuff at you. I don’t want that, but I do wanna be where these AI thought leaders are sharing their thoughts. mean, know, Ethan Molyks on LinkedIn, which is great, and Chris Pan and a bunch of other people, but apparently X is the hub for all of this. that…

@nevillehobson (1:26:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:27:02)
will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #469: Is Internal Communication Failing? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While a company’s reputation doesn’t appear as a line item on a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet, it is nevertheless a critical intangible asset that significantly influences financial performance and long-term success. A strong positive reputation fosters trust among consumers and B2B customers, leading to increased customer loyalty, premium pricing power, and greater resilience in times of crisis. It also makes the company more attractive to top talent, reducing recruitment costs and improving employee retention. A favorable reputation can also enhance relationships with investors and partners, providing better access to capital and more advantageous business opportunities.

The public relations profession is in the reputation business. Yet there are new threats to reputations that aren’t yet on most practitioners’ radars — and if they are, they haven’t found their way into plans and strategies. For example, companies that succumbed to political pressure to back away from their DEI commitments have suffered reputational damage, while those that stood by them have seen their reputation scores increase. That may have something to do with general support for DEI, but research found that customers crave consistency from the companies they do business with, and the sudden U-turn away from DEI commitments leadership previously touted was viewed as a failure of integrity.

Add to that the surge of disinformation and job loss AI is already bringing to the business world, and it’s clear we’re facing a new world of reputation management. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at some recent research and reports to zero in on the newest reputation challenges and how communicators should face them.

Links from this episode:

Culture wars and scandals drag down corporate reputations
Companies that kept DEI commitments saw higher reputation scores in 2025
New York State Updates WARN Notices to Identify Layoffs Tied to AI
Is AI Damaging Your Professional Image?
Musk and AI among biggest threats to brand reputation, global survey shows
The disinformation storm is now hitting companies harder
M&S is taking reputational damage from cyberattack: research
The Reputational Risk Index

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02)
Hello everyone and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 468. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:08)
And I’m Shel Holtz. We talk a lot on this show about brand and reputation, how to build it, how to protect it, how to recover when things go sideways. Reputation matters. A lot of brands make knee-jerk decisions based on short-term objectives, only to suffer reputationally as a result. Reputation isn’t fluff, it isn’t vanity. A good reputation builds resilience. It buys you the benefit of a doubt, ⁓ a bank of goodwill for when things go wrong.

It attracts talent, it boosts your stock price, it shapes policy outcomes and partnership opportunities. And increasingly, it reflects how well your organization aligns with societal values, not just what you say, but what you do. Lately, the rules for reputational risk have been changing. Traditional threats are still around, scandals, product failures, bad leadership decisions. But now we’re seeing new ones emerge, many of them tied to technology and politics in ways that communicators may not be fully pro-

prepared for, but can’t afford to ignore. Let’s start with the latest Axios-Harris poll on corporate reputation, because the shakeups there are dramatic. Tesla, which once topped the list of most admired companies, has fallen all the way to 60th. Boeing, with its safety mishaps and culture issues, and now the crash of an Air India 787 Dreamliner, well, Boeing sits near the bottom of the list. And what’s especially interesting here

is how much of this decline has to do with cultural alignment or misalignment with public sentiment. Axios points to companies being dragged into culture wars, and it’s not hard to see why. The Trump administration’s ongoing pushback against DEI efforts is having a reputational ripple effect. Companies that backtracked on their DEI commitments or tried to stay neutral are paying a price. Patagonia, Microsoft, and Costco, on the other hand, have increased their reputation scores

precisely because they stayed the course on equity and inclusion. They didn’t cave and the public noticed. This tells us something we probably already knew. Authenticity matters. People don’t expect companies to fix every problem, but they do expect them to be consistent and to have a spine when it counts. In 2025, wishy washy doesn’t cut it, especially with younger generations.

Now, let’s add technology to the mix because it’s getting harder and harder to talk about reputation without AI finding its way into the conversation. Case in point, New York State just updated its Warn Act notices. These are the documents companies have to file when they plan a mass layoff. Now, if you’re laying people off because of AI, you have to say so. It becomes public information. So not only do you risk headlines like, Company X replaces workers with AI,

You’re also potentially triggering employee backlash, customer concern, and stakeholder scrutiny. All of that’s in the reputation column. Think about that for a minute. Laying off people because of a merger or a downturn is one thing, but layoffs tied directly to AI? That’s a reputational landmine. And I’d argue it’s a signal to communicators to get involved early. Make sure there’s a story ready to be told, one that frames the decision in terms of responsibility

future readiness and long-term growth, not just cost cutting. Lay the groundwork with your stakeholders on your company’s strategic approach to AI so nobody’s surprised when hiring takes a dip or layoffs are announced. And AI’s impact isn’t just organizational, it’s personal. A piece out of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business explores how your AI tools at work could actually hurt your professional image.

If your coworkers or managers see you using AI to generate ideas or speed up tasks, they might assume you’re less competent or less committed, even if the output is amazing. We’ve been telling people to embrace AI, to use it to be more efficient. But if the perception is that you’re cheating or cutting corners, then your individual reputation could take a hit, even if your actual work improves. Now this creates a tension.

Organizations want employees to be innovative and tech savvy, but our workplace culture hasn’t caught up. Consequently, we need to help employees not just use these tools, but frame how they use them. Communicators can play a key role here in educating both employees and leaders, especially managers, about responsible AI use looks like and why it’s not a threat to human value. The threats to reputation are evolving.

culture wars, political pressure, layoff transparency, AI ethics, it is not the same game that it was a decade ago. And if communicators don’t help organizations see it, prepare for it, and respond to it, we’re going to be stuck playing defense. So be proactive, let’s help our organizations walk the talk, and let’s remind leaders that in 2025, reputation isn’t just a brand asset, it’s a survival strategy.

@nevillehobson (05:16)
summary there, Shell. I mean, there’s so many statistics to pay attention to, to get a sense of what’s going on. I asked the question to myself, is reputational damage on the rise? And I’m kind of guided by some things have been happening recently here in the UK, which I’ll mention later. The short answer, yes. And you’ve explained it, reputational risk is increasingly volatile and high stakes. So ⁓ we’ve got a Canadian survey, and I don’t have the name of the

survey company right to hand. That was done in February. Nearly one in three companies reported reputational harm in the past year. They’re citing inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and strikes as triggers. The Exos-Harris poll you mentioned, that’s kind of interesting. found some other statistics to add to what you said. That poll shows 46 % of companies experienced lowered reputation scores and that’s up from 37 % the year before.

consumers under pressure and rising costs and price quality concerns are the main reason for that. What’s driving it overall? That’s a huge answer for that could take us hours to get through everything. It’s so wide ranging economic stress, digital age, disinformation, you touched on that cultural, political polarization, ethical failing, cybersecurity. I’ve got something to say about that in a bit. But the interesting thing too is that ⁓ the ⁓

The Reputational Risk Index Q1 2025 report that just came out has a really interesting list of the top reputational risks. And what struck me was how three new ones are at the top of this list and the rest of the top 10, the seven, they’ve been around for years. But these risks are fast moving and they’ve replaced what was there before. Those top three won’t surprise you.

Number one is AI misuse, harmful or deceptive use of AI, including deepfakes, misinformation, biased decision making or unethical applications that cause harm or manipulate public perception. Number two, this kind of made me, my goodness, association with Elon Musk, instances where an individual company or entity is associated with, targeted by or publicly criticized by Elon Musk.

So it kind of rubs off on you that kind of social like he insults you on X for instance, or does something that brings your name into association with him. That’s not good at all. So that’s number two, that’s the interesting thing. Number three, this.

Shel Holtz (07:54)
And that one is interesting because it’s kind

of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? Whether you’re on his good side or his bad side is just the connection to him.

@nevillehobson (07:58)
You got it. You got it.

No.

Yeah, exactly. So he’s now departed the White House apparently and has gone back to look after his business interests. Does that mean this will change? Unlikely, I would say. But the third one doesn’t surprise me. ⁓ DEI backtracking. The rollback of regulations, policies or initiatives designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, which aim to ensure fair treatment of full participation for all individuals. If you backtrack on that after you said this is what you’ve implemented.

that will hit your reputation. And that’s your damned if you do or damned if you don’t, I think in light of what the US government is trying to do. So those three are the top reputation risks. The others, anti-competitiveness, defamation, breach of contract, copyright infringement, whistleblowing, price fixing, opioids crisis have been around for a while. But that illustrates, I think that kind of complements ⁓ what we’ve said so far in this. And it’s really quite interesting.

I think this I mean, there’s so much that we could talk about on this show. It’s it’s kind of hard to, you know, keep a keeper, keep it focused on on what we need to say. But I think you mentioned communicators. And that’s my focus to what is the role of communicators of this. And, you know, there’s four things that struck me what can companies do and the communicators working for those companies defend against disinformation, ⁓ rapid monitoring of online discourse.

lead with ethics and transparency in your business. ⁓ No longer optional, some of these things, including DEI, and that’s going to be difficult for some organizations, I suspect. Value-based pricing and quality, as inflation bites companies seen as fair in pricing and product, remain trusted. Crisis preparedness, from digital AI enabled threats to executive misconduct, layered crisis and reputation defense plans are vital.

And I’ve seen people talking about that in the last week, actually, that kind of layered approach to it all. I mean, there’s lots more we could talk about there, but there’s so much happening that can be damaging. And the one that I do want to mention, which I’ll do in a minute, is ⁓ an event that happened here in the UK that I wrote about. I’ve talked about it quite a bit online, as many others have. It’s a global story, even though it’s a British company, Marks & Spencer, the big retailer.

that was hit by a cyber attack in April and it’s still ongoing. ⁓ We’ll talk about that in a bit if you’d like, but they are looking at a cost estimated by experts about 300 million pounds as the cost for not paying the ransom to the hackers. But the consequences have been severe. Interesting though is what was the reputational damage? And there is no single answer to that. So I’ll talk about it a bit, but…

All that stuff about the top three and anything surprising there to you about the fact that these are the new ones that are the big deals for people now?

Shel Holtz (10:58)
Well, I have to admit that I was surprised to see association with Elon Musk so high on the list. That is such a tremendous reputational risk that it’s number two. How many people, how many companies in the grand scheme of things are at risk of association with Elon Musk? So I found that interesting. But other than that, no. And, you know, the whole

@nevillehobson (11:04)
You

Shel Holtz (11:25)
discussion around disinformation, think is one that we, that’s a drum beat we need to keep up because I don’t think most organizations have even started looking at the methods they will use to identify it ⁓ when it strikes them. So this is one, think it’s going to become a bigger problem really fast. And I think a lot of companies are going to get hurt before we start to see, for example,

consulting organizations with disinformation practices. Have you heard of one yet? A PR agency or a marketing agency with a disinformation practice or a disinformation center of excellence? I haven’t. So.

@nevillehobson (12:06)
No,

I haven’t. haven’t. But that’s an interesting one, because I think it’s quite complicated for organizations to realize, partly because I think some of the things that you hear about, and there’s a really good story I’m to mention in a minute that was in the Financial Times the other day, that talked about, as the headline called, the disinformation storm is now hitting companies harder. And much of it is

appears to be kind of opportunistic by bad actors to quote that euphemism of people who do things and say things and take actions that can damage you with surprising velocity that come out at you that completely unexpected and in disinformation largely untrue yet the stories out there. Good example, we see FT quotes, a company called Aalef Foods, Danish company.

the UK’s biggest dairy cooperative. have tankers going around all the farms collecting the milk to make butter and so forth and so on. They learned this the hard way after recently announcing a trial of a feed additive aiming to reduce methane emissions in dairy cows. Some customers pushed to boycott milk products. A social media storm ensued featuring unfounded and bizarre claims that the additive was part of a plot to depopulate the world by creating fertility issues. ⁓

That’s in line with, you know, 5G is a conspiracy of Bill Gates to and, you know, all that stuff went on and it sticks with something like he still see reference to this. This is all the foods, though, is illustrative of that type of fast moving event. And social media plays a huge role in this is is is not can be is very damaging. And they suffered damage as a result of this. There’s other examples I mentioned, too. And it includes a survey by Edelman, they say.

of 400 top communications and marketing execs found that 1810 worry about the impact of disinformation on the businesses. So 80 % fewer than half feel prepared to tackle those risks. What we just talked about.

Shel Holtz (14:10)
Mm-hmm. And I suspect that some of those who feel prepared actually aren’t.

@nevillehobson (14:16)
Yeah, exactly. So let’s talk, let’s talk a bit about impacts then on all of these things. And I can use the Marks and Spencer example, because it is very illustrative. Yeah, it’s very illust… No, it’s very illustrative.

Shel Holtz (14:17)
So, yeah.

I was actually hoping you would because here’s something that wasn’t, other than not

having a robust ⁓ defense in place to prevent the hack in the first place, this is something that was done to them.

@nevillehobson (14:38)
Well,

yeah, this is at the heart of it because it was a cyber attack that began towards the end of April and severely disrupted their operations to the extent that everything you could do before as a customer with online purchasing, the so-called click and collect, looking up your orders, seeing something in stock, reserving it or that was gone. You couldn’t do any of that. Worse, I suppose, for those folks who don’t do online, they go to the stores, you couldn’t use

contactless payment at all. The machines are all offline because of the risks and there were horror stories emerging of ⁓ people, know, pen and paper to write down orders and take stock from one warehouse to another in their own cars so they could keep stock levels going stuff like that. No deliveries. They were halted. Some stores went cash only wouldn’t take anything you could manually do your cars, but they wouldn’t.

The loyalty apps, 18 million members was not working. Recruitment systems and internal logistics were severely impacted by this. Staff, as I mentioned, staff reported manual workarounds like checking freezer temperatures due to IT shutdowns. I the systems were all shut down. So the hacking group behind it, apparently called Scattered Spider, is known for using social engineering and targeting major corporations with ransomware.

I’ve not seen anything new on this since it was first mentioned about three weeks ago, but the speculation is that they got access to Marks and Spencer systems through a supplier, through an employee they tricked into getting them to log in and that then gave them access to all this. Here you’re not allowed to pay ransoms for things like this is illegal, so they didn’t, but they were quite robust in not doing yes, we’ll weather this storm. That is a pretty

bold move and attracted serious criticism. I wrote a post not long ago that was very critical of Marks and Spencer and their communication with customers. Now knowing what I do know from the latest developments, I don’t really feel that I would change that. I might tone it down a bit because they did communicate, which I didn’t disagree with. I just said it wasn’t very effective. They were following a plan they didn’t communicate to anyone. So how would you know even what was happening?

Here’s a reputational impact they have suffered already. It’s actually interesting, in one sense is nowhere near as bad as many people were speculating. There’s a damn good reason for that. But let me just run down the list of some of these things here. So the reputational impact, according to research from the Maru consumer research firms, big, big in the UK here, and obviously, Marks & Spencer is a big client, brand advocacy dropped. So those who would recommend Marks & Spencer

fell from 87 % to 73 % during this period. Trust erosion. Those who would definitely give Marks & Spencer the benefit of the doubt in future issues dropped from 39 % to 32%. Shopping decisions were affected. Between 25 % and 32 % of consumers said they’d shop elsewhere due to the disruption. But broader trust remained more stable. Overall trust, so people saying they’d either definitely or probably trust Marks & Spencer,

dipped only slightly from 84 % to 82%. That’s quite telling. what that means is that that trust, people are still willing to kind of lend them that trust in spite of all of this. So experts analyzing all this, including Maru itself, talking about the incident shows that even long established trusted brands are vulnerable to cyber attacks. That’s the number one takeaway, they say.

Shel Holtz (18:27)
Well, yes.

@nevillehobson (18:28)
They also say Marks & Spencer has significant reputational credit in the bank, but must act decisively and communicate clearly to recover the trust they have lost. And I see lots of people giving them unsolicited advice on that on social networks, which I think is not helpful at all. They’re not stupid. mean, they know this. Don’t need people doing that kind of thing. Give them something new. But I think the implications that

Maru concludes in their reporting is that this particular attack underscores cyber risk as a growing reputational threat, especially when it disrupts core services and affects logic schemes, as this one did in a way that you honestly couldn’t imagine. They were offline for six whole weeks. You couldn’t do anything at all. And my wife, Laura, for instance, buy stuff from Marks & Spencer online. She went somewhere else to get a blouse she was interested in. Not the same.

So does that mean she’s now tempted by this other firm? I hope not, because it was even more expensive than Marks & Spencer. So go back to Marks Spencer. But you know, the point is that even loyal customers may waver when trust is tested by operational failure. And that was a thing that the communication, I remember getting the customer emails and the messages pop-ups in the app, we’re all about we’re on it. We’re on it. We’re sorting it. Don’t worry back soon. I mean, that was a kind of soft messaging that, in my opinion,

waste of time that doesn’t help you at all. Although, is that really true, given the metrics that Maru has come up with in terms of the overall brand trust? Maybe they’re banking on that, they’ll weather this through until the £300 million hit is showing on their account books, and they put in place ways to deal with customers. One suggestion I saw a lot, which I thought would make sense is they need to offer something to customers as a kind of a

recompense, if you will, as a gift of some kind, and don’t try and, you know, layer it all with marketing talk or any kind of thing, just a selfless gift as a way of saying, thank you for your support and your trust or whatever it might be. I don’t know what that would look like via the loyalty program wouldn’t be a bad idea. Some of the stuff they do with that loyalty program is called sparks are pretty lame, must admit, you know, free donuts in the food stall, if you spend two pounds, that kind of thing, do something bit more meaningful. So that might help.

Shel Holtz (20:53)
Yeah, socks, underwear,

you know.

@nevillehobson (20:55)
the stuff that Marks and Spencer are renowned for, I tell you. yeah, so transparent crisis communication, swift action can mitigate long term damages, they’re concluding, ⁓ employer, I suppose. I mean, these make total sense to me. They seem that way to you.

Shel Holtz (20:58)
That’s exactly right.

Well, they make sense. mean, this was a crisis communication. And if ever there’s an opportunity to take a reputational hit, it’s during a crisis. And they did not behave like a company in crisis. They showed little empathy for the customer telling you we’re on it ⁓ doesn’t make me feel better about whatever it is that I’m dealing with as a result of this, whatever it is I plan to do that I can’t do whatever.

inconvenience or difficulty it creates for me. ⁓ I don’t want to be one of those people giving Marks and Spencer advice, but I would have ⁓ flooded the zone with empathy for one thing. And I would have turned the spotlight on frontline employees who were dealing with this every day. So you could see, more than just we’re working on it, to seeing somebody actually working on it, somebody dealing with taking cash and saying,

We’re trying to serve as many customers as we can as all this gets sorted out. But I would have really tried to shape the reputation through content marketing as this was going on, rather than just popping up messages saying, we’re still working on it.

@nevillehobson (22:28)
Yeah, I mean, that is interesting what you say about employees and my experience, which could be throughout the whole chain, but it was certainly in one store that I visit near where I live. I went in there to buy something because I couldn’t do it online. So I went in there and I talked to one of the employees at the cash point where you pay and said, how are things going with all this and what I was left with. She was very reassuring and all that.

It seemed to me highly scripted. It’s like they’d had a presentation, she’d memorize the top three things to say with a smile. Now, I don’t want to imply that it’s fakery, not at all. Was that enough, though? I don’t know. It didn’t really sit well with me, I must admit. But then again, I may not be the best kind of typical customer for that point of view. They were doing something in that regard, but none of it seemed like it was a plan almost. It seemed to me anyway, just looking at what I saw in communication, what I saw being reported.

the press what I saw about the CEO interviewed saying he and his team are working night and day constantly 724 to fix all this that to me did not sound right

Shel Holtz (23:37)
Yeah, next

thing you’re going to expect is the CEO to say he just wants to go home. ⁓ Like like Hayward during the BP golf spill. ⁓ Yeah, I guess the bottom line for all of this, though, is I’m as we’re talking and I’m seeing all the threads pulled together is whether it’s a crisis as Marks and Spencer experienced that was a cyber crime or

@nevillehobson (23:42)
Yeah.

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz (24:05)
a behavior like all of those companies that clawed back their DEI plans because Washington made it clear that it was going to make life hard for them if they didn’t. The companies that are suffering are the ones that are not standing by their values. And I think ultimately that’s what it comes down to, along with developing new plans and new workflows and new thinking.

around how to deal with this, because certainly with AI and the ability to create fakery that is hard to detect, we’re gonna need to have those new plans. But I think if organizations are consistently true to their values and show that they have a spine when those values are challenged, they stand to do pretty well reputationally. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’ll be a 30.

@nevillehobson (24:59)
Exactly.

Shel Holtz (25:00)
for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

The post FIR #468: New Threats to Reputation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Pick a superlative, and it probably applies to Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst best known for her annual Internet Trends Reports. These reports, released in the form of presentation decks, were the culmination of deep research Meeker conducted. Her last report was published June 12, 2019 at Recode’s Code Conference, but she just released a new one dedicated entirely to AI. With credibility as strong as hers, it’s likely that this report will become the defining source of truth about the state of AI. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel break down the report to focus on elements that are meaningful to professional communicators.

Links from this episode:

Mary Meeker’s 2025 AI Trends Report
Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends – here’s your TL;DR
It’s not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change
Q&A with Mary Meeker on the AI revolution
Mary Meeker’s AI Trends Report | LinkedIn
Reframing the 2025 AI Trends Report for Business Leaders | Neville’s blog
David Armano’s GPT, “2025 Meeker AI Report GPT’D

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:10)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 467 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:17)
And I’m Neville Hobson. It’s been six years since Mary Meeker last published one of her legendary internet trends reports. And now she’s back with a 340 slide deep dive focused entirely on artificial intelligence. It’s a massive document, rich in data, charts and insight, but very much aimed at a Silicon Valley audience, investors, platform builders and technologists. And while it’s fascinating, it’s also dense.

If you’re not steeped in the language of model training, deployment, and what it actually costs to run AI at scale, it can feel like stepping into someone else’s board meeting. So I decided to reinterpret it, not to dumb it down, but to make it readable and useful for business communicators, strategists, and leaders who need to understand what’s coming and why it matters. In today’s short form episode, we’re going to unpack what’s in the MECA report, some of the big themes, why they’re significant.

and how communicators in particular might think about sharing this kind of insight within their organizations in plain English, right after this message. Let me start with one insight that really sets the scene for everything else. AI adoption is moving faster than the internet or mobile did, and there’s no waiting this one out. For business leaders, this means constant adaptation.

You can’t rely on annual strategy cycles when AI tools are evolving weekly. Businesses need to become more agile, not just in tech, but in how they communicate, train and respond to change internally. So the question is, how do organizations keep up with something that doesn’t just disrupt industries? It rewrites the rule book as it goes. Shell, when you saw the scale and scope of this report, what stood out to you? And how do you think people outside the tech investor bubble should engage with this sea change?

Shel Holtz (02:06)
When I first started looking through this report, the first thing that struck me was that the word unprecedented seemed to be on every slide. In fact, an analysis I did using AI said that unprecedented appears more than 50 times in the report. And Mary Meeker does not tend to be hyperbolic. So when she says something is unprecedented, you can take it on faith that it…

@nevillehobson (02:26)
Hmm.

Shel Holtz (02:32)
probably is unprecedented. She talked about ChatGPT growing to 800 million weekly users in 17 months. That’s the fastest user ramp up in history. She called that a milestone. It took the internet 23 years to achieve global distribution. ChatGPT amassed about 365 billion annual searches. It took Google 11 years to do that. So what struck me from this whole unprecedented

adoption and scale section of her report is the need for communicators to understand that the people in your audience are using this. It doesn’t matter whether it’s internal or it’s external. So that was one of the big things that jumped out at me. This is not something, regardless of where Gartner

might place it on their hype cycle. It is not something that is going through slow adoption. There was a report, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that said, you know, it really is just another technology. I mean, it may be phenomenal and allow you to do wonderful things, but it still has to spread like a technology. ⁓ And according to Mary Meeker’s report, it’s already done that. ⁓ It’s not going to take as long as other technologies usually do. It’s here.

and people are using it and you have to consider that. There was a lot more ⁓ that jumped out at me, particularly around ⁓ the reshaping of the workforce, but I know you’re planning on talking about that.

@nevillehobson (04:09)
Yeah, it’s interesting. You’re right. The word unprecedented did did appear a lot, particularly in some of the kind of superlative metrics that that pepper this document. What struck me, I suppose, thinking about listeners who may not have read this, yes, thinking so what’s the big deal about this? you’ve mentioned a key point that much of this has already happened and it started already. Hence that point about you can’t think, well, we’ll kind of.

you know, factor in our planning as we go along. If you’ve got a five year plan, you need to do it weekly as the report suggests. And that might surprise a lot of people. You surely can’t be that important. It is. I like the way it’s the report is set up and kind of in eight sections that cover the breadth of what she discusses. But if you look at the kind of headline statement for each of the sections, you do get a sense of the almost a dramatic aspect of

what is actually happening according to Mary Meeker’s report. Change is accelerating. We’ve talked about that. User growth, usage and investment are surging, she says. Performance is improving while costs drop. Usage costs and losses are all growing. And that’s what Mary Meeker describes as part of the huge land grab where you sacrifice immediate profits for simply scaling and getting more people on board. Monetization is complex, she says, open source China and competition.

are rising. AI is merging with the physical world and talks about this now moving out into factories and areas that don’t necessarily make big headlines, but this has been going on already for quite a while. AI-driven growth in internet usage is historic, is driving a new wave of internet activity, says, large-scale adoption across emerging markets. And this is interesting. Many people are coming online primarily to use AI tools. Something I started doing recently was

I installed on my desktop computer, my primary computer, the extension in Chrome to use chat GPT as the primary search tool, not Google, and it replaces Google. It didn’t take me long to suddenly realize that actually I’m getting more value out of my searching this way than I was using Google. Now that just works for me. I know others do agree with that. But this indicates to me, according to another report I saw,

that the younger you are, the more likely you are doing this and not traditional search engines. So this is again, all adds to that picture. And then that final one, number eight, work is evolving rapidly, as you mentioned, and that’s definitely one to focus on. But this gives a sense of the, I guess, the dramatic nature of this that ⁓ is hard to look at it in its totality without

examining each of these areas that are in extreme detail in the report. One of the reasons I did this, which was a I started this for myself, I let me do something in simple English, because this is peppered, absolutely crammed with tech talk. And if you’re not involved in this, you will struggle with this, I’m sure, or maybe not even get the correct synthesis of what you’re reading to understand it fully.

So I think my report did it that did it for me that’s effect. So I decided to publish it, which I did as a PDF on a blog post that you could download. So it’s 340 slides. I’ve done it all down to 18 pages of a PDF. Now, so I’m not saying hey, that’s all you need to read. On the contrary, you need to read this in in tandem with Mary Meeker’s report so you can get the detail because those charts are quite important. I don’t include any of those. But

Let’s talk about the workplace shell because this is something you and I have talked about a number of times on the other episodes of the podcast, particularly one or two of the monthly long form episodes. And I found this one something that if we think people are up to speed with this, I’m not so sure that’s totally true. The awareness that this is happening, we’re going to have co-workers who are AIs and that we definitely talked about.

And the fact that she mentioned in her report, many businesses are lagging behind in supporting the shift that is already underway. So the report underscores the urgency of re-skilling, rethinking performance and supporting AI literacy. And I guess the question arises as it arose in our previous discussions, are we doing enough to prepare teams for AI native workflows or are we still thinking of it as a tool, not a co-worker? That’s the conversation we had recently in fact.

Shel Holtz (08:46)
It is, and no, we’re not doing enough to prepare.

to manage teams in that environment. The other thing that I think we’re still living in denial is that this is going to affect employment. She makes the point that AI-related job postings surged 448 % between January of 2018 and April of this year. Traditional IT job postings have fallen 9%. So this is a pivot or perish moment in

@nevillehobson (08:53)
you

Shel Holtz (09:20)
the world of technology, and you know that’s coming for the rest of us as well. Another one she points out is that 73 % of outputs from a prototype GPT-4.5 were mistaken for human writing. There was a great post from Chris Penn a week or two ago in which he found five posts, I guess he had seen them in his newsfeed on LinkedIn.

from people who said, ⁓ AI writing can never be as good as human writing. It doesn’t have lived experience. It doesn’t have empathy. It doesn’t have soul. So Chris went and found work that all five of those people had done, things they had written. And he said, you know what? It wasn’t very good. So to claim that we’re as humans producing this Pulitzer quality

⁓ literary level of work as organizational communicators, I think is a conceit. As I’ve said many times, got this from Martin Waxman, most of what we write just has to be good enough and AI can do that. I was listening to the On with Kara Swisher podcast just yesterday and she had on two journalists, each of them have written a book about Sam Altman and OpenAI.

And one of them had interviewed the CEO of EY worldwide. used to be Ernst & Young, one of the big accounting firms. And she said, we will not be laying anybody off because of AI. But we also think that we can grow the business to twice its size without having to increase headcount. you know, where did those new hires come from? Job openings plummet.

I think if we continue to live in this dream world of no layoffs, no job consequences from AI, it’s gonna turn around and bite us in the ass. So we have to start living in reality there. But in terms of the workplace, she also makes the point that this is going to weave its way into everything we do. She says that the biggest changes aren’t coming from Silicon Valley.

They’re showing up where software meets the physical world. And that could be on a farm in Iowa.

@nevillehobson (11:42)
Yeah, it is interesting. There are so many areas this is already touching that you don’t quite realize. I guess the sense of this is like a speed increasing wave, not exactly a tsunami, but a wave that’s approaching at rapid speed. It could be a tsunami in that case. We’re not aware of it, it seems to me. One of the things that I noticed as a consequence of this report is how many people I’ve seen, notably via LinkedIn,

who have also put together some kind of documentation summarizing this port. All of it that I’ve seen, and I’m only talking literally of a dozen or so posts, have used an AI to produce it, which got me wondering on one or two I’ve looked at, one in particular, the first thing I spotted was a date error. Did anyone check the AI’s output before they wrote their LinkedIn post saying, hey, here’s a report about this is my interpretation, et cetera. I used chat GPT to summarize.

the report for me, which I then myself wrote the insights from. So I made sure that I did that took me twice as long otherwise as it would have. And I’m fairly confident that it is as accurate as the report itself. It’s because that’s what I’ve been referencing. I noticed David Amano did something quite cool. I must admit he created the GPT that as it’s described, it summarizes only the uploaded Mika AI report with no outside data.

So I played around with it and it’s got actually when you when load it up in your in your chat GPT client, it’s got four already populated potential questions you might want to ask. So I just clicked one. What does report say about chat GPT use? And boom, off it reeled off a whole load of bullet points and so forth. Hey, I’ve got all that in my report, too. So at least we’re kind of consistent in how we accept that was all generated by AI. The point to me about that, though, is the argument.

That’s ongoing still. I find it’s such a waste of time. Is all this stuff about, the dashes and that indicates as AI can’t be any good, blah, blah, blah. No, look, watch out. This is now what’s happening every single day by people up and down every country and every business are using AI to help them be productive, not to con others in that, ⁓ aren’t I clever, but it’s actually the AI who wrote it. Not at all. Maybe some would do that, but that’s not important.

So pay attention to this tool that others scoff at sometimes that this is going to help you because it’s an inevitability, right? And whether you like it or not, this is here. It’s it’s coming. It’s here now. And others are already making good use of it. As we’ve reported, we mentioned again today that there are others further still who are not doing what they need to do to prepare the people for this wave that’s coming. So it is coming.

I think one other area or a number, but one in particular comes to mind as I’m talking this point is the competitive nature of this from a geopolitical point of view. So we’ve heard Trump going on about this, that and the other. China is catching up fast with these tools. Other countries are doing the same. What does that all mean for us in the context of what’s going on in the world right now, which is pretty alarming everywhere you look. So now there’s this. ⁓

You can’t control the things you can’t control. What you can control is your own organization probably. So I’d focus on that and don’t worry about all the other stuff for the time being until the rockets start coming over, right? So ⁓ it is interesting. One other point to mention, I want to just get across this point here, Shell, ⁓ about how ⁓ this isn’t just a tech race, which is related. It’s a global economic and geopolitical competition, says Mary Meesher. The report highlights three threats to current AI leaders.

powerful open source alternatives, intense U.S. competition, and China’s state-backed AI ambitions. For the global businesses, it isn’t abstract. It affects vendor choices, data handling, and regulatory risk. So should businesses be preparing for an AI environment that’s fragmented, politically sensitive, and constantly shifting? Yes, they should.

Shel Holtz (15:55)
Yes, they should. And I think you’re going to see the companies that weave AI into their products are going to make them like Swiss Army knives. Basically, if a model improves over another model, you’ll be able to take the API and just switch it to the new model rather than be married forever to a model that may deteriorate over time or the company may fall into, you know, rack and ruin.

⁓ So I think the software industry is going to catch up with the fragmentation of ⁓ the LLMs, the frontier models after a while. ⁓ You were talking about David Armano’s GPT. I wasn’t aware of that until you put it in our Slack channel. I’m definitely going to go take a look at that. ⁓ I just created a GPT. I got a new camera ⁓ and

It has all kinds of settings I don’t understand. And it’s been a long time since I’ve really paid attention to photography. And I was looking at all the pitches that are on Facebook and other channels for photography lessons and guides. And I was watching some YouTube videos. And finally, I said, the heck with this. And I went to chat GPT and I created a GPT. said, ⁓ create a tutorial that will teach me the settings of, and I gave it the model name and number of the camera I got.

@nevillehobson (17:20)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (17:21)
while concurrently teaching me the fundamentals and principles of good photography. So these lessons say, okay, today you’re going to learn about aperture and we’re going to teach you this. So, you know, it works better than anything that I had found online to create what I wanted. Now for this report, since I only saw last night that this was going to be our topic today, and I hadn’t known about the report for more than a day or two.

I hadn’t had a chance to look at it at all or read a single piece about it. And with limited time, I just dumped all of the links that you shared, the report itself, and one or two other things I found into Notebook LM. created a notebook and I had it create a briefing paper. I had it create the 15 minute podcast that has the man and the woman talking to each other about the substance of the material that’s in the folder. In fact, the briefing report,

divided it into two parts. It was Mary Meeker’s report itself. And part two, it says critical analysis and nuance. And this is some of the other reports that didn’t just summarize Mary Meeker’s report, but shared their own views about it, some of which may have been contradictory. For example, ⁓ one of them made the point that just because people have adopted AI doesn’t mean they’re using it for…

work and productivity purposes. A lot of people have adopted this as just to have somebody to talk to or to ask the occasional question or to play games with or what have you. So you really have to start to think about the depth of use among the people in your organization and not just how many active AI users you have. They could just be, you know, making meme images with them for all you know. you know, so.

@nevillehobson (19:13)
Nope.

Shel Holtz (19:13)
I thought

that was one interesting observation ⁓ that came out of some of the reports.

@nevillehobson (19:21)
No, that’s a very good example, I think. A reality of how you can’t narrowly define use of tools like this because people will decide themselves how they’re going to use it, such as you’ve just set out. I do similar. It’s actually spookier. You mentioned the camera. I’ve been using Chatt GPT to research a camera I’m thinking of buying or a camera type I’m thinking of buying instead of the traditional route, which is Googling it, looking at photography journals and what the journalists say. No.

Chat GPT has done a great job. My need is different to yours, however, because what I’m looking for is something that will let me not use my phone when Laura, my wife and I are out looking at interesting places or walking around stately homes in the countryside. Instead, having a camera that I can use just for that, and it’s not going to be connected to the internet industry. That’s not a prime need. Chat GPT came out with five recommendations. And here we’re not talking about single lens reflex cameras.

not talking about mini compact cameras, talking about something slightly beyond that, that suits that use. I don’t want to have to figure out aperture and all that. I don’t want to know about any of that stuff. So probably a compact camera. It’s come up with one I’ve now been doing further research on, but it started with that. And that’s a change. And it’s a simple one. people are doing that kind of thing all the time, I’m sure. yeah, exactly. So

Shel Holtz (20:42)
absolutely.

@nevillehobson (20:45)
The bit about talking. Yep, I use chat GPT a lot as a sounding board. I often think to myself, my God, if I don’t delete some of my old chats, is that going to crash the whole of chat GPT? I must have thousands of chats in there, thousands that I’ve done since 2022 or 2023. Do I want them for any reason? Not really, but yes, I do. I don’t want to delete them because…

the way chat GPT works, it knows everything about me now from all those chats. And it surprises me sometimes when I ask it something. And it reminds me that we discussed this very topic six months ago, stuff like that. So it is part of our landscape. This is whether we like it or not. Merrymakers report, highly technical though it is, but look at some of the ⁓ business friendly versions or interpretations or

aligned commentaries that are popping up here and then including the one I wrote and published in my blog today, that it will give you the means to better understand all this in your own particular context. But, you know, don’t don’t look at it then come back to in five months, it’ll be out of date by then I would imagine so it’s as fast moving without any question.

Shel Holtz (21:58)
A couple of other notes that I made as I was doing the research on this. First of all, think communicators need to, if somebody hasn’t already taken on this role in the organization, lead the conversation about job evolution. Because if all you’re thinking about AI is that it’s going to ⁓ be in tools that your employees will use, so they’re typing up something in Word and it now has some AI features, you’re thinking about it wrong. That’s not the…

thing that’s going to drive change to the way people do their jobs. That’s just a new tool. So we need to understand job evolution as it relates to AI, ⁓ things like working with AI coworkers and lead that conversation and help prepare the employee population because it’s going to be a dramatic change or may I say unprecedented. I also think that

@nevillehobson (22:53)
Hmm

Shel Holtz (22:54)
There’s going to be a lot of hype. People are going to chase shiny objects. So think it’s important to anchor our AI messaging in concrete demonstrable ROI. We have to look at what are we trying to accomplish and how is the AI helping us accomplish that. ⁓ Somebody made the point that having good governance is going to be a market differentiator. So again, leading the conversation on AI governance. If somebody hasn’t already taken up that.

mantle and run with it. ⁓ Also, it’s important to keep everybody grounded in the role of humans here. One line I read that I liked, and I think this is in one of the reports about Mary Meeker’s report, was that the models ⁓ can predict a perfectly logical next action that falls flat the moment it meets unwritten office culture or office policy.

⁓ You have to keep the company grounded in the fact that people need to be involved in these things. ⁓ Finally, Mary Meeker made the point that this is ⁓ the biggest change in knowledge distribution since the printing press. So bigger than the internet, ⁓ because the internet was after the printing press, right? ⁓ Knowledge is now suddenly more available.

@nevillehobson (23:55)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (24:18)
to more people, knowledge has become cheap, right? Because, I mean, this is basic economics. A big supply means that the thing that you have the big supply of is cheaper. What’s not cheap is judgment. And again, I think that’s a human quality ⁓ and not an AI quality. And finally, there’s also long-term thinking that AI really doesn’t do it. If you’re talking about having a…

an AI CEO, it’ll probably do pretty well at navigating the issues and challenges you’re facing right now. But looking 10 years ahead, my understanding is that it’s not very good at that yet. So keep everybody grounded in the need ⁓ for the human in the loop.

@nevillehobson (25:06)
There was one quote I did like in the report that says in 1999, Vince surf, the father of the internet described the internet era as moving in dog years, seven times faster than regular life. The AI era says Mary Meek is now running at cheetah speed. What’s that at least 10 times faster, if not lots more. So that that kind of thing helps you think, ⁓ this is this is really, really moving. The other thing just to

for my final point to mention is something I mentioned in the blog post where I kind of summarized why does this matter to communicate is more than any other, but not just HR operations, marketing, etc. Your employees are using AI with or without policy. That’s the thing to bear in mind. That’s not like someone they’re using it no matter what your customers expect faster, smarter, more tailored interactions. Your competitors are building new capabilities you might not see coming. And there are about a dozen more, but those three struck me as something that

keep in mind when you’re looking at these developments and trends that Mary Mikos pointing out and others too, and all the interpreted wisdom that’s emerging what others are saying to navigate all of that. And you realize if you are skeptical, that this is definitely real and this is happening and you need to be the change agent as a communicator. So that’s your job.

Shel Holtz (26:25)
And we have a link to the report and to many ⁓ news write-ups and summaries and analyses of the report in the show notes. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #467: Mary Meeker’s 2025 AI Trends Report appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating; by some accounts, it’s getting worse. Moreover, despite abundant coverage of the tendency of LLMs to make stuff up, people are still not fact-checking, leading to some embarrassing consequences. Even the legal team from Anthropic (the company behind the Claude frontier LLM) got caught.

Also in this episode:

Google has a new tool just for making AI videos with sound: what could possibly go wrong?
Lack of strategic leadership and failure to communicate about AI’s ethical use are two findings from a new Global Alliance report
People still matter. Some overly exuberant CEOs are walking back their AI-first proclamations
Google AI Overviews lead to a dramatic reduction in click-throughs
Google is teaching American adults how to be adults. Should they be finding your content?

In his tech report, Dan York looks at some services shutting down and others starting up.

Links from this episode:

Google has a new tool just for making AI videos
Meet Flow: AI-powered filmmaking with Veo 3
Google’s Veo 3 marks the end of AI video’s ‘silent era’
Google announces new video and image generation models Veo 3 and Imagen 4, alongside a new AI filmmaking tool Flow and expanded access to Lyria 2
Ethan Mollick (@emollick) on X
Veo 3 News Anchor Clips
Google has a new tool just for making AI videos
Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle
How an AI-generated summer reading list got published in major newspapers
Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle
Anthropic’s lawyer was forced to apologize after Claude hallucinated a legal citation
Chicago Sun-Times Faces Backlash After Promoting Fake Books In AI-Generated Summer Reading List
Yes, Chicago Sun-Times published AI-generated ‘summer reading list’ with books that don’t exist
Groundbreaking Report on AI in PR and Communication Management
Comms failing to provide leadership for AI
Perplexity Response to Query about Failure to Implement AI Strategically
Embracing the Unknown: How Leaders Engage with Generative AI in the Face of Uncertainty
Google is Teaching American Adults How to Be Adults
Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online
Shocking 56% CTR drop: AI Overviews gut MailOnline’s search traffic
Google AI Overviews decrease CTRs by 34.5%, per new study
The Google Exodus: Why 46% of Gen Z Has Abandoned Traditional Search
Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back
How Investors Feel About Corporate Actions and Causes

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Skype shuts down for good on Monday: NPR
Glitch is basically shutting down
Investing in what moves the internet forward
Bluesky: “We’re testing a new feature! Starting this week, select accounts can add a livestream link to sites like YouTube or Twitch, and their Bluesky profile will show they’re live now.”
Bridgy Fed
Fedi Forum
Take It Down Act 2025 (USA)
Mike Macgirvin

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 466 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

@nevillehobson (00:10)
and I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:13)
And this is our monthly long form episode for May 2025. We have six reports to share with you. Five of them are directly related to the topic du jour of generative artificial intelligence. And we will get to those shortly. But first, Neville, why don’t you tell us what we talked about in our ⁓ short form midweek episodes since

You know, my memory’s failing and I don’t remember.

@nevillehobson (00:44)
⁓ Yeah, some

interesting topics we’ve had a handful of short form episodes, 20 minutes more or less, since the last monthly, which we published on 28th of April. And I’ll start with that one because that takes us forward. That was an interesting one with a number of topics. The headline topic was cheaters never prosper, said, unless you pay for what you create.

And that was related to a university student who was expelled for developing an AI driven tool to help applicants to software coding jobs cheat on the tests employers require them to take. And it had mixed views all around with people thinking, hey, this is cool. And it’s not a big deal if people cheat others who are abhorred by it is an abhorrent idea. I’m in that camp. I think it’s a dreadful idea that ⁓ most people think it’s not a bad thing. is. Cheating is not good. That’s my view.

There were a lot of other topics too in that as well. A handful of others that were really, really good. How communicators can use seven categories of AI agents and a few others worth a listen. That was 90 minutes, that one. That’s kind of hitting the target goal we had for the long form content. If it’s too long, hit the pause button and come back to it. Might apply to this episode too.

So that was 462 at end of April. That was followed on May the 7th by 463 ⁓ that ⁓ talked about delivering value with generative AIs endless right answers. This was really quite intriguing one. ⁓ Quoting Google’s first chief decision scientist who said that one of the biggest challenges of the gen AI age.

is leaders defining value for their organization. And one of the considerations she says is mindset shift in which there are endless right answers. So you create something that’s right, you repeat the prompt and get a different for images, for example, and get a different one, it’s also right. And so she posed a question, which one is right? It’s an interesting conundrum type thing. But that was a good one. We had 16 minutes that one. And

Shel Holtz (03:01)
We had a comment on that

one, too, from ⁓ Dominique B., who said, sounds like it’s time for a truthiness meter.

@nevillehobson (03:02)
We have a comment? Yeah, we do.

Okay, what’s what are those?

Shel Holtz (03:13)
Stephen Colbert fans here in the US would understand truthiness. It’s a cultural reference.

@nevillehobson (03:18)
Okay.

Got it. Good. Noted. ⁓ Then 464. This was truly interesting to me because it’s basically saying that as we’ve talked about and others constantly talk about, you should disclose when you’re using AI ⁓ in some way that illustrates your honesty and transparency. Unfortunately, research shows that the opposite is true.

that if you disclose ⁓ that you’ve used AI to create an output, ⁓ you’re likely to find that your audiences will lose trust in you as soon as they see that you’ve disclosed this. That’s counterintuitive. You think disclosing and being transparent on this is good. It doesn’t play out according to the research. ⁓

It’s an interesting one. I think I’d err on the side of disclosure more than anything else. Maybe it depends on how you disclose. But it turns out that people trust AI more than they trust the humans using AI. And that we spent 17 and half minutes on that one show. That was a good one. You got a comment too, I think, have we not?

Shel Holtz (04:31)
from Gail Gardner who says, that isn’t surprising given how inaccurate what AI generates is. If a brand discloses that they’re using AI to write content, they need to elaborate on what steps they take to ensure the editor fact checks and improves it, which I think is a good point.

@nevillehobson (04:48)
wouldn’t disagree with that. Then 465 on May the 21st, the Trust News video podcast PR trifecta. That’s one of your headlines, Cheryl. I didn’t write that one. So ⁓ it talks about unrelated trends or seemingly unrelated trends, painting a clear picture for PR pros accustomed to achieving their goals through press release distribution and media pitching. The trends are that people trust each other less than ever.

people define what news is based on its impact on them becoming their own gatekeepers. And video podcasts have become so popular that media outlets are including them in their up-fronts. So we looked at finding a common thread in our discussion among these trends and setting out how the communicators can adjust their efforts to make sure the news is received and believed. That was a lengthier one than usual. 26 minutes that came in at has always this great stuff to…

to consume. So that brings us in fact to now this episode 466 monthly. So we’re kicking off the wrap up of May and heading into a new month in about a week or so.

Shel Holtz (05:59)
We also had an FIR interview dropped this month.

@nevillehobson (06:03)
we did. Thank you for the gentle nudge on mentioning that. That was our good friend Eric Schwartzman, who wrote an intriguing post or article, I should say, in Fast Company about bot farms and how they’re invading social media to hijack popular sentiment. Lengthy piece, got a lot of reaction on LinkedIn, ⁓ likes and so forth in the thousands, some hundreds of comments. So we were lucky to get him for a chat.

It’s a precursor to a book he’s writing based on that article that looks at bot farms. They now outnumber real users on social networks, according to Eric’s research and how profits drive PR ethics. Why meta TikTok X and even LinkedIn are complicit in enabling synthetic engagement at scale, says Eric. So ⁓ lots to unpack in that. That was a 42 minute conversation with Eric. His new book,

called Invasion of the Bot Farms. He’s currently preparing for that. He’ll explore the escalating threat, he says, through insider stories and case studies. That was a good conversation with Eric Schell. It’s an intriguing topic, and he really has done a lot of research on this.

Shel Holtz (07:16)
And we do have a comment on that interview from Alex Brownstein, who’s an executive vice president at a bioethics and emerging sciences organization who says, chat GPT and certain other mainstream AIs are purportedly designed to seek out and prioritize credible, authoritative information to inform their answers, which may provide some degree of counterbalance.

And also since the last monthly episode, there has been an episode of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring usually four IABC fellows. That’s the International Association of Business Communicator. I moderate most of these. I moderated this one. And it was about making the transition from

being a communication professional to being a college or university professor teaching communication. And we had four panelists who have all made this move. Most of them have made it full-time and permanent. are

teachers and not working in communications anymore. One is still doing both. And they were John Clemens, Cindy Schmig, Mark Schuman and Jennifer Waugh. It was a great episode. It’s up on the FIR podcast network now. The next circle of fellows is gonna be an interesting one. It is going to be done live. This is the very first time this will happen, episode 117.

So we’ve done 116 of these as live streams and this one will be live streamed, but it’ll be live streamed from Vancouver, site of the 2025 IEBC World Conference and Circle of Fellows is going to be one of the sessions. So we’re gonna have a table up on the platform with.

the five members of the 2025 class of IAVC fellows and me moderating. And in the audience, all the other fellows who are at conference will be out there among those who are attending the session and we’ll have the conversation. Brad Whitworth will have a microphone. He’ll be wandering through the audience to take questions. It’ll be fun. It’ll be interesting. It will be live streamed as our Circle of Fellows episode for June. So.

watch the FIR Podcast Network or LinkedIn for announcements about ⁓ when to watch that episode. Should be fun.

@nevillehobson (09:54)

Okay, that does sound interesting. Shell, what date is it taking place? You know.

Shel Holtz (10:00)
It’s going to be Tuesday, June 10th at 1030 a.m. Pacific time. It’s the last session before lunch. So even though IABC has only given us 45 minutes for what’s usually an hour long discussion, we’re going to take our hour. People can, you know, if they’re really hungry, their blood sugar is dropping, they can leave. But we’ll be there for the full hour for this circle of fellows.

@nevillehobson (10:27)
I was just thinking, the last time I was in Vancouver was in 2006, and that was for the IBC conference in 2006. That’s nearly 20 years ago. I where’s time gone, for goodness sake?

Shel Holtz (10:37)
I don’t know. I’ve been looking for it. So as I mentioned, we have six great reports for you and we will be back with those right after this.

@nevillehobson (10:40)
No, that was good.

At the Google I.O. last week, that’s Google’s developer conference, amongst many other things, the company unveiled a product called V.O.3, that’s V.E.O., V.O.3, its most advanced AI video generation model yet. It’s already sparking equal parts wonder and concern. V.O.3 isn’t just about photorealistic visuals. It marks the end of what TechRadar calls the silent era of AI video.

by combining realistic visuals with synchronized audio. Dialogue, soundtracks and ambient noise all generated from a simple text prompt. In short, it makes videos that feel real with few, if any, the telltale glitches we’ve come to associate with synthetic media. ZDNet and others included in a collection of links on Techmeme describe VO3 as a breakthrough in marrying video with audio, simulating physics, lip syncing with uncanny accuracy,

and opening creative doors for filmmakers and content creators alike. But that’s only one side of the story. The realism VO3 achieves also raises alarms. Exios reports that many viewers can’t tell VO3 clips from those made by human actors. In fact, synthetic content is becoming so indistinguishable that the line between real and fake is beginning to dissolve. Alarm is a point I made in a post on Blue Sky.

earlier last week when I shared a series of amazing videos created by Alejandra Caravejo at Harvard Law Cyber Law Clinic, portraying TV news readers reading out a breaking news story she created just from a simple text prompt. What comes immediately to mind, I said, ⁓ is the disinformation uses of such a tool. What on earth will you be able to trust now? One of Alejandra’s comments in the long thread was,

This is going to be used to manipulate people on a massive scale. Others in that thread noted how easily such clips can be repeated and recontextualized with no visual watermark to distinguish them from real broadcast footage. I mean, one thing is for sure, Sal, if you’ve watched any of these, they’re now peppered all over LinkedIn and Blue Sky and most social networks. You truly are going to have your jaw dropping when you see some of these things. It’s not hard to visualize.

just hearing an audio description, but they truly are quite extraordinary. This is a whole new level. There’s also the question of cost and access. ⁓ VO3 is priced at a premium around $1,800 per hour for professional grade use, suggesting a divide between those who can afford powerful generative tools and those who can’t. So we’re not just talking about a creative leap. We’re staring at an ethical and societal challenge too.

Is VO3 one of the most consequential technologies Google has released in years, not just for creators, but for good and bad actors and society at large? How do you see it, Joe?

Shel Holtz (14:00)
First of all, it’s phenomenal technology. I’ve seen several of the videos that have been shared. saw one where the prompt asked it to create a TV commercial for a ridiculous ⁓ breakfast cereal product. was ⁓ Otter Crunch or something like that. And it had a kid eating Otter Crunch at the table and the mom holding the box and saying Otter Crunch is great or whatever it was that she said.

⁓ and you couldn’t tell that this wasn’t shot in a, in a studio. ⁓ it was, it was that good. Alarm? I’m surprised that there is alarm because we have known for years that this was coming. ⁓ and I, I don’t think it should be a surprise that it has arrived at this point, given the quality of the video services that we have seen from other providers and

This is a game of leapfrog so that you know that one of the other video providers is going to take what Google has done and take it to the next level, maybe allowing you to make longer videos or there will be some bells and whistles that they’ll be able to add and the prices will drop. This is a preliminary price. It’s a brand new thing. We see this with open AI all the time where the first

time they release something, have to be in that $200 a month tier of customer in order to use it. But then within a couple of months, it’s available at the $20 a month level or at the free level. So this is going to become widely available from multiple services. I think we need to look at the benefits this provides as well as the risk.

that it provides. This is going to make it easy for people who don’t have big budgets to do the kind of video that gets the kind of attention that leads to sales or whatever it is your communication objective was for enhancing videos that you are producing with actual footage in order to create openers or bridges or

just to extend the scene, it’s going to be terrific. Even at $1,800 an hour, there are a lot of people who can’t get high quality video for $1,800 an hour. So this is going to be a boon to a lot of creators. In terms of the risk, again, I think it’s education, it’s knowing what to look for.

getting the word out to people about the kinds of scams that people are running with this so that they’re on their guard. It’s going to be the same scams that we’ve seen with less superior technology. It’s going to be, you know, the grandmother con, right? Where you get the call and it sounds like it’s your grandson’s voice. I’ve been kidnapped. They’re demanding this much money. Please send it. Sure sounds like him. So grandma sends the money. So

This is the kind of education that has to get out there ⁓ because it’s just gonna get more realistic and easier to con people with the cons that frankly have been working well enough to keep them going up until now.

@nevillehobson (17:38)
Yeah, I think there is real cause for major alarm at a tool like this. You just set out many of the reasons why, but I think the risk mostly comes more from or rather less from examples like the grandmother call saying, you know, someone calling the grandmother, I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t know anyone that’s ever happened to him, not saying it doesn’t, but that doesn’t seem to me to be like a major daily thing. might more pro-Zec, more fundamental than that. But

Some of the examples you can see and the good one to mention is the one from Alejandra Carabagio, the video she created, which were a collection of clips ⁓ with the same prompt. they were all TV anchors, presenters on television, ⁓ talking about breaking news that J.K. Rowling had drowned because a yacht sank after it was attacked by orcas in the Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey.

⁓ What jumped at me when I saw the first one was, my God, this was so real. It looked like it was a TV studio, all created from that simple prompt. But then came three more versions, all with different accented English, American English, US English, English as a second language for one of the presenters that illustrates from that one prompt, what you could do. And she said that the first video took literally a couple of seconds.

And within less than 10 minutes after tweaking a couple of things after a number of attempts, she had a collection of five videos. So imagine that there are benefits, unquestionably. And indeed, some of the links we’ve got really go through some significant detail of the benefits of this to creators. But right on the back of that comes this big alarm bell ring. This is what the downside looks like. And I think

your point about ⁓ it’s going to come down, competitors will emerge. Undoubtedly, I totally agree with you. But that isn’t yet. In the meantime, this thing’s got serious first mover advantage and the talk up that I’m seeing across the tech landscape mostly, it hasn’t yet hit mainstream talk. I’m not sure how you kind of explain it in a way that excites people unless you see the videos. But

This is big alarm bell territory, in my opinion, and I think it’ll accelerate a number of things, one of which is more calls to regulate and control this if you can. you know, who knows what Trump’s going to do about this? Probably embrace it, I would imagine. I mean, you’ve seen what he’s doing already with the video and stuff that promotes him in his his emperor’s clothes and all this stuff. So this is, a major ⁓ milestone, I think, in the development of these technologies.

it will be interesting to see who else comes out in a way that challenges Google. But if you read Google’s very technically focused description, this is not a casual development by six guys with a couple of computers. This is required, I would imagine, serious money and significant quantum computing power to get it to this stage in a way that enables anyone with a reasonably powered computer to use it and create something. ⁓

got that that aspect to consider should we be doing something like this that generates huge or rather uses huge amounts of electricity and energy and all the carbon emissions we got that side of the debate that’s beginning to come out a little bit. So it’s experimental time without doubt. And there are some terrific learnings we can get from this. mean, I’d love to give it a go myself, but not at 1800 bucks. So if I had someone to do it for that was I could charge them for that I’d be happy.

⁓ But I’m observing what others are doing and hearing what people are saying. And it’s picking up pace. Every time I look online, there’s something new about this. Someone else has done something and they’re sharing it. So great examples to see. So yes, let’s take a look at what the benefits are and let’s see what enterprises will make of this and what we can learn from it. But I’m keeping a close eye on what others are saying about the risks because ⁓ we haven’t, you talk about the education, all that stuff.

No one seems to have paid any attention to any of that over the years. So why are going to pay attention to this now if we try and educate them?

Shel Holtz (22:06)
Well,

that really depends on how you go about this. Who’s delivering the message? I mean, where I work, we communicate cybersecurity risk all the time. And we make the point this isn’t only a risk to our company. This is a risk to you and your family. You need to take these messages home and share them with your with your kids. And every time something new comes out, where there’s a new scam, where we are aware

@nevillehobson (22:10)
It does. ⁓

show.

Shel Holtz (22:34)
And we usually hear about this through our IT security folks, but where we are aware that in our industry, somebody was scammed effectively with something that was new. We get that out to everybody. We use multiple channels and we get feedback from people who are grateful for us telling them this. So it’s not that people won’t listen. You just have to get them in a way that resonates with them.

And you have to use multiple channels and you have to be repetitive with this stuff. You have to kind of drill it into their heads. see organizations spending money on PSAs on TV alerting people to these scams. They’re all imposter scams is what it comes down to. It’s pretending to be something that they aren’t. know, what troubles me about this

I think is that we are talking a lot about erosion of trust. We talked about it on the last midweek episode, the fact that people trust each other less than they ever have. Only 34 % of people say they trust other people, that other people are trustworthy. And we’re trying to rebuild trust at the same time we’re telling people, you can’t trust what you see. You can’t trust your own eyes anymore. So this is a challenging time.

@nevillehobson (23:54)
Right.

Shel Holtz (24:00)
without any question when you have to deal with both of these things at the same time. We need to build trust at the same time. We’re telling people you can’t trust anything.

@nevillehobson (24:02)
It is.

Well, that is the challenge. absolutely right, because ⁓ people don’t actually need organizations to tell them that. They can see with their own eyes, but it’s then reinforced by what they’re hearing from governments. We’ve got an issue that I think is very germane to bring this into conversation, something in this country that is truly extraordinary. One of the biggest retailers here, Marks & Spencer.

was the subject of a huge cyber attack a month ago, and it’s still not solved. Their websites, you still can’t do any buying online. You can’t do click and collect none of those things. Today, they announced you can now again, log on to the website and browse. You can’t buy anything. You can’t pay electronically. You can only do it in the stores. And that no one seems to know precisely what exactly it is. There’s so much speculation, so much ⁓ talk that

of which most is uninformed, which is fueling the worry and alarm about this. And the consequences from Marks & Spencer are potentially severe from a reputational point of view and brand trust, all those things. haven’t solved this yet. That, people are saying, that was likely caused by an insecure password login by someone who is a supplier of Marks Spencer. But this is not like

little store down the road. This is a massive enterprise that has global operations. And the estimates at the moment is that the cost to them is likely to be around 300 million pounds. It’s serious money. They’re losing a million pounds a day. It’s serious. Oh, they won’t disclose it. It’s illegal to do that here in the UK to pay the ransom, if you disclose it. Government advice from the cyber security folks is don’t pay the ransom. Difficult thing to me is that you follow that advice and they’re still not solving the problem.

Shel Holtz (25:45)
And what was the ransom?

@nevillehobson (26:03)
The point I’m making, is that this is just another example of ⁓ forged trust, if I could say it that way, that it was likely until information arrives telling exactly what it was, that someone persuaded someone to do something who they thought was someone else that they weren’t that enabled that person to get access. Right. So this is going to be like that for some of the examples we’ve seen. But I think it’s likely as well to be ⁓

Shel Holtz (26:23)
Yeah, sure. It was fishing.

@nevillehobson (26:33)
kind of normal that you would almost find impossible to even imagine that it was a fake. So what’s going to happen when the JK Rowling example, like someone in a prominent position in society or whatever, it’s suddenly ⁓ on a website somewhere that gets picked up and repeated everywhere before it’s well, wait a minute, is just to what’s the source of this, but it’s too late by then. And that’s likely what we’re going to see.

Shel Holtz (26:58)
We

reported on a story like this many years ago. It was, if I remember correctly, a bank robbery in Texas. It was a story that got picked up by multiple news outlets. It was completely fake. The first outlet that picked it up just assumed that it was accurate because of their source and all the other newspapers.

picked it up because they assumed that the first newspaper that picked it up had checked their facts, but it was a false story. This is nothing new. It’s just with this level of realistic video, it’s going to be that much easier to convince people that this is real and either share it or act on it.

@nevillehobson (27:40)
as it will.

And it won’t be waiting on the media to pick up and report on it. That’s too slow. It’ll be TikTokers, it’ll be YouTube. It’s anyone with a website that has some kind of audience that’s connected and it’ll be amplified big time like that. So it’ll be out of control within probably within seconds of the first video appearing. That’s not to say that, dear, know, this is so what do we do? We’ve got to be that that’s that is the landscape now. And honestly and truly can’t imagine how

example of like a JK Rowling death at sea and all that stuff is on on multiple TV screens, supposedly TV studios that you don’t think when you’re watching hang on, is this legit this TV show you might occur to you, but the other nine people out there watching along with you aren’t gonna ask themselves that they’re gonna share it. And it’s suddenly it’s out there. And before you know it. I don’t know.

If it’s ⁓ say the CEO of big company that’s happened at a time of some kind of merger or takeover going on and then that person suddenly dropped dead, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about. So ⁓ I can see the real need to have some kind of, I can’t even call it shell regulation, I’m not sure, I don’t know, by government or someone.

alongside, you can’t just leave this to individual companies like yours who are doing a good job. Well, there are 50 others out there who aren’t doing this at all. So you can’t you can’t let it sit like that. Because this, the scale of this is breathtaking, frankly, what’s going to happen. And I think Alejandro Caravaggio and others I’ve seen saying the same thing, that ⁓ that, ⁓ you know, this is going to be a tool used to manipulate people on a massive scale. We’re not talking about business.

employees necessary, the public at large, this is going to manipulate people. And we’re already seeing that at small scale, based on the tech we have now. This tech’s up notches, in my view. you know, 1800 bucks, people are going to do this, ⁓ that to them, it’s like, you know, petty cash almost, or someone’s going to come out with something, again, that isn’t going to be that and it’s on a dark web somewhere and you know.

So I mean, I’m now getting into areas that I have no idea what I’m going to be talking about. So I will stop that now. I don’t know how that’s going to work. this requires attention, in my opinion, that to protect people and organizations from the bad actors, that euphemistic phrase, who are intent on causing disruption and chaos. And this is potentially what this will achieve alongside all that good stuff.

Shel Holtz (30:19)
It’ll be interesting to hear what Google plans to do to prevent people from using it for those purposes. I have access to…

@nevillehobson (30:26)
They have a bit an FAQ,

which talks a talks a little bit about that. hey, this is like draft still, I would say.

Shel Holtz (30:33)
I have access to VO2 on my $20 a month Gemini account, I’ll just wait the six weeks until VO3 is available there.

@nevillehobson (30:44)
Well, things may have moved on to who knows what in six weeks, I would say. But nevertheless, this is an intriguing development technologically and what it lets people do in a good sense is the exciting part. The worrying part is what the bad guys are going to be doing.

Shel Holtz (31:03)
to say. So I need to make a time code note.

@nevillehobson (31:04)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (31:18)
The fact that generative AI chatbots hallucinate isn’t a revelation, at least it shouldn’t be at this point, and yet AI hallucinations are causing real, consequential damage to organizations and individuals alike, including a lot of people who should know better. And contrary to logic and common sense, it’s actually getting worse.

Just this past week, we’ve seen two high-profile cases that illustrate the problem. First, the Chicago Sun-Times published what they called a summer reading list for 2025 that recommended 15 books. Ten of them didn’t exist. They were entirely fabricated by AI, complete with compelling descriptions of Isabelle Indy’s non-existent climate fiction novel Tidewater Dreams and Andy Weir’s imaginary thriller The Last Algorithm.

The newspaper’s response? Well, they blamed a freelancer from King Features, which is a company that syndicates content to newspapers across the country. It’s owned by Hearst. That freelancer used AI to generate the list without fact checking it. And the Sun-Times published it believing King Features content was accurate. And other publications shared it because the Chicago Sun-Times had done it.

Then there’s even more embarrassing case of Anthropic. That’s the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, one of the really big international large language models, frontier models. Their own lawyers had to apologize to a federal judge after Claude hallucinated a legal citation and a court filing. The AI generated a fake title and fake authors for what should have been a real academic paper. Their manual citation checks

missed it entirely. Think about that for a moment. A company that makes AI couldn’t catch its own tools’ mistakes, even with human review. Now, here’s what’s particularly concerning for those of us in communications. This isn’t getting better with newer AI models. According to research from Vektara, even the most accurate AI models still hallucinate at least 0.7 % of the time.

with some models producing false information in nearly one of every three responses. MIT research from January found that when AI models hallucinate, they actually use more confident language than when they’re producing accurate information. They’re 34 % more likely to use phrases like definitely, certainly, and without doubt when they’re completely wrong. So what does this mean for PR and communications professionals? Three critical things. First.

We need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with AI tools. The Chicago Sun-Times incident happened just two months after the paper laid off 20 % of its staff. Organizations under financial pressure are increasingly turning to AI to fill gaps, but without proper oversight, they’re creating massive reputation risks. When your summer reading list becomes a national embarrassment because you trusted AI without verification, you got a crisis communication problem on your hands.

@nevillehobson (34:04)
.

Shel Holtz (34:28)
Second, the trust issue goes deeper than individual mistakes. As we mentioned in a recent midweek episode, research shows that audiences lose trust as soon as they see AI disclosure labels, but finding out you used AI without disclosing it is even worse for trust. This creates what researchers call the transparency dilemma. Damned if you disclose, damned if you don’t. For communicators who rely on credibility and trust, this is a fundamental challenge we haven’t come to terms with.

Third, we’re seeing AI hallucinations spread into high-states environments where the consequences are severe. Beyond the legal filing errors, we’ve seen multiple times now, from Anthropic to the Israeli prosecutors who cited non-existent laws, we’re seeing healthcare AI that hallucinates medical information 2.3 % of the time, and legal AI tools that produce incorrect information in at least some percentage of cases that could affect real legal outcomes.

The bottom line for communication professionals is that AI can be a powerful tool, but it is not a replacement for human judgment and verification. I know we say this over and over and over again, and yet look at the number of companies that use it that way. The industry has invested $12.8 billion specifically to solve hallucination problems in the last three years, yet we’re still seeing high profile failures from major organizations who should know better.

My recommendation, if you’re using AI in your communications work, and let’s be honest, most of us are, insist on rigorous verification processes. Don’t just spot check. Verify every factual claim, every citation, every piece of information that could damage your organization’s credibility if it’s wrong. And remember, the more confident AI sounds, the more suspicious you should be.

The Chicago Sun-Times called their incident a learning moment for all of journalism. I’d argue it’s a learning moment for all of us in communications. We can’t afford to let AI hallucinations become someone else’s crisis communications case study.

@nevillehobson (36:37)
until the next one. Right. mean, listen to what you say. You’re absolutely right. Yet, the humans are the problem. Arguably, and I’ve heard this, they’re not, it’s the technology is not up to scratch. Fine. Right. In that case, you know that. So therefore, you’ve got to pay very close attention and do all the things that you outlined before that people are not doing. So this one is extraordinary.

Shel Holtz (36:39)
And it becomes a case study. ⁓

The humans are the solution.

@nevillehobson (37:05)
⁓ Snopes has a good analysis of it talking about this. ⁓ King Features, mean, their communication about it, they said, the company has a strict policy with our staff, cartoonists, columnists, and freelance writers against the use of AI to create content. And they said it will be ending its relationship with the guy who did this. Okay, throw him under the bus, basically. So you don’t have guidance in place properly, even though

you say you have a strict policy, that’s not the same thing, is it? So I think this was inevitable and we’re going to see it again, sure, we will and the consequences will be dire. I was reading a story this morning here in the UK of a lawyer who was an intern. That’s not her title, but she was a junior person that she ⁓ entered into evidence, some research she’d done without checking and it was all fake, done by the AI. And the case

turns out, and again, this is precisely the concern, not the tech. It’s not her fault. She didn’t have proper supervision. She was pressured by people who didn’t help because she didn’t know enough. And so she didn’t know how to do something. And she was under tight parameters to complete this thing. So she did it. No one checked her work at all. So she apologized and all that stuff. And yes, the judge, from what I read, isn’t isn’t penalizing her. It’s her boss. He should be penalizing.

You’re going to see that repeated, I’m sure already exists in case up and down businesses, organizations everywhere, where that is not an unusual setup structure, lack of support, lack of training, ⁓ lack of encouragement, indeed, the whole bring it out, let’s get the policy set up guidance and not just publish it on the internet. We bring it to people’s attention. We embrace them. We encourage them.

We bring them on board to conversations constantly, brown bag lunches, all the informal ways of doing this too. And I’m certain that happens a lot. But this example and others we could bring up and mention show that it’s not in those particular organizations. So the time will come, I don’t believe it’s happened yet, ⁓ where the most monumentally catastrophic clanger will be dropped sooner or later in an organization, whether it’s a government.

whether it’s a private company, whether it’s a medical system or whatever, that could have life or death consequences for people. Don’t believe that’s happened yet that we know of anyway, but the time is coming where it’s going to, I’d say.

Shel Holtz (39:36)
it will,

it undoubtedly will. And you’ll see medical decisions get made based on a hallucination that somebody didn’t check. What strikes me though is that we talk about AI as an adjunct, right? It is an enhancement to what humans do. It allows you to offload a lot of the drudgery so that you can focus your time on more.

human-centric and more strategic endeavors, which is great, but you still have to make sure that the drudge work is done right. I mean, that work is being done for a reason. It may be drudgery to produce it, but it must have some value or the organization wouldn’t want it anymore. So it’s important to check those. And in organizations that are cutting head count,

@nevillehobson (40:06)
Ahem.

Shel Holtz (40:29)
You know, what a lot of employees are doing is using AI in order to be able to get all their work done. That drudge work, having the AI do that and spend 15 minutes on it instead of three hours. It’s not like those three hours are available to them to fact check. They’ve got other things that they need to do. Organizations that are cutting staff need to be cognizant of the fact that they may be cutting the ability to fact check the output of the AI.

which could do something egregious enough to cost them a whole lot more than they saved by cutting that staff. And by the way, I saw research very recently, I almost added it as a report in today’s episode that found that investors are not thrilled with all the layoffs that they’re seeing in favor of AI. They think it’s a bad idea. So if you’re looking for a way to…

get your leaders to temper their inclinations to trim their staff. You may want to point to the fact that they may lose investors over decisions like that, but we need the people to fact check these things. And by the way, I have found an interesting way to fact check and it is not an exclusive approach to this.

But let me give you just this quick example. On our intranet every week, I share a construction term of the week that not every employee may know. And I have the description of that term written by one of the large language models. I don’t know what these things mean. I’m not a construction engineer.

So I get it written, and then the first thing I do is I copy it, and then I go to another one of the large language models and paste it in, and I say, review this for accuracy and give me a list of what you would change to make it more accurate. And most of the time it says, this is a really accurate write-up that you’ve got of this term. I would recommend to enhance the accuracy that you add these things.

So I’ll say, ahead and do that, write it up and make those things. Then I’ll go to a third large language model and ask the same question. I’ll still go do a Google search and find something that describes all of this to make sure I’ve got it right. But I find playing the large language models against each other as accuracy checks works pretty well.

@nevillehobson (42:56)
Yeah, I do a similar thing to not for everything. mean, like everyone who’s got the time to do all that all the time, but depends, I think, on what you’re doing. But ⁓ it is something that we need to we need to pay attention to. And in fact, this is quite a good segue to our next piece, our next story, where artificial intelligence plays a big role. this one ⁓ talks about ⁓

outlander really a new report from the Global Alliance of Public Relation and Communication Management that is, it offers a timely and global perspective on how our profession is adapting and in many cases struggling to keep pace as artificial intelligence continues its rapid integration into our daily work. As AI tools become embedded in the workflows of communication professionals around the world, a new survey from the Global Alliance offers a revealing snapshot

of where our profession currently stands and where it may be falling short. The report titled Reimagining Tomorrow, AI and PR and Communication Management draws on insights from nearly 500 PR and communication professionals. The findings paint a picture of a profession that’s enthusiastically embracing AI tools, particularly for content creation, but falling short when it comes to strategic leadership, ethical governance, and stakeholder communication. While adoption is high,

91 % of respondents say they’re using AI. The report highlights a striking absence of strategic leadership. Only 8.2 % of PR and communication teams are leading in AI governance or strategy, according to the report. Yet professionals rank governance and ethics as their top AI priorities at 33 % and 27 % respectively. Despite this, PR teams are mostly engaged in tactical tasks.

such as content creation and tool support. This gap between strategic intent and practical involvement is critical. If PR professionals don’t position themselves as stewards of responsible AI use, other functions like IT or legal will define the narrative. This has implications not only for reputation management, but for organizational relevance in the comms function. Now, in a post on his blog last week, our friend Stuart Bruce

describes the findings as alarming, arguing that communicators are failing to lead on the very issues that matter most, ethics, transparency, stakeholder trust, and reputation. His critique is clear. If PR doesn’t step up to define the response of the use of AI, we risk becoming sidelined in decisions that affect not just our teams, but the wider organization and society. The Global Alliances report also shows that while AI is mostly being used for content creation,

Very few are leveraging its potential for audience insights, crisis response, or strategic decision making. Many PR pros still don’t fully understand what AI can actually do, Stuart, either tactically or strategically. Worse, some are operating under common myths, such as avoiding any use of AI with private data, regardless of whether they’re using secure enterprise tools or not. So where does this leave us? Well, it looks to me like somewhere between a promise and a missed opportunity.

How would you say it, Joe?

Shel Holtz (46:21)
it is a missed opportunity so far as far as I am concerned. And I have seen research that basically breaks through the communications boundary into the larger world of business that says, yes, there’s great stuff going on in organizations in terms of the adoption of AI, but there is not really strategic leadership happening in most organizations. Employees are using it.

There are a growing number of policies, although most organizations still don’t have policies. Most organizations still don’t have ethics guidelines, although a growing number do. There are companies like mine that have AI committees, but the leadership needs to come from the very top down. And that’s what this research found isn’t happening. I was just scrolling through my bookmarks trying to find it. I’ll definitely turn that up before the…

show notes get published, if it’s not happening at the leadership levels of organizations, it’s not happening at the leadership levels of communication, I certainly can see that in the real world as I talk to people. It’s being used at a very tactical level, but nobody is really looking at the whole overall operation of communication in the organization, the role that it plays and how it goes about doing that.

through that lens of AI and how we need to adapt and change and how we need to prepare ourselves to continue to adapt and change as things like VO3 are released on the market and suddenly you’re facing a potential new reputational threat.

@nevillehobson (48:07)
Lots to unpack there. It’s worth reading the report. It’s well worth the time.

Shel Holtz (48:12)
Hey, Dan, thank you for that great report. Yeah, I had to wipe a tear away as well over the passing of Skype. You’re right. It was amazing as the only tool that allowed you to do what it could do. And as we have mentioned here more than once in the past, it is the only reason that we were able to start this podcast in the first place without Skype. You were in Amsterdam at the time.

And for you and I to be able to talk together and record both sides of our conversation, Skype was the reason that we could do that. The only other option would have been what at the time was an expensive long distance phone call with really terrible audio. Who knew the double ender back in those days? We could have done it. You realize we could have both recorded our own ends. It would have taken forever to send those files.

@nevillehobson (49:02)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (49:09)
back then because the speeds were.

@nevillehobson (49:11)
It would have been quicker

burning them to a CD and sending it by courier, I would say.

Shel Holtz (49:15)
Yeah,

no kidding. So bless Skype for enabling not just us, but pretty much any podcasters who were doing interviews or co-host arrangements. Skype made it possible, but Skype also enabled a lot of global business. There were a lot of meetings that didn’t have to happen in person. I mean, you look at Zoom today, Zoom is standing on the shoulders of Skype.

@nevillehobson (49:39)
Yeah, it actually did enable a lot. You’re absolutely right. I can remember to you remember this, of course, back in those days when both of us I think we were both of us were independent consultants. So, you know, pitching for business securing contacts and following up and all that was key. We had what what Skype called Skype out numbers that were regular phone numbers that people could use like a landline and that we get forwarded through to Skype by

wife’s family in Costa Rica, she used Skype to make calls all the time that replaced sending faxes, which is how they used to communicate because that was cheaper than international phone calls at that time. ⁓ lots happened in that time. But in reality, it’s only 20 years ago. It sounds a lot. But all this has happened in a 20 year period. And Skype ⁓ was the catalyst for much of this. They laid the foundation for

teams that we see now, Zoom, Google Meet, all those services that we can use. So what happened to WebEx and the like? It seems to have largely vanished, what I can see. So we’re used to all this stuff now. But it was great starter for us. And Dan mentions.

Shel Holtz (50:55)
Yeah, I had a Skype out. My Skype

out number I got, it was my business number and I got a 415 area code because that’s San Francisco and nobody knew the 510 area code in the East Bay outside of the Bay Area. So it provided just that little extra bit of cache. Oh, a San Francisco number. I mean, there was just so much good that came out of Skype. They kept coming up with great features and great tools even after Microsoft bought it.

@nevillehobson (51:17)
Yeah.

They did.

Yeah. And the price, the pricing structure was good. At that time I had, I had business in on the East coast in the U S and I had a New York number. So, uh, yeah, it was, was super, but, so good to, to have a reminisce there with Dan. That was great. Um, I was intrigued by your element about Bridgie Fed, which, uh, I’ve been trying to use that since it emerged.

Shel Holtz (51:25)
So.

That’s great.

@nevillehobson (51:53)
with Blue Sky, but also with Ghost, which has enabled a lot of this connectivity with other servers in the Fediverse. And so I’ve kind of got it all set up. But no matter what I do, it just does not connect. And I haven’t figured out why not yet. So you’ve prompted me to get this sorted out, because it’s important. I’ve got my social web address, and it was enabled by Ghost, that works on Mastodon.

and it enables Blue Sky to connect with Mastodon 2. It’s really quite cool, but Bridgifed’s key to much of that functionality. maybe it’s just me. I haven’t figured it out yet. There could be. So this is definitely not yet in the mainstream readiness arena quite yet, but this is the direction of travel without any doubt. And I think it’s great that we eliminate these, you know, activity pub versus AT protocol.

It just works. No one gives a damn about whether you’re on a different protocol or not. That’s where we’re aiming for. And that’s what is actually we’re moving towards quite quickly. Not for me, though, until I get this work.

Shel Holtz (53:04)
One protocol will win over another at one point or another. It always does.

@nevillehobson (53:07)
It’s like, yeah,

Betamax and VHS, you know, look at that.

Shel Holtz (53:12)
Yep.

And that’s the power of marketing because Betamax was the higher quality format. Well, let’s explore a fascinating and entirely predictable phenomenon that’s emerging in the corporate world. Companies that enthusiastically laid off workers to replace them with AI are now quietly hiring humans back.

@nevillehobson (53:16)
Yes, right, right.

Shel Holtz (53:35)
This item ticks a lot of boxes, man. Organizational communication, brand trust, crisis management. Let’s start with the poster child for this phenomenon. Klarna, the buy now pay later company. CEO Sebastian Simitowski became something of an AI evangelist, loudly declaring that his company had essentially stopped hiring a year ago, shrinking from 4,500 to 3,500 employees through what he called natural attrition.

He bragged that AI could already do all the jobs that humans do and even created an AI deep fake of himself to report quarterly earnings, supposedly proving that even CEOs can be replaced. How’d that work out for him? Just last week, Semitkowski announced that Klarna is now hiring human customer service agents again. Why? Because as he put it, from a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical.

that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want. The very CEO who said AI could replace everyone is now admitting that human connection is essential for brand trust. It isn’t an isolated case. We’re seeing this pattern repeat across industries, and it should serve as a wake-up call for communications professionals about the risk of overly aggressive AI adoption without considering the human element. Take Duolingo, which had been facing an absolute

firestorm of social media after CEO Louis Vuitton announced that the company was going AI first. The backlash was so severe that Duolingo deleted all of its TikTok and Instagram posts, wiping out years of carefully crafted content from accounts with millions of followers. The company’s own social media team then posted a cryptic video. They were all wearing those anonymous style masks saying Duolingo was never funny.

We were. And what a stunning example of how your employees can become your biggest communication crisis when AI policies directly threaten their livelihoods. All this is particularly troubling from a communication perspective. These companies didn’t just lose employees, they lost institutional knowledge, creativity, and human insight that made their brands distinctive in the first place. A former Duolingo contractor told one journalist that the AI-generated content is very boring.

while Duolingo was always known for being fun and quirky. When you replace the humans who created your brand voice with AI, you risk losing the very thing that made your brand memorable. But here’s the broader pattern we need to understand. According to new research, just one in four AI investments actually deliver the ROI they promise. Meanwhile, companies are spending an average of $14,200 per employee per year just to catch and correct AI mistakes.

Knowledge workers are spending over four hours a week verifying AI output. These aren’t the efficiency gains that were promised. Now, I firmly believe those are still coming, those gains, and in a lot of cases, they’re actually here now. Some organizations are realizing them as we speak, but we’re not out of the woods yet. From a crisis communication standpoint, the AI layoff rehire cycle creates multiple reputation risks.

There’s the immediate backlash when you announce AI replacements. We saw this with Klarna and Duolingo and others. Employees and customers both react negatively to the idea that human workers are disposable. Then there’s the credibility hit when you quietly reverse course and start hiring people again. It signals that your AI strategy wasn’t as well thought out as you claimed. And that sort of trickles over into how much people trust your judgment and other things that you’re making decisions about.

For those of us working in communication, this trend highlights some critical lessons. Stakeholder communication about AI needs to be honest about limitations, not just potential and benefits. Companies that over promise on AI capability set themselves up for embarrassing reversals. Klarna CEO went from saying AI could do all human jobs to admitting that customer advice, customer service quality suffered without human oversight.

Second, employee communications around AI adoption require extreme care. When you announce AI first policies, you’re essentially telling your workforce they’re expendable. The Duolingo social media team’s rebellion shows what happens when you lose internal buy-in. Your employees become your critics, not your champions. And brand voice and customer experience are fundamentally human elements that can’t be easily automated.

Companies struggling most are those that tried to replace creative and customer facing roles with AI. Meanwhile, companies succeeding with AI are using it to augment human capabilities, not replace them entirely. The irony here is pretty rich. At a time when trust in institutions is at historic lows, companies are discovering that human connection and authenticity matter more than ever. You can’t automate your way to trust. So.

What should communication professionals take away from this ⁓ AI layoff rehire cycle? Be deeply skeptical of any AI strategy that eliminates human oversight in customer facing roles. Push back on claims that AI can fully replace creative or strategic communications work. And remember that when AI initiatives go wrong, it becomes a communications problem that requires very human skills to solve.

The companies getting all this right are the ones that view it as a tool to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. The ones getting it wrong are learning an expensive lesson about the irreplaceable value of human judgment, creativity, and connection.

@nevillehobson (59:32)
Yeah, it got me thinking about ⁓ the ⁓ human bit that doesn’t get this, which typically a leader is an organization, but actually not necessarily at the highest level. I’m thinking in particular of companies, I’ve had a need to go through this process recently, who replace people at the end of a phone line in customer support.

with a chat bot typically as the first line of defense. And I use that phrase deliberately. It defends them from having to talk to a customer where they have a chat bot where it guides you through carefully controlled scripted scenarios that it does have a little bit of leeway in its intelligence to respond on the fly to a question that’s not in the script, as it were, but only marginally. And so you still have to go through a system

that is poor at best and downright dangerous at worst in terms of trust with customers. your point, I agree totally, kind of fosters a climate of mistrust entirely when you can’t get to human and all you get is a chat bot and sometimes a chat bot that can actually engage in conversation. There are some good ones around.

But my experience recently with an insurance company to an accident, car accident I had in December, a guy drove into my car, repaired, and I’m chasing the other party to reclaim my excess. And boy, that’s an education in how not to implement something that engages with people. So, but I don’t see any sign of that changing anytime soon.

So one thing I take from this show, everything you said, indeed what we discussed in this whole episode so far in this context, it’s a people issue, not a tech issue completely in terms of how these tools are deployed in organizations. The CEO at Klana, I was reading about the CEO of Zoom who deployed an avatar to open his speech at an event recently.

⁓ I just wonder what were they thinking to do all these things? Now you mention investors. So it comes back to people. I think ⁓ the idea of replacing ⁓ all these expensive humans with AIs is surely as tempting as you can imagine to some organizations. We’ve talked about recently, maybe it was late last year, on

Part of the future is this deployment. Indeed, recently we talked about you’re to have AIs on your team, a mix of kind of a hybrid in the new sense of the word of people and an AI as part of a team. And how is that going to work? And are the AIs going to take over? So you’ve got to have a strategy. Go back to the Global Alliance support where strategically is a strategy or an approach, a strategic approach, if you will, is one of the biggest failings.

in what’s going on in organizations, not by communicators necessarily, but by the organization as a whole. So it is a time when we said this a lot, know, communicators can really step up to the plate and take on the role of educating their organization into this is how we need to be doing this. ⁓ Often it ⁓ is

the case they want to do that and they would like to do that and they propose all the reasons why they should but they’re shut out by others in the organization. So how do you get around that? You can’t basically. So this is people we’re talking about in the broad sense. People tend to not always do the right things as we know. And we’re seeing a lot of that going on here it seems to

Shel Holtz (1:03:36)
I heard an example, I saw an example of this on the news last night, and this relates to the United States Social Security Administration. It was a woman who called for customer service and got the AI chat bot. This is something that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency Doge put in place, laying off a lot of the people who used to take those calls and replacing them with the AI. And the woman was saying,

⁓ I didn’t get my check in April and it read off some rote response that had nothing to do with not getting a check. It talked about the cost of living increase for the year and said, if this answered your question, feel free to hang up. Otherwise, how can I help you today? And she said, I need to speak to an agent. And it said, in order to better help you, ⁓ what are you calling about?

And she explained she didn’t get her check in April and it gave her the same response again and invited her to hang up. And she said, I didn’t get my check in April. I need to speak to an agent now. And it did the same thing. She never got to talk to an agent. know, people who get social security, a lot of them, that’s their income for the month. So this is very, very serious. There’s not somebody there to help her and the AI doesn’t direct her to a human.

when she needs one. And you got to think that somebody calling Klarna may not be in as dire a situation, but it’s important to them and their frustration will grow. The perception of that organization, their reputation will suffer.

And I mean, for those organizations that compete for clients, they’re going to see people leaving for competitors where humans will talk to them and they’ll have a competitive advantage if they go out publicly and say, do business with us and you’ll talk to a human.

@nevillehobson (1:05:35)
It’s

Yeah, I agree with you. It seems to me that some companies actually don’t give a damn, it seems to me. It truly does. In that example you mentioned, I experienced that too, where you cannot get to a human. Indeed, many companies that I’ve seen, and my experience with this insurance company is one of them, they don’t have a phone number anywhere on their website at all. Their contact page says, feel free to join us on our chat on the website. And you kind of get used to

figuring out what are the what are the kind of key phrases I know that’s going to prompt the bot to say, I’ll get an agent to talk to you now. And there are some that are not consistent and some just will not like like the example you gave. One of the better ones I found is Amazon, where I’ve had occasion to call them on orders, I wanted to return or had questions about something. And they make it very easy. But they their first line is a chatbot. But you can easily get around that because they publish the contact information and they call you back.

Here in the UK, the call center is based in Ireland because there’s an Irish number. But it works well, even though the person who calls could be in Asia. It depends. You don’t really care. You’re talking to a human who is very empathetic and engaging and knows your issue because you pop up on a screen with your account information straight away. It’s very professional, very well done. GoDaddy is another one. I’ve used GoDaddy for years. I had to do something with a domain that I wanted to cancel. I had a question about it.

I phoned them, I got a person and it was delightful experience. And so I’d recommend them ahead of whoever doesn’t do it like that. but this takes time to build up ahead of steam. And in the meantime, you’ve got this situation. And most people, I think, ⁓ don’t really take it to that kind of level. They just hang up and they’ll think twice next time.

That’s a dilemma. as you noted, it’s all part of the big equation about mistrust, etc. I don’t think half of these companies are aware of this, ⁓ which in a sense surprises me. then again, it doesn’t because some of them just don’t care at all. That’s a shame.

And by the way, Duolingo, it’s really intriguing. I didn’t know about all that stuff on their social media. I’ve been using Duolingo for a while and I use them actually to improve further my Spanish. So I take, I do advanced learning with Duolingo. It’s an excellent product. I have to say it truly is outstanding. So I wasn’t aware of any of that bad stuff you mentioned, crazy stuff, really. There you go.

Shel Holtz (1:08:19)
And they’ve been a poster child

for effective social media for a long time. You remember when they killed the owl and then brought Owly back? So, I mean, they’ve been really good at it. And then just to wipe out all of that, ⁓ because people were leaving bad comments over this short-term stretch, it’s just amazing.

@nevillehobson (1:08:23)
Yeah, that I was aware of, but all this crap.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That really is quite extraordinary, really quite extraordinary.

It’s weird, isn’t it?

So that takes us, I think, to another interesting story that ⁓ one we’ve talked about quite a bit already on this. And yes, AI is a big proponent of this. But this is about Google AI overviews. We talked about this some episodes ago. And something quite interesting is happening with mostly the mainstream media online. So.

Positioning, a foundational promise of the open web, has long been this, publish quality content and search engines will send traffic your way. But that equation appears to be breaking dramatically thanks to this AI overviews product from Google. ⁓ Mail Online, one of the world’s largest English language news sites, the print version is called the Daily Mail. It’s a right wing, but politically oriented tabloid newspaper, still huge circulation.

But the website is definitely one of the, I guess, the top five, one of the top five largest English language sites in the world. They recently revealed that when Google includes an AI overview for a keyword they rank number one for, their click-through rate can collapse by more than 50%. On desktop, click-through rates have dropped from 13 % to below 5%. On mobile, the drop is from around 20 % to just 7%.

Even when they’re cited in the AI overview itself, MailOnline still loses up to 44 % of clicks. Speaking at the World News Media Congress in Krakow, Poland, this month, Carly Steven, MailOnline’s director of SEO and editorial e-commerce, called the effect pretty shocking and warned that we’re witnessing a profound shift in the publisher search engine relationship. She suggested that unless newsrooms pivot hard,

towards branded searches and unreplicable content, think of columnists and live blogs, the traditional model of search that visibility may be lost. And this isn’t just a male online issue. An independent AHRF study found that across a wide sway that informational keywords, Google AI overviews lower average click-through rates by 34.5%. That’s a huge dent in the organic traffic pipeline, particularly for media.

but also for brands, marketers, and anyone reliant on Google for discoverability. Critics argue that Google is building a walled garden, keeping users on its own platform rather than sending them out to the wider web. It’s not hard to see why. The more time people spend on Google’s pages, the more valuable the ad inventory becomes, the thrust of our conversations on this topic in previous podcast episodes. But the price may be a slow suffocation of the free and open internet as we know it.

So let’s consider what this means for publishers, for search strategy, for public relations, for media relations, for the business models that rely on Google behaving more like a neutral platform than a content competitor. Your thoughts?

Shel Holtz (1:11:53)
I think there are a number of issues to unpack from this trend. One is that some of this decline in Google search really doesn’t have anything to do with AI. It’s the fact that Gen Z is abandoning Google in unprecedented numbers. ⁓ Nearly half of Gen Z are using TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat as their primary search engines, I guess.

Google wouldn’t be too upset to know that they’re going to YouTube instead, it’s still one of their properties. But why are these natives so distrustful of traditional platforms? How’s their skepticism reshaping the landscape? And what does it mean for business trying to connect with them? They are, after all, the most digitally savvy generation we’ve ever seen. But for those who are just settling for the…

AI overviews, know, PR is evolving from a support role to a core strategy for brands that are looking for visibility in AI powered search. ⁓ know, AI engines are increasingly relying on brand mentions, reputation and authority signal, and PR excels at generating these. With traditional search results being replaced by AI generated summaries and conversational interfaces,

Brands have to focus on building reputation-based visibility rather than just traditional SEO tactics. I saw one report that said about 61 % of signals that inform AI’s understanding of brand reputation come from editorial media sources. That means PR-driven mentions and high authority publications are critical for establishing topical authority and entity recognition. Unlike traditional Google rankings, AI systems don’t rank content the same way.

They learn brand associations through consistent mentions across trusted publications. Research shows that brand search volume correlates strongly with visibility in AI chatbot searches. And that emphasizes the importance of using PR to build buzz around brand names rather than just product keywords.

@nevillehobson (1:14:02)
It’s a complicated landscape, I think. I remember one of our conversations about this, that ⁓ my view then, I’m not sure whether it’s still the same, I think it is, is this is an inevitable evolution of search. That ⁓ if it turns out that ⁓ Google search results include not just a link to your content, but a summary of it, as is common now.

and you then, okay, that’s all I need and you then don’t click through, then you need to find another way to get people’s attention rather than ⁓ complain about it as many were doing. But the Daily Mail’s ⁓ experience shows the reality of this, which in my view adds even greater importance to you need to make sure your content. So your focus needs to shift to the new paradigm, which is where we’re at, not the old paradigm.

That’s history and that isn’t going to come back anytime soon, I don’t think. How does it fit as well with changes such as you mentioned? Other platforms are now people’s preferred search tool. I was reading a story earlier today about some research showing that with certain generation of the Phoenix Gen Z, chat GPT is a favored search tool. People are getting to content via looking up something on chat GPT. ⁓

used to be perplexity was always quoted this way, but not so much these days is that you then click the link in the in the results it gives you and that shows us where you came from that chat GPT. So the whole landscape is shifting and yet maybe brands and others that they’re they’re they’re kind of focus on Google search as was hasn’t shifted yet. Maybe that’s it.

Shel Holtz (1:15:50)
Maybe. The risk continues to those who rely on their websites for income. ⁓ Clicks to the websites in order to get people to see the ads. That’s under threat. The whole model of the web. And that’s not going to serve Google well for its search property if people can’t maintain their websites because nobody’s visiting them.

@nevillehobson (1:15:57)
Thanks

Shel Holtz (1:16:17)
What’s the incentive? What’s the motivation to create that content that Google scoops up and sells ads against? But, you know, one of the interesting things I read in that report about Gen Z was that they fact check. They’re very skeptical. They’re very distrustful. And they will, when they hear something, go to Google and search in order to confirm what they heard someplace else altogether. So you never know, Gen Z and Gen A may…

Maybe Google’s savior when it comes to traditional search.

@nevillehobson (1:16:51)
But

they don’t click through from what they find on Google. That’s the thing. They don’t then click through. that they get what I need to satisfy myself that is legit, what I heard this guy say on YouTube or on TikTok. So I’ve got what I need and I don’t go any further than that.

Shel Holtz (1:17:06)
I didn’t get that from Gen

Z. ⁓ It may be true, but they didn’t say that Gen Z was settling for the AI overviews.

@nevillehobson (1:17:12)
No, but

probably are, would say, because what I have read elsewhere, and we are sure we’ve talked about this, is Gen Z is typically to, you know, tar everyone with the same brush, trust anything, and don’t do fact checking. And so obviously, something shifted in that case, if they are now doing fact checking. So I guess it just shows the volatility of this overall landscape. And in the context of this topic, this conversation, I think the ⁓ reality of search

is it’s not like that anymore, where you would see, there’s your search term, and it couldn’t be a conversational question. It was just peppered with keywords. And up would come listing of links in a hierarchical order based on whatever Google’s algorithm decides the order. And you click a link and go there. And I think that was always unsatisfactory. I certainly found it completely unsatisfactory when you got to your destination.

And you didn’t notice it was a promotional link, and it would just give you generic sales stuff. The example I gave was always in my mind when we were talking about the changes. And we had it in a conversation. wrote a blog post about it. I had screenshots galore showing, here’s my search term that I wrote. It was about ⁓ plug-in hybrid cars, was the search term I used. And Google search results showed me this car maker, this car dealer, you name it, all showing up as sponsored links.

So I click on a couple of them and all I get is a generic page on the website, nothing related to my search term. That puts you off entirely. Whereas with this new basis, you get the paragraph description, you get the answer to your question and links to a whole lot more. And I remember perplexity a year ago or so now would have at the end of everything, it says, you might also be interested in, and there’s all related stuff too.

So the old way is gone and it seems to me that ⁓ some organizations just haven’t quite clicked that yet and they need to move faster.

Shel Holtz (1:19:18)
Incidentally, one other interesting thing I read about ⁓ Gen Z’s use of ChatGPT in particular is that they’re using it for life decisions. It’s not just when I need information, it’s I need to decide whether I’m going to do A, B, or C. What should I do? And they’re testing their decisions. They’re living their life with help from ChatGPT, which I think is an interesting development.

@nevillehobson (1:19:36)
Ha ha ha.

While you’ve also got the therapy and all this stuff that people are also using instead of paying for a therapist at extortion or expensive hourly rates, use ChatGPT. By me, that’s serious.

Shel Holtz (1:19:56)
Yeah, which isn’t a therapist, but

as I heard somebody else say on a podcast recently, you sometimes you can’t find any therapists who are taking new patients or you have to wait a couple of weeks. Using Chachi PT as a therapist is better than having no therapy at all, is what this individual on a podcast said.

@nevillehobson (1:20:13)
Right, to you, Chad

GPT is the therapist in that case.

Shel Holtz (1:20:20)
All right, let’s move on from AI for our last report of the day. Are you looking for a new content marketing opportunity? Well, here’s one. A growing number of adults are turning to Google for help with the most basic life skills, and smart companies are capitalizing on this trends in ways that should make content marketers take notice. Here’s the data that caught my attention. Google searches for things like how to clean a bathroom vent, how to use a mop.

how to change the oil in my car have reached all time highs this year. We’re not talking about advanced home improvement projects. We’re talking about basic adulting tasks that previous generations, yours and mine, for example, Neville, we learned these from family members or home economics classes. According to a report in Axios, they were reporting on Google’s internal data.

More than ever, adults are looking for online help with day-to-day life skills that once might’ve been taught in home ec classes or passed down from elders. By 2018, more than half of US YouTube users were already saying they use the platform for figuring out how to do things they haven’t done before. And this trend has only accelerated. Think about what this represents. Millions of people searching every day for answers to questions like how to change a tire, how to balance a checkbook,

checkbook, how to iron a shirt, how to file taxes, or how to negotiate salary. These aren’t niche topics. These are fundamental adult skills that an entire generation is having to learn from scratch through search engines and AI chatbots. Now, the reason for the skills gap, well, they’re fascinating from a sociological perspective, and we’ll come back to that. But from a communication standpoint, what matters is the opportunity.

When people have questions they’re not asking mom or dad, they’re asking Google or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. And that creates an enormous content marketing opportunity for companies whose products or services relate to any aspect of adult life. Let me share a few examples of companies that have capitalized on this trend brilliantly and for a long time. Home Depot and Lowe’s have turned DIY education into a cornerstone of their marketing strategy.

Both companies have massive YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, extensive how-to content libraries, and comprehensive guides that answer basic questions like how to use a drill or how to install a light fixture. The key is that they’re not just selling products, they’re positioning themselves as trusted advisors for people who lack basic home maintenance knowledge. Home Depot’s YouTube channel has become what many consider the Internet’s go-to resource for DIY guidance.

And Lowe’s content marketing strategy focuses heavily on educational tutorials that build brand loyalty before purchase decisions. The financial services industry has been particularly aggressive in targeting this trend. Banks like KeyBank have created financial wellness centers that provide guidance for young consumers on topics like how much does it cost to rent an apartment as a new graduate or how to negotiate your salary after receiving an offer. These aren’t just

product pitches, they’re addressing real knowledge gaps that their target demographic has. Credit unions and community banks are using this approach to compete with larger institutions. SF Fire Credit Union, for example, offers content about navigating San Francisco’s expensive rental market and provides rental deposit loans, positioning themselves as allies who understand the specific challenges their young customers face.

It gets really interesting, though, for communication professionals. The companies succeeding at this aren’t just creating content. They’re building entire ecosystems around life skills education. There’s even a phenomenon like the Dad How Do I YouTube channel created by Rob Kenny, which has gone viral teaching young adults basic tasks like changing a tire or tying a tie.

And he isn’t monetizing this directly. Companies are still taking note of the massive demand for this type of content. The scope of the opportunities is frankly staggering. We’re talking about content possibilities around financial literacy, home maintenance, career skills, health and wellness, basic cooking, car maintenance, legal basics, technology troubleshooting, relationship advice, every single one of these categories.

represents potential content marketing territory for companies and related industries. Don’t expect this to be a short-lived trend. The factors that created this skills gap, which is the decline of home economics education, they don’t teach home ec in school anymore. Dual career families with less time for teaching practical skills, geographic mobility that separates young adults from family support networks. These are structural changes in society.

So for communication professionals, this represents a fundamental shift in content strategy. Instead of creating content about your products or services, create content about the life skills your customers need to successfully use your products or services. Instead of assuming people know how to do basic tasks, you can become the trusted source that teaches them basic tasks. The companies that are winning at this aren’t just dumping information online.

They’re creating comprehensive, searchable, well-organized content libraries that position them as long-term resources. When someone learns how to change their car’s oil from your YouTube video, they remember your brand when they need to change their oil. When somebody learns about credit scores from your bank’s educational content, they think of you when they’re ready for a mortgage. The key is authenticity and genuine helpfulness.

Younger consumers, Gen Z in particular, along with millennials, they can spot marketing disguised as education from miles away. The content that works is genuinely useful, comprehensive, and created with the learner success in mind, not just lead generation. From a strategic communication standpoint, this trend also represents a trust building opportunity. At a time when institutional trust is at historic lows,

Becoming the source people turn to for reliable, practical guidance creates a different kind of relationship with your audience. You’re not just a vendor, you’re a helpful resource they discovered when they needed you most. So take a stab at auditing your organization’s areas of expertise and identify the basic life skills your customers need to know to successfully engage with your industry.

@nevillehobson (1:27:06)
Good advice to route and the examples you gave, we discussed on DIY. We’ve had that here for years. All the big DIY retailers here in the UK and wholesalers that matter have YouTube channels. Some of the ⁓ consumer electronics stores have installation guides on how to set up your TV. How do you get your computer doing X, Y, I all this stuff has been happening. I use this kind of thing a lot myself.

via chat GPT primarily. How do I do X? So when we were moving to our new house here in Somerset, I found out all I needed to know about the router that I needed and how to configure it and comparisons between what models are on the via a lengthy to and fro with chat GPT. ⁓ well, let’s say the major work was me checking all the things.

Shel Holtz (1:27:56)
You fact-checked it, right?

@nevillehobson (1:28:03)
I’ve yet to, I’ve never experienced a hallucination in this context, as far as I’m aware. So nothing’s blown up or fallen off the walls as a result of that. So even when I bought this portable air conditioner that I haven’t got set up yet, the the to and fro brainstorming ideas on the best way to set up the exhaust hose in my studio and chat GPT was very helpful. I also use Gemini for that too. And, you know, I’m quite comfortable with that.

But ⁓ it is an opportunity for companies. But I can see as well that you mentioned the two key words, authenticity and value to the user as opposed to lead generation. And the cynical side of me talks about how really difficult it is for some companies to get out of marketing mode and think about the engagement with ⁓ potential customers or not even potential customers. Offer something of value to people.

that might give you a benefit. Trouble is that’s hard for some companies to justify without the hard facts behind what’s the ROI going to get out of doing this. So it’s a mixed bag and you’ve got to be careful too. I mean, I was looking on YouTube while you were talking and there’s no end of so-called expert videos that you could follow, but how do you know whether they’re trustworthy or not without doing a lot of legwork to check it up yourself?

So that’s your landscape and always best to get a recommendation, I think. There are some that you could take a ⁓ plunge and say, yes, I would trust this organization. I’ve heard of them. They have a local branch where I’ve been. I’ve been in the store and I know them. So I’ll trust what they’re telling me on this, that, the other. That’s great until they get hacked or some other impediment occurs that dislodges that trust. But that is the landscape. So it’s a

It’s caveat emptor most of the time, think,

Shel Holtz (1:30:02)
think an organization looking to do content marketing around this stuff would ⁓ be advised to dig up the curriculum from a high school home economics class and look at what they taught and see where that aligns with your industry. Because if you find those intersections, it means you have subject matter experts on those topics and it would probably not be that difficult to start creating content.

being strategic about it, creating an ecosystem, making it navigable and searchable and really useful for people and making it discoverable. That’s another thing. But as you mentioned the fact that you use ChatGPT for these how-tos, I’ve talked to other people. In fact, one of the guys ⁓ running the AI subcommittee that I’m on, the Enterprise AI subcommittee ⁓ where I work.

He’s got multiple old vehicles and he’s getting codes when he plugs the computer into it to see why it won’t start. And he’s just going to AI and saying, I have this year model of this vehicle. I’m getting this code on the computer. What do I need to do? And it tells them, and so far it’s always been right. This is happening. So how do we get our adulting tutorials into AI? Well, we talked about that in a previous story. It’s media relations.

@nevillehobson (1:31:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:31:27)
It’s great content marketing, it’s third party validity, but we need to get content out there that talks about the how and not the what. This is a big focus for me right now. I haven’t had time to do much about it because we’re implementing a new internal communications platform and that’s eating my life up until June 2nd when it goes live. But I really want to start getting more content out there that talks about how we do stuff and not what we did because that’s how

That’s the kind of content that finds its way into AI query results.

@nevillehobson (1:32:03)
Yeah, I agree. agree. Now, this is something that communicators particularly need to pay close attention to the way this is evolving and how. You could ask your AI to give you an assessment of what you should do in this situation. You might be surprised at the good advice you might get. Check the sources.

Shel Holtz (1:32:21)
I’m tempted to go get a curriculum from a Home Ec class and develop a website called Adulting, just finding the best content that’s out there right now. Just curate a site that this is what they used to teach in Home Ec and this is what your parents used to teach you when they taught you how to be an adult. Now you can learn it all here. We’ve vetted this. It’s all good, accurate, credible.

@nevillehobson (1:32:24)
You

Do it.

Shel Holtz (1:32:47)
advice from a variety of trusted subject matter experts. Come to one and buy ads, know, buy stuff from the ads that we have to support this site.

@nevillehobson (1:32:51)
is you.

You should do it.

You should definitely do it in your copious spare time.

Shel Holtz (1:33:01)
in my copious

free time, which I have none of. Well, that’ll do it for this episode of for immediate release. Our next episode is going to drop on Monday, June 23rd. Our next long form monthly episode that is we’ll be recording that on Saturday, the 21st of June. Until then, we would be very grateful if you would send us your thoughts about any of the items.

that you have heard here today, you can send an email to fircomments at gmail.com. You can include an audio comment, just attach it to the email, or better yet, go to firpodcastnetwork.com and click that little button that says send voicemail and record your thoughts right there. You can also just send us ⁓ a narrative text comment.

You can leave those comments on the show notes at the FIR website at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. You can leave those comments where we post the announcement about the show on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Blue Sky, on threads and on Mastodon. We also very much appreciate your ratings and reviews wherever you get your podcasts and that

will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #466: Still Hallucinating After All These Years appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Seemingly unrelated trends paint a clear picture for PR practitioners accustomed to achieving their goals through press release distribution and media pitching. The trends: People trust each other less than ever; people define what news is based on its impact on them, becoming their own gatekeepers; and video podcasts have become so popular that media outlets are including them in their upfronts. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel find the common thread among these trends and outline how communicators can adjust their efforts to make sure their news is received and believed.

Links from this episode:

What Is News? (Pew Research Center)
Americans’ Trust in One Another (Pew Research Center)
Video podcasts are the next big pitch at media Upfronts
News Consumption in the UK: 2024

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

@nevillehobson (00:01)
Hi everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Releases. This is episode 465. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:09)
And I’m Shel Holtz in the U.S. And if you work in communication, it’s time to tweak your media playbook. If you still treat a press release and a reporter pitch as the center of the universe, it’s time to reconsider things. We’ll talk about why and how right after this.

Let’s start with the human glue that holds any message together, that being trust. Pew released a survey on May 8th that tells us only 34 % of Americans now believe that most people can be trusted. In the Watergate era, that number was 46%. In the mid-50s, it was closer to 70%. This is a crater, not a dip. Low social trust bleeds into institutional trust. So your brand news

starts with a skepticism handicap. Now, later on this, Pew’s other study also released in May that asked what is news, and the picture starts to come into sharper focus. Americans still want information that’s factual and important, but they apply those labels through a personal filter. Does it touch my wallet, my neighborhood, my values? If yes, it’s news. If not, it’s just clutter. That’s why an election gets an automatic news stamp and a blockbuster earnings release doesn’t.

The gatekeeping power has moved from editors to individual, and each individual is now effectively their own assignment editor. Enter into this mix the video podcast boom. CNBC’s upfronts coverage reads like a love letter to long-form host-driven shows. New Heights with the Kelsey brothers, Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, LeBron and Steve Nash breaking down hoops for Amazon,

These aren’t side hustles, they’re front row inventory next to NFL rights. The numbers explain why. New Heights pulls 2.6 million YouTube subscribers. Joe Rogan’s sit down with Donald Trump chalked up 58 million views. Multiples of top 10 broadcast hits, but on demand clipped and reshared endlessly. So here’s the tripod we’re standing on. Low interpersonal trust.

a personalized definition of news, and an audience migration to host-driven video-forward channels. Shake those three together and the argument that will blast a release, cross our fingers, and call it a day feels about as modern as a fax machine. People trust people, and even though they trust people less than they used to, they do trust peers, subject matter experts, or charismatic hosts who are already populating their feeds.

That means the old CEO quote and boilerplate formula is just table stakes at best. Yes, there are still good reasons to send out a press release, but not in a vacuum. We have to surface frontline engineers, project superintendents, patient advocates, whoever the listener already sees as one of them. We also have to pitch the host and not the masthead. Video podcast bookers don’t really care about breaking the news. It’s more about a conversation that keeps their community engaged through

next week’s and the show’s next month. Study the arc of the show. Offer stories that fit that arc and bring props. If you can’t show it, demo it, or screen share it live, probably isn’t a great video podcast pitch. You need to build a video-first asset bundle. Think 16-9 aspect ratio and 9-16 b-roll. Cut down clips ready for shorts, lower third ready stats graphics,

even physical product the host can hold up. Give them the raw materials to create snackable moments. We need to consider fast-forward transparency, because low trust means listeners will Google literally while you’re talking. Make it painless. Publish the data set, the methodology, the impact dashboard the moment the podcast drops. When a host can say links in the show notes, check it yourself, you borrow their credibility instead of testing it.

You need to measure the clip life, not just the hit. An episode premiere is only inning one. Track how quotes migrate to TikTok, how a product demo GIF surfaces on Reddit, and how snippets thread their way into your earned media that you didn’t pitch. That’s the long tail. That’s the ROI. And all of this, of course, spills inward. Employees are audience segments too, and they’re consuming in the same places.

Internal comms, the should-think podcast-style video for CEO AMAs, peer-to-peer explainers, even training modules. Why write a thousand-word intranet post when a five-minute host-driven conversation between the project manager and a site safety lead will get watched and maybe shared to LinkedIn by the very people that you need to reach? So if I had to condense this new rule set into one line, it’s this. Facts open the door.

Trusted humans carry them across the threshold, visuals bolted shut. Your news still has to meet the classic criteria, timely, significant, novel, but today it also has to pass an audience sniff test delivered by someone they feel they know in a format that lets them see more than they hear. So real quick, build a credible messenger bench inside and outside the organization, package every story visually, court video podcast hosts,

Ship transparency aids and track the afterlife of clips because momentum equals mindshare. Get this mix right and you’ll do more than play stories. You’ll earn a toehold in the very channels that are shaping public perception, channels the upfront buyers just anointed as prime time.

@nevillehobson (05:57)
There’s a lot of stuff there, Shell, that you shared, I must admit. And Pew Research, which you’ve cited a bit, really is way out front with quality data that informs their reporting. I don’t think there’s anything quite like Pew anywhere else in the world with the breadth and depth of data they use to come up with a reporting conclusion. So it’s hard to find comparisons.

listening to how you were setting all this out, it made me think that, you know, what’s actually changed over the years, other than the obvious declines here and there and different numbers. It’s, it’s the defining what is media, what is news has changed, I think, that may well have influenced some of these metrics that you’re you’re quoting. Looking at Pew, for instance,

Consistent views exist on what news isn’t rather than what it is. That’s interesting, I think. Hard news stories about politics and war continue to be what people most clearly think of as news. And I suspect that’s the same here too. But it’s difficult to see some of this through any other lens than…

the radical changes we’re experiencing and we’ve been going through over the past five years or so after two decades of, you know, golden years, you might say when, when we didn’t have the worries we have today. It’s easy to blame Trump for all this, by the way, and of course, it’s not really fair to do that. Not I’m not worried about being fair to him, but generally for understanding what’s happening and the changes that are happening. There’s a wider shift happening in society on which

I would suspect Mr. Trump is one of the catalyzers behind the changes that are going on. So I find it most interesting seeing the US picture as a benchmark, if you will, for what’s happening elsewhere, purely through the lens of the sheer volume of quality data that informs opinions. We don’t have that anywhere else. I was looking at a report here in the UK to get some perspective from this side of the Atlantic on this

broad topic. The regulator here, Ofcom, has produced some really useful data. There’s a big report that came out late last year that is to do with the picture in the UK, the broad picture on news consumption across generations. There’s an interesting metric set, nothing like the depth of what you’ve got.

For instance, comparing podcasts and the new media, if you will, that isn’t really in this report to a significant depth like that. But there are some parallels without any doubt, decline of traditional media, the decline of trust, for instance. But the generational gaps are not the same, it seems to me, although probably looking in depth at them may well be quite similar.

But one thing that seems to be clear is that how people trust who they do trust is not that different here as it is in the US. It’s not quite so granular, it’s a smaller country apart from the US. So it’s hard to look at it through the same eyes as you would in the US with the vast geography you’ve got over there. But you know, I find it quite interesting, you know, here’s a kind of a leaping out statement, we kind of think, yeah, we know that traditional platforms are declining in popularity.

Yeah, that’s a finding that’s universal, I would say in Western countries, certainly. But, you know, just looking through this to see what comparisons I can draw from from the US picture, there are some interesting topics. haven’t connected them with the Pew data, but I bet you they’re similar. For instance, how teens consume news.

Teen show a preference for lighter news topics in favor of social media platforms for news consumption rather than traditional media. No surprise with that at all, I don’t think. It is interesting seeing this decline in traditional news platforms for the top 10 news sources in the UK are now social media platforms. That’s again, that’s interesting. 70 % of respondents to Ofcom survey rate TV news is accurate, while only 44 % rate social media similarly.

So inaccurate is the word for social media, accurate for TV in terms of news reporting. Public service broadcasters, BBC is one, continue to be seen as vital for delivering trusted news, this report says, despite a decline in viewership. This survey I’m referencing indicates that audiences prioritize accurate news from public service broadcasters. And that sense of trust is big here because, you know, we don’t have

cities with their own TV networks in those cities or that state. It’s not the same geographically as one reason. But the other is that the state here defined television back in the 50s. In fact, prior to that, 1930s, even before Second World War, unlike the US where the soap opera emerged in those days, it had sponsors for content that didn’t exist here. was public service broadcasting, then commercial channels arose.

It’s well trusted, even though that trust is often dented by events. For instance, all over the news the last few days is a guy called Gary Lineker, who’s very well known in the UK. He was a professional footballer. He’s been the voice of BBC Sport for two decades, but he’s very outspoken. He’s got himself into trouble. Previously, over using social media for political comment, and he dropped a big clanger recently about Israel and Gaza. basically he’s…

quit, he’s resigned and he’s not getting the big golden handshake he would have got if he had been a good boy rather than naughty boy. I’m sure he’s going to pop up somewhere. he he’s dented his own reputation in terms of trust, but it’s rubbed off on the BBC a bit. So they’re going to have to weather that for a while, I would imagine. But, you know, the the the markets are have a lot of parallels in many ways, I think. Social media platforms increasingly use for news consumption.

Facebook being the most popular source. think that reflects the picture of the US too, doesn’t it, Joe? Probably? Yeah, yeah. So perception of news accuracy and trustworthiness is a relevant metric in the context of this conversation. Search engines, news aggregators are perceived as more trustworthy and accurate compared to social media platforms. Facebook in particular scores lower on attributes like quality and trustworthiness. Yet, as the other metric shows,

Shel Holtz (11:44)
I believe so, yeah.

@nevillehobson (12:06)
Facebook’s the most popular source for news consumption. with paradox, there seems to be. And you’re looking at a couple of other things. Social media and talking with family are the most common ways teens access news. So that’s a bit different to the statistic you quoted on where teens place their trust. So social media is 55%, family 60%. TikTok’s the most used individual news source among teens. That’s 30%.

So it’s kind of interesting. you know, there’s lots of more lots of further metrics there that aren’t really relevant to this conversation. think Americans trust in one another. Would that be the same here? I’ve not found kind of direct directly comparable metrics that I could I could throw at you. So it’s hard to see the difference. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the over the general sentiment in that is not dissimilar here.

Yet there are definitely differences. Racial issues, the discrimination factors aren’t quite the same as in the US, but they exist here. They don’t tend to be skin color, if you see what I mean, it’s more origin like from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East rather than, you know, black Americans who originated generations back coming from Africa. Those are not quite the same. Yet I would say the

the outcomes in terms of analyzing behaviors, look at the cystics aren’t that dissimilar. It just shows, I think, how similar and how different we all are wherever we are in the world. And the difference, one big one in America is you’ve got the metrics that helps you understand it all, that don’t exist into such a scale elsewhere. So I’m not sure this is going have gone off on a slight tangent to what you were talking about earlier, Shell, but I think it is useful to

contrast or compare really the data from one side Atlantic to another, not directly comparable for geographic geographies and simple sheer volume. But behaviors aren’t that different, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz (13:58)
No, I suspect not. When you look at the growth in distrust of each other here, the political divide must have a lot to do with that. People on the left just not trusting people on the right, people on the right not trusting people on the left. But I think it probably goes deeper than that. But what it leads to is it leads to people finding sources of news that are relevant to them, that affect them.

that is conveyed by people that they do trust. So if you trust Joe Rogan, you’re going to watch Joe Rogan’s show. And that’s where you’re going to get a lot of your news, since he does tend to have newsmaker type guests on. This, think, is why we have to pay attention to these video podcasts as a possible outlet for the message that we’re trying to convey.

because there are people who are gravitating to these. see the numbers. The numbers are bigger than the numbers that are being drawn to your top 10 TV shows. And this is just this confluence of the definition of news, who we trust, where we get our news and how we define news and the growth of video podcasting, which we saw played out.

in the last presidential election because Trump and his spokespeople were hitting the bro circuit of video podcasts and the Harris campaign was by and large ignoring them and playing to traditional media. I haven’t seen any analysis that has definitively said that led to victory, certainly didn’t hurt. And it was a wise strategy given the data that we’re seeing now.

So I think the people who are talking about this and thinking about it are absolutely right. You have to start thinking about where your audience is, who they trust, what do they think news is, and how can we craft our news so that it conforms to that and gets delivered through a trusted third party that they’re actually paying attention to and find credible. It’s a big shift.

But the other thing that comes out of accommodating this shift of adopting these new practices in getting the story out for our organization or our clients is that it does accommodate AI search. The interview on that video podcast is going to end up in a training model somewhere. So this

aids that effort as well as fewer and fewer people click any links that they find in a Google search, just settling for the AI overview at the top of the page, which now Google is starting to emphasize anyway, which is a whole different topic of conversation that we have addressed before and no doubt will again. you want people to hear your news, at least you get the side benefit of appearing more in AI search results.

@nevillehobson (16:49)
Yeah. Yeah, things are changing so fast, it seems to me that some of these detailed analytical reports on behaviors and trends and so forth in media, you get the sense that they’re trying hard to remain relevant in the analysis when the demographics and the markets are shifting so radically. For instance, report just the other day here in the UK that was

focused on the Daily Mail, one of the tabloids here that is definitely right leaning in a big way, were talking at a conference on the dramatic fall in click throughs since the advent of Google’s AI overviews. And they said it was alarming and it was shocking. And the volumes, I don’t have the report in front of me, but the numbers were quite significant, the drops. So what are they doing about it? And this to me, I found most interesting.

which I think instead of complaining as some media are about these changes and we got to do something, we’re not, you this is wrong and blah, blah, is do what the mail is doing, which is off, which is starting up a newsletter that you subscribe to. So that I think is definitely a trend to keep keep eyes on. I the the niche newsletter is designed to relate directly to your own interests.

So if you want to get all your news from the mail to you directly, than suffer from, if you’re searching for something or whatever, your own behavior, you’ve searched for something, it pulls up the results from the daily mail, you read it there, and it’s enough to satisfy the reason why you were searching, so no click through. So I get the logic of what they’re doing, and I think others will follow them unquestionably. And I look at my own behavior.

in a very small way. This is just me. not I don’t know if it’s a trend or mirrors anyone else or not. I subscribe now to nearly 20 newsletters. And of course, I don’t get a chance to read half of them, to be honest, show but I read the ones that interest me early in the day when I’m not at my desktop machine or even my laptop, probably my phone or tablet that I wouldn’t otherwise do. And it tends to be glancing as almost snacking on the content. And I see that is a different way I used to what I used to do.

media consumption, which would have been sitting in a desktop computer, looking at the screen reading stuff for half an hour. Don’t do it like that anymore at all. So and some of the newsletters are from new media, if I described like that, not the old media. And they’re well written, they’re entertaining, they’re storytelling, but not just a bunch of dry, factual information, they entertain as well. And so, you know, to me, one of the measures of whether I like them is if I permit the

images to come through automatically rather than be blocked by my email program. others I leave blocked. So you get a sense of how they’re approaching this, whether designing for a desktop computer, or you’ve got tons of broken image links all over the screen, you’re not going to read that. So that’s part of the shift. And I think maybe that’s generational. I don’t know. I’ve not looked into it. Do younger audiences have similar behaviors with newsletters? Well, according to the mail,

demographic they’re interested in is definitely leaning young, not old, even though my understanding of the male, and this may be based just on people I know, they’re old who read the Daily Mail and the right wing. you know, things are changing. the Pew is probably best placed to provide data on the US picture. I wish they would look at international but of course, I guess the raw data is not there. But this is part of the shifting landscape.

generational shifts as well. You know, we got Gen Alpha on our heels at the moment. What is their news consumption like? I was looking at an ad the other day for a digital camera, which I bought one actually that when we’re out looking at things and my wife and I are visiting places, instead of fumbling with my phone, I’ve got this little digital camera hanging on the strap, I could just pick up take a picture. That’s that’s why I did this. But I found one that was like 30 pounds 64 megapixel.

with they call it a vlogging camera because it’s 4k video as well aimed at teens it’s very affordable and indeed the pitching it as a gift to your youngster who’s 10 get him started it’s very simple very safe very straightforward it’s not connected to anything although there are versions with built-in wi-fi so you look at how these things are shifting into one of the tools that are available to to kids these ages now so

We are at a time of significant change. We know this. This is another manifestation of it, seems to me.

Shel Holtz (21:09)
Yeah, by the way, you mentioned newsletters and I think there’s probably a new approach to newsletters that people in communications might want to consider. And that is after an interview, after a news release, after an event to send a newsletter out that provides all of the backup information, because this is again, make it easy to.

have people see you as transparent. Make it very easy for people to confirm the information that you have shared. You also want to make it available online. But if you have people who are paying attention to what’s coming out of your organization and you deliver some remarks or make an announcement, get the backup material out there. Use whatever means are available to you. lots of new approaches in

@nevillehobson (21:58)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (21:59)
this profession

for people to consider in order to succeed. But again, know, the press release with the CEO quote, you still need it for a variety of reasons. I mean, here in the US, compliance, you know, with SEC rules, but it won’t cut it ⁓ in getting the word out to the people you’re trying to reach.

@nevillehobson (22:10)
Yeah.

No,

it wasn’t. And I suspect that’s a similar reason here in the UK. I’ve not looked into that, listed companies have to communicate certain things. I’m just thinking, funny you mentioned that because today I got a press release from an agency that I read it. I thought, my God, this is dreadful, truly, particularly when they use the old fashioned language that we used to use back in the 70s and 80s, I think, it was so and so commented. He commented.

Shel Holtz (22:32)
Most of them.

@nevillehobson (22:42)
People don’t talk like that naturally, he said, or… Oh, you bet. You bet. Well, now we’re getting into the topic of structuring press releases, because to me, it’s like they name the company and then four paragraphs of what the position is of the company, how well they’ve been doing in the history and all that stuff, then you get to the news. So no, that’s not the way to do it.

Shel Holtz (22:45)
The one I love is, we’re excited to announce. Are you? Really? Are you bouncing around in your seat excited?

@nevillehobson (23:07)
The newsletter in the way you suggested it makes a lot of sense to me, I must admit. It’s quite a layer to add into the workflow of producing this hence there are tools that will help you. AI driven, many of them. So that’s definitely worth considering. But the newsletter generally for the example of the Daily Mail in terms of the media, I could see this going a lot. I get, for instance, alerts in the start of the day from news organizations. Here’s today’s headlines.

I used to enjoy them, but they’re all the same now. They’re reporting on the same news, just different presentation. So I’ve got to be selective in what I look at. And the ones I’ve not looked at for a couple of weeks, I’ll unsubscribe. But they are useful. And does it make me click through? No, it doesn’t actually, very, very rarely. The new media ones do, though. Some of my favorite newsletters from the tech area and in politics are well-written. They are entertaining, more so than these. These are…

kind of a shinier approach from the old media, whereas the new media tell real stories in their news and they make it something you look forward to reading and you then engage more with those. So what impact will that have on reporting by Pew, for instance, next year? I wonder. People are popping up all over the place with companies, rather, should say, offering newsletter services. So, for instance, Beehive, see a lot, you know.

Shel Holtz (24:23)
Yeah, well.

@nevillehobson (24:25)
Substack I hear less about now than alternatives to that, although Stubstack is still a pretty big player. is a great one. know a number of organizations have shifted to Ghost as a platform. I use my blog, which also has a newsletter function I use too. And that’s actually more than I’ve ever done before is growing in subscribers. I’m quite pleased that that’s not my prime purpose, but people clearly like that. So for us, we might consider some of that show. That’s a whole different topic here. So yeah.

Shel Holtz (24:50)
Well,

the other thing to consider is that if people don’t trust Entity X, they’re not going to trust Entity X’s newsletter just because they’re cranking one out. You have to build that trust through other means or get into somebody else’s newsletter. But I’m sure this is a conversation that will continue as these changes continue. But for now, that’ll be a 30 for for immediate release.

@nevillehobson (24:58)
Right.

The post FIR #465: The Trust-News-Video Podcast PR Trifecta appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Debate continues about when to disclose that you have used AI to create an output. Do you disclose any use at all? Do you confine disclosure to uses of AI that could lead people to feel deceived? Wherever you land on this question, it may not matter when it comes to building trust with your audience. According to a new study, audiences lose trust as soon as they see an AI disclosure. This doesn’t mean you should not disclose, however, since finding out that you used AI and didn’t disclose is even worse. That leaves little wiggle room for communicators taking advantage of AI and seeking to be as transparent as possible. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel examine the research along with recommendations about how to be transparent while remaining trusted.

Links from this episode:

The transparency dilemma: How AI disclosure erodes trust
The ‘Insights 2024: Attitudes toward AI’ Report Reveals Researchers and Clinicians Believe in AI’s Potential but Demand Transparency in Order to Trust Tools (press release)
Insights 2024: Attitudes toward AI
Being honest about using AI at work makes people trust you less, research finds
Should Businesses Disclose Their AI Usage?
Insights 2024: AI’ Report – Researchers and Clinicians Believe AI’s Potential but Need Transparency
New research: When disclosing use of AI, be specific
Demystifying Generative AI Disclosures
The Janus Face of Artificial Intelligence Feedback: Deployment Versus Disclosure Effects on Employee Performance

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz (00:05)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 464 of 4 Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:13)
and I’m Neville Hobson. Let’s talk about something that might surprise you in this episode. It turns out that being honest about using AI at work, you know, doing the right thing by being transparent, might actually make people trust you less. That’s the headline finding from a new academic study published in April by Elsevier titled, The Transparency Dilemma, How AI Disclosure Erodes Trust. It’s a heavyweight piece of research.

13 experiments over 5,000 participants from students and hiring managers to legal analysts and investors. And the results are consistent across all groups, across all scenarios. People trust others less when they’re told that AI played a role in getting the work done. We’ll get into this right after this.

So imagine this, you’re a job applicant who says you used AI to polish a CV, or a manager who mentions AI helped write performance reviews, or a professor who says grades were assessed using AI. In each case, just admitting you used AI is enough to make people view you as less trustworthy. Now this isn’t about AI doing the work alone. In fact, the study found that people trusted a fully autonomous AI more than they trusted a human.

who disclosed they had help from an AI. That’s the paradox. So why does this happen? Well, the researchers say it comes down to legitimacy. We still operate with deep seated norms that say proper work should come from human judgment, effort and expertise. So when someone reveals they used AI, it triggers a reaction, a kind of social red flag. Even if AI helped only a little, even if the work is just a good.

Changing how the disclosure is worded doesn’t help much. Whether you say, AI assisted me lightly, or I proofread the AI output, or I’m just being transparent, trust still drops. There’s one twist. If someone hides their AI use, and it’s later discovered by a third party, the trust hit is even worse. So you’re damned if you do, but potentially more damned if you don’t. Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Just nine months earlier in July, 2024, Elsevier published a different report, Insights 2024 Attitudes Towards AI, based on a global survey of nearly 3,000 researchers and clinicians. That survey found most professionals are enthusiastic about AI’s potential, but they demand transparency to trust the tools. So on the one hand, we want transparency from AI systems. On the other hand, we penalize people who are transparent about using AI.

It’s not a contradiction. It’s about who we’re trusting. In the 2024 study, trust is directed at the AI tool. In the 2025 study, trust is directed at the human disclosure. And that’s a key distinction. It shows just how complex and fragile trust is in the age of AI. So where does this leave us? It leaves us in a space where the social norms around AI use still lag behind the technology itself.

And that has implications for how we communicate, lead teams and build credibility. As generative AI becomes ever more part of everyday workflows, we’ll need to navigate this carefully. Being open about AI use is the right thing to do, but we also need to prepare for how people will respond to that honesty. It’s not a tech issue, it’s a trust issue. And as communicators, we’re right at the heart of it. So how do you see it, Shail?

Shel Holtz (03:53)
I see it as a conundrum that we’re going to have to figure out in a hurry because I have seen other research that reinforces this, that we truly are damned if we do and damned if we don’t because disclosing, and this is according to research that was conducted by EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, it was published late last November. They basically said that if you…

@nevillehobson (03:56)
Yep. ⁓

Shel Holtz (04:18)
disclose that you’re using AI, you are essentially putting the audience on notice that the information could be wrong. It could be because of AI hallucination. It could be inaccurate data that was in the training set. It could be due to the creator or the distributor or the content intentionally trying to mislead the audience. basically it tells the audience, AI, it could be wrong. This could be…

false information. There was a study that was conducted, actually I don’t know who actually did the study, but it was published in the Strategic Management Journal. This was related specifically to the issue that you mentioned with writing performance reviews or automating performance evaluations or recommending performance improvements for somebody who’s not doing that well on the job.

So on the one hand, know, powerful AI data analytics increase the quality of feedback, which may enhance employee productivity, according to this research. They call that the deployment effect. But on the other hand, employees may develop a negative perception of AI feedback once it’s disclosed to them, harming productivity. And that’s referred to as the disclosure effect. And there was one other bit of research that I found.

And this was from Trusting News. This was research conducted with a grant that says what audiences really need in order for a disclosure to be of any use to them is specificity. They respond better to detailed disclosures about how AI is being used as opposed to generic disclaimers, which are viewed less favorably and produced.

less trust. Word choice matters less. Audiences wanted to know specifically what AI was used to do with the words that the disclosers used to present that information mattering less. And finally, Epic has, that’s the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, had some recommendations. They said that

both direct and indirect disclosures, direct being a disclosure that says, hey, before you read or listen or watch this or view it, you should know that we used AI on it. And an indirect disclosure is where it’s somehow baked into the content itself. But they said, regardless of whether it’s direct or indirect, to ensure persistence and to meaningfully notify viewers that the content is synthetic, disclosures cannot be the only tool used to address the harms that stem from generative AI.

And they recommended specificity, just as you did see from the other research that I cited. says disclosure should be specific about what the components of the content are, which components are actually synthetic. Direct disclosures must be clear and conspicuous such that a reasonable person would not mistake a piece of content as being authentic.

Robustness, disclosures must be technically shielded from attempts to remove or otherwise tamper with them. Persistence, disclosures must stay attached to a piece of content even when reshared. There’s an interesting one. And format neutral, the disclosure must stay attached to the content even if it is transformed, such as from a JPEG to a .PNG or a .TXT to a .doc file.

@nevillehobson (07:34)
Thank

Shel Holtz (07:40)
So all kinds of people out there researching this and thinking about it, but in the meantime, it’s a trust issue that I don’t think a lot of people are giving a lot of thought to.

@nevillehobson (07:50)
No, I think you’re probably right. And I think there doesn’t seem to be any very easy solution to this. The article that I first saw that discussed this in detail in the conversation talked a bit about this, which in some detail, but briefly, they talk about what still is not known. And they start with saying that it’s not clear at all whether this penalty

of mistrust will fade over time. They say as AI becomes more widespread and potentially more reliable, disclosing its use may eventually seem less suspect. They also mentioned that there is absolutely no consensus on how organizations should handle AI disclosure from the research that they carried out. One option they talk about is making transparency voluntary, which leads a decision to disclose the individual. Another is a mandatory disclosure policy.

And they say their research suggests that the threat of being exposed by a third party can motivate compliance if the policy is stringently enforced through tools such as AI detectors. And finally, they mentioned a third approach is cultural, building a workplace where AI use is seen as normal, accepted and legitimate. And they say that we think this kind of environment could soften the trust penalty and support both transparency and credibility. they…

In my view, certainly, I would continue disclosing my AI use in the way I have been, which is not blowing trumpets about it or making a huge deal out of it. Just saying as it’s appropriate, I have an AI use thing on my website. Been there now for a year and a bit. And I’ve not yet had anyone ask me, so what are you telling us about your AI use? It’s very open. The one thing I have found that I think helps

in this situation where you might get negative feedback on AI use is if you’ve written something, for instance, that you published that AI has helped you in the construction of that document, primarily through researching the topic. So it could be summarizing a lengthy article or report. I did that not long ago on a 50 page PDF and it produced the summary in like four paragraphs, a little too concise. So that comes down to the prompt. What do you ask it to do?

But I found that if you share clearly the citations, i.e. the links to sources that often are referenced, or rather they’re not referenced, let’s say, or you add a reference because you think it’s relevant, that suggests you have taken extra steps to verify that content and that therefore means you have not just, you

shares something an AI has created. And I think that’s probably helpful. That said, I think the report though, the basis of it is quite clear. There is no solution to this currently at hand. And I think the worst thing anyone can do, and that’s to the conversation’s first point, leaving it a voluntary disclosure option, is probably not a good idea because some people aren’t going to do it. Others won’t be clear on how to do it. And so they won’t do it.

And then if they found out the penalty is severe, not only what you’ve done, but your own reputation, and that’s not good. you’re kind of between the devil and the deep blue sea here, but bottom line, you should still disclose, but you need to do it the right way. And there ought to be some guidance in organizations in particular on how to disclose, what to disclose, when to disclose. I’ve not seen a lot of discussion about that though.

Shel Holtz (11:10)
Well, one of the things that came out of the epic research is that disclosures are inconsistently applied. And I think that’s one of the issues with leaving it to individuals or to individual organizations to decide how am going to disclose the use of AI and how am going to disclose the use of AI on each individual application, that you’re going to end up with a real hodgepodge of disclosures out there. And that’s not going to…

@nevillehobson (11:15)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Shel Holtz (11:36)
aid trust, that’s going to have the opposite effect on trust. Epic is actually calling for regulation around disclosure, which is not unsurprising from an organization like Epic. But I want to read you one part of a paragraph from this rather lengthy report that gets into where I think some of the issues exist with disclosure. says, first and foremost, disclosures do not affect bias or correct and accurate information.

@nevillehobson (11:49)
Hmm.

Shel Holtz (12:03)
Merely stating that a piece of content was created using generative AI or manipulated in some way with AI does not counteract the racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful outputs. The disclosure does not necessarily indicate to the viewer that a piece of content may be biased or infringing on copyright, either. Unless stated in the disclosure, the individual would have to be previously aware that these biases, errors, or IP infringements exist.

@nevillehobson (12:18)
.

Shel Holtz (12:30)
and then must meaningfully engage with and investigate the information gleaned from a piece of content to assess veracity. However, the average viewer scrolling on social media will not investigate every picture or news article they see. For that reason, other measures need to be taken to properly reduce the spread of misinformation. And that’s where they get into this notion that this needs to be regulated. There needs to be a way to assure people who are seeing content.

that it is accurate and to disclose where AI was specifically employed in producing that content.

@nevillehobson (13:08)
Yeah, I understand that. Although that doesn’t address the issue that is kind of like underpins our discussion today, which is disclosing you’ve used AI is going to get you a negative hit. But the fact that you did use the AI. So that doesn’t address that. I’m not sure that anything can address that. If you disclose it, you’ll get the reactions that the conversations research shows up or the service research shows up, I should say. If you don’t disclose it, you should and you’ll get found out it will be even worse.

So you could follow any regulatory pathway you want and do all the guidance you want. You’re still gonna get this until as the conversation reports, as as ever his research, it dies away and no one has any idea when that might be. So this is a minefield without doubt.

Shel Holtz (13:36)
Right.

Yeah, but I think what they’re getting at is that if the disclosure being applied was consistent and specific so that when you looked at a disclosure, it was the same nature of a disclosure that you were getting from some other content producer, some other organization, you would begin to develop some sense of reliability or consistency that, okay, this is one of these. I know now what I’m going to be looking at here and can…

consume it through that lens. So I think it would be helpful, you know, not that I’m always a big fan of excess regulation, but this is a minefield. And I think even if it’s voluntary compliance to a consistent set of standards, although we know that how that’s played out when it’s been proposed in other places online over the last 20, 25 years. But I think, think consistency and specificity

are what’s required here. And I don’t know how we get to that without regulation.

@nevillehobson (14:50)
No, well, I can see a way that I’m not a fan of regulation of this type until it’s been proven that anything else that’s been attempted doesn’t work at all. And we don’t still see enough of the guidance within organizations to this particular topic. That’s what we need now. Regulation, hey, listen, it’s gonna take years to get regulation in place. So in the meantime, this all may have disappeared, doubtful, frankly, but.

I’d go the route of, we need something, and this is where professional bodies could come in to help, I think, in proposing this kind of thing. Others who do it share what they’re doing. So we need something like that, in my view, where there may well be lots of this in place, but I don’t see people talking too much about it. I do see people talking much about the worry about getting accused of whatever it is that people accuse you of, of using AI.

That’s not pleasant at all. And you need to have thick skin and also be pretty confident. I mean, I’d like to say in my case, I am pretty confident that if I say I’ve done this with AI, I can weather any accusations even if they are well meant, some are not. And they’re based not on informed opinion, really, it’s uninformed, I suppose you could argue.

Anyway, it is a minefield and there’s no easy solution on the horizons. But in the meantime, disclose, do not hide it.

Shel Holtz (16:10)
Yeah, absolutely. Disclose, be specific. And I wonder if somebody out there would be interested in starting an organization sort of like Lawrence Lessig did with Creative Commons. So all you had to do now was go fill out a little form and then get an icon and people will go, that’s disclosure C.

@nevillehobson (16:27)
There’s an idea. There is an idea.

Shel Holtz (16:28)
That’s it.

That’s it. need a creative commons-like solution to the disclosure issue. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

The post FIR #464: Research Finds Disclosing Use of AI Erodes Trust appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov, wrote recently that “The biggest challenge of the generative AI age is leaders defining value for their organization.” Among leadership considerations, she says, is a mindset shift, one in which there are “endless right answers”. (“When I ask an AI assistant to generate an image for me, I get a fairly solid result. When I repeat the same prompt, I get a different perfectly adequate image. Both are right answers… but which one is right-er?”)

Kozyrkov’s overarching conclusion is that confirming the business value of your genAI decisions will keep you on track.

In this episode, Neville and Shel review Kozyrkov’s position, then look at several communication teams that have evolved their departmental use of AI based on the principles she promotes.

Links from this episode:

Endless Right Answers: Expnlaining the Generative AI Value Gap
How Lockheed Martin Comms is working smarter with GenAI
How AI Can Be a Game Changer for Marketing
AI in 2025: 4 PR industry leaders discuss company policies, training, use cases and more

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to four immediate release episode number 4 63. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz reports on how communication departments are moving from AI experiments to serious strategy driven deployment of Gen AI are proliferating. Although I’m still mostly hearing communicators talk about tactical uses of these tools.

The fact is you need to start with strategy or don’t start at all. That’s the conclusion of Cassie. Kako, Google’s former chief decision scientist who warns leaders that Gen AI only pays off when you define why you’re using it and how you’ll measure value. She calls Gen AI automation for problems that have endless right answers.

Now that. Warrants a little explanation. Traditional ai, she says, is for automating tasks where there’s one right answer using patterns and data. It’s gen AI that automates tasks where there are endless right [00:01:00] answers and each answer is right in its own way. This means old ROI, yardsticks won’t work.

Leaders have to craft new metrics that link every Gen AI project to. Not just a cool demo. This framing is useful because it separates flashy outputs from real, genuine impact. With that in mind, we’re gonna look at a few comms teams that are building gen AI programs around a clear, measurable strategy right after this.

Well, let’s start with Lockheed Martin’s Communications organizations, which set a top down mandate. Every team member is required to learn enough gen AI to be a strategic partner to the business. They hit a hundred percent training compliance early this year. They published an internal. AI Communications Playbook filled with do and don’t guidance Prompt templates, a shared prompt library, and monthly newsletters that surface new [00:02:00] wins.

There are a few reasons that this is a worthy case study. First, the team generated savings. You can count, for example, a recent video storyboard project ran 30% under budget and cut 180 staff hours. The team has fostered a culture of experimentation. Uh, there’s a monthly AI art contest that they. Host inviting communicators to practice prompting in a low risk environment, helping them learn prompt craft before they touch billable projects.

And the human in the loop discipline is built into the team’s processes. Gen AI delivers the first draft or first visual. Humans still own the final story. The takeaway, Lockheed shows that enterprise rollouts scale when you train first, codify governance. Next, then celebrate quick wins. Qualcomm corporate comms manager, Kristen Cochran Styles said Gen A is now in our DNA.

Qualcomm’s comms team is leaning on edge based gen AI, running models on phones, [00:03:00] PCs, and even smart glasses to lighten workflows while respecting privacy and energy constraints. Uh, they have a device centric narrative. They don’t just talk about on debate on. Its comms group uses the same edge pipeline that it promotes publicly.

They have faster iterations occurring in their processes, drafting reactive statements, tailoring, outreach to niche reporters and summarizing dense technical research all happen at the edge, shaving hours off typical cycles, and there’s alignment of their reputation because they’re eating their own dog food from their own silicon powered AI stack.

Qualcomm’s comms team reinforces the brand promise every time it ships content. Let’s. Take a look next at VCA, uh, chain of veterinary clinics. One of them was the one that I take my dog to. Joseph Campbell’s, a comms leader at VCA and he’s echoed the strategy first mantra. He noted that 75% of comms pros now use gen [00:04:00] ai, but more than half of their employers still lack firm policies.

A gap he finds alarming. Campbell’s rule of thumb. AI can brainstorm and polish, but final messaging must. Obtain human creativity strategy and relationship building. VCAs approach involves sandboxing with teams practicing in non-public pilots before committing anything to external channels. Crafting guardrails is treated as urgent change management work, not paperwork.

So they’re developing their policies in a very deliberate way, and they have an ethics checklist. Outputs go through fact checking and hallucination screen steps just like any other high stakes content. Now these individual stories of teams employing gen gen AI strategically sit against an industry backdrop that’s moving fast with tripling of adoption.

Three out of four PR pros now use gen ai. That’s nearly three times the level from March of last year. Uh, and [00:05:00] efficiency gains are clear. 93% say AI speeds their work. 78% says it improves their quality, but speed. By itself isn’t value. Cassie Coser Cove’s Endless right Answers framework reminds us Comms leaders still have to specify which right answers matter to the business.

So let’s wrap this up with six quick takeaways for your team from these case studies. First, tie every Gen AI experiment to a business result. Whether it’s fast or first drafts, budget savings, or higher engagement, write the metric before you. Invest in universal literacy. Lockheed’s a hundred percent training.

Target created a shared language, a shared context, and without that, AI initiatives are gonna stall, codify, and update guardrails. VCAs governance, sprint shows policies can be an after, can’t be an afterthought. They’re the trust layer that lets teams scale gen AI responsibly. [00:06:00] Prototype publicly when it reinforces brand stories.

Qualcomm’s on device PR work doubles as product proof and keep humans critical in every example. Communicators use AI for liftoff, then rely on human judgment. For nuance, ethics and style communicators have next desktop publishing social. Gen AI is bigger than these. It won’t just make us faster. It will change how we define good work.

That’s why the strategic questions upfront, what does value look like and how will we prove it matter more than which model or plugin you pick. Good insights in all of that. Uh, shell, I guess the first thought in my mind, it makes me wonder how do those who argue against using AI and, uh, what, what’s prompted that thought as an article?

I was reading, uh, just this morning about, uh, an organization where the leadership don’t prohibit it. No one uses AI [00:07:00] on the belief that, uh, it doesn’t deliver value, and it minimizes the human excellence that they bring to their client’s work. I wonder what, uh, they would say to things like this, because there are examples everywhere you look and you’ve just recounted a load of the advantages of using artificial intelligence in business.

I was reading one of the other articles that you shared, which you didn’t talk about on the examples that Mons, uh, which is really quite interesting, itemizes, how they, how AI plays a large role in their marketing, uh, for instance, to create digital advertising content. Product display pages, uh, towards high level creative assets including social media content and video ads.

They talk about though the 40 ai augmented campaigns that they have implemented, which they say have led to measurable improvements in brand awareness, market share, and revenue. And that compliments all the examples you were saying. They also say, rather than replacing humans, AI assist the, in refining their ideas and generating content.

The key role of humans is to ensure brand distinctiveness and [00:08:00] originality. That simple. Those two simple phrases really resonated with me because AI assists the humans, and the key job of the humans is to ensure brand distinctiveness and originality. And that to me is, makes complete sense. So, uh, AI delivers significant value and they talk about the, uh, the metrics they have.

Uh, here’s a one, uh, they say when start delivering two.

And if you can do that 1% better, that adds up to significant volume gains and significant growth in terms of net revenue. Then, then it’s just the beginning and AI is delivering that according to, so these, these add to the, to the, uh, collection. Of, uh, what I call validation points for the benefits of using a particular tool, particularly when you focus on the human element in it.

So they’re all great examples. Uh, and I think you, you mentioned at the start that too much of the, uh, activity we hear about is focused on tactics, [00:09:00] and this is full of it. It links it all to strategic aspects. Uh, it’s not just the, uh, the improvement in this and the 250 trillion impressions, although that’s pretty extraordinary.

It seems to me these are real learning insights that you can get from all this kind of stuff. And, you know, I love reading all this stuff, so it’s good to see it. I have to say. I, you know, in communication we talk about strategic planning as a core competency in the profession and IABC conferences and in textbooks, the strategic planning process is outlined repeatedly.

I mean, there are, are are different models and different approaches, but it’s always based on what is it that you’re trying to accomplish. At the end of the day, you’re not trying to accomplish writing a good headline. Right. You’re trying to accomplish, uh, having somebody read the article because it had a good headline and walk away ready to buy your product or ready to vote for your candidate, or [00:10:00] whatever it it may be.

And it seems like. Even though we have embraced this as a profession in general, we have by and large forgotten it when it comes to Gen ai just because we get so excited by the immediately evident capabilities, the ability to gimme five headlines in different styles. So I can. Pick one or, or adapt one to, uh, to, to, to what I wanted to say, create this image.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. These are all great uses of the tool, but ultimately we have to look at where it delivers value that aligns with the goals that we’re trying to achieve on behalf of the organization. And you talk about those organizations that say there is no value. I, I would suggest either they’re not looking, they have a, a bias against it at the leadership level.

Or they have people at lower levels who haven’t figured out how to demonstrate that value, and therefore leaders are convinced that there isn’t any. But if you look at the examples we’ve shared here today, it, [00:11:00] it’s clear that you can align what you’re doing with Gen ai. To your organization’s business goals and your strategic plan and your business plan and the like, there’s, there’s, there’s no question that you, you can, uh, the question is why aren’t more people doing it?

I completely agree with the decision scientists from Google’s belief that if you’re not being strategic about it, why are you doing it at all? Yeah. I mean, I think to me the, the key thing to keep remembering, and this could well be the kind of circling point you come around to, to repeat together again, as Mondelez says, while AI has been a game changer for them, it takes human ingenuity to get the most out of a technology that is available to everyone.

And that, uh, is a point you mentioned from one of the examples that you gave that, um, how AI. Augments as opposed to replace or instead of that people talk about. Sure. But this needs emphasizing, I think, in a much, much bigger way. So Mondelez says, uh, again, a real simple point, but it’s, it’s good to say it.

They [00:12:00] think AI is gonna help you do everything from creation of the brief all the way to actual actually trafficking the effort and putting it out into market. It’ll help you. So, um, that bears repeating, it’s not gonna do any of, all of that or any of that. It’s gonna help you do all of that. Hence, you know, AI augmenting intelligence.

And I saw another different use of that phrase the other day, which has escaped my memories. Obviously wasn’t very memorable, but it was another example of it’s the human, that’s the key thing. Uh, not the technology, the technology tool that enables these things. So people’s eyes roll my view, leadership.

No. And I think if leadership is going to pay attention to this in a way that is meaningful to the organization, there has to be an effort to bring managers into the loop to, so that managers can help their employees feel good about this. Understand, and we’ve talked about the role of the manager here before.

Yep. But this, this is a critical one, is the emotional [00:13:00] side of managing. When you have a team of people who are confused and distressed and, and maybe worried about their futures with ai to be able to assuage those concerns and pull people together into a team that works with these things so that they do deliver that value, that’s going to increase the value of that team and of those individuals.

So there’s a lot of work to be done here, and it’s heartening to see organizations like VCA and Qualcomm and Mondelez doing it. Well and doing it right and, and the more these case studies we can see, the easier it’s gonna be for other organizations to basically adapt those concepts. Yeah, I agree. And on the case of, on the part of Mondelez, the article was published in a publication called Knowledge at Wharton from, uh, the Wharton School University of Pennsylvania.

I was quite at the end of April. Uh, I was actually quite amused to see the final text at the end saying that this article was partially generated by AI and edited with additional writing by knowledge at Wharton [00:14:00] staff. Curious about what the additional writing is. Uh, but that there, I would argue that’s a simple but good example that’s fully disclosed of the role AI played in them.

Being able to tell that particular story. I don’t think that diminishes anything. If anything, it’s additional to it, hence the additional. Uh, in the, in the, I was gonna ask, did you, did you find the article less readable because it was partly written by ai? Well, now I know that. How could I tell? That’s the thing.

They disclosed it and, uh, it’s good for them. I don’t think they needed to do that. Again, it depends on how they felt. They don’t say what percentage of the additional was AI generated, but I would imagine, again, a good example. To me, it seems that you’ve got something that you wrote and you running it by your AI assistant to check for.

The flow tone, all those things you kind of do. With Grammarly a bit, I think at the very least, if you’re using Word, you can use the grammar checker and all those tools in there. Not very good. Nothing nearly as [00:15:00] good as an AI tool to do these things. So that’s already with us and has been for quite a while.

It’s getting better, but the human element is absolutely critical. So it would be interesting to know what that additional writing was said, but it’s a good example. It is. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #463: Delivering Value with Generative AI’s “Endless Right Answers” appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A Columbia University student was expelled for developing an AI-driven tool to help applicants to software coding jobs cheat on the tests employers require them to take. You can call such a tool deplorable or agree with the student that it’s a legit resource. It’s hard to argue with the $5 million in seed funding the student and his partner have raised. Also in this long-form monthly episode for April 2025:

How communicators can use each of the seven categories of AI agents that are on their way.
LinkedIn and Bluesky have updated their verification programs in ways that will matter to communicators.
Onboarding new talent is an everyday business activity that is in serious need of improvement.
A new report finds significant gaps between generations in the PR industry when it comes to the major factors impacting communication.
Anthropic — the company behind the Claude LLs — warns that fully AI employees are only a year away.
In his Tech Report, Dan York explains how Bluesky experienced an outage even though they’re supposed to operate under a distributed model.

Links from this episode

A Deep Dive Into the Different Types of AI Agents and When to Use Them
Ethan Mollick’s LinkedIn post on ChatGPT o3’s agentic capabilities
LinkedIn post on rumored OpenAI-Shopify integration
I got kicked out of Columbia for building Interview Coder, AI to cheat on coding interviews
Cluely
Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’
From the singularity community on Reddit: “Invisible AI to Cheat On Everything” (this is a real product)
I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything
LinkedIn will let your verified identity show up on other platforms
Bluesky’s Blue Check Is Finally Here
Burning questions (and some answers) about Bluesky’s new verification system
Bluesky Adds Blue Check System With a Twist
A New Form of Verification on Bluesky – Bluesky
Bluesky’s newly unveiled verification system is a unique and interesting approach
How To Onboard Digital Marketing Talent According To Agency Leaders
Center for Public Relations’ Global Communication Report uncovers key industry shifts and generational divides
Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away
AI: Anthropic’s CEO Says All Code Will Be AI-Generated in a Year
Hacker News on Anthropic Announcement
AI as Normal Technology

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down?
Manton Reece – Bluesky downtime
New Features for the Threads Web Experience
Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization
WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Greetings everyone, and welcome to for immediate release episode 462, our monthly long form edition for April, 2025. Neville Hobson in.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shell Holtz in Concord, California in the us. We’re thrilled to be back to tackle six topics that we think communicators and others in business will find interesting and useful.

Before we jump into those topics, though, as usual, in our monthly episode, we’d like to recap the shorter episodes that we’ve recorded since the last monthly, and we’re. Neville over. I think we’re,

Neville Hobson (2): yeah, I think we are. Shell, uh, episode 4 56. That was our March monthly recorded on the 24th of, or rather, published on the 24th of March.

Um, a lot of topics in that one, they addressed variety of issues. Uh, for instance, uh, publishing platform ghost enabling the social web by employees quitting [00:01:00] over poor communication in companies, the UK newspaper launching AI curated news. And there were three or four other topics in there too. Plus Dan York’s tech report as usual.

So that’s a mighty episode. And.

Shel Holtz: We did on the topic of whether artificial intelligence will put the expertise of practice by communicators at risk. Julie MayT wrote, it’s not about what we do anymore, but how we think, connect and interpret. Human value isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting, isn’t it? The real opportunity isnt doubling down on creativity, context and emotional intelligence by communicating with kindness and empathy.

Looking forward to tuning in. And Paul Harper responded to that comment saying, my concern is that AI, for many applications completely misses emotional intelligence, cold words, which are taken from the web, which does not discriminate between good and bad sources, truth or fake. And Julie responded to that saying, good point, Paul.

When it comes to important [00:02:00] stuff where it really matters whether AI is giving us something real or fake, I usually ask for the source and double check it myself. Chachi PT also has a deep research function that can help dig a bit further.

Neville Hobson (2): Okay, so our next 1, 4 57 that was published on the 28th of March.

And this I found a, a really interesting discussion, very timely one, talking about communicating the impacts of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. And we talked about that at some length. Our concluding statement in that episode was communicated should counsel leaders on how to address the impacts of those tariffs.

And I believe we have a comment on that show

Shel Holtz: from Rick Murray, uh, saying So true business models for creative industries are being turned upside down, revenue and margin streams that once fueled agencies of all types don’t need to exist now and won’t exist in three years.

Neville Hobson (2): Well said Rick. Well said 58, which we recorded or published on the 3rd of April.

This was, I thought, a [00:03:00] really interesting one, and we’re gonna reference it again in this episode. This was about preparing managers to manage human AI hybrid. Teams, um, a lot of talk about that and that how, uh, uh, uh, that we are ready or not for this, it’s on the horizon. It’s coming where we will have this in workplaces, and we talked about that at some length in that episode.

Uh, looking at what it means for managers and how far businesses from, uh, how far it is from enabling their managers to succeed in the new work reality. We also added a, a kind of a, a mirror or a parallel element to this, that it’s also helping employees understand what this means to them in the workplace if they got AI colleagues.

So, um, I don’t think we had any comments to that one. She, but it’s got a lot of views, so people thought about that, just didn’t, didn’t have any comments at this point, but great topic. Uh, I think

Shel Holtz: left, left them speechless if we did.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, exactly. So, uh, maybe we’ll get some after this episode in nine that we publish on the 9th of April that [00:04:00] looked at how AI is transforming content from passive to interactive.

We discussed the evolving landscape of podcast consumption, particularly in light of Satya Nadal, the CEO of Microsoft, his innovative approach to engaging with audio content through ai. So not listening to the podcast, he has his, uh, chat bot of, uh, his favorite chat bot, not chat, GBT of course, it’s co-pilot that, uh, talks to the transcript and ge he engages that way.

Interesting. Uh, I’ve seen comments elsewhere about this, that, that say, why on earth do you wanna do this? But you can listen. Well, everyone’s got different desires and wishes in this kind of thing. Uh, but it seems to me a feasible thing to do it the, for the reasons he describes why he’s doing it. And I believe it attracted a number of comments.

Did it not show.

Shel Holtz: We did, starting with Jeff Deonna, who wrote, to be honest, I find this approach deeply disrespectful to podcast hosts and their guests. It literally silences their human voices in favor of a fake conversation with a solace [00:05:00] algorithm. Now, I responded to that. I thought that Cliff notes would be a reasonable analogy.

People rather than reading Silas Marner, uh, read the Cliff notes where some solace Summarizers outlines the story and tells you who the key characters are so that you can pass a test and it silences the voice of the author, author. And yet we didn’t hear that kind of objection to Cliff Notes. We’ve heard other objections.

Of course, you should read the whole damn book. Right? But I think people have been summarizing for years. Executives give reports to their admins and say, write me a one page summary of this. And now we’re just using. AI to do the same thing. I don’t know if you had any additional thoughts on Jeff’s comment.

Sure.

Neville Hobson (2): I left a comment to his, uh, comment. I just reply to his comment as well, saying that, uh, I didn’t say these words, but effectively it was a polite way of saying I disagree. Sorry, you’re not right with this for the reasons you’ve, you’ve outlined. I don’t have the comment open on my [00:06:00] screen now, so I can’t remember the exact words I used, but I thought I couldn’t let him get away with, with that, without a response.

Shel Holtz: Well, we had another comment from Kevin Anselmo, who used to do the Higher Education podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. He said, I asked chat GPT to summarize your podcast transcript. After receiving the below chat, GPT provided practical advice on actioning the takeaways in my own projects. Interesting exercise, and I will not read everything he pasted in from chat GT’s analysis of the transcript of our podcast.

But I’ll, I’ll tell you what the five key takeaway labels are. Transcripts are becoming essential. A ai AI makes podcasts interactive. Most people still prefer passive listening. AI is going multimodal. And then there’s a notable quote from the podcast, so that was, uh, turnabout. I mean, we’re talking about what would happen if people didn’t listen to the authentic voices.

Well, you know, Kevin didn’t have to listen to us. I’m fine with that. If he [00:07:00] walks away with actionable items based on hearing or reading a summary of our transcript, one more way to get to it. I agree. And Mark Hillary wrote, why would you need a transcript for chat GPT though? Just feed it the audio and it could work out what is being said.

Anyway, I.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, I replied to him as well. We had quite an interchange. I can’t remember if it was on LinkedIn or on on Blue Sky, I can’t remember which, which service now. Um, but um, he was gonna go and experiment himself with something else. Uh, ’cause what he described, and someone else was left to comment about this as well.

Actually, I think that was on Blue Sky too, that, um, talked about, uh, you know, why would you wanna do this a bit bit like GE actually, not like Jeff. It wasn’t just alleging disrespect, it was saying, why would you wanna do this? Um, when I, you know, it was actually Mark who said he’d uploaded an MP three. And, uh, it had done the job.

It actually hadn’t, uh, chat. GPT got the MP three, created the transcript from it, and then it did what it [00:08:00] needed to do. So the transcript is essential to.

Shel Holtz: Whether you created Issa. Nevertheless,

Neville Hobson (2): these, these, yeah, these, these great comments are, are fab to have these I must have been extends the conversation.

Okay. So then four 60, which we published on April the 14th. This one talked about layoffs in the United States primarily, and the return of toxic workplaces and the big boss unquote era. Uh, the tide is turning. We started off and assessed that I mentioned. We’re seeing not, not the same and not layoffs per se, but people quitting here in the UK for different reasons.

But this turmoil in this and toxicity in the workplace is part of the reasoning. So we explore the reasons behind the layoffs in the US are the impact of CEO Tough talk and how communicators can help maintain a strong non-toxic workplace. So that was good. We have comments too, don’t we?

Shel Holtz: We do.[00:09:00]

Starting with Natasha Gonzalez who says something that stood out for me was a point that Neville made about employees in the UK who are resigning from jobs due to toxic workplace culture, rather than being laid off as in the us. I imagine this isn’t unique to the uk. And then Julie MayT, who was the first comment she’s going to bookend our comments, wrote that organizations in the US are starting to see we cracks in psychological safety and trust disappearing.

Then all those folks who keep everything ticking along will start to quietly disengage. It’s up to us, calms people to be brave enough and skilled to say on a wee minute, that message isn’t landing the way you think it is. While the big wigs are busy shouting, spinning, and flexing, it’s us who need to rock up with the calm, clear human communications, no drama, ram, just stuff that makes sense and actually help folks to figure out what the hell is [00:10:00] going on and what to do next.

Neville Hobson (2): Good comment Mr. Bit. And that takes us to the last one before this episode, episode 4 61. We published on the, on the 24th of April that looked at trends in YouTube video two reports in particular that really had interesting insights on virtual influences and AI generated videos. And the bit that caught my attention mostly was, uh, news that every video uploaded to YouTube.

So you take your video, you upload it, um, uh, can be dubbed into every spoken language on the planet, uh, with the, with the speaker’s lips reanimated to sync with the words they are speaking. I mean, this is either terrifically exciting or utter nightmare that, uh, that is approaching fast. So, um, we talked about that and uh, we haven’t had any comments to that one yet, but this is a topic I see I’m seeing quite a bit being discussed online in various places.

So this is just a start of this, I think. [00:11:00] So that takes us to the end of the recap show,

Shel Holtz: so I didn’t see it. Okay. Lemme talk about that.

Neville Hobson (2): And last but certainly not least, I want to mention a new interview that, uh, that we posted on the 23rd of April. This was with Zoa artists in Australia who we interviewed on an article she wrote in the populous blog on bridging AI and human connection in internal communication. It was a really, really good discussion we had with, uh, it’s definitely worth your time listening to this one.

You will learn quite a lot from what or Zoa has to say on this topic. What did you think of it? She, it was good, wasn’t it?

Shel Holtz: It was fascinating and I read that, that post in the popular blog and also was engaged in a conversation with Zuora at the Team Flow Institute where we’re both research fellows and she raised it and it led to a conversation with all the fellows [00:12:00] and this notion of what would a board of directors do if AI was in the room with them right now?

What would they use it for? How would they take advantage of it to some fascinating discussion. So worth a listen. Also up now is episode number 115 of Circle of Fellows, the monthly livestream panel discussion that people who watch live are able to participate in in real time. This was about communicating amidst the rise of misinformation and disinformation.

Brad Whitworth moderated this installment of Circle of Fellows with panelists, Alice Brink, Julie Holloway, and George McGrath. Sue Human was supposed to participate, but woke up feeling ill, but did send in some written contributions that, uh, were read into the discussion. So a good one. I’ve, I’ve listened to it.

You should too. It’s a very timely topic. And just to let you know about the next Circle, circle of Fellows, episode one [00:13:00] 16 is scheduled for noon eastern time on Thursday, May 22nd. The topic is moving to teaching. This is something a lot of communicators do is become adjunct professors or full professors, or even tenured professors.

And we’ll be having a conversation with four IABC fellows who have done just that, Cindy smi, John Clemens, mark Schumann, and Jennifer W. And in fact, I’m speaking at Jennifer W’s class via Zoom pretty soon, so that’ll be a fun one too. You can mark that one on your calendars May 22nd noon eastern time, and that’ll take us to the start of the coverage of our topics for this month, but only after we turn things over to an advertiser for a moment.[00:14:00]

As we have been discussing for some time, AI agents are coming and to a degree they’re already here. Ethan Molik, the Horton professor, and ai, I guess you’d call him an AI influencer. He posted this observation to LinkedIn a few days ago. He wrote, I don’t think people realize how much, even a mildly agentic AI system like chat PT oh three can do on its own.

For example, this prompt works in oh three zero shot. Come up with 20 clever ideas from marketing slogans for a new mail order. Cheese shop. Develop criteria and select the best one. Then build a financial and marketing plan for the shop, revising as needed, and analyzing competition. Then generate an appropriate logo using the image generator and build a website for the shop as a mockup.

Making sure to carry five to 10 cheeses to fit the marketing plan. With that single prompt in less than two [00:15:00] minutes, the AI not only provided a list of slogans, but ranked and selected an option, did web research, developed a logo, built marketing and financial plans, and launched a demo website for me to react to the fact that my instructions were vague and that common sense was required to make decisions about how to address them was not a barrier.

And that’s an open AI reasoning model, not an actual agent. Built to be an agent to take on autonomous tasks in sequence multiple tasks in pursuit of a goal with agents imminent. HubSpot shared a list of seven types of agents in a post on its blog, and I thought it would be instructive given what Professor Mooch wrote to, to go over these seven categories or classes of agents and where they intersect with what we do as communicators.

Now I, I’ll give you the caveat that. Somebody else may develop a different list. Somebody else may slice and dice the [00:16:00] types of agents differently, but this is the first time I’ve seen this categorization, so I thought it was worth going through. They start with simple reflex agents that operate based on direct condition action rules without any memory of anything that you may have interacted with it about before.

So in PR, we could use this for automated media monitoring alerts set up agents that trigger. Instant alerts based on keywords that, uh, appear in news articles or on social media that lets you respond quickly. Uh, you could have some basic chat bot responses, you right, simple chat bots on internal or external platforms that will answer frequently asked questions with pre-programmed answers about things like, I don’t know, office hours, basic company information, dates of upcoming events.

And then you could filter inbound communication, automatically flag or filter incoming emails or messages based on keywords that indicate urgency or specific topics and route [00:17:00] them to the appropriate team member to respond to it. The second type of agent is a model-based reflex agent. These maintain an internal model of the environment to make decisions considering past states as well as what you’re asking it to do right now.

So you could use a contextual chat bot to develop these chat bots for websites or, or internal PO portals that can maintain conversational context. It can remember previous interactions, and then provide more relevant information or support when the employee or the customer comes back for, for a follow-up or for additional information.

Do sentiment monitoring with that, that historical context. Agents that track media or social media sentiment over time can identify trends and, and give you historical context to current conversations. So you know, something’s being discussed around the organization. It can say, well, you know, two weeks ago this conversation happened then that weighs on what’s going on in these [00:18:00] conversations today.

And then there’s automated information retrieval, uh, agents that can access and synthesize information from internal databases or external sources based on what you ask it. Uh, providing more comprehensive answers than you get from the simple reflex agents. Goal-based agents make decisions to achieve a specific goal, planning a sequence of actions to reach that objective.

This is what most of us think about when we’re thinking of agents, automated press release, distribute distribution, social media, campaign management, internal communication, workflow automation. This is all possible here. I think I, I referenced on an earlier episode that I used an agent, a test agent that I think was Anthropic had set up, and I had it go out to my company’s website, identify our areas of subject matter expertise, and the markets we’re in.

Then go out and find 10. Good podcasts with large audiences where we [00:19:00] could pitch our subject matter experts as guests and it would be an appropriate pitch. And I sat back and watched while it did all of these things. So this is what we’ve got coming. Fourth are utility based agents that choose actions that maximize their utility or a defined performance measure considering various possible outcomes.

Uh, we can use these to optimize communication channel usage, right? Analyze how audiences engage across different communication channels and recommend the most effective platforms for specific messages or, uh, desired reach or desired impact. I can use this for crisis communication, simulation and planning.

Personalized communication delivery. Fifth is learning agents that improve their performance over time by learning from their experiences. You can use this to refine your message targeting, to improve, uh, the, the natural language understanding of chatbots that are engaging with customers or employees or whoever.

And to predict [00:20:00] communication effectiveness. They can analyze a number of factors like message, content, timing, audience demographics. To predict the potential reach and impact of your communications, letting you make adjustments. Sixth are hierarchical agents that break down complex goals into smaller, more manageable sub goals.

Here you’ll have higher level agents overseeing the work of lower level agents, so you’ll have a human manager managing an AI agent who manages AI agents. These for large scale communication projects, multi-channel campaigns, and and streamlining the approval process or use cases. And finally, there are multi-system agents.

These are multiple agents interacting with each other to achieve a common goal or individual goals. Integrated communication, planning and execution. Managing online reputation with agents, monitoring different online platforms, analyzing sentiment, coordinating responses or engagement based on a unified strategy, and then [00:21:00] cross departmental communication coordination.

So we need to understand the distinct capabilities of these different types of agents, and if we do, we’ll be able to leverage them to automate, to gain deeper insights, to do better personalization and better achieve our objectives. And I think, I think this is also a, a, a good point to mention. I have not had a chance to, to read it because you said you saw it and commented on it today.

It’s still early here where I am. But Zora Artis, our interview guest posted something that kind of fits in here too, right?

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, she shared a post from LinkedIn, which I found quite intriguing. Uh, written by, uh, Jade Beard Stevens, who’s the Director of Digital and Social Innovation at YMU in London. Brief post, but it says it all, I gotta read it out.

It’s quite, quite short. Uh, she says I wasn’t shocked, but still had to share. This rumor has it that open AI is quietly working on a native Shopify checkout. Inside chat. GPT apparently leaked code shows Shopify checkout, [00:22:00] URL Buy Now product offer ratings. No redirects, no search, just chat compare and buy in one flow.

If this happens, Google, TikTok, even product pages as we know them are all about to change. This isn’t just another e-commerce update. This is the merger of search and checkout. This is AI becoming the new storefront. Brands will need to optimize for AI’s first visibility, not just SEO. This could be bigger than TikTok shop, and it’s already happening.

Now, is this a agent ai? I don’t know. Shell, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of fits somewhere in, in this overall picture of, uh, tools, emerging methods emerging. Uh, look at the seven things you, you read out. Uh, there’s some real interesting stuff in there to, to deep dive into, but what Jade mentions is definitely something to pay attention to, even if you’re not in retail or in e-commerce or any of that.

There’s a huge, not huge kind of developing conversation on Reddit about this, which has some more, in more detail on what’s happening. I did a quick search on [00:23:00] this. This is generally this topic to see, you know, anything else talking. I did find something, which isn’t this, this is gonna replace this other thing that I found, I think, which is a Shopify AI chatbot via chat, GPT as the title of the app goes, uh, put out by, um, uh, not, not Shopify beg, pardon?

Shockly. A company called Shockly that, uh, builds, uh, tools to, for, for vendors on Shopify to, to sell their stuff. This isn’t it, but this has been around since September of 2024, and it is actually quite interesting. It’s an app you install. I see it’s got, uh, just under 30, uh, ratings, all five out of five stars from vendors.

Um, it is all to do with, uh, enabling your whole, uh. Storefront using a, a tool from chat chat, GPT. What, um, Jade’s article talks about is this sort of [00:24:00] thing happening natively within Shopify. So that’s a slightly different proposition, but something like this is coming, so you’ve already got third party apps doing this.

Now you’re gonna have a native app doing this. And if it is, um, well, I don’t wanna get hung up on the word digic here, but if, if this is, uh, uh, enables you to, to complete the whole buying process, from interest to purchase, to signing up and paying for it all within chat GPT, that will, uh, a appeal to quite a few people.

I think if it’s offered something better, faster, or less stressful, less hassle, easier than doing it otherwise in, in, uh, in Shopify, it’ll attract attention. So add this one to the list of things to pay attention to as well.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and whether that’s part of an agent or not, I think depends. It could absolutely be, uh, I could see how that would work in an agent tech environment.

I’m thinking of giving the, the agent the [00:25:00] assignment of buying me a new mirrorless camera, as long as I provide it with the criteria, my price limit of the features that it needs to have, how soon it can be delivered, which brands I don’t want you to consider, uh, but go out and do comparisons of the different models, uh, from different manufacturers that meet my criteria.

Then do price comparison to find the best price. Once you have found the best price, buy it and have it delivered so that I don’t have to do anything else. That’s an agent. So again, you know, if there’s price at the end, what can communicators do with that? I don’t know how much the PR folks can do with that, but the marketing side of the house can probably do a ton with that.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah. So one more to pay attention to. I was looking through the HubSpot article you referenced, and I, it’s a couple things in there that I, that struck me, uh, their views. Uh, one where they talk about under the, uh, autonomous AI agents paragraph, it’s always a good idea to keep a human involved in any AI operation.

Absolutely [00:26:00] agree with that. Um, a lot of very useful, uh, information in HubSpot’s piece. Uh, some good explainers of what some of this stuff means. And then, um, uh, the answer to the question about preparing for an agent, ai future experimenting. I think the concluding sentence is probably the kind of, okay.

Summarize the whole thing into this. The future is agent. Will you be ready now? That’s what we asked in 4 58 when we talked about this topic, and I wonder if we’ll be asking it again after this one. We’ll see.

Shel Holtz: Undoubtedly we’ll be asking this for some time because even after the agents. Have fully arrived and are available.

Uh, I think there’s going to be a lot of people in our profession and across industry who are not ready

Neville Hobson (2): opportunity for.

Shel Holtz: And we’ll talk about that more when we cover another story later.

Neville Hobson (2): We will. Yeah. So let’s take a look at something quite interesting that popped up in the last few days. [00:27:00] Imagine an AI tool that promises to help you cheat on everything from job interviews to academic exams.

That’s exactly what clearly offers. Created by two former Columbia University students, Chung and Roy Lee and Neil Han Mugham clearly acts as an invisible AI assistant that overlays realtime support onto any application a user is running. It gained attention and controversy after Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia for using an early version during a job interview.

Despite this, clearly has just raised $5.3 million in funding from investors promoting its vision of true AI maximalism, where AI can assist in any life situation without detection. The tool is designed to be undetectable, providing realtime suggestions during interviews, exams, writing assignments, and more, much like an augmented reality layer.

But for conversation and tasks, supporters argue it could level the playing field for those who struggle with traditional [00:28:00] assessments, but critics warn it crosses a serious ethical line, potentially devaluing qualifications and undermining trust in recruitment and academic credentials. Realtime interview assistants raises questions, not just about competence, but about honesty and disclosure.

Rarely happens. Interestingly, the Verge tested it. Their real world testing found that clearly is still very rough around the edges. Technical issues, latency and clunky interactions make it more proof of concept than polished products, at least for now. And did I mention they just got over $5 million in investor funding?

The founders defend the provocative framing. They describe cheating as a metaphor for how powerful AI assistance will soon feel. Much like the early controversies over calculators or spellcheck, as they say, not quite the same thing. I don’t think Shel, but so are we looking at the next Grammarly or are we opening the door to a darker future where nobody can be sure what’s real anymore?

So question for you then Shell is what does this tell us about the [00:29:00] blurring lines between assistance and deception in an AI driven world?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think there’s a couple of ways to look at this. I did hear Lee interviewed on Hard Fork. Uh, it was a great interview and he made a couple of points. First of all, he said that having been through these types of interviews, this is, uh, the kind of interviewing you do for a coding job.

That the tests that they give you have absolutely no relevance to the kind of work that you’re doing. You’re gonna do this once for the interview, and then you’re never gonna do it again. So he doesn’t think that helping people. Figure out how to do that particular exercise is, is all that much of a cheat.

But he also said that everybody programs with the help of AI these days and he says it just doesn’t make sense to have any kind of interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI to help you code. I absolutely see that point, but on the other hand, I think this is [00:30:00] just one instance of the kind of thing that AI is going to enable.

And there will be times that it can be very problematic, much more problematic than in this case if somebody can cheat on, say their legal exam or their medical exam, then you’ve got a problem. Somebody who’s not prepared to go out there and and operate on you past the boards because they had help from a program that was written to help them cheat and pass.

So it’s the type of thing that society needs to be thinking about and isn’t yet.

Neville Hobson (2): So if I get this right from what you said, Roy Lee thinks it’s okay to cheat in coding ’cause it’s a stupid question to ask and you’re only ever gonna do it once. So therefore it’s okay to cheat. Meaning you actually pretend you do know how to do this even though you don’t.

I mean, that is bullshit, frankly, truly. Don’t you think?

Shel Holtz: Well, his his point is that, yeah, you, you don’t know [00:31:00] how to do it, but you don’t have to because you’re never going to on the job.

Neville Hobson (2): So don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t even take the exam and don’t apply for that job. That’s what I would say.

Shel Holtz: I guess then you don’t get any jobs, right?

Well, cheating is

Neville Hobson (2): cheating

Shel Holtz: His point is that you’re, well, yeah, it’s cheating. Yeah. But he says his point is that the cheating in this instance isn’t going to affect your ability to do the job. Whereas in other instances, well, I’m still cheating. I’m not defending it. Understand. I’m just telling you what he said.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, sure. Yeah. But it’s still cheating. I, I would say, I mean, it is, to me, this is the same as saying, or someone’s a little bit pregnant or, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, that kind of stupid kind of defensive argument. This is an indefensible situation in my view that

Shel Holtz: of course, it used to be considered.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, but no, no, you can’t. You can’t do it by degrees. She, I don’t believe, honestly, I don’t. You are cheating or you are not. And in this case, again, from how you describe what Roy Lee said, effectively it’s saying, well this is a dumb question to ask and [00:32:00] I’m never gonna do this again, so I’ll get this thing to do it for me basically.

And that they won’t know this. That’s the other thing. They do not know this. They think, are you’s a smart guy? This fell, let’s give him the job. What a ridiculous outcome. And the other ones you mentioned in degrees, you know, taking legal exams or, or you know, passing to be a surgeon. Yeah, they’re serious too, but they’re all the same.

They’re cheating. But I then kind of flip a bit by saying that this is society as we are. I’m afraid this is humans doing this. This will be out there. And this makes it even more difficult to know what’s true and what’s not, and who you can trust and who you can’t. So, you know, welcome to the new world there.

Shel Holtz: I think the adaptation that has to happen has to happen on the part of the people conducting the interviews, not the people taking them. And the reason for that is, I mean, if you think about it, it used to be considered cheating to, to bring a calculator into, well, they mentioned that’s

Neville Hobson (2): the argument he gives.

Ridiculous.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Well, I mean, everybody’s allowed to use a [00:33:00] calculator now because the people that was 60,

Neville Hobson (2): 60 years ago. Yeah. So maybe in 50 years this would be normal. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Who conduct the tests came to realize that the people who do the work are able to use calculators. So they should have been part of the test all along.

So I think that’s a legitimate argument, not a, not a legitimate argument for cheating, but for updating the testing so that people don’t feel like they need to.

Neville Hobson (2): So in the meantime, that’s not the landscape. So they need to develop it. So maybe the simplest way to do this is send your AI agent in to take the exam for you.

Has that,

Shel Holtz: well, there are people doing that for job interviews. Yeah, of course. They, they’re probably pretty close to that. Yep. We’ve seen some interesting developments recently with two platforms taking different approaches to verification, and I think some of this may be a little backlash to X, where now you can just buy the blue check mark and it doesn’t actually verify anything other than that you pony up the money for it.

But LinkedIn and Blue Sky [00:34:00] have taken steps with their verification programs. Let’s start with LinkedIn, which is allowing verified identities to extend beyond its own platform. This change means your verified LinkedIn identity can now be visible on other platforms designed to enhance trust and transparency across the internet.

The system leverages open standards and cryptographic methods to ensure authenticity and security. What makes this particularly interesting is how it integrates with Adobe’s technology. Adobe’s content credential system is one of the tools supporting this cross-platform verification. So when you verify your identity on LinkedIn, that verification status can essentially travel with you to other websites and services that support these standards, including Adobe’s Behance.

Now, this is a site that helps creators and people who need to hire creators connect. Now, this is a fundamental shift in how verification works rather [00:35:00] than a siloed verification system on each platform. LinkedIn’s embracing an interoperable approach that lets your verified status function as a digital passport of sorts.

Now, while it’s too bad, this isn’t tied directly to the fedi verse protocols, the significance for communications professionals can’t be overstated. As content creation becomes increasingly distributed across platforms, having a verified identity that travels with you simplifies your ability to establish authenticity in multiple spaces.

For organizations managing multiple spokespersons or content creators, this can streamline verification processes considerably. Meanwhile, blue Sky has taken a different but equally innovative approach to verification by introducing a new Blue Check system just last week. Uh, they’re implementing what they call a user-friendly, easily recognizable blue check mark that will appear next to verified accounts.[00:36:00]

The platform will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts while also allowing trusted verifiers select independent organizations that can verify accounts directly. Now, what’s really interesting about Blue Sky’s approach is how it distributes verification authority. Under this system, organizations like the New York Times can now issue blue checks to their journalists directly within the app, and Blue Sky’s moderation team will review each verification to ensure that it is what they say it is.

This creates a more decentralized verification ecosystem rather than putting all verification power in the hands of the platform itself. Blue Skies verification system has transparency built in. Users can tap on someone’s verified status to see which trusted verifier granted the verification. This adds a layer of context that helps users understand not just that the accounts verified.

But who [00:37:00] vouched for it? Now, before this update, blue Sky had been relying on a domain based verification system letting users set their website as their username. For example, NPR uses@npr.org and US Senators verify their account with their senate.gov domains. This method is gonna continue alongside the new blue check mark system, and this gives users multiple ways to establish authenticity.

Now, the evolution of these verification systems comes at a critical time with scammers and impersonators on the rise. A recent analysis found that 44% of the top a hundred most followed accounts on blue sky had at least one doppelganger account attempting to impersonate them. For those of us working in organizational communication, these developments signal a series of important trends.

First. Verification is important and it’s becoming distributed and contextual rather than a single authority declaring who’s authentic. We’re moving toward [00:38:00] ecosystems where multiple trusted entities can vouch for identity. Second Cross platform verification is emerging as a solution to digital fragmentation.

LinkedIn’s approach particularly shows how verified identity could function seamlessly across digital spaces rather than being siloed within individual platforms. Third, transparency about who is doing the verifying is becoming important. Blue Sky’s approach of showing which organization verified an account recognizes that the source of verification matters almost as much as the verification itself.

For organizations, these trends suggest that we really ought to be thinking more holistically about verification strategies. Rather than just get verified on each individual platform, we are really gonna need to start thinking about establishing verified digital identities that can travel with our content and our spokespersons across the net.

Neville Hobson (2): Very interesting development. So I [00:39:00] hadn’t familiarized myself much with the LinkedIn one, but that’s e equally very interesting. Uh, blue Sky though, to me is definitely moving ahead in a very interesting area. Unlike XI think you mentioned Shell, but some people are seeing this as like a slap in the face to Musk.

That’s probably a very tangential way down the, the priority list, but yes, I bet they are. But I found it most interesting the way in which they’ve gone about this in terms of the, the levels of verification. You’ve got your little blue check mark looking slightly differently depending on the verification system.

And by the way, this is, I think it’s a smart move to follow the blue check, although technically it’s not a blue check, it’s a white check in a blue background, but whatever people call it a blue check mark because, uh, it’s familiar thanks to Twitter as was and the who. Trashed it completely. ’cause the only verification means you’ve paid Musk so many dollars a month fee and therefore you verified.

I mean, that’s Twitter’s def or X’s definition of what verification means. No value to it, in my view, shall frankly. But, uh, this though, [00:40:00] I think is, is far more interesting. Particularly the transparency about who has verified you. Um, I’ve used my own domain, a domain I acquired back in 2023 for the purpose of this is to verify my handle by domain.

Neville Hobson xyz, YXYZ. You might ask because that’s because at the time the Metaverse was a big deal. NFTs were hot, and everyone who was, everyone had a domain ending in X, Y, Z. So hey, that’s a bandwagon I’ll jump onto, which I did. So I’m now using it have been, and it’s only used for that purpose currently.

So, um, you can’t request verification. That’s another thing to mention with Blue Sky, uh, it’s not much you are invited. Is that suddenly that you might get a, not from saying they have verified you or one of these other organizations might, if you excuse me. On a domain with your employer, they can verify you.

And there is something equally interesting on this. I’m not quite sure if this is just a sample, it’ll stay around or not. But you can actually verify yourself. I’ve [00:41:00] seen some people doing that. I haven’t done it. So because I can’t see the point. Uh, ’cause the point of verification to me is trust in someone else has verified you, not you doing it yourself.

So maybe that will disappear or it’ll have some other function, I don’t know. But the transparency thing, according to the screenshots in Blue Sky’s, uh, announcement posts about this are, are great. A very clear so-and-so is verified. Uh, it says this account has been verified. It has a blue check because it’s been verified by trusted sources.

Then it lists who those sources are and the date they perform. The verification adds lots to the trustworthiness that you perceive rather than just some simply say, yep, you verified, you a blue check. If you’re an organization verify, you’ll have a different style check. And these will all become quite familiar.

They, they’re not complicated at all. So I. You are right at what you said earlier, which is about, verification isn’t just a casual thing anymore. You need to have a strategy about who in your organization, if you are a, a large organization in particular, who gets [00:42:00] verified for what purpose by whom, and we’ll see that emerging as this picks up.

But this is a great start. They do say, and this is going back to the domain, you can self verify with a domain. That’s the only thing that makes sense, because to do it, you’ve got to make changes at your registrar in the in DNS settings and, and a few other things. And also engage with blue sky to do this.

So it’s uh, uh, they say during this initial phase, they’re not accepting direct applications, as I mentioned. Uh, but they do say as this feature stabilizes, so I guess all the excitement’s dying down and people see how it’s all working, they’ll launch a request form for notable and authentic accounts interested becoming verified or becoming trusted verified.

So during the course of 2025, we’ll see this develop and maybe, um, uh, maybe it will, uh, become the kind of benchmark standard for verification on social networks like this. So it’s interesting. I.

Shel Holtz: We need a standard and I’d like to see that [00:43:00] standard. Yeah. Integrated with the fedi verse standards, because these all ought to be infra operable.

We, we really ought to be able to share a post in one place where we are verified and have that post show up wherever people have chosen to follow us from and have that verification show up with us. And people should be able to click on that verification and see who vouched for us. Uh, they should be able to see that the spokesperson for my company was verified by me or by the CEO and it all works together.

Neville Hobson (2): I think that will emerge, uh, thinking about this cross. Posting idea that’s in been in place in a couple of places, but it’s very, very flaky. I’m talking about things like, for instance, it’s been for a while, at least a year, if not longer, where a plugin on WordPress lets you publish your post and it will then share it across, across the Fed us via connection, uh, with Mastodon.

And you’ve then got threads doing the same thing, [00:44:00] but they’re not. They require tweaks to your platform. Uh, the, probably the one that shows you, if I can use this phrase again, the direction of travel is ghost. The, uh, the new platform, which I joined the beginning of this year that has just enabled, um, or recently just enabled the ability to share your posts with Blue Sky Now ghost.

Has invested a lot of time, effort, and probably a bit of money too, I think, into its social web offering, which is in beta. And that’s all to do with the activity pub protocol because Blue Sky has a different protocol at Proto yet that works from ghost to blue sky via a bridge. And that’s a little technical and that has got to be just immediate term usage whilst this, this plays out further.

So someone like Ghost is making big inroads into doing, into enabling this kind of thing. And I would say we’re gonna see a lot of activity [00:45:00] during 2025 from Mastodon in particular, as well as people like Ghost and others to connect up these, these disparate elements of the Fedi verse so that we we’re becoming more cohesive.

But it’s gonna take time.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the fedi verse is, is nascent, but it’s also, I think, inevitable. We’ve been talking for quite some time now about what is the successor to Twitter now that X has become what it has become. And I’m not sure that there is a successor. I think that there are a number of places that people are attracted to.

It could be ghost, uh, could be for its newsletter functionality as much as for its blogging functionality. It could be threads it, it could be blue sky, it could, you know, whatever. But as long as where I am, I can follow who I want to follow and have that appear in the network that I have chosen, I’m good.

So I think this is where things are, are headed inevitably since I think the days of somebody being able [00:46:00] to come along and say, I’m the new 800 pound gorilla of social networking. Everybody’s coming here are over. I.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, it’s been apparent like that, that that’s likely to be the case for, for a bit, I believe very much that the time is gone for, for monolithic centralized social networks like Facebook, for instance.

No, this is the time for niche networks. Uh, people can set things up themselves. Uh, it doesn’t matter. You, you’ve got 50 people on there or 50,000 people on there, doesn’t matter. And indeed, the the recent, uh, outage on Blue Sky is a, is an interesting indicator of the fragility of all of this. And, and Dan’s gonna talk about this a bit later in his report, but this is an interesting time.

We’re now, it’s almost like things are maturing, it seems to me. And I think you’re right when you say that, that people aren’t, aren’t so much attracted by the idea of a centralized place where, Hey, we’ve all gotta go here after the experience on X. You’ve got more about people saying, I want to get outta here, where do I go?

So, um, we’re still at that phase, and you’ve got. Something interesting with Trump’s, uh, not Trump Musk’s, uh, GR [00:47:00] network, developing chatbots for it and all this stuff. So that’s something interesting in that area of this. So it’s all at a time for communicators to pay attention closer to what is happening here and the implications of it just as you and I are doing.

And if you don’t wanna do that, that’s fine. Just listen to FIR ’cause we’ll help you understand it.

Yep. Okay. That’s a really good report, Dan. Thank you. Good topics. You’ve talked about, uh, blue sky. I mentioned just before your report actually the outage was unfortunate, but is it not an indicator precisely of that fragility? I mentioned previously different definitions of decentralization that you mentioned.

I think that’s. Possibly a communication issue because people seem to be latching onto, Hey, it’s decentralized when actually it’s more like, it’s going to be decentralized. ’cause that’s our aspiration that we’re working towards, which is the case with, with Blue Sky. That’s very good on threads move to.com and web improvements.

I must admit, I, I was a bit yawny about [00:48:00] that. You know, dot net.com. Do I care as a user? Well maybe I should because I then read somewhere else that the move to.com enables meta to do things that they can’t do with ANet domain. And I’m sure you’ll know more about that than me Dam at the internet Society.

Again, interesting developments with what’s happening with all of this. So thanks for the report, Dan. This is really, really a good one.

And let’s cha shift gears slightly. I don’t think this story’s got AI in itself that I’m gonna talk about. Oh

Shel Holtz: my God.

Neville Hobson (2): Gotta have one gonna be

Shel Holtz: fined.

Neville Hobson (2): So. Let’s shift focus, as I mentioned, something that’s critical for every business, uh, but often overlooked how we bring new people into our organizations and set them up for success.

It’s called onboarding, right? The topic of onboarding is particularly timely right now, especially in digital marketing, where the pressure to deliver results is higher than ever with digital marketing at the heart of [00:49:00] business communication strategies, every new hire represents not just an addition to a team, but a critical investment in how a company presents itself, engages customers and drives growth.

Effective onboarding therefore isn’t just about helping someone settle in. It’s about ensuring they contribute meaningfully, quickly, and sustainably to an organization’s broader success. A recent feature in Search Engine Journal caught my attention as it explored how digital marketing agencies are rethinking the onboarding experience.

But whatever your business and where the agency or client side hiring great talent is only half the battle, keeping them as where the real challenge begins. The article highlights the critical role of structured onboarding in enhancing employee retention, productivity, and satisfaction within digital marketing agencies.

One strong theme is the importance of starting onboarding before day one. Christie Hoyle, the COO at Kaizen Search explains Our process begins two weeks [00:50:00] before their official start date to ensure employees feel informed, prepared, and welcomed. This early engagement helps build confidence and sets expectations well before a new hire walks through the door.

Zoe blog director of operations at the SEO Agency reboot highlights the importance of immersion during the first weeks. She says, our process is designed to give new hires time to truly absorb how we work before they’re expected to contribute. Human support systems play play a key role too. Phil Dukowski, client services and new ex director at SEO Sherpa and Emma Welland, co-founder of House of Performers, both emphasize mentoring.

As Emma puts it, we assign everyone a mentor as well as a manager to make sure they have multiple people to check in with and speak to. Technology is also critical. Agencies like Vivant use platforms such as Asana to structure onboarding flows. Beth and Ranford, general manager and head of paid media at Vivant says we use Asana across the [00:51:00] business and have a comprehensive onboarding flow, which all new starters enroll with it.

Meanwhile, Olivia Royce, operations director at SEO Agency Novos explains how their structured 30, 60, 90 day onboarding plan breaks the early months into clear milestones aligning with probation periods. She says, we have a clear onboarding process in our task management system, which outlines who is responsible for what during the onboarding process.

Beyond tools and tar timelines, emotional connection matters most. Emma Wellen says, I fundamentally believe a good onboarding is judged by how you make someone feel for us. Making sure expectations are clear from day one is a big part of this.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean onboarding new hire orientation, call it what you will.

It’s vital. There is data that suggests that people tend to leave a job somewhere between one and three years into it, and you have to believe that if the onboarding had been effective, those numbers [00:52:00] would drop. And there is so much wrong in what I see in so many companies doing with their onboarding. I mean, the typical thing is you have a new hire orientation the day you start, and then you’re just.

Thrown into the deep end and how much can you really retain on your first day? You’re overwhelmed, your first day, you’re lucky. If you remember what day payday is, how I record my time, what work hours are, and what the deal is with the parking lot. So I, I like the 30, 60, 90 day approach. In fact, where I work, we are in the process of migrating to a, a new internal communications platform.

We’re consolidating several separate tools in, into one tool. But one thing that it lets you do is target individuals to a different homepage to start with. And one of the things that we’re going to do in phase two is have a homepage for people. Are there. From their first day to their 30th day. Another [00:53:00] homepage for people who are there from their 30th day to their 60th, and a third one for people who are there from their 60th to the 90th, just surfacing those milestones and the kind of information that they need while still providing them the navigation to the same resources that everybody else needs.

But yeah, I, I’ve heard so many different great approaches to this. I think it was Coca-Cola that had essentially a report card and it had a list, and it said, in your first week, you need to go talk to these three people about these three things. And when you did, the people you needed to talk to signed off and you had to have everything.

Signed off at the end of a 90 day period, meaning you’ve met all of these people, gotten to know them, they’ve gotten to know you, you’ve learned from them, and have built that connection and started the relationship, and that speaks to that emotional connection that the report you referenced, addressed.

Companies need to invest the time, energy, and [00:54:00] money in onboarding if they don’t wanna lose these people after they’ve been around for a year or two. That’s what it comes down to because replacing somebody is, I guarantee you gonna cost a whole lot more than what is going to cost to do an effective new hire orientation period.

Neville Hobson (2): And this is talked about a lot, isn’t it? Shell, such as the examples I’ve mentioned from those individuals at those digital marketing agencies. But as you pointed out that, that so many companies don’t do anything beyond, Hey, welcome. Here’s your desk, here’s your password for your email stuff. Off you go.

Uh, there’s some great approaches here and so. If someone says, why, why do we need to talk about this? Well, I think we just explained why we need to talk about this. This is key. If, as people keep saying, people are the most essential resource in our company, you just read the general newspapers to get a feel for the, the kind of dilemma across the board.

Literally. This is not just to do with digital marketing agency. I mentioned that at the beginning. This applies to almost any organization that you [00:55:00] wanna retain people who need to, obviously the package, they get remuneration and benefits. All that is part of that, of course. But how you treat them, make them feel valued.

Uh, I’m reminded my only experience this in in recent relevance. Was when I went to work for IBMA decade ago now, and I started at the beginning of 2016, but I had two months prior to that, a lot of contact with, with HR and others in, in IBM to familiarize myself with at the time how IBM worked. And boy, that was difficult to figure that out at that time, but they, they were on the, on the ball very much with this back then, a decade ago.

And many company you mentioned Coca-Cola. I’m sure this is not alien to many companies, but it probably is alien to lots of companies as well. So, um, I, I hope this helps people if they’re. Looking ask and set their procedures and processes where there’s some good tips here from these folks that I mentioned.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, yeah. There’s so many good ideas you can research on, on how to do a, a, a a a, a [00:56:00] good onboarding program. You referenced the idea of a mentor being assigned to every new hire. I like that in companies that are large enough where there’s a cohort of new hires, there may be 10 per month or or 20 per month.

Uh, to have them go through all of these things as a cohort so they get to know each other and they become a resource to one another. You know, it can be embarrassing to reach out to somebody who’s been with the company for 18 years and, and ask something really, really basic that you think sounds stupid, but to reach out to somebody who started within three or four days of the time you did, have you figured this out yet?

That’s just fine. And I know that. When I worked for the pharma that I used to work for after you’d been there a year, that cohort got together in a meeting with the CEO and the president who talked about, you know, things that we want you to know about now that you’ve been here a year in terms of culture and direction.

But we also want to answer your questions and hear [00:57:00] your concerns. And I gotta tell you, that goes a long way toward building that relationship. It does, and building that trust in the leadership of the organization. And I think, I think it’s a, a, a, a really good idea. There is an opportunity for communicators to inject themselves in what is usually seen as an HR process, because this is all about knowledge transfer and information sharing.

Neville Hobson (2): Good stuff

Shel Holtz: don’t abdicate the responsibility that the communicators have to participate in this process. Well, I’ve been digging into a new global communication report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Public Relations. You’ll, you’ll like the title of this one, Neville.

It’s, it’s called Mind the Gap. The gap referenced is, is the one that exists between generations, even though the logo is the one that’s used for the tube and, and London. It’s not like we haven’t had a ton of research about generational differences, but this one had some revelations. Well, lemme start with the big picture.

The PR industry is [00:58:00] experiencing what the report calls unprecedented upheaval driven by four major forces, artificial intelligence surprise, a hybrid work, the changing media landscape, and political polarization. Those are all topics that we address pretty routinely here on FIR. The report examines these forces through a generational lens, looking at how perspectives differ across Gen Z Millennials, gen X and US Boomers.

Neville. Uh, the researchers surveyed over a thousand public relations professionals this past January, and despite all the disruption we’re facing, 74% of respondents expressed a positive outlook on the industry’s uh, prospects. Only 11% had a negative view. Uh, the optimism spans all generations. That was encouraging.

But dig a little deeper and you start to find those gaps in how different age groups are approaching these changes. Let’s start with ai, which the report ranks as the most impactful trend. [00:59:00] About 60% of respondents believe AI will positively affect pr, but the confidence level varies dramatically by age.

Nearly three quarters of Gen Z professionals say AI will make their jobs easier compared to just over half of Gen Z and X and boomers. So the older you get, the more skeptical you get about the new technology. The gaps get even wider When you look at specific predictions, 24% of Gen Z practitioners strongly believe AI will generate most of the content currently created by humans compared to just 8% of Gen X and 4% of boomers.

That’s a 20% gap. One thing that struck me was a, a story in the report about a grad student who developed a business plan for an AI only PR firm that would charge clients just $15 and 99 cents a month. And most agency veterans and, and people who’ve been around a long time like me, are inclined to dismiss this as fantasy.

Pretty clearly, [01:00:00] it’s a reminder that the next generation sees AI’s potential very differently. Now when it comes to hybrid and remote work, we’re seeing another significant divide. 72% of Gen Z says remote work makes their job easier compared to just 39% of boomers. That’s a 33% gap. And guess which generations all those CEOs demanding return to the office belong to?

What’s really telling is that 47% of Gen Z practitioners would take a pay cut to work from home while only 25% of Gen X and 22% of boomers would do the same for young professionals today, flexibility isn’t a perk, it’s an expectation. Despite these personal preferences, 74% of PR professionals in mid-level or higher positions say they would hire talented candidates regardless of location.

This suggests remote work is here to stay, however, uh, older executives might personally feel about it. [01:01:00] The changing media landscape presents maybe the most fascinating generation gap. Gen Z’s, the only generation that feels more positive than negative about how media changes will affect their day-to-day work.

They’re also far more bullish on podcasts, social media, and influencer marketing than their older colleagues. The report points out that 65% of Gen Z believes social media will be very relevant to PR by 2030 compared to just 47% of boomers. When asked about the most effective marketing strategies, a viral social media campaign tops everyone’s list, but Gen Z places far more value on traditional, I’m sorry.

Is it a Gen Z? I’m gonna make a time.

But Gen Z places far less value on traditional newspaper coverage than older generations. I found particularly striking the reports finding about credibility when asked which generation is best informed about [01:02:00] political, social, and current events. Every age group ranked themselves first. This kind of mutual skepticism presents a real challenge for for cross-generational collaboration.

The report’s findings on corporate purpose and social issues are especially noteworthy. Over the past three years, the percentage of PR professionals who believe companies have a responsibility to address social issue. Has nose dive from 89% in 2023 to 52% today. But here again, there’s a stark generational divide.

Three quarters of Gen Z still believes in corporate purpose, while less than half of older practitioners do. As the report puts it, younger communicators are still serious about corporate purpose while the older ones are losing their conviction. This plays out in job preferences too when deciding whether to work for an organization.

Gen Z values inclusion initiatives at nearly double the rate of Gen X, and they hold much [01:03:00] stronger opinions about refusing to work for companies with negative environmental impacts. So all. What does all this mean for communications? Well, the report concludes that PR is entering a period of major disruption that will redefine it over the next decade.

But as the report suggests, we don’t have to close the gaps. We just need to recognize that each generation reacts to change differently based on their own life experiences. For those of us who have been in the business a while, this means we need to be open to new approaches. The report offers that this advice to foster innovation and collaboration in this new world order.

Older generations will need to embrace change more rapidly, find common ground more easily, and get out of the way more often. Meanwhile, for the up and comers in our field, the report recommends developing proficiency with AI tools, mastering content creation, honing soft skills, and preparing for polarization by vetting ideas with people who hold [01:04:00] different opinions.

I think Fred Cook, uh, the director of the Center for Public Relations, summed it up perfectly. Here’s what he said. The future of the PR industry depends upon how tomorrow’s leaders tackle the critical issues we’re beginning to face today, not bound by tradition, gen Z seems equipped and eager to confront those challenges.

If we educate and support them on this mission, our profession will be in good hands.

Neville Hobson (2): And that’s the, the burning topic, isn’t it, to support people. I mean, glancing through the report as I was when you were, when you were talking about the findings, it’s quite clear that the younger you are, the more you are likely to embrace new thinking, new ideas.

The older you are, less likely

Shel Holtz: I. Yeah, the more set your ways that plays out.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah. I mean it probably plays out well against traditional political divides too, I would imagine. So for instance, I’m, I was really just glancing at the part about organizations taking a stand on issues that aren’t necessarily directly involved [01:05:00] with their business and making statements about what they think about this event happening or this idea that’s wrong or right or whatever.

And there, there’s a huge majority of Gen Z saying this is very important, they do this. How does that play out in reality? And particularly thinking about this survey that was conducted prior to its publication in March. And since then we’ve had all this, um, uh, uh, kind of metaphorical nuclear explosion with Trump’s tariffs that are still, um, unclear what’s gonna happen next and the stock markets and everything else.

The stuff you see visibly in the, in your daily news consumption. Share prices up, share prices down The market conditions here are not good. These, these, they are, uh, what companies are gonna do. What does it mean for us? People are, are pausing in so many areas and it’s basically uncertainty. As to what earth is going on and the effect it’s gonna have.

People, I wonder, would [01:06:00] that have made a difference if they’ve been asked these questions? Now, I don’t know is the answer. And there is so much in here that is typical of what we have seen in the past in generational comparison type surveys. Yet as they say in the financial community, past performance is no guarantee of what’s gonna come in the future.

So it might be worth looking at this through that lens that this is worth. Analyzing and examining to see, particularly to pay attention to that tho those segments of the generations who are more willing to accept new ideas, to drive forward new thinking. Uh, that’s what needs more support. Now that, I don’t know how we do that though, because, uh, reality is that in most, let’s say, agencies certainly I, I would say, but also an organization where there is a PR function, that the more senior you are, the more older you are and are many of those older generations, not necessarily the boomers, but the ones prior to that, the millennials certainly willing to change.

I’d like to think they might be not as a mass thing, but [01:07:00] more than not, perhaps. So this could, this, this to me suggests almost like a blueprint, if you like, a, a kind of a, a, you know, kind of a, like a building blueprint of where, where things need to go, how they need to change and what you need. What tools have you got, meaning the people to help you implement that change if you are in fact gonna be the catalyst for change.

Tricky one. Difficult, but it’s, we’ve gotta do something, have we not

Shel Holtz: It, it’s gonna be a long eight months for the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. Uh, because remember for the last several years, the Trust Barometer has pointed out that people expect business to deal with societal issues because they’re the only ones they trust enough to do that.

Is that still true in the increasingly polarized environment we’ve seen just since January of this year, and of course, the report that was issued in January of this year, all the research was done before Trump took off. So, is there still that expectation, or as we see, for [01:08:00] example, the big tech companies accommodate Trump in order to avoid regulation and the other problems that result from bucking the Trump agenda, do they still have that degree of trust in business and do they still have that expectation?

And if businesses just back off of conveying their views of societal issue and, and the actions that they think need to be taken and the actions that they take in support of that, if they back off of that, are, are people gonna stop doing business with them or is it simply a matter of if nobody’s out there doing it, or only Ben and Jerry’s is doing it and, and Patagonia, then we have to buy from somebody?

Yeah, that’s the time. I remember though, that, you know, David Armo writing frequently about you need to take, put out a stake in the sand about what you believe in and what you stand for. It matters. It’s still gonna matter with Gen Z, where they go work. Unless the, the market changes to the point where it’s, it’s, it’s completely a buyer’s market [01:09:00] and you feel lucky to get a job offer from anybody.

Short of that, that purpose is still important if you want to get the best people coming up outta school.

Neville Hobson (2): Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So it’s a time of great uncertainty, but taking a stand isn’t necessarily what. People will want to do, but they need to articulate and express what they’re thinking may be different ways than taking a stand.

That, that, that always, to me sounds confrontational. I’m gonna take a stand about something, but there are other ways to do this that are perhaps less likely to meet resistance. Trouble is the polarization, certainly in the United States seems to me to be almost beyond the point of fixing. Um, I was reading a, a report, uh, over the weekend, um, and I’ve forgotten the magazine.

It was in, it was long. I mean, it was a 15 minute read. They advertised, uh, it analyzing, um, uh, Trump’s press Secretary, um, uh, Catherine leave it 23 years old. She’s 25 years old, so she was born [01:10:00] this century. But the analysis of that article of her as representative of her. Generational cohort is striking.

It truly is. And the, the, the, um, the passion she has for the political journey she’s on is quite clear and she is confident and able to convince people. I’m looking on a much smaller scale over here in this country. In the uk we have a, a local elections next week, um, where polling is suggesting that the attitudes of, uh, people who’ve been polled, and again, these are small numbers, they’re not national.

These are for the local councils, the mayors and, and so forth and cities I is, is almost like people are saying. I don’t care who I vote for, as long as not anyone connected with a major political party. So you’re looking at the independence and the small ones who never really are ever gonna win power, but they could be the, the kind of linchpins in, in who does.

And you think, okay, we, we’ve heard that before a lot, but this is the first time it seems to be [01:11:00] coalescing around an ideal that many people can buy into. That says a lot for the political structure. You are seeing similar things happening in some other European countries. So this is a, it gives like a wave everywhere and in the US it’s, it’s manifest itself.

What we’re seeing here, Canada, look what’s happening there. They have federal elections Monday. That’s tomorrow as we’re recording this. And so what impact will that have if the political structure doesn’t shift from the liberals in Canada to the conservatives, which is more aligned with Trump? They don’t seem to like Trump either.

So, I mean, one thing you could say Trump has succeeded in, in literally uniting everyone who are in disunity. So Trump’s tariffs have forced the UK and the EU closer together than otherwise would’ve been the case. Interesting. I think Shell, so who knows what’s gonna happen? Uh, the rest of 2025? I don’t see, uh, peace and quiet descending anytime.

So,

Shel Holtz: no.

Neville Hobson (2): Okay, so let’s get back to ai. So this topic is related to [01:12:00] what we’ve talked about to before, and I’ll mention that as I, as I outlined the story here. So, the idea of AI tools supporting workers is nothing new. We’ve been talking about this quite a bit, but what about AI agents acting as workers themselves?

And yes, we have talked about that, but this is about Jason Clinton, the Chief Information Security Officer at Anthropic, the maker of the Claude Chatbot, who believes that’s exactly where we’re heading. He told Axios that within just a year, we could see virtual AI employees embedded inside organizations complete with their own corporate accounts, passwords, memories, and defined roles.

Clinton warns that this will force companies to rethink cybersecurity and access controls, raising difficult questions about visibility, accountability, and responsibility. If AI agents go rogue. That’s a hell of a picture he is painting here. I must admit. He says in that world, there are so many problems that we haven’t solved yet from a security perspective that we need to solve.

Meanwhile, anthropic, CEO Dario [01:13:00] Ammo added another bold prediction that we are only three to six months away from AI writing 90% of software code, and within 12 months, AI could be writing nearly all of it. His remarks reported in ink have drawn skepticism with some suggesting that while AI will certainly reshape coding, it won’t replace human developers entirely.

Still the direction of travel is clear. AI is moving from a support tool to something much more autonomous. If AI employees take on real responsibilities, who manages them? Who is accountable if they make mistakes? Well, this builds directly on the conversation you and I had earlier this month. She, in episode 4 58, which I’ve mentioned at least twice in this episode so far, where we explored the challenges of preparing managers to lead human and AI hybrid teams.

Managers will soon be asked to lead not only people, but also AI agents that autonomously perform multiple tasks. It’s not just about leadership. [01:14:00] Organizations must prepare their employees too. Helping everyone understand what it means actually to work alongside ai. Colleagues in meetings, projects, and communication and communicators will have a vital role to play shaping the narrative.

Guiding expectations and making the future tangible for everyone. However fast this transformation comes, it’s clear that the future of work won’t just be about humans adapting to ai. It will be about organizations adapting their cultures, structures, and expectations too. So let me ask the question. We pose in our FIR four five and that we’ve mentioned in this episode too, are we really ready for a workplace where AI isn’t just assisting, it’s acting as a full team member?

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Clearly we’re not ready. I wrote a whole post about this on LinkedIn, an article about what managers are going to have to do to prepare for all of this. It was based on the question you asked during the episode, Neville, you said, we’re talking about the fact that we’re not ready, but we’re not talking [01:15:00] about what we need to do to get ready.

So I, I gave that a lot of thought and, and wrote an article in response to that. But. I also question whether we need to be all that ready right now, because the fact that AI agents that are capable of performing the duties of a full-time employee are going to be available in a year, doesn’t mean that you’re gonna see a rash accompanies suddenly hiring them.

You are going to see a fairly normal progression look. There was a, there was an essay that was published just on April 15th, not that long ago. Uh, this was written by Arvind Nu and a Osh Kaur. It was published by the, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. That university that fired the student who did the cheating program with ai.

Yeah, but I love the title and the subtitle of this article. It’s AI as Normal Technology, an alternative to the vision of [01:16:00] AI as a Potential Super Intelligence. This is a very long, very long essay. I heard one of the co-authors interviewed on a podcast and and he said it’s going to be blown out into a full book.

But they have one chart here that that really tells the, the story and, and it is that you have the invention and then you have innovation that emerges from the invention. And then you have diffusion. And diffusion has two parts, and that’s early adoption and adaptation. And this takes time. And it takes time.

They say it doesn’t matter what the technology is, it doesn’t matter how. Earth shattering the technology is consider electricity, right? I mean, look at what electricity did for the world, but how long did it take to diffuse through society? I mean, there’s people who are going to be adopting and adapting these things, and we tend to do that over time.

So as employees that are, you know, a, a collection of AI [01:17:00] agents are offered by these companies that are, are, are going to be providing this service. What you’re gonna see is testing a very tentative, it’s not going to impact real world operations. You’ll probably end up with a team of people doing a simulation with an AI employee to see how it goes, to identify the areas of risk and those things that it does well at and doesn’t do well at.

Then you’ll probably see one introduced to one low risk team doing real world work and slowly it will be. Employed by the organization, uh, across all departments, but that’ll take years. So when they say that these are gonna be available in a year, it doesn’t mean they’re gonna be used in a year. I think there’re gonna be very, very few companies that are gonna say, yeah, we’re just gonna stop hiring, or we’re gonna start firing and we’re gonna have AI employees come in and do all this stuff.

I mean, who wants to do that with any first model of any technology? [01:18:00]

Neville Hobson (2): The early adopters and the people who, uh, don’t care about the consequences, I suspect. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: I think one, one of the things that this chart points to is, this goes back to Jeffrey Moore in crossing the chasm, right? I mean, it’s the same kind of timeline and when we think about AI as normal technology as, as amazing as it is, and as much as it can do curing diseases and, and identifying novel drugs and, and all of these things, it’s diffusion into society.

Going to take a lot of time.

Neville Hobson (2): And I think the, the picture people miss or rather don’t, don’t interpret correctly, is a lot of what you see being discussed online or written about in, in journals is you don’t realize it, but they’re talking about the mass adoption of all of this. When, when they talk about the timeframes, it’s a bit like, uh, you know, the Gartner hype cycles on various things.

Talk about the, the plateau and, um, the, you know, use widespread use in, in society. And that is mass [01:19:00] adoption. We’re not talking about that here. I don’t think we should, if I were in a large organization, use yours as example. She, you’ve got an AI kind of task force there. What I’d be looking at amongst the other things, but the focus would be.

What is relevant to us? What do we need to do for us right now? Yes, I’m aware of this big picture, all this stuff and predictions and so forth, but how do we get ready in our timeframe to do these things based on what we know now? So experimentation, clearly what you gotta do. What does that actually mean in practice to, to execute on something that’s described like this, an AI virtual system?

Well, maybe you could actually, we need to think for ourselves is really what I think is the important thing for organizations with groups of people who are looking into where all this is going in the, in the, in the near or far future. But it’s really what it means to you in your organization, more importantly than.

Shel Holtz: I think the process of getting ready is not something that you have to do overnight. Uh, I think the process of getting ready [01:20:00] is going to come from that experimentation is going to come from the processes that organizations implement. Now. I think you’re gonna have problems with organizations that decide, we’re not going to pursue this, or we’re not going to commit the resources necessary to do it well or do it right.

But by and large, I think that organizations will tackle this as they tackle any technology. Just, I mean, look how long it took the web to infiltrate business, but everybody’s there now, so it’ll happen. It will. And that’ll wrap up this episode of Four Immediate Release. Our next monthly episode will drop on Monday, May 26th.

We’re planning to record that on Saturday the 24th. In the meantime, uh, man, I just loved all the comments we got for. Terrific. This episode. We would love your comments on the stories we’ve reported today, as well as those shorter midweek episodes that will coming, will be coming between now and May 26th.

You can [01:21:00] send us an email to fir comments@gmail.com. Send us up to three minutes of audio and we’ll play it. You can record that audio by clicking the uh, send voicemail tab on the right hand side of the.

Website. You can leave comments on the FIR Podcast Network website. The show notes has a place where you can leave a comment and you can also leave comments on Facebook or LinkedIn or Blue Sky or Threads where we share links to the show notes. And we also appreciate comments coming on Facebook to the FIR community.

One other place that you can leave those and your reviews and ratings are also deeply appreciated. It helps people discover this show. So until next month, that’s a 30 for four immediate release.

The post FIR #462: Cheaters Never Prosper (Unless They’re Paid $5 Million for Their Tool) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Videos from virtual influencers are on the rise, according to a report from YouTube. And AI will play a significant role in the service’s offerings, with every video uploaded to the platform potentially dubbed into every spoken language, with the speaker’s lips reanimated to sync with the words they are speaking. Meanwhile, the growing flood of AI-generated content presents YouTube with a challenge: protecting copyright while maintaining a steady stream of new content. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel examine the trends and discuss their implications.

Links from this episode:

YouTube Culture & Trends – Data and Cultural Analysis for You
YouTube Looks to Creators (and Their Data) to Win in the AI Era
YouTube Publishes New Insights Into the Rise of Virtual Influencers

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 461 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. This month marks 20 years since the first video was uploaded to YouTube, a 19 second clip that launched a global platform now at the Center of Digital Media as the platform. Reflects on its past.

It’s also looking sharply ahead. And what lies on the horizon is a bold AI powered future highlighted in two reports published in the past week. According to YouTube’s leadership, we’re five years away from a world where every video uploaded to the platform could be automatically dubbed into every spoken language.

More than that, the dubbed voice will sound like the original speaker with AI generated lip movements tailored to match the target language. It’s a vision of seamless global accessibility where creators can invest once and reach audiences everywhere. [00:01:00] This isn’t speculative. YouTube is already piloting dubbing tech with hundreds of thousands of creators and experimenting with voice cloning and lip reanimation.

But with that ambition comes a fair amount of controversy. Underpinning these features is Google’s Gemini AI model trained on an ocean of YouTube videos, YouTube. Many from creators who weren’t aware their content was being used this way. Some have pushed back arguing that a license granted under YouTube’s terms of service doesn’t equate informed consent for AI training.

At the same time, YouTube’s 2025 trends report highlights the rise of virtual influencers, synthetic personas, who are building large audiences and changing what authentic content looks like. For a growing number of viewers, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the face on screen is real generated or somewhere in between.

What emerges is a picture of a platform trying to empower creators with powerful tools while, while quietly shifting the [00:02:00] ground beneath their feet, culturally, ethically, and. On one hand, a report by Bloomberg paints a picture of YouTube as a tech powerhouse using AI to expand creative reach, drive viewership, and reshape media, but not without controversy over how training data is sourced, especially from creators unaware that content fuels these advancements.

On the other hand, social media, today’s take focuses more on the cultural shift. AI generated influencers, fan created content and multi-format storytelling are changing the rules of what audiences find compelling and raising questions about the very definition of authentic content. Both views converge on the same point, AI is here to stay, and whether you are excited or concerned, it’s reshaping the creator economy from top to bottom.

So is this YouTube fulfilling its mission to de democratize creativity through technology? Or is it becoming a platform where the line between creator and content becomes so blurred [00:03:00] that the original human touch gets lost? We should unpack this. There’s quite a bit here to talk about. Isn’t.

Shel Holtz: There is, and it seems to me a relatively natural evolution for YouTube.

Uh, as long as creators are able to upload what they want, I think you will find plenty of authentic content. There’s going to be no shortage of people who want to talk into a camera and share that. Uh, people who. Themes, uh, that they think people would be interested in? Uh, I, I love hearkening back to a story I read about a, a physics grad student, uh, who started a YouTube series, uh, called Physics for Girls.

Uh, and it was aimed at the K through 12. Cohort of of students and trying to get them interested in the STEM sciences and it became very popular and she was [00:04:00] making, I think I read a million dollars a year in. Advertising revenue. I don’t think that’ll stop. I think people will be able to continue to do that.

What you see is in a platform where there’s no limits, there’s no constraints. How many gigabytes of of video data can be uploaded? They just. Keep expanding their data center capacity, uh, that there’s room for all of this other stuff, including the AI generated content. And as long as it’s entertaining or informative, if it serves a purpose, people will watch it.

And that’s the thing, if it’s crap, people aren’t gonna watch it. It’s not gonna get recommended, uh, it won’t find its way into the algorithm. And. Spending time creating it if it doesn’t produce the kind of results that they’re looking for. But we’ve already seen that influencers. Work, uh, on both sides of the equation, you [00:05:00] can tailor them to be exactly what you know your audience is looking for.

So it’s great for the consumer. Uh, and in terms of the brand or the advertiser, uh. You don’t have these loose canon celebrities that you’re, uh, using or, or somebody who’s just a professional influencer who goes off the rails. You’re in complete control. So, uh, you know, it’s not my favorite concept, but I don’t see any way to slow it down.

And I think the people behind them are gonna continue to, uh, find ways to make them. Resonate with, with the people that they’re, uh, aiming them at. And in terms of the training of AI models on all of this, you know, right now you have a, an administration in Washington DC that is agreeable to the approach that the, uh, the AI companies, uh, open ai [00:06:00] and like.

Want the government to take, which is to, uh, just put an end to this whole intellectual property thing and say, AI can train on anything it wants to. Uh, so I, I think that’s probably coming, uh, God knows Elon Musk is, is training grok on all of the content that is shared on X. And if you have an account there that’s, that’s your.

Implicit permission to let him do that. It’s one of the reasons that he went ahead and bought X in the first place was knowing that he had access to that treasure trove of data. So I don’t see it. I don’t see that slowing down either, and I don’t see the fact that people are unhappy, that their content is being used for training, being an impediment to having that content used as training.

It’s gonna continue to happen.

Neville Hobson: That’s part of what worries me a lot about this. I must admit, if I took, if taking the Bloomberg report, um, which [00:07:00] is, uh, this, this idea of auto dubbing videos into every spoken language. We’ve talked about this before, not what YouTube’s doing, but the notion of. The example, you often give the CEO of a company giving an all employee address and he’s an American or a native English speaker.

Uh, and yet there’s a version in 23 other languages like Urdu or Hindi or, or Spanish even. You know, you then talk about Mongolian, perhaps if they have offices in Learn Battle or something. Um. That, uh, shows him fluent in talking in all of those language, which is, I’ve always believed and I still do.

That’s misleading. Uh, unless you are very transparent, which is fact adds to your burden of, of engage with employees. If you’ve gotta explain every time he’s not fluent, and this is not really him speaking Hindi. It’s, uh, an AI has done it or however you might frame it. So that’s not gonna stop though easier.

Uh, your point I agree with as well [00:08:00] that most people won’t really care about, about this Probably. Um, I mean, I’m a, I count myself as a creator, uh, uh, in terms of the very tiny bits of content I put up on my YouTube channel, um, which, uh, isn’t a lot, uh, it’s not a regular cadence, uh, is now and again. Uh, and if I found versions in, uh, you know, in, uh, uh, in native, uh, in, in a native language on Bolivia, for instance, would I care?

Well, only in the sense of is, is it reflecting exactly what I said in English and have to, you have to assume that it’s gonna be doing that, but that’s not to me the point really, they’ve gone ahead and done it without permission. There will be people who don’t want this happen to content. Ts and Cs saying they can do this.

If you don’t like it, you’re gonna have to stop using YouTube. And that’s the reality of life, I think. But there are a couple of things though. Uh, I, I think, you know, Google wants creators to use its ai IE Gemini, uh, to, uh, create, edit, market and [00:09:00] analyze the content that they create and, and, uh, uh, that’s, you may not want to use Gemini.

Um. You’ve got, uh, uh, the training element that Google is assuming they’re okay to use your content to do things like that. Uh, it aligns with their terms of service, they say, but trust isn’t in that equation as far as critics are concerned. The voice cloning and lip animation, the technology is amazing, I have to say.

Uh, and according to Bloomberg, YouTube’s already testing multilingual dubbing in eight languages with plans to expand that. Well, yeah, there’s cloning and lips. To mimic native language speech are in pilot phrases. So all this is coming without doubt. So I think it is interesting. There’s some downsides on all of that.

According to Bloomberg, dubbing will reduce, uh, CPMs when moving from English to other languages. You’ve got that to take into account too. But expanding reach to new language audiences may ultimately increase total revenue. If it’s a monetization thing you’re looking at. Um, so [00:10:00] YouTube says they think quality content, to your point, will still rise above the growing flood of AI generated deepfake material.

I guess that’s part of what we call AI slop these days, right? So there’s that, which of course leads you straight into the other bits about virtual influences, uh, and, uh.

Just a casual look. And I was doing this, uh, this morning, my time before we were recording this, uh, uh, coming across examples of what people are writing about and publishing, uh, with photos and videos of people that you, you get it in the highest resolution you want. I swear. You cannot tell if it’s real or not, if it’s a real human being or an AI generated video.

Will that matter? At the end of the day, I, I think it probably comes down to do you feel hood wicked when you find out it’s an ai when you thought it was a person? And there’s a few surveys out recently, and, and this is kind of tangential connection to this topic, but of people who are [00:11:00] building relationships with ais, they’re, they’re getting intimate with them.

And, and I don’t, I don’t mean the, obviously meaning what we might think intimate means, but developing emotional bonds. With an AI generated persona. And so, uh, there’s great, uh, risk, I think there of, uh, misuse of this technology. So, you know. Going down the rabbit hole or, or even the, the, the, the, the idea of it’s all a conspiracy and they’re out to steal our data and confuse us.

No, it’s not that. But there’s great risk, I think, of opacity, not forget about transparency. This is, this is completely the opposite of that. Uh, and it’s, it’s got, uh, issues in my view that, uh, uh, we ought to try and be clearer than just give. The likes of Google and others, uh, literally can’t blanc to do what the hell they want without, uh, without any, uh, uh, any regulation, which, uh, unfortunately that seems to be aligned with, uh, Mr.

Trump and his gang in Washington as to what, they [00:12:00] don’t care about any of this stuff at all. In which case, um, uh, tech companies, if you listen to some of the strong critics are rubbing their hands with glee at what they’re gonna be able to do now without any oversight. And therein is the issue. But I’m not saying that’s something we should therefore, you know, get out our pitchforks and shovels of March on Washington.

But it’s a concern, right? I mean, this is a major development. Um, the virtual influencers I think is, uh, is is exciting idea. I. Um, but the risks of of misuse are huge in my view. So I just having the yes but moment here basically. And I normally not, I don’t normally do this shell, I’m normally embracing all this stuff straight away, but there’s big alarm bells ringing in my mind about some of the stuff that’s happening.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think a lot of it is going to be contingent upon what we become accustomed to. Uh, yeah. As, as you become accustomed to things, they just become normalized and you don’t give them a second thought. There was a TV commercial. [00:13:00] I’m gonna have to. See if I can find it. They must have it on YouTube. Uh, even though this had to be 20, maybe 25 years ago, I believe it was an IBM commercial.

It was a great commercial by the way. This is why I remember it so many years later. Yeah. Uh, it was either black and white or, or sort of CP toned. Uh, it was in a dusty old diner out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a waitress behind the counter, uh, and there’s nobody there. One guy wanders in and sits down.

And he, I don’t remember what he asks for, but they don’t have it. They don’t have this, they don’t have that. And then he sees the tv. He says, uh, what do you have on tv? And she says, every movie and television show every ever made in any language you want to hear it in, uh, and talking about the future of technology, right?

If you get to a point where anything you wanna see. Is available in your language [00:14:00] then, does it continue to be an ethical question when you see your CEO who doesn’t speak your language speaking to you in your language? Or is this just something that we all accept that the technology does for everything now and it doesn’t matter whether he speaks your language or not, he can because of the technology.

Now, I’m not saying that. Promoting as an approach to take today from an ethics standpoint, I think you do need to let people know, uh, we think it’s gonna be a lot easier and more meaningful for you to hear, uh, the CEO speak in your native language. Mm-hmm. But he doesn’t speak it. This was AI assisting with this, but in five years when everything.

Is handled that way, it will it even matter. I, you know, I, I suspect that it won’t, I suspect it won’t matter whether somebody speaks that language when you know that any media you consume can be consumed in your native language thanks to the technology that we all [00:15:00] take for granted at that point.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. Uh, that’s a sound assessment.

Uh, and you may well be right and I, I suspect that much of what you said will likely come to pass. I just think that there’s. Concerns we ought to be paying more attention to than we seem to be. It seems to be. So for instance, uh, one big thing to me is, is um, I guess it’s kind of related to the ethical debate, but what does real mean anymore?

I. In this, what does authenticity mean? Now, it doesn’t mean what it meant yesterday. If you’ve got virtual influencers, uh, creating videos, you don’t know that that’s not, that’s not a real person. Things like that.

Shel Holtz: That’s, that’s keep in mind that I was, I was sold, uh, sugar Frosted Flakes by Tony the Tiger, uh, who was not a real person, uh, or even a real tiger.

But they,

Neville Hobson: they weren’t pretending it was, or, or making you assume that it probably was. That’s the only different, but this is. Thing.

Shel Holtz: This is, uh, uh, the, the modern equivalent. Uh, and well, Tony the

Neville Hobson: tiger. [00:16:00]

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And yeah, the, the virtual influencers I’ve seen so far, uh, are obvious. Uh, I have not seen one that they have worked really, really hard to convince you that this is anything but a virtual influencer.

And on Instagram, at least most of them, I see the disclosure, uh, that, that they are, uh, I just don’t think people care. Uh, no. If, if, if they’re getting good information, if they’re being entertained, you know, are you not entertained? If you are, you’ll continue to watch. And, uh, if somebody says, you know, that’s ai, your answer’s gonna be okay.

Neville Hobson: I get that, but I think we have a responsibility to, uh, to point out certain things, whether people care or not. That’s part of our Oh, that question. Our responsibility is communicate. Yeah. So yes. So, so hence my point about, uh, what does real mean? What, how do we defining real now? Uh, and I think the, um, the, the, the kind of, uh.

Bigger worry. Waiting in the wings is [00:17:00] the fakery that we see everywhere. It’s getting even easier to, uh, to do this kind of thing. Um, deep fakes, whatever they’re now called. Um, that’s been off the radar for a bit now, but suddenly you’ll see something and to, for what I mean, I read, I haven’t seen anything myself, but I did read this morning that already there’s videos around of Pope Francis who died, uh, on Monday, uh, that he is not.

Actually, uh, according to these videos, he’s out there speaking and, and doing all these events and so forth, um, that will confuse some people. And th this is the, this is, I think the gr the, the grave risk, uh, of not the technology, um, because. It’s what people will do with it. And that’s not, I’m not suggesting for a second that because of that, therefore we shouldn’t do X and y and so forth.

Not at all. But we need to, uh, address these concerns and indeed the, uh, the unspoken concerns, uh, before they become a problem, uh, or at least make people aware [00:18:00] and that that is a lot. Not to do with the awareness that we’re already seeing from governments everywhere. Like here in the uk for instance, I see government ads across every social network now and again about, uh, checking the very, checking the authenticity of things and people, uh, and products that people are pitching and so forth.

Uh, and that will ramp up, no doubt, in which case opportunity for communicators then for that kind of education. So, um, it, it, it perhaps will come down to, uh, to that the, uh, the, uh, the ethical debate on training, on consent, uh, on people’s rights, intellectual property, whatever. Governments in Washington, DC I mean, that.

Uh, the situation with Trump and his, uh, um, his psycho fence, as I call them, really, uh, is only, um, uh, is well, it’s more than a blip. It’s, it is made a huge change around the world that no one could have predicted. Whatever you think about Trump, you gotta give it, give it to him in one sense that he [00:19:00] has forced huge change on almost every country around the world.

So, uh, I see here things that people are discussing now, we’re gonna. Would never have dreamt that these politicians would be suggesting that if Trump was not on the scene. So that is a big impact in all of this, and it’s hard to predict what effect that’s gonna have on something like this. But, um, I think the, uh, the concerns of people about training, for example, using their content without permission, uh, human beings, again, this is a, a related thing to what other conversations are worried about being replaced by the.

That’s not, not, not a separate or a suddenly new thing, but it just reinforces in my view, certainly that we need to address all of these things. We need to show that we have people’s backs in their concerns about this, and we’re gonna help kind of understand it if we can. That’s our job as communicates, it seems to be.

Shel Holtz: Yes. In addition to creating some of this content.

Neville Hobson: Oh, indeed. [00:20:00]

Shel Holtz: That’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #461: YouTube Trends Toward Virtual Influencers and AI-Generated Videos appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The tide is turning.

For several years, workers have enjoyed a seller’s market. Unemployment has been low, and companies have competed for the best employees. Now, for a variety of reasons, we are experiencing a surge in layoffs, exacerbated by sizable staff reductions in U.S. federal agencies. With so many newly-unemployed workers on the street, employers now have the advantage as we shift to a buyer’s market.

Emboldened by the flood of potential recruits on the market, and anxious to be on the good side of the current U.S. presidential administration, some CEOs are trading in their supportive servant-style leadership for old-school tough boss talk. And while they may be able to justify this behavior in the short term, the impact on the culture — and what that will do to the employer brand — could deter the best potential recruits from taking that job, which will be filled by a mediocre performer desperate for employment.

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore the reasons behind the layoffs, the impact of CEO tough talk, and how communicators can help maintain a strong, non-toxic workplace.

Links from this episode:

Layoff announcements surge to the most since the pandemic as Musk’s DOGE slices federal labor force
CEOs deliver tough talk as workers face a softening labor market
What’s Causing Corporate Layoffs?
Are Workplaces Getting More Toxic? Some Employees Think So
‘Toxic workplace culture’ main reason behind staff resignations, new research says
Gen Z are ‘conscious unbossing’—avoiding stressful middle management roles

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Raw Transcript

evillehobson (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Release. This is episode 460. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:08)
And I’m Shel Holtz.

As we know, business goes through phases. Right now, we’re entering into a reality that’s reshaping organizational communication. It’s a new phase in corporate America that’s going to demand a lot of communication, including counseling leaders with messages they may not want to hear. Let’s start with what’s happening. Layoff announcements have surged to levels we haven’t seen since the pandemic. According to CNBC earlier this month, we’re seeing cuts across a broad range of industries and companies

suggesting something sort of systemic is at play. And it’s not happening in isolation. It’s coinciding with a shift in tone that CEOs are using when they talk to employees. What we’re seeing is a shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market. You may remember it hasn’t been all that long since executive messaging was all about bringing your whole self to work and prioritizing mental health and building workplaces centered on empathy and inclusion.

Those days are fading pretty quickly. Axios recently dubbed it the return of the Big Boss era. CEOs are dropping that therapeutic language of 2020 and embracing what one commentator called masculine energy. It’s less, we’re all in this together and more, step it up or step out. This isn’t just about bravado. There’s calculation here. This new tone serves multiple audiences.

not just employees, but investors, board members, and political stakeholders. This is, remember, Trump 2.0, where radical transparency and performative toughness are in vogue. Some CEOs see value in being leaked when they talk like this. It’s internal messaging with an external target. But let’s dig a little deeper on these layoffs. An analysis from the Wharton School points out that what we’re seeing isn’t just a response to economic turbulence or pandemic

era over hiring, companies are bracing for long-term changes, slower growth, productivity gains they anticipate they’ll get from AI, and increasing shareholder pressure for efficiency. Some organizations are trimming fat, others are actually cutting muscle and hoping automation or restructured workflows can pick up the slack. Neville, before I list some of the things communicators should be thinking about,

What are your thoughts on these trends? I read recently the companies in the UK are laying people off and UK firms are planning more, though I don’t know if CEOs have shifted their tone in their conversations with employees.

@nevillehobson (02:42)
No, I haven’t seen that. I haven’t seen anyone talking about that. Let’s put it that way. And I did a little look up myself to see what was happening here in the context of this conversation. Yeah, I see reporting on that too, not for the same reasons in the US, though, because Trump 2.0 seems to be the big gorilla behind all of this activity happening in workplaces in America. That’s not the case here, although I would say that that

will likely pick up a bit as events shift and change globally. But the main reason I see being mentioned, a couple of pretty good articles recently point this out to toxic workplace culture is the big driver behind employees quitting, not being laid off. There’s a big difference. They’re resigning. So

Not quite the same landscape shell, but it seems that the result is similar, i.e. people are going to be without jobs.

Shel Holtz (03:34)
And I think that if you see these CEOs being more paternalistic, maybe a little more autocratic in their behavior toward employees, you’ll probably see those workplaces shift toward the toxic direction because leaders set the tone for the people who report to them and the people who report to them. So you’re very likely to see that. You’re likely to see.

middle managers revert from the coaching and mentoring style that’s been in vogue for good reason for the last several years toward that just be the boss and tell you what to do and yell at you when you don’t do it right or fast enough. So the toxic workplace could be on its way back to the U.S.

@nevillehobson (04:13)
wonder.

Yeah,

I wonder though, the reality of that, given what you mentioned is on the decline since 2020 was was how you framed it, the kind of more kinder concern for employees well being and all that kind of stuff. And it’s gone out the window in America, I see this being talked about quite a bit. Not yet here in the UK. And I put I insert the word yet because

I think it’s likely to be the case, I wonder, it’s people we’re talking about, right? So you’re looking at, and what you said is absolutely correct. It starts at the top and filters down. So behaviors are influenced by the leadership behaviors, et cetera. And so the manager for a team in an office, that’s not the head office, it’s a branch office somewhere, but the manager there, or even the big department.

is not, I would say, correct if I got it wrong, but it seems to me they’re not going to suddenly, there’s a sudden shift in behavior. This is a gradual thing. Right. So it’s going to be very difficult for some. You could almost equate it to things I’ve seen in the news recently, for instance, in relation to Trump in laying off federal workers. So for instance, people who

Shel Holtz (05:10)
No, they see the modeling of behavior from the top, so it’s gradual, of course.

@nevillehobson (05:27)
have communicated and that news is leaked, that they don’t agree with a certain policy of the Trump administration, that person’s been fired. So are we likely to see that in the private sector as opposed to the public sector? Well, probably. But that being said, whichever way you look at it, we are seeing a shift, are we not, in things that I tend to put it in my own mind, looking back.

over what’s happened just over the last few months, that we do have a change that is huge. And I often say to people when we have these conversations, they are increasingly happening even with friends. The first two decades of this century are the golden years when money was cheap, freedoms were huge, you could get on a plane and travel anywhere. And again, in the European context, that’s a big deal. Get on a plane at London and go for the weekend in Prague.

all you got to do is buy your etiquette and accommodation. That’s it. Didn’t need visas. need. Well, you have passport checks if you come to the UK because even within the EU, the UK insisted on that. They really don’t like foreigners, the Conservative Party in this country, seems to me. So they were in charge during nearly all of this time. But I think that those days are gone and we need to be getting used to this. And it is a time of great uncertainty.

in the workplace. So we hear about uncertainty in stock markets and people thinking, how do I price my goods? Do I have to increase it or what? Here we’re seeing something else that is likely to be of concern to people. It’s a very uncomfortable time for everyone. And indeed, I don’t envy the kind of middle manager in an organization who’s responsible for a team of 20, let’s say, and he’s being told to do certain things that are against his beliefs. What’s he or even she going to do about that?

There is the dilemma.

Shel Holtz (07:09)
Yeah, and I think if you’re a frontline employee in an organization, that uncertainty is coming at you from a number of different directions. It’s not just what’s the flip-flop policy coming out of Washington today that’s going to move the markets one way or another. It’s also, is my boss or the CEO of this organization going to take a whole different approach that’s going to change the culture into one that I don’t want to work in anymore?

And I think that’s a real consideration here for communicators as they think about how they’re going to navigate through all of this. What’s going to happen is you’re going to see as, mean, imagine being a meta employee right now, because say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg. He did champion liberal causes and he created a workplace culture of, I mean, it was a culture of trust. He and Sheryl Sandberg,

used to tell deep secrets in all employee meetings and they never leaked because employees knew that if that information leaked, they’d stop having this information shared with them. Now he’s embraced this, know, masculine culture. He’s obviously pandering to Trump. And what is that tone going to do to the way he perceives employees, the way he treats employees?

how it affects the culture. The best people in any organization are the ones who can say, I’m done and find a job somewhere else. The mediocre people in the organization are the ones who can’t find a job anywhere else. They’re the ones you end up stuck with. So I think the short-term benefits these CEOs may see from becoming the tough boss again.

could evaporate when people aren’t going to continue working for you who you need and you can’t recruit because your employer brand has gone down the toilet.

@nevillehobson (08:59)
Yeah, I think it’s going to get even more difficult becoming a months shell because some of the big tech companies and it is the tech companies. I can’t think of any other way to express it, but did a deal with Trump, they sold their souls to the devil in expectation that they would get what some kind of preferential treatment or be not interfered with and all that.

I saw a news story today in one of the tech journals that made the comment that Zuckerberg had done the deal with the devil and what has he gotten in return? Absolutely nothing. So what does that mean? So this uncertainty continues in this area, but I think trust is evaporating fast from big companies. And equally, I did read something a week or so back.

It’s actually very relevant to what you said about Zuckerberg and the culture he developed with Sheryl Sandberg. He got rid of Sheryl Sandberg. I think he threw her under the bus, if you remember. Right. And say the DEI stuff was all her. He didn’t agree with it, blah, blah, all that kind of talk. So would you trust him? I certainly wouldn’t if an employee. So you’re going to get people right. So this is likely to be the case in many more organizations. And that’s a very alarming picture, I think.

Shel Holtz (09:47)
Oh, and he talks trash about her now, yeah.

No, not even a little.

So let’s take a look at what this means for organizational communication professionals, because I hate to throw a cliche out there, but it presents both a challenge and an opportunity. We are the voice of the organization. We keep the narrative and we facilitate the internal dialogue if we’re doing our jobs well. So what role should we be playing in navigating these particular waters? Well, first we need to be advocates for transparency and clarity.

This is nothing new, but when layoffs happen, the way they’re communicated is paramount. is, we’ve been talking about this for probably 50 years in terms of communicating layoffs in such a way that it leaves the workforce that remains productive and optimistic about the future. Employees deserve more than legal precision when they’re told what’s happening. They need context.

They don’t need vague, you know, we’re realigning with strategic priorities language, but actual explanations. Why are we doing this now? What’s next? What does this mean for us who are still here? know, ambiguity breeds anxiety and erodes what? It erodes trust. Second, we have to be sense makers. The survivors of layoffs are likely feeling a mix of emotions, fear, uncertainty, guilt.

We need to actively listen to their concerns and provide channels for them to voice these feelings. This isn’t a doom and gloom message. It’s a reality check. Workplace toxicity, as we mentioned earlier, is creeping back into the workplace. A recent Investopedia report showed a significant number of employees feeling that work environments have become more hostile, less safe to speak. That is, no psychological safety or reduced psychological safety. And they become more cutthroat.

If we’re not creating channels to surface those feelings, we’re not doing our jobs. Third, communicators have to coach leadership on consistency. As an article in Axios points out, employees are remarkably attuned to tone. If we’ve gone from we support you to produce or perish, then leaders need to own that change. They can’t pretend the vibe hasn’t shifted. When the tone of leadership changes overnight and this tone from leadership has changed overnight.

People start wondering, who is this person? Is this the same guy I signed up to work for? That disconnect can unravel trust faster than a layoff could. Fourth, we have a crucial role in shaping the internal narrative. In the wake of layoffs and the shifting leadership tone, it’s easy for negativity and toxicity to creep in. We need to find ways to preserve culture when leadership is, intentionally or not, undermining it.

That might mean emphasizing peer stories, championing middle managers who are under enormous pressure, or quietly maintaining the threads of the pre-layoff values the company once celebrated. And let’s not forget about Gen Z. They’re watching all this unfold and they’re drawing conclusions. A Fortune article from late last year pointed out that many young professionals are actively avoiding middle management roles. They don’t want to become managers.

It’s not because they’re lazy, it’s because they see those positions as stressful, thankless, and misaligned with their values. In an environment of layoffs and perceived shifts in leadership attitudes, retaining talent, especially younger generations, is going to require a more nuanced approach. This is the time to reaffirm that communication is not just a soft skill, it’s a strategic imperative.

@nevillehobson (13:38)
Thanks

Shel Holtz (13:41)
the way we frame hard decisions, the way we guide executive tone and the way we preserve human connection in the face of corporate calculus, these are the levers that we can still pull. So as communicators, we have full plates. We are essential in navigating organizational change, fostering trust and shaping the employee experience during this shifting period of significant upheaval.

The way we approach these challenges will have a lasting impact on our organization’s reputations inside and out, but let’s not shy away from having those difficult conversations. Neville, thoughts?

@nevillehobson (14:17)
And difficult they will be, expect. I think what you said makes a lot of sense. The only thing I would say is I would worry if the, let’s say the head chief communicator in an organization, whatever the job title might be, the person in charge of communicating internally and externally, but let’s see in the context of a conversation internally, if that person is like, say,

Caroline Levitt, Trump’s press secretary, who is so, it’s like a mini me of Trump in behavior. Black is white, white is black. the most untrustworthy individual I’ve ever seen with a blonde hair and a nice demeanor, but I wouldn’t trust that person at all. You would be very worried if your CCO was like that. Also, if you’ve got a CEO like Jamie Dimon, remember we talked about him.

in episode 451 when the speech, the rant peppered with bleeped out expletives on a, what do call it, a meeting with employees was leaked, basically saying, my way or the highway, he didn’t give a damn. And if you got CEO like that, yeah, you’re in trouble.

Shel Holtz (15:16)
That’s what they meant about

wanting to be leaked and heard by the president, right?

@nevillehobson (15:22)
Exactly. So it’s an alarming time, I think, again, without making it sound like, you know, the kind of the end of the world. These are things that are very concerning. This sudden shift in focus, attitude and behavior. So I’ve yet to see anyone talking about, you know, layoffs that they believe are absolutely because they’re literally a complete about turn in behavior.

by leaders and organization leading to employees being let go. So layoffs, redundancies, as we call them here in the UK, because the distinction here, of course, is you are not fired, your job has been eliminated, therefore there’s no role for you anymore. So your job has been made redundant, you’re gone. So we’re likely, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of uncertainty continuing and worsening.

communicators. Yeah, all those things you mentioned, Shell. I think when I was looking at what’s happening here in the UK, I mentioned that I did encounter one report that was in HR director magazine that was just a couple of weeks, a couple of months ago, talking about toxic workplace culture are the main reason behind staff quitting, I resignation employees resigning and going somewhere else.

So there’s a kind of the flip side of all of this is the employee taking the initiative and saying, I’m gone from here. That’s on the increase. So if you tie that with then layoffs and redundancies, the workplace is not looking very secure at all for anyone.

Shel Holtz (16:43)
And I think you also have to factor into this that our employees are also consumers and they’re wrapped up in a lot of the data that we’re seeing about consumers. Consumer confidence is at a very steep low right now. So this is weighing on them in the workplace too. And that’s factoring in with the uncertainty about the economy and what the impact of that is going to be on their organization.

their employment. So lots of reasons for communicators to be listening, to be sharing what they’re hearing with leadership and counseling leadership on how to communicate through all of this in a way that maintains a level of productivity, but also maintains that employer brand so that people want to work for you.

@nevillehobson (17:27)
Yeah, I think again, referring to the UK publication HR director and what they were talking about toxic workplaces, their focus in their assessment, then their kind of, here’s the list of what you need to do is aimed at HR, specifically at human resources, who they say is the the kind of start point of this. I don’t disagree with that. That

I would argue is where they are with setting policy and setting behaviors and communicators communicate that and maybe help shape the messaging around that. So in addition to that list of things you mentioned, I would add you need to be hand in glove with your HR side because they will know things you don’t know and you need to know and they may not be proactive. They may be all scared sitting in a corner of cells even. So there’s that, that’s key to it. And the other thing I would argue is that

all you’ve known so far on how you address these sorts of issues probably needs rethinking now in light of what’s happening. Because all the stuff I read and that I know of and you will be the same, I’m sure, is to find and fine tuned over years in times that are not like this at all, where trust is gone completely. And again, just reflecting back on Edelman’s trust barometer.

we’ve seen kind of warning signs in some of the research from that recently, that this, you know, things like, for instance, how leaders can shape workplace culture, the company’s ethos and leadership training, all those things are great. But for circumstances like this, there’s something else needed more than that, I would say. They talk about a thriving workplace is where toxicity is neither tolerated nor ignored. Difficult.

if the leadership is involved in that, eg, Jamie Diamond, JP Morgan, instance, who is fostering a climate of toxicity, then then that’s real tricky. So this is where going back to the role of the communicator. That’s where some very creative thinking and behaviors need to be put in place, which may not be something you’re used to. So communication leadership is the key to that, I would say. So interesting time. I mean, you mentioned

The cliche, know, threats and opportunities, this is opportunities, I see it, but it’s an interesting time we’re in and it’s going to be especially interesting in the coming months.

Shel Holtz (19:37)
Yeah, I just want to go back to your remark about working hand in glove with human resources. And I think there’s a flip side to that, too. They may be developing policies that they think are great, but they have not considered how the employees are going to react to that if it’s message to the way they’re planning on messaging it or maybe not react well to it at all. Maybe they know that employees won’t react well to it.

and need communications help in explaining why. mean, there are things that happen in the workplace that employees don’t like and there’s things you can’t do about that. Your job isn’t to make employees happy, it’s to help them understand why this is happening, where they fit in a solution, where we’re going from here. communicators can’t just be sitting on their hands, know, cranking out articles about the company picnic. We need to be in the thick of this strategy.

@nevillehobson (20:21)
Ha ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz (20:24)
in order to see our organizations through these times. And that’ll be a 30. Indeed, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (20:27)
Yeah. Interesting times indeed. Yeah.

The post FIR #460: The Return of Toxic Workplaces and the “Big Boss” Era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this episode, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson discuss the evolving landscape of podcast consumption, particularly in light of Satya Nadella’s innovative approach to engaging with audio content through AI. They explore the significance of transcripts, the potential for AI to facilitate interactive experiences, and the challenges that come with adopting these new technologies. The conversation highlights the future of podcasts as a medium that can be both passive and interactive, reshaping how audiences engage with audio content. Neville and Shel also examine how these same generative AI tools can make other content interactive and the ease with which users will be able to take advantage of it as LLMs become multi-modal.

Links from this episode

The surprising way Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella uses AI to consume podcasts on his commute
Podcast Transcription: How & Why You Must Transcribe Podcasts

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:03.168)
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 459 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:10.742)
And I’m Neville Hobson. One of the more thought provoking stories I came across recently was a short piece on Geekwire about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and how he listens to podcasts, or rather how he doesn’t. According to Nadella, the best way for him to consume podcasts these days isn’t by listening to them in the traditional sense. So what does he do? We’ll discuss that in just a minute.

@nevillehobson (00:38.72)
Instead, during his commute, he interacts with the transcript of a podcast using his personal AI co-pilot. He speaks to it, asks questions, interrupts when needed, essentially turning what would normally be a passive listening experience into an active conversational one. Nadella describes it as a full duplex conversation, a two-way interaction, which until recently would have seemed futuristic. This kind of back and forth modality, he says, is more convenient and powerful than traditional listening.

His comment was, there’s no going back. This shines a spotlight on a crucial, but sometimes overlooked asset for podcasters, the transcript. Providing a transcript isn’t just about accessibility, although that’s a critical benefit. It’s also about discoverability, repurposing, and now enabling new ways of engaging with content. Transcripts can enable a number of things, such as improving SEO, helping your podcast get found in search.

makes your content more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, enable content repurposing into blog posts, social media or newsletters, and as Nadella demonstrates, allow AI tools to analyze, summarize or even hold conversations about your content. In a world where attention is scarce, transcripts are no longer just a nice to have, they’re becoming essential infrastructure for how audiences, including high level business leaders, interact with audio content.

So here’s the primary discussion point for our conversation today. Could Satya Nadella’s model be the future for busy professionals where AI acts as a bridge between long form audio and actionable insights? And if so, what does that mean for podcasts and communicators in how we produce a packaged content? What do you think, Cheryl?

Shel Holtz (02:23.167)
I think there will be a fair number of people who will take advantage of this and the activities that you’ll be able to engage in like it that will emerge as these tools continue to evolve. I think there will be a majority of people who will continue to listen to podcasts because it is the lowest friction way to listen to a podcast. There’s no work. just go to the podcast app, pick the one you want to listen to. Latest episode play.

And a lot of people don’t want to work in their car. They’re driving, they’re relaxing. Asking questions is not on their bingo card for their for their drive to or from work, for example, or or during a road trip. So I think people will continue to take the easy road for the most part. But for people who are trying to learn a lot or glean information.

related to current events or emerging science or whatever the theme of the podcast they listen to is. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is going to be a popular approach and there are more than one way to do it. For example, you could put that transcript into Google’s Notebook LM. I don’t think you can talk to it yet, but you can. can you? OK, great. Well, there you go.

@nevillehobson (03:40.267)
Yeah, yes, you can. Yes, you can. That’s just just just been introduced. But it’s different because there you’re talking to the two AI hosts and you then having a conversation you can’t script.

Shel Holtz (03:49.226)
Right.

Yeah, exactly. But if the transcript has been loaded into the notebook, then the conversation, obviously, you can listen to the podcast with the two hosts talking about it. But at that point, you might as well just listen to a podcast, one or the other listen to the original. But the whole idea of Notebook LM, even before they introduced that podcast feature, was your ability to query the notebook based on everything that’s in it. You could have 50 episodes of a podcast or you could load

the transcripts of the most recent episodes of 20 different podcasts on the same theme and just start querying it. And it’ll give you answers to your questions. This was what makes it so powerful a tool. think there’s also, by the way, I’m using a tool now. This is not for podcasts, but along the same lines, it’s called Drip Drippp, three P’s. what I do here and it’s a paid service is

I take all of the AI email newsletters that I subscribe to, and I subscribe to probably 12 or 13 of them, and it gets all of them and sends me one email summary of what’s in all of them. So I’m now reading my one daily drip rather than all 13. Email.

newsletters, which is particularly useful because there are days I don’t have time to read any of those newsletters, but I find the time to read that one drip. this being able to repurpose, which is kind of what we’re talking about here, content to make it more consumable for you in the circumstances that you’re in. This is, I think, one of the powerful uses that we’re seeing a lot of people start to adopt AI for.

@nevillehobson (05:39.17)
Yeah, I mean, in this specific case of what the Sati Nadella did with co-pilot, it’s not so much reading it out. It’s the way in which it interacts. You interact with it. And literally it’s random. It has no foresight of what you’re going to ask, but it finds the content you’re looking for. So you could ask it, for instance, tell me a bit more about the topic that Shail and I talked about on

Shel Holtz (05:49.931)
Mm-hmm.

@nevillehobson (06:08.333)
XYZ topic or at about the 18 minute mark. Can you quickly summarize the key points of what we discussed? And it will do that. And that is wow to me. The first one’s easy. You could tell it as I did in an experiment I did, which you’ve got a clip we’re going to have. You can be able to listen to that in a minute is to summarize the podcast. And what I did was upload the transcript of our previous episode for 98 for 58. Sorry.

And that was the one we talked about on AI being a part of your team, an AI chatbot and all that. So I uploaded the whole thing and asked it a couple of things and you’ll hear that in the transcript in a minute. But it got me thinking that the interview with Satya Nadella is worth a read. It’s quite concise, but you can project out your own thinking as to what this might mean and what Satya Nadella talks about his experience with it and particularly the multimodal element.

Your point about driving got it entirely, although if you’re commuting on a train or a bus, no big deal. You can just do it like that. But I think the idea of being able to tell the chat bot, give me a summary of the episode 458 and it’s got, it’s uploaded and it tells you that that might prompt further things. Tell me, you you and I talked about such as a topic. Give me the key takeaways that we discussed.

So it’s literally as fluid as that. It’s not more structured than that even. And the experiment I did, which may or may not be an indicator of wow or not, worked extremely well. There are some big downsides with this. And this I wondered about what Satya Nadella is doing about this, because the work in preparing the transcripts and uploading it to the chat bot, each time for each episode is severely not.

good from ease of use and all that. There’s big barriers that you’ve got to be really keen to do this. I did it. One thing I found, Nadella used Copilot. I knew few people using Copilot actively, but I know tons of people using ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, can you do this? To which it replied, seriously, confidently, yes, of course I can.

@nevillehobson (08:28.755)
And it then actually asked me, what do want to do? Upload the transcript and tell me how we can have a conversation. I said, well, that’s exactly what I want to do. So I followed the advice on ChatGPT’s page about this, which is to use the mobile app on my Android phone. But when I tried to upload the transcript, ChatGPT told me on the app, sorry, the app doesn’t support file uploads for this use. You can upload files, but not for this use, using the audio.

engagement function. But I did discover that the web app, the PWA on Windows 11 does support that. And so I engaged with the chatbot via the PWA, the personal web app on Windows 11 on my desktop computer, not the mobile. But it was an interesting experiment in my engagement with chat GPT that way, very conversational. And I was actually very impressed indeed with with how it performed.

So let’s include the clips so people can listen to it, Shell, because it was well done. It’s lightly edited to edit out some of the gaps in it to make for a better listening experience. And I’ve amplified the chatbots audio a bit because I was doing this on my microphone, the desktop, and the sound was coming out of the desktop speakers, which had to amplify a bit. But I think you’ll get the idea here. When I asked it to summarize, then I asked it specific questions about one of the segments we discussed. So let’s take a listen.

@nevillehobson (10:01.899)
So what do you think of that, Cheryl? I mean, that’s a simple instance. I honestly couldn’t imagine me going through all the faff of uploading transcripts for each individual episode and then listen to it on my car and asking it questions. I just simply couldn’t imagine that. But as you mentioned earlier on in our conversation, things like this are only going to get easier, I would imagine, don’t you think?

Shel Holtz (10:24.711)
absolutely. For a number of reasons. One of the big ones is that what’s coming is the large language models, the big frontier models are all going to be multimodal before too long, which means that you’ll be able to upload the audio podcast or even the video version of the podcast from YouTube or just point it to it. And it’ll be able to do exactly the same thing without having to go through the rigmarole.

of the transcript. this is just going to get easier and easier as time goes on. The other thing that you mentioned having to create the transcript, a lot of podcasters are including a transcript in their show notes for SEO purposes, and we are among those. I don’t edit it. I don’t go in and fix all of the errors. I don’t have time. It’s raw. So that at least somebody searching for some keywords might find us. But all you would have to do with

@nevillehobson (11:14.391)
For this you’d have to.

Shel Holtz (11:20.743)
any podcaster who’s doing that is copy and paste that transcript. You don’t have to go through any hoops to create one.

@nevillehobson (11:27.241)
no, no. When I said you have to do something with the transcript, I didn’t mean that at all. You don’t write it out. But I’ve noticed this in the past on other experiments I’ve done. If you upload a raw verbatim transcript with lots of Ams and As in and some things that didn’t quite catch and so it does it wrong, that will seriously impact the quality of what you get back. So for something like this, I would definitely edit lightly the output. And of course, on a 20 minute episode such as we had, that would be an easy thing to do.

but that doesn’t scale. this isn’t, in my view, this is not a prime time tool for everyone to think, wow, I can use this. This is if you’re keen, if you’ve got the patience and the time to go through the prep. So you prep 10 episodes, let’s say, or even your transcripts. Let’s say you speak, you’ve got the ideal audio environment in which you’re recording, in which case the recording software will pick up everything about 99 % correctly, like Riverside that we do, for instance.

And that’s got a method to smooth some of the stuff. Or you’ve got Descript. I mean, there are tools you can do this. The point, though, is there are still separate tools you’ve got to use to get this into the state before you can upload it and share it with the chatbot. That may well be a barrier too much for people. The idea is fabulous, I think. I love this idea, which is why I was so keen on trying it out myself. And I think it is going to be part of the landscape pretty soon, just without all the barriers, hopefully.

Shel Holtz (12:52.009)
Yeah, and the easier it gets, the more people will do it. But to your initial question, I don’t think podcasters have anything to worry about. think people, by and large, are just going to continue listening to podcasts. After all, a lot of people listen to podcasts because they like the hosts. They like the segments. They like the vibe. And you won’t get that out of summaries and the ability to query. But on the other hand, I listened to an episode of a podcast that was over five hours long.

@nevillehobson (12:59.925)
No, no.

Shel Holtz (13:20.595)
It was interviews with three people. think they were from Anthropic, but it was a five hour podcast. Boy, would I have loved a summary and the ability to query that because a lot of it was very over my head.

@nevillehobson (13:29.335)
Yeah. I mean, I think.

Sure. I think this is in that area, of course, this is just another method of engaging with the content. It isn’t intended to do this instead of listening to the podcast. Not at all. If you want to do that, like you said, get a summary, whether it’s 20 minutes or five hours, that could be handy. It might work good for if you’re the kind of person who likes trying out new things. There is a new podcast. don’t know. Let’s get it. Let’s upload the transcript and get a summary. mean, that’s maybe not, you know.

daily activity. But all of this will be part of the landscape to make things a lot easier. And I could even imagine that one of the chat bots, you’re not going to go through all this stuff of uploading files and editing, you’re going to tell the chat bot to do that. Look at the file, get the transcript, see if it’s okay, share it with your colleague at ChatGPT. We’ll take it from there. But it’s a neat idea. I’d keen to know anyone listening, one of our listeners has done this with

Copilot or are you thinking about it? Who’s using Copilot? ChatGPT were hurdles. I wonder how that would be with Copilot. I did ask ChatGPT to compare this feature with Copilots, which it did. And it came back and Copilot excelled in areas such as complete integration with all your typical software apps you’ve got on your PC. Whereas ChatGPT, this is not integrated in the same way. That’s today. I suspect that’ll change.

Shel Holtz (15:02.582)
So what we’re talking about here is taking a passive medium and extending its utility to make it an interactive medium, which is amazing, frankly. And it’ll be interesting to see what other kinds of media can be made interactive with the aid of artificial intelligence. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of for immediate release.

The post FIR #459: AI Transforms Content from Passive to Interactive appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The most common refrain we hear about society and the rapid advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence is, “We’re not ready.” We’re not ready for Artificial General Intelligence, and we’re certainly not ready for Artificial Superintelligence. Yet both are approaching uncomfortably quickly.

Business (along with government) is near the top of the list of unprepared entities; in business, managers lead the list of employees who need to get up to speed…fast. It could be as soon as this year that managers will be asked to lead hybrid teams of human employees and AI agents that autonomously perform multiple tasks — emulating what a skilled employee can do sitting at a computer, but much faster and perhaps more accurately. This will need to result in a new approach to managing. In this midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel look at what this means for managers and how far business is from enabling their managers to succeed in this new work reality.

Links from this episode:

AI Agents Mean We Are The ‘Last Generation Of Managers To Manage A Wholly Human Workforce’
The rise of the AI manager
“The Manager’s Job,” 50 Years Later
AI has more emotional intelligence than many people. Here’s what human managers can learn from it
Will AI Agents Join the Workforce This Year?
Q&A: ManpowerGroup exec explains how to manage an AI workforce

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to four immediate release. This is episode 4 5 8. I’m Neville Hobson.
Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz.
I read an article in Forbes the other day that pointed out that because of the role AI agents will play in the workplace, we are the last generation to manage a wholly human workforce. Uh, I spend a fair amount of my time communicating.
I. With managers, uh, through a variety of channels where I work. So with all this in mind, let’s take a look at the evolving role of managers in the era of generative AI and how internal communicators can support this transformation Traditionally. Managers have balanced administrative tasks, strategic planning, and people management.
However, recent McKinsey research confirms that less than 30% of a manager’s time is spent on people leadership with the majority consumed by individual execution, uh, or [00:01:00] administrative duties. How is this all going to look in the era of generative ai? Well, that’s what we’ll talk about right after this.
With the integration of generative ai, many routine administrative tasks are being automated, enabling this profound shift that we’re seeing in what managers focus on where they spend their time. This transition transforms managers from day-to-day administrators to strategic orchestrators who can coordinate complex systems.
Involving both human talent and AI tools beyond simply using ai, its co-pilots for their own individual tasks. And it’s worth, uh, noting that that remains important since, uh, there is data that shows that managers spend a heck, a lot of their. Time on, uh, that individual performance, that, that individual contribution, uh, and not on managerial tasks, but beyond doing that, managers are now creating and, and managing [00:02:00] sophisticated workflows where humans and multiple AI systems, this being the agents that we’re hearing so much about, collaborate to achieve outcomes that weren’t possible before.
Uh, this evolution redefines quality and excellence in management, moving beyond supervision to creating environments where both human and AI capabilities can thrive cohesively. While AI handles routine tasks, managers will focus more on the uniquely human aspects of leadership, building the team’s culture, fostering innovation, providing emotional support, and making ethical judgements.[00:03:00]
We’ll look at the new managerial competencies and how communicators can help managers make this transition right after this. Now the shift isn’t without its challenges. Managers need to develop new competencies, including understanding AI capabilities and limitations, interpreting AI generated data for decision making, managing the ethics of AI implementation, fostering collaboration between human and AI team members.
Intelligence to support [00:04:00] teams through technological change. Yet as managers navigate through these changes, internal communicators have a pivotal role to play in facilitating a smooth transition. We do that through education and awareness, demystifying. AI by providing clear, accessible information about what it is, its capabilities, its limitations.
This includes creating informative content, working with the training and IT departments to develop workshops, sharing success stories across the organization. This is a change, so we should be looking at change management support with all the conversation going on about the relevance of change management.
This is a change. It does require some support. Uh, we need to highlight new managerial skills that will evolve as we move into this era. This might involve collaborating with HR to create competency frameworks or sharing resources for skill development. Uh, feedback loops will have to be implemented, channels for [00:05:00] continuous feedback that allow managers and employees to share their experiences.
We can facilitate these mechanisms through call surveys, focus groups, and digital platforms where insights can be collected and acted on. Uh, and storytelling. Finally, obviously, sharing those narratives about how AI integration is positively affecting the organization. That can be really powerful stuff.
Highlighting the stories where AI has taken over mundane tasks, letting managers focus on strategic initiatives and team development that can be really motivating and, and provide some practical insights for others as well. Finally, there’s that issue of ethical considerations, uh, and developing those guidelines because AI will become more integrated into management practices, and we’ll have a role in facilitating discussions about how that should be done ethically, that includes helping develop and communicate guidelines around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and ensuring human oversight.
Remains in critical [00:06:00] decision making processes. So as we continue to explore this intersection of organizational communication and digital technology collaboration between managers and communicators is, is really going to take center stage here sooner rather than later. And as communicators, we can navigate the complexities of this.
AI driven era, we can foster workplaces that leverage technology and value, uh, that irreplaceable human touch that makes organizations really thrive.
Neville Hobson: Okay. Lot to, uh, lot to think about there. Uh, one question I have shell about all of this and, and I’m kind of confirmed in my thinking by looking at, uh, all the articles we’ve assembled that will be in the show notes that are talking about this topping in one way or another, that we talk about the last generation of managers to manage a who holy human workforce.
I, I, I don’t disagree with that at all. It seems very likely, , but. I wonder why there’s this kind of fixation in the mainstream media, the [00:07:00] tech press, and in fact anyone talking about it, that they want a graphic or an illustration to go along with the article. Why is it they always show a robot or some kind of machine that’s human-like sitting, typing at a computer or shaking a hand with a, with a human being?
That’s absolutely not what we’re expected to see. Yeah, it’s a bit of, it’s a metaphor, Neville, it’s a metaphor, it’s a bit of software, but it fixes in people’s minds that your workforce is gonna be robots sitting there. So how do you, , manage that then in the context of, uh, day-to-day. Uh, work in teams that are human beings.
, you have , your Microsoft teams call typically, uh, you’ll have physical meetings. , so where does the AI sit in that context? Where, where’s a scenario where you’ve got your AI colleague. Whether it’s an AI assistant or whatever it might be, , where does it, or are you gonna call it he or a she or a they, whatever, uh, how does that integrate into [00:08:00] the physical workforce that you are managing?
That
Shel Holtz: is the million dollar question. Uh, and I think the answer right now is, which no,
Neville Hobson: no one is asking or even answering actually. Well,
Shel Holtz: yeah, and I think, I think that’s, a couple of these articles start to point to that they, they make the point that if the agents can go out and do things that right now people are doing and they’re doing it using processes that take considerably longer, how do we then integrate?
These so that there are now workflows and processes that accommodate what those agents can do, the timelines that they can do them in. And the problem is we don’t know what those agents are going to do yet. , very, very few are available. The ones that we see from, you know, HubSpot and Salesforce are fairly rudimentary at this point.
, I think we’ll see some. Significant leaps this year. , some really startling stuff, , in 2026. , and then we’ll be able to start to see within [00:09:00] job categories. In the field I work in, , how is it going to. Integrate into the actual project as it’s being built. How does it integrate into pre-construction and estimating?
, and those people who have very longstanding, , well-defined processes and workflows to do that, , it’s all gonna be thrown into the wood chipper, right? Because with these agents doing things in minutes that used to take hours, days, weeks, months, . You’re gonna have to come up with new workflows, and you’re gonna have to figure out exactly what the people do, how they do it, when they do it, to accommodate what’s now available.
And if there are, , consulting practices that will be built on this, there will be trainers who will go out and work with organizations on this. None of them exist yet, because again, we need the agents to see exactly what kind of impact it is and have some practical field experience with this.
Neville Hobson: So it seems to me that we’ve got things around the wrong way in that [00:10:00] case. ’cause all I see are lists of tasks and things that, that the ai, , , the participation of AI in your workforce team is gonna have to do. I. So, , you know, the evolving workplace dynamics, how people do things, and, uh, looking through just some of them, , enterprise applications, customer service, transformation, research and data analysis, software development, cybersecurity, blah, blah, blah.
, okay, fine. That’s great. Identifying the tasks that need doing, but it seems to me that the, maybe the more essential task is somebody has to be talking about how will the AI fit into this, , without. Indeed it probably isn’t a, without, without a whole scale shift and change in how teams actually work, where you’ve got, , you know, your typical team, groups of people reporting to managers.
, it’s not, you know, hierarchical only. It’s, , across cross fertilization of ideas. You name it. , people will get together, they’ll chat on the phone, , they’ll do text message. [00:11:00] They’ll communicate with each other on the fly as a project is developing. , where does the AI fit in there in the sense of, you’ve asked your AI assistant to, , hey, take, , this is what we wanna do.
Go and get that data. Come back to me with, , the top 10 things. You actually probably wouldn’t have to tell it that. Go and analyze that and come back to me and tell me what you that be, what you.
30 seconds later it’s done that, , and , probably 10 seconds after that, there’s your spreadsheet all prepared and wait, hang on a minute, that’s, , way too fast because, , you are not capable of this. And that’s an extreme example. I’m sure it isn’t gonna be like that, but we need to be discussing those things, right?
Right. Now, if this is already on the, , on the horizon for people, and you’ve just mentioned something, I agree with you, within a year. This is gonna be real and not a mass, not widespread, not universal, certainly not. But there’ll be some many businesses doing this already. So, , [00:12:00] I just wonder, , the practicality of this, , the ideals are fantastic and I remember when I was at IBM, this is now nearly 10 years ago, with IBM Watson, talking about the role of.
Tools like Outlook at the time would be autonomous in terms of fixing your appointments. So scheduling this and doing that kind of thing, wonderful. But that’s just one-to-one in a sense. And, and you can’t, , uh, use that, uh, effectively in a group who aren’t, who aren’t ready for this kind of thing. So I, I, I’m just curious.
I think, I suppose really why is no one talking about this? You mentioned some of these articles pointed to this, but no one’s actually discussing it. Certainly not that I’ve seen outside of academia. And so when are we gonna get to that in, in business? What about, uh, the companies that you work for, the ones that I might work for, or the clients that you might engage with?
What’s happening with these guys early days with most
Shel Holtz: companies? . I can tell you , where I work. We have a, an AI committee. I’m [00:13:00] pleased to be on it. You mentioned that, , we have divided into subcommittees , and we have objectives and goals and we’re working on it. But, you know, I don’t think there are many organizations that are routinely using agents now to, no, it’s too soon.
Take over, a routine element of a workflow. , they’re, they’re just not, they haven’t been deployed yet.
Neville Hobson: Hence, , if you talk in your organization, say, Hey guys, this is coming. Okay. We’ve got AI agents coming. They’re gonna be doing all this work that you hate and it’s gonna be wonderful ’cause they’ll give you all the results in this short period of time.
So, are we ready? I. No, we’re not, we’re not ready. Nope. You’re so don’t talk about this stuff yet, then it needs to be the other way around. I think before we get into this for the flow, , so that you can set the right expectations with everyone. , actually I. That’s what I make.
Shel Holtz: Yeah. I mean, the agents are on their way, , , and very, very soon.
, and you’re gonna see them as with HubSpot, , [00:14:00] and Salesforce built into products that you’re already using. , so it’s around the corner that we’re gonna be able to deploy them within the organization. Or organizational tasks that are not part of a branded product. It’s just something that we have built or we have hired somebody to come in and build.
Uh, and it does the thing that we need it to do. , so I do, I think we do need to start thinking about, we don’t wanna be confronted when there are suddenly agents doing things and everybody’s in disarray because the workflows that we have been. Using for the last decade or 30 years or 50 years, depending on your industry, , have , just been thrown to the winds.
It, it doesn’t work based on when deliverables are happening. So, , I don’t it, it doesn’t mean that we need to figure out how to do it now, but we need to let people know it’s coming. Otherwise, it’s just, yeah, I gonna be a chaos and a shock.
Neville Hobson: Yeah, we do. We need to be telling this is what’s coming and this is what we need to do now.
Ready for when it’s coming. But I, I do wonder Shell as [00:15:00] well, , is this perhaps also not a case of, , , how could you, how could I, how’s the best way to describing It’s , of jargon overloads that suddenly there’s this AI agent and everyone’s latched onto this, Hey, the agents are coming. , whereas much of what your AI agent.
Or whatever you have been used to calling it until now that your chat, GPT generator, AI assistant may be, uh, is actually doing a lot of this stuff already, if just not at scale, , in groups where it’s all communicated across a whole team. So, for instance, I’m thinking of a number of case studies that , , I’ve.
Read, over the past year, , one in particular, , from Microsoft talking about, , an advertising agency out in the far east out in Asia who, , had, , a software tool that was based on artificial intelligence that would manage everyone’s tasks and let everyone know the status now and again, automated.
So I see to, I say to myself, think of something like, , Asana. Or one of those tools except fully automated, [00:16:00] and people were getting used to that and seeing great results from it that they recognize as well, that it required them to do certain things differently than they’d done before. But they didn’t see that as a, oh God, I’ve gotta do this and I don’t wanna do it.
They wanted to do it. I’m thinking that’s where we need to be. , and maybe it is a partly a thing, a jargony thing. , it’s called AI agents All sounds cool and blah, blah. , that, it is missing the bit though that we’re talking too much about the, the outcome without understanding how we’re gonna get there.
That’s what seems like to me.
Shel Holtz: I think agent , is definitely jargon, but I think there’s some substance behind it. I mean, remember when we interviewed Aaron Quien from. Profit, , and what he’s doing with AI and press releases. Now, if you take that to the, , agentic level, , imagine that your company has an announcement to make, so you provide all of the details of the announcement to your AI agent, which has been trained on your media space, and it will go, , find all of the reporters who might be [00:17:00] interested in reporting on that.
Draft a press release or press announcement, or a press kit or all of the above, , that each one is tailored to each reporter, , produces three versions and three different tones of voice, , and cues them up for distribution to those reporters and puts everything in a folder for you to go review before you choose the one you’re going to send to each reporter.
It’s just the multiple steps that it takes without intervention, unless it has a question in which case it asks you. Right, right. This is so much different than a chat bot box.
Neville Hobson: Right. I get it. I get it. But it just needs to set the right expectation, I think. Because that is not universe, not mass market yet.
And, and this is part of the trouble with some of these things where , the talk focuses on this is gonna be with us, meaning it’s univers, it’s everywhere. This is what everyone’s gonna be doing. It won’t be like that. I’m sure it won’t be. , it comes in small steps and in iterations, and some will do it and others will see it and they’ll start [00:18:00] doing it.
This is how most things tend to happen. , it’s ideal. It sounds wonderful, but I think it, it’s, to me, the expectation setting is key in that, , we want to get down this road and bring everyone along with us to understand this is what’s coming. This is what we need to do now. So what your company’s doing is a good example of that.
And I’m sure many, many other companies are doing that as well. And some of these examples and these articles, the ones you showed, the ones I dug up to miss that. Actually, , and they’re talking all about, you know, development of frameworks and, , customer service, absolute transformation in the customer experience because of this Well, and that, thank God I say Ben’s better than the current state of customer service, even with menuing, voicemail systems, all that stuff.
So yet it’s not yet. There. , and we need help to understand how real this is, but without people saying, yeah, rubbish, this isn’t gonna happen, because that’s not right either. But it’s a long way off, it seems to me. But the steps need to be taken now, and now I I, I’ll backtrack on what I just said there.
She, because we know that a long way off [00:19:00] means six months. Yes.
Shel Holtz: Yeah. , , this is, , an, an accelerated world that we live in.
Neville Hobson: It
Shel Holtz: is.
Neville Hobson: It’s exciting without any doubt. , I just would hate to see that excitement, , eyes glaze because people don’t see how they’re gonna get there, and that’s the bit that we need to focus on, I think.
Shel Holtz: Yeah. And by the way, you, , wondered how, , we would deal with the AI in the meetings? I, expect it won’t be very long before, it’s just like talking to the computer and Star Trek. it’s just part of the conversation, correct. Representing all of the agents that knows Right. Everything that’s going on, , in that AI space and can answer any of your questions.
And by the way, if, if teams wanna start getting used to this now, one of the things they can do is start using Notebook, lm, , throw , all of the documents for whatever it is you’re working in. There. And then during meetings, just start to query lm. If you have a question about anything, , it can answer based on any document that you have put in that notebook.
So get used to having that conversation with an AI agent. It’s, it’s, yeah, [00:20:00] not, , I mean, it’s available right now and useful and it’s gonna be everywhere sooner or later. Yep. And that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #458: Preparing Managers to Manage Human-AI Hybrid Teams appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

There are few business leaders who won’t need to explain to various stakeholders the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the trade war it will initiate. How they position those impacts could determine whether they find their organizations in the Administration’s crosshairs. Communicators should counsel leaders on how to address the impacts. Neville and Shel share their thoughts in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

Trade associations: PR’s secret weapon during tariff battle
More pocketbook, less politics: How C-suites should talk about tariffs
Trump’s tariffs – how should the EU react?
Adapting Communication Strategies During Trump 2.0

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 457 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz.
Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville. Hobson. Today’s episode, we’re gonna have a talk about Trump’s terrace. This is a hot topic. You cannot avoid this if you turn on the TV news or pick up a newspaper ’cause this is a hot topic, , everywhere you go, anywhere in the world.
So we’re gonna talk about this from a communicator’s perspective. Now, let me set the scene. Um, the second Trump administration, which is where we’re at Trump 2.0, has begun introducing aggressive tariff policies. These acts are already reshaping the global trade landscape. Trump has proposed across the board import tariffs including a 10% levy on all foreign goods and potential increases of 60% and more on Chinese and other imports if implemented, these acts would trigger broad economic consequences, including a high probability of retaliatory tariffs on American goods and [00:01:00] services by affected nations.
In practice, this means five things. First, rising costs for consumers and businesses. Then disruption of global supply chains, retaliation from other countries, as I mentioned, investor uncertainty and market volatility, and to geopolitical tensions and strategic risks. This isn’t only a US issue, it’s a global risk that requires proactive communication planning, especially for multinationals and export heavy sectors in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
So I mentioned we’re looking at this from a communicator’s perspective. So the question is, what must communicators do in this situation? Wherever you are, whatever you work in, particularly if it’s a large enterprise and it’s multinational, these are likely to be issues that concern your business, concern you as a communicator and the people in your organization who need to do the communicating much of the time.
So to help companies navigate this volatile [00:02:00] environment, communicators have a central role to play strategic messaging, stakeholder, stakeholder reassurance, and political risk mitigation will be critical. Drawing on insights from a wide range of sources that I research, including in particular, I’m quoting from PR, daily Campaign, Asia.
And, , a really interesting report from Fleischman Hillard in January. There are a number of key actions for communicators to guide their companies through an imminently volatile trade landscape. That means four key actions. First work with professional associations for coordinated advocacy. This way you can help present unified positions on tariffs.
, professional associations can effectively lobby policy makers and frame public messaging without exposing individual companies to political backlash. Second, help the C-suite focus on economic impacts, not politics. Executives should focus on how tariffs impact the business prices, jobs, supply chains, [00:03:00] without drifting into political commentary.
This approach keeps the company above the political fray while remaining transparent and informative. Third, build agile response strategies for today’s fast moving media Monitor emerging platforms where trade issues trend from TikTok to Reddit. Be prepared to respond in real time misinformation spreads fast in politically charged conversations.
And fourth, localized and aligned messaging tailored for each market and audience. Translate global strategies into locally resonant narratives, especially for markets where trade tensions may spark consumer or political reaction. So before we get into any kind of detail on this, let’s talk about that overall picture.
So shell, how do you see this shift? Affecting the way companies approach public communication, especially when the policies originate in the us, but have global consequences. You are in the us how do you see it all?
Shel Holtz: Well, I think it’s a crisis communication scenario for most organizations. , the [00:04:00] threat is consistent with the types of activities that lead us to.
In crisis plan or crisis scenario, and I think those principles apply.
Recommendation to look to associations is a good one. , what we’re trying to do is protect our reputations while still advocating for the organization. , and I really think there’s two ways to look at this. One is, , as you mentioned, professional associations. Professional associations are IAB, C and PRSA.
For example, they represent people in professions. , then there are trade associations which represent industries. And I think there’s tremendous value in those trade associations. , I remember when I worked at Allergan, a pharmaceutical company, we were a member of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
, it was a lobbying organization, did other things, but it’s primarily a lobbying organization so it could go to Congress and. Make a lot of noise [00:05:00] without painting a target on the backs of its members. , you know, a legislator wouldn’t know which member had supported a position that the trade association was taking and, and which opposed it.
, so there’s, there’s a lot of, , value to doing that. But I also think. A couple of, , other things that weren’t mentioned in these reports. One is, you know, you have to define what it is you want the reputation of your organization to be if you haven’t already done that. And if you have done that, you need to figure out how that aligns with what’s going on with these tariffs.
And it’s not just tariffs. I mean, let, let, let’s clarify. It’s also, I mean, if you look at. The activities here on DEI that’s having global implications because you have global companies, you have American based companies with European affiliates and Asian affiliates and Latin American affiliates and so on.
You have internationally based companies that have a a, a large presence in the us. Look at Unilever. [00:06:00] As an example. , and what are the European parts of the organizations and, and the other non US parts of these organizations going to do around DEI? Are they going to. Tailor their policies outside the US to accommodate what the Trump administration wants done in the us.
, if they don’t, will they, um, provoke the ire of, of the administration. So, , I think this, this goes beyond tariffs. So identify, , how all of this affects your reputation and then. Counsel your leaders on how to talk about this. So, you know, rather than talking about the politics, for example, talk about the economic impacts of these things.
. Might keep you out of the crosshairs of, of the administration as, as they pursue these policies within, um, individual organizations. , so yeah, and, and, and one other thing to keep in [00:07:00] mind here is that. Trump is fairly mercurial. , he announces a tariff and then three days later he says, well, we’ve had talks and I’m not going to implement the tariff.
And then three days later, well, yes I am. And well, it’s gonna be a different, it’s gonna be higher, it’s gonna be lower. , what all this means is that there is tremendous uncertainty. Out there. , and I think uncertainty is probably the key thing that’s happening as a result of all of this. So we need to be communicating with our stakeholders and especially our employees on a regular basis to let them know, look, this is where things are today.
It may change tomorrow. Your leadership team is nimble and watching all of this, and we will respond appropriately, , based on. The latest announcement out of, out of Washington. But we also have to acknowledge the fact that we know that this could change in 24 hours or less. , so I think addressing uncertainty is part of crisis [00:08:00] communication, and one of the reasons I think crisis is, is.
The underlying approach to take to all this.
Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s interesting, I think because you mentioned this goes beyond tariffs. I don’t disagree with that at all yet. , ta the tariff issue, , and , you just outlined it, is full of uncertainty. Mm-hmm. Whereas things like, , restrictions on DEI that’s certain that has happened already, so they’re not that.
Unlikely to be a backtrack, so you kind of know what you need to do about that. This is very different. , and I think the uncertainty issue is, , something that, , spooks everyone, , particularly, , stock markets, , particularly the, those external groups that have a big influence on your share price.
If you’re a listed company listed on your market position, , your competitive position, you name it. , and so, , the, the idea of, , helping, , the, , C-suite, particularly senior leaders in the organization on framing, what is the messages that you’re gonna con be consistently communicating? [00:09:00] And you mentioned, , certainly yeah, stick to the economics of it all.
Don’t get into the poli political era, , area. , even though it, , it might be difficult to remain politics free depending on the business you are in and where you’re operating, but, . There are clearly opportunities, even in the time of uncertainty, where you need to be able to, , explain to your various stakeholder groups how tariffs, whether they’re implemented, particularly if they’re, if they’re implemented, how they will impact your business.
, and that’s a valid. , top, , valid focus. So on prices, jobs, , supply chains, all of that, as I mentioned earlier, without going into the political area. , and linked to that is used language that resonates with those everyday concerns. , rising costs, impact on choice or supply delays, rather than the abstract jargon that emanates, , outta the, the political area when they’re communicating stuff about tariffs.
So we hear about, 10% on this, 60% on that, [00:10:00] even 200% on, , wines from France, for instance, if they don’t obey Trump’s whims, , what does that actually mean? , it doesn’t necessarily mean that your price in your bottle of wines suddenly getting up by 200%, so you need to be able to help people. Put that in the right context for them.
, and that applies to employees particularly, I think. So you’ve got that. , I think also, , , saying to employees for instance, , don’t worry, we’re on the case. We’re taking care of all this. You need to explain exactly what you’re doing. In that case, I would argue. So you need to, , assemble.
You know the right people to respond. That’s not just a communicator. You need legal, government, affairs, whoever, , who are ready. And this is where the role of communicators comes in to craft , and prepare timely responses to tariff announcements or inquiries from the public. So that’s very reactive and there are undoubtedly things you can do on assumptions that would stand you in good stead if you just see which way the wind seems to blowing.
This is where Trump makes it very difficult because of the fact that he’s changing his mind all the [00:11:00] time. He has said on multiple occasions that he sees, , this whole thing of tariffs as a negotiating tactic, but then as you pointed out, suddenly he changed his mind. I mean, this makes it very, very difficult.
I think the. The picture’s not too different. If you are, , , a business in another country outside the United States, and you work for a, not a US based company, you are working for , a big, , company in your particular country that sells to various countries around the world, including to the us, , your dynamic approach might be different, but I, I think that the issues are not.
That dissimilar in terms of how you need to explain this to your various stakeholder groups, what’s going on? So you could argue that much of that is not really the role of communicators in the, in, in there is so much uncertainty they can, you know, it’s not really affecting you, I would argue. Yes, it is.
You need to have that 360 degree view no matter what. So, you know, in a sense , with, with some confidence, what not to [00:12:00] include in your communication is not really relevant to particular situation. Isn’t, , gonna come any easier as we get into this now? Because what we’ve been seeing, I believe is, is kind of like the, just the first shots in the battle.
, where now we’ve got an events, . And I find this extraordinary, I don’t know how you see this, but the, the vice president and his wife, , saying, we’re gonna go to visit Greenland in on Friday. And the Greenlanders and the Danes are saying, you’re not welcome. And they say, well, we’re still gonna go.
So they’re gonna go no matter what. So what happens if they’re a fused entry? I mean, what impact is , that I’m not suggesting that that should be in all your communication, but you need to be aware of potential implications for something like do something crazy like invade Greenland.
I don’t see how that’s possible. , but we are in this, , very strange situation where. Truly anything is possible. , I was thinking about something I saw , on TV news at lunchtime today about the stock markets. , , all the stock markets are up [00:13:00] big time. , the major ones around the world are all up.
, what does that tell us about, , realities of, like, the cynical view from me certainly is that, well, as we know from history in wartime there certain. Types of business do extremely well, , , and some people benefit from that. We’re seeing something similar now, it seems to me. Communicators, , have an opportunity here to, , really demonstrate leadership in, , in advising the C-suite in particular, but not just the C-suite, , other parts of the business too, and external audiences, , with clarity in uncertain environment as far as they know, and they can earn some respect for doing that, , , being proactive as well, and I’m sure that’s happening in many companies.
So what else is there shell, do you think that, , communicators could do that we’ve not touched on? Oh,
Shel Holtz: quite, quite a bit. I do wanna say that, yeah, I, I haven’t looked at the markets today, but, , , they took quite a fall over a period of a couple of weeks. So this could be a correction too. Yeah.
Probably rather than a response to anything that’s making them feel [00:14:00] positive, but. , I also wanna come back to the DEI issue just for a second, because there is tremendous uncertainty around that. Not for the same reason, not because they’re changing their minds, but because the executive order and the, , the regulations that have been produced within the administration are ridiculously vague, , and legal teams and HR teams are having a lot of difficulty.
Interpreting them and deciding exactly what they need to do in order to not run afoul of them. , so there’s uncertainty there too. But in, in terms of, you know, what else communicators can do, the first thing we can do is put together response teams, , assemble the teams with, , the various.
Perspectives and expertise, both internal and some consultants. , where I work, we, we have lobbyists in, in each of the regions where we operate that are familiar with the governments, , of those regions. , and, , would probably wanna bring them into this, , so that they are, , on deck and ready, , when something is announced to craft a [00:15:00] response, , to make recommendations to assess the impact.
, and then, , those rapid response protocols for those teams to use need to be developed too. What are the guidelines for really fast responses to unexpected developments? , you know, and have to incorporate the research we’ve already done, , and the scenario planning that we’ve done around various potential issues that could emerge.
This also requires that we. Expand our monitoring. There may be emerging, , networks, , and platforms, , that people are using to, , discuss this and share information. , identify those and incorporate them into your media monitoring mix might even pay off, , your leaders are very busy people.
They’re running the organization. Yes, they’re getting the news and they have, . Groups that they’re a part of that share the news, but it’s still sort of cherry picked. It might be worthwhile if you could do this. , and here’s an opportunity to put, , generative AI to work, , to do a daily summary of where things are at on, .
[00:16:00] These issues, , what are the latest executive orders? , what are the latest changes that the administration has made to previously announced actions? , what are the reactions from various countries and other stakeholders? What are the impacts that are being reported in various industries, especially your own?
, and just a daily bullet point summary that says, this is where we’re at to help guide them. In their decision making. , but again, I think the primary thing, , , is what do we want our reputation to be dur during all of this? And then how do we couch the communication, the messaging that we are delivering in response to this in order to reinforce that reputation and to avoid getting engaged in divisive political arguments, , which wouldn’t be beneficial for most organizations.
Neville Hobson: Yeah. , that, that’s sound advice. I think. And I would just simply add to that, that, , this applies wherever you are in the world. If you are in Europe or in Asia, it doesn’t make any difference that you would do this [00:17:00] as it relates to the relevance of your organization, the country you are in. , I think the other bit to, to mention is if you are working for a global company, whether it’s American or any other, , you could also, .
Perform a really valuable service to others by translating global approaches that affect your business on a global level into locally resonant narratives that apply in that particular country you are in. Or if you’re responsible for communication, a number of countries to tailor it to. To help you communicate effectively in those other countries too, and in the languages too.
So, , there may be different trade tensions in some of those other countries, which is likely to be the case. This is not all very uniform, , what we’ve been seeing about 10% of this and 60% of that. It may be, , different , in in particular countries, particularly smaller ones, but. The effects are likely to be resonating around the world, and some of the things that , are very hard to predict indeed is exactly what and where.
, so hence the, , the, that adds uncertainty [00:18:00] to , the broader uncertainty about what all that this means. So. Opportunity for communicators, I think is how I summarize all of that. Shell in un very uncertain times, this is a moment to shine, if you will. Even if what you are doing is not kind of like headline making.
It’s valuable to those you serve in the organization in terms of the intelligence you give them that enables them to confidently talk about these issues. So that’s what you need to pay attention to.
Shel Holtz: Absolutely. And listeners, we would love to know how you are handling all of this in your organizations, both within the US and outside the us.
, how are you counseling your leaders? What kinds of messages are you sending to employees? What kinds of teams have you assembled? , we would love to report on that. If you would rather we don’t mention your name or your organization. That’s fine. We don’t need to. Just the case studies would be, , an amazing follow up and that will be a 30.
For this episode of for immediate [00:19:00] release.

The post FIR #457: Communicating Tariff Impacts appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It’s not just jobs that AI will affect. It’s the perception that employees have important expertise. After all, if AI can do the work, it’s easy to view employees’ special knowledge and experience as less important to the organization. Neville and Shel examine the steps communicators can take to continue to be viewed by leaders as subject matter experts who expertise brings value to the company. Also in this episode:

The publishing platform Ghost is enabling technology to embed it in the fediverse.
New studies reveal that bad communication is leading employees to leave their jobs.
A national UK newspaper has launched AI-curated news for “time-poor audiences.”
Unilever is stepping back from its purposeful activities, opting to invest heavily in influencer marketing.
Have fans of your brand given it a nickname? New research suggests you probably shouldn’t use it.
Dan York reports on the Internet Engineering Task Force’s work on a way for websites to signal what AI can collect and process.

Links from this episode:

The social web beta is here
Social web (beta)
Substack rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse
Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’
Ghost Connects Creators Across the Social Web
The Social Web Foundation
Communication breakdown: 61% of employees unlikely to stay in their job cite poor communication among top reasons
Survey Results: People take Pride in Their Jobs
Independent launching AI-powered news service for ‘time-poor audiences’
BBC News to create AI department to offer more personalised content
The LA Times’ AI Experiment Sparks Backlas
How Gen AI Could Change the Value of Expertise
LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2025: The 15 fastest-growing skills in the US
Companies’ biggest barrier to AI isn’t tech — it’s employee pushback. Here’s how to overcome it.
Farewell Photoshop? Google’s new AI lets you edit images by asking.
Unilever swaps social purpose for social media as new CEO calls brands “suspicious”
Ben & Jerry’s claims CEO was unlawfully fired over political issues
Why Brands Should Avoid Using the Catchy Nicknames Consumers Give Them
How nicknames may weaken brands

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

IETF’s AI Preferences Task Force (you are welcome to join the mailing list and participate)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hey everyone, and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4 5 6, the monthly long form episode for March, 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. We are delighted that you have chosen to join us for today’s review of really interesting material that has surfaced over the last month in the world of communication, business, and [00:01:00] technology.

We will start as all of our monthly episodes start with a look at the short midweek episodes that we have produced since the last monthly, which was episode number 452, but Neville, we have some comments that predate that episode that have come in, , since that last monthly episode in in February. , the first of these is a comment on episode 4 51 that comes to us from Sally Get who says Verizon Recruiters have a new tactic dangling the remote hybrid work Carrot.

At t is requiring workers to return to the office full-time. Rival Verizon is touting its more flexible opportunities as a way to add top talent to the V team per an email sent to at t employees business in Insider found that, , 1,200 open Verizon roles across the us, , 10 of which are remote and many of which require at least eight [00:02:00] in-office days a month.

But at and t isn’t budging telling Business Insider. It wants people who want to work in team environments with strong relationships and collaboration fostered by an office construct. So this battle over return to office, , and employees who desire to continue to work remote is ongoing.

Neville Hobson: That was a good comment from Sally.

It, it, , makes a lot of sense what she said. , let’s have a quick look at the, , at the episodes we’ve done, including the last monthly, because we got a few comments, right? She, , so we talked about quite a range of things in, , in 4 52, the long form monthly for February, YouTube. Shifting from mobile to tv.

Are we living the age of chaos communication? That’s a big topic, I must admit. , the impact of loosened content, moderation, policies, Gallup report, and what people want from leaders. Any value to AI generated research panels? We asked. It may be the end of the line for LinkedIn hashtags, we pondered and Dan York Tech report, , [00:03:00] Macedon and a few other things in there.

So a pretty big, , discussion field over the course of 90, more than 90 minutes. That one, I think it was Cheryl. And as you mentioned, we got some comments to that.

Shel Holtz: We did two of them, , one from Kristi Goodman who says, I have a note to add to your conversation about changing social channels. My nonprofit had a surprise last week.

We’re on a crazy number of social channels because as you know, it’s important to be where your people are with dwindling followers and engagement. Our plan at the start of the year regarding Twitter X was to maintain our main account, just to monitor it. We’d never advertised there. We expected to walk away soon.

But during a 20 hour state legislative committee that we were part of, advocates and reporters took to Twitter with lots of live tweeting, info sharing and even new followers, 85% of our engagements that day were on Twitter. I honestly don’t know what to think. And then as a bonus, she shared a photo from a few months [00:04:00] ago when Bryan Person drove to Austin for my office holiday breakfast.

He’s been producing IRA’s podcast since it launched in 2025, it says.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Terrific. Yeah, I saw Christie’s comments on LinkedIn. I think I left a reply , to it. , that picture of Brian’s neat though. He looked, , he looked quite, , alert and alive. Haven’t seen Brian for a while. It’s good to see that I haven’t

Shel Holtz: seen or spoken to him in a while.

I see a comment from him every now and then. , but he was one of the original. He was members of by our audience. He was, the second comment comes from Catherine Arrow who says, hello there, Neville must say it was wildly disconcerting to see myself tagged in your post and then listen to you read and discuss my article on the podcast.

I would’ve happily discussed it with you both and answered some of the questions you had on your mention of the Melbourne mandate. And I think that was actually my mention of the Melbourne mandate. Yes. That’s still up there on the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management site.

You can find it here. She shares the link, which we will add to the show [00:05:00] notes and that will take you to the old WordPress site, which still has a lot of material on it. It’s old now to the point that it’s almost wearing whiskers, but much of the thinking we did then I was, , the Global Alliance secretary at the time is as relevant as ever in today’s operating environment.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. Great. I did, I think I did respond to her comment as well on LinkedIn that I saw.

Shel Holtz: I believe you did.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So then, , 4 53, which we recorded on March the fourth. , that’s what, , we discussed some research inspired from, , by Duke University’s for Cure School of Business, , and explored why strategically roasting customers with humor and light-hearted banter can enhance brand loyalty and deepen customer connections.

In 4 54 that we recorded on March the 10th, we broke down the many implications for the practice of pr. The actions required to prepare brands to be targets of the same kind of treatment. Ukrainian [00:06:00] President Zelensky got at the hands of, of the Trump, of Trump vans and the complicit media that infamous White House press conference, and that’s a topic I still see being discussed a lot online.

And then in 4 55, the episode immediately prior to this one we’re recording. We did that on March 17th. We shared our thinking about the advice offered by Lulu Chang, messa founder and CEO at the agency roster in her manifesto, calling on leaders to skip the agency and go direct. In other words, traditional PR is dead again.

We had a good chat about that one. Didn’t we show?

Shel Holtz: We did. And interestingly, I just read a post by Jenny Dietrich talking about how in this very same environment, how important the peso model is and to engage in paid, earned, shared, and owned, , that they all have relevance and I importance. She didn’t mention MEVY at all, , but you could sense that presence there.

Anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. [00:07:00] Excellent. , we also did two new interviews, , in the preceding 30 plus days. , the first one, , which was something we were both looking forward to quite a bit. So we recorded it on, we published it on the 26th of February. That was with Steve Ruble, who is a big figure from the early days of social media and a stellar career over almost two decades with Edelman.

And Steve had a lot of insights, , on what we discussed, which broadly speaking, we covered the wide spectrum of artificial intelligence, media analytics, and the future of pr. , it was big and it’s definitely an interview worth, , listening to, or conversation I’d say covered about 40 minutes just over.

, and, , it’s worth the 40 minutes having a listen to. We also had, , a great conversation with, , Sam Michelson, , the CEO and founder of Five Blocks. And that’s, we asked him in the interview, , what the origin of that was. , so listen to the interview and you’ll get that. , [00:08:00] that was a great conversation about how AI search is changing reputation management.

So it was focused particularly on that area. , and , it really was great, how Sam shared his thinking. And we contributed to the overall conversation on how PA AI powered search is changing, , the whole landscape of how reputations are built, managed and perceived online. So we talked about that in some detail and discussed what companies and communicators need to do in that new landscape.

So it was definitely worthwhile. So that’s quite a lot of stuff we published in the last 30 Days show.

Shel Holtz: And we’re prolific, aren’t we? , , and in addition to the interviews, there’s also a new episode of Circle of Fellows up on the FIR Podcast Network. This is the monthly panel discussion, , featuring fellows from the International Association of Business Communicators.

I moderated the panel. It was on ethics in communication that went. Nicely with Ethics Month at I-I-A-B-C. [00:09:00] The the panelists were Todd Hattori, Jane Mitchell, Diane Eski, and Carolyn sel. The March Circle of Fellows is scheduled for this coming Thursday at noon eastern time. That’s March 27th. And this is, , an interesting one.

We’ve never tackled this topic before. It’s working with data in communication. And the panelists are Adrian Ley, Robin McCaslin, Leticia Vez, and Angela Seneca. So if you’d like to tune in, live and participate in that conversation, that’s coming up again, March 27th, this coming Thursday at noon. If you head over to the FIR Podcast Network, you’ll get the link to the YouTube live, , stream.

So hope you can join us for that. And we’re gonna take a short break, , to sell you something and we’ll be back with our stories of the month.[00:10:00]

One

Neville Hobson: of the more significant developments in the world of digital publishing happened last week, and it’s a move that caught the attention of creators, developers, and advocates from more Open Web ghost. The open source publishing platform that powers many independent blogs and newsletters has announced support for Activity Pup, the protocol that connects users and platforms across the Fedi us.

We’ve discussed Activity Pub and the Fedi US in previous episodes of this podcast. It means that every user of the Paid Ghost Pro platform now has the option to publish content on their ghost site that can be followed, shared, and replied to directly from platforms like Mastodon, pixel Fed Peer Tube, and others in the Federated Social web.

Once you’ve enabled the social web beater, your ghost account becomes a fed averse identity, for [00:11:00] example, at you, at your domain. That would be your web, your social web handle. Every post you publish is automatically pushed out as a federated object, and when someone on Mastodon replies to your post, that rep reply should show up as a comment on your blog.

Although I’ve not seen that yet myself, your blog essentially becomes a native part of the Fedi verse. Not just a website you have to visit, but a presence you can follow and interact with from anywhere in the network behind the scenes. This is part of a broader vision from Ghost to make the web more open and interoperable.

They’ve also co-founded a new nonprofit, the Social Web Foundation, with the goal of accelerating adoption of protocols like Activity Pub and pushing forward a decentralized model of content and social interaction. Ghost, CEO, John O. Nolan is one of the founders, and this latest feature release aligns perfectly with that mission.

It is also a clear point of differentiation from platforms like Substack, which operate in a much more closed [00:12:00] ecosystem. In fact, TechCrunch’s headlines said it best. Substack rival Ghost is now connected to the Fati verse that framing is telling. Ghost isn’t just a tool for publishing, is becoming part of a distributed, creator owned web where no single platform owns the relationship between publishers and their audience for communicators and digital, digital strategists.

This is an important moment. It signals a shift in how we think about publishing, reach and engagement. Instead of building audiences within walled gardens, there’s now a viable way to build a presence that is platform independent, but still deeply connected to where conversations are happening. As I wrote in a post on my New Ghost blog last week, I think this move is more than just a technical upgrade.

It’s a cultural signal, a sign that a growing number of people, creators, readers, and developers alike want to return to the principles that made the web powerful in the first place, openness into operability and user control. Indeed, ghost [00:13:00] noted in its announcement. If you’ve been writing things on the internet for a while, you might describe it as the return of the blogosphere.

You’ll know the significance of that. If you were here the first time around. I should mention that ghost newsletters aren’t yet part of the activity pub enabling in the beta only posts on your ghost website. I imagine embracing newsletters will come in the near future. Also, I mentioned earlier that the public beta is available to users on the subscription based hosted Ghost Pro Service Ghost has said that support for Activity Pub on self-hosted Ghost Pro will come with the release of the Ghost version six upgrade later this year.

So let’s dig into what all this means for communicators, for independent media, and for the direction we see social platforms evolving. She, what’s your take?

Shel Holtz: Well, a few thoughts on this. First, , I miss my RSS news reader from the first go around the bloggersphere. That was how we managed to avoid having to go visit each [00:14:00] blog that we followed independently, , to see what was new.

, and I think the fedi verse is kind of like that, but better, , given what’s coming with the ability for comments to move freely, , around the fedi verse, not just your most recent posts. , of course, I. Don’t think that this is the return of the blogosphere because it never went anywhere. It maybe a return to greater awareness and, and more utility of, of the blogosphere.

Yeah. Again, the challenge with the blogosphere and the reason that these walled garden social networks became so prominent is because setting up a blog is work. , and in many cases it’s also money. And a lot of people who felt I would like to share something, didn’t wanna go to that trouble, it wasn’t that important to them.

, or they just weren’t technically able or financially able. And along [00:15:00] comes, Facebook. Suddenly they’re able to share their cat photos and whatever’s on their mind without having to create something and maintain something and, and pay a monthly bill or two, , in order to do so. , I think that’s not going to change because of this, , the fact that you set up, , a ghost blog and a and a ghost newsletter is testament to your commitment to this that not everybody has.

That’s fine. There are people who wanna be consumers of this, and I think it’s gonna make it easier for people to consume and easier for people who engage with comments, which is great. Now, how successful will ghost be with this, , you know, Substack for all of the issues that it has still has a first mover advantage?

, it’s. Referenced now routinely in the news. I mean, I’m watching a mainstream news broadcast and they’re saying this person in his [00:16:00] substack, , this is becoming as common as it used to be to hear that so and so tweeted something. , it’s becoming sort of the defacto place where people are sharing their perspectives that get picked up in the mainstream media.

Can, can ghost overcome this? , perhaps I, I don’t know. , nobody has really overcome some of the other organizations who have capitalized on that first mover advantage. Think of Amazon, for example, but we’ll see, , this move into the fedi verse may give them the momentum they need

Neville Hobson: possibly. , I think, , it is interesting.

You are, you are absolutely right. I, I, , in what you say. but. I see this as much more than just newsletter publishing. , for instance, I moved from WordPress where I’ve been for 18 years, , to ghost. I shut up shop on my WordPress blog, , with consequences from that, , SEO, the historical, , history built up, , with, with Google, search count, , console, et cetera.

All of that, [00:17:00] I start from scratch. But for my goals were different. I’m not interested so much in that. I was interested more in the writing. And the thing that is different with Ghost, in my view, , even compared to WordPress, which is a, which is a better comparison, WordPress is also enabled. The activity pub via plugin, but ghosts is a way easier to set up.

In fact, there is no setup. It all happens. You just enable the beater and boom, you’re there. WordPress, you ought to publish a plugin. In my case, one of the reasons why I shifted was my hosting service would not support the plugin, wasn’t WordPress, it was the hosting service, refused to enable it, , ’cause they had something else going with a similar file name and so forth and so on.

So I thought, no, I’m outta here. I’m gone. , so there are other factors too, but that was a big one for me. But the major reason was simply the writing. I didn’t want to be a website admin anymore. I was a WordPress admin person more than I was a WordPress blogger. Fed up with it, didn’t want that anymore.

So I stopped the [00:18:00] old site’s still there as an archive. , but I’ve got a new site. The only difference with the domain name is now.io as opposed to.com. so, , that will appeal to many people. . It doesn’t yet support the activity pub on the self-hosted version of Ghost, because I could have done that.

I could have downloaded the software set up on a server just as you do with WordPress. I didn’t wanna do that anymore yet. I know two friends of mine are doing that. Well, you don’t have to do that word with WordPress

Shel Holtz: either, right? You could, you could set up on wordpress.com.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. But I had also had enough of the WordPress issues going on in WordPress with the CEO and his, , his legal fights with another, , reseller of WordPress, , hosting.

It was ugly and it also struck me, , that you’re constantly bombarded with upgrade to this. Hey, this new plugin is only $20 a month, all that daily. Literally enough. So I moved, , I don’t have any regrets, , after three weeks from the move, although I started the new presence back in January, so. In terms of where this is [00:19:00] going, , from a social web slash activity pub point of view, this is purely the beginning for Ghost.

, the Fedi verse has been there a while and Mastodon has been the big leader in that. I think now is the time for this sort of change to happen with another player making a firm commitment, which Ghost did quite a while ago. Now it’s public. The public beater is there. , they’ve had warm support from many of the obvious places.

The tech. Press, for instance, the likes of TechCrunch, verge, Vox, et cetera, all of those guys, , and a number of, , of their prominent, , influential voices who are set up shop on ghosts for both blog and newsletter. So I’m just, you know, one of the many individual users there. , I’ve had some great engagements via my new newsletter, which has been quite pleasing, more than I ever had with WordPress.

That’s no criticism of WordPress. They had a newsletter, but not to the same, , scale as how Ghost does it. So I think when the newsletter is supported in the activity, pug activity, [00:20:00] that’s when you’re gonna see. Bigger take up, I think from many of the big newsletter publishers, will that shift the needle in any form?

Right. It’s hard to tell. , I think the, , , reality as I see it certainly is that , from a communicator’s point of view, let’s say you are a, a communicator that in an organization looking at developments, , in this broad area, particularly with all the talk about, let’s look at blogging again, move away from these walled gardens.

Here’s another option you need to be considering. , it’s not too, it’s not. , much different to WordPress conceptually, , practically, it’s very different. WordPress has a huge ecosystem of hundreds, if not thou. In fact, it’s thousands of developers, plugin developers, theme developers. There’s theme marketplaces that work.

Ghost doesn’t have any of that, or very little of it. So there’s a lot more, , of, of the need for you to be hands-on, like in the very early days of blogging. , yep. You’re gonna have to write some h TM L. You’ve got JavaScript and CSS to get a handle on if you want, customize [00:21:00] stuff. If you don’t wanna do any of that stuff, there are resellers who will host it for you and take care of that.

In my case, I went to the hosted route to take care of the general installation of everything. I concentrate on the writing, and largely I’m doing that. I think this is an important move in terms of what is gonna happen with, , the fedi verse and, , enabling this idea, this appealing idea of wherever you are, , on a part of the Fedi verse that’s connected to everything else on the Fedi verse.

You can engage with content on a different service entirely, and guess what? Even blue sky. Is supported and that uses a different protocol to activity Pub. Now, that’s still, I think, an intent rather than an action because there’s a workaround you have to do, you’ve gotta follow somebody who’s developed a bridge to enable it.

And that’s not working too well at the moment, but I’m excited about that because of that brings blue sky in. There’s a barrier down immediately between tutor and protocols because it doesn’t really matter. You, the [00:22:00] average user won’t be bothered about, oh, it’s a d it’s at protocol and I’ve got activity.

But you don’t care about that. You shouldn’t even be thinking about that. You just write, publishing someone on Blue Sky leaves a comment on Blue Sky that shows up in your block. Reminds me very much of, , not the early days so much, , of the beginning to get developed. Days of WordPress. In particular, WordPress, , Shannon Whitley comes to mind immediately.

Mm-hmm. With his tweet chat plugin that enabled you to comment on Twitter. That would show up. In your WordPress blog post that you’ve commented on, and that was outstanding. An outstanding feature that all went away during the changes that went on, and, , a ton of other reasons. Now we’ve got something that has the promise to fulfill that intent, , in a way that you don’t have to do anything, , at all.

You as the you, as you as the blogger. , it would be great if once that’s connected to newsletters too, because then you’re gonna see all the barriers down in terms of engagement. And that should be of interest to [00:23:00] communicators in, in business B2B. This will come to the platform. , there are already a lot of businesses on Ghost already, , and some, .

There and others are experimenting. And that’s what I would advise community to take a look at Ghost with this thought in your mind that this is going to break down barriers across different platforms because of the fedi verse, whether it’s at protocol, whether it’s activity, pub, , work arounds, whatever.

It enables you to do things and enables others to connect with you. So I’m pretty excited about what’s coming.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I have an email newsletter for the company I am employed by, and it goes out once a month. We use MailChimp to Yeah, create and distribute, manage the subscriptions and the like. And I have been thinking about changing to, frankly, Substack, , just to get that cash littles on Substack, I

Neville Hobson: hear.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Well, it’s the cachet of the name because you’re now hearing it in the media. You, you, you’re now hearing it on podcasts, [00:24:00] people referencing, oh, on this person’s substack on that person’s, they don’t even say newsletter, they say Substack. On the other hand, , transitioning to Ghost would give us the ability to build a broader readership through.

The integration with the Fedi verse. , on the other hand, you have to wonder how many people hear Ghost and go, well, what kind of rinky dink outfit is this? , for people who haven’t heard of it , and don’t know what it is. , just that reputation , and it’s not, the substack doesn’t have some reputational challenges that they’re facing, as we have mentioned.

Seriously here, there are people who have, have left over some of this, but, but still, yeah, I would have to stop and think about what’s best for my organization. Sure. , if I were gonna make that transition.

Neville Hobson: I, I would say I have a simple view. Shell, frankly, and it’s easy for me as an independent person. I don’t work for a company.

I don’t have big organizational issues to consider, but I look at that the same as I would look at XI definitely would not wanna be in [00:25:00] a toxic place like that. Now, I’m not saying to sub sex toxic, I don’t know that. I do know though a number or a handful, let’s say, including a couple of prominent ones who have left Substack and have joined Ghost because they do not wanna be in a place that has, as I mentioned, the N word, , a number of people, , allegedly, , find, , tuned into that kind of, of thinking.

So, , I think your point is valid, though. It’s got. Name recognition right now, but hey, listen, everyone had that issue when they started out and time will tell whether they’ve got traction. I believe Ghost has serious traction. They’ve got, , a good presence. They’ve got a, a, a nonprofit foundation behind them.

They’ve got money, they’ve got support, and they are approaching it absolutely the right way. , unlike WordPress for instance, which I think about quite a bit still. So I think. The newsletter is, , important. , it’s definitely comparable to Substack. It’s not comparable to MailChimp or any of those other ones.

It was a newsletter only via email. [00:26:00] This is newsletter and web via a publishing mechanism on the, on the server that you host your blog on. It’s all takes care taken care of in the background. It is very much a social web approach to it all, and this then enables this, , beta service.

, it’s, , I think as I mentioned, , maybe I should restate. It’s a very early beta, the stuff not enabled yet, so I think you should test it out. , test out Substack too, if you have time. , it’s

Shel Holtz: interesting. I don’t know if either of them have corporate clients. I mean, , they very well may, but it’s not something I’ve, well, it depends how

Neville Hobson: you’re defining corporate clients.

I mean, there’s a number of public listed companies on there. There’s a handful of big media properties using Ghost as there are on Substack. So, you know, take a pick.

Shel Holtz: Well, let’s move along and talk about jobs because people leave them, , they leave them for all kinds of reasons, but the one we hear about most is that people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses.

We may need to put a new spin on that. [00:27:00] According to a recent survey from the Grossman Group, people may actually be quitting because the company doesn’t communicate well. The survey found 61% of employees who say they’re unlikely to stay in their current jobs. Cite poor communication is one of the top reasons why that’s not a marginal number.

That’s the majority of employees who are at risk of walking out the door, pointing directly at communication breakdowns, and it’s not the first time we’ve heard this. Alert Media’s 2025 Workplace Survey Report finds that employees are craving more consistent, clear communication, especially when it comes to their safety and wellbeing.

One of the standout findings from the report. Psychological safety depends heavily on good communication, and when that’s lacking, trust falls apart. We’re not just talking about the usual day-to-day work cranked out by professional communicators. You know, HR emails, articles on the internet weekly newsletter.

What employees are flagging isn’t always about [00:28:00] channels or campaigns. It’s about day-to-day interactions. It’s about the way their leaders talk to their teams. It’s how transparently companies share bad news. It’s whether employees feel listened to and included in the loop. These are all things that internal communicators should be focused on if the company has an internal communications function at all.

In the Grossman Group research, a full 70% of respondents said that when communication is poor, it negatively impacts their productivity. Close to the same number. 69% say it drags down morale. That’s a direct line to disengagement, quiet, quitting, and ultimately attrition the cost. Well, Gallup estimates that low engagement, much of which stems from communication issues, costs the global economy $8.8 trillion.

That’s trillion with a T. Now, there’s a wrinkle. In the Grossman survey results, it found that employees overwhelmingly believe communication is [00:29:00] everyone’s responsibility. Yet they also made it clear that their number one ask is for better communication from wait for it, their direct managers. In fact, that was the top request, even more than hearing from the CEO or the leadership team.

So maybe employees do leave their managers, but specifically the managers who can’t or won’t communicate effectively. Now, another thread worth pulling comes from a recent CNBC piece highlighting what they call a vibe shift around layoffs. For years, companies could lay off workers with a boilerplate statement about market conditions, and that was that.

Now employees and the broader public are demanding transparency. That is, they want better communication. They wanna know why certain people were cut, how the decisions were made, and what leadership is doing to support those who are impacted. Anything less feels disingenuous and fuels a toxic narrative inside and outside the organization.[00:30:00]

Now, I find it disheartening that companies are still doing this. I I, I communicated all of this kind of information during layoffs going back to the 1980s. What can internal communicators do about the situation today? First, we can stop thinking of our job as just publishing information. I know I harp on this a lot, but I still see a lot of communication departments, that’s what they do.

Professional communicators should be training, coaching, and empowering people, managers to communicate better, especially in high stakes, high emotion moments. Think layoffs, reorgs, workplace safety in incidents, this is where trust is either built or broken. Second, we need to listen more and help others listen better.

Employees wanna feel heard. That means internal comms teams should be building better feedback loops, making space for upward communication and encouraging open dialogue between teams and their leaders. I’m reading a book right now called Leading the Listening [00:31:00] Organization just so I can figure out how to better do that.

Third, we can help shape the culture of communication by modeling clarity, empathy, and transparency in everything we produce. Interestingly, even in companies where morale is high, , consider North Carolina State University, where a recent survey showed strong pride among the staff, there are still gaps.

Fewer than half of the employees at NC State said they felt fully informed about leadership decisions. Pride and positivity don’t eliminate the need for better communications. If anything, they underscore the importance of maintaining that trust through consistent, honest communication. We’re in a moment where communication isn’t just a soft skill, it’s a retention strategy, it’s a risk mitigator, and for internal communicators, it’s an opportunity to step up, not just as messengers, but as the strategic enablers of better leadership at every level of the organization.

Neville Hobson: [00:32:00] It makes a lot of sense, I think. , this is something we talk about frequently, isn’t it? And here we are again with, with this about managers about better, better, better naming them to communicate, et cetera. I just wonder why it doesn’t happen. I mean, you’ve seen that

Shel Holtz: interesting

Neville Hobson: because

Shel Holtz: the survey indicates that for all the years we’ve been talking about this, the needle doesn’t seem to have moved.

Neville Hobson: It doesn’t, and I’m, I’m also thinking about Edelman’s trust barometer, this, this area features in there and in terms of general lack of trust, but you threw out a lot of metrics in that, in that narrative there. Shell, so let me ask you if, what would you say are the top three things communicators need to do about this if it’s enabling managers to be effective communicators themselves?

What do communicators need to do specifically?

Shel Holtz: Well, communicators, first of all, need to get the buy-in from their leaders. That what they are there for is not just to inform employees of what’s going on. This is more than corporate journalism. This is a department. [00:33:00] Whose expertise is to improve communication throughout the organization, and that means all kinds of communication.

How many communicators out there are partnered with their training departments, you know, learning and development? How many of them are working with managers around communication issues that they’re facing, either in their teams or in dealing with other teams? This is what we should be doing. We should be facilitating the flow of information and knowledge and helping managers communicate effectively two way with the members of their teams, , at all levels, , of the organization, frontline managers , , and senior leaders.

, we, we really need to help organizations become effective at communication at all levels, not just on the intranet and across email. Hmm. So that’s the big thing.

Neville Hobson: Okay, so, , how do we then avoid [00:34:00] having this conversation again in six months? Then what do you say? What do you say to that?

Shel Holtz: I don’t think there’s any way we can avoid having this conversation in six months. , I, I think that there are, , organizations that are led by people who think that communication should be writing nice stories about, , the wonderful things that are happening in the organization that nobody’s going to read.

, and that’s great. , that, that that’s all we need. , you know, we talk about how the internal comm star rose during the pandemic because companies had to lean on communicators when everybody was working from home and we. Weren’t accustomed to reaching people and engaging people that way. Well, it’s been five years and that star is falling again, I’m afraid.

, and I think it’s incumbent upon us as the communicators to make the case that what we do really is about retention and risk mitigation, and [00:35:00] building engagement and improving productivity. , and we just have to connect those dots for the, for the leaders of the organization so that they can take advantage of what communication brings to the table.

Neville Hobson: A call to action for internal communicators. I hear there, shell, that’s a, that’s a good one. So, , let’s go back to something we haven’t really talked about yet in this episode. Ai, we knew it was coming. It was coming. This is a interesting, to me, one of the more interesting developments, , recently and how traditional media is experimenting with ai.

And this comes from the British newspaper, the Independent, which, , has announced the launch of a new AI powered news service called Bulletin. Designed specifically for what they describe as time poor audiences. The idea is simple but compelling. Use artificial intelligence specifically Google’s Gemini AI model to generate ultra brief news summaries each no [00:36:00] longer than 140 words.

These summaries are created by rewriting original reporting from the independent, or content from news agencies. The key point though, is that journalists review and check every single summary before it goes live. They’ve hired a dedicated team of seven staff to support bulletin, and the goal is to offer readers a fast, accurate briefing service while maintaining journalistic integrity.

It’s part of the independence, broader strategy to make its journalism more accessible to busy readers. Those they say who are juggling long work hours, family responsibilities, or are just overwhelmed by information overload. Bulletin will launch at the end of March on bulletin news with initial sponsorship from the social platform.

We are eight, , that includes investor and former English Premier League footballer Ferdinand among its backers. As part of that partnership, the independent will produce exclusive content for we are eight as well. What makes the Bulletin particularly interesting, [00:37:00] I think, is how the publisher is positioning this effort.

Christian Broughton, the Independence managing director, said the journalists themselves were closely involved in shaping the AI workflow, ensuring they remain in control of the content editor-in-Chief Jordy. Greg describes Bulletin as brilliant shorthand for the independence journalism, a supplement, not a replacement for the deeper Coverage newsletters, podcasts and documentaries.

And of course, the independence move isn’t happening in isolation as other UK publishers like Newsquest and Reach are also experimenting with AI assisted reporting. Others in the US and elsewhere are also experimenting. Still, the independence in the UK seems intent on framing bulletin as a human led initiative supported by AI rather than the other way around.

So is this a new model for trusted, scalable journalism in an age of short attention spans and algorithmic overload? Or is it a step towards automating too much of what journalists do? [00:38:00] What do you think she,

Shel Holtz: well, it could be either one. Depends on how they go about it. It’s all in the execution. But you’re right, there is a lot of AI infiltrating the world of journalism these days.

And what I find most interesting about it is that it is uneven.

It,

Shel Holtz: there don’t seem to be trends. It all seems to be. Ideas that are generated internally and implemented so that you have different publications using AI for different things. And some of them could be really good for journalism, some of them not so much.

For example, the Los Angeles Times has introduced an AI driven labeling system to flag articles that take a stance or are written from a personal perspective. Their billionaire owner, , introduced this in a letter. , it’s called the Voices Label, and it applies to opinion pieces along with news, commentary, criticism, and reviews.

Some [00:39:00] articles also include AI generated insights, which summarize key points and present alternative viewpoints. , this is not. Making a lot of people happy. , Matt Hamilton, vice chair of the LA Times Guild said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, we don’t think this approach, AI generated analysis unvetted by editorial staff will do much to enhance trust in the media.

And earlier results have raised concerns. , the Guardian, , highlighted an LA Times opinion piece about AI generated historical documentaries where the AI tool claimed the article had a center left bias, and suggested that AI democratizes historical storytelling. Another flagged article covered California cities that elected Ku Klux Klan members in the 1920s.

The AI generated counterpoint stated that some historical accounts frame the Klan as a cultural response to societal change rather than a hate driven movement, which I suppose is not [00:40:00] necessarily an accurate but awkwardly positioned as an opposing view. , then you have, , El Folio, an Italian newspaper, , published.

In addition, entirely generated by ai. , the Associated Press has collaborated with Google to integrate realtime news updates into Google’s Gemini Chatbot Time Magazine. Introduced time ai, , platform that enhances journalism. Engagement using, , generative ai. It offers personalized and interactive storytelling experiences.

Reuters, , employees generative AI across various aspects of news production, including reporting, writing, editing, production, and publishing. But they do disclose when content is primarily or solely AI generated. ESPN began publishing AI generated recaps for women’s soccer games. , the Garden Island, , newspaper in Kauai, Hawaii introduced AI avatars named James and Rose to deliver live broadcasts by discussing [00:41:00] pre-written news articles.

, courts uses chat GPT to write hundreds of articles every day on securities and exchange filings. , and various news outlets are using AI for things like generating interview questions, predicting churn, transcribing interviews, suggesting headlines and proofreading. It is all over journalism and to.

Argue that is somehow inappropriate or unethical. , I think is, , the metaphor that we have used on this show more times than we probably should have is King Knut trying to hold back the tide. , it’s going to become a defacto part of journalism. And one of the reasons this makes sense is if you think about the budget cuts that especially print journalism has been experiencing, if they can get AI to pick up some of that drudgery load, , so that the reporters can focus on doing the reporting, you know, the, the shoe leather on the streets, , that’s to their benefit.

So yeah, I think you’re gonna see some [00:42:00] newspapers, , and other media outlets succeed with this. , they’re gonna find the right balance. They’re gonna keep the human exactly where they should be in the loop. , others, , like the LA Times, maybe not so much.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, , I, that’s how I was it too. I think, , given the information , I’ve found about what the independence planning to do and the key part of the role of journalists in the production of the content that is, generated with the help of the AI is absolutely crucial to this.

, you mentioned courts. , I was reading a courts piece recently, and it was quite clear to me that this was not, this, no journalist has written this content, and I just wonder, again, I don’t know this, but I just wonder, do they have actual humans checking the stuff before it gets out? I’m assuming they would.

, therein lies, I think, interestingly with

Shel Holtz: courts, they, they temporarily shut it down because of inaccuracies and then brought it back, expanding it to publish longer articles with disclaimers about the potential AI related, , hallucinations that. You could read that. [00:43:00] Yeah.

Neville Hobson: But that you see that that’s not good enough.

, totally not because , you get that , with the raw prompt response from chat GPT at the bottom, every single one. You know, it may be inaccurate. You need to check it. What what you need to do is, , is to create content. And you might use the ai, , in the case of the independent to gather, , the stories that, it has been asked to do.

And, and assuming it’s prompted in the right way, if that’s how they’re going about it, to, , create the content that you, the human then can edit. And you are the subeditor if you like. , let’s call it the verifier, the checker, whatever. You’ve gotta do all that too. , and so you don’t actually have to write the story.

, which is again, a, a discussion topic that would take us down a huge avenue, huge road , if we wanna get about into that in this episode, which we don’t. That’s another day, I think. , but, but I think. You are right. It’s a tsunami that’s approaching, this is going to impact journalism and questionably.

So in good ways, certainly, and in not so good ways. [00:44:00] Certainly, , the not so good ways I, I suspect is likely to be self-inflicted from within the industry more than anything else, by those who see an easy way to, , replace people or to not have to worry about increasing budgets to do the things they wanna do.

They can employ an AI to do this. And, , part, I suspect partly the failure of those organizations are gonna be mixed because of the fact the human people, the humans who need to read the content, pay money for it, are not gonna do that. There’s likely also to be regularly pushback in, in significant numbers of countries so that they’ll be threatened all those ways.

, there will be protests no matter what. There will be people who think this is a very bad idea. Totally. And the bad idea, I, I think is definitely the case for those who do not. Go through the, the, the right process to do this, which the independent seems to be planned. I’m looking forward to seeing the first edition.

That website, they’ve, they’ve got bulletin news. I took a look at it, , just before we started recording and [00:45:00] all it gave me was a completely blank page. Nothing on the page at all. I looked at the page source and there was nothing there either. So I dunno what’s happening with that. Maybe it’s just not live yet.

Shel Holtz: Well, , it’s late in March if the out, but it’s not

Neville Hobson: the end of March. Well, indeed. But if the story’s out there, they, they, they would be wise, I would say, to prepare something saying coming soon or whatever it might be. So, , but I’m gonna keep a cosign it because I’m keen to see how they’re doing this.

I’m like every average Joe, I’m time poor like everyone else, but I’d put time into this just to see how it is. , I did ask Gemini myself, how can I do this, do something like this if I wanted to. , be a, , , kind of new summary publisher. And to make it easy, I said, you know, how would I produce a newsletter that summarizes everything I’ve published on my website in the preceding 30 days with little summaries of all of this?

And it told me quite clearly how I could do this. The only thing missing is the bit I’m keen on, is it automating it? I don’t wanna have to create a template and then [00:46:00] copy and paste. No, no, no. What’s what’s the point of that? I’m looking for something that would enable me to create something additional that I can then review and approve and publish.

, there are ways to do it, and there are third party tools you could do. The Zapier comes to mind, but there’s two manuals. So I look into it further, I think. But if the independent is doing this, therefore there is a means. It may be that it’s a cost and the specialists you need to bring on board, but I could see this coming, , in a big way.

, and here in the uk, , reach is a, a newspaper publisher that owns a number, a significant number of regional newspapers, as well as a number of the national tabloid dailies. And, uh, they’ve been employing. AI tools to create some of their reporting for quite a while. So when you read in my local newspaper down here in Somerset, for instance, about, you know, this restaurant in that town has just published a new menu with their summer offers of nice food and all that stuff.

It makes a story. , I , don’t know. And I’m if, if you are listing here, correct me if I got this wrong, but I bet you an [00:47:00] AI did that, not a journalist. So, , some of the writing also you get suspicious about the quality of the writing. So you make is this AI generated. So I think the more you can do this where their, their approach, it seems to me, , is very good.

AI is the assistant for the human. So these are human led initiative, assisted by ai, not the other way around. That’s the way to do it in my book.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. I’m untroubled by the notion of articles in the mainstream press that have been written by ai. If there are articles that don’t require great writing and the securities filings.

Articles is a great example that hits some government database that you’re monitoring. The basic facts are there. The model has been trained on tens of thousands of articles about securities filings, and if it can share the facts accurately, , somebody does a quick review to make sure it’s right, why not?

Does that need a Pulitzer Prize winning journalists to crank that article out? I [00:48:00] what’s important is the information be shared timely among people who are going to make investment decisions based on these types of things, not how well it was written. Have those reporters go out and do the writing on the stuff where it matters.

Some of this writing just needs to be good enough.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah, you could be right. I’m not saying I disagree with you. I, and I don’t necessarily think I fully agree with you, but I, I think the, to me it’s like, , you need to be sure that what you are reading, , or consuming, , , in a different way of looking at it, is authentic.

And that doesn’t mean the literal use of the word authentic, , is, is it what they say they do. , so if they’re using AI to, to help them, they need to disclose that somewhere. And yes, I know, I hear the arguments from people saying, no, you don’t need to do. Yes you do. We are not yet in a stage where you don’t need to help people understand that you are genuine, , and that you are approaching this the right way.

Because if you didn’t do this, that news that someone will find interest wouldn’t get reported. ’cause you don’t have enough [00:49:00] journalists to do that. So that answers a big. Part of the question about how are we gonna, , ensure that we’re fulfilling a social purpose, , even though we’re a business, of course, but the purpose in society, to report on the news of interest in your niche, in your community, in your geography, whatever it might be.

When we don’t have enough journalists, we are stuck with cashflow problems and so forth, and we’re probably gonna close down. So that is one of the reasons why I remember reading this about Reach a year or so back, why they were doing this for local reporting and indeed sports reporting in particular.

So, , the thing about, , business results that you talked about where it’s just data that makes it easier for it to be, , reported on by an ai because it won’t necessarily have, here’s what x, Y, Z company did, and they reported the loss. It therefore means that for their market position going forward, X the human rights that bit, unless the AI’s.

The means to do that, which requires a human to be involved at that [00:50:00] stage. So that’s taking it down a slightly different avenue. It seems to be, again, this is a huge topic. Shell, , and I think it’s great to talk about it like this because there is no, , silver bullet answer. There’s no, this is the way you do this.

And there there are 15 other ways you could do it too. But I, broadly speaking, your point I agree with though is that, , there are things that, , are worthy of reporting in the media that don’t justify that Pulitzer Prize winning journalist to be doing it. , so in which case you’ve got a bot to do it.

Yeah, that makes sense. But the human, and it doesn’t have to be the pulitz surprise winner, , although why shouldn’t it be needs to revise it and authenticate it and verify the story. So the human must still be involved.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I you need to have that copy editor role for sure. , but yeah, I don’t need authenticity, , for certain types of, you know, two paragraph.

Purely factual articles. I know I’ve mentioned this multiple times, but even before chat, GPT was released in [00:51:00] November, 2022, , there was Associated Press using I think writer or Jasper to crank out articles about high school baseball games. They had never had the reporting staff to go out and cover these games before, but the stats were recorded in some accessible database, and now you could just turn the AI loose, train it on baseball score stories and let it.

Scrape up the, the statistics from the game and write the story. , somebody edits it , and off it goes, who cares? I, it doesn’t need to be authentic. I need to know if my kid’s team won. , and you know, if, if it’s a question of are we gonna send reporters out to do this, or are we gonna send out to cover the government scandal, I’m gonna let the AI write the high school sports stories and send the reporter out to report on the government scandal.

That’s where the authenticity is required.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, disagree. Sorry, I, I I need the authenticity for everything, no [00:52:00] matter what it is. In fact, it’s, well, the thing is that too, before the AP only a two paragraph report, I wouldn’t read it anyway. ’cause I want the meaning. I don’t just want the score, I want the meaning.

But before the

Shel Holtz: AP started doing this, they weren’t covering those games at all because the resources weren’t there to do it.

Neville Hobson: No, indeed. So the resource there is now to do it properly, in which case do it properly is, is what I would say. So yeah, the authenticity is important. Like I said at the beginning, not the literal meaning of the word authenticity.

So can I trust what the, what what I read in print, metaphorically speaking is, is the truth or is accurate or is factually correct? How do I know that? And

Shel Holtz: what’s going to damage your credibility is if enough of those articles turn out to be inaccurate. Which is why you still need somebody checking, but, and hence you

Neville Hobson: need the authenticity.

Exactly. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: But do you need somebody to go to the game? Take notes, sit in the press box and, and take notes during the game and file the game. It depends on the game game. Well, not, not a high school game for sure. Not a regular season game. High game. No. Depends. School game. It depends on,

Neville Hobson: on what the report’s gonna be.

If it’s a lot of, of analysis and [00:53:00] prediction and so forth that you, you’d expect. So I was looking at a report about, , just, just over, just over, over this weekend about the recent, , rugby championships in Europe, the Six Nations, and a terrific report I read on, , one of the news on the sports websites that was full of, I could tell the writer really knew this topic exceptionally well, but the start of writing this tone, all that stuff was engaging.

It was entertaining. That’s what I wanna read. Not a dry two paragraph. That’s simply this is what happened. And at the 46th minute this guy did that and they went ahead and they won the championship. No, I can get that anywhere. Get a blogger to give me that source. I want to read that. Breadth and depth of information.

Well, I, I guarantee therefore guarantee I, I would pay pay for that newspaper and I would subscribe to it.

Shel Holtz: I guarantee you the people who are interested in how the high school team did, will read any story versus reading no story. Uh, and, and that’s the option that these publications have right now.

Neville Hobson: There we go.

Such as the landscape. She,

Shel Holtz: you know, and if it’s a feature story, , by all means, [00:54:00] but if it’s really just, , there were nine innings and here’s what happened. , I, I honestly don’t care how that got written, as long as it’s accurate. Fair enough. And like I say, I think the issues will arise if enough of those end up being wrong.

, not, or just simply people need them

Neville Hobson: not worth your time reading. ’cause it’s crap basically.

Shel Holtz: Well, again, if you care about the score of the game, that’ll be fine. As long as it’s good enough.

Neville Hobson: Okay. That’s a

Shel Holtz: good, good point. And we’ll move on because we have more ai. Exactly. We have more AI to discuss, , starting with a brief report from Dan York.

Dan York: Greeting she Neville And fr this is all around the world. It’s Daniel coming at you from the Vancouver British Columbia airport where I was planning to have a much, , longer time to give a report. But, , I didn’t. So the thing I will just say is I was spent the week in Bangkok, Thailand at the Internet Engineering Task force, meeting 1 22 about internet standards.

And there’s some interesting stuff going on this, , this time around. What’s happening with [00:55:00] just sort of the evolution of, of encryption and of protecting the web in so many different ways? There were a lot of, , interesting discussions. One thing to pay attention to is there’s some new work going on about AI preferences, which, if you’ve worked with websites for a while, you’ll know about the robots txt file that you use to go , and indicate that you want certain parts of your site, , blocked or not.

, in this case, it’s a new one, which will allow you to indicate whether you want certain parts of your site to be scraped by AI engines or not. , it’s a new bit of work. It’s called AI preferences. It’s something that’s happening, it’s emerging, it’s being standardized or it’s being developed.

Yet after that, it needs to then be implemented in browsers and things like that. So there’s a ways off to go, but it’s something to just, you know, there is work being made done to pay attention to this. Another big, , little area of work was, , some work around what’s happening with the World Summit on the Information Society or WSIs plus 20 review that’s happening this, this, , summer [00:56:00] in Geneva.

Well and on throughout the year. Something else to pay attention. If you look up WSIs plus 20 WSIS plus 20, you can read a bit about what’s going on this year as far as some of that. That’s all I’ve got time for today. I’m just gonna give a quick little report like this and send it off to you guys. , as always, you can find more in my audio writing at Dan York.

Me. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. Sorry to hear about your flight delays and I’m sorry it kept you from recording a full report, but, , did enjoy your discussion of AI preferences. The standard. We will have the link to the Internet Engineering Task force group that is working on that and, , very interested to see how that develops and whether there will be widespread.

Acceptance of it among the publishers of sites who would be affected by it. But let’s keep talking about ai, because the conversation around AI and the workplace is shifting and that’s happening [00:57:00] fast. We’re no longer just wondering if AI will impact our jobs. There’s a new question floating around. What happens to the perception of expertise when AI starts performing the tasks that we once, , relied on to prove our value?

That question is central to a recent Business Insider article, which outlines how generative AI is replacing entry level work that used to serve as a critical foundation for learning and advancement tasks, like writing first drafts, generating visual concepts, and summarizing research. These were once the building blocks of professional expertise, and they’re now handled with just a few prompts and clicks.

It’s efficient, but it’s also potentially destabilizing both for employees trying to climb the ladder and for leaders trying to hold onto their status as, as thought leaders or subject matter experts. At the same time, LinkedIn’s 2024 Future of Work Report adds another layer. AI skills are now the [00:58:00] fastest growing in demand skills globally across nearly every industry.

In fact, AI literacy isn’t a niche specialty anymore. It’s becoming table stakes. The report also found that job postings mentioning AI attract nearly 17% more applications than those that don’t. In short. Everyone’s looking to work with and learn from people who understand ai. There is even a study that found that 60% of C-Suite executive executives are actively looking for new jobs, and they’re looking at companies that are accelerating their moves into ai.

They wanna work at companies that are embracing artificial intelligence. So if AI is the new baseline, how do communicators and the leaders we support stand out? How do we maintain the perception of expertise when the tools we once relied on to demonstrate it are now automated? Take Google’s new AI image generation tool.

This is just released within the last few days with a few typed instructions. [00:59:00] Users can perform edits that used to take a skilled Photoshop pro hours. The craft of visual design is being democratized, but does that mean the designer is less value or is there value simply shifting from execution to discernment, from mechanics to meaning?

This is where communicators come in first. We need to help reframe what expertise looks like. In the age of AI expertise is no longer about being the fastest or the most technically proficient. It’s about context judgment and the ability to connect the dots. Internal comms teams can spotlight leaders who are doing just that.

Not just using AI, but thinking with it. Making smarter calls, guiding ethical use, understanding limitations. That’s real expertise and we need to make it visible. Second, we can help organizations avoid the trap of hollow leadership. When AI handles all the grunt work, it’s tempting for some leaders to coast, [01:00:00] but employees still wanna see evidence of strategic thinking, clarity, and vision.

Communicators can help leaders show their work, how they got to a decision, what alternatives they considered, and why they chose a particular path. That’s especially important in an environment where employees are already skeptical of AI’s impact on their careers. There’s a new survey from the AI tool writer that found two out of three executives say generative AI adoption has led to tension and division within their companies, and 42% say it’s tearing their company apart.

The Business Insider article points out that skepticism and resistance are growing, particularly when AI is introduced. Without transparency, communicators have a key role to play in framing these transitions as opportunities, not threats. That means telling stories of upskilling, sharing case studies of people who’ve reinvented their roles, and reinforcing that human value still matters.

Third [01:01:00] communicators should champion the human plus AI model, not human versus ai. That could mean creating content that shows how real employees are collaborating with AI tools to enhance their work. It could mean coaching managers to acknowledge the role AI plays without diminishing their own contributions.

The perception of expertise now includes the ability to use AI well, but it also includes knowing when not to. Finally, we should remember that communication itself is evolving. AI can help with drafting and distribution, but it can’t replicate cultural intelligence, can’t read a room, can’t build trust.

Communicators who master AI will become more efficient. Communicators who master both AI and human nuance will become indispensable. So while AI may be rewriting how expertise is demonstrated, it’s not erasing expertise. The opportunity for communicators and leaders alike is to redefine and reassert what expert [01:02:00] leadership looks like in a world where the machines are catching up.

And as the LinkedIn data shows the future belongs to those who are fluent in both technology and trust.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I don’t have any doubt that that is true. Uh, listen to what you’re saying. I, I’m just what? Was popping into my mind was, , these are great guidance points, but you know, for a communicator, for instance, to acquire the kind of skills you outlined, , the thought in my mind is where would that person go to If there’s no, if, if he or she is the kind of point person and there’s nowhere else that he or she can look at, where do they go to to find out about how to acquire those skills?

And that’s questions I’m sure many would be asking an organization. Where do you think, well, I think

Shel Holtz: if you accept the notion that the communication profession is being redefined as all of this unfolds, then the career path has to be redefined as well. Exactly. , I don’t [01:03:00] have an answer for what that is.

, I haven’t frankly given it a lot of thought. , but if I were to, I might be able to. Conjure up some thoughts on what a new career path is, when it’s not gonna be writing those first drafts and, and doing the research summaries that that, that the PR interns and the entry level communicators used to do.

We’re gonna have to rethink this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I was reading the Business Inside piece that, , particularly the section that’s got the subtitle, AI Beyond the IT department that, , talked about this and given the example of Colgate Palm, , that was looking to. , developing an AI strategy. They were looking at their corporate values and code of conduct around workplace culture.

So they seem to be taking this, I think, , as a foundational approach. , they quote someone there saying that everyone should be able to decide to themselves how AI is going to impact their own job and their own tasks. Maybe that’s something that needs to happen. I’ve not heard anyone talk [01:04:00] about that when I see conversations happening about, helping employees get up to speed about how to use AI in the workplace and so forth.

But that. Tech typically tends to focus still, I think, on generative AI and the, the outputs as opposed to outcomes. It just what you get out of an a generative AI when you ask it to do something. , but how is it gonna impact their job? And maybe that’s something I could see as being a really useful way to go about getting consciousness on the, on the, on the broader topic than what am I going to use AI for?

Or, , these are the, I I’ve heard about all this, but deeper than that even. So, , again, going back to the business side of piece and, , Colgate Palm example, they give, , they talk about, they have an AI hub. Focuses on job specific use cases like sorting data or writing copy rather than technicalities, like AI model types.

So employees can build AI assistance that suit their needs. The Colgate tells employees to think of it as if they’re providing instructions [01:05:00] to an intern. I mean, , these are very empathetic approaches. It seems to me that, , why aren’t more people doing this, I wonder, or they are.

Shel Holtz: Think they are. , at least that’s my experience.

I was, , frankly blown away. I have to tell you, I’m on the AI committee at the company where I work, and we had our first meeting and , the senior VP who put this committee together was very deliberate in making sure that it represented the entire organization. There are people from the field, , who are part of this, , and skeptics as well.

He made sure that it was not populated just by people who were enthusiastic. But you know, one of the first exercises was to go around and talk about how you’re using it. And I had been under the impression that very few people were adopting it. People were skeptical, people were nervous, people just didn’t have the time.

People didn’t think it could do anything for them. Everybody was using it for something. And many for. You know, very specific [01:06:00] construction related activities that I had never even considered. , I was floored that so many people were using it, and I think this happened in large part because the company gave them the permission to, we have been very forthright, , in, in telling people that we want you to experiment with this.

We want you to figure out how this can help you in your job. We’re not going to be able to tell you, you’re going to have to do your own r and d and evidently a lot of people are.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’m not surprised to hear that. , you tend to encounter it when something like you’ve described takes off or starts happening where you get people together and everyone is then telling their own stories about how they’re doing things.

Or you, as you pointed out, you find out that you are in this group and everyone is using iron one, one way or another. So I, I suspect you’re right that that’s, that is happening in lots of organizations. It’s not talking about it too much. What people are talking about though is the need that, that needs to be something like that needs to be in place.

And in the [01:07:00] conversations I’ve seen, many are talking about, it’s signifying it’s not happening in their own workplace. So it’s very uneven. Good opportunity, I think to, , for somebody, a consulting firm or someone 80, , someone else even to come up with some kind of program that is replicable in, in organizations that kickstart this kind of thing.

, in this example, again, on the inside of this business, I had a piece about Colgate Parli. It doesn’t say how they did this, but they clearly had some help to put together the program. I would, I would say, so that’s encouraging if it’s happening at scale and, , , it’s a good sign of that. So,

so let’s talk about, . Something quite intriguing, , that a big company is taking a big bet on influencer marketing, and that’s a topic we’ve talked about on and off, off and on in this podcast. So this story is about a striking shift in marketing strategy from Unilever. , the British multinational, [01:08:00] one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies.

It operates in over 190 countries and reported annual revenue last year of more than 51 billion pounds. $66 billion. 60 billion euros. To get a sense of the scale of the numbers, in February as past February, Unilever ousted its CEO Hein Schumacher, who had been little more than a year and a half, uh, at the helm, replacing him with its finance chief Fernando Fernandez, to speed up the company’s turnaround plans.

Fernandez has made headlines with his plan to dramatically increase the company’s reliance on social media influencers, influencers, as part of its advertising strategy. Today, about 30% of Unilever’s global ad spend goes into influencer campaigns. Fernandez wants to push that up to 50% or more. The reasoning behind this, as he put it bluntly, brands are default suspicious.

Now we see that actually shall, , not those exact words, but the sentiment behind that in [01:09:00] the Edelman Trust barometer and others on distrust of brands. So that’s interesting. So brands are default, suspicious, says, Unilever’s new CEO. Consumers no longer take brand messaging at face value. He says, especially when it’s coming from polished campaigns.

But when the message comes from someone they trust and follow, an influencer appear, a personality they relate to, it lands very differently. And this isn’t just about a few celebrities fronting global ads Unilever’s going granular. According to a report in Tortoise Media last week, Fernandez wants to build a content machine aiming to partner with micro and nano influencers, people with between 1,050 thousand followers across every region where they operate.

So that’s across 190 countries. Fernanda says he wants to see at least one influencer promoting its brands in every region of every country, including in 19,000 Indian postcode areas and 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. [01:10:00] After the us. It’s these two countries that account for the largest share equivalent to more than a fifth of influencer sponsored posts online.

So the goal is hyper-local storytelling that builds trust at scale. This change also reflects a cultural pivot inside Unilever. Under his previous leadership, the company became known for its bold stance on social purpose and environmental, social and governance, or ESG messaging. But that direction drew increasing scrutiny and pushback from investors.

Fernanda appears to be shifting gears away from brand activism and towards pragmatic engagement influence over ideology. That said, this approach isn’t without risk. It highlights how influencers are becoming the new information. Brokers often more trusted than news outlets, but also harder to control.

Missteps can have real consequences, whether it’s a celebrity failing to disclose paid promotion, or an influencer aligning even unintentionally with controversial [01:11:00] causes or campaigns. So this raises some big questions. Can brands truly scale authenticity without losing control? What’s the role of the communicator when influence is increasingly decentralized?

And how do we strike a balance between reach, relevance, and reputation? It’s worth unpacking some of this shell, don’t you think,

Shel Holtz: oh boy, is this worth unpacking? And here’s an opportunity for ai, , to be used strategically in the communications team in order to scrape up all of the influencer messaging that you have paid for and get an analysis of the sentiment, , , and the response so that we can report back to Mr.

Fernandez what the payoff of all of this is. You know, the problem I have with, and I realize 50% isn’t putting all your eggs in one basket, but relying so heavily on influencers with all [01:12:00] of the potential issues that they bring, that you’ve already outlined, , is that it ignores the other channels, , in the peso model.

Where would influencers fall? I would say that they fall and be owned. , I’m not, not the owned, the, , the paid, , because. I mean, he, he’s already said 50% of the advertising budget we’re going to be paying these people. But on the other hand, you might also call it earned. They have followers who listen to them and therefore, , they’re able to influence those followers.

So maybe it straddles that line, but if people recognize that, Hey, this influencer that I follow and respect, and, , I I am influenced by them, has touted this product from Unilever, , maybe I will go buy it. , they still realize that, especially if the influencer is ethical, , and has disclosed it, that they were paid to pitch this product.

I think that heightens [01:13:00] the need for earned media where it wasn’t paid for, but it reinforces and validates what the influencer has said. It reinforces the need for shared media so that people can engage around this and the company and the brand can engage, , because it’s an engagement that you build the trust not in, in pitching canned messages.

, I’m also troubled by the withdrawal from societal type of issues. it’s interesting that Unilever fired , the CEO of Ben and Jerry’s just within the last couple of weeks, a guy named David Steve, and it was over disputes involving Ben and Jerry’s social mission and the CEO taking a stance on polarizing.

Political issues, , in an amended complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. , the ice cream brand known for its outspoken views on human rights in the environment said that Unilever’s dismissal of Stever violated [01:14:00] a merger agreement, which prevents the un unilateral removal of the CEO. And, you know, you have to wonder, , when Unilever acquired Ben and Jerry’s, they had to know that Ben and Jerry were hippie activists who mm-hmm.

Used the company as a platform for social discussion, and suddenly they’re out firing the CEO because he did exactly what Ben and Jerry’s has always done. Makes you wonder about the future of Dove and their real beauty campaign. Is that gonna fall by the wayside? Because somehow it is seen as too woke , and not transactional enough.

I don’t know, but it, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, , it’s, it’s a time of change. The report I quoted from talks about the cultural shift happening within Unilever. This IC is very much as part of it. They’re in the middle of spinning off the ice cream business, including Ben and Jerry’s into a separate company.

Whether that’s for a sell off or what, I, I have no idea. , but your point, I think, I, [01:15:00] I agree. I remember when they acquired Ben and Jerry’s, I remember reading quite a bit about, listen, these, , this, this company is very outspoken on issues that offend corporates. You know, what are you gonna do about that?

Unilever, hands off, we are gonna let ’em get on with it. And they have done, until now it seems. But things are changing quite radically, it seems, certainly in Unilever. And I, I agree with you that spending 50% of your ad budget , on nano and micro influences, , is a risky move. As I mentioned, there are big risks in doing this.

So, , I dunno more than the reports , I’ve cited, , what, from the report side, I’ve cited no detail about their marketing team and any of the individuals or what Ady plans might be. , but I find it interesting that one of the world’s biggest consumer products companies is taking this route.

, this is something that they, , you mentioned Dove. They have a stellar reputation with how they position dove in the marketplace. I can’t imagine for a second they’re going to [01:16:00] risk damaging that. I can’t, I just can’t see it. I mean, dove isn’t part of Ben and Jerry, so no hippies involved there, I don’t think.

But, , they went through. We’ve, we’ve quoted them quite a bit from use cases of how they treat women, for instance, in an exceptionally positive way. Some of the, , ad campaigns we’ve talked about that are really, truly are remarkable. So they’ve got, , a lot of equity tied up in that, in reputation, et cetera.

, I don’t believe they damage that. Then again, we don’t know precisely what Mr. Fernandez has been tasked with doing , and how soon quick is what, I guess from reading what reading this article I quoted from plus others in the financial press. So, , it’s early days, but nevertheless, these are bold steps they’re taking.

I mean, look at the idea of, having at least one. Influencer in every region where they operate, , in, in every, in everywhere there’s 190 countries and all these 19,000 postcode districts in India, that’s humongous. How are they gonna police all that? So these are questions I’m sure they have answers to nearly all of them.

So time will tell, shell won’t

Shel Holtz: [01:17:00] it, , undoubtedly will. And if there is any element of your report that will send chills up the spine of communicators everywhere, it’s that Mr. Fernandez was the chief financial officer and he’s now making the marketing decisions. Yeah. I’ll also point out that, uh, if, if, if you’re doubting Ben and Jerry’s hippie credentials, they have not one but two flavors that are named for jam bands.

Neville Hobson: ,

Well, the good news about Mr. Fernandez, he’s, he’s, he’s not a lawyer. So that, I suppose a good thing, well, at least there is that.

Shel Holtz: Well, let’s take a quick drive down memory lane. Back in 2010, general Motors made a small internal comms decision that sparked a surprisingly big public reaction. A memo from Chevrolet’s Detroit headquarters asked employees to stop referring to the brand as Chevy.

The goal was consistency, especially important as the company looked to strengthen its brand presence in international markets where it was just [01:18:00] entering like France, where Chevy didn’t carry the same recognition as the full name Chevrolet. They even had a cuss jar in the office with employees dropping in quarters every time they slipped and said Chevy.

Sounds kind of quaint now, right? But the backlash was Swift social media lit up with mockery brand experts and journalists called it tone deaf. Even the New York Times weighed in suggesting the company was squashing a beloved cultural shorthand in favor of corporate rigidity. Within days’, GM had to walk it back clarifying that they weren’t banning Chevy, just aiming for consistency in global communications.

We reported on this story on FIR back in 2010, , and how a member of the PR team who called himself gm, Joe, ran across the parking lot to shoot video of this executive, I believe he was Australian, , explaining why they had made this move and he had to run because the guy had to catch a flight. He only had a couple of minutes to go [01:19:00] get the video.

At the time, all of this looked like a classic case of over management, but today. GM may have been more right than wrong. New research suggests that nicknames, even though they can be charming and familiar, might actually weaken a brand’s image, especially when that brand is trying to convey authority, credibility, or professionalism.

An article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted a growing body of evidence that suggests brands using their full names, especially in new markets, as GM was trying to do with Chevrolet in France, or in formal contexts, are perceived as more competent and trustworthy than those that lean on nicknames.

According to a study published in the Journal of Marketing, when a brand uses a nickname in its messaging, consumers are more likely to perceive it as warm, but less competent. That’s a problem if your brand needs to be taken seriously. It’s one thing to be liked. It’s another to be respected. [01:20:00] The researchers tested this theory across a wide range of product categories from car brands to investment firms, and the results were consistent.

If a brand needed to convey dependability, professionalism, or technical prowess, nicknames hurt. In one example, people were more likely to trust a toothpaste brand named Colgate than one marketed as Colgate. And when asked who they’d rather invest their money with participants overwhelmingly chose Anderson Wealth Management over Andy’s.

Let’s go back to Chevrolet for a second. In the us, Chevy is a particularly endearing term. It shows up in country songs. It’s short, catchy, and nostalgic, but in a global context, like launching a new European market where no one grew up with a 57 Chevy in the garage. That familiarity is lost, and what’s left is a name that might sound informal, unserious, or even confusing.

This all has real [01:21:00] implications for communicators. First, it’s a reminder that names matter and not just for logos and legal documents. The language your organization uses about itself as part of your positioning and sometimes the very thing that makes your brand feel close and approachable in one market can undermine its credibility in another Second, it underscores the importance of intentionality in brand messaging.

Are you trying to be relatable or reliable? Warm or wise, fun or formal? Of course, the best brands often manage to be all of these things, but you can’t assume a nickname will always land the way you want it to. This is especially relevant for internal communicators, guiding tone and voice across regions or audiences.

If your company’s entering a new market, introducing a new service line, or expanding beyond a friendly niche into a more regulated space. How you refer to yourselves matters. The nickname might feel authentic and beloved internally, but if it undercuts the [01:22:00] perception of competence externally, that could cost you.

Third communicators have a role to play in managing transitions. If your organization has relied on a nickname and now wants to shift to something more formal, don’t just drop it cold Turkey. That’s what made Chevrolet’s original memo field jarring. It, tried to turn a branding nuance into a black and white rule.

Instead, we can help organizations evolve their brand language gradually explaining the why to employees and building consistency across touchpoint over time. Finally, it’s worth considering the emotional side of nicknames. As much as the research says nicknames can dilute authority. They also build affection sometimes being Andes instead of Anderson.

Wealth Management makes a brand feel human, local, and loved. And if your brand leans more into hospitality, entertainment, or consumer culture, that may be exactly what you want. So the takeaway here isn’t that nicknames are bad, it’s that nicknames are [01:23:00] powerful and communicators need to understand when they’re working for the brand and when they might be working against it.

Chevy may never shake the nickname and. Maybe it shouldn’t, but thanks to the research we have now, we’re better equipped to have that conversation, not just at the executive level, but with employees, partners, and audiences too. Because in the end, how you talk about your brand shapes, how people think about your brand, and that’s not just a naming issue, it’s a communication issue.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s an interesting analysis you’ve given, Michelle. I was actually reading through the Wall Street Journal piece when you were talking and came to the mention of Chevrolet in this article. It’s quite interesting. In research that was done, , I could see the name Zang. I, I can’t catch where, what his affiliation is with the university.

I think, , examined historical social media posts by Chevrolet, so I bet it included back to 2010. Cheryl and online advertising efforts from a few other firms [01:24:00] target your UPS and compared engagement metrics when those companies used their nicknames versus their trademark names. In every case, the use of nickname branding was associated with inferior engagement.

So, for example, when Chevrolet’s tweets included Chevy, it received 143 likes on average when the brand used Chevrolet. Instead, engagement tripled, garnering 4 21 likes on average. And the same applied to ads for targets , as well. So, uh, completely, supports what you were saying and the overall look here, and I think the minefield for communicators, and you talked about that a bit, is, is getting to know which to do when with what and where.

And that requires amongst other things, , a deep understanding of your audience. It would, it would appear to me. I mean, you mentioned Chevy is using country songs, so first thing that came to mind was driving my Chevy to the levee. I mean, everyone knows that, , phrase outta that, , outta that song Madon, even though that’s a rock and [01:25:00] roll song.

Yeah,

Neville Hobson: well, no, I dunno about that. But Madonna’s version was the best better than Don McLean’s in my book, who was heresy to my friends. But in any case, . That’s in ingrained, but it’s very interesting having this analysis. It’s something you don’t think about. I, I think, and maybe that’s part of an issue, it also talks about, and I’ve heard this mentioned elsewhere plenty of times, that you no longer own the nickname of your brand and in some cases even your brand, particularly when you get into areas where your brand name has become homogenized.

So that’s generic. Xerox being one, I suppose. Hoover another one.

Shel Holtz: Kleen Hoovering.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, bandaid. Exactly. Another one like that. , so these are all things to consider , and maybe we’re in a, a time now where these now become more important than they ever would’ve done in the past, possibly because of skepticism, , mistrust, whatever it might be by your audience to your behavior [01:26:00] or to things that suddenly emerge that people, people that, , that are memes across the internet are criticisms that grow and then vanish.

So you need to understand these dynamics, which is where clearly monitoring and, and, and analysis is important, but it’s a minefield to navigate without doubt. And knowing the right approach is well. That’s a kind of salary raised territory if you get it right. , not about reduction if you get it wrong, but you need to get it right.

Shel Holtz: Well, that’s the kind of expertise you need to demonstrate to show management that you, , bring value. And AI can’t do the work that you do. There go. I have seen McDonald’s commercials where they refer to themselves as Mickey D’s, and after reading this research, I’m wondering how wise that that is.

Neville Hobson: I suspect those American brand names never made it outside the us. I’d not heard of that about McDonald’s, , before, I must admit. But it is, , it’s, I’m gonna think about this some more now and I’m sure I’ll come up with some, , examples from here. , that, uh, either didn’t work or did, [01:27:00] I’ll have to have a think about that.

But there’s, it’s a good, it’s a good topic. And it’s our last

Shel Holtz: topic that will bring this episode of four immediate release to a close. Our next monthly episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, April 28th. We will record that on Saturday the 26th, and I hope I get to read some of your comments in that episode.

You can leave your comments as most people do these days to our LinkedIn posts announcing. Episodes, , that’s one venue. You can always send us an email to fi comments@gmail.com. , we check that, , once a month before the episode to see if we have any comments. I, somebody emailed me directly through FIR comments and it was like a month old and I was, oh my God, why didn’t we send this to my email address?

I only check this once a month. , you can attach up to a three minute audio file, , if you are so inclined, and we will play that and react to it. You can leave a [01:28:00] comment on the show notes at fir comments@gmail.com. You can record a comment directly from our website@firpodcastnetwork.com. , and, , we also announced these episodes across other social channels.

We check those for comments. . Facebook , and Blue Sky and Threads. , so leave us a comment. , we would love to have you be part of the show and to engage with you. And, , we also appreciate your ratings and reviews wherever you get your podcasts. And that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #456: Does AI Put Communication Expertise At Risk? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the early days of Web 2.0, several pundits told us that traditional PR was dead, especially for startups, where founders would be better served by handling their own public relations. After some disasters, along with many founders finding themselves overwhelmed by the need to build their business and craft thought leadership pieces while handling media inquiries, that philosophy faded. But now it’s back, and getting a lot of attention as Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder and CEO at the agency Rostra, has released a manifesto calling on leaders to skip the agency and “go direct.” Neville and Shel share their thoughts about the advice in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Rostra’s “Go Direct” Manifesto
‘Traditional PR is dead’: Inside Lulu Cheng Meservey’s radical in-your-face playbook
Dissecting the “go direct” communications debate
Lulu Cheng Meservey on When You Need an Agency and Who You Should Hire (on X)
Is PR to Blame for “DEI” Becoming a Four-Letter Word in Corporate America?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 455. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shell Holtz. And several years ago there was a trend making the rounds of startups. Who are passing on bringing a public relations professional on board, opting for the founder to do their own pr. The rationale for this was that the founder was in a better position to tell the company’s early story, and that with resources limited, spending money on PR shouldn’t be a priority.

There were plenty of arguments on the other side, too, focused on, understanding the media, knowing what kind of story is gonna produce the kind of results you’re looking for and so on. In any case, the whole debate just seemed to fade away. Until now, a PR practitioner named Lulu Chang Meserve is shaking up public relations with this bold stance that traditional PR is dead.

I guess we could put this under our blank, is dead series. Her philosophy centers on empowering [00:01:00] founders and organizations to go direct, meaning they should take control of their narratives without relying heavily on traditional media.

Her philosophy centers on empowering founders and organizations to go direct, meaning they should take control of their narratives without relying heavily on traditional media intermediaries or PR agencies. This approach emphasizes authenticity. Transparency and direct engagement with audiences. We’ll explore what Meserve is saying right after this.

Messer V derives the label corporate communications as though it’s the corporation and not a team of talented communicators or even the company’s leaders and other spokespeople and thought leaders who are doing the communicating. But her [00:02:00] strategy is appealing to startups and tech companies that are eager to maintain their unique voices without the dilution that can come from conventional PR methods.

By advocating for leaders to communicate directly through platforms like social media, company blogs, and other owned channels, she believes organizations can foster more genuine connections and swiftly address issues as they arise. Now, this isn’t just theory that she’s slinging around. She’s implemented it in high stakes environments.

She was at Activision Blizzard where she NA navigated complex public scrutiny with assertiveness and transparency. Her approach has garnered attention and endorsement from prominent figures in Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, who appreciate the emphasis on authenticity and direct engagement.

Now critics of traditional PR argue that relying solely on established media channels can lead to misrepresentation or a loss of control of the [00:03:00] message. Messer v’s approach addresses this by cutting out the middleman, allowing organizations to present their narratives unfiltered. However, it’s worth noting the strategy requires a deep understanding of one’s audience and the nuances of various communication platforms to be effective.

Her approach also ignores the value of earned media having . A trusted third party tell your story. But in parallel, we’re witnessing instances where traditional corporate PR strategies are facing significant backlash. And DEI has been raised as an example. The question some are asking is whether companies were motivated by the anticipated PR benefit of promoting DEI than to a commitment to genuinely improve diversity inclusion in the organization over a long term.

Chris Gez, and I hope I’m pronouncing that it’s G-I-D-E-Z-A. Strategic Reputation and communications advisor asked this question in a LinkedIn article last month, and he concluded that PR [00:04:00] should share some of the blame for DEI becoming a four letter word in corporate America. I. He argues that a lot of companies wrap themselves in the DEI flag because they looked at DEI first and foremost as a reputational opportunity, or they said the potential risk was serious if they didn’t wrap themselves in that flag.

It’s a situation that highlights how traditional pr, can backfire, especially when it’s perceived as ina inauthentic or reactionary. So this backlash against DEI efforts underscores the importance of authenticity and direct communication in organizational strategies. When companies implement DEI initiatives primarily as Pete.

Our maneuvers without genuine commitment, they risk public skepticism and potential backlash. Mastery’s emphasis on direct and transparent communication can serve as a valuable lesson. Here. Organizations have to align their public messaging with their core values and actions to maintain credibility. [00:05:00] Of course, some, including me might argue that going direct is just the owned and shared part of the pay zone model.

There’s still plenty of evidence that traditional PR is still useful. Would you really wanna just go direct during an existential corporate crisis? I don’t know, Neville. I find the, all or nothing approach here not be one that I advise people pay much attention to.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I tend to be with you on that.

Shall I? Had not heard of this lady before this conversation. But I did read the manifesto. She posts on her firm’s website, the firm called Roster. Traditional PR is dead as the provocative clickbait like headline. And she goes into her explainer on that, which is largely I suppose I could summarize it with the bold sentence she has on her site saying The old PR playbook of relying on third parties with misaligned interest is obsolete.

I wouldn’t disagree with that although I might say it’s not obsolete. It’s actually alive and well. People with misaligned interest is all over the place, but that [00:06:00] therein lies the issue that where you can agree with some of what she says but it’s difficult when she applies what she says to the entire industry.

The whole PR profession is basically full of charlatans and not worth your time. They have their own interest, not yours, and you shouldn’t waste any time with it. Spent quite a while dissecting this. I think if we wanted to and come up with a dozen, two dozen reasons why you shouldn’t do this to the exclusion of working with, as you mentioned, the talented folks who tend to occupy the PR space.

Certainly in most organizations. I did read as well a kind of a postscript to all of this. She published on X, which was linked to an article about all of this just a few days ago actually, where she posted a lengthy tweet. Obviously she’s got the account that lets you do the 40,000 characters or whatever it is.

When do you need a PR agency and who should you hire? That’s the first part of her. Submissive and she who has [00:07:00] a second part that goes into that in more detail, how much should you pay for one? These to me are quite provocative statements. All of it’s great for discussion. If you think it’s worth the discussion, I’m not sure it is shell to be frank.

Certainly not in the PR industry even though I would argue that she does make a number of. Kind of head nodding statements that you could say. Yep. I wouldn’t disagree with that. Where she does talk about some of the issues in pr, she talks about press releases, read like they were written by a baker’s dozen of middle managers where she she talks about corporate communication itself, an oxymoron as nothing meaningful, as you pointed out, communicated by face committee if it were thus.

I wouldn’t disagree hard, I don’t think with almost anything she’s written, but it is not like that at all. Maybe in her world it is other, I suspect these are serving statements that serve simply to reinforce the argument she’s making for why go direct is her mantra. And as you noted, I. We’ve [00:08:00] been here 15 years ago, if not 20 years ago, at the dawn of the social media age, where there were a number of people, particularly in that Silicon Valley startup environment you mentioned, who were talking very strongly about, you do not need pr, don’t waste your money.

You, the founder, can go direct and do all this stuff yourself. It became quite clear. That’s not really a wise thing when the founder is trying to talk to investors and raise money and actually do the founding work of his startup. But this, as you said, this kind of goes around and comes around and now here’s the latest wave.

She, is in the kind of celebrity PR area because of all the quotes she’s got there. She mentions an interesting expression the podcasting circuit sort of makes it sound like a celebrity magazine. So that’s the kind of era, this is not the real world at all, but good luck to her really.

I think there are a couple things we can learn from what she says though, that I think make it easy perhaps to . Reinforce the view [00:09:00] of why traditional PR is not dead at all. And you could actually counter all these with some sound arguments on that. I think it’s worth putting a list, a link to this website manifesto in the show nutshell.

So if anyone was interested, they can go and look at it themselves, but I don’t think this is anything. We should worry about in the PR profession, UN, unless or until or maybe both. We suddenly hear different from normal companies rather than celebrity types.

Shel Holtz: In this post on X she has a line here that I think is very telling.

She’s. Saying, of course I don’t mean that you need to do absolutely every communication activity yourself. She says, if you can’t keep up with all the comms work that needs to be done, you’re a bottleneck and need to get help . So it’s only a matter of being overwhelmed by it. She also says that finding strong writers is hard, so unless you’re luck out, you’re better off doing the writing yourself.

Even if it’s mid, at least it’ll be mid in your voice. I, again, I think this completely [00:10:00] ignores the value of, of third party coverage. She talks about misaligned interests. I talk about reporters who are writing about the things that you are interested in getting out to an audience and whom your audience is reading.

This is why you find those writers who are . Taking an angle that is consistent with the approach that you wanna take to get to tell your story and work with them pitch them appropriately so you get their interest and then they tell your story to their readers in a way that resonates.

And it’s credible because it’s not coming from you. Of course, you said that it’s your organization, you’re looking to get the best response you possibly can, that here’s somebody who went out and did some research and some interviews, and they said it based on. Their investigation or their reporting and that is of value there, there’s just no question about that.

Maybe their interests are misaligned. That’s why you work with them to get the best outcome that you can. Doesn’t mean that you don’t [00:11:00] go direct, it’s a long with not instead of, as Mitch Joel. So often said and anytime anybody says X is dead I, and I don’t mean x, the former Twitter I mean fill in the blank is dead.

I, I. Get very skeptical. We’ve been hearing this for so long now. We’ve done so many episodes going way back 20 years on people claiming that something is dead. That wasn’t traditional PRS is doing just fine. The other thing that I think she is saying here, and it has been said before and I have couched it in these terms before.

Is that bad? PR is bad. Don’t hire bad PR people. Don’t hire somebody who’s gonna write a press release. That sounds like it was written by committee. I know they’re out there. There’s a lot of them. It’s that situation that we exist in which anybody can hang out a PR shingle and say, I do PR and crank out crappy press releases.

Doesn’t mean that there aren’t. Agencies out there, or independent practitioners or people that you can [00:12:00] hire in-house who can write a great press release, it’s gonna get a lot of pickup and get a lot of the attention that you need. So you know, bad PR is bad. Don’t use it. Use good pr.

Neville Hobson: Ha. Yeah. Simple answer there.

Shall I agree with you? I think thinking about the reality of public relations practice compared to what what she writes about it does occur to me that again, reading her manifesto in particular, that it’s almost as if the kind of major thing a founder. Going direct is almost like telling the story in his or her own words, directly talking to influential people.

He or she may engage with, most of that kind of approach isn’t like that. Um, I’m thinking for instance, where and you actually touched on the point where you’ve got a, not you, not a potentially biased voice telling the story. Like you said, it was a sound, of course he’s gonna say this or that is someone who is [00:13:00] able to

Provide the nuances of the story tailored to the people they’re talking to which is, the relationships that you build, not just with other fou, with founders, it’s with journalists, it’s with influencers, it’s with industry analysts, policy makers who shape public discourse, all of that. So is a founder gonna have time to do all of that?

And there comes back to, I think a genuine reality. That this is not really the kind of job the founder of a startup could or should be doing. Even that’s why you have professionals. So you could apply the argument if you don’t need PR people ’cause he or she could do this themselves.

What about all these other areas in the business? The finance. What about strategic planning? You could do this all yourself. Unless you’re Elon Musk, of course. Then most people don’t do that.

Shel Holtz: I remember the Melbourne mandate from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management 12, 13 years ago that put PR at the middle of the business because they understood.[00:14:00]

All of the issues that could weigh on a business and counsel the leaders about actions they’re going to take and what message that might inadvertently send and what kind of repercussions it, it might create. If a founder’s doing this on their own then there’s nobody there to say, wait a minute.

If you say that, then this could happen. They’re not experienced professional communicators, and again, it’s not a, it’s not a job where you just hang out a shingle and decide . Today, Hey, I think I’m gonna become a PR person. It takes practice, it takes experience. It takes work to be able to look at what a company is planning to do and anticipate what the feedback from various stakeholders is gonna be.

I just don’t think a founder’s equipped to do that. Should they be going direct? Yes. Yes, they should, but they should be doing it with counsel. And it should be balanced with paid and earned media.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. So if we take the manifest, going back to a manifesto, the section on communications, the founder’s job, you take that [00:15:00] literally as it is written.

You could pick holes in that. A big one would be in, in the event of. A crisis that erupts the communication that’s required from that the planning that goes into all of that, of course the monitoring, the paying attention, the nuanced messaging you might create, and identifying who you’ll deliver it to on a timely basis that you can’t do this.

I I’m. Pretty certain. She doesn’t mean it exactly like that, but that’s how it reads. Communicates to founders, they’re irreplaceable. They’re the ones who can do all the communication. They don’t need polished people or those with the. Right credential. So I’m not sure where she’s going with that argument, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense, it seems to me.

It, like I said, it’s worth a read to contrast that with what, if you’re in the PR business, how you see the role of public relations. I think though, one thing I would add to this is, to me this adds even more kind of pressure, [00:16:00] if you will, on . The, this whole issue we’ve discussed a number of times on the regulation of the industry, the licensing of practitioners where you could uh, sidestep being blindsided by bad PR people.

So it’s in that area too, it seems to me. But this is definitely not something a proce procedure. I would recommend to anybody to follow this line.

Shel Holtz: No, and I raised that whole situation about pr contributing perhaps to the fall of DEI by touting it when the commitment wasn’t there in the organization.

That’s cautionary we, we can’t engage in that kind of communication. I’m a full supporter of DEI, but if I were counseling an organization and saw that the leadership wasn’t really bought into it, I wouldn’t. Suggest that they make a big deal out of it publicly, and I think that’s what a lot of organizations did.

Neville Hobson: I agree. I-I-A-D-E-I hasn’t been a big thing over here in [00:17:00] the UK compared to the promise it has in the US and the kind of backed on it all. Certainly not that I’ve seen in mainstream media reporting, and certainly not what I’ve seen . Practitioners talking about on open platforms. But you are right.

What I’ve observed and this is mostly in the US is that there are numbers of things I’ve read about DEI initiatives and organizations where my first thought was. This is a PR activity they’re talking about. Yeah. It makes them look good. And in which case, yeah, no surprise, all this stuff is going on.

I dunno where this is gonna end up. Shell it seems to be going from bad to worse in terms of kind of de deprioritizing deleting even anything related to those three acronym letters. Don’t see that happening over here. But another interesting, as a kind of an aside to all of this is some US companies, I don’t have my notes at hand are not implementing what the parent company in the US is doing about DEI across a number of European countries.

That’s interesting. It seems to me, [00:18:00] because are we gonna end up with, severe battles going on between subsidiaries in different countries refusing to follow the lead of the parent? That’s interesting. May or may not happen, but it’s certainly something I’m seeing people talking about.

So it’s I, I. It is a tough one from a communications point of view. And if we go back to, it’s the founder’s job, go direct. You are the one who has to do all this. The founder of a startup is faced with a similar issue to communicate on DEI as the founder of a big global multinational corporation.

There’s an issue and you might be asked about what’s your DEI initiatives and how come you’re not employing this kind of people? Or how come you are employing this kind of people? What are you gonna say? That’s of course purely reactive. What about proactivity? About all of this? Yeah, there’s too many wooly holes in this.

That would make me very uncomfortable if I were having this conversation with a client saying, what about go direct? Should we ditch PR and and do all this ourselves? Although I don’t, I can’t imagine anyone asking [00:19:00] that question, frankly. Hel

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Oh no. My only concern is that people look at the blow back to DEI recognize that it’s partly because it was just a PR thing in the first place and say maybe this is right.

Maybe we do need to go direct and as true public relations, a council and I think it’s on the public relations profession to ensure that we don’t do that type of thing so that our value is not, tarnished by these kinds of mistakes. Yeah. Agree with that. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four Media Release.

The post FIR #455: Traditional PR is Dead (Again) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

At the now-infamous press conference that turned out to be an orchestrated ambush of Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Real American’s Voice correspondent Brian Glenn lobbed a hand grenade of a question to Zelenskyy. That single question was emblematic of an entire shift in the way the media works, requiring a comprehensive rethink of how public relations practitioners prepare for a media environment in which engineered outrage is rewarded by the press because spectacle earns more clicks than substance. In this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel break down the many implications for the practice of PR and the actions required to prepare brands to be targets of the same kind of treatment Zelenskyy got at the hands of the leaders of the free world and the complicit media at the press conference.

Links from this episode:

When a Trump-supporting journalist heckled President Zelensky for not wearing a suit
Trump and Vance attack Zelenskyy in remarkable Oval Office exchange
Antisemitism in the Oval Office

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (2): [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 454 of four immediate release. I’m She Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. I’m sure almost every listener to this podcast has heard about the extraordinary encounter between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on the 28th of February with US Vice President JD Vance.

During the argument. Here’s what happens. A Rightwing journalist, Brian Glenn, questions, Zelensky choice of attire, rather than focusing on war or democracy during a press conference alongside Trump and Vance, why wasn’t he wearing a suit? They wanted to know, this wasn’t an offhand remark, but a calculated attempt to manipulate perception.

Demonstrating how mainstream media today isn’t just about information, but about controlling narratives. In the post on LinkedIn last week, mark Bukowski highlights a fundamental shift in pr, media, [00:01:00] and public discourse, illustrated by the seemingly trivial but strategically loaded question asked of Zelensky by Brian Glenn setting the scene for an ugly ambush on the unsuspecting zelensky by Trump and Vance in front of an assembly of journalist reporters and TV cameras.

As Politico described it, Trump advanced both turned on the embattled Ukrainian wartime leader during a remarkably tense exchange accusing zelensky of failing to express sufficient gratitude for US involvement and overplaying what they said was a weak diplomatic hand. Bukowski argues that the media landscape has fractured, no longer functioning as a singular town square, but as a collection of information silos shaped by algorithms, AI driven amplification, and engagement driven clickbait.

Traditional pr, once focused on managing reputation and discourse, is now deeply entangled in a performative attention economy that prioritizes spectacle over substance. Trump [00:02:00] exemplifies this shift by not just controlling messaging, but orchestrating the entire conversation, selectively choosing which media outlets get access and ensuring that only those who play his game shape.

The narrative this Bosky warns is a crisis not just for pr, but for public discourse and truth itself. If pr, media and politics are now entangled in a world where attention is weaponized communicators and industry associations must take proactive steps to adapt and uphold credibility. I. So she, how do you see it all?

Where you sit in the us?

Shel Holtz (2): Yeah, here in the US this was all anybody was talking about for a few days. But I didn’t look at it from the PR perspective until you shared this Mark Bakowski link in our Slack channel, and that led me down quite a rabbit hole. I started dissecting all of this in terms of the implications for.

Public relations and communications. You [00:03:00] touched on a few of them. Certainly. There’s the fragmentation of the media ecosystem. We don’t have a town square anymore. We have silos. They tend to be driven by echo chambers. And those echo, echo chambers are driven by algorithms. Organizations trying to reach broad audiences have a problem.

So that’s one thing to consider. That’s also something that we were aware of. There’s this shift from message control to conversation control that I teased out of Marx. LinkedIn post we in PR typically sought to manage a message and shape public perception. That’s the role of public relations.

Now, as Mark suggests in the article, some figures don’t just control the message. They control who gets to ask and what conversations dominate. You referenced that as well in terms of him picking which media get to. Report on him in person blocking AP and Reuters because he doesn’t like them.

Then there’s [00:04:00] this notion of performative media. In pr we used to focus on crafting narratives for traditional media. But today’s media as characterized by this reporter’s question was an example of spectacle over substance and the fact that the media. Reported on that shows that it works.

The heckling that Zelensky got from Trump and Vance and some of the press in the room wasn’t about getting an answer. It was all about engineering outrage. So what does this mean for reputation management? Do pr people need to get ready for performative attacks on their executives, on their brands?

I don’t have answers to these things. These are questions that, as far as I can tell are just emerging now. But I think a couple, I

Neville Hobson: think they, they have to prepare for this kind of thing. Oh yeah. There’s no

Shel Holtz (2): question they have to, but how is a question.

Yeah. There’s also the suggestion in the article, the truth is devalued when attention is the currency. Now we’ve all known that attention is the currency. [00:05:00] With the rise of social media in its current form with its clicks and its ads and the way the Facebook and the rest of them make money.

How do you balance engagement with integrity? There’s this pressure to win the attention game that, does that lead us to continue to prioritize clickability over credibility? This is another. Issuer, I think we have to weigh the two sides and make some decisions and implement some processes.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I think you mentioned when I interrupted you earlier about how the, how I utterly agree therein lies the huge dilemma for communicators because we could come up and indeed I do have a laundry list. These are the things we need to do this. It doesn’t have the how I. For instance, one of ’em I’ve got here is about prioritizing media literacy and narrative analysis amongst your communication team.

So it talks about train the teams to identify and contract disinformation tactics, recognizing when narratives are being manipulated. Great. How do [00:06:00] we do this regularly. Audit media sources, influencers of credibility for engage. That’s an easy one because I’m sure many are doing that now too.

But some of these things I have to admit are almost common sense. Champion fact-based storytelling, for instance e emphasize accuracy over engagement aligned storytelling with verified sources. And that probably gets, I think, to the. To the heart of the matter on the how. And there are some things that we are, I think overall collectively, many communicators are a bit lax on which is a thorough verification of sources.

And so you are not, if you are encountering a situations such as the a the outcome of that event in the White House and you are gonna report on it, you’re gonna look at who’s saying what about it, you . Probably got more work to do to verify your sources because anyone with an opinion is posting including in the mainstream media where they might not be as, as thorough in their verification procedures as they could be quoting some, even some [00:07:00] papers.

But I’ve seen blogs mostly with unverifiable. I was gonna say facts. They’re not facts. I say their opinion and most of ’em aren’t. So again, that just makes it even more essential to do your due diligence properly when you’ve got this kind of situation that you’re trying to address.

That’s one, one area. Another

Shel Holtz (2): area to consider is that going forward Zelensky going into a meeting with Trump will probably be anticipating this type of an attack. And I think I. Brands and leaders should do the same. Manipulated narratives are going to become a routine tactic in competition, whether it’s in the political arena or the arena of commerce.

So do we need to shift toward narrative defense strategies in a media landscape where . Bad faith actors are manufacturing this kind of outrage. If we continue to do as Mark says in the LinkedIn piece focus on [00:08:00] influencer fluff and corporate vanity metrics, we won’t be ready for these.

No. And it is pretty clear that in this kind of immediate landscape, those kinds of attacks are coming. And we have seen the things that start in the political realm. Migrate their way over. We saw that with DeepFakes, for example. First they were in, first they were in entertainment with ridiculous and just fun stuff.

But then they went into politics in order to. Make you think you were hearing or seeing a politician who never said or did what you heard or saw. But now it’s affecting business. So far it’s mostly, phishing attacks and the like. But we’re seeing this particularly with the ai Yeah.

Generated stuff. I think there needs to be a shift in the focus of what PR is working on if we wanna remain relevant and. Prepare content that helps us when these kinds of manufactured outages are targeting . The business.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. [00:09:00] Yeah. I think projecting this out into a business situation it, it had got me thinking when I was thinking this through myself even about how would you, how do you anticipate, let’s call them weaponized PR tactics by the other side, let’s say and have yourself prepared for that.

How do you do that? We’ve now have a clear indicator of what that looks like. The Trump Vance ganging up on Zelensky, so it wouldn’t be difficult to project that out to, for instance, your a PR agency pitching for a client’s business. And this. This also I guess clearly shows how the age of politeness has diminished entirely.

Where before if you disagreed, it’s polite disagreement. Here you’ve got a situation where it’s outrage and it’s anger. It’s vulgar and it’s, the effing and the blinding language going on that in polite conversation you never had. That’s changed radically. And that’s now common currency.

Look at any TV program, a series, a topical series on anything. And the f word is [00:10:00] almost it’s it’s occupying now the space as, oh damn we, we all said many years ago, and that was a rude word, no longer. So all that has shifted radically. So that is your environment. You are making a pitch.

And beforehand what might have happened is that the other side, if they didn’t like it wouldn’t say much, but you’d tell after you’d done that, they weren’t that impressed. Now they tell you in extremely strong terms that you’re full of. You know what? How do you anticipate that? That’s actually not too difficult.

So I place that under the heading of Anticipate weaponized PR tactics and that. Is part of that, you are in a pitch and that’s the response you’re getting. How are you going to address it? Are you gonna say anything about it afterwards? And this is another thing the kind of traditional non-disclosures and privacy elements are now questionable whether people will observe those.

So you gotta assume that NDA procedure we had many years ago ain’t gonna, ain’t gonna work anymore. So you’ve got to take that into account. So the environment has shifted. [00:11:00] If you then look at a product launch media invited, they’ve been told not to, embargo until so and so that I’m afraid I would place no trust in anyone obeying that anymore at all.

Shel Holtz (2): I. You remember Andrea Beckley and her civilization efforts to bring civility back into the public online commons. She must be despondent over the state of things right now.

Neville Hobson: The politeness thing I wrote a post the other day about are you polite to an AI when you’re talking to a chat bot?

And I argue the case as to why I saw that you should be. Yeah. And I am. That’s I say please, and thank you. Sure. I do all the time. So that’s where we’re at. And this is under threat to all these behaviors by the likes of people like Trump and his supporters or Hisense, whatever you want to call ’em.

And people take advantage of that too. So you’ve got a landscape that is extremely. Difficult to truly understand based on the rules [00:12:00] we’ve been following for a long time. And this reflects, I see big headlines in some of the tabloids here in the uk. Trump has overturned the world order.

He has, frankly, he has. And we have to accept that there’s no, there’s probably no going back on anything now until Trump’s gone. But his legacy is gonna be that this is actually gonna be the norm for quite a while forward, I would say.

Shel Holtz (2): Just to come back to the PR implications of this. Sure. A couple of additional thoughts.

One is that there may be some people who work in media relations or public relations who are watching Trump and wondering if the things that he is succeeding at are worth emulating. And I’m looking at, as we’ve already discussed, his control of message through controlled access. Is there something that

PR people are going to take away from that. Are we going to start to think that we should be controlling who shapes public discourse about our brand, about our products about our [00:13:00] organization? And I’m not sure that’s the best tactics to adopt in pr, but there may well be some people who are considering that.

One other thought and that’s what I saw, an article

Neville Hobson: one. One quick comment on that before we move on is that then presents an opportunity for professional associations to really show their value. Sure. Revise their codes of ethics, advocating for responsible media practices public education campaigns, or media literacy, for instance.

Just a couple of things. Supports. PR training for this kind of thing but also

Shel Holtz (2): advocating for open access to your. Content. You’re not going to tell what a media outlet? No. We don’t like the way you report things, so you can’t

Neville Hobson: cover us, yeah, that, that actually was truly stunning when the AP was banned.

But they don’t seem to be too alarmed themselves about it any longer after the initial, what kind of thing. So it’s happened, but it still could happen further. So it is to do with that control. This is getting a [00:14:00] bit like. Oh, dare I say, it’s Soviet Union Days. I mean it’s extraordinary.

Shel Holtz (2): One other article crossed my feeds and it’s tangentially related to this.

And I think this is a communications unintended consequence that maybe Trump and Vance didn’t consider. And if you’re planning on engaging in some of these kinds of tactics it’s a fair warning. That this kind of communication might follow. Now, this happens to be on a substack of somebody that I have never heard of before.

He’s a Holocaust historian. But this was making the rounds. He wrote a piece called Antisemitism in the Oval Office, and it is a rather lengthy and very well documented. Essay that essentially says that the attack on Zelensky was an anti-Semitic attack. Now I didn’t see that. I saw the press conference.

I saw it while it was happening. Is he Jewish zelensky? Pardon? Is he Jewish? Zelensky? Yes. Zelensky is Jewish. Okay. [00:15:00] Yeah, definitely. But what this guy is arguing is essentially that if you look at the laws. That were implemented in Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich? Not, yeah before they started hauling people off to concentration camps where they were just trying to marginalize the Jewish population in society.

It was exactly the same criticisms that were being leveled. Its zelensky, the way you dress and things like that. And he documents this extremely well. Yeah. And this is making the rounds. And if it’s. Gaining traction among populations that are opposed to antisemitism. And you listen to the Trump administration talk about its efforts to STEM antisemitism.

A lot of this at universities, which I really think is just targeting universities, finding an excuse to target universities. . But you’re gonna lose some support among some of the people who have been supportive. Thinking through what people might [00:16:00] say or might do as a result of this action that, you’ve been looking at what we get out of attacking Zelensky what do we pro prospectively lose should be another consideration.

This goes back to something I. Talked about years ago, which is in the communication strategic plan, we should have a step that just before launch, we close our eyes. We project six months out into the future after we have launched whatever it is that we’re going to launch and say what went wrong. It was a tremendous failure.

Why what failed and anticipate consequences that you hadn’t anticipated before.

Neville Hobson: There’s something that just popped into my mind, a news story I saw this morning about empathy and how Trump and Musk demonstrate with their words and their deeds, a complete and utter lack of empathy. And the article paralleled that with what happened or what was happening in Nazi Germany.

At the same time of the period you are talking about. So I’m thinking we, [00:17:00] we would like to see more of this kind of comparison being made. It’s alarming frankly, because I think there’s a lot of people are gonna say, you know what? I think they’re probably right. These guys are like that. I dunno what that says for where we go from here.

Shell, frankly, but this is not as usual. That’s a fact.

Shel Holtz (2): Oh, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. Count on that, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #454: When the Media Rewards Spectacle Over Substance appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It may seem counterintuitive, but playful teasing between brands and customers can produce unexpected benefits. Inspired by research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, we explore why strategically “roasting” customers with humor and lighthearted banter can enhance brand loyalty and deepen customer connections. Discover how embracing a bit of playful provocation might be the surprising secret ingredient your brand needs to stand out, build lasting relationships, and keep your audience coming back for more.

Also in this episode, we follow up our report from FIR #442 (December 26, 2024) about the publicity battle between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively: A report in the Hollywood Reporter finds that the fallout from this conflict is affecting publicists everywhere.

Links from this episode:

Why ‘Roasting’ Your Customers May Help Your Brand
FIR #442: Justin Baldoni’s Attack on Blake Lively Explains Why PR is a Dirty Word
Lively vs. Baldoni Has Already “Change Hollywood Publicity Forever”
The Ethics of PR: Lessons from the Blake lively Smear Campaign (Neville’s Blog)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Well, hi everyone, and welcome to four immediate Release. This is episode 4 53. I’m Neville Hobson. I’m Shell Holtz, and all of our reports of late have been very serious in tone and nature. So we’re gonna lighten it up a little bit today and talk about poking fun at your customers in public. Doing that in, in insulting your customers, while others are watching, may not seem like the best way to get their business.

But brands are increasingly embracing playful provocation to engage. Consumers and foster deeper relationships. This strategy, often referred to as a roasting customer involves lighthearted teasing that humanizes the brand and makes it more relatable. This isn’t just a, an observation I’m making based on, tweets and other messages that I see from brands. This is based on Uni University research, that rigorous academic research in this case from Duke University’s Fuqua [00:01:00] School of Business, which highlighted the effectiveness of this approach. I. Professor Gavin Fitzsimmons and his colleagues found that playful provocation enhances the customer brand connection by making brands appear more human-like.

Their studies demonstrated that teasing increases engagement compared to humor alone, but caution that excessive provocation can lead to negative perceptions, to which I said, well, no, duh. So there’s a balance that needs to be struck, but let’s. Take a quick look at several brands that have been implementing this tactic successfully.

Starting with one of the ones that I think is best known for this, which is Wendy’s known for its sharp and witty social media presence. They frequently roast both. Competitors and customers. In fact, they have a national roast day where they invite followers to request a roast leading to some pretty funny and engaging interactions.

A user, for example, said, roast to me Wendy’s, and Wendy’s said, you’re like a participation trophy in human form. [00:02:00] And there’s Ryanair. The European airline u uses a cheeky and irreverent tone on platforms like TikTok, often poking fun at common travel mishaps, and even its own services, which resonates with a younger audience.

On TikTok they said, when you realize your carry-on is bigger than our leg room I didn’t see the photo that went with, but I can imagine. Duncan the Coffee and Donuts place and a Halloween campaign, they featured a spider themed donut that was accompanied by suggestive messages on social media, aiming to rebuild interest in the product and engage customers with playful content.

Netflix often engages in playful banter with its audience on social media, teasing fans about their viewing habits and preferences that humanizes the brand and fosters the sense of community. KFC another fast food place. They’ve employed humor and mild provocation in its marketing, such as responding to customer tweets with pretty witty remarks, [00:03:00] enhancing brand relatability and customer engagement.

There’s Old Spice. They sent a tweet that said If your grandfather hadn’t worn Old, old Spice, you wouldn’t exist as the type of thing that they do. Dollar Shave Club has viral marketing campaigns that invo include humorous and edgy content that mocks traditional shaving brands. Oreo. During the 2013 Super Bowl blackout, they were quick-witted saying You can still dunk in the dark.

We reported on that when it happened. They took advantage of an unexpected situation, earning some praise and engagement by being a little. Snarky. Spotify their annual rap campaign highlights users listening habits, sometimes teasing them about their most streamed songs or genres, which encourages social sharing and brand interaction.

And Telstra, the Australian Telecommunications Company, they launched a whimsical animated campaign titled Wherever we Go that was aimed to reshape its [00:04:00] corporate image and connect with customers on a more playful level through that personal . Content research supports the effectiveness of the strategy.

A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that playful provocation increases engagement and connection to the brand by making it appear more human-like and relatable. But they also caution that doing this too much can pro provoke negative feelings and underscores the importance of balance.

There was also research highlighted in the magazine, frontiers in Psychology. That indicates that witty brand teasing can be an effective communication strategy as low aggressive humor increases consumer interest by reducing perceptions of manipulative intent. So when executed thoughtfully, teasing and playful, Provo provocation can serve as a as powerful tools for brands to enhance customer engagement and build stronger connections.

So you’re gonna start teasing people on LinkedIn, Neville. It’s it’s interesting I have to say shell the examples you gave, [00:05:00] many of them I’ve heard of some I haven’t. I’m actually intrigued. I guess it, it leads me to ask the follow up question, which is, okay, they did these things. What were the outcomes?

Were they worth doing? I have to say, when I was listening to what, to you outlining all of these, I was trying to think of some recent ones and I can’t actually recall any. I mean there obviously have been some. But I think it’s a it’s a risky proposition, isn’t it? You need to be very confident in your brand proposition and the fact that it’s well understood, I suspect, or you are strong enough to withstand a backlash to that.

So you gotta have your plan well structured to get the result you want, I would imagine. Some of ’em are clever. You mentioned Ryanair. It’s an Irish airline actually, and they have a reputation. We’ve talked about this in episodes from many years back. The CEO of Ryanair is renowned for insulting customers but not in a humorous way.

He really does insult them. I. He’s had a sea change in the last couple of years where he’s actually become [00:06:00] a normal, reasonable human being. rather than the kind of obnoxious person He was bellowing with age, is he? Yeah. I think, and he has some smart people running the social accounts without doubt because I still see them with some of the witty approaches to very snarky approaches, which actually

Produce a smile rather than anger. That’s a sea change in how they’ve gone about it. But it is a fine line, isn’t it? You need to be careful with humor. We know that otherwise, if you get it wrong, it can have serious implications. I think it begins with your brand voice. I believe.

If your voice is one that is very serious and then all of a sudden you decide to. Engage in some of this banter with somebody online. It’s going to be very much a non-sequitur. It’s gonna be jarring. People are gonna wonder what you’re up to. But if you have established a voice that is playful like that, Wendy’s did this early on, on Twitter.

In fact, I remember when I was [00:07:00] consulting I met with a team from Wendy’s, and this was. Before they were on Twitter for, I’d have to go look my notes, but it may have even been before there was a Twitter and they were trying to figure out what to do with social media. They were thinking maybe they could have their stores each set up a, a Facebook.

Page and talk about their little league sponsorships and the like. But then along comes Twitter and boy did they find their voice, and it’s been their voice consistently. So nobody is surprised by it. Everybody’s expecting it. And that’s one of the big reasons people follow that account. Oh, and by the way, here’s a coupon for a dollar off of one of our burgers.

It is, it’s been very effective for them. And yeah. Yeah from the get go, I think you’re, you have to establish a voice that is consistent with this kind of thing. Yeah. That makes total sense. And weave it into your brand strategy rather than just big events.

You mentioned the Super Bowl is one example and there others, we see it here, although not to this extent that [00:08:00] I can recall during football. Match it at major championship events, for example, where there’s big audiences. So opportunity is there if you get it right. And Phil, marks of those who do well.

Before we wrap this episode up, I want to. Offer a quick follow up to a story that we reported back on episode 442 on December 26th of last year about the kerfuffle between Justin Bald and Blake Lively. That has led to accusations and counter accusations and lawsuits and counter lawsuits. And the reason we reported on this is that Mr.

Baldoni was represented by a public relations firm a publicity firm that engaged in some practices that. We’re dodgy to say the least. Now the Hollywood reporter is reporting that the situation has created a considerable [00:09:00] anxiety among Hollywood’s publicity class. According to several personal and studio publicists that the Hollywood reporter interviewed, the scandal has changed how representatives not involved with the case operate.

One of them said, this will change the personal publicist game forever. 100%. When a client says, I want you to protect my reputation and get ahead of this story, or, I don’t like that headline, can you call the reporter? No way. If what you’re doing has ramifications for another celebrity, you’re now going to think that you could get sued.

Another veteran publicist said from the start from the very start of the lively baldoni shit show, it was PR who made the situation worse. Changing the face of PR is what this veteran publicist said that the case is doing. The fiasco notes of Veteran Studio Publicist brings to mind something that publicists are taught at the very start of their careers.

All comms folks are taught from day one. [00:10:00] Never put anything in writing you wouldn’t want on the front page of the New York Times. This has been a reminder of that all important rule. So some changes going on throughout our industry that have been sparked by this situation. Neville. Yeah. It ha it has, we did report on it.

You’re right. So I wrote a blog post myself with further thoughts on it, and I’ve been following it as I’m sure you have. On the latest developments in the case. It’s still an ugly lawsuit situation without any doubt and the reputational damage to the main protagonist. Blake Lively.

And Justin Baldoni is severe in B’S case. He’s suffered massive damage to his career in being ignored and dropped Lively’s, fallen foul of some missteps, I think in how she’s been talking online, including embracing, uh, taylor Swift is her support that, has she rejected that?

So that was an interesting development. I saw recently that Lively’s husband, Brian Reynolds had been, come out [00:11:00] speaking for her that misfired a little bit. So it’s messy. I think though the thrust of what we talked about, certainly my post was the ethical. Thing regarding B’S PR team or agency or whoever they were.

And indeed, we, I think we named the person who, whose name doesn’t spring to mind right now that was behind all of this. There was outrage on the ethics thing. And I suppose we could bring out the cynical hat. Put it on because that’s it. Nothing else has happened as a result that I’ve seen commented on publicly.

The flurry at the start was how dreadful this is, and it’s bad for the industry, and they should know better. I’ve not seen anyone commenting further on that. So it’s all about the lawsuits and the fallout from that. That’s still developing, but. I think we ought to be looking at this still from the ethics point of view and I guess reminding us this is not how you should do this.

But I’ve not seen anyone talking about that show. Yeah. Apparently the publicists themselves are talking about it because [00:12:00] they’re going to reject requests from their clients to engage in any of the kind of activity that, bald was looking for when all of this got started we’ll see how much that trickles over into the rest of the public relations industry when it comes to badmouthing your competition, for example.

Yeah, doubtful that it’ll have that much of an impact, but. We’ll see. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve not seen you mentioned about publicists reported over this side of the Atlantic at all. So maybe it’s a US focus, I suspect, but it, it needs more than that and I dunno what would stimulate it. It’s probably.

Not interesting enough for most people, it’s yet another case of something bad going on. And maybe it’ll get lively, pun not intended. Once it gets, if it is, if it does get to court or if some other development happens, but the accusations are really bad on both sides. The missteps on both sites seem also to be impacting this and what other work.

People think about it. So I think Blake [00:13:00] Lively has lost some of the sympathy. She attracted at the very beginning with those missteps. And so mill advised advice on some of the behaviors. Balian in the meantime, as I mentioned earlier, has suffered big time from this. But he’s doubling down on his defending of it.

So this thing’s got legs for a while. I think she. Yeah, exactly why most PR people now looking at this wouldn’t want to touch anything even close to it. , and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

Raw Transcript

The post FIR #453: Humor Us — How Playful Teasing Strengthens Brand Relationships appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“We are once again at a moment in time where things will not — and cannot — be the same again. However it unfolds, the only certainty is chaos will follow.”

So wrote global PR practitioner Catherine Arrow in a post on LinkedIn. In this monthly longform episode, Neville and Shel discuss Catherine’s observation that communicators are caught in the thick of conflict in which division is actively cultivated and truth is disputed and weaponized.

Also in this episode, YouTube viewing has shifted from mobile phones to television sets, with implications for the way communicators and marketers produce video for YouTube; there is much for communicators to consider when engaging on platforms that have shrugged off content moderation (part of the chaos Catherine Arrow referenced); Gallup’s Global Leadership Report is out and we’ll share what people want from their leaders; you can now create personas using AI — does that mean it’s a good idea to ask them questions instead of convening a panel of humans for your research? And LinkedIn is de-platforming the value of hashtags — does this spell the end of hashtags on LinkedIn?

In his Tech Report, Dan York discussed Mastodon Quote Posts, Apple’s ending of end-to-end encryption in the UK, and WikiTok, a TikTok alternative that delivers an endless scroll of Wikipedia.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

CEO Says TV Overtakes Mobile as “Primary Device” for Viewing
I was watching YouTube on my TV before it became more popular than phones – here are 3 reasons why it’s better on the big screen
There’s a Good Reason Most People Prefer YouTube on TV
Welcome to the Age of the Chaos Communicator
The Global Alliance’s Melbourne Mandate
What loosened restrictions on social media content moderation means for B2B communications leaders
Perplexity search on impact of loosened content moderation on communication and marketing
Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want
The Case Against AI-Generated Users
Synthetic Users: If, When, and How to Use AI-Generated “Research”
User research. Without the headaches.
FAQ: What Are Synthetic Panels?
What is synthetic sample – and is it all it’s cracked up to be? And can GenAI be used off-the-shelf to create one?
The end of the road for LinkedIn hashtags?

Links from Dan York’s Report

Bringing Quote Posts to Mastodon
Apple removes Advanced Data Protection for iCloud in the UK after the government ordered it to build a backdoor, something the company says it will never do
Apple pulls iCloud end-to-end encryption feature for UK users after government demanded backdoor
Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction

Raw transcript:

Shel Holtz: [00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 452 of four immediate release, our long form episode for February, 2025. I’m She Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in Ingot.

Shel Holtz: And we have six really interesting topics to share with you today. Some serious implications for communicators that we’re going to help you navigate.

Before we get there, though, we have our usual monthly rundown of housekeeping to take care of, starting with a look at what we have reported in our short midweek episodes since the last monthly show in January. Neville. We’ve got quite a few episodes four we’ve had since the last episode.

Neville Hobson: And they’ve been great topics. I think we’ve we’ve covered some pretty interesting areas. The first one since the last monthly, that’s episode 4 48, we recorded on the 29th [00:01:00] of January was riffing on a couple of LinkedIn posts that looked at change management and enterprise social networks is at the end of the line for these things written by Caroline Keeley and Sharon O’Day respectively.

And they did a good job of setting out the case. So we talked about that. Worth a listen, we have a comment right on that one.

Shel Holtz: We do, we have two comments on that one. The first is from Natasha Gonzalez, who says, definitely agree that internal usage may be a reflection of a change in external social usage and that the Godspeed approach has never worked well.

And then Sharon O’Day, who was one of the people who. Was the source of the material that we riffed on in that episode said great discussion. Thanks. Shell and Neville. I agree with most of the points you bring up here. People need clarity on what channels are for and how they should use them, but that’s more of a challenge than you might expect.

Very many comms reviews. I do reach the conclusion that even the comms team don’t know what their ESN their, employee social network is really [00:02:00] for and with trust on the decline. As you discuss, it’s understandable that employees might be reluctant to share. Will people look through my past contributions to our employee social network and conclude my disagreement is disloyalty.

No wonder people are retreating to smaller forums or choosing to check out active discussions in a world where Elon and his ilk are in the ascendancy, having an opinion on your employee social network may be, may mean putting your neck on the line. I was tempted to title my piece. Did Elon Kill the Employee Social Network?

If leadership are active, authentic on social themselves, it creates psychological safety, which will encourage people to participate. But the reality is very few leaders really do this, and if comms are using employee social networks as another broadcast channel, then long term they contribute to their decline as they’re no longer positioned in audience’s minds as a place of listening, debating, or sharing.

Neville Hobson: Good comment. [00:03:00] So then episode 4 49 on the 5th of February. This is a topic we’ve talked about before. The title of our episode was Employees Use of Shadow AI Surges. We talked about shadow ai. I’ve forgotten the date show. It was about a year ago, I think quite a while ago. And this looked at an aspect of this that’s not decreasing.

If anything, it’s increasing. On the risk side people are using these tools still in organizations and not telling anyone that they are, particularly where there is prohibition in place. So as a stealth approach to using generative ai, we said, but there are plenty of risks. So we looked at the data.

There’s data now on this and discussed various approaches companies can take that will benefit both them and their employees in four 50 on the 13th of February. That was a really good topic where we discussed recent research that shows senior leaders in organizations have doubts about [00:04:00] communicators abilities.

And that’s a that’s a pretty bleak assessment. It talked about complexities in the worlds of business, medium politics, and where you’ve got that situation. The concern of senior executives. The confidence is not high. It decreases. Our people up to the task is what they’re asking.

And you and I outline the research results and discuss ways communicate, can reverse this troubling trend naturally. We had lots of suggestions in that area, and we have a comment on this one too, don’t we?

Shel Holtz: Two of them here, actually three here. First from Amy Santoro who says, this saddens me, but I’m not surprised still since I started in communications in the nineties, we’re not valued and struggled to get a seat at the table.

Patrick Edwardson says, great conversation. Think you’re absolutely right when it comes to communication professionals needing to be more proactive in offering solutions and perspectives to leaders, rather than ending up in a reactionary mode, which is easily done given [00:05:00] the current volatile external environment.

More on that to come in this episode. And finally, Steve Renzo sums it up pretty well, saying that’s depressing.

Neville Hobson: Good ending to that one. Then in episode 4 51 on the 17th of February we talked about return to office. Obsessed executives are minimizing the employee voice. This is the now infamous and widely known behavior of the CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

The bankers Jamie Diamond, who unfortunately for him had a severe rant during an employee meeting that was recorded. And of course, the recording leaked. It’s, the expletives are dreadful. It is seriously someone who really doesn’t care. What did employees want to do or think? They need to do what he tells ’em and just get into the office and be there.

So we talked about that. And I see that we’ve had on LinkedIn, certainly a lot of people who’ve who’ve who, who liked it and stuff like that. We provided mostly you shall evidence that productivity, morale [00:06:00] higher with remote workers. We did cite a lot of that research. But if it comes down to, or when it comes down to a leader who behaves like this, your work is cut out to to, to show the benefits of a hybrid approach to the workplace or any other method that splits the get into the office or work from home.

It’s a never ending debate, it seems to me. But I’ve seen others talking about this too since that episode. IE other behaviors not leaked recordings, but leaders of big organizations saying, I don’t care. You gotta get in the office. So this is an argument that has still got a long way to run, I’d say.

So that was yeah, sorry. We got comment two, haven’t we?

Shel Holtz: We have three. Starting with Stuart Bruce who says, if it’s a simplistic back to the office mantra I’m against it. Simply having people sitting behind a desk in an office is counterproductive. However, if it’s managed intelligently by rethinking office layouts, what people do when they do it and more, then there’s value.

The osmosis effect is [00:07:00] invaluable. Junior people, learning from senior people simply by being around them. The spontaneous sharing of ideas. The problem is that too often in offices, there isn’t a lot of those two things happening. If people are to be back in the office, it needs to be benefit, both the employer and the employee.

That means rethinking what being in the office really means. And I have to say, I, I really agree with Stewart. It’s why I favored the hybrid model over a fully remote model. Although there are cases where an employee, it makes sense for them to be fully remote, but not as a routine. Be at home, be remote when you’re gonna be nose down, doing.

Individual work and be in the office when there are things happening that are gonna put people together, interacting, engaging, collaborating, sharing. That’s what makes sense to me. Jesper Anderson also commented he asked, did you hear Richard Edelman on Provoke Media’s new PR agency leader podcast?

He’s very much in favor of mandatory returning to the office, saying people [00:08:00] are at their best when they are together. And finally, Steve Neruda says, having read a couple of discussion threads on LinkedIn on this subject, what stood out to me were the comments that one’s employees couldn’t be trusted, which read to me like a very Trumpian every accusation is a confession.

People projecting their own faults and failures externally.

Neville Hobson: Good comments. All of them. Great. Yeah. So that’s a hot topic. No doubt. We’ll be talking about it again in the future.

Shel Holtz: I also wanna let you know that the most recent episode of Circle of Fellows from January is up and available on the FIR Podcast Network.

Was a really good discussion on creativity, on how to get that creativity sparked, especially in the busy corporate environment. Zoa artists, Diane GSKi, Andrea Greenhouse, and Martha Mka joined me for that episode. And then coming up this Monday an unusual day to [00:09:00] record. Circle of Fellows. That’s usually the third Thursday of the month, but this month it worked out for Monday at noon Eastern time.

We’ll be talking ethics because it is communication ethics month at IABC. And that conversation will involve Diane GSKi again two months in a row. Todd Hattori Jane Mitchell and Carolyn Riel. Should be a great discussion on communication ethics, especially in light of some of the communication we’ve been seeing in the last few months.

Neville Hobson: Definitely. And also just to let you know, we have a new FIR interview that will be published next Wednesday, the 26th of February. Those of you who’ve been in this game for a long time in terms of digital and social will recognize this name. Steve Ruble. Steve has longevity in this. He is a hugely influential voice and kickstart a lot of the developments that happened from 2005 onwards.

He spent nearly 19, [00:10:00] 20 years at Edelman and he’s now looking at new pastures, new ideas, new ventures. New adventures. I would say we had a great conversation with Steve, just a week or so back. And we’ll be publishing that, as I mentioned on Wednesday. So that’ll come out in the morning, GMT, so you can catch it when you wake up.

And also that same day, we’re recording the next FIR interview, which we’ll publish sometime in March with Sam Michelson, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Five Blocks. That is a digital reputation management agency among other things. He’s involved with his company, which is how I came to know.

Sam also runs a server, offers a service called Wiki Alerts which lets you track. Pages to Wikipedia pages, and I’ve been using that service myself for probably five years. But Sam and I connected, we had a long chat. He’s based in Israel. The company’s based in New York. And looking [00:11:00] forward to exploring Sam’s thoughts on a topic.

Both you and I have talked about quite a bit the letters, AI feature in there in terms of digital reputation management. So we’ll get some insights from Sam on what he thinks about where this is going and in, in the context of organizational communication. So that’s all coming up. New interviewing published on Wednesday the 26th of February.

The following interview will come out in the first half of March, I reckon.

Shel Holtz: Looking forward to that interview on Wednesday. Sounds like it’ll be an illuminating session. And now it’s time for us to start reporting on our six topics of the month after this.

There is a major shift in video consumption Communicators need to pay attention to. YouTube is now watched more on TVs than on mobile devices. For years, YouTube has been synonymous with mobile viewing, but according to YouTube’s, CEO Neil Mohan TV screens have [00:12:00] overtaken smartphones as the primary way people watch YouTube.

In the US viewers now watch over a billion hours of YouTube daily on their TVs. This trend isn’t just happening in the us it’s in the UK too, where 34% of YouTube viewing already happens on TVs and among kids aged four to 15, that number jumps to 45% in the uk. Clearly, this is something that’s not slowing down.

So why is this happening? There are several factors driving this transformation, and it starts with the evolution of smart TVs and streaming devices because YouTube is now pre-installed on most of them on the Sony TVs and the Samsung TVs, those smart TVs they come with the YouTube already pre-installed.

Same with the Roku and the Apple TV box just makes it easier than ever to watch it. On your tv. It’s also not just for short clips anymore. YouTube is just teaming with documentaries in-depth, explainers and [00:13:00] episodic series. I think it’s interesting that Epi episodic series are thriving on YouTube and it’s turned into a shared viewing experience with more people watching YouTube together.

Just like traditional television. And I know I do most of my YouTube watching on the computer, but if I see something I think my wife would be interested in, I pull it up on the TV and we watch it together. So there’s that. For communicators using YouTube, this shift has some pretty big implications. If audiences are consuming YouTube like tv, then we need to adjust the way we create this content.

So what do we need to do differently? First you need to optimize for TV screens and most of the YouTube videos that are up there. Now were designed for mobile. And if your audience is watching on tv, you’re gonna need to adapt. First of all you need that 16 nine aspect ratio, the wide screen format, because vertical videos suck on tv.

And I can tell you that from personal experience, [00:14:00] you need to make your text and graphics bigger. What works on a phone that is a few inches from your eyes might be unreadable from across the room. And you also need to make sure your audio is high quality because poor sound is a lot more noticeable on your sound bar or your surround sound system, even your native TV audio than it is.

Listening to it on your phone. Next thing you need to do is think more like a TV producer. They’re watching YouTube more like tv, so you need to lean into longer content. Viewers on TV are a lot more likely to watch content that is 10 plus minutes. You need to invest in better production, quality lighting, sound and editing matter more on a large screen and consider episodic content because as I mentioned, recurring series and repetitive formats, episodic formats encourage you to come back and watch the next episode, so you get people hooked on your content.

It’s no longer just a one-off, oh, I saw this, I [00:15:00] watched it, it was interesting, and I’ll never see anything from you again. Third, it’s important to leverage the second screen experience because viewers may be watching YouTube on tv, but their phones are still in their hands. YouTube is expanding features in order to accommodate the fact that people are watching on their TV with their phone in their hands.

They’re doing QR codes and videos because it’s a simple way to drive viewers to take action, and they’re offering phone-based interactions. They’re making it easy to comment or engage with the video on your mobile phone while you’re watching the tv. If you want viewers to sign up, comment, share, you have to make it easy for them to do that from their phone.

Because they really aren’t gonna use their remote to do that on the tv. And if you are advertising on YouTube, you need to consider your ad strategy too. They are rolling out TV specific ad formats. Three of them are interesting. One are pause [00:16:00] ads. These are ads that will appear when you pause the video.

So what kind of ad would you like people to see when they pause a video? Next is non-intrusive overlays that are better suited for passive TV viewers. And finally, is high quality skippable ads. If you can skip the ad, you will, unless it draws you in. Viewers are a lot more willing to watch if it’s a well made, interesting, compelling ad.

Now, if you’re using YouTube ads, these formats could be more effective than traditional pre-rolls. The takeaway from all this is that YouTube isn’t just another social platform anymore. It’s the new television. If you’re using YouTube for communication, it’s time to start thinking like a broadcaster.

Neville Hobson: Listening to what you’re saying there, she I just said to her, my God, the manipulation is dreadful.

Truly. But I watch, more t more YouTube content on TV than any other device. In fact, the worst device to watch YouTube on is a mobile phone. Frankly I, in my experience, horrible not only is [00:17:00] it a small screens, it’s squeezed in, the vertical you mentioned, okay. But all the popups and all the ads and all the kind of and particularly the ads that break in the middle of something you’re watching.

So it’s a dreadful experience in my humble opinion. Maybe not so humble, but that’s my opinion. So I tend to watch YouTube on TV for stuff I’ve saved that I found elsewhere. I actually quite and this is not like I see something, I think, oh, my wife and I would like to watch it together.

We don’t do that with YouTube. We do that with Google movies. That’s a fact. Now that’s not YouTube. That’s a separate thing, but it’s the same company of course. But I like to watch things I’ve found elsewhere that I’ve saved. I can watch on a big screen, and it could be an ad, it could be something else, anything.

Even yet, that experience is not brilliant no matter what device you’re using, simply because of the int inclusivity of the advertising, other messaging that interferes with what you’re watching. So you could say. If you take the premium account, pay for it, you don’t get the ads. That’s actually not quite [00:18:00] true.

You do, but maybe not so badly as this. So I think your point is a key one that you mentioned towards the end of what you were saying, which is if an ad is done really well that draws you in, you wouldn’t object. Utterly agree with that. But I’ve yet to find any on YouTube in the uk. The worst ones are, the kind of over fifties life insurance plans.

Maybe that’s the algorithm looking at me and serving up that rubbish, wor, badly made, I mean everything. I better stop me now, shall I get you on a rant yet? So I think TV’s great. It’s a better medium to watch it, but you don’t always have time to do all of that. So the next option I think I would agree with you is a big screen monitor in your office attached to your desktop computer.

Definitely not a phone tablet. Okay. If it’s a large one, but I think. The rest of what you said makes sense from the, from the content writer’s perspective and the medium that people are shoving this content out there. I just don’t think anyone’s really doing that very well on YouTube. That’s my take.

The feeling I [00:19:00] get often is that you’re there and you will be interfered with intrusive advertising, whether you like it or not. And often there’s no skip. You gotta watch the damn things. In some cases not all. So I don’t have a very good perception of YouTube. So I’m not the target audience as much of this stuff and I’m totally fine with that.

Lemme tell you that

Shel Holtz: I don’t see any ads on YouTube ever because I pay the premium fee. Oh, I don’t to avoid the ads. Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s worth every penny as far as I’m concerned, to not see those ads. Sure,

Neville Hobson: I get that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. But the fact that more people are watching on TV now than mobile doesn’t mean people aren’t watching on mobile.

So you have to know who your audience is and where are they more likely to be watching. I didn’t see any demographic breakout except that number for kids four to 15 in the uk watching more than the overall population on their TVs. So yeah, I think it’s partly recognizing where [00:20:00] you’re.

Audience demographically is likely to be watching, but it’s also what kind of content are you thinking of producing? If, if you’re looking for a TikTok like video if you’ve made it for TikTok, I, there’s no reason not to repurpose it for YouTube. The more places it, it is, the better, as long as you’ve made whatever adjustments need to be made for the differences in the formats.

But on the other hand, and I know I’ve talked about this on the show before, there are businesses now companies that are making documentaries and YouTube is now a good place to host those because people will sit and watch a documentary. I’ll tell you the truth, Neville, michelle and I wanted to watch a movie. There was a remake of the movie that was about to come out, and the original starred one of Michelle’s favorite old time actors, Tyrone Power and we wanted to watch the original before we saw the new one and checked every streaming service and nobody had it.

I was, oh my God, this movie has to be somewhere. Where it ended up being, it [00:21:00] was YouTube. So that’s what we did. We pulled up YouTube because it’s on both our Apple TV box and our Samsung tv. So we just pulled up YouTube, did a search for the movie, and sat there for an hour and 40 minutes and watched a movie.

So that’s a new behavior and I think people, who produce content have gotta get accustomed to that and start factoring that into your thinking about what kind of content are you gonna produce.

Neville Hobson: I would agree with you. I would, the only thing I’d say to what you, the kind of pace you outline, I don’t do any of that with YouTube other places I do that.

Not a place I naturally look to, to spend time on except, as I mentioned, as I saved, I wanna catch up with a concert a clip of an ad that I really thought was impressive, things like that. I don’t watch movies, I don’t watch documentaries. There, there are other places I go for that kind of content, but we’re all different and that’s why there’s so much choice out there.

I just get, find so much choice. I gotta limit it to something. So I don’t pay [00:22:00] for that. I pay for other servers, but not pay YouTube. So I tend not to use it. That much in that regard. But it the point though, you are making, I think I would agree with that. You’ve gotta get your aunt together, offer content in a way that’s compelling to the viewer that keeps them around.

And they might then look at other stuff. And that’s why I’m reading the Gizmo article that you shared on this, talking about the revenue that has been steadily increasing. The writer of this piece, by the way, has a a scathing review of YouTube’s mobile app, . I agree with him. He talks about the brain brot of the YouTube mobile app turns me off more than it turns me on.

If I truly wanted dumb quick hits to shock my brain with numbing dopamine, I would turn to TikTok . But and he also makes a comment too which was in my mind, strange to consider YouTube’s popularity on TV when the company keeps raising the price. Obviously YouTube TV service. That’s an interesting point.

So in the US he says YouTube TV now costs [00:23:00] $83 a month. That’s a lot of money. Wow.

Shel Holtz: Might as well just pay for cable.

Neville Hobson: Gosh. Yeah. That’s crazy. He says, if I’m gonna be forced to watch ads because I can’t afford a premium subscription, I wouldn’t wanna do it on my TV or phone.

Okay. That’s his take. But it’s an interesting topic. Shell and I think content creators really should think this through better than they do to make it a more compelling experience for the viewer.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And by the way, one of the reasons I watch a lot of YouTube is because jam bands tend to upload their concert videos, to YouTube, and I am a jam band fan and one reason I can watch them on my phone is that I did get the pixel fold okay.

My phone is now it unfolds into a mini tablet and it makes that experience a whole lot better.

Neville Hobson: Is it any good?

Shel Holtz: I love it. Yeah, it’s great. It’s a little heavy a little heavier than I’m used to for a phone, but I got used to that pretty quickly. I like it. I like it a lot.

Neville Hobson: Cool. Okay next we’re going to talk about a different world in an age of chaos.

And this [00:24:00] stems from a post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s coming up a lot in my research when I look for topics these days. And that’s a good thing. There’s some great content there. I’ll tell

Shel Holtz: you, I’ll tell you, I’m saving more and more LinkedIn articles to my Tumblr feed which is what I use to look for articles to write about or to talk about on the show.

So I agree with you.

Neville Hobson: Sure. I use pocket for that, and it’s chock full of LinkedIn content, but I also save on LinkedIn as well. But now picture this. Imagine a world where reality itself is contested, where facts are no longer agreed upon, and truth bends under the weight of disinformation. Does that sound familiar to what’s happening right now?

It could be some familiarity there. This is the world we find ourselves in today, and as communicators, our role has never been more crucial or more complex. Five years ago at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic communication had some semblance of order governments held daily briefing scientists stood alongside officials, and even as chaos unfolded, there were still structures in place to [00:25:00] make sense of it all.

Fast forward to 2025, and that coherence has all but vanished now. We find ourselves in an era that Catherine Arrow calls chaos communication. A time when public relations professionals, journalists, and communicators, are no longer just sense makers, but active participants in an information war, in a thought provoking post on LinkedIn.

Welcome to the Age of the Chaos Communicator. Arrow. Arrow warns that we’ve entered a new phase of public discourse, one where truth is deliberately distorted. Polarization is a strategy, and neutrality is no longer an option. We face a world shaped not just by geopolitical tensions and economic upheavals, but by deliberate attempts to reshape reality.

She critiques the role of public relations and communication professionals pointing out that they are no longer just mediators, but often find themselves entangled in battles over truth itself. Some uphold ethical standards while others willingly participate in disinformation [00:26:00] for personal or political gain.

Arrow warns at the stakes are now higher than ever. . As those in power actively work to reshape narratives for their own benefit in this environment, neutrality is no longer an option. Communicators must take a stand, push back against misinformation and act as defenders of truth, even at personal or professional risk.

As communicators, what role should we play? Do we amplify messages regardless of the truthfulness, or do we take a stand knowing that speaking up could come at a cost? Arrow argues that we are now one step beyond traditional crisis communication, and we must embrace the uncomfortable reality of chaos communication, where defending the truth is not just an ethical responsibility, but a battle in its own right.

Ultimately Arrow calls for a redefinition of the communicator’s role in this new era, urging professionals to move beyond traditional PR functions and embrace the responsibility of countering manipulation, upholding integrity, [00:27:00] and ensuring that history is not dictated solely by those with loudest megaphones.

This age of chaos raises important questions for communicators. How do we ensure that ethical communication remains at the forefront? How do we counter disinformation without adding to the noise? And most critically, if we don’t take a stand for truth, who will?

Shel Holtz: Well, the question I have is, are we doing this on our own using platforms like LinkedIn or are we doing this on behalf of our organizations? Because if we’re doing this on behalf of our organizations, we certainly can’t just go off and do it on our own. A lot of organizations are grappling with the chaos that is coming out of Washington, DC right now and making some tough decisions about what they’re going to say and what they’re not going to say in order to protect their business.

Good god look at Elon Musk right now and specifically thinking of Twitter or [00:28:00] X where he is suggesting not in so many words, but everybody is . On top of this interpretation that if you advertise on X and you don’t increase your ad spend, you could end up being the target of a government investigation, your organization.

You talk about the weaponization of government and the administration is doing that. If you don’t tow the line on DEI policies, you’re, you could end up being the target of an investigation by the Department of Justice. These are pretty serious threats. And I think organizations that have employees they need to pay so that they can feed their families and, keep a roof over their heads.

They need to keep their vendors working. They need to keep their investors happy. That’s a tough call to take a stand. I think there are fewer and fewer organizations, frankly, that are doing that be because of the threat. Now I. Absolutely agree. And I am taking a stand [00:29:00] individually, online, wherever I can as, as well as through other community activities.

But I think it’s interesting if she’s talking about, as an official spokesperson of your organization, you are speaking for your organization. You can’t make that up as you go. .

Neville Hobson: I’m not sure she’s talking about that. Although that may be part of what she’s saying. She doesn’t state it, but it is more of a general thing, it seems to me.

And I think it makes sense. Like you I could see the risk element of this but perhaps more significantly to your prime point, which is you can’t just go out and do this if you are talking on behalf of the organization. Of course not. I don’t think she’s suggesting that.

It does make you think when I read her article, this was before the news rapidly emerged about the thousands of people that Trump and his psycho fence are firing in public sector or the federal employees. I read today, I think the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is letting go some thousands of employees.

The big [00:30:00] one is the 10,000 or so that have been let go in. I’ve forgotten which government department shell, do you remember? It was in the news? Yeah,

Shel Holtz: it was the US agency for international development.

Neville Hobson: Is it that one? Okay. Because I think Department of Defense is coming up next. So I was reading Generals this morning.

They had about

Shel Holtz: yeah, chairman of the

Neville Hobson: so I guess in the context of that without this conversation just focusing on all this stuff going on in America, I think. In my mind it’s been why aren’t we seeing more people pushing back on, on stuff like this? But the wider picture would be generally what the US is, the current administration in the White House is doing, broadly speaking across the board, the threat of tariffs and this kind of deal making in Ukraine.

It’s all about mining these precious metals that’s all Trump wants. He wants a deal, and he’s talking about how much money everyone can make on this. Good grief. He’s all about the transaction. And, uh, cozy up to Putin and so forth. No one’s really saying a lot about that.

And I [00:31:00] can understand that. Part of me understands that, the high risk element of that. But I think it’s more why do that? No one has a clue how to respond to this yet. That’s what it looks like to me. Whether you are in a European government, whether you are in a global multinational corporation, let’s wait for.

Someone some company that’s a big global enterprise is gonna get in the cross hairs of either Musk or Trump and have to go through some kind of serious accusation. So what are we gonna do about that? So I would imagine what Catherine Arrow is pointing out is already on the discussion tables of large organizations.

I would think the what if, and this is what would you call it? Chief says, we’re beyond crisis communication. This is chaos, communication planning. So that is already going on, and maybe we’re in the, to use a second World War analogy, this is the phony war. There’s not real war broken out yet.

These are little skirmishes. These are the . Probing and the pushing. That’s what it seems to me. And yet the consequences of these actions are dreadful and dreadful. They’re dire, [00:32:00] they are gonna affect all of us. So you mentioned about, in a company people have gotta, look after their employees, they can feed their families or totally.

Right. Maybe that’s what’s influencing the lack of things as well. So we’ve got all that. This then is the, almost like the game plan for this is what you’ve gotta decide as a communicator in the organization. And by the way, thinking about that, the communicators.

What about those folks who are in those organizations that have fired all those federal employees, the communicators, assuming they aren’t amongst the fires. I’ve seen a couple of people talking on threats who are communicators who’ve been let go in, I’ve forgotten which agency? So it’s across the board.

And we are gonna see some dreadful consequences of all of this. In the meantime, we’ve got what c Catherine Arrow is pointing out to us that we need to decide ourselves. How do we ensure that ethical communications at the forefront how do we counter disinformation? Listen to everything Trump says, and the fact checking [00:33:00] guys are hard at work on everything he says and almost.

The majority of everything he says is not true most of the time. So how do you counter that? Because it’s like we’ve often talked, if you don’t respond to stuff like that after a short period of time, it becomes the truth to most people. ’cause no one is saying different and there’s a big risk. If we don’t stand for truth, who will is her concluding point. That’s a very good statement. But we should adapt that to the real world, to the reality of the circumstances in our own situations. There is risk doing this without doubt. I don’t have the answers to these questions I’m asking too.

I’ve been thinking about this as I read Katherine’s post and just observing what’s going on as Musk with his chainsaw at a conference. Goodness me Trump, who. I just wonder, is he, does he think this is all a joke? Do you think so? Is he just letting Musk have his way until something goes wrong and then he fires him and then we see a conflagration?

Who knows? But this is a dangerous time. This, I, [00:34:00] in my view, is a good clarion call for us to think about some of these things and indeed this kind of conversation you and I are having, others should be having these conversations too, because we are at a time of grave peril. It seems to me, in this age of chaos.

And chaos is right.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. And when Catherine Aero says that we need to take on a new role, I would argue it’s not a new role. It is something that was suggested maybe 10 or 12 years ago by the Global Alliance for Communications and Public Relations. Yeah. This is the organization whose membership is made up of communication associations.

I-E-B-C-P-R-S-A CPRS. They’re all members of the Global Alliance, and they met in Melbourne way back when and drafted what they called the Melbourne mandate. I don’t even know if you can still find that online. But at the center of the mandate was that the communicator’s role at the center is to be the conscience of the organization and to help guide.

The [00:35:00] doing of what’s right and the rejection of what’s wrong. And that’s exactly, I think what she’s talking about here. Just more speaking up than providing counsel. But as communicators I think that they were right in the Melbourne mandate that because we have that view, not only of all of the organization’s operations, but everything that’s going on externally, we’re in the best position to say, look, this is how people are going to react to our taking this position. I look at Target the gr the department store chain as an example. They dialed back their DEI, they dialed back the pride month celebrations. They used to have a lot of product from gay L-G-B-T-Q designers and the like in the store.

And they’ve dialed that back because of the pushback they were getting. But now there’s been a suit filed against them customers who supported their DEI initiatives and their supportive Pride month are boycotting and making a lot of noise. They’re being torn apart by both ends.

And [00:36:00] you have to wonder how an organization is going to deal with that when half of the people want you to do one thing and half of your customers want you to do another. And they you can’t have it both ways. So I’m, these are difficult times.

Neville Hobson: They are. And I’m thinking something you mentioned about the Melbourne mandate is a good point.

But I think we’ve got, we’re at a time now where nothing at all is black or white, is very nuance’s. Lots of dreadful shades of gray. Much more than that movie talked about. Lemme tell you that. And you’ve also got something we can observe which she references that some people uphold ethical standards.

And I would like to think the majority of communicators do, while others willingly participate in disinformation for personal or political gain. That’s not a new thing, of course, but at a time when things are not what they appear, particularly when. In the kind of good old days, an authority figure, like the [00:37:00] president of the United States, you could almost literally say, if he says it’s it is.

So, now you’ve got Trump doing that kind of stuff. If he says it’s it ain’t, that’s a fact, but what are you gonna do about it? And it gets worse every time he talks. I think this presents a, this kind of adds to the dilemma confronting communicators because it is not black and white, the old rule book that you may not apply the way it was intended back then.

So you’ve gotta think fast on your faith, be pretty agile as the word goes and look at how do you convince your leaders, your colleagues and others that of a certain course of action when evidence, quote unquote out there suggests it’s not that, it’s this, how do you deal with that? So it’s, it is a time of chaos.

Shel Holtz: We’re gonna stick with this topic. We’re just gonna zero in on one element of the chaos, and that’s the upheaval we find ourselves in. Thanks to this trend of loosening content moderation policies [00:38:00] on major platforms, notably X and Metis platforms this shift has profound implications for communicators, especially in the B2B sector.

So if you’re working the B2B sector, pay attention MET is transitioning from third party fact checking to a community note system that’s similar to the approach that X formerly Twitter took under Elon Musk’s leadership. If you care to call it that Zuckerberg is framing this move as a commitment to free expression, aiming to address concerns about over enforcement and perceived biases and content regulation.

But this relaxation of content controls has really sparked a lot of debate. Critics argue that reducing moderation can lead to increases in misinformation and harmful content, posing risks to public disclosure and brand safety. Really interesting to be having this discussion. Right now. I’m reading the book, the Sirens call by Chris Hayes, which is about the attention economy.

And we only have so much attention to give. It’s being commoditized, [00:39:00] but there is an endless supply of information out there and people are working hard to draw your attention. To their content. And if you spend your time with disinformation and misinformation, that means there’s less time for you to hear the countervailing opinion on all of this.

So what are the implications for communicators for those of us in communications, these changes require a strategic reassessment. Here’s what to think about. First, brand reputation management With fewer moderation controls, there is a greater risk of misleading or harmful content proliferating. You may find that your brand’s messages is right up against something that’s controversial or offensive, and that can damage your brand’s reputation and ERO trust.

So it’s really important to monitor social channels vigilantly, and respond quickly to any content that could negatively impact your brand. Then there’s navigating misinformation. The [00:40:00] potential rise in unchecked information means communicators have to be proactive in combating false narratives, developing clear factual content and engaging directly with your audience to correct misperceptions, misconceptions, and disinformation can help maintain your brand’s credibility.

Also, educating your audience on how to identify reliable information and information sources can empower them to navigate the digital landscape more effectively, and they may even be grateful to you for that. Next is evaluating platform strategies. As platforms change their moderation policies, we may need to go so far as reassessing where and how we engage our audiences.

There are already people pulling their X accounts and telling people you, and you’ll now find us on Blue Sky. That’s because X is among those platforms that have become less conducive to your brand’s values and messaging. Due to an increase in harmful content, diversifying your digital presence and considering alternative [00:41:00] platforms with moderation policies that align with your brand standards can mitigate potential risks.

Finally there’s enhancing internal policies that we need to consider internally. Revisiting your social media guidelines is imperative. Ensure that your team understands the importance of responsible content sharing and the potential implications of engaging with unmoderated content.

Providing training on best practices can help maintain a consistent and positive brand image across all channels. So by staying informed and being proactive, we can navigate this complex environment effectively, safeguard our brands, and continue to engage our audiences in a meaningful way.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it sounds so wonderfully.

Let’s do this the way you say it, shell, um, it’s good to link it to Catherine Arrow’s assessment of the Age of Chaos, because this is part of that. I agree. I find it almost incomprehensible to, to understand why [00:42:00] anyone would want to, um, eliminate content moderation in this day and age notwithstanding Trump and Musk even, and Zuckerberg for that matter talking about, because moderation restricts freedom of speech.

That’s the kind of overriding argument that I understand they’re saying is that’s why they’ve done this, because they want to give. Better freedom of speech without these impediments of government censorship, which is really what it amounts to. So all this pushback in Trump’s style against the the European Union and their efforts to provide safeguards for people online and so forth, all that’s gone by the wayside basically.

So brands generally the people running those brands have serious difficulties. Now with this in being present on any platform that doesn’t have moderation, which is where ones like Blue Sky really do stand out with what they have, and they’ve ramped up their their safeguarding teams significantly.

Trouble is. The likes of X in [00:43:00] particular with what, 600 million users and Facebook with what are they got 3 billion users. The numbers are staggering that, that’s like a drop in the buckets. But maybe this, again, the extension of the conversations that we’ve had in prior episodes, which is that maybe this is something that brands who.

Do not wish to literally give up on their content and their messaging being overwhelmed by stuff that they abhor and does not represent their brand values at all. Being associated with a place that has stuff like that. Maybe this is another nudge to get going with, considering other platforms, which comparatively, in terms of user numbers are niche right now.

But that’s more honest it seems to me. And it’s not saying that, oh, great, we can have them to moderate all the content that, that’s one we can say, but we want not at all. This then becomes a far more strategic approach to this, and it actually sets in place, I think. [00:44:00] The beginnings of a framework for this is how it’s going to be in the future.

That these monolithic networks that are controlled by a single corporation or one crazy individual who changes things on a whim now and again, and it is more like again and now would not matter. It takes power away from those people and you then are more honest and truthful to yourself and your audience.

So that is the future though. ’cause what we got now is the age of chaos and it ain’t pretty.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And I find the argument that this is all about free speech to be a little disingenuous. , honestly, if you’re looking for unfettered free speech there’s always four chan. It’s still there.

Last I heard. And anything goes on four chan. There are places that do that. But yeah it’s getting uglier and uglier. I am seeing stuff in my Facebook feed that I have never seen before. People I have not followed, I have not commented on, I haven’t even lingered on these posts.

And I [00:45:00] find them objectionable and offensive. And why are they in my feed? What is it about the algorithm that is injecting this stuff into my feed? You, I think what makes TikTok so addictive is that it. Figures out pretty quickly what you like and just automatically starts giving you more of that.

In fact, in his book, Chris Hayes says he had a, an evening at home one night. So he he was alone which is rare. So he decided to have a half a gummy an edible and play with TikTok. And he said after an hour he realized he had just been scrolling through videos of people making sandwiches lovingly and carefully and cutting them in half, one after another.

And he said, oh my God TikTok knows I’m stoned , so, why can’t Facebook do something a little more like that? Why is it loading me up with this content? And it is, I think this shift toward a more . Conservative approach to [00:46:00] what we see. And I’m actually blocking a lot more on Facebook these days than I ever have.

And I think it’s all because of this accommodation of the new administration and a desire to stay outta their crosshairs. That could be. I also think it’s the algorithm responds to what you post yourself, the content you post, and the volume of your posting. So I don’t do much on, on Facebook. I hardly ever maybe it’s probably less than 1% of my time there, less of that even engage with anyone who’s not a friend at all.

Neville Hobson: I spend all my time purely in my friends. The equivalent of the timeline. I don’t engage much now and again, I’ll have a look at what’s going on and I quickly go away because I don’t see anything there that interests me at all. But that’s just me. I know others who are completely the opposite to that.

TikTok I gave up on TikTok about six months ago. It’s just full of utter bilch. That’s how I see it. I have no interest in that at all. It’s a shame. But I think, [00:47:00] this is the landscape we have and it is not gonna improve. I shell I’m certain it won’t ever improve be, it’s getting worse, if anything.

And now with what’s happening it’s I despair that this is ever gonna be a pleasant place. So I’m still on Facebook. I’m still not a hundred percent decided whether I’m gonna completely shut it down, but I’m leaning that way. And that doesn’t sound like ridiculous fence setting. I dunno what does, but that’s where I’m at still right now.

Shel Holtz: I just finished reading a book. I can’t remember the author’s name. There are people listening, I’m sure, who would are shouting it at me. As soon as I tell you the title of the book it, it is called Nexus. And it is a history of information networks from the Stone Age to ai. And one of the points the author makes he’s a historian something of a philosopher an Israeli he wrote a book called Sapiens that I think was a bestseller.

But he says, what enables democracy is information networks that allow people to engage in [00:48:00] discussion about the issues that affect. The society and to arrive at some kind of consensus. And we’re losing the ability to have those conversations because of this chaos and because of this flooding of the zone with misinformation and disinformation and people latching onto conspiracy theories and whatever suits the tribe that they belong to.

And that’s worrisome. That is the conversation the authentic conversation seems to be drying up in favor of commenting on and sharing of misinformation and disinformation and, the spread of this stuff. I think, you’re paying attention to what is being shared about how to address all of this in unmoderated communities where your organization, your brand may be active.

Listening to Catherine Arrow’s advice all of this is important because, yeah, we gotta do what we can.

Dan York: Greeting she and Neville and FR listeners all around the world. It, Stan, you are coming at you from a [00:49:00] snowy Vermont USA, where we have about 20 inches or 50 centimeters for you, Neville, of that white stuff on the ground.

It’s beautiful out here. Cold, but beautiful. So this month I wanna mention first something that people have long requested for the Mastodon platform, which is the ability to have quote posts. If you think about that, we used to call them retweets back in the day of Twitter, but they have since been called many other things in different platforms.

But quote posts is certainly one topic, or quote, tweets, we used to say different ways, but a lot of platforms have them, and this is of course, the ability to go and take somebody else’s content and share it in your content, in your stream with your own feedback and comments and things. When Mastodon was first being created back in the mid 2010s, it was around 20 16, 20 17 that it first got started.

They, the developers chose very specifically not to [00:50:00] include quote posts. I. And one of the rationales they had at the time was really that one of the ways in which quote posts can be used is to be negative about somebody, process often referred to as dunking or something where you are going and

Taking somebody’s quote and saying, oh, look at what an idiot they are, or something like that. In much , much more profane words perhaps, but really, trashing somebody and doing it so in the wrong usage it can be a very unsafe kind of thing. And so the developers of Mastodon, when they were first creating it were against this.

And so they didn’t implement it. But over the years, they have of course noticed that a lot of people like quote post, and there are very many other very positive uses of how it can be used to share something, amplify it, work with that. And many communities like using quote posts in different ways, and also that people coming to Mastodon from other platforms, were finding, [00:51:00] wait a minute I can’t do quote posts.

Then, I don’t wanna be here and trying other things now because Macedon and the broader Fedi verse is an open environment, there have been a number of clients, including one that I use called Ice Cubes that have implemented a form of quote posts where it is basically taking the original post and forwarding and it sharing it very much like we used to do before the retweet mechanism was something that was created in Twitter.

There’s been a need for a better way. So Mastodon, the team there at the developers of it, the Mastodon team put up a post earlier this month that talked about how this could be potentially implemented and what they looked at was basically creating a quote post mechanism, but providing additional controls.

So what will happen as they implement this is that you will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted. So [00:52:00] you’ll have a configuration if you don’t want people doing that, if it’s something you’ve seen abused for you or something, you can just not enable that. You will also be notified when someone quotes you, which other platforms allow as well.

And then interestingly, you’ll be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context. So if somebody were to go and take your post and forward it and say, you know what an idiot you could choose to have it withdrawn from that quote. Interesting idea about how to go and do it. They rightly point out in their post that there is no standard for this.

And so that’s one of the pieces of work that they’ll be doing is to bring it through the W three C or the process, a standards process. There’s now a fedi verse enhancement proposals kind of process that will go and write an extension to activity pub that will allow this to happen. So if you’re interested in the fedi verse and Mastodon, this is something that is working its way through and and we’ll see where this goes.

I’m looking forward to having that capability as I spend more and more of my time [00:53:00] in the fedi verse these days. Second topic this month, I wanna just comment on the fact that, in your world, Neville, the the UK government was being very assertive to Apple, that they wanted the ability to go and have a backdoor to be able to get into any and all encrypted backups of UK citizens in Apple’s iCloud.

They were demanding this under the UK’s Investig Investigatory Powers Act or the Snoopers Charter, as some people call it. They wanted to be able to go and get access to end-to-end encrypted files everywhere. So they were demanding that Apple put a back door in its system. I. If anybody has been watching the news, security news over here in the United States back doors, they never just stay for the government.

We’ve watched here in the United States where a group of Chinese hackers apparently have been able to use back doors in a telecom system to be able to go and get in into [00:54:00] all sorts of conversations and things all over the world. Back doors are an incredibly bad idea. So there’s a lot of concern about what would Apple do.

And what they chose to do is that they’re gonna stop offering their encrypted cloud storage offering something called advanced data protection to users in the uk. So now, as of this time or when this is happening here, UK users will have a less safe experience than anyone else in the rest of the world because they will not be able to have their data protected.

So any of the data, the photos they store, the family photos, the documents, anything else they put in the iCloud. Will not be protected anymore because the UK government wants to go and be able to hack into it or look at it. So, let’s be careful here a little bit about what’s going on.

FaceTime, some of the messaging will still be end-to-end encrypted, but the difference will be that the backups will not be, and so you will not have that protection with, if you turn on the advanced data [00:55:00] protection, your data is end-to-end encrypted. And so Apple can’t see it. A government can’t see it, nobody can see it.

It’s protected with it turned off the government or others could see it. So UK users will be less secure than the rest of the world. We’ll see what happens, whether the UK government relents and agrees with everyone else that back doors are bad or or what will happen. Stay tuned. I wanna end with kind of something a little bit more fun if we’ve been doom scrolling through whatever your service may be, threads, blue Sky, Mastodon, or even those other ones out there.

If you want an alternative, a developer Del Deliver, develop something called Wiki Talk. Yes, it’s a play on TikTok and if you go to their website, which is wiki to W-I-K-I-T-O-C-T-O-K, just search on that with your search engine, you’ll find it quickly. It is something where you can just go and do vertical swipes and like you would in TikTok or something, and [00:56:00] you’ll swipe through random Wikipedia articles.

It sounds hokey, but you know what, it’s . Fun, just looping through and seeing whatever different things are. It doesn’t have videos. It’s not like TikTok in that way. It’s just random articles, which then you can go and be able to click a button and read more. But it’s just something fun.

If you want an alternative to doom scrolling through all the news these days. With that, I’ll turn it back to you guys, shall Neville. Thanks for including me here and I look forward to this listening to the show. The outline you’ve got looks fantastic. So that’s all for me. You can find more in my audio in writing at Dan York.

Me. Thanks for listening back to you guys. Bye for now.

Shel Holtz: Thanks very much, Dan, as always a great report and I cannot wait to go take a look at Wiki talk . It sounds like so much fun. The idea of doom scrolling through Wiki the endless scroll of Wiki articles just sounds wonderful. I gotta give that a try.

Neville Hobson: Leadership is at the heart of everything. I think most of us listening to [00:57:00] this would agree from the highest levels of government to the smallest of communities, but what do people truly want from their leaders? What makes someone worth following? Gallup’s latest global leadership report offers some fascinating insights into this question.

Based on an extensive survey of more than 30,000 people across 52 countries, the research identifies four essential needs that followers expect from those in charge, hope, trust, compassion, and stability. Hope is the most crucial element, said 56% of survey respondents, leaders whose visions for the future inspire confidence and optimism are the ones who leave the most significant impact.

Trust is not far behind. It’s 33% ensuring that people believe in the integrity, honesty, and reliability of those who lead them. Compassion and stability round out the equation, reinforcing the importance of care, empathy, and consistency in leadership by focusing on what leaders contribute to people’s lives.

[00:58:00] Gallup’s study highlights the evolving dynamics of leadership and the critical role of understanding people’s expectations, but here’s where it gets even more interesting. 57% of survey respondents said they’re more likely to name family members as their biggest daily influences, followed by their managers or workplace leaders.

At 18% political and religious lead leaders came in at 7% each with celebrities trailing at just 2%. Leaders in the workplace have significant potential to improve lives with 34% of employed individuals, citing a manager, workplace leader or colleague, as having the most positive impact. And while hope is the primary need in every region, its emphasis varies.

For example, in Europe, people place relatively more importance on trust. While Latin America shows a greater need for compassion, younger people aged 18 to 29 are more likely to seek hope from their leaders compared to older individuals. [00:59:00] The report highlights that when leaders fail to provide hope, trust and stability followers experience higher levels of stress and dissatisfaction, which impacts overall societal wellbeing.

It also suggests that leaders who recognize and act on these needs will foster greater engagement, productivity, and resilience in their communities and organizations. It all means that leadership isn’t just about politics or public figures. It’s about the everyday decisions made in homes, workplaces, businesses, and communities.

Gallup concludes that modern leadership requires self-awareness and understanding of the expectations of followers and the ability to provide clear vision and guidance. Above all, hope is the defining trait that separates influential leaders from the rest. In an era of uncertainty, and dare I say an age of chaos, how can leaders better serve those who look to them for guidance?

How can they cultivate hope and trust in an age of skepticism? And what role do [01:00:00] communicators play in helping leaders connect with their audiences effectively? These are big questions. She .

Shel Holtz: These are huge questions. And how do you convey hope when people are feeling hopeless? That is a skill that is not something that you can just tell your leader they need to do if they don’t.

Already have the character or the experience or just the foundation to, to be able to do that? This is why I think having a leadership coach can be so useful to a lot of leaders. There are people out there who are certified executive coaches. I know a few. In fact I also think it’s worth reexamining the key styles of leadership.

There are, I, you can get master’s degrees in just servant leadership for example. And that’s one of the styles of leadership. It’s the style where you are humble and protective of your people, but you’re also there to serve them. What do you need from me to help you get your job done?

So [01:01:00] the organization can achieve its goals, but there’s also coach. Leadership style, visionary leadership style? Certainly autocratic. Think about Jamie Diamond. If you wanna peg his leadership style, it would be autocratic. There’s laissez-faire, which is hands off, just I’m gonna let people do what they do.

Democratic transformational, transactional, bureaucratic, there’s all these styles and the idea that you can latch onto one of these and beat just that these days, especially in light of the Gallup survey results. I think it’s absurd. If you are primarily a coach, that’s great, but you also need to be

Visionary, and you also need to be a servant to your people. Yeah. So which one of these is your foundational style, and then which other ones do you integrate into your leadership style? And as communicators, especially executive communicators, the communicators who work with. The leaders of the organization.

I think it’s important to work with them on this so that they are able to [01:02:00] pull out the type of leader that is needed in the moment. And, that progressive progress focused inspirational leader, that, that visionary style needs to come out in these days because people need to see that you have a clear vision of where we are headed and how we’re going to navigate through these chaotic times.

And if a leader’s not doing that and it’s certainly not what I’m seeing from the Jamie Diamonds of the world then your employees are going to feel disengaged and nervous. And you’re going to see. Productivity drop, you’re going to see client relations erode. All kinds of bad things happen when your employees don’t feel that they’re being led by people who are in a position to, to get us through this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. That’s about, it’s very valid. I think when I was reading the the global leadership report when I first got a copy last week popped into my mind quite early on that what I thought of hope as the most crucial element, [01:03:00] according to what the survey respondent said I thought of Barack Obama who actually introduced this.

In a memorable way to people globally, not just in America. Do you probably remember back in the first, when he was first elected we had people creating these kind of bits of code. You could get a badge with Obama’s face, you create your own, with your own. They proliferated everywhere across social media back at, back in the time, or blogs mostly as they were then.

But that is enduring what he did. No matter what’s happened since then or since he left politics effectively it, it resonates still with people. And that’s born out in this survey. And there we’re talking about leadership from a national figure in a country, not just a boss at work. This is embracing society as a whole and that element I think is key to ensure we don’t.

Lose sight of that big picture when we talk about, in the workplace and so forth. Yes, that’s important of course, but this is the bigger picture overall. And I think at a time, like where [01:04:00] we’re at now and this has been the thread of this entire episode we’re discussing, is that this is the age of chaos without any question.

And this, we add this then to the list of questions we are asking of communicators. How are you going to help your organization, your leader or boss, your CEO, whoever it might be, navigate this. The rest, the landscape that we’re currently strolling along. And you apply that then to your family.

The pressures I think are immense, particularly on communicators who’ve never really had to really stand out in areas outside their own niche areas. And this, ’cause this is definitely that. There’s no easy answers here, there, there aren’t. There’s just simply this is something to think about and that too take into account and so forth, which is really what we’re doing.

But it is a difficult time. And I think our role. It is precisely as communicators to help leaders be better be the best they can be. Oh God, that’s a [01:05:00] Gillette slogan. I saw an ad for that the other day. the best, best demand can be. That’s the one. Yes. That’s the role basically. And you gotta add all this to everything else we’ve discussed here.

It sounds a horrible laundry list of dreadful things you’ve gotta be aware of. That I am afraid is the landscape. So you don’t need to sit and look at it. Oh my God, having a deal with this. You just need to deal with it. And that’s very easy for me to say. But look at them individually. Don’t think of everything all at once.

That’s the old trick where you wake up at three in the morning and your brain says, okay, here comes everything that you’ve got locked away you are worried about or concerned about. It’s all coming out right now. Don’t do that. I. You need a plan. Coaching is great. That’s a good one.

But there’s so many things to think about that you, you need help. And that’s what professional associations can can really play a big role in that kind of thing. So it’s a bad time we’re in. That’s effect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And when Catherine Aero talks about this new role for the communicator, I think this is an, just a perfect [01:06:00] example because first of all, if you’re doing internal communications, presumably you’re listening to employees have a voice and you’re able to distill what you hear into some core messages that you can take to your leaders and say, look it’s fine to say employees need hope, but what do they mean by that?

And how can we craft your messaging and your interactions so that they feel that sense of hope and work with the leaders to project that that’s an ideal role for a communicator in the organization.

Neville Hobson: So bottom line is as the survey points out, hope is the key attribute, let’s say that people look for in leaders to give them hope.

And so our job is to enable the help our leaders do exactly that.

Shel Holtz: Let’s get off of these depressing topics and talk about something that we enjoy talking about, and that’s ai. A relatively new use of AI is con generating considerable buzz in the research community.

And this is [01:07:00] the use of AI generated users or synthetic users as research panelists. As more companies offer these AI driven solutions, we need to weigh their advantages and limitations, especially for communicators and user experience. That’s UX engineers. Synthetic users are AI generated profiles that are designed to simulate real user behaviors, thoughts, and experiences, leveraging large language models.

These artificial . Personas can participate in interviews, surveys, usability tests, panels, providing immediate feedback without it having to engage actual human participants. There are platforms like synthetic users that’s the name of an organization that offers tools to create these AI driven personalities profiles with the goal of streamlining the research process.

Now, there are benefits to doing this that start with speed and efficiency. Synthetic users can be generated and [01:08:00] deployed quickly, accelerating the research timeline. This immediacy is particularly beneficial in fast-paced environments where timely insights are crucial. You don’t have time to go out and recruit a panel and schedule a time for them all to be together, right?

Then there’s cost reduction. Traditional user research. Usually involves considerable expenses related to recruiting participants incentives for them to participate and logistics, especially if you’re gonna pull a focus group together face to face, getting them all into town. At the same time, AI generated users eliminate these costs, making research more accessible, especially for organizations with limited budgets.

Then there’s accessibility to hard to reach demographics. And this is I think one of the more compelling uses of synthetic users, because you can tailor them to represent a specific demographic that can be challenging to recruit. This could be a niche market sensitive population. And now these synthetic users can provide insights that might be harder to [01:09:00] obtain otherwise.

And there’s also, and I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing, but I guess some researchers like consistency in responses. AI driven personas offer standardized feedback, reducing variability, and enabling clear comparisons across different studies or product inter iterations. But don’t, kick back and think, wow, this is great,

I’m gonna start using synthetic users for my research. Because there are downsides and limitations that start with the lack of genuine human emotion and behavior. As human behavior is complex and context to dependent, synthetic users are data-driven, so they may not capture the depth of real human emotions, spontaneous reactions, or the nuanced decision-making processes that genuine users exhibit.

Then there’s the potential for inaccurate or overly positive feedback. Studies have shown that AI generated responses can sometimes be overly positive or fail to reflect the critical perspectives that real users [01:10:00] might provide. That’ll skew your data. Relying solely on synthetic users raises questions about the authenticity of the data and the ethical impli implications of making decisions based on artificial feedback.

There’s a risk of missing out on genuine user voices, which are crucial and empathetic and user-centered design. And then, AI generated users may lack the ability to provide context rich insights that come from personal experiences, environmental factors and cultural backgrounds. And these often are critical in understanding user needs and behaviors.

I. We don’t come to you with problems and no solutions. So here’s the advice for communicators and UX engineers first. And this makes me think immediately of Mitch Joel who said it’s not, instead of, it’s a long with use synthetic users as a supplement, not a replacement.

While AI generated users can provide quick and cost effective insights, they should compliment, not replace research involving real users. [01:11:00] Balancing both approaches makes sure that the depth and authenticity of human feedback are preserved. You need to validate your AI generated insights with real user data before making significant decisions based on synthetic user feedback.

Cross-reference the findings with any data that you can find from actual users to make sure that it’s accurate and relevant. Be transparent about the methodologies that you used. This is really important from an ethical perspective. When you’re presenting your research findings, be very clear that you use synthetic users in your methodology.

Transparency builds trust and allows stakeholders to understand the context and potential limitations of the data and stay informed about the ethical I implications of synthetic users. Keep yourself educated, keep your team educated about the ethical considerations surrounding AI and research, and come up with some guidelines to ensure that your use of synthetic users aligns with your organization’s values [01:12:00] and respects user dignity For communicators and UX designer, the key lies in integrating synthetic users thoughtfully into a broader research strategy, ensuring the technology enhances rather than replaces the individual perspectives of real users.

Neville Hobson: That’s a lot to digest in that shell, I think starting with how much, I hate the phrase synthetic user, but it’s part of the lexicon. I get it. I. The main thing I would say is really to, what kind of echo what you said there, that to don’t use just this should compliment what you’re doing, which is how I have always approached using generative ai.

Generally speaking, it doesn’t replace, it compliments things that I’m doing. It enhances what I’m doing. This is surely how we should be looking at this. I think though, that there are big alarm bells. I’ve read a couple of articles that all they talk about are the cons. And I agree there are definite pros to doing this speed.

Ideally accuracy, [01:13:00] but assuming that it’s been fed accurate. Input to give the accurate output. It’s is part of the landscape and it is likely to increase in that way. But there should be big guardrails on this. And I think the ethical question is one that comes in there that it is really important to, to behave ethically and transparently.

And there we come against the age old human element. ’cause a lot of people don’t do that. It is part of the landscape and responsible people responsible communicators and others will do, use it wisely. We’ll take advantage of the benefits of this that will enhance and improve perhaps what they’re doing without using a tool like this.

And those who don’t, aren’t going to benefit and they just muddy the overall landscapes. You’ve gotta be aware of that, but this is part of what is evolving. And you just gotta be. Sure. Really sure of what you’re doing and how you’re going about it. That doesn’t leave any doubt in anyone’s mind about your own honesty and transparency.[01:14:00]

Shel Holtz: Yeah. What worries me is that there are going to be research reports released that are based on. What was gleaned from a panel of synthetic users. And you won’t know that, and we’ll be making decisions based on this when the data could be really flawed. Now I’ve been aware of synthetic users for a while.

It’s not a new idea relatively speaking because, I’ve talked to people. Yeah, the idea of employee personas is certainly not new that’s been around for, 30 or 40 years at least, maybe even longer. The idea that we have created a persona to represent this cohort of employees in the organization that helps us craft our communication if we know it’s largely meant for that portion of the audience.

And I have been aware that people have been translating their employee personas that they may have had around for years to ai, because now you can query. The persona, which is nice, [01:15:00] right? Yeah. And I think I’ve mentioned on the show once before, I was talking to an executive communicator. His team has trouble getting to the CEO just because of his schedule and unavailability.

So they’ve created a persona, an AI persona of their CEO based on all his speeches and all of his writing and everything that they could throw in there about him. And now if he’s not available and they’re writing a speech and they need to know what he would think about this they’ll query the AI version.

Now, that’s not the final say. Obviously the CEO’s gonna review the speech before he delivers it. But it’s an interesting approach. What I hadn’t thought about was assembling a group of these as a focus group or using them for something as. Seriously research focus as testing this user interface and telling us if it works for you based on the fact that you are from this region or are in this age group.

So that [01:16:00] worries me. That, I think the advice that was here about blending real humans with this research, using it as a supplement, as good advice, there are people who won’t take that advice. They’re just gonna take the cheap and easy way out.

Neville Hobson: Yeah I’m just reminded of one of the concluding points I read in one of the articles you shared from a company called IDO id o.com the case against AI generated users, and you’ll love this or not maybe, but one of their researchers says, using synthetic humans for direct research is like naval gazing, but not at our own navels , but into the great, messy, cluttered, and often disgusting naval of the internet with a capital I, Dan will like that.

The capital I, the solution isn’t to make up fake people. It’s getting better access to real people. I’ve been toying with that in my mind because I’m not sure I agree. The solution isn’t to make up fake people. It’s getting better access to three people. That’s actually not what’s happening. So that’s not, I don’t believe [01:17:00] a valid criticism, but it’s a, it’s like what I have heard from other people.

So again, that’s what you’ve gotta deal with when you’re trying to sell this idea internally.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. I remember going out to Dell in Round Rock, Texas, and I was there with a group of social media folks in the early days. And I learned while I was there that they found the people who were making the most negative comments in the Dell forums online and convened basically a panel of them brought them, actually flew them out to Round Rock and had meetings with them.

What is it that drives you crazy about us? Because they figured that if they could solve some of these problems, they’d make a lot more people happy than just them. If you tried to. Encapsulate them in a synthetic persona, are you going to get the same level of information as you would from these people who are really pissed off at you?

And I have to say, I doubt it. It, you might get the basics, but it’s gonna be [01:18:00] sanitized. And as the research shows probably a little more positive than your real critics would be.

Neville Hobson: That’s a good point. So that was probably not long after Del Hell. I would’ve thought that in those earlier days where Jeff Jarvis was the star of that saga is great Wikipedia page if you’re interested in knowing what that was all about.

Because that’s 20 years ago now.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I remember that.

Neville Hobson: Me too.

Shel Holtz: Tell hell .

Neville Hobson: Goodness me. That was a nice little diversion in, into a cul-de-sac away from all the terrible stuff we’ve been talking about. Le let’s get back to the terrible stuff. , look at our final story, which is at least it’s not politics.

No, this one is definitely not politics. Is it the end of the road for LinkedIn hashtags? Great question. For years social media managers, marketers, and content creators have relied on hashtags to increase reach, improve discoverability, and categorize their posts. But what happens when a platform like LinkedIn starts pulling back on their importance?

Luke, [01:19:00] Brendan Jones raises this very question in his LinkedIn post the end of the road for LinkedIn hashtags where he explores LinkedIn’s shifting stance on this once powerful tool previously using three to 10 hashtags in the LinkedIn post would significantly increase reach as the platform relied on them for categorization and discoverability.

However, LinkedIn’s improved natural language processing now allows it to determine a posts topic without the need for hashtags. Some reports suggest that LinkedIn is gradually making hashtags irrelevant with some even predicting they’ll become unclickable within the next year. It is a significant reversal considering that LinkedIn only introduced hashtag support in 2018.

So what does this mean for communicators and marketers? Are hashtags officially dead on LinkedIn, or do they still hold value? Bernie Jones argues that while hashtags may no longer be a discovery tool, they still serve as visual markers helping readers quickly understand a post’s theme. They [01:20:00] also remain valuable for branding, categorization, and campaign tracking.

The shift also reflects a broader trend across platforms. Instagram, for example, has recently imposed limits on hashtag use while X, formerly Twitter and TikTok continue to rely on them. Blue Sky supports them as does threats, although in the latter case, a thread message will only enable one hashtag out menu if you include more than one.

There is real value in using them strategically said one reader on LinkedIn to Brin Jones’ Post, there’s still a useful tool for our B2B client. She says to ensure primary keywords are covered, especially in a thought leadership strategy, when you may have a post that focuses on a secondary topic rather than thinking of them as a way to be found.

It’s more about reinforcing relevance within a niche. Another reader said, I think unless LinkedIn is actually starting to penalize hashtag use this key point in your article will remain very true. Even denuded of their discoverability power [01:21:00] hashtags provide strong visual labels for your content to flag it as to flag it to relevant readers at a glance.

So should we abandon hashtags on LinkedIn altogether or simply rethink how we use them? Bri Jones says, in my view, the LinkedIn hashtag hasn’t reached the end of the road. Just a consequential fork. What do you think she.

Shel Holtz: I think it’s sad that we’re not gonna be able to use ’em for discovery anymore. And I agree that they are visual cues, but it’s important to remember that hashtags like the at symbol to designate a, an individual were user generated tools.

These were not innovations from the social networks themselves. It was users going, Hey I think this would be a great way for people to be able to find posts, comments that deal with this topic. I gotta tell you I am currently at work. Going through the transition from one intranet provider to a provider [01:22:00] of an integrated internal communications platform.

Our current intranet, I won’t name the vendor because I don’t wanna say anything bad about them, but I don’t like the platform. If we wanna tag an article so people can search for the article, we have to go into SharePoint and go through this rigmarole to establish a tag that now shows up on the intranet.

And when I want to tag the article, I have to go to the tag page and find the tag and click it. It’s a process. The one we’re switching to, the tags are all based on hashtags. Anybody who creates a hashtag, that now becomes a searchable term and. The reason this user generated approach to coming up with the searchable label for this kind of content is that the people who are in charge don’t necessarily know what’s important to a group of users.

I. I am not a construction superintendent. I don’t know what the issues are that they are grappling with, but if there is something that has emerged and over the course of [01:23:00] the next month or so, they need to have a conversation about this and it’s going to be intermingled on teams or down the road in a community on the intranet.

Once we get this thing launched all they need to do is establish that hashtag and now the system will be able to group all that content together. We could even put it all in one widget if we want to, and it’s in their control. And that’s what I like about this. If this is a user focused environment in the social space losing that control I think is not a good thing.

But even with LinkedIn making this decision I do agree just being able to see that pound symbol at a glance, I can say, oh, this is of interest to me. I’m gonna go ahead and read the rest of this post.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. By the way, we never call that a pound symbol. Here in the UK we call it a hashtag. A hashtag Hash symbol.

Yeah, hash symbol. Hashtag you call it pound symbol because it means pound weight, right? Is that why you call it that? Because here, I have no idea. I just know that

Shel Holtz: it’s no pound time. [01:24:00] Sound sign and we quote the hashtag design too, but

Neville Hobson: yeah, you do. I know, I was just teasing. It reminds me this does of Chris Messina, who is the guy who invented the hashtag this was about gosh, getting onto 18 or so more years ago now.

And I interviewed him actually on an episode when you were traveling and I was doing one, one solo and I interviewed him. This was September, 2023 in episode 3 55, as the numbering was then. And he was talking about that it’s time for an upgrade to the hashtag that was his big argument at a time when it was under threat from being hijacked for nefarious purposes on the negative side, but it wasn’t delivering what he thought it ought to have been doing.

And I’m wondering what he would think of this idea on just one platform, but it could spread to others. This discoverability element is not is not so strong. If that vantage is linked in, I think that would be a shame. Um. I think Luke Briney Jones was, had a good post and the people who [01:25:00] left comments there had good points to make.

So there’s no kind of solution of answer to the question. Are hashtags done and over with on LinkedIn? I don’t think the other commenters made that play in their view. So maybe it largely comes down to usability by users to keep it going. Maybe

Shel Holtz: would be if users adopt something it tends to find its way into the mix from the social network owners.

We’ll see. Also I do see them on blue sky, so

Neville Hobson: yeah, they’re alive somewhere. blue sky is Twitter was back in the day where you could actually pepper your posts with hashtags. Sensible use doesn’t suggest that. But that’s still embryonic, relatively speaking. It’s still small, but I search for hashtags like I used to on Twitter, and that’s one way of surfacing content.

So there’s no sign or signal that, as far as I know from Blue Sky, this is gonna stop. So I hope it doesn’t I hope LinkedIn doesn’t abandon support for it the way it seems that it seems [01:26:00] to be going, and that’ll be a shame if they do.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And the other thing is, so you remember, they haven’t been as, as prevalent lately as they once were, but hashtag campaigns and on LinkedIn for B2B organizations to run a hashtag campaign I think people are gonna miss being able to do that.

Neville Hobson: I agree.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll wrap up this episode of four immediate release, episode number 452 for February, 2025. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. Our next episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, March 24th. That’s our. Long form monthly episode. We’ll be back with midweek episodes here in a little bit. Until then, we hope that you will comment as so many people did.

And I have to say, all of the comments that we shared in today’s episode came from LinkedIn. They were comments left to the posts announcing the availability of an episode on LinkedIn. That’s not the only way to comment. You can comment by sending an email to fir [01:27:00] comments@gmail.com. I scroll scrolled through 227 emails in that account and not one of them was a legitimate comment.

Most of it was spam . But you could do that. You can attach an audio file up to three minutes. We would love to play a clip of your comment. We haven’t had one of those in a long time. It would be great. You can leave a comment directly on the show notes at FIR. Podcast network.com. You can leave a comment in the FIR community on Facebook.

There are lots of ways that you can get your comments to us wherever we share an announcement, we do it on Facebook, we do it on threads, we do it on Blue Sky. Wherever you’re following us, leave a comment. We’ll find it and share it here on the show. And we also appreciate your ratings and reviews wherever you’re inclined to do that.

And until our next episode, that’ll be a 30 for immediate release.

The post FIR #452: Communicating in Chaos appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Leaked audio of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reveals an executive who has dug in his heels and has no interest in listening to the voice of the employee. In the clip, he essentially tells employees, “My way or the highway.”

While the return-to-office mandates don’t represent a majority of businesses, they have been high-profile, as have employee responses, most of which plead for continued accommodation of remote or hybrid work schedules. Executives, of course, are empowered to make the final decision, but ignoring the voice of the employee comes with high risks, including the loss of top talent and disengagement among those who remain.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that productivity and morale are higher with remote workers, but that ultimately depends on the culture the organization has established to support it. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel listen to Dimon’s rant and offer their thoughts on the state of work in this volatile era.

Links from this episode:

Leaked Audio: Here’s What JPMorgan CEO Dimon Said About Hiring and Remote Work
“I’ve had it”: JP Morgan boss rails against Gen Z in expletive-laden outburst
Meta CTO says employees who think ‘everyone has to like’ its policy changes should ‘quit’ and ‘consider working elsewhere’
Meta censors internal dissent over Mark Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump: report
Dimon Says He’d Be Cutting ‘Stupid’ DEI Costs Even Without Trump
Terry Szuplat on LinkedIn: Wow. Zuck just gave every CEO a masterclass…in how NOT to announce layoffs
Meta’s recent layoffs take an unexpected turn
Gen Z Wants More Face-to-Face Interaction in the Workplace, Survey Finds
Meta employees question the company’s removal of posts on its internal forum: ‘This is a free speech issue’
Remote work is now the top requested workplace accommodation
The Big Four are sticking with hybrid work. Here are the RTO policies of Deloitte, KPMG, EY, and PwC.
Returning to the office? Focus more on practices and less on the policy
In-person work doubled over the past year, survey finds
‘Hush hybrid’: When some employees work from home despite in-office policy
Hybrid And Remote Work Still On The Rise, Despite Misconceptions, Study Shows
Opinion | The unexpected impacts of ending remote work
Hybrid Work Reigns Supreme, Despite Leadership Doubts
Hybrid working has benefits over fully in-person working — the evidence mounts
WFH isn’t going anywhere: 1 in 4 active job listings offer full-time hybrid; remote arrangements
Hybrid/Remote Isn’t Going Anywhere. It’s Time to Stop Treating It like an Interim Arrangement (Shel Holtz’s blog)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 451 of four immediate release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: And I’m Neville Hobson. Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase made headlines last week when a leaked recording of a staff meeting captured him delivering an expletive filled tirade about remote work. His frustration was clear. He’s had it with hybrid working bureaucracy and what he sees as employees slacking off on Zoom. We’ll dive into his rant next. In his rant, diamond dismissed work from home Fridays as a fast. He claimed Gen Z employees are being left behind due to remote work and accused staff of wasting time in meetings and approvals. He made it clear JP Morgan employees should be in the office or find another job. It is a stark example of the growing divide between corporate leaders trying to enforce [00:01:00] return to office policies and employees who have embraced flexibility the way Diamond delivered.

His message raises bigger questions, not just about the future of work, but about leadership itself. Here’s a clip of the last 20 seconds of diamond’s remarks where he lays into remote work bureaucracy and his expectations for JP Morgan employees. Bear in mind the tone and included expletives, so put your earbuds in if you’re listening in the office.

Jamie Dimon: Now you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. So the people of you who don’t wanna work at the company, that’s fine with me. I’m not, I’m not mad at you. Don’t be mad at me. It’s a free country. You can walk with your feet, you know? But this company’s gonna set our own standards and do it our own way. I. And, and I’ve had it with this kind of stuff and you [00:02:00] know, I, I come in, you know, I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since Covid, and I come in and I, where’s everybody else? Are they here or there? And the zooms and the zooms don’t show up. And people say they didn’t get stuff. So that’s not how you run a great company. We didn’t build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi disease shit that everybody else does.

Neville Hobson: Well, that’s quite something. Shell really quite extraordinary. His remarks are a, a high profile example of the ongoing struggle between executives pushing for office returns and employees who value flexibility. His outburst may energize some traditionalists, but at risks alienating younger workers, harming employee morale and reinforcing jps Morgan. Morgan’s image as an inflexible employer, it serves as a strong [00:02:00] example of executive missteps in workplace communication. broader debate on remote work’s future undoubtedly continue, but diamond’s handling of the issue may not win. JP Morgan, the hearts and minds of its workforce. shell, what’s your take on his approach?

Shel Holtz: His approach suck. Is my take on his approach. Yeah. It, it’s, it’s made headlines, but the reality of the workplace tells a, a different story despite all of the skepticism from some executives. And I think it’s worth pointing out that something like 60% of organizations are sticking with their, their hybrid or remote arrangements they, they continue to thrive in this.

Configuration and the data overwhelmingly supports the staying power of, of hybrid and remote work arrangements. You have studies consistently show that nearly one in four active job listings still offer full-time hybrid or remote options. And this aligns with broader trends across [00:03:00] industries. A lot of companies recognize flexibility is a key factor in attracting and retaining talent.

I saw one study very recently that said retention is higher. In organizations that allow remote and hybrid work and, and the cost of replacing employees is high. And we, we see a lot of employees disaffected in the current work environment and even in sectors where leadership is pushing return to office, employees are resisting requests for remote work accommodations have searched, is one of the most sought

Workplace benefits, but the tension between employees and executives just keeps growing. There was a McKinsey report that highlighted the successful return to office strategies, focusing less on rigid policies and more on. Effective workplace practices, companies that force mandates without addressing employee concerns, risk disengagement, and attrition.

Deloitte [00:04:00] EY formerly, formerly Ernst and Young PWC, formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG are all experimenting with different hybrid models. Acknowledging that one size fits all doesn’t work. The firms recognize that employees expect some degree of autonomy in their work arrangements. In fact, autonomy.

And purpose are among the key intrinsic rewards that employees seek in the workplace. And all of this is reinforced by findings in the Washington Post, which point out that businesses rigidly enforcing return to office policies are facing, push pushback, higher turnover, and decreased productivity.

There’s also a major contradiction at play. Many executives are lamenting a lack of in-office collaboration. Yet employees report feeling unheard in workplace decisions. Internal communication best practices emphasize two-way dialogue, yet a lot of leaders out there like Jamie Diamond. Are failing to listen, engage for success.

This is a an [00:05:00] employee engagement initiative over there with you in the uk, Neville, they’ve long identified employee voice as one of the four enablers of engagement. When workers feel like their concerns are being dismissed, whether it’s about work flexibility, productivity measures, or broader company policies, then they disengage.

This recent internal backlash at Meta that we’ve seen is a case in point. Employees questioned leadership decisions only to have internal discussion forums, censored that deepens mistrust. So you have this widening gulf between employees and leaders. I. Interestingly, while Gen Z employees express a desire for more face-to-face interaction, it’s not necessarily about being physically in the office five days a week.

What younger workers want is meaningful connection, mentorship and clear career progression things that aren’t automatically guaranteed just by bringing people into the office. If anything, research shows us that hybrid work when done right, can enhance [00:06:00] collaboration rather than hinder it. There was a report in the magazine nature that underscored how hybrid models improve efficiency while maintaining work-life balance.

And then there’s morale Studies are emerging around hush hybrid. This is a phenomenon where employees pretend to comply with return to office policies while actually working remotely as much as possible. It’s their supervisors who are enabling this. So we get a major disconnect between leaders and employees.

One that can erode trust and weaken workplace culture. Companies like JP Morgan Chase that fail to acknowledge this risk. Alienating their workforce, particularly when there’s clear evidence that hybrid and remote work aren’t just popular, but effective diamond’s, broader fru frustration isn’t just about hybrid work.

His comments about cutting what he calls stupid DEI costs reflect a larger mindset shift among some corporate leaders. But whether it’s workplace flexibility [00:07:00] or diversity initiatives, executives who ignore employee sentiment do so with their own peril. Companies that succeed in this evolving landscape will be the ones that balance leadership priorities with genuine employee engagement.

The world of work has changed whether leaders like it or not, the smartest companies are fighting against. These aren’t fighting against these shifts, they’re adapting to them.

Neville: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. Listen to what you’re saying. I mean, seen a lot of these surveys too in these reports, and the thing that I just wonder you know, surveys indicate time and time again that workers value flexibility with productivity studies, Showing mixed results on whether remote work hinders or enhances efficiency. many executives are struggling to enforce office attendance post pandemic, leading to tensions between leadership employees, as you point out. But this, this, we, this kind of surfaces with regularity. Every week almost seems to be, there’s another survey saying, here are the benefits, and [00:08:00] yet people like Jamie Diamond Say what they’re saying on one you know, on one level or another, a rant like his edicts about, you’ve gotta come to the office or the unspoken part, find another job. So what is it you think then that is going to, I guess. Make the common sense view as I see it according to the surveys the ascendant in all of this, and not the other way around. Because what I see almost every time I look at a business journal or the business section of the newspaper is another company’s trying to enforce you gotta come back to the office. That’s relentless. So is that, do you think?

Shel Holtz: I think it’s a combination of detachment and arrogance. I think the, these leaders are not close to their workers. They’re not listening. They’ve, they’ve shut down either their own ability to listen or the listening channels. I mean, Facebook meta, I. Has done this by censoring their internal [00:09:00] channels.

So employees can’t talk about this stuff with each other. And I think it was the, was it the CTO? I can’t remember his name, but he was reported at meta telling employees you called it the quiet part. He came right out and said, you don’t have to work here. I think Diamond said the same thing out loud too.

Neville: Oh, a number, a number of times in his rent. Yes.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And that’s what’s happening in a lot of these return to office initiatives is that the best employees, the, the, the greatest talent in the organization, they’re the ones leaving they value the ability to have greater work-life balance that comes with a hybrid arrangement. And they’d rather work for an organization that appreciates that and accommodates it.

Rather than one that puts its foot down. Yeah. And, and there are some other issues that are emerging out of this as well. I mean, in addition to attrition, I was reading that Amazon, which has required all employees to come back to the office, finds it doesn’t have enough office space for them. So where are they gonna put ’em?

You know, I’ve probably, in [00:10:00] of the US federal government offices that are now

Neville: Well

Shel Holtz: I.

Neville: I was gonna, I was gonna mention that in, in the context of what is happening since Trump took office the firing of thousands of of public sector workers in the us. Is that, do you think I. Emboldening those companies with leaders like Jamie Diamond to really go hard on this. You’ve gotta come back and you can always leave if you don’t like the idea. stimulating, I guess more fear, more panic, more alarm about your own career and your, whether you’re gonna have a job or not. And, and so. The kind of stories that are part and parcel of the reporting, I suppose that people are leaving in droves. The best ones are going and finding work elsewhere.

Are they really? Is, is this perhaps another indicator of the you know, goodbye to the first two decades of this century? That was the golden time really of, of travel everywhere. Easy money, no low interest. Ideas people could start. the idea of [00:11:00] DEI took roots and suddenly that’s all in retreat in the face of this, this literal relentless authoritarianism we’re seeing that the US is certainly promoting and that’s having repercussions elsewhere in Europe, certainly so. Is this the end of, these choices that you better buckle down if you want to keep a job because you will not find it easy to get another one? Is that, is that what we’re looking at? Do you think?

Shel Holtz: At least the pendulum has swung that way for now. eventually swing back again, as it always does. But yeah, I think you have seen this kind of behavior from people like Mark Zuckerberg, who I think I. Initially felt like they needed to accommodate Trump in order to stay out of his crosshairs, and then found that this bro alpha male sort of approach to leadership appealed to him.

This is somebody, of course, who did not go to management school [00:12:00] or work his way up through an organization to learn how cultures work. He built a company from the ground up. He’s always been in charge and doesn’t know any better. He, he used to have Sheryl Sandberg there to sort of moderate him.

Now he’s saying she was the problem, her, her influence, led them to do all of these woke things. But you know, the job market is definitely tightening right now, but the best people will always be able. To find a job and the data that I shared, one in four job listings is either full-time hybrid or full-time remote.

Those people are gonna pick those best who are out looking for companies that accommodate that. And. You’re gonna end up with the companies like JP Morgan Chase are gonna be left with a workforce characterized by mediocrity and who wants to do business with that. I anticipate that if employees listen and say, yeah, I don’t wanna work here.

I can go get a job, I. Where I can have work life balance [00:13:00] and I can be productive and I can do great work, and I will come in when there’s a reason to come in. I, I just wrote about this today, by the way. I think face-to-face is vitally important. You just need to do it. As a mandate when there’s something going on where people are gonna be able to interact, because I gotta tell you, Neville when I am working in an open space I usually have an office with a closed door.

When I go to one of our offices, the other office I, I. Sit out in the open office environment. If I am nose down writing articles or preparing a report or editing video, I have my earbuds in so people won’t bother me. And this is really common in those environments. So bringing people into the office when the work they have to do is individual contributor work doesn’t create collaboration.

It doesn’t create innovation. It just creates frustration and isolation. Let people do that work at home, and I’m, of course I’m talking about [00:14:00] the people who can, there are obviously

many jobs out there that don’t work from home. I, I work in the construction industry. Buildings can’t build themselves with workers working from home and.

What we need to do is acknowledge that hybrid remote is the way of the world these days, and start to train managers to manage hybrid and remote teams so they understand how to do that in a way that doesn’t disenfranchise, disengage Those full-time onsite workers who feel like they don’t get to take advantage of a benefit that other workers do.

This is, this is a consequence of treating it like. It’s an interim solution to a short term problem as opposed to a tectonic shift in the way work is done.

Neville: I think another thing that got me thinking as well, listening to to diamond’s rent [00:15:00] he highlighted things. I see other people talking about other leaders and organizations, the ones who . Argue for a return to work. So Diamond’s example in this case was talking about the, the Zoom and the Zoomers who don’t show up.

I mean, I’m in on a Friday and where is everyone? They’re not here. he talks at the beginning of his rent. And this is where most of the. His expletives come in about people on Zoom calls, who all they do is is chat with each other and, and, and, you know, insult others, of what idiots they are and stuff like that. I, I, I refuse to believe that’s completely common practice in his organization that’s tells me there’s something seriously wrong in that organization. If that is the case.

Shel Holtz: What you’re looking at, there is a, a leader who is trying to force a. In the office culture on a workplace that is now hybrid and the culture has to change to accommodate it. The, the problem here is [00:16:00] not solved by making everybody come back to the office. It’s by implementing policies and building a culture in which people understand that this is the way we do things on Zoom, and this is, is not acceptable.

I mean, there to consequences for that kind of behavior, right?

Neville: Sure. I mean, he, he’s got a wholly different view to that, in which case I would argue just, if this is an example, nothing’s gonna change there at any time soon. As long as he’s the CEO

Shel Holtz: No, I don’t think anything’s gonna change there as long as the CEO is Jamie Diamond and the dinosaurs like him who look up in the sky and, and see the asteroid coming and say things don’t have to change, you know? Let’s see what happens to JP Morgan Chase’s earnings over the next couple of years as he continues alienating his workforce or building a workforce of people who, you know, are content to come into the office every day, and, you know, is that the workforce that’s gonna produce the kind of bottom line results that the shareholders [00:17:00] are looking for?

I doubt it. I, I don’t think so.

Neville: So what’s your, what would you say to communicators in an organization where this, not necessarily the CEO, but senior leadership or people in positions of power have this attitude. What would you say to them?

Shel Holtz: I think we need to as internal communicators serve as a conduit for information to move up. Jamie Diamond’s not listening to his employees beyond the messages that they are sort of inflicting on him petitions and the like. And he has said he doesn’t care. You could do as many petitions you want.

I don’t care Contextualized. By the communications team to say, look, these are the issues. This is what’s happening. Let’s look at the data. Let’s look at our attrition rates. Let, let’s look at who we’re losing and what the pool is like out there of people who are willing to come work for an organization where they can’t be.

Hybrid or, or, or [00:18:00] remote. And, and to present the scenarios that can make all of this work so that he is satisfied. I, he, he began his rant talking about young employees, right? But a young employee being in the office head down with an earbuds, with the earbuds in their ears so that they can focus on their work.

They’re not getting the mentorship. Or the exposure to the culture or the other things, you know, the, the, the clear career paths that, that they crave. And there’s no reason that that has to be . Limited to an in the office experience. I, I am a big believer in face-to-face. I have repeated a line for years I heard at a conference, which is that we we’re hardwired for face-to-face communication.

And anything that isn’t is, is a corruption of face-to-face communication. I mean, this, this goes back to, you know, the days of our lizard brains with fight and flight reactions, right? It’s all face to face. I do think that that’s important and I think . [00:19:00] A corporate or an organizational identity a sense of shared common purpose face-to-face in the real world, not on Zoom.

I is important and I think that organizations should create the opportunities for that. This, you know, you, you might. Chuckle at the idea of the company picnic, but getting everybody together for a casual non-work event where you can have exposure to the leaders of the organization in that kind of, you know, casual setting where you can.

Engage with a lot of people that you don’t see all the time and have a sense, wow, this is, this is the company. It’s not just my team that I interact with and my internal clients that I interact with. I get a sense of this broader team. The same thing with town hall meetings. Get everybody together, have a social hour before that with, with some beverages and, and some hors d’oeuvres, and then let people mingle for an hour after the town hall is over and have this interaction and have [00:20:00] this opportunity.

To see the whole organization or your part of the whole organization together. Bring people into the office when there are big meetings to be had or, or celebrations, or recognitions reasons to have everybody in the same place at the same time. Focus on the reason. For having people work from home or come into the office rather than they need to be here five days a week, or they need to be here three days a week, even if they are gonna jam earbuds into their ears and, you know, focus on their, their single, you know, individual contributor work.

Neville: Yeah. I find it very surprising that that we’re, you know what you just outlined, here we are in 2025. I remember this kind of thing in the mid nineties talking about this town halls, picnics, or get togethers with everyone in an informal setting in the organization. So here we are 25 to 30 years later and we’re still talking about that.

Something’s not right here. It seems to me.

Shel Holtz: [00:21:00] No, I agree. And, and I think it’s intractable leadership that is to blame here. They’re not listening, they’re not engaging, they’re, they’re not collaborating. Something that they’re telling everybody that they’re bent on is, is more collaboration, but they’re not doing it. And, and again, this is a minority of organizations, most are still.

Embracing hybrid and remote. But they’re gonna continue to have conflict. They’re gonna continue to have disaffected, disengaged employees until they wrap their minds around the fact that that hybrid and remote are here to stay. Either that or, you know, they die and are replaced.

Neville: Yeah. Well, it’s a, it’s a huge topic and we’ve touched on something that’s made the news headlines last week. it makes us think about this. And indeed listeners, if you have any thoughts on this topic, any experiences you wanna share, we’d love to hear them. So let us know.

Shel Holtz: We definitely would, and the link to the full rant as it was recorded in a leak will be in the show notes and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of [00:22:00] four immediate release.

The post FIR #451: Return-to-Office-Obsessed Execs Are Minimizing the Employee Voice appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Listen to communicators talk about their impact on their organizations and you would be forgiven for thinking that executives find their communication teams to be indispensable. Recent research says otherwise. As complexities mount in the worlds of business, media, and politics, less than 20 percent of senior executives are confident their communicators and public affairs professionals are up to the task of navigating the current environment. Neville and Shel outline the research results and discuss ways communicators can reverse this troubling trend.

Links from this episode:

CEO confidence in communications dwindles, new report
Study: Only 17% of Executives Have High Confidence in Their Comms Function

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to episode four 50 of four immediate release. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz. And there’s a very troubling trend emerging one that might be surprising given all the rhetoric we’ve heard about how communications Star Rose during the CO pandemic four years ago. What we’re seeing today is.

Kind of the opposite of that the declining confidence that CEOs have in their communication leaders and teams. This isn’t just an anecdotal observation. There’s a new study from Weber Shandwick and KRC research that finds that only 17% of senior executives have high confidence in their communications and public affairs functions.

That means more than 80% of executives feel that their comms teams aren’t where they need to be. That’s a striking statistic, and it suggests that many CEOs and senior leaders don’t see their communications teams as ready to handle the complex challenges that [00:01:00] those leaders are facing today. We’ll dive into this research right after we try to sell you something.

So what’s driving this lack of confidence among CEOs in their communicators? One factor is the sheer complexity of the business landscape. The environment today is unpredictable. Geopolitical conflicts, economic uncertainty, social movements, misinformation, campaigns, and other things may get harder than ever for companies to.

Consistent and trusted messaging. At the same time, digital transformation and AI driven automation are changing the way companies engage with employees, customers, and the public. Executives who participated in this study ranked delivering economic value as the highest priority. At 41%, functional value came in second at 24%.

Almost half the number of executives who ranked economic value as most important ethical, societal and emotional values ranked significantly lower each with [00:02:00] less than 15% of executives saying they were top priorities. And that says something. It suggests that many leaders are still viewing communications primarily through a financial lens, how comms supports revenue growth, investor confidence, market performance.

While that’s understandable, it also reveals a gap in how communications is valued as a strategic business function. I. Take stakeholder priorities. For example, the study found that while 79% of executives say it’s very important to consider all stakeholders, there’s a big gap in which stakeholders actually get attention.

Customers and shareholders remain the top priority, but only 45% of executives see employees as key stakeholders in decision making, and just 22% consider the communities where their businesses operate to be essential. That’s a problem I. Employee engagement, company culture and corporate reputation are all directly tied to communication effectiveness.

If leaders don’t see employees as central to [00:03:00] the company’s success, they may also fail to recognize how critical internal communications is in shaping workforce alignment, motivation, and retention. This desk this disconnect extends to what CEOs expect from their communications leaders. The research shows that many CEOs are looking for a T-shaped communicator, someone with broad knowledge across multiple areas, but deep expertise in a specific function.

Sustainability. For example, finance or employee engagement. That makes sense given the complexity of moderate business. But it also suggests that communication professionals need to move beyond traditional PR and corporate messaging to embed themselves deeper into business operations, risk management, and strategy.

That’s interesting. In light of the study we reported just a few months ago that found more and more CCOs, chief communication officers are in fact seeing their roles expand beyond communication. Another issue is the rapid rise of AI and automation, [00:04:00] which is reshaping communication workflows, and executives may not be seeing their communication teams leading the charge on these innovations.

If comms leaders aren’t proactively demonstrating how AI and digital transformation can improve corporate storytelling, employee engagement and crisis response, CEOs may assume they’re not adapting fast enough. The study also reveals that in large companies, that’s companies with more than 50,000 employees operating in 20 or more countries, executive confidence and communication teams is even lower.

This suggests that as organizations scale, the ability for communication teams to maintain strategic alignment and influence across global markets becomes much harder. So what should communication professionals be doing to rebuild confidence? First, comms teams need to demonstrate their business value more directly.

That means tying communication outcomes to clear business metrics, whether that’s revenue impact, employee retention, or brand trust. Leaders who speak [00:05:00] the language of business finance risk operational efficiency, we’ll command more credibility in the boardroom. Second, communicators need to play a bigger role in shaping corporate decision making.

The fact that employees and communi communities rank so low as stakeholder priorities suggest that communication leaders need to advocate for a broader view of corporate responsibility. A company’s reputation today is shaped by form, far more than just financial performance. It’s about trust, credibility, and how well an organization engages with its employees, partners, and society at large.

Third communication teams must embrace emerging technologies like AI and automation. If CEOs feel that their comms teams aren’t adapting quickly enough to the modern landscape, that could be another reason for the declining in confidence. Communicators should be at the forefront of leveraging AI for content creation, crisis monitoring, and data-driven audience insights.

And finally, it’s [00:06:00] time for communication teams to prove their ability to navigate uncertainty. Today’s CEOs face unpredictable challenges from regulatory changes and political instability to generative AI disruptions and cybersecurity threats. Communication leaders who can help companies stay ahead of these issues rather than just react to them, will be the ones who earn their seat at the table.

Neville, what did you take away from this report? A lot actually, and you covered most of it. I think your last point is the starting point. I would look on this, and this is reflected in other surveys we’ve commented on, which is agility. It’s being able and willing to go hand in hand to pivot, react, adapt, whatever you might wanna call it, rapidly and confidently.

That means you need to know a lot more than you. Possibly are know about today. And therefore you need to be very proactive to ensure that you do know literally everything possible that is related to what you need to do as a [00:07:00] communicator. That’s probably something many of us are doing now anyway, but if you’re not, you really do need to do that.

It doesn’t surprise me. It’s troubling a lot of this. That headline figure only 17% of senior execs have confidence that their communicators are well prepared to tackle the current volatile environment. And a lot of this relates to the shifts we’ve seen in the last month led in the United States.

By the actions of new President Trump on his second term and the executive orders and all the stuff he has as we see literally almost daily on the TV news. This phenomenal signature on these executive audit documents that he physically signs and weighs ’em at the camera. They’re having repercussions everywhere.

It’s actually quite extraordinary. She, frankly. The Trump effect that is global, that’s taking place every single country is impact or paying attention to wondering what is he going to do next. So this is truly quite extraordinary, I think. So that’s part of the environment. And the tariff wars that are about to [00:08:00] begin by all accounts are definitely gonna have an impact on global business.

We’re already seeing. Effects in the financial markets in stock markets, we’re seeing that in interest rates that are they gonna go up and go down or whatever it might be. And the nervousness that is derived from that, we’re also seeing which is mentioned here a real change in DEI initiatives in organizations.

And in fact, we’re seeing I have to say mostly American companies that are backpedaling like crazy to. Ditch these that’s gonna have a big impact on perceptions. And they we’re not yet seeing exactly what that impact’s gonna be. ’cause it’s only been the last week or so that this is impacting people’s perceptions and opinions and therefore their behaviors perhaps.

But that is part of the landscape. Whether it’s temporary, pardon? That we don’t know. I just was just reading a story literally before we, we got together to record this episode about what Disney. Is decided to do, which is literally pull back completely on [00:09:00] DEI and speculation now about what impacts that can have on their animation studios and therefore perceptions of kids.

You could project this out in a big way. So 17% of senior execs don’t have comp, or only 17 have confidence that communicators are up to it basically. The other thing I think just to mention was. And maybe this goes hand in hand with DEI, I don’t know, but the the metric talking about how employee communication is way down the priority list on the stakeholder total of who you’re paying attention to, customers, et cetera.

Employees aren’t as high as I would’ve thought they should be. So there, there’s lots here that is concerning the provoke media story. Talks about, in fact, it’s not provoked, it’s the exo story talks about. So it’s some interesting things I think that are worth paying attention to.

Particularly their concluding point about no scenario plan is ever gonna survive contact with the amount of volatility that’s out there. And that [00:10:00] again. Be prepared, be make yourself agile, get to know exactly all these various things that are happening and try and understand what they mean. So you need to be paying attention to that.

So 70% according to S’S interpretation of of Weber Sandwick survey, 70% are anticipating heightened volatility in the year ahead, and very few of them feel prepared. That’s not a good. At all? No, as I said at the top troubling and I think DEI is probably an excellent example to elaborate on a little, because as you look at what has happened in just the three weeks since Trump took office and began his executive assault on DEI, what have we seen?

We’ve seen some. Companies, several companies do what Disney has done and many others, especially those in the tech industry although I saw a statistic the other day that said 65% of companies are not changing [00:11:00] their DEI programs, and of those 22% are actually planning to invest more in 2025.

So they’re defiant. But among the companies that have. Scaled back, they’re starting to see blowback from their customers. Take target for example, the retail giant here in the us. Target said that they were going to scale back their DEI in response to the administration’s mandates and customers revolted.

There has been a sell off of their stock. Their share price has. Taken a precipitous drop. There has been a considerable fall off on sales as customers have called for boycotts of the organization, and they have actually reversed themselves as a result of this. So public pressure brought to bear has created a whiplash at Target. Now, how good are their communicators at reading the marketplace and advising leadership on what [00:12:00] stakeholder audiences are saying and thinking in order to help them with their decision making? I would say based on what I’ve seen from Target, not very well. So I think it’s vital that communicators understand the issues that are roiling out there.

In the media space, in social media, in the business world and be doing environmental scanning. This is a term I learned from IABC research Foundation’s excellence study, years and years ago. What was that like 19 86, 87, around then. But environmental scanning means that you are on top of.

What the trends are and what the thinking is and what the sentiment is around these issues. And essentially you’re doing an every morning intelligence briefing like leaders of countries do so that you can let management know what’s going on. I woke up. Some mornings ago to the news that the Trump [00:13:00] administration was going to impose 25% import on all imported steel and aluminum.

I work in the construction industry. We work with a lot of imported steel. We set prices for the buildings that we’re building based on what the price was of steel at the time that those. Deals were made. If those prices go up 25% the building’s gonna cost more. Are we prepared for that? Do our employees know what’s going on?

If they’ve heard about these tariffs, are they worried about our ability to be profitable? We need to tell people. So the first thing I did is fire off a message to one of the senior executives saying, we need to let employees know where we’re at with this. He thought it was a good idea. This is the kind of thing communicators need to do in order to build that confidence at the leadership levels.

You can’t just be reacting to things and reporting what the leaders say. We need to be counselors who are advising them based on our read of what’s going on out there. Yeah, you’re right. And one other [00:14:00] point related to all of this that struck me as well, was the metric in the report that leaders of larger companies and those operating in more than 20 countries are more likely to report a loss in comms and public affairs confidence.

It got me thinking that much of the examples that we might. Discuss or read about or in the us not outside the US yet. I wonder some of these larger global multinationals, whether they’re American or whatever they might be with operations in other countries, what’s the effect gonna be if the US company, the owner, the kind of parent company rolls back on DEI and that meets with fierce resistance in, in, in some of their subsidiaries or associated companies elsewhere around the world, then what?

What are we gonna do about that? I did read, and I don’t have the details in front of me, so I can’t remember the name of the company. One company has already experienced that with employees in Germany, France, and the UK saying, no, we, we refuse to implement this and this big turmoil going on internally in that organization.

So [00:15:00] will we see a lot of that? I would suspect we will. In which case, what’s the impact? Project out what the questions are we need to be asking that if we are communicate is what does this mean? To what do we need to do? What do we need to advise? How do we prepare for this? So that you’ve gotta have that in your planning list.

If you are in that position with a company in that situation. You’ve then got larger Italian companies. What about in the in the Arabic speaking world, out in Asia, et cetera how does this impact those? Is this a ripple effect? We’ll see from DEI. ’cause you are seeing. Again, it’s largely in the US according to Axios, they talk about several CEOs are tripping over themselves to appeal to the new Trump administration.

I call that sucking up like big time. Really, it’s embarrassing seeing some of the behaviors by these CEOs, yet pragmatism, I suppose you might call it the effect on the share price if they’re publicly listed. All these things. Are very distasteful, but this is reality. What do you do [00:16:00] about this?

And what about the values you profess, this is a long discussion. We’ve talked about this before. Yeah. You say these things, we stand by this. And I remember that conversation we had in a recent episode. She, and that particularly did a total reversal and said what we said then is not the case anymore.

We don’t believe in that. So where does all that fit into this overall landscape? So the volatile. Picture is very wide. It’s a very large landscape to look at. Yeah. You, I had not heard about this company that had the the uprising from among employees in other, I’ll see if I can dig out the note on it.

Yeah. Good. But I think one of the things and. Ties directly back to the results of this survey is that A CEO sees this happening in their foreign subsidiaries or affiliates, and they say, our internal communicators aren’t doing their job because they didn’t create alignment around this decision.

Yeah. As opposed to counseling the leadership to say, this is how you’re going to [00:17:00] experience a response from our. Subsidiaries in Germany and France and Italy and the like, based on the fact that we have employee profiles that, that cover our geographic regions and we can project based on, it could even be AI analysis of our employee sentiment data from.

Everything that we’ve done in Teams and Slack and email and the other channels that employees are engaging in, we can come right out and say, this isn’t gonna fly. You’re going to have some unhappy people and that’s gonna affect productivity. Let’s rethink this. That’s the kind of counsel that we need to give, not, oh, yes sir, we will communicate that we’re doing this even though we know you’re gonna run into resistance.

The other thing I’m seeing and this is really interesting and I’m seeing this mostly on LinkedIn, is. Experts in DEI who are providing counsel on the difference between legal and illegal DEI as defined in the Trump administration’s executive orders saying that [00:18:00] basically illegal DEI is anything that elevates somebody.

Because of their protected class or background or what have you, which frankly, that’s not D-E-I-D-E-I does not do that. D that, that’s equality, not equity. Equity is creating a level play playing field that gives everybody the same opportunity and that they’re saying is legal. DEI under the definition, who’s.

Reading all of this and going to their leaders and saying, we can continue to offer DEI that is in compliance with what the Trump administration is asking. If we do A, B, and c based on my reading of what the experts are saying, again, this is proactive rather than reactive, and it’s what we need to be doing.

It is. So a lot to pay attention to with this, I think. And the DEI, I guess is the hot one on everyone’s radar because of the rolling back on it as per an executive order. But all the other [00:19:00] elements, indeed looking at what Axios is interpreting from the port, from the from the survey on the share of CEOs who say they plan to expand specific functions, top of the list marketing and brand building or marketing communication and brand building.

And that I think, does reflect what you said at the very start, that the focus is external on this and employee communication is actually second on that list, but there’s quite a big gap between the numbers. And then all the other functions, investor relations, public relations, crisis, et cetera.

But marketing, communication and brand building is number one. So if you’re a marketing communicator, pay close attention to that one. Absolutely. And of course DEI was just an example. Yeah, there, there are tons of issues out there that could be affecting your organization, that could be challenging your leadership.

You need to know what those are, and you need to be monitoring all of those and providing counsel on how stakeholders will react and what the impact of the business will be from the wrong messaging. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode [00:20:00] of four immediate release.

The post FIR #450: Senior Leaders Doubt Communicators’ Abilities appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Employees everywhere are using AI to save time and be more productive. The thing is, many of them are using tools their employers have not approved and they’re not telling anyone. Companies are benefiting from this stealth approach to using generative AI, but there are plenty of risks, too. Neville and Shel look at the data and discuss approaches companies can take that will benefit both them and their employees.

Links from this episode:

Why employees smuggle AI into work
FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company?
The Rise of Shadow AI is a Double-Edged Sword for Corporate Innovation – NevilleHobson .com
Chasing Shadows: Getting ahead of Shadow AI
Half of all employees are Shadow AI users, new study finds

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 449 of four immediate release. I’m She Holtz. I’m Neville Hobson. In episode 4 1 9 last July, we explored the concept of shadow AI questioning its potential risks within organizations. Shadow AI refers to the use of unsanctioned artificial intelligence tools and technologies by employees without the knowledge or approval of their company’s IT governance.

This practice can lead to security and vulnerabilities, data breaches and compliance issues as these tools operate outside established protocols. A recent survey by Software Ag highlights the surveillance of this phenomenon revealing that over half of all employees admits to using AI tools that work artificial approval.

The survey underscores the need for organizations to address this growing trend by implementing clear policies and providing sanctioned AI resources to ensure security and compliance. So what does this latest survey add to the topic we [00:01:00] discussed last July? We’ll discuss the picture next.

This week the BBC reported on this latest survey noting that many employees resort to unauthorized AI applications to enhance productivity, especially when official tools are lacking or inadequate. This unauthorized usage shadow AI mirrors the earlier concept of shadow it where employees used unsanctioned software or devices for work purposes.

The report suggests that organizations should proactively engage with employees to understand their needs. And provide appropriate AI tools, thereby reducing the reliance on unsanctioned applications. And we have three good examples of how different organizations are addressing shadow ai. In response to the growing use of unsanctioned AI tools, banking giant JP Morgan Chase develops an internal generative AI assistant called Index GPT for over 60,000 employees.

This tool assists with tasks such as document summarization and problem solving, [00:02:00] ensuring that employees have access to approved AI resources within a secure environment. The Australian Telecommunications Company, Telstra has implemented a rigorous process to assess all AI tools and capabilities within its business.

Telstra maintains a list of approved generative AI tools and provides guidelines on their usage. For instance, while the company has not officially banned the use of Chinese AI model deep seek, it discourages its use and prefers employees to utilize Microsoft’s copilot for which it is rolling out 21,000 licenses.

And US Retail Giant Walmart monitors AI use within the company and prefers in-house tools, but does not strictly prohibit external platforms. This approach allows Walmart to balance innovation with security by providing employees with approved AI resources while maintaining oversight of external tool usage.

So there’s a number of takeaways here. Shell, I think the first one being there’s a prevalence of shadow ai. Over half of employees use [00:03:00] unsanctioned AI tools at work, posing potential risk to organizations. Those risks from using unauthorized AI can lead to security vulnerabilities, data breaches, and compliance issues.

Proactive organization responses play an essential part in addressing this. Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Telstra, and Walmart are proactively engaging with employees who understand their needs and provide appropriate sanctioned AI tools, thereby reducing your reliance on unsanctioned applications.

Your thoughts? I think that, first of all. Organizations that are restricting the use of ai, which is leading employees to practice shadow AI so they can, enjoy the benefits that AI is going to deliver to them. These organizations need to understand what’s happening with these tools, what these employees are using them for.

I don’t know if it was the same survey you were looking at ’cause what I was. Reading didn’t cite the source of this, but it was a recent survey that found that knowledge workers [00:04:00] are using shadow ai. 83% of them say to s save time. 81% to simplify tasks and 71% to increase productivity. Those are just horrible things.

What business would want that? And I think there. Are misconceptions at leadership levels people who really aren’t paying attention to what’s happening that’s preventing the organization from implementing tools that employees could use with permission. . And that’s driving a lot of this.

I think it’s. Got to be more understanding at the most senior levels of the organization of what these tools bring to the table. Then it’s a question of. Education of employees. Employees really need to understand, first of all what the risks are of using unapproved tools. They need to understand the organization’s process.

Where I work, we have gone to great pains to explain the process of identifying, not just ai, but any. [00:05:00] Technology that might be beneficial and how it is evaluated how it moves into testing and then how it moves into common use across the organization so people understand that there’s a process and if there’s a tool that you like, recommend it and.

It will be put into that process. And finally, I think employees need to understand what tools are available to them. For example, today I will be communicating to employees in our organization that the tool they already have access to, which is co-pilot baked into Office 365 now offers. Access to chat GPTs full complete reasoning model.

You have to pay extra for this if you just have the access to, to chat GPT. But Microsoft decided to, to bake it right into co-pilot at no additional cost. So I’m gonna talk to our employees about what a reasoning model is, when you might want [00:06:00] to use it and hey, you can extra cost. No hassle right there within copilot.

So I, there are steps that organizations can take to minimize the use of shadow it shadow ai. I think what’s concerning is that they’re not taking these steps. They’re just worried about it. Yeah I think that’s the key point. She, what I took mostly from those examples for instance, those three companies in different industries and different countries even are doing is the key to this.

Particularly what struck me was, um, Telstra in Australia. I. Who are right on the ball with the latest thing going, which is deep seek the Chinese AI model that they haven’t abandoned at all, but they’re discouraging its use. So what does that tell me? That little bit of information, not the detail of anything, is they’re communicating something that employees might be wondering about.

They’ve read about deep seek and some might be thinking, oh, I’d love to try that, but can I, should I? Now they’ve got some clarity. They’d rather you didn’t, [00:07:00] and presumably they’re giving some reasons why not and so forth. So it’s not quite clear from that example, but it illustrates, jP Morgan Chase has taken a whole new level.

They’re rolling out an internal generative AI tool for 60,000 employees. So they, at that level, that’s way advanced than just simply explaining what AI tools are and whether you can use ’em, not, they’ve embraced that. They’re rolling that out. Then you’ve got the other extreme, which is Walmart, who, don’t who prefer in-house tools, but don’t strictly prohibit external platforms. I think they, I’m assuming therefore that they’ve explained the reasoning behind all of that. But the point is though they’re proactively communicating, which is the exact thing organizations should be doing.

They need to be proactive for a lot of reasons, and not the least of which is the speed with which all of this is advancing. I was listening to a marketing AI podcast just yesterday. Excellent podcast by the way, called the Artificial Intelligence Show. Yeah. And they were talking about the fact that there is this.

Benchmark [00:08:00] that has been introduced recently called Humanity’s Last exam. You’ve probably heard of it, I think it’s 3000 questions that are asked of a new large language model and it evaluates how well they answered the questions and the. First time it was used, and I can’t remember which models were used in which sequence, but one of them scored something like 8%.

Then the next one a new model was released by a different AI company and it scored something like six 16%. And then a new model was released by another AI company and it scored 24%. These are not. Trick questions, but they’re not simple answers where it could go into its training set. It has to reason to get to the answer.

And what was frightening was that the time that last between that first test that did six or 8% and the last one that did 24. Was about two weeks. So that’s how fast all of this is advancing, which leads a lot of people [00:09:00] to think that we’re probably closer to artificial general intelligence than we had thought we were before.

And companies that are sitting on their hands with this are just opening the door to more and more problems. You talked about deep seek. . If you use deep seeq on the web, one of the many interfaces that allow you to play with it. You’re exchanging data with servers in China and that could be proprietary company data.

There is some statistical evidence about the amount of proprietary information that has been shared using shadow ai. I don’t have the number in front of me, but it’s not inconsequential sharing that with. Open ai, sharing that with Google or Anthropic is one thing. Sharing it with the People’s Republic of China is another

Now I’m playing with Deep Seek. I like it. I love R one watching it think the process it goes through and it’s almost like watching a human think with the text. Displaying on the screen, but I’ve installed it on my computer. It’ll run [00:10:00] if I disconnect myself from the internet completely.

That’s the whole idea of these open source models, is that they don’t call out to any servers anywhere, any data centers. It’s all contained right there on your hard drive if you wanna be able to. Let your employees use this thing, consider an implementation behind your firewall that’s completely protected.

But we have to start thinking about how we give these tools to employees so they can be more productive and efficient. The company can do better, and we don’t run the risks associated with employees bringing tools into the organization behind the backs of it. So bottom line effect, essentially it comes down to communication, doesn’t it?

Because everything you’ve outlined, it requires that proactive engagement with employees to help ’em understand why you’re doing it. What is it, how they can take advantage of it, and the pros and cons of all. The point is though clarity that there is no question in the employee’s mind, [00:11:00] can I use this?

Should I, or I better bring my own? And I think one other thing that you need is not just communication to employees, but engagement with them around this. I will share one other thing that we’re doing where I work, we’re establishing an it an AI committee. And we have an open call for membership on this committee.

And I’m. Not responsible for this. It’s out of the IT department. But what they’re looking for is a cross section of the company. They don’t care how well you understand AI or how much you’ve used it or what level in the organization you’re at. They’re looking to get people from all across the organization.

So there is representation from all corners of the company Yeah. In the decisions that are made about this. And that will be thoroughly communicated. So people don’t think this is executives in the ivory tower, or this is the software police in it. These are representatives from our parts of the organization.

That have [00:12:00] looked at the issues. They’ve looked at the risks and they’ve made these decisions. And I think that makes it a lot more understandable and a lot more acceptable. So engage employees in the process. Yeah, I would agree with that. Shell. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to this survey.

To all the references we’ve made here that you can take a look yourself and get up to speed, but there’s some useful stuff to understand here and for employers. Yeah, you build up that proactive engagement with employees on this very topic and you will be, I’m certain, please, with the outcome from that, I would say, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #449: Employees’ Use of Shadow AI Surges appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Change leadership consultant Caroline Kealey thinks change management is dead. Communication leader Sharon O’Dea thinks Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) is dead.

That’s right: It’s time for another installment of “X is Dead.”

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel outline the cases these two communication thought leaders make and offer our own thoughts.

Links from this episode:

2025: The Year Change Management Died
Sharon O’Dea’s LinkedIn post on Enterprise Social Networks

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome to four immediate release. This is episode 4 4 8. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz. And it is time for another segment of our recurring series X is dead. This is X as the algebraic symbol, not former elite Twitter. It’s been a long time, but we do occasionally dedicate some time to arguments that something we’ve been all.

Taken for granted is dead. And in just the last week, I saw two of these both on LinkedIn and both making pretty compelling cases. We’ll discuss both of them right after this.

Let’s start with change management. Carolyn Keeley wrote this one titled 2025, the Year Change Management Died. I’ve known Carolyn for years through IEBC, and she has a global practice in change leadership. A point she makes in the article. She calls it a sobering realization given her work in change management for the last 20 years.[00:01:00]

But she says change management isn’t working. It had been a useful third pillar in the traditional triangle of strategy, project management and change management when deploying planned transformations. She writes, that was then. This is now. Carolyn says, we’re now operating in a fundamentally different world.

The assumption of toggling between periods of change and of business as usual, entrenched in traditional change management now seems quat. She writes a variety of patterns. Account for change, management’s demise, including the dismantling of trust and legitimacy across all sectors. There’s a pervasive AI inspired fear of becoming obsolete.

Employees feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. Silos are calcifying as we retreat to information cocoons and people are in a perpetual state of continuous partial attention. Carolyn is certified in the ADKAR model of change management, but she says that the [00:02:00] thing that. Changing isn’t clear.

The essential quality of organizational today tends to be emergent, not planned, making it hard to progress through a change sequence and the acar model. That’s awareness, desire, knowledgeability and reinforcement falls apart these days at the desire checkpoint. Where we go now, she says, is to clarify the North Star and the fog of chaos.

Many teams have lost the plot. She writes, before introducing a map, focus on the compass. Make sure your teams are crystal clear on which way is north. That is ensure the goal of your goals is well defined. Second, cut out or trim the noise in your organization so your employee’s attention and focus are on the right things.

And third. Cultivates Sturdy leadership. The second piece is from Sharon O’Day, founder of DW Access and Litho Partners, a pair of communication focused firms in the Netherlands. For Sharon, its enterprise social networks That’s dead. [00:03:00] She says she was speaking to a comms leader who was surprised when the hashtag they created for a public launch wasn’t used by anyone other than members of their own team, not a single mention across external social or their internal social channels.

She ascribes the death of enterprise social networks to the shift to short form video as the social networks where we all used to immerse ourselves. Twitter, Facebook have gone bad as public. Social media turns toxic. People have shifted to sharing in small groups or not at all. She writes a phenomenon that you and I have discussed a lot recently, Neville.

It’s no surprise then that we’re all seeing that shift reflected in how people communicate at work. And she says. She’s hearing a lot of that participation in, so enterprise social networks is failing. A lot of companies are shutting them down. She also sees digital fatigue as a contributor. One thing she wrote gave me pause.

She says, Viva, engage, which is what Yammer evolved into, continues to lack [00:04:00] clarity of purpose. A report that looked at data from hundreds of organizations concluded that Veeva Engage has shifted from a collaboration and community tool to a broadcasting platform for communicators. To me that’s blaming the tool for how people use it.

Kind of like blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations. In any case, Neville, change management and enterprise social networks. What do you think? Are they done? They ought to be ? I think when I read Caroline’s piece, it’s a very well written article and it does provoke a lot of thought. Even though I don’t see a lot of

Trenchant discussion going on. It’s a lot of agreement to her points in the comments which is good. But a couple things stuck out to me, like flashing lights almost. Some of the comments she made one is unquestionably a reality of what’s happening now. And this is. Connected directly to what we’ve been talking about recently, the collapse of trust.

So she says, just when we crave institutional stability the most, we are seeing the [00:05:00] dismantling of trust and legitimacy across every sector, politics, business, culture, education, religion. So if you extrapolate that to Edelman’s Trust, which we’ve discussed in two episodes recently that is spot on.

In terms of what’s actually happening collapsing trust, I’d say it’s collapsing as opposed to declining. It’s in serious trouble. People do not trust organizations and the people who lead them. And we’re seeing that played out in reports like this, including the other one we talked about in the last episode from Fleischman Hillard in terms of focus on corporate affairs, so that.

Is a kind of a yes. We need to recognize that, which is part of her argument. But then at the end I think is a is a point as well. So we recognize col trust has collapsed, which is behind a lot of these shifts that are happening. Caroline says in her concluding points, what the world needs now is a forward motion propelled by a new form of leadership.

One that holds the tension between being grounded and [00:06:00] unleashed between head and heart and between fear and hope. The collapse of traditional models is an invitation for the brave to challenge, to reinvent, and to create absolutely spot on in my view. So the old models change management. I see some comments.

Cognize. This is a term and maybe the way it’s been practiced that’s been going for . Two decades and more. I can remember a decade ago when I worked for IBM that was what I was doing was attached to change management programs in the mega enterprise monolithic style. Here’s the Rigid Rule book.

We follow this every step, and there’s absolutely no divergence from this. And so you think that? I, in fact, I now think about it, question, was that really effective back then? I don’t believe that works at all today in this current change in climate. So where are the new leaders then who can nod and say, yep, absolutely.

It’s all changing. So what are you gonna do about it then? So that’s a big point that’s come out of Caroline’s article. Sharon’s article. Is also [00:07:00] great. Is enterprise social over, I would say the way it’s been done for X years ought to be over. We need something different, she says.

Again, this struck out to me, one of the comments she men mentioned anecdotally. She says, I’m seeing more comms Pros report declining participation and engagement. On their ESNs, they’re questioning whether to relaunch them or close them down. I’d say the latter is probably the best route to go if you’re asking this or that.

But I think also people, is it perhaps that there are too many organizations who have these expecting it’s almost like saying if we put it up there, they will come. Use it. If we build it, they will come. They’re not doing that’s the thing. And with the lack of trust, and again, these are very generalized comments I have to say, but we’ve talked about this.

The younger you are, the more questioning you are and the willing less willingness to accept. You must do this simply because [00:08:00] some senior person with a long job title tells you that. Or we’ve done the survey that says this is where we’re gonna go. People want to be I guess schmoozed a lot more, they need to be schoo, that’s the word, not schmoozed, smoothed a lot more to recognize value that.

They provide to the organization. ’cause they’re the future. They’re the future. But it works both ways. You’ve gotta have a bit of give and take Here we’re not seeing that it’s there’s too much. In fact, it’s not even carrot and stick shell, I don’t believe. You don’t, there’s no dynamism in my view, with some of these things.

Yes, all these tools are there expecting miracles to happen. And I think, again, back to my IBM days this rather cool tool at the time, the name of which I can’t recall offhand. It was a a bit like GaggleAMP, that kind of tool, an employee advocacy tool as part of an advocacy program where you have

Pre-written text people would share across social networks. And there was a laity to do this gamification approach to it. You get rewards and there’s peer pressure and competitions, all that. I think those are absolutely [00:09:00] artificial now, frankly. In the sense of. Advocacy in such a controlled manner.

So those are all things that maybe we ought to be questioning how they fit in an enterprise in particular. And so it probably means I’m just glancing through Caroline’s. Sorry, but Sharon’s article, do we need to review the role of ESNs in the channel mix? Yes, we do. I believe, or just accept things change and maybe the time’s just coming to end.

That could be the answer too, but something must replace these things, I would say. So this is therefore the time perhaps. Turmoil again that we haven’t seen in quite a while. The way we’re seeing it, that’s a reflection of what else is going on. So these are all jigsaw pieces in the big puzzle, it seems to me.

But change management, as Caroline writes, I don’t believe that has a future at all in that form. But I can’t tell you ’cause I’m only just reading this, what I think should replace, I don’t know that I think that needs some more conversation. But it’s excellent what both of these have written [00:10:00] because it’s stimulating discussion.

Absolutely. I thought both of them were outstanding pieces. Yeah. And I am in I’m largely in agreement with some caveats. Yeah. With Carolyn’s piece on change management. I, all of the conditions she outlines all of the changes that we’ve gone through, where people are at I and the nature of much of the change organizations are facing these days.

I think she’s right. It is emergent. There is still programmatic change that happens in organizations. There are mergers and acquisitions. There is a change in a core technology that the organization uses and you have to get employees from here to there in a defined period of time. And I think largely the principles of change management up continue to apply in those.

Narrow circumstances in terms of enterprise social networks. I think that and this is based largely on my experience, 21 years as an independent consultant working [00:11:00] with organizations on their digital, internal media, and most of them are introduced to the organization using what I have for years called the Godspeed method, which is, here you go, everybody, Viva, engage.

Godspeed. And what we need is a culture of messaging. It was Pitney Bowes maybe . 23, 24 years ago, I was at a conference and I heard somebody from Pitney Bowes talk about message, mission control. Somebody needs to establish the culture of messaging and reinforce it. This is what this tool is for. Here’s how you use it.

This is what this one’s for. Here’s how you use it. We don’t use it for this, we use it for this. We use this for that. Reinforce that through, among other things, reward and recognition. If you call somebody out for having used a messaging system in support of organizational goals, other employees look at that and go, oh, is that what you get recognized for around [00:12:00] here?

I can do that. And. We need tools that allow employees to share knowledge and information with each other. And Carolyn in, in the change piece talks about calcified silos. And that’s absolutely happening in organizations. We can’t let that happen. That means organization is trapped in those silos and people who need it can’t use it.

Back in 1996, and there were no intranets, there were no. Enterprise Social Networks. Bob Buckman at Buckman Labs started a social network at his company called Kinetics, and it was for one specific reason. It was for people who needed information in order to. Do something work related would post it and everybody was expected to check in daily and if they had the answer, they were expected to share it.

He was not looking to establish enterprise social networks and [00:13:00] make them succeed. He was looking to create a knowledge-based organization rather than one where people kept their knowledge because it was. Power and sharing it should exact some sort of cost which is what happened in a lot of organizations.

And it was wildly successful, largely because he was the most active user. Everybody saw him out there and knew that he would see them sharing or soliciting information. And he would also notice the people who weren’t participating. This is what I mean by establishing a culture. Of messaging.

This wasn’t, Hey, let’s have an enterprise social network and we can throw hashtags out there when we’re launching a program. This is a very well-defined network that had a clear purpose and clear expectations, and everybody could see how it benefited the organization. I. But he was clear. He came right out and said in a memo to employees that if you don’t use this there are opportunities in this organization that are gonna close up to you.

So I think you can have success with [00:14:00] these, and I think we need to find success with these, especially in a world where we have a lot of workers who are remote or hybrid. And we’re not all in the same room at the same time to be able to share knowledge and information. But it needs to be ingrained in the culture, what it’s for, how it’s used, what we use it for, what it’s not for and what the expectations are.

I think I remember one of the conversations we had in an episode within the last six months I think talked about people in organizations, in teams trusting their direct supervisor, the person they report to in the team. And I think that’s where. This needs to focus. So one of the points that Caroline makes in the three step to consider I think this would be very germane to this part of the conversation.

She says, organizations are aching for sturdy leaders, change agents, managers, and executives who have the fortitude, the skill and capabilities to support [00:15:00] and galvanize teams building fit for-purpose, leadership capabilities in leading through change, chaos, and ambiguity is vital. So that stuck with me in, now, in the context of what you’re saying here, that in my view is how you need to galvanize people to participate in knowledge sharing in an organization, not the kind of almost threatening approach.

I see. You are not using the network and. These things are gonna be close to you. If I don’t see you doing this here, that ain’t gonna work today. That worked 30 years ago. And I’m thinking now in many organizations, I’m just reflecting on one in particular that I did some work with last year, that everyone was, looked about 12 years old.

You mean? They’re under 30? Most close to 20. And their whole approach was different, and that, that struck me as an observer. It wasn’t at all in any way negative at all unless you were someone who really had difficulty handling with, [00:16:00] dealing with people younger than you who were utterly different to you.

I think. We’re seeing that more and more. We’ve talked many times about the new wave coming into the workplace, who were born after 2000 who are different. Expectations are different. Our structure’s that different. I’m not in the enterprise loops as much as I used to be working for big organizations.

But what I observe, what I hear anecdotally Sure is you’ve gotta make connections with their younger generation. You are on their mobile phones and all this kind of stuff. If you build an internet, it’s there. They’ll come. They won’t, if they can’t get it on their mobile device in a way that is easy.

User interface, all that. So these are I think elements of the points. Caroline’s making in particular, and the points that Sharon makes too in what she’s saying about enterprise social networks. So it maybe reminded me actually when she talks about Yammer Viva engaged. Now I remember this is about 15, 16 years ago, introducing Yammer to an organization that [00:17:00] I felt this was perfect for this organization and employees with

Alacrity jumped on this before you knew it. 60 people had signed up and we were chatting away and I thought, oh my God, we got an emergency here. Because there was no strategy behind it. There was no guidance on what to do and how to use it. And of course, some significant issues, particularly as some of the senior leaders in the organization didn’t think it was a good idea at all.

Others did. So that. Wasn’t the way to do it. But what struck me about it was an un a kind of a hidden and suddenly emerging desire by people to share things that way that didn’t exist in any shape or form. And they just jumped on it like nobody’s business. It’s often, I’ve often reflected on that as an example of great outcome, but absolutely not the way to aim for it.

So the point I’m making though. Is that it helps you discover, I think preferences of people in ways that are live right in front of your eyes. You can see it. And if you [00:18:00] can somehow embrace that, and that to me means not the CEO or a very remote senior leadership figure, particularly if you’re a big organization, but that small.

Part of the organization you are in and your leader, if you see he or she embracing this, and you trust that person, and that’s becoming more important. Forgotten who it was. Sharon or Catherine talked about cocoons the old silos that we’re talking about getting calcified.

I agree, but they’re still there in many organizations. So silos aren’t necessarily a bad thing if they’re not closed. Silos, in fact, silos, the ventilations. You need small groups of people. That’s more, maybe that’s more in line with what we’re seeing externally. The shift away from centralized social networks to more dynamic niche per, personal interest ones.

How can we replicate that in organizations without the risk of them becoming their own silos that no one’s allowed in ’cause it’s a small niche. Big challenges, I think. So these are great. Aspects or milestones really along that [00:19:00] road to where we’re gonna get to with this chaos all around us, I think.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That Bob Bachman’s threat wouldn’t carry much weight today. It was a different generation that was in the company. It was also a group of people who had never experienced any kind of social network before. I, how many of them had been on CompuServe?

Probably very few. So there he needed to use every tool in his toolkit to, to get people. Started with this. But the idea of a network, I think continues to be important. And, Yammer I mean I saw many terrible implementations of Yammer, but I read a report from Deloitte where they worked with a company to launch it.

And what they did was initially have three pilot groups. They identified three groups of employees who were struggling. Largely because they were dispersed different time zones, different geographic locations. Yeah. And it, it was communication the need for asynchronous communication that would improve what they were doing.

And [00:20:00] so they created these three pilot groups and they held their hands through 90 days of using Yammer to help ’em get their work done. One of them was a group of people who used to work in the field. I think the report referred to them as gray beards. And now they had jobs in the offices and these were people who were the least likely to use a social network like a Facebook or a Twitter.

But they became great champions of this because their cycle time, their time to market. Was reduced by 30 or 40% because of their use of Yammer. But they were using it in a strategic way with guidance from a group of people who knew what they were doing. And they were able to take those three pilot groups and tell those stories to the rest of the organization and have the people who participated service champions so that when the rest of the organization adopted it, they adopted it for what it was.

Intended in that organization to do and was very successful. So go figure, if you’re strategic about something, it works better than if you’re not. And I, yeah I think that’s what’s needed here. [00:21:00] I’m not suggesting that, the, the typical enterprise social networks that we have seen over the years, and I’m trying to remember the names of some of them that I have worked with a lot back 10, 15 years ago.

May not be the solution, but channels that allow people to engage and share information when they’re, when some are remote and some are in the office and some are in the field and some are in the off the main office, the headquarters and some are in different time zones in different countries.

I think we still need that. We just need a culture of messaging that provides the guardrails and the. The rationale for why, this is, why using this is part of the way I get my job done. It’s not extracurricular. It’s not something we do for fun. It’s not something we do to build camaraderie.

This is the way we work here. And then they’ll work fine. Yeah. The I love your optimistic view there. Shell really, I do. But I don’t disagree with you. One comment I did like in in Sharon’s LinkedIn piece there’s lots [00:22:00] I liked actually, but this one in particular from Susie Robinson says, I think this is a complex topic that can’t be answered with a binary yes or no, as there are so many variables.

I shared some thoughts, but not exhaustively and honestly think it depends. I agree with that. I love this woman . And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #448: Has Night Fallen on Change Management and Enterprise Social Networks? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer characterized the current communication environment as one infected by grievance. Another commentator claimed that we are living in an age of ubiquitous malignancy. Communicating with a broad audience of stakeholders is especially challenging in this landscape. While the Trust Barometer identifies business as the only one of the four sectors trusted enough to do anything about it, the options at this point are anything but clear. Also in this long-form episode for January: Different AI large language models (LLMs) portray brands differently, making it a new requirement that communicators consider how AI will position them when developing their messaging. Muck Rack’s 2025 survey on how PR professionals are using AI is out, and it contains a few surprises. The state of content marketing is at the heart of a new report from the Content Marketing Institute. It is apparently harder to quit Meta than it is to ditch X, leaving a lot of people sitting on the fence (your co-hosts included). Meanwhile, Bluesky’s growth is surging, and the company is planning to introduce an Instagram competitor as some of the most important voices that had made their home on Twitter have made the transition. In his Tech Report, Dan York explores the tale of two TikTok bans.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

2025 Edelman Trust Barometer
Reversing the Descent into Grievance
Corporate Affairs Trends for 2025 – FleishmanHillard in the United Kingdom
Marshall Manson on the challenges of messaging about your business
How AI Search Platforms Characterize Brands
What Does Meta’s Pivot From Fact-Checking To Community Consensus Mean In The AI Age?
OpenAI Releases AI Agent That Helps Book Flights, Order Food for Users
Reactive PR & AI: How to capitalize on trending topics faster
Muck Rack’s State of AI in PR 2025
Muck Rack State of AI in PR 2025: Full Report
From Bluesky to Substack: Evolving Your Social Strategy to Avoid Brand Extinction
How Brands and Agencies are Approach Bluesky — and How Meta’s New Policies Could Impact the Platform
Bluesky is Getting Its Own Photo Sharing App, Flashes
Bluesky Saw a 17x Increase in Moderation Reports in 2024 After Rapid Growth
Twitter Quitters Help Bluesky To More Than 27 million Users
Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos
A New Campaign Aims to Safeguard Social Media from Billionaires Using Bluesky’s Underlying Tech
ECB Launches Presence on Bluesky Amid Musk’s Political Maneuvering
How BlueSky, Twitter’s One-Time Side Project, is Challenging X
Neville’s Facebook Post on Meta Fence-Sitting
Neville’s Threads Post on Meta Fence-Sitting
Why I Have Finally Quit Facebook. It’s Not Just About Fact-Checking
Lawyer Fires Meta as Client Over Descent into Neo Nazi Madness
I Have Struggled with How to Respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Descent into Toxic Masculinity
Enterprise Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2025
How B2B Brands Can Leverage Employee Generated Content in 2025
Reflections on 2024 and the Road Ahead for Content Marketing
Brands targeting Gen Alpha are heading to Roblox

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4 4 7 and our long form monthly episode for January, 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the uk and I’m Shell Holtz in the us. It’s great to be back with a long form monthly episode. Artificial intelligence figures prominently in this episode.

What a surprise. I’m sure you’re all shocked, falling outta your chairs. Ai really, and it’s, it’s interesting timing based on open AI’s announcement yesterday that they have released their first AI agents. You have to have the $200 a month account to use them. Right now. I don’t, I have the 20 bit of a hurdle.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it’s definitely a hurdle. Yeah. But he, he Sam Altman did say it’s coming for the, the regular $20 a month account in the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to that. Okay. We’ll hang on to our hats in that case. No, you’re right. She is it this, there’s this, this topic features large in many of [00:01:00] our.

Topics of discussion today and all from slightly different angles, so we have some useful stuff to share. Before we get into much more, let’s have a look at what we have done since the last month of the episode. We’ve actually done five episodes since then, which is one more I think that we’ve done.

Yeah, we’ve been busy previous. Yeah, I mean, that’s true. So just a quick rundown on all of them. We’ve got some comments on some of ’em too, but a quick rundown. 4, 4 2 on the 26th of December we talked about the it’s still in the news, it’s not, certainly not gone away. The issue between Blake Lively, the actress, and Justin Bald on the movie they were on, whose title escapes me completely as I’m speaking these words.

But it’s all over the news. We discussed. Well topic or the answer, or not the answer, actually the question why PR is a dirty word. Related to that, it’s actually quite interesting, but that, that thing’s still going on. 4, 4 3 on the 3rd of January. So our first episode in [00:02:00] 2025, that was our 20 year anniversary epi episode.

We actually started on the 3rd of January, 2005 with the first episode. So on the, on the 3rd of January, 2025, we marked that anniversary. And we had in your word shell, a bunch of comments to that, a whole bunch of comments. I would guess maybe 30, 35. I’m not gonna read 30 or 35 , but I do have a sampling here.

To share. Terry Flynn communications professor up in Canada says, congrats you’re both pioneers in podcasting when most people never heard or knew of the term. Your FIR podcast has always been one of my go-to sources for information in the PR in comms field. We had a comment from Kevin Trobridge, and interestingly, this was a comment that was left on Blue Sky.

I began listening when I first started teaching public relations in the fall of 2005. It helped me stay connected to the industry and challenged my thinking about how the, how new technology was changing the way we [00:03:00] communicate. It still does. Tom Murphy, who has been listening for a long time left two comments.

One I think was on Facebook and one was on LinkedIn. He said an incredible milestone. Congratulations on the 20th anniversary. It always has been and continues to be recommended listening if you’re working in communications and he. Said basically the same thing in his other post, Donna Papa Acosta, whose voice you hear saying the podcast for communicators right at the beginning of every episode says, I still remember discovering the show in the early days.

You guys are the best Alan Schoenberg like so many of your others. I’m looking forward to listening to this episode. Thank you for having me as a guest more than once and for contributing so much insight and knowledge to the industry. John Cass, who was there in those early days. Yeah, the new communication forum this was a post he left to your.

Post on LinkedIn. He said you and shell are amazing. What a great inspiration to communicators and marketers everywhere. Mark Taylor. [00:04:00] Well done. I remember listening to your first shows before we left Johannesburg. Been in the UK almost as long now. Yeah. Gary Goldhammer says, I remember the beginning and was honored to have earned a few mentions.

Congrats. You both deserve medals for dedication and perseverance. and Philippe Boreman. Congratulations. What a fantastic journey. I remember the start 20 years ago. Thanks for all the great content and conversations. So just a little sampling of what people had to say. Super. Really nice comments.

Thanks everyone. That’s excellent. So then 4, 4, 4 9th of January preparing for Trump 2.0. We talked about that. And that really was looking at the implications for public relations and particular media relations with the advent of, of the new regime coming in at Trump 2.0. And I, I find that actually a really interesting topic discussion that we had.

She really, so then 4, 4, 5 on the 14th of January media relations in the turbulent media [00:05:00] landscape. And that was a kind of a continuity in, in a sense. And we had one comment to that, didn’t we? We did from Shireen Goodman, who is a business coach who said, it’s fascinating how community connections shape news, trust.

Navigating this landscape takes creativity and adaptability. Let’s embrace the change. Yeah, good point. And then 4, 4, 6, the episode prior to this episode on the 20th of January navigating Grievances the title of the Post. And this was one of the insights from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer that had been published literally the day before.

We recorded that with the usual excellent analysis and reporting of the findings that revealed a global crisis of grievance and eroding trust in societal institutions. The grievance topic was most interesting, I found. She so it’s good that we had the chance to talk about that topic.

High level discussion didn’t drill into a lot of detail [00:06:00] but good. Nevertheless, I thought. Ed, you’ll hear more about that later in or shortly. Today’s episode. Shortly actually. Yeah. Very, very shortly. And also posted over the last month as the latest episode of Circle of Fellows, that monthly panel discussion with usually four IABC fellows.

I tend to moderate those and I moderated this one on sparking creativity. So, so it was a really fun episode with Zora artist Diane GSKi, Andrea Greenhouse, and Martha Mka. Our next episode, if you would like to market in your calendar and participate in real time, be on Monday, February 24th at noon.

And this will deal with communication ethics. Yeah. I wonder if Blake Lively and. Justin Bald will come up in that conversation. Not if we don’t want to be sued by Baldoni. Right? Yeah. Take care. And Diane Gki is coming back for that episode along with Todd Hattori, Jane Mitchell and Carolyn sel. I have one [00:07:00] other quick announcement to make about Circle of Fellows because this is actually pretty exciting.

The IEBC, the International Association of Business Communicators Conference is scheduled for June in Vancouver, and we had this idea of submitting a speaker proposal to do speaker of to do Circle of Fellows there, and it was accepted. Cool. So we will be doing an episode of Circle of Fellows.

It will be on this issue of the Edelman Trust Barometer and communicating in this era of grievance, and it’s gonna use exactly the same format. As Circle of Fellows does routinely, you’ll be able to watch the stream live and participate in with, with comments and observations and the like. It’ll still be available as a, a video replay and a podcast, but it will be recorded live in front of an audience in Vancouver.

So very excited about that. Yeah, definitely. That’s a great, great thing. So we, we did a few of those back in then, didn’t we? Broadcast? [00:08:00] We did one that sticks in my mind certainly was a Reagan conference in Amsterdam where you and I were on stage doing an episode. And there were a few others. You were, you did a few, but we have done that before, but that’s a gap of 15 years or so, I think.

Yeah, I think, I think I mentioned this in the anniversary episode, but there was one where I was speaking to, I think it was an IABC chapter. It might have been in Massachusetts where I brought a sound board and, and multiple microphones and you were. Wherever you were. It was either the UK or the Netherlands.

I don’t remember how long ago this was. I think it’s that the one Philip Boman was doing when he was at IBM. Because there was one. Yeah, I don’t think so. There was one. I I was at that event in, in Belgium. And you dialed in via Skype, if I recall correctly, from the states? No, it it, it could be then.

That might have been the one. Might have been the one, yeah. I dialed in via Skype and Yeah. Took you, we took questions from the audience. I walked around with a handheld mic. That’s cool. And we recorded the episode that way. It was a nightmare to set that up and make sure that it all worked [00:09:00] back in those days.

Now would be easy. It would be very easy today. Yes, it would. We’ve gotta find an event we could get into or do that again. Shell, I think that would be really, that would be fun. We haven’t done that in a long time. We’ve gotten into a rut . So event organizes on PR and related topics. Hello, . Just let us know.

So, we’ve got in the pipeline, a couple of really good interviews. We had you and I talk to Sylvia Cambi just the other day about guess what, AI loomed large in that conversation. Sylvia is someone I’ve known for close to two decades and she is a renowned communicator. She, she’s got a lot of experience and memories to share on.

These topics and others. So that interview we’re looking to publishes in the first week of February and then coming up to have a chat with is our old friend Steve Ruble. Steve was a pioneer 20 odd years ago, and the dawn of blogging, it wasn’t [00:10:00] even called social media back in those days before he went to Edelman.

And he was quite a mentor to a lot of people, me included actually. So we had the opportunity to to book him and have him appear on the show in an FI interview. So that interview is coming up in mid-February and we’re, we’re likely to publish that one at the end of February. If not, it’ll be very early in March, but around, that’s the kind of timeframe we’re looking at.

So we’re looking forward to that. So two in the pipeline and a couple of others pending discussion and cementing. So we’re looking pretty good for really good conversations over the coming months. Great content coming outta the FIR podcast network and we will be back with our reports right after this message.

No worries. I had to, I had to make a time code note here anyway, so that’s [00:11:00] fine.

So as I mentioned, the navigating grievance was a, a primary topic in enablement’s trust barometer. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. And a related topic to it. So we discussed the trust barometer that had just been released. We took a high level journey through the findings of that report, which revealed a global crisis of grievance and eroding trust in societal institutions.

That’s government, business, media, and NGOs. Key topics include the impact of trust inequality, the rise of hostile activism, and the expectations placed on CEOs to address societal issues. And by the way, some of these terms might be new to you but they’re gonna become very familiar over the coming year, years, I reckon, particularly hostile activism.

It’s a very ugly phrase, but it’s an illustration of what’s happening today that would not be thought about even perhaps as recent as five years ago. Definitely 10 years ago, trust inequality. [00:12:00] So, that is a great look at something that’s emerging with it too in, in the context of why I’m introducing it this way is a report from Fleischman Hillard that was published last month on five trends for corporate affairs in 2025.

Each trend addresses a specific theme managing the wave of politics. How geopolitics becomes the day job. Ubiquitous malignancy from misinformation everywhere. New sources of data, new applications, and bigger things are coming as AI moves ahead. So both the Edelman and the Fleischman Hillard reports converge on a critical issue.

That’s the escalating distrust and misinformation, which are eroding societal cohesion, and institutional credibility. Edelman’s findings reveal this global age of grievance driven by economic insecurity, systemic inequality, and political polarization. This leads to a zero sum mindset. They say, where any gain for one group is seen as a loss for another [00:13:00] notably 61%.

Of respondents globally reported moderate or high grievances, feeling that institutions favor the wealthy, while ordinary people struggle. As institutions fail to address these grievances, disillusionment intensifies, manifesting in polarized media narratives and hostile activism. Among other things, young people are particularly disillusioned with over half endorsing hostile activism as a legitimate means of driving change.

Compounding these issues is the trend of ubiquitous malignancy. That’s a magnificent phrase. I think shell or misinformation in everything everywhere, all of the time. To coin a phrase as, as Dave Berry would say, ubiquitous malignancy would be a great name for a rock band . It would, wouldn’t it?

Absolutely. Described by all podcast, perhaps . So that’s described by Fleischman Hillard as a defining challenge for corporate affairs in 2025, where misinformation, DeepFakes and bot driven [00:14:00] content are pervasive. Malignancy in communication now exists in every conversation they say, requiring organizations to assess and manage the balance between authentic and inauthentic narratives.

Organizations face the dual challenge of addressing stakeholder grievances while navigating a fractured communication landscape. Authentic engagement and decisive intervention in the spread of false narratives are crucial to rebuilding trust and mitigating societal divisions. According to Edelman’s report, business emerges as the most capable institution to lead these efforts, but cannot act alone.

Collaborative solutions involving NGOs, governments, and media are essential trust building initiatives. Transparency and communication and ethical leadership can transform grievance into optimism and enable progress in an era where information credibility is paramount in their report, Fleischman Hillard urges communicators to move beyond conventional methods, leveraging behavioral science to understand audience [00:15:00] sentiment and apply channel specific techniques to maintain trust and credibility in a fractured landscape.

So addressing these interconnected challenges requires communicators to remain vigilant, adaptable, and committed to fostering trust across every platform and interaction. Whether it’s reversing the crisis of grievance or addressing ubiquitous malignancy, this applies to everything everywhere, all of the time.

How do you see it show? I see it as a minefield, frankly, right now all of the things that you have posited are, are, are absolutely true. I don’t know what the solutions are. You have people who are mired within their bubbles and the algorithms from the social networks that they engage in are, are feeding them.

Outrage because that’s what keeps them on the platform, which is what makes the platforms money Yeah. Is when they stay and, and see more ads and, and the like. [00:16:00] So I, there’s, there certainly have to be steps, measures that business leaders can take informed by their public relations and communications professionals.

But at this point, I’m not sure what they are. I think authenticity is vital. You’ll hear authenticity is a theme in several of the reports coming up today. And I think that candor is, is important. I think those, those collaborative efforts, those partnerships that you referenced are going to be important when you can see unity among different groups talking authentically and addressing these issues.

Part of it I think is going to be. Not so much trying to talk people out of their grievance as helping them see that either the grievance is unjustified or is is being addressed one way or [00:17:00] another. I’m not quite sure how you do that, especially when the grievance and is, is especially unjustified.

But you know, we got into this pickle in the first place because of algorithms. I mean, it, it wasn’t like this. I mean, people there, there was a left and a right before algorithms took control of, of social media feeds. But what you saw in those feeds was just the most recent posts from your friends and other people you were connected to.

Now it’s gin up outrage because the algorithm has figured out that outrage is what keeps you glued to the network. So as long as that continues, I don’t know how we’re gonna fix this. And the answer might be part of what we’re going to be discussing later in the episode, which is convincing people to leave the algorithm driven networks and, and go to ones that are more organic, where you can have nice conversations about things you’re interested in with, with people you like [00:18:00] conversing with, and, and not be fed this constant stream of.

Outrage. Yeah. It, it, it, it is a huge a huge picture. And I think the way you started your, your comment earlier was, you know, not sure where this is gonna go. I agree. And I’m thinking one thing that comes across from Edelman’s report in particular was some key actions and Fleischman has similar to calls to action for communicators, for, for instance.

These though require you to realize or to, to believe that this is a winnable. Contest, you can win this. And that’s not, therefore the other guy loses which is the Trump approach to things. I think it, it’s win. You win and there’s gotta be a win everywhere. That’s trying to, to, to, I think, establish it in, in a way that most people are willing to consider that approach.

But the real reality I think is this is so big, it’s global, it’s [00:19:00] everywhere. How do you address it? And therein, I think, becomes part of the challenge is you’ve gotta pick something and do something about it. And that, in my view is a leadership issue, but it probably needs the communicators to to stimulate that in a way that a leader can

Grab hold of and do something with. You mentioned authenticity and, and being authentic. Absolutely key. The transparency of it. But there, to me it’s like you could do something in an organization that really does require first a centralized approach from a government typically to really lead the charge.

And we’re not actually seeing that. I don’t think. So does it mean that you then wait for, for the condition to be right, for that to happen? No, you’ve gotta do some of your own organization, in which case you might see repetitive actions taking place and you, you probably wanna share some of it, but not all of what you’re doing.

But at the bottom line I think is if you are the communicator in a large enterprise, typically then you have to . Take a lead in doing something. [00:20:00] So you know, things like, I mean, you mentioned or repeat to the point I made about collaboration across those different sectors, those four institutions of society.

Sure, absolutely. Partner with the government, NGOs and the media to tackle these things. That’s easier said than done because it would’ve been done by now if it were easy. So equip your own teams for the complexity to literally believe, get everyone to believe this is the new normal. This landscape, this the hostile activism, which, which ranges from, you know sharing misinformation online strongly, but also insulting people, attacking them online.

And as Edelman’s report makes very clear indeed, even physical violence in the, in real life that this is alarming, but this is the landscape not everywhere but in some places. So, you know, what, what we’re discussing may be kind of way beyond someone’s interest or understanding if they’re in in a rural community in Central Africa, for example, compared to being in New York City or in London or in [00:21:00] Paris or somewhere like that.

But the reality is that this is the reality. And you know, I, I kind of tongue in cheek using the, the strap line from the movie everything everywhere, all of the time. But that’s exactly how it is. And that’s a point Fleischman Hillard makes quite strongly. So it’s something that. I think that positions communicators as key players in whatever action you take in the organization is something that really, if you are a communicator, you need to grab that, that opportunity and do something.

Yeah. The problem is that I think that there are underlying issues here that I’m not sure business is in any position to influence greatly mm-hmm . Look at the issue of violence in politics. I have read several reports that there are, there is a growing number of people who believe that violence is justified in political causes in the us.

So I, what does business do about that? And [00:22:00] it is my personal belief, and this is based on, seriously, a tremendous amount of, of study. I’ve, I’ve read many, many books and, and listened to a lot of lectures and tried to absorb both sides on this issue. But I think the underlying cause of, of the vast majority of this grievance and, and the ubiquitous malignancy is in the caste system and institutionalized racism.

The remedy for that has been DEI initiatives and we have an administration now that is doing all it can to erase those. You see attacks on leaders. Some have already been fired in the US government claiming that they’re DEI hires. All that means is that they’re not white men. It doesn’t mean that they’re not qualified.

It’s just code for, we want white men in these positions. What does business do beyond. Maintain their DEI [00:23:00] efforts, and many are not, many are, are rolling over because they have government contracts or they just wanna stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs as his retribution tour gets underway.

So I I, I wanna think that there are ways that business can deal with this. I imagine that there will be, a lot of creativity employed. I know that there are people out there like Kim Clark holding weekly calls about what we can do to address this. She’s focused specifically on DEI. But the big picture is that this is something I think that we have to get through, do what we can to improve things and, and to address it and to ensure that our stakeholders feel comfortable with us so that we can continue to do business.

But the idea that we can fix this I, I think that’s a bigger thing than Yeah. That what PR people can do and what business can do. We can contribute. Yeah. You know, Edelman’s saying that business isn’t a better position than anybody else [00:24:00] is not a big help, frankly. No. It requires all these elements to be in play as well.

The, the collaborative efforts, et cetera. I think you are right. She, I think I mean, I’m, I’m hopeful that we’ll see pushback more than we’re, we’re seeing some already, but we don’t know the outcome of that yet. I mean, there’s some local I was reading one of the UK newspapers today that there’s an example across the US in various states of state governments not.

Not going to take action according to what Trump’s executive order is on whatever the topic is. How, whether that’s success or not, we don’t know is Trump is he likely to somehow enforce these things? What I do see though, and I hope I’m dreadfully wrong here, is, is a severe dark age approaching in the United States that will have amplification everywhere.

And I think it might be longer than four years, assuming he, he gets he doesn’t get elected. He can’t actually, can he, he can only run to two times. Well, there’s a, there’s a measure that has been introduced in the house. Yeah, I read that would give him a third term. So, yep. But it reminds me of [00:25:00] a, a, a, a headline in The Guardian the other day with an excellent illustration.

Talking about it was an opinion piece showed Trump sitting on a, on a throne with a crown, and it showed this is caricatures really of the three tech bros. Yeah, Zuckerberg Bezos and Musk groveling at his feet. Basically it said something, this is where the dark age comment of mind comes, comes into that Trump is the emperor.

He behaving like an emperor and he sees himself outside the law. And history shows us that when an empress does that, the acolytes also see themselves outside the law. So and the comment was made which I thought was very apt that George Washington would, would understand all this ’cause this is what he wanted to get away from.

And establishing the United States in the revolution that took place. It wasn’t about tea at all. It was about getting rid of this kind of thing. And guess what? You got a modern day emperor in the making. And most people, I think, might think that’s a crazy [00:26:00] thing to say, but. Don’t do that. Pay attention to what’s happening in that regard, because it looks, that’s what it looks like show.

It’s absolutely what it looks like. And you talked about pushback, and I’m not quite sure how we’re gonna go about that effectively. One thing we know, we’ve talked about this on the show before, is that citing facts and statistics doesn’t sway people. No. I’m thinking just for example during the Charlottesville march back during Trump’s first term what they were all shouting was, Jews will not replace us.

Well, Jews represent 0.02% of the world population. 40% of all of the Jews in the world live in Israel. Sorry, we’re not replacing anybody , but citing those facts is not going to sway these people from their views of replacement theory, which is, you know, just one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.

But. They believe it. And, you know, you cite your data, [00:27:00] they’re gonna say, I have my facts. So, so how do you persuade? Maybe you chain them to a chair and make them work with debunk bot. But yeah, it’s no good. It’s, yeah, I, it’s, I think business has limited opportunities here. They should, they should focus on what they’re doing internally.

For the most part, I think, yeah, that makes, that would make sense. You have to do something and it, it doesn’t mean blindly do something. Think about what we said on the calls to action. For instance, what communicators could do. Things like equipping teams for complexity. Have people understand this is the new normal perhaps, and, or, or even if it’s not, but have the discussion and make some plans accordingly.

So you can align some of the things you do and reinforce these messaging. Align with core values. I mean, these are all things that are communication focused that are part of the skillset communicators should have and, and it can now exercise. So that’s, that would be a good place to be. I also think a, a shift to stakeholder [00:28:00] capitalism would be very helpful.

And this is an attitude that a business adopts. It, we, we, we heard it articulated first when the US Business Roundtable said, we’re no longer gonna focus solely on shareholders. But all stakeholders that has evolved into this concept of stakeholder capitalism. It’s still capitalism. It’s still about making money.

It’s just making sure that that money is fairly distributed and that the issues and concerns of all of your stakeholders are factored into the decisions that you make, not just the shareholders. Makes and I think makes sense. That could have some sort of impact on, on grievance although not the key grievance that that has led us to where we are so well.

Let’s talk about artificial intelligence , because it’s, it’s, it’s been grim up to this point. Neville . Yeah. There, there’s been some reporting over the last couple of weeks that that’s worth a quick rundown. Some, some some new [00:29:00] research and, and developments notably around agents and brands. But let me, let me cover a couple of other things first starting with how AI characterizes brands and there is research that finds that AI search platforms portray brands differently.

So perplexity. Tends to emphasize a brand’s positive attributes when somebody queries it about a brand or when a query produces results that include a brand. But Anthropics clawed will tend to bring up past controversies that the brand experienced. Now, this variability is significant. It means the way a brand is described depends on the AI platform that that people are using.

And that adds a layer of complexity to brand management For communicators, this is underscoring the importance of monitoring how AI platforms talk about your brand, position, [00:30:00] your brand, and take proactive steps to shape that narrative by making sure that your messaging is, is consistent and transparent.

Next we have Meta’s end to fact checking. In the US and reliance on community notes has AI related implications that we really haven’t spent a lot of time talking about. Meta’s change of heart is part of a larger convergence of technological advancement, political change, and those evolving media dynamics that we talked about a couple episodes back this is according to a site I found called TV News Check.

I had never heard of it, but it’s got some really interesting content on it. This shift signals a fundamental change in how social media platforms approach truth. For instance, a study by copy leaks found that there was an 8362% increase in AI generated content on the net from November of 2022 to March of 2024.

That’s almost an [00:31:00] 8500% increase in a year and a half. Now, imagine how that’s going to affect the ability to maintain online information integrity with meta doing away with its content moderation. A lot of this AI generated malicious slop is going to be shared on Facebook, and as AI generated content continues to proliferate across the net, we’ll probably say, see information availability, overshadow information quality as we move from paying attention to journalists.

To news, flu news, flus, who’s going to maintain accuracy amid all that slop? But let’s talk about agents. As we mentioned at the top of the show, OpenAI has introduced its first agents. They’re limited in capability. They can’t do anything malicious, but they’re the first shot out of the gate.

And it’s one of the most exciting developments in Gen AI is the rise of agents that can perform tasks on behalf of consumers. Book [00:32:00] flights, order meals, manage your calendar. But what does this mean for brands? For one, AI agents provide an opportunity to streamline and personalize the consumer experience.

When a user asks their AI agent for recommendations, whether it’s for restaurants, hotels, products, the agent pulls from the information available online to make suggestions that puts the onus on brands to ensure that their digital presence is optimized for AI interactions. If your product isn’t well represented in well in ai, searchable databases or reviews, you risk being overlooked.

Brands can enhance these experiences by creating AI friendly content. For example, structured data on your website can help AI agents better understand and recommend your offerings. If a consumer asks an agent for a family friendly hotel near the beach, a brand with properly tagged data about location, amenities and reviews is far more likely to get that recommendation.[00:33:00]

Another strategy is to partner with platforms integrating AI agents. Imagine an airline developing seamless integrations where an AI agent can book flights, select seats, and notify travelers about upgrades in the brand’s voice. Think about a retail brand enabling AI agents to handle returns, answer product questions, and suggest complimentary items based on purchase history.

The real opportunity lies in how brands humanize these interactions. AI agents shouldn’t just execute transactions. They should reflect the brand’s personality. For example, a luxury brand’s AI interactions might emphasize exclusivity and elegance. While a family-oriented brand might focus on warmth and ease of use, these nuanced touches can turn mundane AI-driven interactions into memorable brand experiences.

Finally, brands have to consider accessibility. Agents should enhance, not limit how diverse audiences interact with your brand. [00:34:00] So ensuring your product descriptions and services are available in multiple languages can help AI agents provide more inclusive results. Moving along from agents. Let’s talk about proactive pr.

With platforms like OpenAI and Google analyzing millions of data points to surface trending topics, brands need to be quick on their feet. Reactive PR is not adequate. Communicators can use AI tools to monitor these trends in real time, allowing brand brands to engage in relevant conversations as they unfold.

I have set up a couple of chat GPT tasks that alert me to things that are happening that I’m not finding through the other tools that I have that might incline me to want to get some proactive messaging out. An example might be if a trending topic aligns with your brand’s mission or values, you can craft timely, authentic messaging to join that conversation.

That’s not only keeps your brand visible, but also positions [00:35:00] it as responsive and in touch with the world around it. And finally, brands are tapping into Gen AI to foster creativity and engagement campaigns where consumers use AI to design products or create unique artworks are becoming increasingly popular.

For instance, fashion brands have used generative AI to allow customers to co-create designs, making them feel more personally invested in the brand. This kind of collaboration not only produces highly personalized content, but also deepens the emotional connection between the brand and its audience.

It’s really a win-win. Consumers get a unique experience. Brands gained advocates who are excited to share their creations with their networks. So lots of opportunities for brands emerging in the AI space that, that it really goes beyond having it write content and create images. Yeah, absolutely. It, it got me thinking, listening to what you were saying, particularly about open AI’s operator the the agent they’ve built, and [00:36:00] also this last bit you talked about reactive PR and so forth that, when we talk about the state of pr, and we’ve got a report coming up on that, actually the state of, of AI in pr. It’s still largely focused on the how many since the last time and, and what they’re doing by percentages. And what we’re gonna talk about in a bit is not much different than that, or we’ve got some better views on it.

This though is the sec next level. That we need to be paying close attention to. And it’s easier to do that because now everyone, I mean this is very loosely talking here. Of course, everyone has acquired the knowledge. They’re up to speed on those basics. Now, how many people are using ai? Yeah, I get it.

To write this, I get to review this or summarize that report or whatever. This is now what we need to be paying attention to. And that article you shared for what you were saying from search engine land has a really simple but very clear kind of explainer at the end, knowing when to leverage reactive PR versus proactive pr where [00:37:00] AI plays a significant role.

And this, when, when you read this, you’ll think, oh yeah, that makes sense. But first time I’ve seen this. All together. This way it’s well done. So reactive pr, the example they’re giving is capitalizing on breaking news. So there’s something happening that outside your control, you didn’t instigate it.

Here’s things you can do. Yes, Jackie and proactive, aligning with cyclical news. I mean, these are terrific examples. So, you know, good for you search engine. Putting that post together, it’s really, really useful. I, I think the exciting one though, to me is, is indeed this so open AI agent, the operator and what they, how they explain it in the in the introduction page on their website.

Is exactly what you were saying at the very start of this, of this segment examples of what they could do. So you know, it, it is like, you know, the, they’ll, you’ll give it the, the task, you’ll prompt it. I mean, this is putting it in real simple terms and off it will go to, to fulfill your task and then come back to you.

But then there’s much more it’ll do. It’ll [00:38:00] ask you question that you haven’t prompted. It would even be able to do multitasking whilst it’s doing these things unprompted. So that’s handy. And especially things, the example they give is dead simple. But you know, it’s the way they explained it to open eyes, similar to using multiple tabs in a browser.

So you are, you are having the operators doing multiple tasks simultaneously by creating new conversations. So the example they give whilst it’s making a booking for a holiday on a holiday website, it’s also ordering a personalized enamel mug on Etsy, like the, like the FIR podcast mug. We had, we had those back in the day, didn’t we?

We, we did. Not on Etsy. Not on Etsy. Mind you, no. So these are really good, and it reminds me, again, experience back at IBM with IBM Watson. What they were talking about is this. Except they were linking it to business productivity tools, like equipment of Outlook, for instance. Not just the email, but everything, the calendar, the contact list, and all that, that would manage [00:39:00] your agenda for you, manage your business life for you, meetings and, and accepting requests, all that kind of stuff.

And it’ll do all that, right? Eventually you’ll have an agent that will do all that for you. But this, the way they described this is wider and probably far more exciting to, to a general audience. It’s not just business here. And this is fantastic. So this is where we need to be. I think in, in our journey of, of knowledge of what’s possible with artificial intelligence.

And it’s generally talking, it’s about generative artificial intelligence, but not exclusively in a business sense, and for brands specifically, which is the focus of this conversation. So this is really good. Yeah, IBM had an intranet years and years ago. We talked about it on the show, but I bet it was toward the beginning of our, our work together.

It had a homepage that had a module that would look at your calendar identify what was coming up, and then provide you with resources to [00:40:00] help you with. So if you were doing an interview, it would link you to the interview guide and, and the talent acquisition guide. If you were doing a performance review, it would link you to appropriate resources for that.

You know, I, I work with somebody, I was telling about this and she said, that’s the dream is, is that the intranet helps me through my day. Yeah. Without making me go look for stuff. It knows what I’m doing and, and proactively delivers it. AI agents will do that. Drop dead easy. Yeah. Just set up an agent to do that and house it in a module on the homepage of the intranet so that it is targeted to each individual employee through active directory or what have you.

And, and it’s done. So I, I think that’s coming.

Okay.[00:41:00]

In terms of proactive pr, what strikes me about this concept is, is that there’s nothing new to it. You talked about what’s happening in the news. David Meerman Scott, how long ago did he write the book on Newsjacking? Yeah. It was real popular for a while, but I don’t see much of it anymore. Then we did a report years ago.

This was, I think it was a tequila brand that on Instagram, shared a picture of the tequila bottle and a couple of glasses and some . Coffee beans. And it’s because coffee bean martinis were trending on Google . They saw that in the Google Trends report that you can go look at anytime you want. And they said, wow, look at everybody talking about, let’s jump into this conversation.

So these ideas are not new, but they haven’t been broadly embraced. We continue to lean on the old practices of public relations, which is reacting to something that has happened so that we can [00:42:00] fix it. And that’s gotta change. I, I mean, we can’t stop reacting if something happens. We have to address it.

But we have to balance that with, with proactive pr that helps get our messages across. Yeah. And move the needle, or maybe even move the Overton window if we should be so lucky. Right. I think as more people do this, more knowledge will disseminate and we’ll see an uptick in this, I hope. But this is really interesting stuff, I have to say, Cheryl really is.

So, on that point let’s talk about that survey I mentioned that research about what what’s happening with AI and pr. That is a a survey report from Muck Rec that’s just come out. So this I found quite interesting when I was looking into this about how we’re gonna talk about this, because I thought, okay, let’s just look at some linking here.

So there’s no doubt that developments and AI are moving at quite a pace. I think we agree on that. I said those words back in March, 2023, nearly two years ago in [00:43:00] a blog post about AI and pr I wrote. While hype is at its peak, the time is now for learning more about ai, experimenting with it yourself and discovering how it can be of distinct value to you and your work and in your leisure.

With learning and experimenting comes the confidence to discard the hype as you glean insights that help you focus on what matters and what actually is important, except in a large part in the PR profession. I said at the time, the survey by the PRCA, that’s the Public Relations Consultants Association and the ICCO, that’s the International Communications Consultancy Organization, revealed that 25% of respondents categorically stated they would never use AI tools like chat GPT in their work.

I mean, that’s. That’s come back to haunt him. I tell you, thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. According to Muck Rec’s latest report on the state of AI and PR for 2025 published this week, three quarters of PR professionals, 75% are now using tools like chat, GPT and [00:44:00] DE to elevate their work. This is substantial progress, I think, according to MuckRack figures, which showed that this is only 28% in 2023 rising to 64% in 2024.

So we’ve seen a clear progression there. It paints the report, paints a fascinating picture of an industry quickly embracing this technology with 93% of users saying it speeds up their work and 78% claiming it improves quality. What’s especially interesting I is how PR pros are using ai, not just for writing and editing, but for brainstorming research, even strategy development.

Yet as exciting as this adoption is, the report raises questions about how well the industry is managing this shift. Fewer than 40% of PR professionals say their organizations have clear AI use policies and fewer than half provide any training. This means many practitioners are navigating this space with little guidance, relying on their own judgment for ethical use and disclosure.[00:45:00]

The report also highlights risks that can’t be ignored. A top concern the next generation of PR professionals may become too dependent on AI neglecting the core skills that underpin the craft. There’s also fear that clients or leadership might see AI as a shortcut for creativity, undervaluing the unique contributions of human practitioners.

So where does all this leave us? We’ve seen how AI can amplify creativity and efficiency, yet its impact on foundational skills and values remains uncertain. Muck Rack’s report offers a powerful snapshot of where we stand, but also challenges us to think about where we’re headed. How do we strike the right balance between innovation and authenticity, between speeding up processes and preserving the craft?

These are critical questions. How can PR professionals use generative AI to create meaningful outcomes while safeguarding the integrity of their work? What steps can the industry take to support ethical and effective use? Big questions. I [00:46:00] think Cheryl, very big questions and even with the strategic development and brainstorming and other uses to which PR practitioners are putting ai, I still think that we are focused on low hanging fruit and not really digging into some of the potential nor I think are we

Examining how we’re going to be able to use it as the agents become available. Anthropic has a demo version of an agent. It doesn’t actually run on your computer. It runs on a virtual machine so that nothing that goes wrong can infect your computer or affect your security or your privacy. But I gave it a, a, a try.

I went ahead and installed what I needed to install on my computer to run the virtual machine, and I ran the agent and I, I produced a video. It’s on LinkedIn and Facebook and on my YouTube channel. But what I used it for was to identify opportunities [00:47:00] in construction related conferences in 2025 that had open calls for speakers or the calls for speakers.

Were going. To come out during the year where the conferences provided us with an opportunity to showcase our subject matter experts in the market sectors where we operate. So my instructions were really clear. I said, first, go to my company’s website and identify our market sectors and our areas of subject matter expertise.

Then find relevant top tier construction related conferences. And I gave it the instructions about calls for speakers. And I said write a document with a strategy for getting into these conferences and create a spreadsheet that lists the top 10 conference. Its date, the URL for the conference when the call for speaker [00:48:00] deadlines.

And I set it off, and you could see in the left hand column it would explain each step. In fact, what it did was it took a screenshot after it had completed each step of the desktop so it could see what it had done and what it had to do next. But I just sat there with my arms folded, well, not quite, because I occasionally would get a message that said, you have reached your rate limit

And I would have to type, please continue. Or it would say, you have to wait one minute and 30 seconds to get a new rate limit. And I go, okay. And then I’d say, please continue. But other than please continue all I did was sit there with my arms folded and watch it do this as it created a document and a spreadsheet.

You, you start to apply this to other work that we do in PR and communications, and it begins to really seem overwhelming. How, how much of our day-to-day activity is going to be taken [00:49:00] over by a well prompted AI agent. I, I think this report is right though in

advising caution because a lot of this work is work that an intern would do. If, if, if I were in a large enough de department that I have, I, I would have an intern. I would have an intern go out and find the conferences. I would probably spend an hour with an intern first. So they understand what our areas of expertise are and what our market sectors are.

then I would turn them loose and they would probably spend a day and a half. Reading about each conference and you know, noting the dates of the call for speakers and what the requirements were. I don’t need an intern for that anymore. An AI agent will be able to do that in three or four minutes without an intern who learns the entry level ropes to begin their progress up the ladder to becoming a partner or becoming a vice president of communications or a chief [00:50:00] Communication officer.

I think this is a serious problem and not enough attention is being paid to it. Yeah. Because there’s so much excitement about what this can take off our plate that we’re not thinking about how the up and coming people in this industry learn the ropes. There’s just seems to me gonna be fewer and fewer ropes to learn.

Yeah, that’s a very good point to emphasize. We are excited about all this and we are being galloping down the road with excitement and this is falling by the wayside. It seems to me. It also seems to me that we need to address this now because the pace is picking up and the, the new outcomes up.

People who talk about are accelerating in, in, in the frequency and the shortening the time between them all. So now is the time to be looking at this. And it could well be that not just in communication. I think the legal profession and many other professions where that sort of description you made of a career path, let’s say, and knowledge [00:51:00] path an insights path in the organization is is well for most organizations I would say it’s important.

But that is, we expressed it well that we, we relying on something that can perform all those tasks in minutes as opposed to days. And we have choices here. What are we gonna do? We’re gonna do the minutes, aren’t we, not the days. And plus we’ll save money on our budget. So that kind of thing. It, it, it definitely needs to be addressed at an organizational level, I would say.

I think if I were the leader of a public relations agency, I would be convening my top leadership and starting the process of rethinking career paths. And I would be doing that in the client side too. Frankly, we know, especially among millennials and Gen Z, how important career development is to them in the jobs that they choose.

They want a company that is going to pay attention to them take their desires to grow seriously and provide them with not just the opportunities to learn, [00:52:00] but a clear path to get to where they want to go with their managers working with them. With AI taking over a lot of these roles what does that career path look like in a lot of jobs?

I mean, you know, I work in construction, so a lot of construction jobs, frankly, aren’t gonna change that much until we have AI empowered robots that can actually go, you know, do a concrete pour or, you know, build rebar form work or, or what have you. Yeah. But. For a lot of jobs how you get from a college degree to wherever it is you wanna end up in your career is going to look very different.

And this is on top of the fact that anybody who thinks that we’re not going to have significant job loss down the road from this just isn’t paying enough attention to, to what’s actually happening. There are gonna be a lot of people outta work at, at some point, and as a society, we need to figure out what to do about this.

I’ve already heard somebody refer [00:53:00] to it. Oh, we’re just creating a big welfare state. And as a perception problem, the idea of a universal basic income when the machines are generating all the wealth is, is not the same as, as a welfare state. Not suggesting that’s the only solution I. Don’t know, that’s for other people to figure out.

But somebody has to start figuring it out because we’re gonna get there sooner than we’re ready for. So what we can do at the business level is start to think about our employees and how we’re gonna accommodate their desires to grow in their careers. In a world where AI is doing 60, 70, 80% of what that job used to do five years ago,

that Dan York Huh? Go down. So give two minutes. I need a pee. I knew that was coming. . Yeah. I thought I’d last, but I had a di a a Coke zero just before we started. [00:54:00] Best product Coke has ever made. I’ll be right back. Okay. Two minutes.[00:55:00] [00:56:00] [00:57:00] [00:58:00]

It’s a dilemma to me. We’ll talk about that. But first, with the tectonic shifts in the media, is content marketing still as viable a practice as it has been? The content Marketing Institute’s 2025 enterprise content marketing research report finds that while content marketing is thriving, the landscape has become more complex for openers, there’s good news.

The report highlights that 71% of enterprise marketers surveyed believe their organization’s content marketing efforts are either moderately or very successful, which is actually a, a slight increase from last year. But success isn’t without its challenges. One key takeaway from the report is the growing pressure to prove return on investment.

With budgets [00:59:00] tightening in many industries, leadership teams are scrutinizing content marketing investments more than ever. Teams that document their strategies are significantly more likely to succeed at this. The report emphasizes that organizations with clear goals, audience personas, which is important and workflows are better equipped to produce the kind of content that delivers measurable ROI, and they’re able to demonstrate that to those leaders who presumably will then leave their budgets alone.

Just a few weeks into 2025, employee generated content is emerging as a powerful tool, particularly for B2B brands. According to an article in Forbes, tapping into the voices of employees enhances authenticity and extends reach. Employees tend to have their own personal networks of family, friends, and colleagues who trust their recommendations, making their content a valuable asset for brand storytelling.

So if you do a video that features one of your employees, it’s not just gonna get shared through your networks, but through their [01:00:00] networks. Take as an example how a B2B SaaS company might encourage sales reps to share tips on LinkedIn about how they use their company’s software. These posts come across as genuine, relatable, and more credible than corporate promotions.

We also in content marketing need to start thinking about Gen Alpha. Much of today’s content marketing targets are millennials and Gen Z, but Gen Alpha, the kids born from 2010 through this past December 31st. You know that right? Anyone born as of January 1st this year is part of generation beta.

But in terms of Gen Alpha, marketing Brew recently spotlighted how brands like Kids Bop are using platforms like Roblox to connect with the alpha demographic kids. Bop partnered with Game Fam to create an interactive experience within Roblox where could kids could engage with the brand through mini games and music.

This matters because [01:01:00] Gen Alpha represents the future of consumer culture. Not to mention that the oldest of them are already 15 and marketing targets. They’re growing up with digital experiences and their expectations for engagement are through the roof. For brands, this means creating content that’s immersive, interactive, and seamlessly integrated to the platforms where they spend their time.

By the way, immersion is something to consider for internal communications too, and this doesn’t mean people putting on VR headsets necessarily. As Monique Nik would put it, putting employees at the center of the communication process, just like the ROBLOX Initiative, put kids at the center of that experience.

So what should we take away from all this? The content marketing landscape in 2025 is shaped by three big factors. Strategy, authenticity, they’re the word again, and adaptability. So document your strategy. The Content Marketing Institute report makes it clear. Organizations with documented strategies [01:02:00] perform better.

This isn’t just about having a plan, it’s creating a roadmap that aligns content with both business goals and audience needs. Finding that point of connection. We need to leverage employee voices because encouraging employees to become content creators. Is going to extend your reach and deepen audience trust.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s sharing their expertise on LinkedIn or contributing to a company blog and experiment with emerging platforms. Keep an eye on how platforms like Roblox evolve. Even if your brand isn’t targeting Gen Alpha today. Understand these environments in order to prepare yourself for tomorrow’s audiences.

Of course, we’re gonna keep an eye on these trends and share any insights. That will help you stay ahead. But Neville, what do you think got content marketing today? Yeah, I thought you were gonna say, by the way, at the end of that last statement you said you are gonna add so you don’t have to . But we don’t say that we [01:03:00] you do have to.

It’s it’s on you as much as it’s on us. Right? Exactly. Right. Exactly. I, I find it intriguing, to be honest. She, in one, one particular area, which is listening to what you were saying and looking at some of the articles that you were referencing, this is stuff I remember being on kind of discussion agendas two decades ago.

Really but we didn’t call it content marketing back then. So I’m thinking, are we still in the, sorry state where we need to remind people these are the things you gotta do in organizations. Is, is that what it looks like to you? ’cause that’s what it seems like to me. Yes, that’s exactly where we are.

And if you look at a lot of the content that’s coming out of organizations today, it’s clear that people have not necessarily embraced the principles of, of content marketing. And, you know, you have the Content Marketing Institute, which does really excellent work in this space. I don’t think enough organizations pay attention to the learning that, that they share.

Yeah. That, okay, I get that. And, and I, I think that sounds reasonable. I’m [01:04:00] just looking at one of the points made in the content Marketing Institute’s report. Nearly half of enterprise marketers do not have a scalable model for content creation. I find that quite extraordinary, isn’t it? Where they talk about Yeah, really.

I mean, they talk about where is it 33% do. 46% do not, but get this 21%. Don’t know if they do. . Imagine that’s an unknown. Unknown. Yeah. Or a known unknown, I guess. Right? And, and they say we, we have a long way to go still. And I think that’s absolutely right. So the, the lack of, there’s many reasons why they give.

And to be fair, I mean, I, I’m making it sound like they, people are are being really silly, but not paying attention to this. There are many reasons why there are difficulties with this. One of them, which is actually the least occurred to me, folks, lack of data skills and, and talent, even the expertise to do this kind of work.

So you’ve got the wrong people you know, on board or not the right people at all. Difficulty tracking customer journeys. [01:05:00] This is in the measurement area. 66% of people say that. So my comment about, you know, isn’t this what we were talking about two decades ago is, is valid and, and. People aren’t paying attention.

Well, they probably are. But these are newer challenges that are, that are impacting them now. And I think this though is quite significant. Some of these kind of alarm bells I’m seeing written being talked about that are still what they were that time ago, except wearing a new suit of clothes probably.

But there is, it seems there’s a lot of work still to do in this area. A tremendous amount of work. I, I suspect a lot of organizations say they’re doing content marketing, but what they’re really doing is just bad marketing. I saw a conversation that was happening on LinkedIn that Steve Czo was involved with the other day, and he was slamming press releases because they always say, we are excited to announce.

Like, yeah, are you really, are you really excited about announcing this ? And I, I. Said, not everybody does [01:06:00] press releases like that. And I, I said he, he was actually slamming press releases in general. Do they actually do any good anymore? Yeah. And I made the case that there are things that press releases can do for you in addition to satisfying regulatory requirements in some cases.

But, you know, for search engine optimization getting a press release out there, you know that there’s gonna be a hundred publications that fill their space with press releases. And that, you know, because Google rewards currency and frequency having your press release, a new release with new content show up in a hundred different places is gonna boost you in that algorithm of.

But yeah. Are the, are the press releases actually any good? So I, I shared one. I said, here’s real news that we actually wanted to get into the hands of, of people. It was the first building ever in the world to be awarded a certification called a true certification. That means the building was built with zero waste, nothing going to [01:07:00] landfills.

Or incinerators. That’s a big deal. Yeah. And it matters to be known as the first to have done something like that. And, and Steve, when he read the release, he came back and he said, and you weren’t excited about it, . So but that’s not content marketing. That’s, that’s, that’s an SEO practice based on work that we have been doing for a hundred years.

So, you know, content marketing is, is different. And yeah, it, it, it takes work. It, we just did a, a relaunch of, of the, the company’s website, and there was a decision made above my pay grade to the news section was just gonna be news. And I gotta be honest, we don’t have that much in a year, maybe five or six real solid news stories.

And I said, what about all of this stuff that talks about our company culture? And, and you know, because we know that a, a good number of the people who come to our website are, are college students wondering where they’re gonna go do their internship or where they’re gonna apply for a job? [01:08:00] And culture matters.

And they said, well, not in the news section. So now we have a blog on the website to handle all of that. So that’s a bit of content marketing, but yeah, it’s, it’s more complicated and it takes work that it seems to me a lot of leaders and organizations aren’t willing to fund. Yeah, in fact, I’m looking at a chart on the the content marketing website in this report, why strategy isn’t effect as effective as it could be.

And this is where it comes down to your point earlier, it’s not bad content, it’s just not, not good marketing generally. ’cause these apply no matter what. Lack of clear goals is the number one reason why strategies aren’t effective. Lack of clear goals not data driven. That’s a modern event.

I’d say not tied to a customer journey. Ineffective research. I mean, this is. I’ve seen all of this as you would’ve done on anything, everything apart from content marketing or including content, it, it is everywhere. that word again, everywhere. So all at once. All at [01:09:00] once. Yeah. It’s unrealistic.

Expectations is a great one. And, and to your point, you’ve the very beginning, poor content quality, that’s the least reason, but that’s on the list. Poor con content quality. So there’s work to be done without a doubt.

Let’s talk about Facebook and Instagram threats, the meta social properties that we touched on earlier. And this is the dilemma that I mentioned. I call it the fence sitting dilemma. Quit or not in light of events recently particularly Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement a few weeks ago now on the killing off of moderation on all the platforms and the, the storm of opinions and, and comments that have resulted consequently link it to Trump’s inauguration and the moves by as I’m getting to learn the terminology now, shell, the tech, the Silicon Valley bros.

And what they’re all doing with all [01:10:00] of this and the, a fear, uncertainty, and doubt everywhere. So I’ve been using this as the example I suppose to illustrate my own dilemma on this. Which is a is a big deal for me. I have to say that I then discovered also for lots of other people. So this dilemma surrounding META’S platforms that I mentioned, has reached a turning point for many people.

Mark Zuckerberg’s announced of a significant polish shift on concept moderation, among other things, has cast an even brighter spotlight on the ethical challenges of engaging with these platforms. It’s a question I’ve wrestled with and judging by the responses to my recent posts. I’m not alone. In a recent blog post, I reflected on my own journey with meta platforms, and I said I’ve enjoyed using threads, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook to connect with others.

But recent revelations have forced me to question whether these platforms align with my values. I did this in 2023, about x formerly Twitter, which I joined in 2006, soon after Twitter’s founding, ultimately issuing posting on that [01:11:00] platform. But stepping away from meta, as I have discovered, is proving far more complex.

I wrote on threads and in a post to friends on Facebook just a few days ago, I said this, I’m still on the fence about deleting Facebook, Instagram, and threads. Spending less time on them is one thing, but it’s proving far more difficult than I imagined letting them go. Especially Facebook, where I have cousins and other family members there as the one place online to connect, as well as a large number of private groups.

How does this fence sitting fit with my values that I’ve talked about? This is a real dilemma. I said, well, that post signif generates significant discussion on Facebook reflecting the complexity of this issue, and people shared what they thought about this. One friend shared their decisive action.

He said, I have made the decision to leave, deleted most of my content already to have no traces there. I read about people who have Trump and Vance as friends without adding them, and when they removed them, they were added again. Also, read [01:12:00] about content algorithm changes in a way that they see Republican stuff and content they’re not interested in others.

However, pointed to the tension between ethics and practicality, a balancing act that resonates deeply. One said we all have to balance personal ethics with reality On a daily basis, Zuckerberg and others have chosen to dance with the devil because otherwise the devil will burn them. But you are in a unique position to do something about it.

Neville, you have considerable personal influence in some very influential context. Together, you could stay within this broken system and influence a change. We need. The idea of leading change from within is quite a compelling one, but so is the argument for stepping away entirely. A different commenter drew from their experience of leaving X.

I’m also on the fence, but I recall how everyone urged me to stay on Twitter. When I chose to leave after Musk took over initially, almost none of my contacts moved. Now they’ve all followed if family and friends aren’t willing to make a little effort to stay in touch, it really makes you question the value of those relationships.

That’s one [01:13:00] perspective. For others, the middle ground gradual disengagement feels like the best path. Said one, slowly backing away is probably the best thing anyway for your own wellbeing. Spend less time and slowly back away. At a certain point, the right path will make itself known. I did like that sentence there, like some something down, coming down from the heavens perhaps.

And then there’s the stark truth about the digital landscape as a whole. According to one friend, think the owner of your internet provider are charming, progressive people. Your modem. It’s like Twitter before Musk. It was in large part owned by Saudi oil. Barretts. Terrible, terrible people, but at least they kept their mouth shut and hands off.

That’s one perspective. So the decision to stay or leave with leave meta platforms is not just a practical one. It’s a profoundly personal and ethical choice. For many, Facebook remains the only online space to connect with family and friends or participate in private groups. For others, stepping away is a statement of principle, a way to reclaim a sense [01:14:00] of alignment with their values.

But is there a middle path? Can those of us who abhor the direction meta is heading, remain engaged while advocating for change from within? Or does our departure speak louder than our presence ever could? These questions have no easy answers, but the discussion they spark reminds us that our choices matter, not just for ourselves, but for the kind of digital world we hope to create.

So I’m still sitting on the fence. Shell, even though this is this and, and a lot of other things have, you’ve given me a lot of help in thinking this through in a way that helps me come to a conclusion and I think there are. Some choices that may not seem apparent to many, which is there isn’t anywhere else like Facebook, a centralized walled garden controlled by a corporation.

There isn’t anywhere like that else, the same, the same way. But there are places that don’t have any of that controlling freakery behind it, or it doesn’t have algorithms that influence everything and [01:15:00] interfere with what you wanna do, could be mastered on. That could be a place for niche networks that are all independent yet connected.

And that’s a top big topic to explore. That’s not for now to explore, but I’m throwing that possibility into the ring requires I think a, a, a shift in thinking from others who might be interested, but realize there’s not a kind of like a ready set place they can go to and just chat. There’s stuff they need to do.

I suspect. In any case, I’m still on the fence. I’m thinking more about this. I wanna thank all my friends who contributed. And by the way, I’ve not named anyone ’cause that was a private post on Facebook. It wasn’t public, but they’re great. And there’s a, there’s others I haven’t mentioned, but thanks to everyone because it’s been very, very helpful.

So what are your thoughts, Cheryl? Well, I’m not on the fence. I’ve made my decision before I, I get to that though. I, I think it’s worth noting that at the inauguration of President Trump, which was moved indoors reportedly because of the weather, although there have been outdoor inaugurations [01:16:00] in colder weather in, in the past governor Greg Abbott of Texas, and governor Rick

I’m sorry. That guy, I’ve got that wrong. I’ve gotta make a time note. Okay.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, were in an overflow room watching on a screen while up there with Trump. In the room where it was happening were Jeff Bezos, mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. So you can see where the power dynamic is shifting, and if America is sliding into an oligarchy, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk are among the oligarchs that are at the peak of that hierarchy.

And it is not just meta, it is the Yeah. World of big tech. And it’s hard for new players to get in there because they don’t have the resources, especially in the world of ai. They don’t have the resources of a Google [01:17:00] or, or an open AI to build the models that cost billions of dollars to do, so what you see is that the networks that we participate in are now being controlled by America’s oligarchs, and that’s troubling.

Yep. That said. Facebook has 3 billion people as its monthly average monthly users I think it’s 650 million on X. It’s easier to leave X because everyone I engage with is not there and never was. Y did people initially go to Facebook. They went to Facebook because remember, Facebook came along as blogging was big, but blogging required effort, right?

You had to know how to set one up. Mm-hmm. You had to pay a fee for the use of server space and for the, the blogging utility, the stuff wasn’t free. There was a commitment to it. And if I just wanted someplace where I [01:18:00] wanted to go, say something when it occurred to me, or share a picture of my cat or what have you I wasn’t gonna go to that amount of trouble with a blog.

But when Facebook came along. Wow, it’s free and all I have to do is go to this text field and share what I wanna share and I’m done. So that’s what led a lot of people to embrace Facebook and led to 3 billion people using it at least once a month. There is no country that has 3 billion people. It is bigger than any country out there.

And this is why I am able to find cousins that I haven’t talked to in 20 years. In fact the husband of a cousin saw me post that I was going to a concert in Las Vegas, and he wrote, you know, I live in Las Vegas. So we got together with my cousin Elise and her husband Terrence, whom I haven’t seen in, in decades.

This is what Facebook enables because of its sheer size. [01:19:00] And I think there is a legitimate point to one of those comments that you shared about how serious are your family connections about staying in touch. Yeah. But second cousins, it, it’s not routine for those people to stay in touch anyway.

Facebook has enabled connections that we typically lost in life before that. Also, people I went to high school with that I haven’t talked to since then, discovering each other on, on Facebook. There were also the groups but I’ll tell you what I, what really nailed my decision that I’m, I’m not going to leave.

Facebook is the Meta Quest the VR headset that I use for exercise. I saw in the Supernatural Community, supernatural is the name of the workout app that I use, and there’s about 20,000 people in the community on Facebook. Somebody said what other headsets use allow you to use Supernatural?

’cause I wanna leave Meta and that means dumping my Meta [01:20:00] Quest. And the answer is, dude, meta owns Supernatural. It’s their product. The only place you can get it is on the Quest. There’s also not a comparable headset at the price point for the Meta Quest. So you, you look at all of this, the groups, the pages the connections with people that you would lose, and they’re not all gonna go to Blue Sky and deal with that.

You know, what I compare it to is. You have Zuckerberg who has turned to the dark side. Well, the United States is, is now being led by Donald Trump. I’m not leaving that either. I’m not sitting on the fence about whether I’m gonna leave the United States. It’s my home. I’m gonna stay here and I’m gonna fight for what I believe is right in this country.

And I’ve made the decision that Facebook is like that. I’m gonna stay there and fight for what I think is right there. Yeah. And I mean, not lose lose everything I get out of it. I totally hear you. And, and I think this is where it does come down to, you know, each person’s circumstance are, are unique to [01:21:00] that person.

I don’t have that infrastructure. . To, to regret if I didn’t have it. Yes, I’ve got cousins I’m in touch with. But I don’t have, to my knowledge, second cousins, I’ve not seen for 30 years that I will find ’em on Facebook. No. So if, if I had, if I decided to quit entirely, that wouldn’t be such a consequential, momentous decision to have to balance.

I know for instance that most of, most of family members that I, I I connect with, I could connect elsewhere a bit of effort, but I, I could I think though that to some people and a couple of comments that I didn’t mention now I think about it, talked very strongly about that the values area, they’re not prepared to compromise those values.

Being, being part of something. They abhor Totally. They are leaving and they, they the fact they’re gone. So I, I get that. So I’m still sitting on the fence. In terms of. Leave or stay. And if I stay in, what form do I stay? In fact, I joined Facebook in, I think [01:22:00] it was June or April 20th, 2007. I blamed Philip Young.

He invited me, , he told me about it. It’s his fault. So Philip, it’s your fault, . So but you know, the, the climate, the environment back then was totally different. You mentioned you know, it was the dawn of blogging and this was easy ’cause you have to pay. There was actually MySpace at the time I had a MySpace account, and that actually got me thinking that was complicated compared to Facebook.

And you are, you are absolutely right. Facebook. You open an account and immediately you can, you do stuff, you search and boom, there’s 15 of your friends already. More than likely, more often than not, it started out as a useful thing. And I think that was the appeal to a lot of people too. This is exuberance of this.

At the time when all these smart kids in Silicon Valley were doing stuff, all this stuff was coming up and it was a very American product, but it caught on here in the UK very rapidly and indeed across most of Europe as well. So there’s that. And as you said, 3 billion. Yep. There’s a lot. The, the alternatives are not apparent at all.

What they are. And there’s no universal [01:23:00] that like everyone’s gonna migrate over there. No, that doesn’t exist. That kind of place. And you’re right, blue sky. I’ve had this conversation with a number of people examining places like that. They’re not comparable to Facebook, they don’t have private groups, they don’t have, you know, a marketplace that you can sell stuff and buy stuff the way that you can on Facebook.

When we moved here to Somerset, before that, boy was I the heaviest user of Facebook marketplace. Very useful. So there’s that kind of selfish reason perhaps that I get a great deal of personal value outta being there. So should I stay? The, the values thing though is is a, is a big thing for, for most people.

It’s, it’s not that it’s not a big thing for me, it’s not the biggest thing. ’cause one recurring thought I’m having. As it related to that comment, who said stay and you can try and affect change from inside it is that why should I change my whole social environment because of one man who happens to be the man who owns the damn place, but his behavior [01:24:00] should not directly.

Affect my own decisions and therefore my home behavior. That’s part of my thinking. But it’s like you, it’s an interesting analogy where you talk about you, you are in the US and you’re not gonna lead just because Donald Trump got elected. That’s I would argue that’s a wholly different circumstance, a wholly different situation.

We don’t have that here. Not yet anyway. So this is still a dilemma for me, and I’ve not made my mind totally yet. I have to say though, I’m leaning more towards not exiting. There’s other things I might do, but I’ve listened to what people are saying. So I’ve set myself a, a, a deadline at the end of January, which is what I said in my post back at the beginning of January.

In light of Zuckerberg’s announcement, I’ll give him 30 days to, to show that I should stay. So that’s where I’m at currently. So I got a week to go. and I’m changing my behaviors on Facebook. I, one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed about Facebook, and it’s not a Facebook feature, it’s my own decision feature, is that [01:25:00] I don’t friend anybody from work.

On Facebook. It’s the one place where I don’t, I don’t care if it’s the, my colleague in my department or a guy he’s, he’s an engineer there who’s the only other person in the company I know who’s really into jam bands besides me. And we have great conversations. No, he works at the same company. I don’t want anybody who works at the same company connected with me on Facebook so that I can let it rip, right?

And it is the place where I am sharing my political perspectives that I don’t share on other social networks. Although I have started talking about DEI from a business perspective on, on LinkedIn, but on in, you know, in terms of how I feel about Trump or you know, what have you. That’s what I do on Facebook, but I’m going to be using it less.

Yeah, I’m gonna continue to use it for the groups that I’m in where I have tremendous value. I have virtually ended my use of Instagram. The only thing I check there is my daughter’s stories, because I. I need a way to stay in touch with [01:26:00] my daughter . And the way you do that with, you know, the kids these days is online.

I kid, she’s in her thirties, but but yeah, still I, if, if I wanna see pictures of my granddaughter, they’re gonna be in her, her stories. So that’s how I see them. But I’m not sharing anything there, and I’m not commenting or liking anybody else’s posts or looking through photos. And in fact, as you’ll hear in a minute, there’s, there’s a new alternative on the horizon that I think is probably gonna do pretty well.

Yeah. But I’m just, I’m just gonna dial it way back. I’m gonna use it for what I use it for. And yeah, that’s the future of Facebook and me. Yeah, I, I, I’m thinking about behavior change and what I’ve done at the moment is downloaded all my content from all meta properties which I do about once a year.

I hadn’t done Facebook for a while. They’ve got all that. I’ve got all my Instagram pictures. I’m probably not gonna share them anywhere. At least for the foreseeable future, they’re sitting on a, on a solid state drive that’s not connected to anything. They’re all there in little archive. And I’m [01:27:00] okay with that.

There’s still, I haven’t deleted them from any way yet. I might or might not do that. So I, I don’t get much value out of Instagram, actually. I’ve got more weird people following me than, than I know what to do with most of them, you know scantily dressed, busty young women. And where I, where they come from, I have no idea.

So, so it has little value. Threads is new, but I’ve already dialed back on threads mainly because there, there’s, there’s stuff about I’m, I’m not liking anymore, I have to say. And so Blue Sky is my, my preference, but that’s not a com, that’s not an alternative to Facebook at all. I don’t see it that way other than the messaging and, and that I never used Messenger, by the way, for years I’ve not used Messenger.

So Facebook suffers from the consequences, I think, and perception of the various scandals they’ve been involved with in recently years. Notably Cambridge Analytica. They’ve lost trust, certainly and Messenger featured large in one. That’s why I stopped using me. That must be six, seven years ago now, whatever it was.

I can’t remember. So. We’ve got, [01:28:00] we have, I think, parallel views that don’t diverge really. I’m not disagreeing with you about the family and therefore that’s why I’m staying. Not at all. I recognize that’s important and it’s important to me too, but maybe not to the same extent as you. And it’s certainly a smaller group that I’m connected with.

But the dilemma for me is real in terms of this has been a large part of my online experience for. Nearly 20 years and to suddenly stop it is, is the thing, what am I gonna do? My God, all these cat videos. I love watching the, the real scrolling that I do late at night sometimes just catching up with weird stuff going on in the world.

I’ll switch to TikTok for that. Yeah. I get immense pleasure with that. I’ve been on TI don’t like TikTok at all. Truly. I don’t, it’s not my, my scene, it’s not a generational thing. I just don’t like it. Lot too many weird people there. I didn’t want all that kind of stuff. That’s my perception anyway. But there are other things.

Pixel fed, I started up as a potential alternative to Instagram. There’s well you’re gonna talk about in my know, but I mean, there’s other [01:29:00] alternatives are emerging. I’ve still got a flicker account for God’s sake, you know, from 2004. Yeah. And that I’ve not been to, gosh, I’ve not logged in for about five years, so I hope you’re still there.

I don’t even know who owns that anymore, but, so we’re at a, not a crossroads exactly, but we’re at a kind of a, a square with many avenues to go down as to what happens. And judging by the comments that I got to my post 38 or so others are, are, are, are dealing with a similar dilemma. Well, especially those who are looking to flee X more than they’re trying to flee Facebook.

Although certainly people looking to get out of Facebook, you know, people are finding themselves drawn to Blue Sky. Now, of course, we’ve talked about Blue Sky before, but it, it continues to exceed expectations. It’s started attracting the A-listers who were mostly using Twitter to share whatever was on their minds.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen Lizzo, Stephen King, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Times, the Washington Post, a slew of politicians, notably from New York and Pennsylvania, [01:30:00] the Pennsylvania Supreme Court number of National Basketball Association teams, sports journalists. The list just keeps growing.

It’s become common. Just to add, add to that, we, we’ve seen significant numbers of, of people in continental Europe and European Union countries, quitting governments, police forces academic institutions. One case, I think it was Austria, might not be Austria, one European 60 academic institutions quit.

We’ve seen we’ve seen others in in the in public sector organizations across the continent, quitting and going, most of ’em gone to Blue Sky right when you, so some, some have added Blue Sky and are staying on Twitter, but their primary channel is moving to blue Sky. So all that it, it’s actually

Global, I would argue. Yeah. And what you’re seeing is a lot of people in the platform that they were using saying, I’m leaving, here’s my blue sky handle. Sure. And that is really motivating a lot of people to head over and set up an account on Blue Sky, whether they’re planning on leaving [01:31:00] Facebook or X or not.

What started as a niche alternative to traditional social networks has become a compelling option for brands looking to escape the increasing chaos and declining trust in platforms owned by increasingly distasteful corporate giants like Elon Musk and Meta. Well, first, let’s address why Blue Sky is drawing attention.

They’re up to over 27 million users and growing. It’s not just a haven for disillusioned Twitter users. It offers something fundamentally different. We’ve talked about the fact that it is a decentralized platform where users have more control over their data, their feeds, and their overall experience.

This decentralization makes it less vulnerable to the whims of a single owner or entity, which has been a major pain point for communicators, navigating X’S unpredictability or meta as controversial policies. One of Blue Sky’s standout features is its approach to custom feeds. Users can create or subscribe to feeds tailored to specific interests or communities, [01:32:00] whether that’s marketing trends, environmental accidents, or activisms or or niche hobbies.

For brands, this opens up new possibilities to connect directly with highly targeted audience and audiences in a way that feels organic instead of intrusive. Imagine creating a custom feed for your brand’s community. Where you curate not just your own content, but relevant posts from thought leaders and influencers in your space.

It’s a way to position your brand as a trusted source of value, not just another voice clamoring for attention. On the surface, blue Sky resembles early Twitter with a focus on text-based posts and a chronological timeline, but it’s what’s happening under the hood that matters. Blue Sky’s at Protocol. We’ve, we’ve talked about it short for authenticated transfer gives users the ability to own their identities across.

Platforms Now that doesn’t just apply to individual users. Brands can establish a presence that isn’t tied to one specific platform, reducing the risk of being [01:33:00] derailed by a platform’s sudden policy changes or outages. But wait, there’s more. The company has announced the development of Flashes, a photo sharing app that’s being described as a direct competitor to Instagram, which is of course owned by Meta.

This move is a clear bid to attract users and brands who are fed up with meta’s recent decisions to roll back content, moderation. Flashes will focus on visual storytelling, allowing users to post up to four images or short form videos. Why will people embrace flashes? Because they’re already on blue sky and enamored of it, and it’s connected.

Now of course, blue sky isn’t without challenges, it’s rapid growth, partly fueled by high profile. Twitter quitters has led to a significant increase in moderation demands. Reports of harmful content, surged 17 fold in 2024 alone, prompting concerns about whether the platform can scale its governance responsibly.

The company has just 20 full-time employees [01:34:00] and about a hundred contractors serving as content moderators. So this is a critical consideration when venturing into new social spaces. But Blue Sky seems committed to improving its moderation, tools and policies, and community driven. Its community driven approach gives hope that these issues can be addressed collaboratively.

We’ll see. So what should communicators do as they consider Blue Sky? First, don’t dismiss it as just another Twitter clone. Its foundational values of decentralization and user control resonate with a growing segment of your stakeholders who are tired of being at the mercy of algorithms and corporate agendas.

Experimentation is key here. Start by securing your, your brand’s handle and exploring the BLA of the platform’s. Unique features like custom feeds, test the waters with content that aligns with blue sky’s ethos, authentic, conversational, and community focused. Engage with users who are passionate about the same causes or industries that your brand represents and keep an eye on flashes.

[01:35:00] With Instagram becoming increasingly contentious, a fresh, decentralized approach to photo and video sharing could be exactly what brands and users alike have been waiting for. It’s not like there aren’t other alternatives. You mentioned pixel Fed Neville but people who’ve already found a home on Blue Sky, as I say, may be more inclined to opt for flashes.

Frankly, blue Sky’s giving us a much needed opportunity to rethink how we connect with audiences and how we tell our stories in this new media world. Hmm. It, it’s true. And, and whilst I was listening to you talking there, I just looked up on the use account website on Blue Sky. It’s just under 30 million as we speak today.

And so up 3 million from when I grabbed the number, right. So it is actually 29,000,406 2,400, and, and the counter is going up, but as fact at the bottom it says increasing by 2.6 users per second. So it’ll probably hit 30 million in that case by before the end of the weekend. I’d say so. So it’s [01:36:00] on a roll.

I, I think you know, you and I joined at the time of the private beta before it was even public. And it went public right? You needed an an invite. Right, needed an invite and all that. And it was in the low, I think I was in I, I honestly can’t remember offhand now. But it was like the 5000000th or something.

They were actually 500,000 or something. It was very, very low number. So it’s, it’s appealing and in fact, people coming from X will find familiarity with the look and feel of it’s the interface in many, many respects. But you mentioned moderation and that I think is, is, will become increasingly more important than it would’ve been in light, particularly of Meta’s announcement that they’re ditching it entirely and replacing it with this kind of user note stuff that Musk implemented in Twitter, which is useless everywhere I read about it, they say it’s definitely not worth.

Not worth the pixels that they’re written in. So you know, good luck with that. So, but, but they, blue sky are serious about, I believe they have challenges. You mentioned that you touched on that, and I think a big one of course is how are they gonna [01:37:00] sustain themselves financially with this? Ads have just been announced on threads.

A disappointing move, but hey, you, come on, you, you’re not ever gonna find a social network without ads on a meta platform. Believe that. So that’s coming soon on tests in the US and Japan. No sound from Blue skies, whether about advertising, they have floated ideas about a subscription model. I find that appealing.

So, you know, for myself. If I’m on a place I could trust and feel reasonably confident, I’m not gonna encounter too many weird people, and it would cost me XI, I, I, I’d consider that. So it is an alternative, right? Shell, it really is a, a feasible alternative for X users. I’m not sure about Facebook, if you’re looking for the same experience.

It’s not that, but you might find it a better experience as a place to engage with customers and stakeholders or friends. Yeah. Yeah. As well. As opposed to everything else that you can do on Facebook. I have revised my outlook on Blue Sky. I, I think right now it [01:38:00] is the place to be. There are reasons that people are not going.

I mean, threads was seen as one of the great alternatives to X, but now because it’s a, a meta property and right subject to those same content moderation. Guidelines that Zuckerberg has implemented on Facebook. It’s, it’s less appealing and frankly it has deteriorated in my view when I go check the feed over the last month or so.

Whereas Blue Sky is quite engaging and, and welcoming. But yeah, when I see the influx of journalists, I see Jeff Jarvis, for example, is, is posting there all the time now I I, I saw a post there last night during the Senate confirmation vote on Pete Hegseth as, as secretary of Defense from Senator Elizabeth Warren on Blue Sky.

So it, it is gradually e evolving as the place for [01:39:00] thought leaders, opinion leaders, influencers to be sharing their views. That’s what made. Twitter compelling, even if Twitter never got to a billion users before Musk’s acquisition. It’s what was quoted in mainstream media when somebody there said something a government leader or a business leader and that is, is is slowly shifting to blue sky.

Yeah. It’s, it’s picking up, I think the days of watching and waiting are, are over the time to establish presence. I think Twitter has been that, have fulfilled that, and it’s gonna take, I think, something major to suddenly shift that away. But it is gradually, gradually diminishing as the examples I made earlier about organizations moving to Blue Sky, but still keeping Twitter going because people used, seeing them there.

It’ll take something I think quite significant to suddenly shift that, but it will, it will take place, I’m sure. And Blue Sky’s looking appealing. [01:40:00] One of the worries I have about Blue Sky’s appeal is is is advertisers and brands being there and behaving like they do on Twitter? No. Don’t want that.

The beauty of Blue Sky, which is very different to x, is you have a. Block button and a mute button and a report button that you can liberally wield. I’ve been doing that recently, mostly for blocking out political content, us political content. But you can do that with anything. And I think that gives the power to the user in that case, because you don’t have that power on X unless you are paying the money for some of the features that they offer.

I, I think you know, let’s keep a watching eye on this. I think, I mean, I’m looking at the counter again. It is edging up. It’ll hit 30 before the end of the weekend. I bet you. So I think it’s it is an exciting place. I’ve, I’ve FI spend more time there now. I’ve made new friends there, but I’ve con connected with a lot of people who’ve come from X mostly.

I’ve actually not. Encountered someone I know who’s come there saying they’ve left Facebook to come there and not found anyone saying that. [01:41:00] But it’s worth exploring and see if you like it. That’s the thing. Yeah. And I think brands that misbehave which would include behaving the way they have been behaving for decades because it’s part of the ethos at Blue Sky to put the user in control it’s easy to block those brands.

That’s right. That’s right. And they won’t get any traction out of their presence there. The, the brands that figure out the ethos and, and engage authentically create that resource in a community for their customer base, for example. Yeah. They’ll succeed there. I agree with you, and the ones I see there are behaving that way that, that, which is a good thing.

But I’ve got the block button if I need it, and it’s a good thing that it’s there too. Yeah. And that’ll take us to the end of this episode of four immediate release. Our next episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, February 24th, the monthly long form episode. We will be doing our midweek short form episodes in between, so keep an eye out for those.

In the [01:42:00] meantime your comments are so deeply appreciated and we, we, we would love to be able to include them in the next monthly episode in February. You can leave those wherever we share updates of new episodes on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on blue Sky. We look at all of those for your comments in addition to the show notes on.

And threads. And don’t forget, we have a FIR podcast channel on Blue Sky and follow that. It’s FIR podcast as what’s That’s right. You know, we need to put that in the show notes so people can go just find it rather, rather than try to search for it. Right. There’s a, there’s a link on the homepage of the website, but Yeah, it should, we should put that on the show notes.

You’re write. Yep. So you could leave notes in, in the FIR community on Facebook. We do have a community there for our listeners. We do. It’s, it’s, it’s not well populated anymore. , but it’s still there. We even have a page on Facebook for FIR so, you know, wherever you can leave a comment. [01:43:00] You can also send us an email to fir comments@gmail.com.

You can attach an audio file, spin ages since we’ve played an audio comment ever since Chris Hanson retired. . Yeah. , I think. But we would love to get some of those. So also your ratings and reviews. Are what helped new listeners find us. So please, wherever you listen to your podcast, drop us a rating and a review.

And until next time, that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #447: Decisions, Decisions: The Struggle to Communicate in the Age of Ubiquitous Malignancy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short midweek episode, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson unpack the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, revealing a global crisis of grievance and eroding trust in societal institutions—government, business, media, and NGOs. Key topics include the impact of trust inequality, the rise of hostile activism, and the expectations placed on CEOs to address societal issues.

Neville and Shel explore the challenges and opportunities for businesses and communicators, emphasizing the need for empathetic leadership, authentic dialogue, and community engagement. They also discuss the implications of income disparity, the role of stakeholder capitalism, and how communicators can help foster trust through two-way listening and collaboration.

Links from this episode:

Edelman Trust Barometer: Welcome to the Age of Grievance
2025 Edelman Trust Barometer
Economic grievances fuel support for hostile actions, Edelman global survey shows
Trust in CEOs erodes, new report shows
We Are on the Precipice of a Grievance-Based Society

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 446 of four immediate release. I’m She Holtz. And I’m Neville. Hobson. We are recording this episode on Monday, the 20th of January, 2025. A memorable day for many in the United States of a public holiday, Martin Luther King Day, but you’ve also got the inauguration of a new president today and Mr.

Donald Trump is coming back for Trump 2.0 his second. Term of office, and it’s kind of, I think, really appropriate that this day is also the day we’re gonna be talking about the latest Edelman Trust Barometer from the Edelman PR firm. This is an annual product. We’ve been reporting on it a lot over the last 25 years, and I actually remember she, I think I was at the first maybe and or the second of these when they were done, 1999 to 2000.

So it’s been with us a long time, but we have reported on this quite significantly. This one though is I think quite different to what we’ve seen [00:01:00] before in a number of areas. It’s a weighty volume. We’re not going to attempt to dissect the whole thing in this short form episode. That just isn’t the time to do that or just to do it.

So, we’ll, we’ll come back to it in our monthly. But we’ve got a few things we have to say about this. So we should get on with this. So. It was actually over the weekend at Davos that Aman unveiled the results of this trust parameter. It’s the latest annual report and public sentiment of trust in governments business, the media and NGOs from a survey of 33,000 people in 28 countries carried out last October.

Overall, the picture is a desperate one, I would say, showing that in Edelman’s words, widespread grievance. Eroding trust across the board. Those with a high sense of grievance, distrust all four institutions, business, government, media, and NGOs. We’ll discuss a report on what the survey findings mean for communicators right after this message.[00:02:00]

We are living in a time of gre grievance says Edelman, CEO, Richard Edelman, defined by a belief that government and business make our lives harder and serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system while regular people struggle in this age of grievance, disillusionment with societal institutions, that’s government, business, media, and NGOs is pervasive and widespread around the world.

According to the survey, 61% of respondents have a moderate or high sense of grievance. People around the world feel betrayed by leaders and left behind by societal institutions, government, business, media, and NGOs. The erosion of trust is across the board. None of the four key institutions are trusted universally, all face significant distrust among those with high grievance levels.

Trust inequality, particularly among income groups, exacerbates the issue. In addition, aggrieves people distrust [00:03:00] CEOs, as well as innovations like artificial intelligence. For any organization to succeed now and in the years ahead, its leaders cannot ignore grievance. A significant finding is that four in 10 people approve of hostile activism, where radical tactics such as online attacks, disinformation, and even violence, are seen by many as viable ways to address systemic issues.

Hostile activism is most prevalent among respondents aged 18 to 34 with 53% supporting these tactics. Over the last decade, society has devolved from fears to polarization to grievance. As Richard Edelman incumbents in the US, uk, France, Germany, South Korea and Canada were ousted amid voter anger over job losses to globalization and inflation.

He added. We now see a zero sum mindset that legitimizes extreme measures like violence and disinformation as tools for change. Other findings are many. They [00:04:00] include globalization, recession, and technology fears. They’re heightened where the percentage of employees who worry about losing their jobs because of these forces has re risen significantly since last year, free of discrimination surges.

Nearly two thirds of respondents worry about experiencing prejudice, discrimination, or racism up 10 points in the last year, and with significant increases across countries and demographics, including among white respondents in the us. CEOs must take action. They have permission to address a societal issue.

When their business contributed to the problem, it harms their stakeholders. They could have a major positive impact or it would improve their business’s performance. As communicators and leaders, we stand at a critical juncture where trust is in free for grievances are deepening, and the potential for societal instability grows.

This is just a high level snapshot, I, I should add, but clearly there’s major concern about the state of trust and what to do about it. This crisis of grievance surely is [00:05:00] a moment for decisive, empathetic leadership, grounded in action and authenticity shall. It seems that trust is declining precipitously, as you mentioned, it’s across all four institutions.

Mm. A couple glimmers of hope, at least for communicators working in business. First business is still the most trusted institution and the only one above water among the four institutions business. Has the highest trust level at 62%, and it’s viewed both as competent and ethical, but still eroding.

It’s not as high as it has been in previous surveys. Another glimmer of hope is that despite trust challenges, CEOs are expected to address societal issues. So there is an expectation that business is going to do something about this. So I, I think communicators need to take this to heart and use it as at least to inform strategies for communication.

[00:06:00] And, and this would be both internal and external. I think we need to think about what the role of businesses in societal change, and I, I don’t, I, I, I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I know that here in the US businesses retreating from the idea of societal change. Right now with the Trump administration taking power today they are retreating from DEI, for example.

And yet that is one of the things, that a lot of people are looking for and feeling that they’re not getting because of that divide largely between rich and poor. So and, and that’s one that just confounds me here in the US because of, of all of the outpouring of support from business and from large sector of the population for the Trump administration, and yet the people who are going to be leading that administration have a net worth.

It is larger than the gross domestic. Product of most of the countries in the world. Hmm. And so you’re being led by the ultra rich. Some people are already calling it an oligarchy, and yet [00:07:00] it’s this divide of, of wealthy and not wealthy that is driving a lot of this grievance. But we need to be combating misinformation.

We need to be engaging people locally. I think we need to have our CEOs and other leaders, and frankly even our frontline employees more visible in the communities because when you know people, you trust them more, and it’s easier to get a handle on what that the organization that represent is doing in order to address the concerns.

That they have. We, we need to be cognizant of the risks that people perceive with technology and talk about how we’re employing them and why this is perhaps good for the general population. We need to navigate the polarized societal landscape carefully. But mostly there’s opportunities here for CEOs to position themselves as not just thought leaders, but empathetic and action oriented.

People [00:08:00] who can foster trust particularly when they’re addressing pressing issues that matter to people that they have told us matters to them. In this survey issues like inequality, discrimination and environmental challenges. Mm. Yeah, there’s a lot to take in from that. I think shell, you are right.

The lessons for communicators and their clients internally, if you are in that sense or externally, doesn’t really matter on taking a lead and initiative, if you will, for authentic communication that addresses these grievances. I don’t know, as we’re talking what form that might take. I don’t think there’s a single form.

It’ll depend on a lot of things. The flip side of that, I think is the fi, the actual findings of diet distress and negativity across the board in all these key metrics. The one that worries me, in fact many of them do, but let’s pick one. One that worries me quite a bit is the majority of people are convinced that wealthy people take more than their fair share.

So [00:09:00] the metric is quite . Staggering. Two thirds of people believe that they don’t pay their fair share of taxes, and almost two thirds believe that they’re the cause of many problems. And you combine that then with hostile activism, and it’s not hard to see for instance, that that dreadful murder of that health healthcare company’s CEO in New York a month or so back.

Some of what I’ve read subsequently I understand it’s, it’s hard to even say that, but I do understand why that an event like that might happen, particularly in light of some things I’ve read recently, for instance. And of course this is where you then have to pause a bit and say, did I verify all this stuff?

It was in a reputable journal that talked about, there’s evidence that they overcharged patients over a thousand percent. And so there’s a, a prime example. The hostile activism metric. The staggering too. The one I think that’s the least worrying ’cause it doesn’t involve violence, is intentionally spreading disinformation.

A quarter of the respondent said they’re okay with that, [00:10:00] and we are seeing it every single day. I think it’s also combined and this adds to the is part of the grievance certainly, but it adds to the destruction of trust is the way in which leaders. And I’m using that word very loosely including politicians lie.

They absolutely lie. They do not tell the truth. And so no wonder people don’t trust them. And you then have, in my opinion, the egregious display of wealth by some people, and you’ll know who I mean when I talk about those people sending rockets into space and doing all that kind of stuff that flaunt their success and wealth and no wonder.

That’s a, that’s the wrong message sense then political leaders doing the same. And you mentioned Trump, who’s taking office today. He’s gotta be a prime example here, but he is not the only one. So this all adds to this climate of, of this time of, of grievance that translates into this where people feel that they have to take their own actions ’cause they can’t trust anyone.

I. From a business point of view where we’re talking about what [00:11:00] can, what can we do in our for our employers or our clients to help them with this? Well, there’s plenty and you’ve just kind of set the, set the bench on that, I think. But there, there’s a bigger picture at stake here, and I think that would.

All contribute to to to stopping you achieving your goals in advising a CEO to be proactive. So what happens if A CEO addresses a group of employees that people feel empowered to criticize him right there and then indeed insult the CEO? No respect at all. How do you. Navigate that kind of environment.

How do you prepare? So all that is now top of your agenda as opposed to not really a likelihood we need to get with a positive message. This is a tough time for this, I think, in light of stuff like this, don’t you think? Oh, it, it absolutely is. And you know, one of the fascinating dimensions of all of this is the.

Anger that we’re seeing aimed at the ultra rich. I’ve seen [00:12:00] a couple of memes. I’m, I’m just gonna point to two and I, I don’t have them in front of me, so I’m not gonna be able to cite them. Word for word. But what strikes me about these two is, is not that they exist, it’s that they are being shared repeatedly.

I mean, I’m seeing these things. Probably a hundred times on multiple platforms. One of them is a, a graphic of a very long list, and it says, where is the Elon Musk Cancer Clinic? Where is the Elon Musk? Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. And, and then the other one has a photograph of Musk. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg with goofy smiles on their faces.

And it says, how must it feel to go to bed every night knowing that you personally could solve world hunger and homelessness and wake up in the morning and still have enough money that you’ll never be able to spend it all and still not do anything? And I’ve seen that one, probably 75 or a Yeah, or a hundred times.

So this anger at. The ultra [00:13:00] rich, and I’m not going to make the case one way or another that it’s, it’s justified anger. There are people who say, if you work hard and make that kind of money, you deserve it. But that anger is real. And, and, and that’s part of the grievance. And I think it is something that organizations need to think about in terms of their governance of their pay packages.

As, as they consider how customers prospective customers are going to respond to them as this continues to spiral outta control because frankly, I see this getting worse before it gets better. Yeah, totally agree with you. She, and that example you gave is not a new thing at all. I can remember.

Going back 20 plus years a company I worked for at the time and you had company cars and all that and I picked up a a a a Saab 900 Turbo very pokey machine that was outside the realm of what people expect of someone let me in the job I was doing to be driving. They’d expect me to be driving like a Ford or something like that, or a voxel.

I show [00:14:00] up in a, in a Saab beautiful car. It was great. And I remember getting pushback on this comments, snidey comments from people, snarky remarks at the time. And that is still the case now. So you subdue this now. So I think it is a big problem. I don’t believe it will be solved without the help of government, but we don’t trust government.

So where on earth do we go from here with that? In that case? I, it’s, I don’t know , I, I always appreciate people who are able to say, I don’t know, . All I can talk about is what, what business can do and what communicators can do in, in support of that. And I think it’s helping to develop communication strategies that are two-way that engage the local communities and, and engage the communities.

With which organizations interact. But I also think that there needs to be a rethinking of, where the money goes. And I thought this was underway when the US Chamber of Commerce announced that shareholders were [00:15:00] no longer the top priority. But I’m starting to hear people talk more about stakeholder capitalism.

You know, nobody wants to go down the socialism road for obvious reasons. But this idea of stakeholder capitalism making money is good. We just need to make sure that it gets into the hands of the people who played a role in producing that capital, not just the owner of the business behind it.

So it’s, it’s something to consider if, if you. Want to stop the cycle that we see because it’s, it’s, it’s getting bad enough that pretty soon it’s gonna rear up and, and bite business in the ass. Yeah, I, I think it’s, it, it, my kind of conclusive comment on, on all of that really is something that is not new by any means.

It crops up all the time, which is listening. You gotta prioritize listening, genuinely understand the concerns of stakeholders. And I really don’t like the word stakeholders. A catchall word that people dish up a lot, but employees, your customers, your [00:16:00] investors. Families of all of those people, and these are pretty socialist ideas, but they are universal in my opinion, and we don’t do enough of that.

And this must be prioritized. All that listening and addressing them and yeah, this is important. Do you understand them? You, the communicator in, in the sense of aligning with the core values of your organization. You’ve gotta tailor it to that. And so you can present a credible picture to everyone.

So don’t broadcast. You’ve gotta foster meaningful dialogue. So that’s, that’s my conclusion. It’s not a new message at all. I think there needs to be at least two dimensions to, to listening. And now I’m talking about with external communities, not internal communications. Right. But I think surveys are fine, but what we need is face-to-face.

We need to start doing some town halls out there to understand the grievances, to ensure that voices are heard, to make sure that people. Understand that their voices are being heard and, and then we need to [00:17:00] figure out within our stakeholder groups, I’m fine with that word by the way within our stakeholder groups, which groups are affected by the issues driving this GRE grievance?

And then find ways to collaborate with them. We have to. Co-create solutions, and we have to empower these groups to feel like they’re part of a decision making process. I mean, you know, helplessness is what drives a lot of this feeling like you don’t have Yeah. Any way to do anything about it. And if business can provide an entree for people to feel like they, I.

Do have the ability to take part in the decision making process other than going to, you know, vote on election day that that could help. I mean, we’re just scratching the surface. But in, in terms of listening, I really think that listening I. It doesn’t have to be confined to face to face, but I think a lot of it needs to, because we need our people out there engaging.

They need to see who these people are, meet them, kind of get to know them, because those are the people that you end up trusting. It’s, it’s those nameless, faceless [00:18:00] people that are making decisions, you know, on the, on the 72nd floor and, and only come out with their bodyguards to get to their car.

That, that we tend not to trust. Right. Well, we got, we have work to do. I think shell, don’t you? ? Oh, plenty of it. Can’t, can’t, can’t rest on all our laurels at this point. . So I think we’ll probably be talking about this when we get together on Saturday to record our, our monthly long form episode. But until then, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #446: Navigating Grievance — Insights from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The media landscape is in turmoil. It may not be exactly the turmoil we hear about, though, based on research release in a new Poynter Institute report. For example, it is taken as gospel that “people don’t trust the media,” but a survey finds that’s not necessarily accurate. Local news reporters, for example, are highly trusted, mainly because they have established relationships in the community. That supports a broader notion: These days, connection matters more than credentials, for better or for worse, leading to the rise of the “newsfluencer,” who can be anybody from an experienced journalist with a Substack newsletter to a citizen journalist with no training to a provocateur who is able to build an audience.

If your job involves getting coverage for your company’s news or brand, what was once a straightforward assignment is now a complex maze full of mines. Should you get your CEO onto a podcast? Elevate a frontline employee with a strong personal brand to help get the word out? Start sharing information in small social communities? Or any of dozens of other options?

Neville and Shel delve into this one aspect of the OnPoynt Report in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

OnPoynt Report – Poynter
Christopher Penn on LinkedIn
Mayra Báez on LinkedIn
Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2025

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4, 4 5. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz. And we have been reporting here over the last several episodes about the changing media landscape since communicators rely on media to get the word out. , that’s the heart of media relations, right?

It’s an important topic to address the Pointer Institute. Is one of the organizations engaged in research into the massive changes that the media are experiencing. If you haven’t heard of them, the Pointer Institute for Media Studies is a nonprofit journalism school and research organization based in St.

Petersburg, Florida. They own the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact Checking network. Where they operate PolitiFact, they just released their on point. That’s P-O-Y-N-T, of course, because that’s how you spell pointer. The on point report, which sheds light on the evolving landscape of media relations.[00:01:00]

The report offers a lot of useful insights. Into how technology and shifting public perceptions are reshaping the way organizations interact with the media. So we thought we would dive into that today, starting with a look at the changing media landscape On point highlights a significant transformation in the media environment.

Traditional news outlets are contending with declining. Circulation and viewership. While digital platforms and social media have surged as primary news sources, this includes things like substack newsletters, and of course journalists are writing these as a way to reach people, but. Other professionals are too without journalistic training, and so are activists and conspiracy theorists.

Anybody can start one. All you need is a credit card. I read a LinkedIn post by Myra Baez an audience strategist who pointed out that the Washington Post has laid off most of its PR team. They wrote that talent driven journalism is the future of media and personalities [00:02:00] and creators will lead the way.

Myra says that the post is creating a star talent unit and that Al Jazeera plus experimented with this, I guess she used to work there more than a decade ago, intertwining the organization’s brand with journalists’, personal brands for Al Jazeera plus’s, social media oriented journalism. And she said it worked.

We’ve entered the area. We’ve entered the era of news influencers and news creators. She wrote, it’s not just journalism. This trend spills over into other industries. Businesses are replacing traditional PR strategies with regular employees who bring strong personal brands. The era of faceless organizations is ending.

She wrote, and that’s a key point for business communicators, but she also notes. People aren’t differentiating between reporting and influencer content, and she says it doesn’t matter. It’s all about connection over credentials, she says. But , is it really, does the idea of a [00:03:00] professional journalist carry no weight anymore?

Do we really want a news influencer who’s only experience is on TikTok or Instagram to report a complex story? The same way somebody who studied journalism school in school and got experience working for professional editors can now maybe I’m old, but I don’t think so. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value out there with people telling stories in new.

In interesting ways in any case, this shift has led to a more fragmented media landscape where audiences access information from a multitude of channels, each with its own credibility and reach. So before we move on to the issue of trust in media, Neville any thoughts on the shift in the media landscape?

Yeah, I think it’s we quite a few actually, but I think just a couple. This is inevitable. It seems to me, given the state of things that we see all around us, the signals are, there have been for a while that this shift is coming and it’s su not sudden. It’s little by little. It’s gradually been [00:04:00] approaching.

I think it’s interesting that, the shift is it? It’s more a question, generationally based in terms of preferences of where people want to get their news and information from. If that’s not, I. Front and center of the strategies of media organizations. I think they’re gonna be in trouble because this is this is about gi giving people stuff that retains them and engages with them.

And that’s different generationally. Now, as we know you and I are in that that lovely group called the Boomers, right? And you and I actually are utterly not . Like the stereotypical boomer. I certainly am not in terms of the things that interest me, the tools that I use and how I behave online, all that kind of thing.

Yet most people are they’re true to form in that regard. And you’ll find that not just in journalism, but in politics and a ton of other things that will, we may touch on some of that. So I think. This trend is inevitable. It’s already underway. We’re seeing some interesting [00:05:00] things happening.

And indeed the point of report is rich with insights on where this is going. We need to as communicators. Be fully aware of this and not try and not understand it because you have to understand it if you wanna know who your audiences are and where they’re at and how you will reach them.

And the same with the journalists that you need to catch. I was thinking about TikTok reading about that today and what’s going on in the US about, are they gonna be banned from the America and all this kind of stuff, and yet. TikTok, those two words cropping up in news reports daily about a place where this or that is happening, and therefore, does it make sense to ban them?

That’s political drive. I get that. So though you are gonna alienate a lot of your audience if you do that in the United States. But that’s slightly separate topic. But it makes me think of these shifts that are happening and you have to be completely on top of . The developments and pay attention to them.[00:06:00]

So yeah, lot’s happening. Absolutely. And to your point with generations. Yeah, absolutely. I think that boomers are probably still reading print newspapers by and large. Yeah. There is a risk though, in assuming that I. Any cohort is a monolith. I think one of the characterizations we hear of boomers is not very tech savvy.

And yet it was boomers who invented the internet. Let’s not forget that, that people like Bennett surf boomers. And you look at somebody like. James Licklider, who was involved with darpa and the effort to create the packet switching that invented the, he preceded boomers. He was part of that greatest generation that came before, so I think there’s danger in assuming too much about any one cohort, but definitely look at those characteristics and what media they’re using.

I think it’s worth noting, just as sort an aside here to mention that those folks who we see as boomers, Vince s being one, wasn’t a boomer. Meaning he wasn’t gray hair [00:07:00] and white bearded when he did all this stuff. He was quite a young guy. Tim Burners Lee, another one. He was in his thirties when he invented the World Wide Web.

Yep, just a point. So keep in mind the, there are very tech savvy boomers. Yeah. Out there and older. Let’s talk about trust in media because that’s a pivotal focus of the report. Public confidence in media institutions has been waning influenced by factors such as perceived biases. A lot of that is politically driven misinformation and the rapid spread of fake news, which I think we’re at greater risk of because of.

This erosion of trust poses challenges for organizations striving to convey their messages effectively through any media channels. And yet, 83% of people say local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the wellbeing of their local community.

69% say local journalists in their area are mostly in touch with their community, and 71% say local journalists are reporting news accurately. Now, how does that square with the idea that . People don’t trust [00:08:00] the media. And the answer to that is the media is not a monolith. As the on point report notes, people are more likely to trust people they know journalists to news organizations are most trusted when they develop relationships with customers, donors, business partners, and sources.

And there’s a growing number of local news and topic oriented sites. On the us The On Point report says three new ones are launching every month on average. Are we targeting. These with solid content. Neville, your thoughts on trust in media. It’s shifted. The old definitions are changing. What do we mean by trust?

I think that’s a good thing as it evolves, but it’s very interesting the point you mentioned in the pointer report about the word media is too broad and as, as they say, and the word trust is too broad and inexact. And I think that’s absolutely right. Word of this phrase of distrust of media I agree with pointed that it tends to look at a [00:09:00] huge picture, not the local scene.

And you hear this anecdotally a lot, don’t you? And you’ve referenced it even that people may not trust that particular organization, but hey, where I live and how I relate to them, they’re wonderful. And that’s a, that’s. It sums it up really, doesn’t it? So it’s good to see this is, I believe something important to pay attention to and be part of that shift and understand it so that you are able to engage with people as this whole thing shifts.

In terms of trust, yeah I really was taken by this focus on local journalism. I have been, as I don’t know if everybody listening knows that my degree is in journalism way back when print was print, newspapers and radio were the only options available to you. But I have been very concerned about the closing of so many.

Local community newspapers because you need somebody to sit in the school board meeting and report on [00:10:00] that in the zoning commission meeting to report on that. If there’s no public oversight of these institutions, then they can just do whatever they want behind closed doors. So I’m heartened to see these local news sites opening.

I don’t know how rigorous their journalism is, but there’s an opportunity there. There’s that old expression that all politics is local. Maybe all media relations is local too. So I think we need to look at these as opportunities for getting our word out through journalists who are trusted.

By the local community and find the local angles to our stories. And by the way, AI should be able to help with that. If we need to crank out, our, pitches for 50 different geographic regions, that could take a lot of time if you’re trying to do that manually. Yeah I think I would add to that, maybe this is just in the uk, but I suspect not in that the media, local media and this is a very broad observation and [00:11:00] it is just that an opinion observation.

That, what I certainly note is that the online versions of newspapers here tend to be dominated by a handful of very big companies, won a lot of titles, and they are driven by . Ads popups it’s hard to see news stories. And when you go to a website that’s your local newspaper website, you are just overwhelmed with the advertising and the promotional stuff to actually see the story.

So you tend not to go. So I often wonder, when I do go and encounter all this stuff, how can they keep in business for God’s sake? Because surely circulation the really, the, what do you call it, the visitors must be declining, but I guess not. Print the actual print. It’s hard to find newspapers outside of the old traditional news agents.

In the supermarkets. Local ones tend to be free giveaways now, so I don’t think they have the credibility anymore. That’s my own perception. That said where I live in Somerset, in England, the local papers here are actually quite [00:12:00] enjoy, but they’re very good at reporting local news. The only trouble is, so the journalism’s good.

The only trouble is it’s in, is the medium in which that journalism is published with all the ads and the, and it’s not an, not a pleasant user experience, I find. Yeah. I took a look in the on point study. They listed a bunch of these. Relatively new local news sites. Yeah. And it was heartening to see that they weren’t riddled with ads.

These are I’m gathering efforts by people who are passionate Yeah. About getting local news out there and not looking, they’re not media moguls looking to sell a lot of advertising, probably just looking to cover their costs. And, there’s probably a lot of volunteer. Citizen journalists who are saying, yeah, I’ll go to that zoning commission meeting and sit in and write a report.

Again I worry about the quality of journalism people knowing what sources to reach out to how to do an investigation. [00:13:00] I remember when I was working for a daily newspaper I led an investigation. It was into, corruption, the county level. But I had to know how to go to the county office and get the right records and sit there with a ruler and go down every line and take the right notes and document all of this, which is something I learned in journalism school.

You wonder if somebody who says, yeah, I’ll go to the zoning commission meeting, even thinks to do something like that as opposed to just taking the notes and reporting what they heard. But something is better than nothing and it could evolve into something more I suppose. Let’s talk about the implications of all of this for media relations.

That’s the connection to the theme of this podcast. The report underscores a number of implications for media relations professionals. One you already referenced, Neville Diversified outreach. Relying solely on traditional media is no longer adequate. Organizations need to engage with a variety of platforms including digital outlets, blogs, podcasts.

Did I mention [00:14:00] podcasts? . And social media influencers and news influencers. In an. In order to reach their target audiences effectively. And I wonder how many PR agencies, not to mention in-house PR teams are thinking about the need to undergo this transformation. Then there’s authenticity and transparency in an era of skepticism.

Being genuine and transparent is crucial. Audiences are more likely to trust organizations that communicate openly and honestly, acknowledging both successes and challenges. And here again, is an opportunity . Employees who have strong personal brands representing the organization.

Rather than being a faceless organization, we need to build direct relationships. With the rise of social media organizations have the opportunity to establish direct connections with our audiences. This direct engagement can help build trust and foster a sense of. Community and of course embracing technology.

Leveraging technological tools such as data analytics and AI [00:15:00] can enhance the effectiveness of media relations strategies. They can help in understanding audience preferences, predicting trends, and crafting personalized messages. So in terms of media relations, devil thoughts. You’ve nailed it. I think she

I think pointer talks about a pointer which makes sense to me. Media organizations that can adeptly blend compelling narratives with captivating audio and visual elements will emerge as industry leaders shaping news consumption, generating new revenue, and refining the boundaries of journalism.

So they gotta expand their skill sets of their journalists to get there. So it’s not a single thing that needs to happen. There’s quite a bit that needs to happen there. And for communicators to understand this from a media relations point of view, there are changes there too, to be in step with what is happening as pointer mentions.

So it is quite interesting you mentioned podcasts earlier, and one of the trends they talk about is that what. [00:16:00] News publishers are planning to produce more of 47% of them more podcasts. Okay. That’s beaten by newsletters. It’s 52% and video by 64%. But guess what? They’re not planning to produce more of articles, traditional articles.

Yeah. 0%, 0% produce more articles. Yeah. Now, equally interesting just to me to mention this, that pointer sites the data for that, those metrics. It’s global. They talk to media leaders. They say 56 countries. This is for Reuters Institute of Journalism Report last year. The journalism media and technology trends and productions.

The 2025 version has just come out literally the other day. I was glancing through it the other day. It’s fascinating some of the stuff, so I need to read it properly. That’s probably gonna be a top one of my topics on a monthly episode, by the way. It’s interesting it’s mentioned here in that way, and I think that like all the things that they’re talking about here that you and I are discussing each of us as [00:17:00] communicators need to be paying very close attention to these shifts that are happening.

Even the ones that are just trends that might happen in six months or whatever it might be. This is a part of the evolution, if you will, of of what’s happening in the overall media landscape. I think there’s so much to. Grapple with this that you need to decide what you’re gonna pay attention on and you need some help with that probably.

So Pointers report is a good place to start I think. Yeah, it is. And in terms of podcasts, I think being able to pitch a media outlet for its podcast is something we’re going to need to start doing, but I. Certainly wouldn’t limit myself to media podcasts. I would look at the podcasts the media are quoting.

This is something we talked about last week, is you’re seeing people quoted from, Zuckerberg was quoted just the other day from his interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Yeah. There are podcasts that have large followings that. [00:18:00] People are appearing on and then being quoted by the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

So podcasting like TikTok is now becoming a source of news. Used to be Twitter at one point a little less these days and more the podcasts and TikTok. Yeah. And in fact the the 2025 version of that Reuters report that I mentioned talks about that in the context of growth of social media platforms that are gonna get media attention, Twitter or XI should say, is at the bottom, literally blue sky.

TikTok forgotten the other one, the three one. That ones that caught my attention. But Blues scum in particular thread are right up there. No threads. Threads are off. The chart almost is down there with X. Not, they don’t see threads. They don’t see threads as I, I suspect I, my interpretation, they don’t see threads as mattering much in the future.

I was actually grappling to try and find the chart that I referenced, but I can’t lay [00:19:00] my hands on it in a second. But it’s interesting. We are seeing that. Prediction happening, and indeed you can get some indicator of that. The x the media attention on XI saw a story that two days ago that academia generally speaking broadly, 60 academic institutions across Germany and Austria are quit.

Twitter gone. They’re out. Yep. They’re talking about government agencies in Germany leaving XX, not Twitter x. And some media organizations are stepping up their moves elsewhere. So Blue Sky is not the only destination people are going to. We are seeing this. Gaining momentum, I think it seems to me and the influence to a lot of it, of course, is what’s happening in the United States, in the political landscape.

We have a new president taking office formally in a week’s time as we’re recording this on 20th January. So all of that, it’d actually be interesting she to see as a kind of a related side. What media did to pay attention to on the 20th of January. The u the usual suspects, [00:20:00] of course, ’cause they’re not going away the mainstream broadcast media, but you’re gonna see live broadcast coverage coming from all sorts of places that you might not even have thought of.

So you, you will be able to encounter that kinda thing wherever you are online. I’m pretty certain of that. That’s not much different to what’s already been happening, but maybe it’s intensifying. And it could be that . You’ll find influencers and people described that way in the United States certainly will be reposting, stuff like that.

And so you’ll have discussions going on and opinions being shaped and formed and published and quoted upon. So it’s gonna be pretty much a wild west landscape, I would say. It is, and everybody’s going to walk away with a different perception based on confused on what media they’ve consumed. Unlike the old days when everybody watched Walter Cronkite and got the same information.

Yeah. Which leads us to some strategic recommendations and, we’re talking about social media. One of these strategic recommendations is to prepare for the end of public. [00:21:00] Social media, it’s a caveat. This is not something that’s going to happen tomorrow, but Chris Penn mused on LinkedIn that AI slop and bots might take down public social media because as he wrote, the only ones left will be bots talking to each other.

He suggested that you make your plans now for a future where your social networking is out of the public eye in private places where people in your circle. Of trust, provide the support and connection you crave. And if you’re a marketer, prepare for a future where public social media is no longer a driver of any kind of business.

Interesting post from Chris and I don’t disagree with it, but again, I don’t think this is something that’s gonna happen imminently. This is going to happen gradually as those AI bots start yeah. Taking over. But I. A couple of other strategic recommendations. Invest in media literacy educating both internal teams and the public about media literacy can help in discerning credible information from misinformation, thereby fostering a more [00:22:00] informed audience.

Cultivate media relationships, right? Building and maintaining strong relationships with journalists and media outlets and news influencers is essential. Understanding their needs and providing valuable newsworthy content can enhance your media coverage. And then there’s crisis preparedness in this particular information environment.

Having a robust. Crisis plan is not an option. You have to be prepared to respond quickly and effectively to negative publicity that can come from just about anywhere now. That can, mitigate potential damage. There’s a ton of information and data in this report. There’s a whole section on AI that we didn’t even touch on.

Yeah. But Neville, any concluding thoughts? I was thinking you mentioned about building relationships with journalists. And one thing I started doing is paying attention to media organizations who are publishing a list of journalists active on Blue Sky as part of these new startup packs that Blue Sky enabled.

I’ve seen probably a dozen different media organizations across Europe. Started doing [00:23:00] this and some specialist trade publications, particularly in in the pharma, in healthcare those are available sources. You don’t have to go digging for this kind of stuff, listing all those folks. Now, it’s not to say that you get them and you start spamming them with messages on the social network.

You’ll soon know that’s absolutely not the way to do this. Some probably will though. But there’s a great. Place to gain that. And of course, no one else is doing this in other platforms. So that’s gonna give Bluesky advantage as people start building out their approach to connecting with with journalists and others of interest.

So it’s a useful tool, by the way, and there’s some other tools where you can convert them into actual lists even more valuable. So those are the things you need to take advantage of because it will give you an advantage in doing things that way. Absolutely. The link to the report and to the LinkedIn posts that I referenced, the one from Maya Baez and from Chris Penn are gonna be in the show notes and that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #445: Media Relations in a Turbulent Media Landscape appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Media outlets around the world — and in particular in the U.S. — are strategizing how to cover the incoming Trump Administration. Some are even planning to shift their focus to more soft news in order to retain readers and avoid drawing the president’s ire. We look at the implications for the media relations industry in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

How publishers are strategizing for a second Trump administration: softer news and more social media
The Trump to-do list: How communicators are getting ready for the MAGA takeover
Communicating Successfully Amid Political and Social Dissent

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 444 4 4 4 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz. And I’m Neville Hobson As we record this episode on the 8th of January. It’s just under two weeks until Donald Trump prepare assumes the US presidency. That’s 20th of January is the inauguration day.
That’ll be a second term for him. We’ve got a story about news publishers that face the challenges of unpredictability and polarization. These realities necessitate strategic shifts to adapt to a fast-paced, erratic political environment for US-based news publishers. The challenges of covering Trump’s second term are particularly acute.
The fast-paced, unpredictable nature of his administration will require editorial agility as well as innovative strategies to sustain engagement in a politically charged environment. However, the implications of a second Trump [00:01:00] administration extend far beyond US borders capturing the attention of publishers and communicators worldwide.
We’ll explore this topic right after this message.
From Europe to Asia, global audiences are deeply invested in the ripple effects of American policies and political rhetoric on international markets, diplomacy and cultural trends. International publishers such as the BBC and the Independent, are recalibrating their strategies to engage North American audiences.
While communicators and multinational corporations are preparing for how Trump’s leadership might shape global narratives. Requiring alignment across diverse regions and stakeholders for publishers. According to a report by Digiday this week, the focus is twofold, balancing hard news coverage with softer lifestyle oriented content and engaging audiences more deeply through social media and interactive platforms.
Publishers like Newsweek and the Independent are prioritizing lifestyle content, not [00:02:00] only to attract diverse audiences, but also to create safer advertising spaces amidst a politically charged landscape. Enhanced social media monitoring and staffing changes reflect the need to keep pace with Trump’s activity patterns, particularly on platforms like Truth, social, and X tools like polls.
Ask me anything. Sessions and comment management are being deployed to foster community interaction while gathering valuable first party data. At the same time, publishers are grappling with the toll of covering a Trump led news cycle. The relentless nature of his previous term was described as a gushing river of news prompting concerns about staff burnout and long-term sustainability.
Despite these challenges, the potential for increased readership and revenue from a busy news cycle remains a motivating factor with publishers seeing opportunities in the heightened public attention that Trump presidency typically generates. On the other side of the communications fence, the emphasis for corporate communicators lies in preparing for Trump’s hallmark [00:03:00] unpredictability now amplified by the controversial team he’s assembling.
Notably, Elon Musk’s significant influence within this new administration has already introduced an unprecedented dynamic. Musk is known for his polarizing public persona and unfiltered approach to communication and his involvement as a layer of complexity that communicators have never faced in a government context.
This combination of leadership styles demands rapid response capabilities, and scenario planning At an unparalleled level, teams must ensure messaging, clarity, and internet. Sorry. An internal alignment to navigate sudden shifts in public discourse with misinformation, polarizing policies and unconventional decision making, likely to dominate the agenda, proactive communication strategies and robust risk mitigation plans.
Are essential to maintain credibility and public trust in this uncharted environment. The shared challenges of unpredictability and audience polarization highlight the importance of adaptability [00:04:00] across both sectors. For publishers, this means finding a balance between hard news and softer content to attract readers and advertisers alike.
For communicators, it involves crafting agile strategies that enable swift. Pivots while maintaining coherence and transparency. Both sectors must also address the human cost of this rapid pace, safeguarding the wellbeing of staff as they navigate the demands of a divisive and volatile political landscape.
To restate what I said earlier, this is the global picture. In essence, the coming months will test the resilience and creativity of publishers and communicators alike. Success will depend on their ability to stay nimble, engage their audiences meaningfully, and weather the unique pressures of covering and responding to a Trump presidency.
And let’s also mention the news this week about meta and its fact-checking overhaul on its social networks to replace content moderators with community notes similar to X. None of this is a stroll in the park shell for anybody. Absolutely not. And I think the move by [00:05:00] and Mark Zuckerberg is emblematic of what we’re seeing.
From a number of different types of media that are, let’s face it, running scared. On the newspaper side, you have the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post refusing to make presidential endorsements. Their editorial teams wanted to, the publishers, the owners, and that includes Jeff Bezos Amazon’s founder.
Chairman of the board, who’s the owner of the Washington Post said, we’re not going to make a presidential endorsement because clearly they were gonna invoice endorse Kamala Harris. And you also had the Washington Post recently experienced the departure of a very popular political cartoonist. When the editor in chief declined to run one of her cartoons, for the first time ever, the cartoon showed Jeff Bezos kneeling at the feet of.
Donald Trump and she said that kind of, I don’t remember her exact words, but the [00:06:00] spirit of it was that the cowardice displayed here is something she didn’t wanna be part of. Now the editor said, no, it wasn’t about that. It was the fact that we’ve done two reports on this and another one coming up and we just didn’t wanna overdo it.
But that’s suspicious. To me. So I think you have a lot of media that are proactively capitulating and abdicating their responsibility to report accurately or as they would with any other president in office. The other side of this is that you have Trump suing media. And this is a way to get around the First Amendment if somebody says something you don’t like.
The first real experience we had with that wasn’t Trump, it was Peter Thiel suing Gawker out of existence over, I remember that, their publication. But now you have Trump just got a $15 million settlement from A, B, CA, B. C can afford it. But now he has filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register [00:07:00] over the.
Poll that they ran. This is a highly lauded poll. In fact, when they talk about this particular presidential poll, they say it is one of the most highly regarded in the entire country. It was wrong. Most of the polls were wrong. Most of the polls were wrong four years ago. There are reasons that the polls are not as accurate as they used to be, that we could get into another time if we ever do an episode about polling and research.
But he’s suing over the fact that it. Reported that Harris was going to win in Iowa. She did not. So you have this ability to sue media out of existence and put an end to that kind of reporting. Now you consider the fact that what you’re seeing out of Trump and his followers in the Republican party.
Is an effort to rewrite history, and this gets to be very dangerous. When I talk about rewriting history, the most obvious example is recasting. What happened on January 6th, [00:08:00] 2020 as a Day of love, and. Shoving to the side and trying to eliminate from the public consciousness the fact that 20 police officers were, I think that number may be wrong, but a lot of the Capitol police were injured, five died.
Yeah. This was a violent assault that a lot of those people were carrying weapons and they’re rewriting that history. And if we don’t have the newspapers to report the facts and the other media. There’s going to be some serious issues that will follow. Yeah I think therein lies one of the big issues, frankly, which is the facts according to who.
The, you know the phrase, there’s never a single version of the truth. Whose version of the truth are you gonna listen to? There are now in light of these changes with this president coming in the social network he owns plus the one that Musk owns really causing interference with that.
But there’s some interesting aspects to this. According to Dig Day’s report in terms of how some of the mainstream [00:09:00] media are planning to report the news and engage with their audiences. And this I found most interesting. For instance, they give an analysis here from one of the publications that talks about.
The tension they give to Trump on social networks, they’re noting he’s typically active when the journalists are not. Night journalists are not there. The people who are monitoring according to Digiday tend to be the more junior, less experienced people. So they need to shift that around to, to be able to respond or plan for how to respond to Trump when he is up at 2:00 AM.
Ranting that is part of the landscape. The guy, this is what the guy does. And I would imagine others will be doing similar. Newsweek is quoted as saying that what they’re planning to do with Trump being elected is I. Have more interactivity with their readership on social networks and in the comments to their site.
They’ve been building that up a bit. They talk that they say they’ve expanded their social team. They hired a community manager in October to oversee onsite [00:10:00] engagement, to manage comments and to conduct reader polls. So that kind of thing is being ramped up quite significantly. They say Newsweek receives an average of eight to 10,000 comments.
Every single day across all its content. So they’re gonna leverage the engagement with those commenters more than they have done in the past. So that’s I guess to me that means that’s one way of building better connections with your audience and maybe they’ll listen to you more and repeat your side of the story rather than what the other guys are gonna be doing all the time.
So that’s interesting. I think also. Newsweek, the independent, the uk newspaper that has a strong focus on North America and the Huffington Post as well, told Digiday they’re gonna focus on softer, more lifestyle focused news content in 2025. And they say that this strategy can help boost traffic.
So many days. The discovery, the majority of their audience comes from Google Discover according to Newsweek. And that platform favors increasingly softer [00:11:00] lifestyle and consumer focused content. And Digiday notes. He’s not the only one coming to that conclusion. So rather than simply hard news reporting, they’re going to focus on stuff that I guess adds comfort to the readers in the face of all the disruption that’s likely to be the case.
That’s a really interesting approach. I wonder what. Communicators are gonna think of that in terms of what they’re planning in using the mainstream media and their engagement with journalists, et cetera. What do you think about that, Sean? Think that we as communicators need to seriously think about what’s going on.
In the media. Media in terms of our relationships with them, if they’re doing softer news in order to gin up subscriptions and make money as opposed to fulfill their obligations as journalists. And let’s say you are a PR person working representing an organization that. Attacked and the attack against you [00:12:00] a political one may not be justified.
It may not be based in fact it’s hard to. Disprove a negative though, right? Or to prove a negative that we didn’t do this, we’re not this and the relationships that we have built up with the media in the past I don’t know how well those serve us if these publications are shifting their emphasis away from this kind of reporting to fluff as I would call it.
So yeah, I, I think as we’re. Proactively and I’m hopeful that organizations are proactively developing their crisis plans for this. Even if you have differentiated. Clearly those things that you will engage in publicly and those things where you are going to remain silent. You should be considering your vulner vulnerabilities.
Where might we be attacked by somebody from the other side of the political spectrum and what crisis plans can we put in place in order to [00:13:00] address those? If the media is shifting its emphasis away from this kind of coverage. We need to find other ways to get those messages out, whether it’s getting onto podcasts or doing TikTok.
Clips or, flooding blue sky and threads and the like. I don’t know. This is something I’m going to be thinking seriously about. I don’t suspect the organization I work for is gonna be subject to much of this. It’s just not the nature of the organization. But on the other hand, I don’t wanna be blindsided either.
Yeah. So I am gonna put together a group from our legal and HR team to start thinking about these things and be ready if any of it, rolls down our way. Yeah I think there is a a clear and present risk of the environment changing so radically that it’s hard to plan for it when you’re not sure how it’s gonna change.
All you know is there are forces at play that will become official on the 20th of January, and my feeling [00:14:00] based on simply what I’m just observing others saying in the mainstream media in particular. It will be like a you know, a gushing river again. There’s a quote in Digiday piece about a large news publication not named the head of social there saying that the news cycle during the Biden administration compared to Trump’s administration in his first term was like a slow stream versus a gushing river.
So the tap is on. There’s this constant stream of stuff coming your way. How do you navigate that? And that’s where they then lead into. Another issue they need to be highly cognizant of is the risk of burnout by the journalists and other people who work for these publications. So you gotta take that into account as well.
I think it’s good for the business side of news according to this unnamed publication, but the people side, we are gonna have to watch that. They said, I think we’re all gonna have to take care of each other as journalists in this environment. And that’s actually a good, I think a good thing to recognize the reality of this is what’s coming.
Yeah. I was having this [00:15:00] conversation with somebody yesterday and I’ll, reveal if it’s not already clear. My, my personal political leanings here, which I try not to do, we, you wanna appeal to all communicators with FIR, not just those who agree with us politically. I. But I have been reading reports about people on the left who are checking out.
They are, they’re burned out, they’re distressed, and they’re not paying attention to the news and they’re not engaging politically. And it was Edmund Burke who said that all it takes for evil to succeed is for. Goodman to do nothing. And that’s what worries me. It worries me about burned out journalists.
It worries me about people who were politically active, who are throwing up their hands and giving up. So yeah, this is a source of concern for me. I was reading something interesting. This was in an article by Matt Purdue strategist at Magnitude Inc. This was in PR daily.
The Reagan [00:16:00] publication and he was writing about what corporations can do to prepare for this. This is something that we discussed briefly in our December monthly episode. Yeah. But he had some data here that I thought was really interesting. ’cause one of his first points was to lean on your employee resource groups.
These are groups representing, people within your organization who share commonalities. You could have a black employee resource group. You could have a queer employee resource group, a Hispanic, whatever it may be. He said 73% of companies use their ERGs to communicate internally on societal issues, but only 41% hold regular meetings between ERGs and leadership to talk about these issues.
And only 11% have ERG representation. On leadership groups that make decisions about these issues. These are not clubs for these folks to get together. They are called resource groups because they are supposed to be resources to the organization. And I absolutely think that the communicators [00:17:00] and organizations can help facilitate that.
And during these turbulent four years. That we’re looking at. I think we should be leaning on those ERGs and at least calling them in for consultation when issues arise that are related to what binds them. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think what all of this says to me certainly is whatever your role in an organization as a communicator or whatever, your role in a mainstream media company as a communicator you need to be utterly aware of the wave that’s coming.
Way collectively in terms of what we communicate, how we communicate indeed be being clear on who our audiences are and where they are now. It’s hard to define that better than that. All I know is simply is a wave of. Change coming and much of it depending on your outlook. I think for mine, certainly [00:18:00] it’s not good what I see developing and that’s coming our way and you need to be on the case particularly, but not, certainly not exclusively if you work in an organization or you’re in an industry sector or something.
That attracts controversy or is involved in an industry that doesn’t have great public support and is a target for people like Trump, for instance. So if you are in the I dunno, in the fossil fuel in, actually fossil fuels, they probably support that. But if you are in, wind farms or whatever it might be you better be ready for the kind of bad guys to be very active and using.
Methods of communication that are certainly beyond the norm that we’ve been used to. You can already see the trajectory of insults and bad language and just general reactions to people in a negative way that are commonplace across some social networks. Now, how long will it be before it’s.
Everywhere, particularly on Meta’s properties collectively, which a stat I read this morning said there are 3 billion [00:19:00] people in the world use meta social media properties every single day. So what happens if the the discourse on those just turns just awful, just like x Then everything is shifting and it seems that we might be headed down that road according to events here.
Unknown yet. So keep an eye on what’s going on. That’s what I see. Yeah. Without question. It’s important to monitor how the, this is all affecting the media that we rely on to communicate as well as to gather information. I’m gonna have to make a time code because I had something I wanted to Oh, I remember.
Okay. So where am I? 20, right around 20 minutes. Yep. We recorded our 20th anniversary show recently. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. 20 years. And I, one of these days there will be an AI tool where we can point it at FIR and it will say how many times in an episode we said we don’t talk politics here.
And [00:20:00] it’s, I think, telling how significant this challenge is that it has led us to talk exclusively in an episode about. Politics that this could have a significant impact on our businesses and our ability to engage with our stakeholders especially as our stakeholders. Reflecting society in the US in particular grow more po, more polarized?
No, it’s not a good forecast. She, but it’s it, looking at it PAs dispassionately. If I, if it’s possible to do that. This is probably one of the most interesting. Times we could be in as communicators. Set aside, this is about a curse. May you live an interesting times. Yeah, we got the curse of it, no question.
But we’re in it and we can help navigate it for others and be prepared. The boy counts. Be prepared. We need to be on the case. Absolutely. And before we go just a note to listeners on a completely different topic, Neville, you today posted our [00:21:00] interview with Martin Waxman. Yes. We spoke with Martin in just before Christmas, the week before Christmas.
Martin’s a digital communication strategist. He’s a teacher. He has LinkedIn training courses. He’s a speaker based in Toronto. And he was, as we mentioned in that conversation, a part of inside PR and, lots of stuff here on podcast with others, Joe Thornley, Jenny Dietrich, and David Jones.
We had a chance to talk to him about AI and public relations and there were revelations of that conversation, shall I thought. Martin, very articulate speaker. He certainly knows a lot and he’s able to talk through many of the topics related to public relations in a way that are very credible and really good to listen to.
So that was published today, as you noted. And it’s up there. If you’re not subscribed to the FIR interviews feed, it’s not on the FIR main feed, it’s the FIR interviews feed. We’ll do so you can easily find that on your favorite podcast app or on the [00:22:00] website. Yeah. Also, if you are listening to us on the Marketing Podcast Network, the FIR.
I interview Feed is not part of MPN, so you’ll have to head over to FIR podcast network.com or find FIR interviews on your podcast app and that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #444: Preparing for Trump 2.0 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For Immediate Release launched on January 3, 2005. Episode #1 explained what podcasting is, then looked at the role blogs played in the tsunami tragedy in Asia. On our 20th anniversary, Neville and Shel recall FIR’s origins and the many changes the show has undergone in two decades, some significant milestones, memorable moments, some of the challenges we have faced over the years, and other recollections. We will return to our normal programming next week.

Links from this episode:

FIR Episode #1
First mention of podcasting for business (Rex Hammock) in September 2024
FIR Interview: Michael Whiley at GM on the GM Blog (February 22, 2005)
FIR Interview with Steve Rubel (March 26, 2005)
FIR #100 (January 5, 2006)
FIR #191: Two Decades in 2.5 Hours (January 20, 2020)
Pivoting the FIR Podcast (January 10, 2022)
FIR at 19: A Milestone in Podcasting
FIR #377: Two Decades of Podcasting (January 5, 2024)
Podcast Statistics and Data, Buzzsprout
The Future of Podcasting: 9 Trends for Creators & Companies”, Riverside
“The Power of Podcasts: Why Every Business Needs a Voice in 2025”, One Zero Creative

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4, 4 3. I’m Neville Hobson in the uk. And I’m she Holtz in the us. And if you didn’t recognize the opening the usual opening was not played today to introduce FIR. That’s the opening that we used when we were brand new. And today the day we are dropping this episode, January 3rd, 2025 is the 20th anniversary.

FIR. We launched this podcast on January 3rd, 2005. Neville. At the beginning you mentioned that this is episode 442, and that’s correct. In terms of the renumbering that I started some time ago we did 824 episodes behind before that. So this is actually episode number 1000. [00:01:00] 266, and that does not take into account the FIR interviews, the FIR book reviews, the FIR lives, and some of the other things that we have done, were probably up around I would say 1400 episodes of podcasting altogether in the 20 years.

We’ve been at this, and today what we’re gonna do is take a look back. We wanna just have a chat about what it’s been like these last 20 years and tell you how all of this came about where we’re at and where we’re headed. This all started with a conversation. In November of 2004 you had heard of podcasting Neville.

I had heard of podcasting. And both of us had started blogs because we had heard of them. Assumed that this was going to be something that, would be important in the world of communications and that the best way to learn about it and be responsive to [00:02:00] our clients about it. We were both I was consulting at the time and you were working for an organization out of the Netherlands.

We thought the best way to learn about it would be to do it. And having listened to a lot of podcasts, we thought that we would break the mold and have. Co-hosts rather than one person just going on and on into a microphone. There was one co-hosted podcast at the time. It was the Dawn and Drew show, I think.

I believe they were a husband and wife, and it was meant to be humorous and rude. And we wanted to give something back to the communications industry. So we decided to start. This we posted an MP three test file to make sure the technology would work more on that coming up in December of 2004, and then launched our first episode, which listening to now just makes me cringe on the 3rd of January.

It was cringeworthy 2005. Yeah, it was cringeworthy the audio quality, not too brilliant as we hear it today, but [00:03:00] at the time, not too bad. Yeah. Among other things, I remember the audio artifacts that you would get over Skype, but we’ll talk more about the technology in a bit. Yeah. Over the years, we have changed the frequency.

This is, this has been a very inconsistent podcast as you’ll hear we started off weekly and the more we went along, the longer the episodes got because of the. The number of things there were to talk about and how much there was going on in the world of communication and technology. So then we went bi-weekly and at some point we went back to weekly.

Then when we reinvigorated this podcast not too long ago, we decided that it would be. Monthly. And then we started doing these midweek episodes because there were things we wanted to talk about and not wait for the monthly episode. So this, that’s one of the changes we went through.

There, there were a lot as you noted. I [00:04:00] agree. I think the frequency thing was something we, as you say too, and froze with a lot. We, but we were back in those days and hasn’t really changed a lot I think. Bursting at the seams to talk about topics that interested us quite a bit.

And as you said, when we started I was actually transitioning out of the company I worked for, I was based in Amsterdam at the time that had been acquired by someone else, and my job had gone, so I was looking for. Things to do. I’d picked up some interesting consulting work on blogs at that time, and I was thinking about podcasting quite a bit, but like you said I certainly wasn’t keen in doing a solo thing, much more interest to have someone to talk to.

And then lo and behold, you and I talked. The rest is history, as they say. That was good. That’s right. And I should point out that we knew each other through I-A-E-B-C and had collaborated before on at an IABC conference when online communication was taking place through CompuServe in the PR and marketing forum in the [00:05:00] IEBC hyperspace section of the PR sig.

We. Coordinated a and an effort among all of the IABC members in that space who were at the conference to essentially live log that conference that was a conference in Boston at that time. So that was, that’s right. That was quite, that was a precursor to what was to come that we now know is FIR.

But I think the yeah, that was the first instance I can remember of anybody live talking. Yeah. Yeah, the thinking about the word podcasting, there’s a lot of talk about this. Oh it was invented by so and so back in 1990, whatever. And the first person to use it was X and all that kind of stuff.

What resonated with me, the first reference to business podcasting was by a guy called Rex Hammock, who was a very prominent blogger at the time, A CEO blogger. As it happened, ran his own company. I remember in September of 20 of 2004, he wrote a blog post, and I’ll read the section that he mentioned.

He said talking a bit about executive communication using [00:06:00] social media or blogs. No one had the term social media at that time. He said, I can see a much quicker adoption timeline for CEO podcasting than CEO blogging. Stick a microphone in front of a CEO and say, what would you like to tell your employees today?

You get a much quicker buy-in than sitting a keyboard in front of ’em and saying, blog A messages for the world to read. A word of warning to corporate communicator, type says Rex. Don’t script it for the CEO With podcasting voices, not a metaphor for writing in a conversational, believable fashion, voice is actually voice.

That’s 20 years ago. I think that still resonates today, shall don’t it. It does, although it turns out to only be semi prescient because podcasting certainly has taken off to the point that it’s influential in presidential elections now. But I would say the number of companies doing internal podcasting is still relatively low.

There’s not a lot of CEOs talking into microphones to record a podcast and sharing with their employees what they wanna share that day. [00:07:00] A couple of other changes in format that we went through. One when we started, we were doing interviews within our episodes, and as they got longer and longer, one of our first thoughts was if we started an interview podcast, then our show could just be us and.

The interviews can be in the interview feed. So we split that out and as I mentioned before, that led to book reviews and a feed we used to call speakers and speeches when we were able to record our talks or get permission to share other people’s talks that we thought were relevant to our audience. We also changed the format.

We started off calling it four immediate release but as we started these other shows and calling them FIR book reviews. FIR this and FIR that we decided to change the name of this show to the Hobson and Holtz report which continued up through episode 8 24. But that’s when you took a hiatus.

Work got very busy and I changed the format of the show where I was putting together a panel of communicators. Yeah, every week which [00:08:00] was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. And then you joined me on a couple of those panels and then had a hankering to return to the show. Yeah, we, the hiatus started in 2015 where as you said it was a pretty a pretty busy, extremely challenging time.

And that was not long before I, I packed it all in and joined IBM which is was in the kind of wings as it were. And, but I had a, I did have a hankering, I was a guest on a couple of episodes in early 2017, and then we decided to get back together again. That was a, 2017 was a year I took off my dad had died and there was a lot of stuff going on.

So the timing from this contextual point of view was just right. And so we did that. And here we are. Here we are eight years on, still doing it. Oh one. One other thing to mention before we move on to a another related topic is that we have had a number of correspondence over the year. We. We don’t do that anymore.

But this began because we were getting audio comments from Lee Hopkins out of [00:09:00] Australia. And one day I said, if he keeps sending in these audio comments, we might as well just make him a correspondent. And then we, the next comment we got from him was, this is Lee Hopkins, your correspondent from started doing what was called the Asia report. And then when he wasn’t able to continue doing that, Michael Nestley stepped in and did, yeah. The Asia report. We also had regular reports from folks like Mark Story and David Phillips and Eric Schwartzman. Yeah. From Hollywood. Yeah, Michael Nesty was based in Singapore.

Lee was in, in Adelaide, in, in Australia. David Phillips is based here in the uk. Eric Schwar, as you said. In Hollywood. Mark, I think, was in Washington at that time. He was Eric’s now I believe in New York. I forget to not forget to mention Dan York, who’s the longest. Correspondent in this context, and he’s still with us filing his tech report every month.

He’s in the US East Coast, I think Vermont at the moment. So yeah, pretty global reach with all these guys. And thinking about Lee funnily enough, I remember [00:10:00] the I ident we created for him and you found a guy on one of those services that would create. Jingles and intros and all that kind of stuff to introduce.

Yeah. Today I would just use Suno. Yeah, the one he one, the one this for Lee, that was well done by the guy who recorded it was, put another shrimp on the Barbie. It was so characteristically stereotypically Australian was the point we were trying to get across. And Lee was a really good sport.

He really played to that well. So that was a, that was an interesting branding perspective. It was fun while it lasted. Yep. We’re gonna talk about some of the milestones that we recall from over the years. And Neville, you’re gonna take the lead on that. There are just two I wanted to mention before you do.

One is our interview with Richard Edelman. He agreed to, to speak with us. I believe he was at the gym. And, my, my guess is he was using a payphone at that point and dialing in somewhere. But it was a great interview. It was almost an hour. We covered a lot of ground. And then when was that?

Do you have the [00:11:00] end, the date? I don’t, I can find that out. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but it was in, and I don’t have a date on, it was in the, it was in the early days. So roughly would’ve been around what, 2006, 2007. That kind of time. Probably, maybe a little later. Okay. I’ll look it up while you’re covering some of the highlights and see if I can put a date on that.

Okay. As well as the other one. And this is one that I continue to reference today. In conversations with people, various contexts, and this was an interview we did with two gentlemen. One of them, I can’t recall his name but he had been an attorney in the trucking industry in the US and now was.

Crossing the United States meeting with hospitals to try to teach them that. Listening to your lawyers and sending doctors who have made a mistake during surgery into their rooms to hide and call their lawyers led to less favorable outcomes [00:12:00] than simply admitting to the family or the patient what had happened, why and how you’re gonna make it right.

The other was Helio Fred Garcia. From the Logos Institute, and I believe he’s at Columbia University. I’ve seen Fred speak oh, four or five times. We’ve had several conversations. I’ve read a couple of his books and that was a, just a spectacular conversation, just a real revelation in terms of the insights that are provided.

Into crisis communication despite everything we, we read and see and study and all the sessions we go to at conferences. You think you’ve heard it all, but this was just loaded with Revelations. It was a great interview. There’s a lot we could have picked to include in this episode to talk about milestones.

But if we’d done ’em all, we’ve been here to rival the two and a half hours episode that we did in 2020. So we haven’t done that. Good ones to mention. It was not easy. But there are quite a few that struck me [00:13:00] as memorable. Back in those very early days. In particular one that come, came to mind was the interview we did with Michael Wiley, who was the, his title at the time, director of New Media at general Motors, GM Communications.

And that was a milestone because General Motors was very active with a blog. Where the chief Blogger was a man called Bob Lutz, who’s big. Figure in the US auto industry. He was blogging about small block engines, the cars, the works, and the bog was called the GM Fast Lane Blog. And they were also experimenting with podcasting.

And so they were very early business adopters of. Blogs and podcasts long time long before we called it social media and indeed Michael’s, Michael Bo title directed New Media. That was a phrase that was in common use at the time. So we had a only a 20 minute conversation with Michael, but it was a kind of a scoop for us to get the huge interest at that [00:14:00] time in what a big corporation like General Motors is doing with new media.

So we had a conversation with Michael. That was a great chat and he told us what the primary goal’s worth for the Fast Lane blog, and that was a kind of a scoop to be able to share that fact publicly. Now, of course, looking back 20 years it was it doesn’t seem such a bigger deal. And indeed, I would say most people have gone through all that since then in, in what they’re trying to do from business point of view.

But he said, just to quote him. To get beyond our old ways of communication with a new direct line of communication to all stakeholders. That’s the primary objective. So unfiltered communication, that was a phrase Bob Lutz used quite a bit direct to the audience, bypassing the middleman, which is the PR firms, the ad agencies, the mainstream media, all that revolutionary notions at the time, not.

Unpopular, but contentious to many typical communications issuing press releases. Said [00:15:00] Michael, talking to the media who repurposed your messages for you, and there’s no way for customers to get their thoughts back to you. We’ve been wanting to create this direct line of communication so that our various stakeholders aren’t going to message boards to talk about us.

They have an opportunity to come and talk directly to us. We’re big into getting feedback from our customers, employees, and others. Taking their comments to become a better company and develop better products. We’re really getting some excellent feedback just about every discussion we have on the Fast Lean blog.

We’ve had an excellent dialogue. That may not sound a big deal, Dave. That was a huge deal back then. A big company like that. A public listed company talking about direct communication with customers and soliciting direct feedback, bypassing all the usual channels. That was revolutionary. So that was really great getting that opportunity to hear all those things.

And Michael told us at length other things too about how they were looking to expand that with other bloggers. But Bob Lutz was the star blogger without any question. He also told us a little bit [00:16:00] about their plans for podcasting. But it was the blog that was the big deal. And we had other things quite a bit too, actually.

We talked a bit about. How communicate, or rather this followed on a couple days later, actually, other communicators who listened to that interview went away and wrote up their opinions about it on their own blocks. Nowadays it’s just social medias. You gotta social networks and do all that kind of thing.

But they gave top marks to, to Michael and to our conversation. So a couple of quotes here. From people who are still around today. Lela Fever, common crafts, he said, I think it’s safe to say that GM is getting it Cluetrain style. This was great to hear from someone at gm. You should really check out the interview and for those listeners of you in the Gen Z arena, you might not have heard of C Cluetrain.

You should pay attention to what that was at the turn of the century. That was huge. The Clue Train Manifesto. Kevin O’Keefe at Lex Blob, he is definitely still around as Kevin, like large law firms. General Motors is learning from its first [00:17:00] blog. He said legal marketing professionals can learn much from GM and their PR blogging efforts.

Philippe Boreman, our friend Philippe in in Belgium and points further south in Northern Africa. He said GM has started to podcast and suddenly you see the topic being discussed everywhere. And Alan Moore Brett here in the uk. I haven’t seen Alan for quite a long time now, but he was pretty prominently active in those days.

He said Gmma being far more expansive in utilizing digital channels to build far more effective communications. With its stakeholders than just a blogging vice chairman. So you’ve got the sign of what others saw and how they felt. This was so important at the time, and I agree. It was pretty important.

So there was that one other one that I wanted to mention, even though it’s in passing, I think because we might have some updates on this, is we were really fortunate to secure, and this was quite a scoop, an interview with Steve Ruble when he was working at. Cooper Katz, a PR firm in New [00:18:00] York.

The prior, before his accelerated rise at Edelman, before he went there and he had a great blog, it was very influential called Microper Persuasion. And longtime listeners will remember that I’m sure I said in the blog posts at the time. These arguably Steve is arguably the most.

Prominent and influential blogger in the PR profession, either side of the Atlantic, and I think he really was Shell, so we had a great chat with him. You asked him and. No, that followed later. This was in March, 2005. The business week article was later than that. You asked him a question about how things are going with the blog and what developments are gonna be with that.

And he said, I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing blogging like a madman. And what I’m trying to do is really, I wanna shake the tree. I think that PR professionals need to really, get what’s going on here and jump on board. And I think that the three of us and the other 97 of us who currently blog in the PR industry, we need to do a better job of talking to the everyday PR man or [00:19:00] woman and what it means to them.

I. ’cause I think a little bit of what we’re doing now is talking amongst ourselves and talking amongst the people who do get it in social media land, actually in mainstream media land as well as, with the different opportunities we get to talk the press. But I think we need to get everyone on board.

I think we’re still having that conversation, Cheryl, don’t you? Although it’s probably 9,700 PR bloggers now. A thousand even. Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot more ways in which you can communicate. Now I noticed, by the way, just reminding myself he called it, he mentioned social media in that interview.

That was the first reference I remember hearing about what we now commonly call social media. It’s also worth remembering that Steve Ruble and Joe Jaffe started their podcast was it across the pond? Was that what it was called? Across the Sound? Across the sound shortly after we started ours.

And so did oh, it was Terry F and David Jones started inside PR after listening to FIR. Yep, it’s true. [00:20:00] And another milestone episode I felt was episode 100, a hundredth episode that suggested that we might have longevity with this thing that we started in 2005. The hundredth episode was actually on January the fifth, 2006.

So one year on from our first episode, we published a 100th episode. That’s an average. That works out about just under two a week. That’s about right, isn’t it? Yeah. ’cause we started, it wasn’t long before we went biweekly. You are right. And we, in that episode, we talked about a range of topics.

You using a CV as an RSS fees and a podcast. The World Economic Forum was podcasting and blogging, or had planned to at their upcoming event. What are the CEO’s biggest fears about these new media? Dan York’s report was in there and we had listeners, comments, discussion, upcoming interview with the music and all that.

But the comments. Lots of them. I think we’re gonna talk a bit more about comments in a while, aren’t we? That was the 100th episode. So we, we were quite well established then. We looking at the the show notes we [00:21:00] had a section we called from our US northeast correspondent.

That would be Dan, I would say. We had news briefs as we called them at the time, the snippets of information listener comments, discussion where people sent in audio or wrote text comments in the blog, and we discuss those comments and have a conversation about those comments that took up a big chunk of each episode in the show.

We don’t do that anymore. Things have evolved. Commenting is not a big thing, but we’ll talk about comments later on, I think. So that was the 100th episodes. A huge milestone for us in 2007 was the publication of the podcasting book that we collaborated on. And that was something that emerged from a conversation I had back in 2005.

So two years prior with Yvonne Devita, who was how would you describe Yvonne? A book agent doesn’t quite do it. She was more like an editorial publishing guide, had all the contacts in the publishing industry. [00:22:00] Yeah. She worked with people who were self-publishing and helped them get their book into shape.

We put together we planned this book. You and I had a conversation about it. You, at that time were already a well published author. I think you’d done four books at that time, and this is something you were quite well accustomed to. I wasn’t. I had the junior role in here as the, as.

It wasn’t a 50 50 venture. You did most of the writing, but the book was out. It was the second book. Of worth that focused on podcasting from a business perspective. The first was Todd Cochran’s book that he published in late 2005. I think I’m right. I bought it. I remember when it came out. But our book was modestly called How to Do Everything with Podcasting.

The bus, the focus was very much on business and it came out in June, 2007. That was when it was available in the us from Amazon and other online sellers, as well as normal books sellers, and it was made available on Amazon in the UK and July the first of that year. We had great reaction to it.

Shell, didn’t [00:23:00] we had warm reviews everywhere you looked. It was really heartening to see all of that. At least my point of view as the kind of junior author, if you will. Yeah, we got some good feedback on it. Not everybody agreed with everything that was in it. If you read the reviews on Amazon, there’s one person who thought it should have been better Fax checked.

But I couldn’t find any specifics that he was arguing about. No, I would urge you not to read it now. It is woefully out of date, especially in terms of most of the technology. I think the things that are still accurate have to do with types of microphones and the like, everything else. Yeah. Has changed.

Yeah. I think, I guess only thing I would add is about how to do a business podcast is still valid though. Yeah. A bit like Todd’s book, it’s outta date when you talk about the equipment. Yeah. And even the reasons why you’d want to podcast. And the tools available to you. The services are available to you and how you go about it.

Totally changed. I agree. So that is worth bearing in mind. I would say to anyone, yes, go and read it. If you wanna look back at what things were like back in [00:24:00] those days. I would argue though that nevertheless, in the business sector, there are still some valid insights. That still apply today?

Trouble is how do you separate it out from the stuff that doesn’t apply today? That’s the trick. Don’t rely on this, but it was a milestone for us in 2007, two years later, after that first conversation, we published a book. I think we got some more things to talk about that are a little bit later.

But let’s stay with with that period from 2007 up to about 2015. So seven, seven years or so. And some of the things that we were doing during that time, for instance we used to not. I wouldn’t say regularly, as in every year, two or three times. We did quite comprehensive listener surveys.

And remember at that time we had sponsors Reagan report Reagan Communications with the Prime sponsor. You’ll probably remember the others. Chip Griffin, I think, was was the one who started sponsor. Custom scoop chip, and they would do the media monitoring minute, which I think Jen zing pre what a lot of other podcasts ended up doing, which was having [00:25:00] substantive content from their sponsors rather than a pitch.

And Jen Zing enzyme ended up coming in and doing some of those too. She at the time was, she was great of chips. Yeah. We also had Igloo software and there were some others in there that I. I can’t remember that we had as sponsors, right? So that was the kind of the golden age of sponsors paying money to be associated with our podcast.

Not enough to retire on or even take that cruise we talked about back in those days. Shell, but it was nice and it signified. People had a belief that. This was worth supporting and they’re willing to put some money into it. Oh. Yeah. So of course that was another one. It’s worth before. It’s worth mentioning, again, a thanks to all the sponsors at that time because that was the pinnacle from that point of view.

It was good. And we were able to do some of the things that we were, we planned to do with knowing that we had people like Reagan and others who were supporting us in that regard. It’s probably worth now talking about the [00:26:00] technical challenges you mentioned at the beginning of this episode.

How and how we started and I’ll mention just briefly ’cause I know this is gonna come into Mix Miners, but that was a bit later on. But Skype was instrumental. It wasn’t a challenge. Skype was an enabler for us, wasn’t it? Skype was an enabler and a challenge. We would not have been able to do this if Skype had not been around in the early days.

No, because the cost of an international call and the technical requirements for recording to record and international call at the quality levels that were required even in the earliest days for podcasting. Even on the Daily Source code the first podcast, Adam Curry. That Adam Curry, yeah.

Started as he was developing the podcast catcher, which is more that we’ll talk about in terms of the technology was saying that if it’s not listenable, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, people won’t listen. So we knew that the audio quality had to be, it couldn’t be a phone call and Skype, no was the answer.

The problem was that [00:27:00] you couldn’t record both ends of a Skype call and the idea of a double. Which is where we each record locally. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to us, but it hadn’t. But so we came up with this thing involving virtual cables, which was a piece of software that you would install that would allow you to run two instances of Skype simultaneously.

So I would have one running and have that output going to one recording device and the other one running and going to another. Recording device. Initially we were recording on the computer, but that was unreliable at the time. Keep in mind, there was no cloud yet at this point. So we did that for a while and then I would mix them together in, audacity, which was the free audio editing tool that most podcasters were using at the time because nobody wanted to invest in the professional editing software. Podcasting [00:28:00] hadn’t gotten beyond the hobby level at that point. The research I did led me to the mix minus, which allowed me to do this through a single soundboard out to separate recording devices, which worked really well because that way I could use the same audio settings on everything and create a more consistent sounding show.

And now of course, we’re recording on Riverside. There were also times that we were using some other tools that were available out there for some of the stuff that we were doing FIR Live. And I promised I would let you know when the Edelman interview and. The Fred Garcia interview happened, and they both happened on FIR live, not FIR interviews FIR live number 11 15 years ago, 2009 was the one with Richard Edelman.

And the, the one with Helio, Fred Garcia and Jim Golden was the name of that [00:29:00] attorney was number 14 of FIR live on May 26th. And we used a tool for those that was called Blog Talk Radio. And what blog Talk Radio let you do was dial everybody dialed in and had a conversation, like it was a talk radio show.

And that, so they dialed in on, not via Skype or anything, but it was an interface on the web, could use their phone. There was a, an 800 number phone you could give them. I couldn’t remember. That’s cool. And it would show them as waiting and it gave you all the controls that you would have if you were a radio show host.

It was really revolutionary at the time. It’s interesting hearing that, it’s like the hybrid stage from the transition from the analog days of radio. To being digital and indeed now, of course is nothing, is way more advanced now than it ever was back then.

That was that bridge period Skype, as you mentioned. Absolutely. Was. A hu huge disruptor of telecommunications industry globally. I remember when Skype first came out of [00:30:00] 2003, I signed up for it straight away and was using the Skype out feature, which you paid for. It was about the 10th of the cost of doing normal phone calls, so the audio quality wasn’t.

Too bad, but for our point of view, it wasn’t brilliant, but it was better than the phone lines and it was easy. So that was another signal of of where, change was coming from a technological point of view. The challenges that it brought, and I wanna just mention briefly in this. At around that early period was something else that happened that was truly revolutionary, which was apple supporting podcasts in iTunes when they released iTunes 4.9 in June, 2005.

Not long after we started that drove. Immediate interest and awareness in podcasting. And I’m pretty sure we had a ben benefit from that in a very small way because that was aimed mainly at lit by differentiator, let’s call ’em consumer type podcasts that Dawn and Drew show you mentioned. And by the way, I always found them rude.

Not [00:31:00] funny, but that’s ’cause I’m a Brit, not American, I suspect. But I think the the the gates were opened with that, even though now. No, now it’s 15 years on, 20 years on, and it’s 20 years on. It’s taken the market in whole new areas where we hear stories about, the hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes created every week and the millions of podcasts that are out there.

The mind boggles with the numbers. The quality’s improved though, but getting back now to that it’s hard to imagine then what we’re able to do now. The cloud solved a lot of problems. We used Zencaster for a while, although I could never resolve the issue of drift. So our, yeah, two feeds didn’t align and I was having to do a lot of slicing and dicing of Yeah.

A nightmare audio feeds to make them align. And we. Then went to a double lender where we would record locally and you would use a service to send me your file. And that was pretty easy to sync up. I’ve been using Adobe audition for a long time now as opposed to the free audacity. And now we’re on [00:32:00] Riverside fm.

The number of podcast tools that have become available as the size of the podcasting space has grown is. Really impressive. This is everything from hardware, all in one podcasting, hardware tools to software like Riverside. It’s not the only option out there. There are several out there that are available that allow you to do this and factory in the video component.

Since we know that a lot of people listen to their podcast now on YouTube, it’s important to have that video component and we’re able to add that. Now, if you go to the FIR. Channel on YouTube you can watch. Not that there’s anything to see, it’s just two talking heads. But I suspect that most people who find it and listen on YouTube aren’t really watching.

It’s just in the background. Yeah. While they’re doing something else. But yeah, it is important to be there and Riverside is one of the tools that makes that possible. Yeah. Yeah. It is it’s taken the technological development in audio recording in the way we are doing [00:33:00] it right up into the realm of professional radio studios and so forth that do have done this kind of thing for a long time.

It, it had a big impact, I think, on people’s. Willingness to listen to podcasts, where now the expectation is they want the same listening experiences they get when they tune into to DAB radio, for instance, a pristine quality audio. It’s.

They’re accustomed to more and more professional podcasts. Precisely. You look at things like precisely serial, and that’s what they hear. So when they hear something like ours, if it doesn’t measure up in terms of the quality of the audio, yeah, but I’m talking mostly from the listen experience point of view more than anything where back then I.

It was outside the realm, even with kind of, okay, we’ve got tons of money, we could do this, which was never the case. It’s outside the realm of that. Back then, professional quality microphones, the kind of stuff in radio studios. They cost a lot of money. Now I. That cost barrier is gone and both you and I have got equipment and we have purchased equipment over that of recent [00:34:00] years in particular that we couldn’t have probably dreamed of doing back in 2005 or so.

So we’ve got the ability, so I’m in my new garden studio in Somerset, in England. That’s where we moved to in October and built this place. It’s soundproofed. I’ve noticed in recordings I’ve done recently, the quality is. Completely, a hundred percent better than it ever was before with the soundproofing panels.

So decent microphone. The pop filter you can probably see on the video. And other things, the software, Adobe addition that I use as you do. There’s a few other tools I use occasionally, but I always come back to Adobe because it’s so good. And we’re doing this on Riverside, as you say, and that uses a mix of.

Storing the recordings on your hard drive and uploading it in packets as we are going along. So it’s good to have a good internet connection. Most of the times people do have great internet connection, gigabit internet. I had that before we moved. That’s a work in progress still to get it like that in the new place.

It will maybe a [00:35:00] month or so away yet. All those things combine to to provide. A means by which we could pro produce and share content where the quality of the listing experience was really good. And if the content is good, then we’re onto a winner. Now, we don’t hear much from people these days on this.

Maybe we need to ask people directly, so perhaps the time comes into the survey to do. But I think. We are at a point where two decades in, we’ve done we’ve our own experience has been great. The journey’s been fantastic. The challenges and hurdles are all part of the excitements and experience of doing this.

It’s challenging, getting dates in and all that stuff. Sometimes given our time zone difference, which has always been the case. You are in California, I’m in the uk, which is eight hours ahead of you. It was worse when exam.

Yeah twice a year. We’re an hour closer. But but we’ve managed it and it’s, it works out. Okay. I’m just thinking back just a few years. In fact it’s to 20 I. 20. [00:36:00] So the, actually the beginning of 2020 in January, that was the formal start of the COVID-19 pandemic where we did an episode that you put this together.

She and we called it, or I did in my post describing it, maybe the longest single episode of a podcast ever. Two and a half hours this episode. To now that’s a typical episode of. Of this week in Google. And I did just listen to a five and a half hour episode of a podcast. No, that’s, that, that’s a whole different ballgame.

But this week in tech with God, what’s his name? The the John Devore, right? Neil Port. Leo LaPorte, right? This we Tech, yeah. Leo Laport. That’s right. The network. That was the benchmark for long form content. But this one you gathered 17, as we described it, the smartest communicational professionals in the business.

I. For their take on FIR effectively. And let me run off the names here. Christopher Barger contributed. Jeannie Dietrich, chip Griffin, Lee Hopkins. Marshall Kirkpatrick. Sharon McIntosh. Rachel [00:37:00] Miller. Scott Monty Christopher s Penn, Jen Phillips, Eric Schwartzman. Bill Spaniel, David Spark, mark Story, Andrea VAs, Brad Whitworth, and Dan York.

They were all in there. We had Donna Papa Costa, who was a podcaster back in those early days, created our identity, our voice identity, the podcast for communicators in her unique voice, and that was a terrific labeling for us. This is episode under the new naming episode one 1 91 that was published on the 21st of January.

It’s worth a listen to what all these guys have to say. That’s only I. Not long ago, five years ago. And it’s only got better since then, shall I would argue. ’cause we then talked about the we had another kind of note of where we were at back in January of this year. We talked about, two decades of podcasting that was a bit premature. It was in 19 years, but we had something similar. And so we’ve gone that route. That’s [00:38:00] why, one reason why we don’t have any of those testimonials in this episode. ’cause what more is there to say that these guys haven’t that episode though?

January, 2020 is really worth a listen. There’s some very smart comments from all those folks I’ve mentioned, so that was great. So that takes us to today. There’s other things we could talk about too, but there’s so much there. I think, one other thing to mention is we have done, when we have been able to is live recordings together.

When we’ve been at events typically, or. I’ve been over in California, or you’ve been over in the uk The last time we did this, actually face to face shell was when you and Michelle came over and stayed with us in 2022. And we did a, we did an episode in my dining room where we had some difficulties with microphones, but we actually managed it in the ed.

And there’s other examples. There’s a, an infamous one actually of a, when we were at a conference, I think it was in 2006. In in California and there’s some great photos, you and I sitting at a [00:39:00] table and people talking to us in the venue. And it was, we were with headphones on laptops, mixers as well.

The works was there too. You’ve done a couple at conferences and we’ve managed that. We’ve we’ve always been on the leading edge of doing this stuff, haven’t we? We did one where I was speaking, I can’t remember where it was or to whom, but I think it was in or near Boston. And I got everything set up at the conference and brought you in.

And we did an episode in front of everybody. Yeah. And one of the segments was them asking questions and being able to hear you in addition to me. And then that was published as an episode. I’d have to do a little digging to find. That particular episode, but that was that was a technical challenge in those days.

Yeah. And a lot of fun. We’ve also, over the years, had themes that have seeped into many episodes during a. 10, 12 month period. Second, [00:40:00] life was a big one of those. Certainly AI finds its way into every episode now. And by the way, speaking of the technology it should be no surprise to anybody that Riverside fm, that tool that we use for recording has added.

Many AI features that we take advantage of in editing. One of those that I just love is its ability to remove filler words, which is also, by the way, a feature of d script tool that I also use in producing this show. It can also fix the sound. It wasn’t that long ago. I. Neglected to confirm that my good microphone was the one being used to record.

It ended up being the webcam microphone and I, it sounded like I was in a tin can or on a. Landline telephone. And I ran it through magic Sound on Riverside fm and it sounded like I was in a studio talking into an expensive microphone. These technologies are remarkable. Yeah. And they are.

We’ll continue talking about ’em well into the future, I’m [00:41:00] sure. Yeah I agree. I’m sure. It’s funny you mentioned Second Life. That’s a, I’m glad you mentioned that because that was an experiment we did. That was a milestone where we established a presence in Second Life, and we experimented with things that were new at that time, such as being able to.

Pass audio to and fro second life, to outside the virtual world, into the real world. We did a number of episodes in Second Life. We even had a storefront in Second Life, like a place where you could hang out with your virtual avatar and build a community in Second Life. We tried that a bit.

That was a great experiment that we did. I think on that point about. Riverside fm. Yeah, you’re right. These tools are fantastic, what you can now do, and it is something that we’re gonna see a lot more of. So I’m thinking maybe I. Think of the time we’ve got left for this episode. It’s a quick tour over 20 years, and we are linking out to other stuff you might wanna listen to, like that episode with 17 smart professionals in there talking.

Might be worth saying. What’s [00:42:00] next? What’s coming up? Not so much for us, although we might touch on that, is in the industry as a whole everyone’s doing analytics. We’re seeing lots of very interesting. Data being produced and the interpretation of that data to suggest that podcasting, and I’ve been hearing this for years, shell, we have been hearing this for years, that it’s poised to take off.

It’s poised to break into the mainstream in the workplace. I arguably, it’s there, but it’s not mass, but that. That’s okay, because this is not about just getting big numbers. We hear enough about big numbers. We hear there are hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes produced every week. There are millions of podcasts.

Arguably the these are selective choices by people who with content that appeals to niche audiences. That’s one of the beauties. Nevertheless, you also then hear about. Some podcasts that are literally in the realm of broadcast radio in terms of audience reach, the likes of Joe Rogan in America, who’s in the Millions.

There are people making serious money outta [00:43:00] this. Spotify, notably, we’re a niche podcast. We set out the outset to reach professionals in organizational communication around the world with insights on tech developments in communication particularly, and that’s how we’ve continued doing this. Now we do this.

It’s for love, not for money. We don’t have sponsors right now, and we haven’t sought any really. EE even when we did have sponsors we weren’t getting rich. It was covering our costs. Oh, no absolutely. That, that, that was why we weren’t doing it for the kind of enrichment point of view.

It was the joy of doing it and being able to articulate things and engage with like-minded others, but in terms of what’s coming. But our sponsors all came to us too. We never, they did, went out and said, would you like to sponsor our show? You’re absolutely right. They, we’ll have links in the show notes of some of the reports about what’s next for podcasting.

And you can read yourself, there’s a lot of of opinion out there. Some of it is very informed and highly credible. One of my, [00:44:00] what I think is one of the best looks at the future of podcasting is from Riverside itself, Riverside fm, where they talk about nine trends. Coming up in in during this year and well into next year they talk about podcast growth and they segregate or they segment their research into what’s the future look like for individual creators?

What’s it look like for businesses and companies FAQs on the future of podcasting? And I think it is something that our constants I would argue that people talk about. On what is coming next the change that’s coming, they talk about, you mentioned that AI is gonna have a big role. There’s a lot of it already in place and in our experience on Riverside, for instance making podcasts as lives easier, I.

By taking a lot of the heavy lifting out of the of the audio manipulation process. I don’t mean the editing so much, although you could do it for that too. But like you said, taking out the ums and the ahs, for instance optimizing the audio quality, things like that they could speed up [00:45:00] podcasting workflows and applies to.

Every industry. So things like that’s more accessible. Upping expectations through the quality that is good. We use a tool, I discovered this about a year ago, called Crumple Pop. It’s a lovely name, isn’t it? Based in Florida. They produce a suite of tools that do magical things to audio. For instance, you are talking in a room that’s got a lot of echo ’cause there’s no soundproofing or anything.

This tool will eliminate that. No one would. Ever know that you had done this in anything other than the studio. If you are out in the street and there’s a heavy wind blowing and you don’t have a pop filter, or even if you do a wind filter it’ll eliminate all of that and general other things that it could do, some of which are quite technical.

Adobe Audition has tools now in the latest versions that are AI driven. That do things like normalize different audio tracks with literally a couple of clicks before you had to drag little things on the audio waveform and do all that kind of stuff. It’s a lot easier now. And as I said, you are finding that AI is behind much of this.[00:46:00]

Other things that in in Riverside’s predictions they’re talking about content repurposing where AI takes audio and converts it into other formats, such as short form video. And that’s something that we are seeing more and more podcasters doing. We’ve, we are doing it, as you mentioned earlier, she two talking heads and audio as a pod, as a MP four file on YouTube.

Some people like the format. That way it’s not a too heavy lift to do that, to meet that desire. It does mean though that there is further change coming from a technical point of view. We’ve gotta keep on top of that, which we do video. So video’s a big deal for podcasting. I still. Talk about podcasting, meaning audio, although I don’t say audio, podcast.

I say podcasting. And then there’s video podcasting, but that’s just me. They’ll always just podcasting at some point. Voice search optimization is where voice controlled AI assistance, like I. Google, Alexa and Siri that we traditionally used [00:47:00] to will help put your podcast rank highly when a listener searches for yours via their AI assistant.

And we’re already seeing some of the signs of that. And of course the big disruptor in that area is tools like Perplexity, AI and chat, GPT and others who are also jockeying for position to be the preferred search tool. So there’s stuff like this there’s a lot more, and we’ll share the link to their predictions so you can read it.

Private podcasting meaning it’s offering loyal community paying subscribers. We don’t do paying, but I can see that being a big deal. For many short form content. We do some of that. We always struggle on keeping the episodes short and people still talk about, Hey, can’t you cut your 90 minutes down is too long, and you get a bit tired of saying, hit the pause button and listen to the other bit tomorrow, you.

Some people like the long form. I certainly do. So it’s great. So there’s lots of interesting things tips to stay ahead. They point these out, stay on top of the latest, pay [00:48:00] attention to what’s going on record high quality content. We aim to do that, and I think we deliver on that because our quality is quite good.

There’s a lot more to look at and I wonder. Here we are in the beginning of 20, 25, 20 years since our first episode, what the next five years will look like. And I’m not looking 10 years because I think it’s gonna be entirely different. Two indicators of where we’re headed with this, I think first of all, is that you’re now seeing news reports that quote people who said something in a podcast.

Yeah. This could be anything from a report in People magazine about a celebrity trashing a colleague to a. Politician making some revelation that gets reported because they were talking no names mentioned, right in the friendly confines of a podcast that was hosted by somebody who was on the same side of the political fence as them.

So podcasting is now where news is broken. Used to be Twitter now it seems to be podcasts. The other thing. [00:49:00] That I think it’s important to recognize, and I referenced it earlier, is that while in the 2024 presidential campaign here in the us Kamala Harris’ campaign spent over a billion dollars on traditional media.

They spent far less in the Trump campaign, but he appeared on podcasts that appealed to the bro community, Uhhuh, and they turned out. For him. So I think in the post-election analysis, a lot of people had said podcasting is one of those places where politicians are going to have to. Invest time and perhaps even some money down the road because that’s where influence is wielded.

So it’s taken a long time for podcasting to get there. It was a lot of years that people said this is always going to be a hobbyist thing. It’s never gonna go mainstream. And that’s gone mainstream. And partly that’s because of the shift. Technologically from needing pod catching software which Adam Curry developed.

And he had to be fairly [00:50:00] technical savvy to use these things to now just using an app on your phone to get the podcast you want, and listening in your car when it’s. Connected to your car’s entertainment system. Discoverability has changed. It used to be a nightmare. Apple changed some of that.

And now the podcast apps have discoverability features and even algorithms that recommend podcasts to you based on your current listening habits. I think this is all going to continue to accelerate. The momentum continues to build and I think the influence available in podcasting is going to continue to increase.

I also think it’s going to be a space that makes room for everybody. You could be the Joe Rogan with. 40 million listeners, you could be us with, a thousand or so reaching out to the PR community that’s actually interested in staying up on the intersection of communication and technology.

But I don’t [00:51:00] see an end in sight for podcasting. I just see more growth and expansion. Yeah. And influence. I’m with you on that. Indeed. I’m with you on that. Indeed, much of what I’m seeing, people reporting on what they think is coming next is aligned with that sentiment. So exciting times ahead if you’re a podcaster.

If you are not yet a podcaster, think about it. Exciting times ahead await you if you decide to go this route, but like you said, she. We started in the days where you needed a computer and that’s really the only way you could do this. If you are in a generation, a lot younger than we are, you are accustomed li most likely to a mobile device.

Talk, tap, publish. That’s it. No fancy time spent on, on editing and audio and all that kind of business. It’s all, instant. That said I see I listen to a number of podcasts on in the car that are produced that way, that are long form content, 45 minutes plus. And I listen with one ear on what am I hearing quality wise.

I’m wondering how they produce this. [00:52:00] It’s all really remarkable where things have come since those early days. For us, though, we’re available on any device no matter what. And hopefully your listening experience will be great. However you get your f. It has been a lot of fun looking back over the last 20 years.

The next episode will launch our next 20 years. No idea what we’ll be talking about, but it will undoubtedly be next week, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release. Happy anniversary, Neville. Thank you. She likewise.

The post FIR #443: From RSS to ChatGPT — FIR’s 20-Year Tech Communications Chronicle appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Astroturfing, smear campaigns, social media manipulation, unauthorized release of private information, defamation, character assassination, whisper campaigns, media planting, and gaslighting.

These activities are undertaken by the seamiest, most ethically challenged public relations practitioners. While there are far more PR professionals who abide by ethical codes, the bad actors get all the attention, leading to a sordid reputation for the industry that some believe we will never be able to overcome.

The latest example comes from the agency representing actor/producer/director Justin Baldoni, who responded to accusations of inappropriate behavior by engaging an agency that employed all of the tactics listed above. Initially, the campaign had the desired effect but ultimately backfired as the campaign itself drew more attention than the original allegations.

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the controversy and address the idea of requiring licensing or certification of all PR practitioners and whether it would weed out those who find codes of ethics to be mere inconveniences to be ignored.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

Blake Lively’s claims against Justin Baldoni put spotlight on ‘hostile’ Hollywood tactics
New York Times’s TikTok report
Robert Pickard on LinkedIn: ‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine
Blake Lively Accuses Justin Baldoni of Sexual Harassment
Why Justin Baldoni’s War Against Blake Lively Worked So Well
Justin Baldoni’s Crisis PR Has Links To Other Controversial Celebrities
I’ve Seen Celebrity P.R. Tactics at Work. Blake Lively Is Not Alone. (New York Times)
What Is Astroturfing? Experts Break Down the PR Tactic Used in Alleged Smear Campaign Against Blake Lively

Raw Transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 442 of four immediate release. I’m Shel Holtz. And I’m Neville Hobson. And we are recording this the day after Christmas Day. And this topic is very timely news wise. It’s in the news, but it has depth of distinct interest to communicators. And this is the huge kerfuffle surrounding the actors, Blake Lively and Justin Bald, and the aftermath of the work they did on the film.

It ends with us. It’s become a flashpoint for ethical discussion in the PR and entertainment industries. The incident as covered by many, the B-B-C-C-E-O today, New York Times that I’ve seen today, in fact and many others, showcases a disturbing confluence of workplace misconduct allegations and aggressive reputation management strategies.

With continuing allegations over egregious behaviors by PR pros and agencies, what are the [00:01:00] impacts for practitioners and the profession? We’ll address this question right after this.

The conflict began during the production of It Ends with us where Blake Lively accused Baldon and producer Jamie Heath of boundary violations and inappropriate behavior, prompting the studio Wayfarer to implement safeguards such as hiring an intimacy coordinator. Despite these measures, tensions persisted particularly over creative control.

Lively ultimately won significant input into the film’s final cut and received a producer credit as the film approached its release. Private messages revealed a coordinated effort by Baldon and his crisis PR team, led by Melissa Nathan to damage Lively’s reputation. I. The campaign allegedly involved amplifying negative narratives about Lively online while suppressing stories of b’s.

Alleged misconduct techniques included fostering untraceable social media narratives, leveraging media connections to plant damaging stories, and utilizing [00:02:00] tactics reminiscent of campaigns seen in other high profile cases like that of Johnny Depp and Amber Hurt. Documents disclose that Baldon and his team sought to portray lively as difficult to work with and opportunistic, aiming to shift public focus from his actions to her perceived shortcomings.

This strategy significantly impacted Lively’s career and personal brand resulting in a decline in her haircare product, sales and public backlash against her. The PR tactics used in this case highlight the ethical quandaries surrounding the industry’s role in reputation management. The notion that PR professionals could systematically attempt to bury an individual raises questions about the need for stricter professional standards such as licensing or accreditation for PR practitioners.

Something Shel and I have discussed many times in this podcast. B’S public image has remained relatively intact despite the revelations. While Lively has suffered reputational damage. Critics argue this outcome [00:03:00] underscores the pervasive double standards in how society evaluates men and women in public controversies.

Allegations of harassment and subsequent retaliation illustrate persistent issues within Hollywood’s power dynamics. The case exemplifies how crisis management can ve into ethically dubious territory. Real world consequences for individuals and public discourse. It also strengthens the argument for introducing licensing requirements for PR practitioners to enforce ethical standards and accountability.

A number of PR practitioners have weighed in on this, especially on LinkedIn. Many are highly critical of the alleged egregious behavior and actions of some PR practitioners. But before we look at what others have to say, she, what’s your take on the PR issues arising from all of this? It leads me to re reiterate my belief that we do need licensing or a requirement for certification for people to work in this industry because there are no repercussions to the agency that [00:04:00] engaged in this behavior and this behavior is beyond the pale.

I mean if you look at the codes of ethics of any. Association out there that represents people in the communications industry. P-R-S-A-I-A-B-C-C-P-R-S-C-I-P-R, they have violated several of these truth and accuracy. Uh, is one. They engaged in defamation and they spread falsehoods.

The core of her lawsuit is the accusation. That his team spread these false and damaging stories about her, and that violates code of ethics, which does emphasize. Honesty and accuracy in communications. They misused influence his position. And I think this has come out more strongly since this story has gained the legs that it has.

He has been a prominent advocate for women’s rights. They he’s misusing his influence there to a attack. A woman potentially harm a colleague [00:05:00] is a. Breach of trust. There’s a lack of transparency involved here, which is another PR principle of, fostering open and honest communication.

The smear campaign was conducted covertly. She didn’t know about it. She didn’t have the opportunity to respond to any of these accusations. The harassment and the smear campaign. This is potential abuse of power dynamics in the entertainment industry where I’m really glad that I don’t work.

Uhhuh I should note that my father was in the entertainment industry and I I was exposed to it a lot growing up and determined early on that I really didn’t want anything to do with it. But PR professionals do have a responsibility to ensure that their actions don’t. Enable this kind of abuse.

And I think the thing that disturbs me the most is that there are ways that a PR agency could have taken on this account and handled it well. By prioritizing truth and accuracy, I. I [00:06:00] absolutely advise against defaming the person that is on the other side of this argument facilitating open communication, upholding professional standards, all could have been brought to bear in a strategy.

I. That would have worked. Th this is the easy way out for Balone. And, frankly I think that the people who did this should be ashamed of themselves. I’m sure they’re not, I’m sure they’re very proud of the results of this. Although, to be honest, the more this story grows, the worse it is for bald his reputation.

It was looking pretty good for a while, but the more discussion there is around this, the more it’s backfiring against him because he’s being seen as a guy who hired an agency that did these things. You also, because this has gotten so public, have a lot of people coming to Blake Lively’s defense, including Colleen Hoover.

Who wrote the book that the movie was based on, I don’t know if she wrote the screenplay or was heavily involved in the film, but when you have all of these [00:07:00] people publicly standing behind Lively it’s not going to stand well for Balone. So ultimately, I don’t think this worked out for ’em, but only because it got the amount of attention it did.

This PR agency takes on work like this all the time. I don’t know. If there have been previous instances where they have taken the same approaches and it just hasn’t, gotten the kind of exposure that this assignment did. But in, in a world in which they had to be certified in order to do this kind of work the certifying agency or the licensing agency would be able to revoke it because of the violation of ethics, and they wouldn’t be able to do this work anymore.

That doesn’t happen, as I’ve said a million times. Anyone can hang out a shingle that says public relations on it, and take on clients and behave any way they want. And that’s what happened here. Yeah, it looks that way, doesn’t it? And what’s, what I, what sort of takes me aback a bit too is the strong way in which the agency [00:08:00] defends what they’re doing is just doing their job.

I saw just before we started recording this, an article in. People magazine that was in my feed that I’m following for this, I thought, oh, someone’s mentioning astroturfing finally has it come back again? I don’t think it ever went away. No. In fact, there’s a, the text in the narrative, which I thought was absolutely to the point.

It says, at the core of live’s allegations is astroturfing a strategy designed to manipulate public opinion by creating the illusion of grassroots support. Or backlash. The complaint claims that Baldoni Crisis PR firm, the agency group, let’s tag. T-A-G-P-R coordinated social media efforts to portray her as controlling and difficult during the film’s production.

And it, it notes a paragraph later emphasizing that they were simply doing their job because everyone does this. I think there’s absolute bollocks to use a technical term we have over here in the uk. I can’t believe that for a second. But there are many who do though. And thing I, I wanna point, I wanna mention, just [00:09:00] share really some of the conversation that’s been going on LinkedIn in particular.

Bob Pickard, who’s the name I think you are familiar with Shel. Oh, sure. He wrote just for Christmas, I felt nauseous reading this article. We can bury anyone inside a Hollywood smear machine in the New York Times and that is a really good article I have to say on this kerfuffle, no proper professional communicator with even a similar crim of ethics could ever debase themselves using such gutter tactics of character assassination.

No genuine crisis, public relations expert, quote unquote, could conceive of writing down such slimy nonsense or so lacking in judgment. As we can bury anyone. All too often celebrity publicity does not equal communications professionalism. And there are quite a number of comments to to that post that he made.

There’s also some, another one I want to reference too, which is in the House of Marketing and PR communications group on Facebook. That was posted again just for Christmas Day by Helen Reynolds. And she has an [00:10:00] interesting take here. She starts by saying popular, unpopular possibly a popular unpopular opinion.

I work in comms, not pr, it’s an old debate, but this story about Melissa, Nathan, that’s the the PR person mentioned earlier, has made me embarrassed. I. The popular idea is and always has been, that smearing people and coverups are the job. I don’t want to be associated with pr. She says, ironically, PR as a profession has the worst reputation.

The term is permanently tainted. She says, and she had responses from a number of people who say hang on a minute. You’re tying the whole profession like this. The whole profession’s not like this. That’s I guess, a point of all of this because it is highlighting what negatives in the profession of which.

That’s what’s getting the attention, not the good the profession does. So this debate, no doubt on this angle in particular the professionalism or lack of certain people who work in the PR industry is highlighting this whole point about, wait a minute if this was some kind of. Like doctors, like lawyers and so [00:11:00] forth, where you are ju you are in a sense, judged by others before you get a license.

You have to apply and be verified and all that kind of stuff. You wouldn’t have this you, I think that’s probably a little naive saying you wouldn’t have this you would still, but you’d be able to do something about it if you do. We’ve talked about this lots of times before. Your view is strong on this.

I know. I don’t disagree with you either. I don’t believe this is gonna happen. I hate to say it like that. No this might get lots of debate going such as what we are having in this podcast. What I’m seeing people writing on social networks like LinkedIn, will anything actually happen. It, as Helen mentions, popular, unpopular, or possibly popular un god, a mouthful to get tongue twist, to get you word.

Popular. Popular, possibly unpopular opinion. Because it’s clearly isn’t something front of mind to many in our, in this profession. I, I don’t see a kind of groundswell of people demanding, something must be done about this. I don’t see any of that. I don’t see the professional bodies commenting on this publicly [00:12:00] at all.

So clearly this is not, embarrassing enough to force action. So what’s to be done, do you think? I don’t know what other PR agencies would do if their billings are fine. And as we reported recently talking about the Edelman layoffs and trauma at other agencies billings aren’t fine right now.

So maybe this is the time for some self-reflection in the industry. But I think. One, one of the challenges that you face with the reputation of PR as an industry is that because you have people like this and agencies like this engaging in behaviors like this and that’s what gets the attention and how much attention does it get in the public media when a PR agency has a successful engagement that.

Was done completely ethically that ticked all of the boxes on codes of ethics it never gets talked about. So what does that lead to? It leads to [00:13:00] portrayals of public relations, people in the movies and TV and novels as being more like this individual than the people that you, and I know Bob Picard for example.

Who, who do. Engage in their practice based on a solid foundation of ethics. I, as you mentioned, the problem is that there are no consequences. There’s nothing that’s gonna happen to her. I. She’s looking at all this bad press right now over this, but how many celebrities are looking at this and say, yeah, she’s the one I want in my corner.

Something bad happens. I imagine she’s gonna do rather well as a result of this, sadly. But, by the way I should note my view that licensing or a mandatory certification should be. A requirement is 180 degrees from where I used to be on this issue. When I heard people talk about it, my argument was no, because if you look at the professions that do require this, the [00:14:00] law, accounting, medicine.

Things like that, there’s one right way to do things and in public relations there’s a tremendous amount of creativity and a tremendous amount of flexibility. There’s dozens of ways, hundreds of ways that you could approach any assignment that, that you get in a PR agency. And how do regulate that?

And I have come around based purely on ethics. We’re not going to say there’s one way to do. Something, but there are clearly ethical and unethical ways of doing it, and that’s what the licensing or certification bodies would be looking at in a world where it was required when a complaint was filed that this violated ethics.

We’ll look at it, we’ll investigate and we will determine what the consequences should be. Should it be reprimand should it be. A revocation of the license or the certification. These bodies would have to come up with the committees or groups that would make these assessments.

But I [00:15:00] don’t see it happening anytime soon because I don’t see the motivation out there to do this. And of course it’s not the PR industry that would do this. It would be the business community. It’s not the lawyers who say you have to have. A-A-A-A-A-A license to practice law.

It’s the state in the United States, it’s California. You have to have pass the California bar. So at some level it would have to be a governmental body some kind of a public institution that would need to make the determination that this has gone far enough and we need to start licensing or certifying these people.

Yeah. It’s a, it is a tricky one. I can see that quite clearly. It’s. It’s sad. I think I was thinking when I was thinking about this today organizations many have codes of ethics that they publish. I’m talking about in the profession, not just general businesses, but although some do but mostly you’ll see this in advertising, in pr of course in marketing, where people publicly state, we follow this code of ethics [00:16:00] practice.

I wonder I’ve not none come to mind that I that they quite outstanding and all encompassing and embrace this kind of topic that this is not how we conduct ourselves here. The easy thing perhaps would be to say if you’re a member of a personal body, they have a code of ethics, it’s new, have a code of knew how to publicly support that and.

Many people do that wouldn’t be, none of that is enough. So you are right. It’s not the professional associations, it’s the clients, let’s say who, who might need. But there’s, there is no motivation. I. Yeah, and I think there’s an opportunity for education that you wanna look for an organization with individuals who have the certification from a credible organization like the Global Communication Certification Council.

But one, one other point just to make you brought it up with that people article talking about astroturfing. Yeah. I don’t know why anybody would think it had ever gone away. Astroturfing originally was really difficult to pull off. What you had to have was a network of people [00:17:00] that you could send.

A letter to, and then they would rewrite that letter and sign it and send it to their local newspaper to appear in the letters to the editor. So essentially, you had the same letter in hundreds of local newspapers showing a groundswell of public grassroots support for whatever the issue was in the digital world.

With influencers and social media, it has gotten a lot easier. So there’s more astroturfing, not less taking place today. We see it, although I don’t see people calling it astroturfing so much, but it is what it is. Yeah. I remember in, in, in the current climate IE digital since the turn of the century, I first came across that term in the, you’ll remember this Shel in the early days of blogging global PR week.

Version 1.0 of course that had a lot of people who we know who are still active discussing this whole thing. And I’ve seen others discussion since then, but nothing really, there’s no needless have been moved other than it gets into public [00:18:00] consciousness. Maybe someone might hear what we are talking about and think, okay, let me.

Amplifi this topic that I think would be a good idea if we said to people, look, if you hear this and you are broad agreement with the topic we’re discussing here, please talk about it. Please amplify it to others. Maybe that way someone’s gonna take notice. So don’t write to your member of Parliament and that kind of stuff.

Just talk about it on your networks and raise it with your communities and see what people have to say and will that make a difference. I put my cynicism aside, but only in the sense that, don’t have your expectations set too high, but if enough people start talking about this, it might get subtraction at some point.

Yeah. My expectations are not set very high and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #442: Justin Baldoni’s Attack on Blake Lively Explains Why PR is a Dirty Word appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The world’s biggest PR agency laid off five percent of its global staff. It’s a sign of the headwinds facing the industry, including reduced opportunities for earned media, which is what PR agencies spend a lot of their time trying to achieve. We’ll explore what’s happening in the PR agency world in the long-form FIR episode for December 2024. Also in this episode, an update on the social media landscape, with Reddit surpassing X (formerly Twitter) in the U.K.; a look at some of the key findings in “AI Activated,” the latest relevance report from the USC Annenberg School; there’s a waiting list for an app that’s being called a feed reader for the fediverse; communicators are gearing up for challenges that face them as Donald Trump prepares to return to the U.S. presidency; and there’s new information about how businesses are adapting to Artificial Intelligence. In his Tech Report, Dan York, recounts his trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the United Nations’ internet governance body’s meeting; he also shares his thoughts on efforts to protect children from social media’s harms.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

Reddit launches AI-powered Reddit Answers to upgrade platform search
Bluesky promises to shake up social media. It might finally succeed.
From Fox News to NBC, Legacy Media Wants In on TikTok
Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now.
USC Annenberg Relevance Report
Navigating AI’s Impact On Marketing: Lessons From USC’s 2025 Relevance Report
USC’s Relevance Report 2025: What It Means For The PR Industry
The 2025 Relevance Report: AI Activated
Edelman Staff Cuts Reflect Industry at a Crossroads
Edelman Lays Off 330 As It “Simplifies” Structure For Greater Integration
Edelman layoffs: MD Lisa Kovitz and other long-time execs among those affected
The 7 biggest PR challenges for 2024 and beyond
Vox Media Announces Layoffs, Lifestyle Properties To Face Restructuring
No More Stalled Promotions, RIFs: Be Your Own PR Firm
Announcing Surf, The First Browser for The Open Social Web
About Surf Social
Flipboard’s new app is a discovery engine for the decentralized web
Flipboard’s Surf app is a big new idea about the future of social
Flipboard just launched Surf, which is sort of like an RSS feed for the open social web
The Trump to-do list: How communicators are getting ready for the MAGA takeover
PR Pros Remain Mostly Calm Amid Uncertainty Over Trump Agenda
Rollbacks and Repeals: How a New Administration Effectuates Policy Changes
“The bar for engagement has been raised:” Execs on their hopes and fears for a second Trump term

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 441 of four immediate release. This is our long form episode for December, 2024. I’m Shell Holtz in Concord, California. And I’m Neville Hobson in Kru and Somerset in England. It’s the week before Christmas as we are recording this, and in a few days time, it will be Christmas for those of you who celebrate like me no snow here and no white Christmas expected here in the uk talking to friends in in Colorado the other day that they’ve not got snow where they are, but it should have some.

So if you’re celebrating Christmas and expecting a white one, the UK in the south certainly is not the place to be. Nevertheless don’t count on it in San Francisco either. No, don’t count on it there either. So today is actually as we’re recording this, which is on Saturday the 21st, December, it’s the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year.

And here in the uk we were lucky to see eight hours of sunlight today. The good news in the [00:01:00] south of England, less the further north you go. The good news, though, is that from now on the daylight time grows more every day as we get closer to the summer. That was actually a crossword clue this morning in the New York Times, is that the days starting today will be what from now on and the answer was longer, right?

That’s correct, yes. So it’s great. So to our show today, we’ve got some great stuff to talk about. But first let’s do a quick rundown to remind you of what we have covered in between these monthlies. What have we talked about since the monthly episode for November, which was three episodes ago. Or four, counting that one.

And we’ve done three basically since then. Now we’re doing this monthly. So episode 4 38 which we published in early, the early beginning of December. That was about Google’s AI overviews, which many are saying are turning upside down. Search engine optimization or SEO. [00:02:00] So we looked at the data, we took a look at the data and the trends, and had a good chat about that.

And recommend, we recommended some actions communicators can take to ensure that web properties still get attention as the shift to AI search continues. And that’s really what’s behind all of this, the shift to AI search. There’s that AI again. Pay attention. You’re gonna hear that a lot in this episode.

We’ve got a handful of comments to this one. Didn’t we show? We did starting with Shashi Beam Kanda an old friend of ours and of the show, he’s currently the principal research director for the Infotech Research Group, and he said, thanks for sharing, speaking with our members and trends that are surfacing first a reduction in organic traffic with the same level of conversions, which to me indicates the traffic is highly targeted even though there may be zero clicks due to AI overviews.

And then LLM traffic has started appearing as referring [00:03:00] sources. Though not much, I think only desktop traffic from LLMs will show in the analytics for now. So that’s what Shashi had to say. Heidi Sullivan who I met when she was at Cision said, great FIR episode. Lots of great and practical suggestions to get into AI overviews as organic search result Traffics.

Traffic declines, but we’ve all got lots of work to do. And Amy Santoro communicator, I know through IABC said Agree. I always double check AI research. Smart Amy. Smart. Good. That’s great. Feedback there. Episode 4 39 we published in mid-December that was talking about the top digital trends or digital marketing trends for 2025, and we focused really on agent AI in that episode.

That was the top trend that the report we cited. Highlight it. So we took a stroll into agen ai, which just a couple weeks ago was a [00:04:00] relatively new term in the mainstream. Suddenly everyone’s talking about it. And indeed, I’ve seen reports at around that time saying, oh, this is gonna be the word for 2025.

I’m pretty sure it’s likely to be Italy hyped like crazy. You can be sure of it and everyone will use it, not knowing, it’s not a made up word. I’ve heard some people saying this is a manufactured word. No, it’s not. It’s been around a long time. Look it up. It’s the dictionary. Find something. Yeah, it is signifying there’s something that acts as an agent for something or someone else.

It’s pretty straightforward, so you get a sense of what it’s about. But we looked at it and considered some of the possibilities for communicators along with the five other digital marketing trends from that report. So that was a pretty interesting episode. And then episode four 40 which we published just a few days ago during the past week.

Where we talked about influence and indeed experimenting for influence what some organizations are doing to enable their ex experimentation and what many more aren’t that ought to be as we discussed in our conversation. So [00:05:00] we reviewed some research on the subject and discussed ways, communicate this can apply experimentation to their work.

And that’s a topic I have a feeling we’ll be talking more about during 2025. So that’s where we’re at since the last episode. We have also just published the most recent episode of Circle of Fellows. This is the monthly panel discussion among usually four fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators.

I usually moderate it and I moderated this one, which featured Neil Griffiths and Russell Grossman from the uk, Martha Mka from Canada, and Jennifer wa from Canada. Hey, I was the only yank in this episode. And the focus of this was how communications as a profession can lead you to bigger leadership roles.

It was a fascinating discussion. A lot of people who have already listened thought it was one of the better episodes that we have done. Really went by fast. So that is up on the FIR [00:06:00] Podcast Network now and available for you to listen to or watch as a YouTube video. The next one is also scheduled for Thursday, January 16th at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, and we’ll be talking about how communicators can spark creativity.

We only have two panelists confirmed at this point, but they’re good ones. Zora Artis and Amy Greenhouse will be joining me for that one and two other August fellows. So should be a fun one to talk about sparking creativity. I suspect AI will come up in that conversation too, since a lot of people are using AI to spark creativity.

To get off that blank screen or ideate with images and the like. So looking forward to that. And we have, as you mentioned earlier, Neville some great stories to report today, and we will get to those on the other side of the break.

A lot of [00:07:00] FIR reports recently have looked at the evolution of the social media ecosystem. We are seeing significant transformations reshaping how individuals and organizations communicate with platforms like Reddit, blue Sky, and TikTok. At the forefront of these changes, they each is introducing unique features and experiencing shifts in user engagement.

And it’s worth noting that with the exception of Reddit, none of those platforms existed 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, nobody was really thinking about Reddit as a contender in the social network space. It was, but that’s not how it was perceived. For communication professionals to make informed decisions for their organizations or clients.

All of these shifts. In the social media landscape is something that we really need to get our minds wrapped around. And it starts with Reddit. Reddit recently surpassed x, formerly Twitter, of course, in popularity within the uk. It’s now the [00:08:00] fifth most visited social media platform on your side of the pond.

Neville. In May, 2024, Reddit attracted 22.9 million UK adults. That’s a 47% increase from the same period in 2023. That’s quite a surge, and it’s partly attributed to enhancements in Google search algorithms, which have improved Reddit’s visibility and accessibility. I’ve noticed this in Google searches.

I’m getting more and more content out of Reddit. But Reddit’s commitment to user-driven content and community engagement resonates with a growing audience. And of course, there are those people who are just looking for that alternative to X. And while many of them are headed to blue sky and some to threads, there’s some headed to Reddit.

To further enhance user experience, though Reddit has just introduced Reddit answers. This is an AI powered conversational interface. They designed it to streamline retrieval of information. The feature allows [00:09:00] users to ask questions and get curated summaries that leverage the platform’s ex extensive knowledge base by integrating advanced AI capabilities.

Reddit aims to simplify navigation and improve content Discovery. Reinforcing is position as a leading platform for community-driven discussions. This use of AI is getting fairly common. There are newspapers like the Washington Post that are introducing similar features. Then there’s Blue Sky, which we’ve covered.

I would have to say exhaustively here on FIR. We’ll have more on Blue Sky later in the show in fact. But for now, let’s just say that Blue Sky has amassed millions of users reflecting a growing interest in decentralized social networking models, which at least so far, Reddit is not after a long period of generally ho hum attitude toward blue Sky.

Now it’s fair to say something’s actually going on there. Even though it may be banned in the US by this time next month, TikTok is increasingly becoming a [00:10:00] primary news source for younger demographics, prompting legacy media organizations to set up a presence on the platform. Fox News, NBC, they’re all producing personality driven content tailored to tiktoks format.

In order to engage this segment of the audience. Notable journalists are creating these spontaneous, unscripted videos that align with the platform’s emphasis on authenticity and relatability. Although TikTok doesn’t yet generate substantial ad revenues for these companies, it is viewed as a strategic investment in cultivating future audiences if it’s still around.

Now, these developments underscore the dynamic nature of the social media landscape. Communication professionals need to consider some strategies in order to account for this continuing. Evolution of the space. First you have to diversify your platform engagement. Look at emerging platforms like Blue Sky and [00:11:00] legacy platforms that you may not have been active on, like Reddit to reach audiences seeking decentralized and user-centric experiences.

You can’t be concentrated in just one or two networks anymore. You need to leverage AI tools like Reddit answers to enhance content discovery and audience interaction and adapt content strategies. You develop authentic personality driven content. For platforms like TikTok or wherever people go after TikTok is banned to effectively engage younger audiences.

It’s also important to stay on top of these shifts if you’re gonna engage with diverse audiences and leverage the opportunities presented by emerging technologies and platforms because this evolution isn’t gonna slow down anytime soon. You are right there. I saw that guardian story too about the surge of Reddit in the uk and it’s it is pretty interesting, isn’t it?

Particularly that growth in just a year, 47% increase. And you [00:12:00] outlined I think some of the reasons perhaps that is driving that growth. We talked about Reddit. A few episodes ago. And my concern about Reddit to companies if one says to an organization, Hey, you should be on Reddit. No, you need to ask why is your audience on Reddit?

Are the people you want to connect with on Reddit? Do your research before you make that kind of choice. But it is true, and I agree with the sentiment of what you outlined she, that you, the days are gone really where you would, and this sounds weird, isn’t it? 20 years ago less actually that 17 or 18 years ago that Twitter appeared and started something that became significant, such as we saw it in the latter part of the 2010s.

So probably about 2015 to 2018 would’ve been the peak of the kind of presence of Twitter as it was then. And that. Drew, as we saw and still see. One of the reasons, perhaps why it’s still [00:13:00] going organizations across the globe using Twitter as a formal communication channel, announcements opinion influential comment in response to others.

You name it, by organizations and the people who are part of those organizations. That is still true today but certainly nowhere near the power it had in those days. So there are alternatives. As we’ve mentioned some of the research we’ve seen, some of the reporting showing generational behavioral differences very marked compared to what they were before.

And the fact that gen Z in particular is wielding quite a big influential role which has grown in the past couple of years, so that’s surged with credibility. The landscape is totally different to what it was in those golden days where you just had a one or two major places that you could use to, to reach the audiences.

So we’re seeing this landscape shifting radically. I think blue skies. The most [00:14:00] interesting one. I’m there as you are from the pre-launch days. I’m there more now than Threads, which was my favorite place. It’s still a good place to be, but it’s not from my point of view. And it reflects what I see others saying to.

It’s not the place for engagement. At all in my view, and I’m not like some who join every conversation and respond constantly to others. I don’t do that. I’m more listening. Yet I find some of the people I’m connected with on, on blue Sky definitely. I seek them out every time I go there now.

Which is a new behavior for me. So I find that great. Yet professionally, I’m all over the place looking and listening at what’s going on. And Reddit I’ve been on Reddit since it started in the early two thousands. But I’m spending more time on Reddit these days in places where I like to be a number of the subreddits to see what’s going on.

I’m in and out more frequently, so that, that’s my contribution to that. So I think blues Sky in particular I was reading one of the other articles you linked to Shall, New York Times Clay Shi piece on [00:15:00] that. So I think it’s quite good what he had to say. And he talks about red blue sky might fail.

Sure it might not. I go with the might not. But it’s still working through how it’s gonna make money. And is it gonna do advertising? I did see some talk last week that some folks had discovered some screenshots that were posted by somebody that showed a subscription model. And where you pay a certain amount of money and you don’t see ads.

That’s, I think that’s more attractive. Way than just doing advertising or across the board. But again, this is all speculation. They’ve not confirmed or denied anything. Still early days, there’s, they’re now 25 million north of that number in terms of users, considering it was four months ago, they’re only 7 million.

So if numbers are important to you, then 25 million from seven is actually interesting. Very interesting. But it is good and it is a mark of what is evolving in this space. Stay tuned. [00:16:00] Yeah. A few thoughts based on what you were saying. I hadn’t heard about the screenshot of a subscription model and.

It’s interesting because I think people would’ve rebelled against that some time ago, but it has become so common in the podcast space that people are now accustomed to hearing about that concept. How many podcasts are there where you can hear the ad free version by subscribing?

NPR has that, the New York Times has that I think Crooked Media, which does Pod Save America and Pod Save the uk. They have it. And, grim and mild, which does lore, they do that. It’s getting really routine. So now I think people are going to hear other platforms adopting that idea, and it’s not gonna seem so, no disruptive or inappropriate.

So that could work in, in, in terms of the use of Reddit. I agree. You have to see if your audience is there, but I’d be willing to bet your audience is there, or at least some of them. There are [00:17:00] so many subreddits that are highly specialized around niches and interests that a quick search is gonna reveal whether there’s anything there for you in terms of reaching the people that you wanna reach.

But the other thing is, they’re still doing Ask me Anythings AMAs on Reddit. And you don’t need to have your audience there to tell everybody if you have the means of getting the word out, that you’re gonna be doing an a MA on Reddit, because people will go they’ll sign up in order to be part of that a MA if they’re interested in what the the leader or thought leader or influencer, whoever it is that you’re putting out there has to say.

I think there’s a lot of opportunity on Reddit. And the other thing is, of course you could tell people that you’re gonna be there and that’s where you’re gonna be hosting real conversations and again, attract people to the platform. And in terms of Twitter.

Government leaders and business leaders in the [00:18:00] like posting. It was also the place, as we have talked about a lot lately, where news tended to break. Yeah. And it’s not that they had the billions of users that, that Facebook for example, does but there were enough journalists following it that when news broke if it was a citizen journalist reporting something, they were on top of it real fast.

And if the journalists were breaking it first of all, they could source information on Twitter and then break the story on Twitter. And then as news continued to unfold, they could embed those tweets. There was no longer the man on the street interview. They were just embedding tweets in the story.

I don’t see anybody embedding tweets from X in the media anymore. So this is another big shift away from X that we’re seeing. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not gained serious momentum yet, although I’m noticing more frequently people talking about this group of journalists in this country have stopped [00:19:00] posting on TWI on X and then now on Blue Sky, there are a number of startup hacks full of journalists for individual publications some geographically based, et cetera.

So you can find this, it’s not yet easily discoverable at all, and it’s not yet by any means gained any momentum in the sense of the ubiquity of X. Share buttons to X everywhere you go on the web, on the worldwide web, you see it everywhere. Everyone has got a website with an article, has got sharing buttons and includes x.

I don’t yet see blue sky anywhere. I started seeing threads here and there, so maybe it is one of those slow burns, but I suspect. Blue Sky’s likely to pick up on that faster. We are seeing things like a developer ecosystem developing with some interesting things going on. There’s one I’m very keen on that I’ve been experimenting with, which is called Auto Blue, which which is a plugin for WordPress that you can use when you publish a blog post.

You schedule it for instance, or publish it manually, whichever that it automatically [00:20:00] shares that to Blue Sky. Threads has had that capability for a while and with threads, by the way, it also then shares it out to the wider fed of us by Mastodon. But Bluesky does it through its. A way it accesses the fedi verse so that connectivity’s there.

So these are all embryonic steps. I’m not sure when we will suddenly see a groundswell, but I suspect we will. And it will require something that does signify a wholesale shift from mainstream media, journalism’s journalists to a platform like this, for it to suddenly become truly in the mainstream.

And that then requires everyone else to put the sharing buttons and all that stuff. So this is not something that’s gonna happen overnight. Maybe towards the end of 2025, we might see something, but during the year it’ll grow. I believe, I don’t think it’s gonna collapse anytime soon. And it is gonna be an interesting year from this point of view.

Sure. And we’re gonna see during this year more of that shift of the media from X over to TikTok. [00:21:00] If tiktoks still around, and I’ve read a number of pieces that are speculating where people will go if TikTok is banned. And we should be clear what’s gonna happen if it’s banned. Is that the the Play Store and the Android?

It’s the Us, yep. And what it’s going to mean is it’ll be banned from the app stores. If you have it on your phone, you’re still gonna be able to access it. Yeah. But then you upgrade your phone and you need to reinstall it. It won’t be there. So it’ll be through attrition that will, there will be fewer and fewer users.

So where do the people creating these videos go? Do they go to reels on Facebook or on Instagram? Does everything shift over to Snapchat? Do they benefit from this? We don’t know. It’s all speculation at this point, but that type of video as. A real place now with that younger generation to the point, as I mentioned that mainstream media outlets are producing content aimed at that.

So that’s another shift to, to keep an eye on. And this is why I [00:22:00] think, we have to be decentralized as communicators. We can’t focus on Yeah, one or two of these. I remember when you said, oh, I’m already on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. I can’t do, I can’t handle anymore. I don’t have the bandwidth.

You gotta have the bandwidth. You’ve gotta be on all of these now. You do, there are tools that will help you get a sense of what’s happening across all of these. One I’ve been playing with recently is called sil, SILL, that is offering one appealing feature right now, which I’m taking full advantage of, is a daily email telling me the top six stories across Blue Sky in particular that.

My community is paying, is sharing, and I find that actually extremely good service surface is stuff I missed or wouldn’t pay attention to. It needs that to be far more robust and large in, in scale. But it’s a startup. They’ll have a, it’ll be a paid service soon as I understand from their emails recently.

But things like that, we’ve had those sorts of tools for quite a while on the web generally. But [00:23:00] this is different than just having it on a website. This is focused on the new social landscape. And it’s it’s interesting what’s happening. We have some stories to talk about that in, in later on in this show.

Yeah, somebody to pay attention to. Communicators need to be ubiquitous themselves across the social landscape and just understand. Who’s doing what, where, and is this something you need to pay more attention to? You have help. AI can help you with some of these things. There are some generative AI tools that you could, should explore that would help you stay on top of this.

And there, that’s the beauty of AI for you. And keep your eyes on it because there will be more tools coming down the pi. That’s very true. Which is a nice little lead into to this story. I was gonna say, that’s what I call a segue. That’s a segue. Exactly. I mentioned at the beginning that we that you’ll hear AI mentioned a lot, and this is true on, on, on this story certainly and others coming that this is such, so front of mind with what’s going on, that [00:24:00] understanding all of it is almost impossible for anyone.

So we’re offering our little bits on some of these topics. It’s also the time of the year when everyone is doing predictions and trends, reports. There’s so many of them. And we’ve talked about a couple in recent episodes. This topic, this one I’m gonna mention today, I think is definitely worth your attention.

So in December, just a week or so ago the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism published its relevance report for 2025. This is the organization’s annual deep dive into the key Trends impacting public Relations. Each edition focuses on a key theme with the 2025 report titled AI Activated dedicated entirely to the impact of AI and pr, showcasing practical applications, ethical considerations, and future opportunities.

First, though, let’s understand context and perspective with regard to this report. These relevance reports began in 2016 to explore emerging trends and challenges shaping the communication and PR [00:25:00] industry, drawing an insights from leading industry experts, researchers, and academics. The report serve as a guide for communicators, navigating and ever evolving landscape.

Helpful. In other words, Microsoft contributed significantly to the 2025 reports theme, including key essays from Microsoft executives that provide practical insights into AI’s transformative role in PR and communication. Microsoft’s involvement underscores its leadership and integrating AI into communication and its collaboration with academic and professional institutions to shape the future of the industry.

So this report takes a definitive, optimistic view of AI and pr, but doesn’t shrink from pointing out areas of concern. In the forward USA’s, Fred Cook questioned the PR Rdic entity’s appetite for early adoption of new tech, of a new technology. Something we’ve touched on in previous episodes, Cheryl, especially one that could threaten its own existence, happily, he notes his concerns were unfounded.

The report shows that AI adoption has [00:26:00] moved from fear and skepticism to widespread activation within the PR industry, with communicators increasingly using AI to streamline operations, enhance storytelling, and address complex challenges like misinformation and bias. It also emphasizes the need for ethical AI governance and the balance integration of AI and human creativity.

So I’ve pinpointed three significant findings in this report. It’s a big report that covers a huge amount of thinking and certainly not something we can dissect in this episode. So highlighting 16 pages. 116. Yeah, that’s the PDF. Yeah. So first, AI is revolutionizing PR workflows. Tools like generative AI are now integral to content creation, media monitoring and sentiment analysis, significantly improving speed and efficiency.

Custom AI applications such as tailored GPTs allow organizations to deliver precise, compliant, and inclusive communication at scale. Second, [00:27:00] leadership and culture drive AI adoption. AI’s successful integration is often led by senior leaders fostering a culture of experimentation, innovation, and trust employees using AI frequently report feeling more valued, engaged, and empowered.

To take creative risks. And third, ethical and responsible AI is essential. The risks of AI, including misinformation, bias, and polarization require a commitment to transparency, inclusivity, and governance. Organizations must invest in AI literacy, adopt diverse data sets, and develop frameworks for responsible implementation to ensure long-term trust and equity.

The report positions AI as a catalyst for transformation in pr, offering tools to navigate challenges and maximize opportunities in an evolving business landscape. There is much to absorb and learn in this 116 pages, as I mentioned earlier, including in credible calls to action for communicators and organizations, and I do recommend spending time on that.[00:28:00]

It is definitely worthwhile. Some final words from Grant tos, global Chief Digital and Intelligence Officer at PR firm Berson, who in his essay titled AI is an uprising, not an upgrade. Answers two critical questions. First, what would an AI transformed organization look like? It would have fluid adaptive structures.

He says it would offer continuous learning and experimentation. It would be a symbiosis of human creativity and AI capabilities. And his second question, what must we do? We do to stay ahead even as everything changes rapidly around us? Embrace experimentation and calculated risk taking. He says, foster a culture of lifelong learning.

Develop agile decision making processes, cultivate trust between leadership and workforce. Now, all of those things to my ears, sound like we’ve been talking about this sort of stuff for a long time. Pre ai. Fundamental [00:29:00] things don’t really change that much. The ways you go about them perhaps do, but these to my mind, are absolutely critical.

This is about transformation. This is about organizational willingness as a personified by those who lead the organization and the others, including those who make up the organization, which is people, let’s say. Let’s face it. So we’ll have a link in the show notes where you can download a copy of the report for free in exchange for your name and email address.

There’s lots of work to do here. It seems to me she, oh, there’s a ton of work to do here, and I don’t know if it’s just the gloomy weather, but I’ve been growing more and more skeptical about all of this lately. Not the power of AI and the potential of ai, but organizational ability to adapt it. I.

Look at what organizations do in terms of how they manage their business and how they manage their people. And the need for oversight and the need for [00:30:00] governance doesn’t seem to align well with the way a lot of organizations approach their business. So I am not optimistic that you’re going to see a lot of organizations employ that kind of thinking, that kind of analysis and strategizing.

I think you’re gonna see the very large organizations do it, but when you start to get down to mid-size business and small business, I think you’re gonna see people either ignore it, misuse it, underuse it you it’s I think it’s not gonna be pretty for quite a while. And I feel that way about, I.

PR agencies and the PR industry as well. Because as much as I see, Fred Cook saying that he was gratified to see that the early appetite for adoption of AI didn’t create the kind of downside that, that he had anticipated. And as I’m thrilled to see the early adoption of any technology in the PR industry, which tends to be very [00:31:00] late in, in adopting new digital technologies.

They miss boats a lot, don’t they? They’ve missed boats as long as I’ve been in this industry, and that’s been a long time. And it’s very gratifying to see them not miss this boat. But what I think they’ve latched onto the writing capabilities of ai and can’t see much beyond that when again, I think that’s one of the least interesting things.

That this tool can do. And the way that it can help in a public relations agency or a public relations practitioner beyond that are massive. But we as an industry tend not to look past the craft of what we do very often. And so we’re very focused on how can this help us with the craft as opposed to the backends and the analysis and the management of relationships and the other things where there’s potential, especially as a agentic, AI advances.[00:32:00]

Yeah I see tot I get totally where you’re coming from on that shell and until recently I would be with you on that. I remember two years ago reading surveys from my, the likes of PRCA that talked about 25% of people they surveyed would never ever go anywhere near AI at all.

It’s not the future. Guess what it is. I think though that I’m far more optimistic that Sure. I’m, I have skepticisms here and there on the level of how this will work. You are right. I’m sure this is not, so the landscape is exceptionally uneven. This is not like on mass, everyone’s gonna move to, this is not gonna happen at all.

What will happen though is those who are really. Clued into this, who have studied this, who have listed, who have read reports like uscs and all the other documentation out there. Listen to people like Grant Toes and Fred Cook. They are the ones who will benefit from this. And indeed, we have a, an upcoming report where I’m gonna be talking exactly about that with case studies.

[00:33:00] So there is a lot of going good going on broadly, not just in pr, but PR is catalyzing some of the things that are happening and the people are taking advantage of these tools that are there. I feel that reports like this like this USC report and and I’d just given a gloss top level assessment of it, if you will read those 116 pages definitely worthwhile.

It’s. Presented in this Roy Rose tinted, look at all that. There is a lot of, yes. But in there that does give some things worth paying attention to. So it is not even I see that therefore, as opportunities galore for communicators who are clued in to what’s going on, to advise their employers and their clients in, in not in everything, they can’t, they’re communicators.

So broad business strategy is not their their focus. It’s how you communicate that and how you do what tools you’re gonna use to do that. So all working together, and that does require leadership. So you are right in one area. The lethargy, the resistance. [00:34:00] The total skepticism of some will interfere with that.

There’ll be obstacles to, to organizations doing this. But yeah, I just, I see this as a tremendous opportunity for communicators to take a leading role. Yeah. And another reason to pay attention to this report in particular, I think is because it is from the Annenberg School, right? Unlike, there’s a really good report out now from Fleischman Hillard.

There’s been one out, and I think there’s a couple of others from McKinsey. I’m sure Boston Consulting and Accenture and others have released reports. The thing about the USC report is they’re not trying to sell anything. They’re not trying to use this as a, as a lead generation tool. I and I know that Microsoft was a heavy contributor, but they do this trends report every year.

They’ve got a lot of experience with collecting and analyzing this data. So it’s worth listening to what they have to say. From that perspective. I think one of the things that’s going to be needed. Is for organizations at the top to look at the bottom up [00:35:00] use of AI and start to synthesize that.

And I, I’ll tell you what I’m reporting on it where I work, when I find an employee using ai, I’ll interview them and do a short article saying, this person’s using it. Look what they’re doing with it. I just talked to our head of accounting who’s using it for Excel. They have a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that they inherited from an earlier.

Time that were custom done and can’t figure out what the formulas are. So they’re just giving it to AI and saying, what is this formula trying to do? And it deciphers it. Or I’m trying to create a formula that does X, Y, and Z and it’s not working. Take a look. What am I doing wrong? And it tells them, so it’s speeding up their use of Excel which by itself is gonna save a lot of time and be very beneficial to the organization.

So the more those stories get shared, I think the clearer the uses become and people can see beyond their biases [00:36:00] and the limitations they’ve placed on how they think they can take advantage of a chat bot. Yeah, ab totally. Those are the kind of uses that people go, oh, they’ll thinking about, oh, it’s gonna chat GPT, I’ll ask, oh, I prompt it and it tell, tells me the things I can use in a report.

They don’t realize that this is way beyond that. That kind of use. You gave examples of there are loads in this article in an upcoming report later in the show that talks about case studies that I mentioned that gives you a glimpse into this. This goes way beyond the kind of things that you think AI is all about.

Certainly at an enterprise level, a big organizational level, some of the things that are improving workflows are truly quite extraordinary. And you think when you hear about it, you think, of course that’s what AI’s for. That can help you do that. So that’s a great example. The Excel. I can give you a small example on my own account.

Something I do mostly as a hobby, as a personal interest is PHP coding. And [00:37:00] I write codes. I’ve got three books that tell me how to write PHP and it’s a bit like I, I found in my old bookshelf the other day, HTML written, it was published in 2002. Boy was that leading edge at the time. But the book’s this thick and it’s huge.

So anyway I write stuff myself based on my limited experience so far. For instance, things like WordPress plugins, I have a a kind of a a playground site, a sandbox site that I try out stuff with. Usually it crashes everything. But since I started asking my AI for help. Phenomenal. So it’s improved my ability to deliver on that.

It’s increased my learning on how to do it and increased my confidence on saying if I try this, maybe it’ll work. ’cause that’s what I did before and it worked. So these are things you don’t need a company policy to do. What you do need and this is key in my view, curiosity and the willing to experiment.

And that last word we talked about that topic in, I think the last short short form version. The experimentation. It was [00:38:00] either 4 39 or four 40. I can’t remember which one it was. Four 40. That’s yeah. Okay. So that’s key. This report goes big on experimentation. And indeed grant tube’s point about.

What we gotta do to stay ahead, embrace experimentation and calculated risk taking is a key thing there that isn’t, doesn’t come naturally to everyone. That sort of approach. So that’s a leadership thing to encourage that. There We’re talking about then potentially transformation, how you run your organization.

So this is, these are all elements that are connected and we gotta do this though, I think. Let’s temporarily leave the world of AI behind and enter the cold, cruel world of business. Earlier this month, Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, announced the layoff of 330 employees representing over 5% of its global workforce.

This reduction is the largest in years for Edelman and was part of a strategic restructuring aimed at simplifying its [00:39:00] business model to better align with current client demands. Edelman’s restructuring reflects broader trends in the industry where firms are consolidating and adapting in order to stay relevant.

The recent $13 billion merger between Omnicom and Interpublic Group, creating the world’s largest advertising conglomerate is an example of this shift toward integrated services and technological investment. Edelman’s, CEO. Richard Edelman addressed the A os pretty candidly. He said, I don’t like to do this.

I’ve held off as long as I can. If I were running a public company, this would’ve happened months ago, but I need to run a business. And that’s the job I’m very sympathetic to that point of view. His layoff affected a number of very high level people in the organization, including our friend Steve Ruble.

Most of these folks took to LinkedIn to announce the fact that they were leaving. Now, Richard’s take underscores the financial [00:40:00] pressures even privately held firms face leading to difficult decisions to maintain fiscal health. There were a number of factors that influenced the decision, not the least of which was a revenue decline.

The firm anticipated an 8% decrease in US revenue and 3% globally for this year. If anything signals a need to make operational adjustments, that would do it. The question of course, is why are these revenues declining? We’re gonna get to that. There’s a growing demand for integrated services prompting Edelman to streamline its structure.

They had a bunch of specialty brands that were under Edelman Edel. There was Edible Revere, saludo Mustache, EGA, Delta. These were boutiques and every one of ’em had their own support staff. So Edelman was paying for accounting and it and the like for multiple companies. Now they’re all just gonna be hoovered up into Edelman and allow them to have that interdisciplinary.

Type of an approach to the work [00:41:00] that they do. There’s also been some significant shifts in the media landscape. The reduction in traditional media outlets and widespread newsroom layoffs have limited opportunities for PR professionals to secure earned media placements that challenges traditional PR strategies.

After all, how many people when they think of PR think that it’s media relations and there’s less and less media relations to be done these days. That media contraction is just one of the headwinds the industry is facing. There’s also, of course, the rise of AI and digital platforms that are forcing agencies to adapt by integrating new technologies into their service offerings.

Clients are more and more seeking comprehensive solutions to combine traditional PR with digital marketing, and this requires a more integrated approach. Now, despite these challenges, there are plenty of opportunities for agencies and their employees. Agencies can expand their offerings to include digital strategy, content creation, social [00:42:00] media management, data analytics, all to meet the evolving needs of clients.

They should embrace innovation, leverage AI and other technologies to enhance efficiency, open new avenues for client engagement, embracing technological advancements, particularly AI can streamline operations and provide deeper insights into audience behaviors. And. Improve your campaign effectiveness.

And then we need to focus on owned media. Because of the decline in earned media opportunities, agencies can help clients build and manage their own media channels. It could be blogs, social media platforms come up with some new stuff. If there’s a dearth of local media coverage, maybe that’s a vacuum that you could help fill, but this will maintain direct communication with target audiences.

Now, for PR professionals, this period of transformation offers a chance to develop new skills and expand your expertise [00:43:00] into areas like digital strategy and integrated communications. The client’s demanding versatile communicators. Who can navigate the complexities of mod modern media landscapes that’s rising.

That presents career growth opportunities for those who are willing to adapt. And if you’re an in-house communicator, like me thinking of working with an agency, I’m not, you should clearly define objectives and ensure that the agency’s capabilities align with the organization’s goals, particularly in digital and integrated communications.

Regular communication and setting measurable outcomes can enhance the. The effectiveness of your partnership with a PR agency and if you’re actually thinking of a career in a PR agency, then it’s important to recognize the industry’s dynamic nature. Challenges definitely exist. As I’ve outlined.

Agencies do offer diverse experiences and opportunities to develop a broad set of skills. Prospective professionals should seek agencies [00:44:00] that invest in employee development and embrace innovation. These are the agencies that are most likely to thrive as the industry continues to change. Yeah, that’s quite a picture you’ve painted there.

Shell, it is something I think that I see this in the UK as well. Not, there’re probably similar reasons. Basically you’ve gotta reinvigorate your business, you’ve gotta trim the fats and all the stuff that Richard DA was having to address as a leader of a business that IE is running a business for those affected by layoffs, redundancies as is the word used most frequently here in the uk.

It’s a challenging time without doubt where suddenly you are on the job market along with quite a large number of others with similar experiences and skills as you similar age typically. And therein is another issue, which is that of ageism. I hear people talking about that quite a bit.

That Hey, gray Lives matter. Yeah it’s challenging and some of the advice that common sense advice that you outlined is absolutely [00:45:00] spot on. You need to do this and even though you may not feel like doing it, use your time between now and the new year. You are on a break to update your profile on LinkedIn.

Friends, that’s gonna play a big role for you. Whether you believe that or not, it probably is going to. And all the things that you’ve been saying you haven’t had time to do, now’s the time. You should look at courses on LinkedIn learning. Get up to speed on ai. There’s some terrific content there.

And if you are an ai, if you’re a LinkedIn member on the premium lower, you’re paying for it. That’s part of the deal. Definitely worth it. I’ve been doing that. Not for the same reasons as the as we’re discussing here, though. So get up to speed with things. AI in particular. There’s a great article, one of the stories you shared in the show nutshell from o Dwyer.

This was good. No more stall promotions. RRIFs be your own PR firm. And written by Jane Genova, who’s a kind of a coach for seniors as describes the bio. Great tips here on on what to do. Some of things you can do, leverage your reputation when you’re talking to people. Approach everything as a grand [00:46:00] experiment.

There’s that word again, experiment. That’s what I tend to do anyway. Approach everything as an experiment and so that, that changes your outlook and okay, even in the face of the fact that you’re suddenly let go. And it may not be the financial aspects of that worry you ’cause you’re probably quite cozy if you’re a very senior role.

It’s the sudden lack of the environment that you’ve been accustomed to the kind of authority that it brings you by your role, by virtue of your role. There are still many people in organizations who see. Influence and worthiness as, as explained as, as basically explained by your job title.

And for me, a job title is the least significant thing I recognize others see it as one of the most significant things. So all that’s suddenly gone. So this is the time for that. And I think it’s the nature of things. So a word I hear a lot these days, she, you probably do fractional. I see people calling themselves a fractional CCO, chief Communication Officer.

In fact, Heidi Sullivan, who was one of our commenters who’s listed currently is a [00:47:00] fractional CMO. I find it a dreadful word to describe this, but I recognize that people like it. It also sounds those who say I’m fractional, 16 different roles, you are fractional. Wow. I’m trying to visualize the pie in imperial measure, not metric, how many eights of an inches.

That’s stuff like that. But that’s how it is. And we’re all this is how we use information online to explain our perception of people and where they’re at in their journey, let’s say. It’s a time for constant renewal. It seems to me that you’ve got to be on top of all of these things, particularly at a time when you know, coming up right behind you are those earlier generations who are younger more agile, physically, literally, than you are as you get older.

And you’ve got to be make yourself readily attractive to others from a work point of view. That, that’s an interesting challenge considering one of the things that I keep hearing about the younger generation is that they wanna show up when they wanna show up and they’re gonna sit at their desk on their phones and they just, those damn young whipper snappers [00:48:00] aren’t willing to do the work.

I tell you I’ve worked with people recently who are as clients who are a lot younger than me, and their attitudes, actually I’m more like the younger than them, even in my attitudes to behaviors in the workplace tools that I use. And they do. But it, this is a not a new thing.

This is how it’s always been. I, you’ll remember this. I know you will. Desktop publishing, when that came in, anyone could publish a newsletter, and they did. It’s, and they did exactly. You, I remember when employee communicator had to get their hands around all, every department distributing their own newsletter.

It’s incredible. Greeting Shell and Neville and FR listeners all around the world. It’s Danor coming at you on this last episode of 2024 on a very snowy and cold day in Vermont, having just returned this week from the desert Sands and warmer temperatures of Riyadh Saudi Arabia. I was there for the 19th Internet Governance Forum or IGF organized by the [00:49:00] United Nations and it was a remarkable event.

It brought together people from all across society, from government, from industry, from civil society, from the technical community, from just regular old users, from people of all walks of life and forms who are there to talk about how do we govern the internet in such a way that it can be, what are the future conventions, the norms, the things that we will do?

And it was a remarkable gathering, people talking, and of course, this being 20, 24, people could come in remotely. And so you had speakers from around the world who were there participating and talking about everything. Of course, AI had many sessions because it’s 2024 and we gotta talk about ai.

There were sessions, there were some sessions around the metaverse type of thing. There were lots of sessions around security, around safety, around cybersecurity, around resilience, around connecting the. The next, the remaining two and a half billion people, there [00:50:00] were sections on gender inclusion, on just, all of these things.

Closing a digital divide, the use of the internet, amazing conversations, talks, and everything else. And it was all of us talking about that. Which brings me to my two points this year as we close this time out. This next year, 2025 is gonna be a cha time of a lot of change around the world. Obviously here where I live in the United States, we have a new incoming administration with all the changes and challenges that may bring in different ways, but that’s happening elsewhere.

All across Europe, we’re seeing new governments coming into place and new elections happening just north of me and Canada. There are signs now that there will probably be a new election and new government next, early next year. It’s happening all over the place. Governments are changing, societies are changing in different ways, and one of the things that communicators should pay attention to some degree, [00:51:00] is what’s happening at the UN level.

Next year will be the 20th anniversary of something called the World Summit on the Information Society or WSIs. And that was an event that. Set up a lot of how we are talking about the internet, how we’re governing the internet, how we’re engaging, and what norms and conventions we’re doing. There’s gonna be a lot of work next year to look at review that where we’ve come in 20 years and where we’re going.

Part of that will be what is the future of this event? I just went to the IGF. Will it continue to be an event that goes on? And there are powerful forces that would like to end it. They would like the decisions about our future on the internet to be made only by governments and only by government representatives.

So you and I, the people who are out here in the industry or in the technical community or civil society, we would not get a voice in the future of where so many things go. So it’s important. [00:52:00] WSIs plus 20. You’ll see these acronyms. WSIS plus 20. You’ll see this being thrown around as it all happens, heading up toward meetings in June and July.

And it’s important because this will determine what voices will be part of the future of this at a government level anyway, and this can then cascade down into what we do. We, at the Internet Society where I work, we have a saying about the internet is for everyone. And we add to that now, of course, and everyone must have a voice in its future, so pay attention this year.

The second thing I’ll mention is that we are seeing all around the world a rise in wanting to protect the children, which has always been here. But what’s happening is this movement to impose legislation around age verification or age assurance. I think I mentioned in the last report maybe about Australia, was declaring that anyone under the age of 16 should not have access to social media sites.

Nevermind that they don’t know how they’re gonna do [00:53:00] that. But a number of these laws are happening here in the United States. Many individual states are saying that it’s also happening in other countries places. Everybody is trying to get on this game to say that, people under a certain age should not have access to content in some ways, and I’m a father of two daughters.

I get that. I understand it. I appreciate that. The challenge is how you do it. There aren’t easy ways, and what’s happening in many cases is that people are looking at solutions that will require all of us to provide some kind of id. You might get to the point where if you go to your local Starbucks and you want to get online, you might have to show some kind of ID that says what your age is.

It’s not a joke. There’s actually a law that would’ve created that. But the reason I say this for us as communicators is some of these laws could have extremely punishing fines. Extremely punishing, penalties. So you as a [00:54:00] communicator, you might have a forum for your members. You might have a forum for your community.

You might be engaged in something like that. But with some of these laws, you would have to be sure to gate and be able to know the ages of people being there, or else you might be fined incredibly. So you gotta pay attention. You’ll hear different names, age verification, age assurance, assuring the age.

They’re similar, but those are the words that we’re gonna hear as we go into 20, 25 and beyond, because a lot of the policy makers of the world want to solve this and are trying to put something in place even though the solutions aren’t that great. Let me just end it there and say thank you to all of our FIR listeners.

We are in a time of celebration, whether you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza or the winter solstice or whatever, this is a time of [00:55:00] celebration, a time of recovery reflection, and a little bit of a pause before the chaos of what will be this next year and more best wishes to you all. Thanks for listening over this past year.

You can find more in my audio in writing@danyork.me and back to you, Shea Neville. Bye for now.

Thanks for that report, Dan. Really good explainer you gave on what you experienced in Riyadh at that UN meeting and the whole situation with regard to how the internet is evolving. I’ve read reports recently one that strikes me a lot about the disappearance of content online as sites go dark or people change web pages or whatever it might be.

And the fact that we’ve also got others who want to control it, and this is not new. You will know that at the Internet Society, the splint internet, there’s things going on. So seeing this kind or hearing you describing these sort of policy areas is really helpful. [00:56:00] Good report. I also enjoyed the discussion around the availability of social media to kids.

I remember seeing a headline the Day Australia passed the Law that banned social media for kids under 16. And it said something like, Australia banned social media for kids under 16. Good luck with that. And I was just hearing, I think it may have been yesterday on the news that, the Australian government has alerted social networking companies to be on the lookout for a mandate to have an age verification method in place that is something more robust than simply clicking a box that says I’m over 16 which of course any 12-year-old can do.

So we’ll see how that goes. At some point it may be easier to just not offer your service in Australia but it’s a genuine concern. We’ve seen Instagram come out with their teen version of Instagram with more controls [00:57:00] and some very warm family oriented TV commercials to promote that.

I, I am impressed by the way, with how much they’re investing in raising awareness of this. Tool how much adoption it’s getting. I haven’t seen, but it’s definitely a concern and it’s nice to see that whether it’s being done well or not. It’s nice to see people trying to address it.

Agree. We got the same here in the UK with the online safety bill, which is chugging along. It’s getting attention in some areas. The regulator is flexing muscles in that area in terms of what it requires of the major social networking companies. So I think we’re gonna see in 2025, the early part, certainly more on these attempts to.

Safeguard children but also to control access. The down the flip side of this, according to all those conspiracy theorists on X anyway, is that this is how you control your citizen’s access to the internet. Yeah. If you were China or somewhere, I’d say that’s [00:58:00] likely to be what you’re doing.

I don’t believe that’s the kind of prime reason the Australian government’s doing this at all, or the UK government, the online safety wheel, but that’s part of the discussion landscape to be Sure. Yeah and I do hope. Governments that are looking at implementing these kinds of restrictions are thoughtful in the approach they take.

I, I, a flat out ban is not a good thing. As I’ve heard a number of people point out. If you’re part, if you’re a, if you’re a child and I’m talking about maybe adolescent aged and you’re part of a marginalized community, if you are L-G-B-T-Q for example having access to that community online can be a lifeline for you.

As opposed to a place where you’re made to feel ugly or inadequate or whatever it might be, that is causing some of the distress along among a lot of youth. In ensuring that the access to those communities is still available to these people is important. A flat out ban could be very harmful to some people.

Yeah. [00:59:00] So let’s talk about surf. Last week, Flipboard maybe you’re familiar to many of you, the online magazine creator aggregator, et cetera, that you can read content on an app very visually. It’s very good. It’s been around a while. We’ve talked about it before with publishers on, on, you can do publish as well as a consumer.

Now we have publishers there individually, but Flipboard has had some success since the advent of the Fedi verse emerged a couple of years back in being one of the leading players that bring this to the forefront in people’s minds and how they use this. Last week they up unveiled surf.

An app that many people are calling a feed reader for the Fedi verse and described by Flipboard itself as the first browser for the open social web designed for Android and iOS Surf seamlessly integrates decentralized platforms like Mastodon Threads and Blue Sky with RSS feeds, podcasts, and even YouTube offering an all in one way to [01:00:00] explore and curate content from across the open web.

Unlike traditional feed readers, surf combines discovery, integration, and personalization into one user-friendly experience making decentralized networks accessible to a broader audience. Fast Company highlights how surf leverages decentralized protocols and open standards to build connections that weren’t feasible before, reflecting a shift towards a more decentralized and open internet.

The Verge notes that surf blurs the lines between feed readers and Fed Verse clients making such distinctions increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, TechCrunch calls surf a bold reinvention for Flipboard, moving from curating mainstream media to championing exploration of the open social web. A standout feature of surf is its customization as Sarah per notes in her TechCrunch report.

Surf allows you to build personalized feeds on specific topics, whether it’s AI model development or mounted biking by combining [01:01:00] real-time searches, hashtags, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, and more. I’m on the beta wait list and can’t wait to see how surf might redefine how we engage with the decentralized web.

I’m on the wait list too, and I can’t wait to take advantage of this. I remember tools like this from long ago that would curate and aggregate for you and of course feed readers. There is a still a feed reader. Feedly is still functional. There’s quite a few and I still use it.

Yeah I use one, what’s it called? Innovator? I can’t remember now. I haven’t used it for a bit, but I’ve had been a member, I’ve been a user of it for about a decade. There are around, and of course we know much of the content we get. Football being one example is delivered via RSS. No one knows about that.

No one cares about, that’s right. R ss is still, it’s exactly what it is. It’s the plumbing of the internet. It just because Google did away with its Google news reader doesn’t mean that RSS went away. Podcasting wouldn’t be possible without [01:02:00] RSS. What’s what’ll be interesting for me with this will be to see how well it’s adopted because, feed readers.

I am, you and I lived on feed readers back in the salad days for blogging. Feed Demon. Feed Demon, that’s right. And there were others there, there was some early ones. Where you had to download and install them just software for any other application. But I don’t think that, if news readers were that popular, Google’s a news reader would still be around.

I think most people just went and found blogs to read and having this extra step for curating them that required an extra piece of software was too much. Just like starting a blog was too much for most people, which is why when Facebook came along, oh, I don’t have to start a blog. I’ll just post here.

And is it as, as Facebook, as good as blogging? I would argue it’s not for a number of [01:03:00] reasons. But. It accommodated all those people who weren’t interested. So yeah, I think this could be great. If it gets a lot of uptake, it could create a virtuous circle for the Fedi verse as more people adopt this tool, more clients open up for social networks that are part of the fedi verse that leads more people to adopt this and similar tools and round it goes.

We’ll have to see because again I question how many people out there in the, among the great unwashed are gonna be interested in using a tool like this. I will though. Yeah. Oh, me too. I could see a real advantage, but linking to what we talked about in one of our early topics today is for communicators to get a view across the landscape of what’s going on.

This would be helpful to do that where you are able to bring in content from all these different platforms into a single location. Now, I know I’ll hear some of you listening say, yeah, but we’ve been hearing about this kind of thing forever and there’s been apps that [01:04:00] you can do that with. True. This, though, the uniqueness of this is the social web, if you like, let’s call it the Fed averse for the time being.

This is what. Core of it. And it remains to be seen exactly how it’s gonna work, the features that it’s gonna offer other than what some have posted publicly with screenshots on the early alphas of this. The best reporting I have seen actually is Sarah Paris’s writing in Teran explains very clear very well done.

The features of this, but the customization one that’s one that appeals to me a lot because I’d like to have something that brought in content I’m interested in into a single location. And if it’s a mobile app, like this is, there’s a web version coming, they said, by the way, but the moment they just on the mobile app this would be great.

So for that reason, I’m looking forward to it. But communicators pay attention to this. If you are thinking, yes, I should be paying attention to more things, this could well be the thing that helps you most. Save you a lot of time. And Sarah Perez has been at TechCrunch forever. Her reporting has [01:05:00] always been top journalist.

Yep. Yeah. Yep. But we’re only about a month away from Donald Trump, assuming office for his second term. And communicators across various sectors are strategizing right now to navigate. What they’re anticipating is shifts in policy and public sentiment. The second Trump administration is expected to bring changes that are sig going to significantly impact communication strategies.

Communicators are gonna need a proactive and adaptable approach to deal with these changes. The administration is poised to implement substantial policy changes across multiple domains, and we’d be wise to be ready to have. Strategy in place proactively to deal with them. Let’s start with economic and regulatory policies.

A focus on deregulation is anticipated, particularly in energy and finance. And while this may reduce the cost of compliance for businesses, it could also introduce risks related to environmental concerns and [01:06:00] financial stability. If you work in financial services and there’s a lot of deregulation it was deregulation that led to the housing mortgage crisis in 2018.

So be on the lookout for those types of things. Look at the regulations that have been scrubbed away from your industry and do some risk analysis of what that could mean and start thinking in terms of your crisis preparation for those there’s technology and communication. There’s an expected emphasis on regulating online content moderation.

In the us that would mean reforms to Section two 30, which shields internet companies from liability for user-generated content. This could affect how organizations manage their digital communications and engagement strategies. That’s right in our wheelhouse. So we need to be ready to deal with that.

We’re looking at changes to environmental policies. The Trump administration is less concerned about climate [01:07:00] change than the Biden administration, and potential reversals of previous climate initiatives may alter the landscape for corporate sustainability efforts influencing how companies communicate their environmental commitments.

And of course, there’s DEI the Trump administration is wholly sympathetic to the war on DEI, and a lot of organizations are caving to that pressure. Others are just changing what they call it. In light of these anticipated changes, and probably lots of others, communicators should consider a number of strategies, and the first is proactive engagement.

You gotta remember the relations part of public relations. We need to develop a comprehensive understanding of the new administration’s policy agenda and then engage with policymakers and stakeholders early. That’s the only way we’re gonna be able to shape favorable outcomes and mitigate the challenges these things could create.

Adaptive messaging is another thing we should be looking at. Flexibility and communication [01:08:00] strategies are going to be just essential crafting messages that resonate with diverse audiences while aligning with shifting policies. That’s how you’re gonna maintain public trust and organizational credibility.

We also need to be crisis ready. Given the potential for increased scrutiny and politicization of having robust crisis communication plans in place is vital. This includes preparing for scenarios where company policies or statements may attract public or governmental attention, and think about how you’re going to communicate with your employees about all of these things.

Transparent and consistent communication with employees is critical, especially as policy changes may affect workforce dynamics. Keeping staff informed and engaged will foster a co a cohesive organizational response to external developments. Journalists are anticipating a renewed hostility toward their work under the incoming Trump administration.

We’ve already seen a, b, C agree to pay $15 [01:09:00] million to settle a suit with Trump, and he’s filed a new one against the Cleveland Plain dealer and the polling company that showed a poll just before the election with Trump winning in that state. He did not with Trump losing in that state, he actually won.

This could influence media relations strategies. Companies should be prepared for a potential potentially adversarial media environment. Consider building stronger media relationships than you have now. Establishing and maintaining those relationships with journalists can help facilitate more accurate and favorable coverage.

I think it’s more important than ever for your people to be trained as spokespersons. If they’re well prepared to handle challenging questions and convey key messages effectively, that’ll make life easier. And our need to monitor the media landscape is more important than it ever has been. We need to stay informed about changes in media dynamics and public sentiment so that we can adjust our communication messaging and strategies accordingly.[01:10:00]

But we need to be proactive, engaging with stakeholders, adapting our messaging strategies, preparing for crises, and navigating media relations thoughtfully. If we do that, we can guide our organizations through this period. It’s a complicated landscape without any doubt. And of course the major focus of everything you’re saying is in the United States.

Yet this is a global issue. Particularly if you just think of it purely from a business point of view that companies with business all over the world, many companies have operated in multiple countries, and therefore this is important to everyone. In that sense, I’m thinking of, how you would prepare for this when there is so much unknown still.

So you have to work on some assumptions, I would say, but there are some fundamentals you can do. Sure. This man is coming into the White House, that he’s said he’s gonna appoint this person, that person. And most of those appointees that he’s mentioned have attracted i, horror from normal people.

Let’s say particularly when you have someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who’s gonna [01:11:00] be in charge of what vaccines, at least anyway. Everything health related. He is. If he’s confirmed, he’ll be the Secretary of Health, human Health and Human Services. Yeah, I was reading an article by Paul Holmes in Provoke Media talking about this in relation to healthcare generally, and big pharma in particular, that got me thinking about this very thing.

How do you prepare for this when you truly do not know what policies are gonna be in place and the direction of travel, if you will. So it makes it tricky. But you’ve got a plan no matter what, and it could well be, you can have this happens then we do this, or if we do this to make that happen, we will do it this way or whatever.

So it’s, it is in a sense, I suppose crisis, communication, planning in one sense, looking at it that way. But this affects everything and everybody, it seems to me we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We do know in some areas that we are not gonna what happened again, lot does depend on your political perspective, I think.

So if you are a maga you’re gonna love what’s coming, I suspect, hopefully, [01:12:00] hopefully reason will win the day. But what we’ve seen with this shutdown I suspect not. So the US is very unique. It seems to me, in the openness and transparency of its really dirty laundry politically that is laundered further whole world to see.

And that’s what’s been happening with this, and this is now happening with this as well. Very interesting. Yeah. I spent three years in the pharmaceutical industry and if I were in the pharmaceutical industry today I would be focused on the prospect of RFK Junior as the head of HHS. I’d be looking at his beliefs the people that he and Trump are planning on putting into other positions of leadership like the FDA and what their beliefs are and what policies they’ve talked about.

And start strategizing. Do we need a, I have seen a ton of communication now, unfortunately, I don’t, I haven’t seen this from the pharma industry, although I don’t know how much they’re, controlling from behind the scenes, but [01:13:00] talking about measles and talking about polio and how great these vaccines were, and denigrating the belief as I would myself that, rFK Jr. And some others have that. Oh, it wasn’t really the vaccines that did that. It was the change in the weather or, whatever it might have been. And building public opinion matters, right? And if you see a surge of public opinion and heated public opinion saying, no, these, I don’t want polio bad, I don’t want my kid in an iron lung.

It could influence policies. So this is what we need to be thinking about now. You can’t wait until the legislation’s introduced right? Or signed even worse. We need to be anticipating based on our industries and what we know about what Trump has said he is going to do, and what the people he’s appointing have written what their policy positions are.

We need to be paying close attention to this right now. Yeah. Good call to [01:14:00] action there, Cheryl. So let’s explore a topic. We’ve discussed a great deal during this year, and that’s reshaping the way we work, which is the rapid adoption of generative AI tools like Chat, GPT in the workplace.

Employees in nearly every industry are turning to these tools to code, right and research. As we’ve mentioned before, many workers are adopting AI faster than their employers can issue guidance or policies. Consider this according to a Financial Times report. Last week, nearly 25% of the US workforce and almost half of those in software and finance are using AI weekly.

In many cases, workers are experimenting in secret, wary of being labeled as lazy or incompetent. There’s also a fear that productivity gains could lead to job cuts or for those who stay heavier workloads. That said, not all organizations are lagging behind. Many companies were initially cautious, some even implementing blanket bans over privacy concerns, but others are already far ahead [01:15:00] rolling out detailed policies and infrastructure.

Businesses like McKinsey, Walmart, and JP Morgan Chase aren’t just catching up. They’re leading the charge says the FT building, secure in-house tools and moving full steam ahead into execution mode. For them, AI is no longer an experiment. It’s a strategic asset embedded into their processes. It’s clear there is a transformative trend reshaping industries worldwide, where employees across various sectors are leveraging AI technologies to enhance productivity, automate processes, and modernize customer experiences.

Notably, many organizations are not just keeping pace. Are leading the charge with comprehensive AI strategies and implementations. Also, last week, Google published an updated list of 321 real world generative AI use cases from the world’s leading organizations. We’ll have a link to Google’s report in the show notes, but let’s briefly review six industry specific examples.

Retail fast food chain. [01:16:00] Wendy’s is piloting generative AI at their drive-through windows in Ohio, streamlining order processing and allowing staff to focus more on customer service, beauty and cosmetics. The Estee Lauder companies are partnering with Google Cloud to transform the online consumer experience using generative AI enhancing personalization and engagement.

Automotive Volkswagen of America has developed a virtual assistant within their My VW app, enabling drivers to access information and receive assistance through AI driven interactions. Telecommunications Telecom implemented a Google powered voice agent to address customer calls increasing efficiency by 20%.

Healthcare, Qlik Therapeutics leverages AI to describe, to develop prescription digital therapeutics, enhancing patient engagement and treatment outcomes. Education Beyond 12, a tech enabled nonprofit has developed an AI powered college coach to offer [01:17:00] scalable coaching to first generation students providing support through text app and web platforms.

These examples illustrate that AI integration is not a distant future, but a present reality with companies actively deploying AI to gaining competitive edge. However, this rapid adoption also brings challenges including the need for clear governance, balancing innovation with risk, and navigating evolved legal frameworks.

AI’s rapid adoption is undeniably transforming the workplace, offering opportunities for greater efficiency, innovation, and customer engagement. However, as organizations navigate this new reality, the CRI critical question remains, how can they strike the right balance between empowering employees to use AI effectively and mitigating risks related to privacy, ethics, and workforce dynamics?

The examples we’ve highlighted show that companies across industries are proving it’s possible to integrate AI in ways that drive value while remaining thoughtful about its implications as we explore this [01:18:00] topic. In episodes of this podcast, we’ll focus on what leaders, teams and communicators can do to harness AI’s potential responsibly and ensure it’s a tool for progress, not disruption.

Michelle thoughts? I’m trying to open my VW so I can see the, yeah, I was gonna say, you have a vw do you have this in your My VW app? I haven’t used the, my VW app in quite some time I need to log in and see, and of course it’s doing two factor authentication, so I have to go check my inbox.

Oh yeah. But I have an ID four electric vw, which I love, with the exception of the fact that the range is only about 185 miles, so I’m charging it all the time. But I don’t take it on long trips. We take Michelle’s Lexus on long trips, but, I think this is absolutely right, is the need to look at what other organizations are doing and how they’re using it in order to spark the ideas about how you can use it.

I think two things that are going to drive this much faster. One is the the introduction of agents, which we talk about [01:19:00] ceaselessly. Because as soon as an organization says, oh, we can get this done that way, it’s not just, here’s a query and I’m gonna get a response, but we can actually have these tests routinely taken over by ai.

And, the thing to keep in mind about agents is it’s not one agent that’s gonna do everything. There’s gonna be an agent that does one thing and an agent that does another, and an agent that does another, and that you’re gonna end up with, dozens or hundreds of agents running in your organization.

So that’s one of the things that I think is gonna drive this. And the other is, as more and more software has the AI baked into it, and you’re using the software anyway I think this is what’s going to lead organizations to realize that this is just part of price of admission now for doing business.

And it’s gonna end up in, in every organization at some level. I think those that are strategic about it are going to get the edge. But you see all of these case studies and all of these different organizations and you can’t imagine it’s gonna take long before their [01:20:00] competitors go, Hey, wait a minute we can’t fall behind with this.

You’re right. I think it’s worth to, to your point, knowing what or looking at what others are doing. These six examples I gave are just six outta the 321 in that Google document. They’re definitely worth looking at. There’s a handful I read and I then researched them online to find out more information.

You can do the same Google it. Actually, you know what that’s a generic word. Now Google the lowercase. Okay. It means search. And it probably isn’t gonna be Google. It’s not Probably flex it. Yeah, flex, yeah. Flex it. Exactly. It’s good to to read this the FTS piece. Was in, I thought initially when I first read it, there’s an opinion piece really unduly negative about no one’s doing anything in organization.

It corrected itself or it added in. But there are some highlights and there are some highlights, and this really relates to what we were discussing earlier about the PR business missing the boats. And a couple of years ago, they were definitely way [01:21:00] out there in understanding and even willingness to get involved in all this.

They’ve come a long way in that there are some examples in the 321 of companies in, in that area. But the main thing is to look at this in retail, in automotive, in telecommunications, what people are doing in those areas. There are other case studies too. I’ve used many, I think we’ve talked about some of these, of what’s advertising agencies are doing, how they are employing generative ai.

And of course you are right to mention, the the rise of agents ’cause that was in my mind when I was talking, when we were in the conversation about the the report from USC that doesn’t mention agents. So this is all written before the sudden awareness of AI and agents that has really captured imaginations over the past, literally the past month or two.

And the way you described it exactly was gonna light up bulbs in people’s minds about, oh, this is how this is gonna give us value. And you mentioned an ai, an agent for this and an [01:22:00] agent for that. You’re gonna need super agents to manage all the agents. So this is, that presents some really interesting scenarios, I think.

But we are in another time of rapid change with tools around us. There’s, you and I talk about ai. I see many other people talking about this. I see content constantly about this kind of sifting through all of that. To find the stuff of value is something that communicators ought to do very clearly.

And tools like this or resources like Google’s a big help for that. Yeah, I joked about plexing it but I talked to more and more people who are using either perplexity or chat GPTs new search functionality instead of Google. And that led to an article that I just saw yesterday that Google said, watch for it.

At the top of Google searches, you’re now gonna have an AI search capability too. They see the writing on the wall, they see people shifting over to perplexity and chat GPT for search and yeah, they know they need to do something about [01:23:00] that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have now on Google search, if you used Google search for things, and I still do typically at the top of the search is an AI generated answer to your question.

What I’ve noticed recently though is that they’ve now giving sources to that they weren’t doing that to start with. So I tend to think how can I trust what they, who’s saying this now? They’re providing the sources. So if they are literally shifting as the goalpost is shifting, they need to do that and they can still offer something that people might find a value, but they need to move faster than the current doing.

I, it seems to me, yeah. The AI overviews with the footnotes is a step in the right direction, but I think they’re planning something much more robust and more along the lines of what you’re seeing from perplexity and open ai. That’ll do it for this episode of four Immediate release.

But don’t go away just yet. We have a few things to let you know about not the least of which is when our next monthly episode will drop. We’re planning to record that on Saturday, January 25th. So it [01:24:00] will drop on Monday, January 27th. Note your calendars, folks. Also to let you know that January the third, 2025 is the 20th anniversary of this podcast for immediate release.

We are not gonna do what we discussed a decade ago that when we hit our 20th we’ll be on a cruise somewhere at the Pacific, maybe around Hawaii or damn, or yeah, we’re not gonna make it. But we’ll do it on our 25th. Yeah. The third is actually in our calendars for one of the short form midweek episodes.

So we will devote that or we’ll talk about that on the anniversary date when we publish that episode, which will be on January the third. I will have done the math and I’ll know exactly what number episode that actually is. Good. We’ll have lots of statistics for you. Also to let you know that we have another FIR interview coming.

Sean, I had a terrific conversation just a few days ago with Martin Waxman. Many of you will be familiar with Martin in Canada, and [01:25:00] we chatted with him at length. Great conversation That will be published week commencing January the sixth. That’s the plan, so look out for that. It was a wonderful conversation.

It was he’s one sharp guy. He is A lot of people who listen to FAR may remember Martin from inside pr the podcast that he did with Joe Thornley and Ginny Dietrich. Yeah. We suggested that it would be nice to hear those three voices together again, they would one of these days, and he seemed amenable to that idea.

Yeah. In the meantime, as you’re waiting for all of this great content from the FIR Podcast Network you can comment on anything that you’ve heard about in this episode or anything that you think we ought to be talking about or would like us to consider. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can send email to fir comments@gmail.com.

We love audio comments and haven’t had one in a while, so attach an audio file to that email up to three minutes. We’ll play it and you can be part of this [01:26:00] conversation. If you don’t have the wherewithal to record that, go to the FIR website, fir podcast network.com. You’ll see a send voicemail button on the right hand side.

Just click that and you can record up to 90 seconds. You can record as many of those as you want, and I will get those and look forward to playing those on the show. You can leave a comment on the show notes at FIR. Podcast network.com. You can leave comments where we let you know that we have posted new episodes on Facebook and LinkedIn and on Blue Sky and Threads and MAs it on.

We’re everywhere except X. We’re not on X anymore. And we also very much appreciate your ratings and reviews. Oh, and I forgot to mention that you can also leave comments where we share the latest episodes on the FIR podcast network page on Facebook and the FIR group on Facebook. [01:27:00] So also to quickly mention, and you mentioned Blue Sky.

We just opened an account in the name of FIL podcast until now. We’ve been sharing in our individual accounts on threats. Okay. We’ll continue to Oh sure. And, but now we have a dedicated account that replaces the X account. So look for a widget at some point appearing on the VIA website. But in the meantime it’s FIR podcast on Blue Sky.

So if you wanna look for us, follow us, that’s where you’ll see news and information about upcoming episodes. And you can there too, of course. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #441: PR, AI, and Social Media Are All Shook Up appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Even when they know it has been rigged, people assign a lot of credibility to experiments. When they see the experiment produce favorable results, for example, potential customers might be more inclined to buy. Experiments can also influence decision-makers in your company — again, even if they assume you put your thumb on the scale. The phenomenon is similar to wrestling, with audiences knowing the match is staged by enjoying it all the same. Neville and Shel review some research on the subject and discuss ways communicators can apply experimentation to their work in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Socializing an Idea? Experiments Can Help Convince Your Audience | Working Knowledge

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to four immediate release episode four 40. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shel Holtz, and Marketing. Is hard. Seriously it’s getting more and more difficult to influence people. Some businesses are finding that experimentation can be a powerful tool, not just for making decisions about the marketing approach that you’re gonna take, but as an actual instrument of influence.

A recent study by Harvard Business School’s, Rebecca Karp and her colleagues, reveals that business experiments can serve. Two purposes, gathering data and persuading stakeholders. We’ll dive into how this plays out in two distinct complimentary approaches right after this. First, let’s examine how experiments influence I internal decision makers.

Carps research shows that business experiments frequently become what she calls staged performances with scripted endings. Now, before you shrug this off as [00:01:00] just petty manipulation, consider an interesting parallel. She draws from of all things professional wrestling. Just as wrestling fans they’re known as smarts.

I didn’t know that. That’s a mashup of the word smart and mark. Smarts understand that they’re watching a performance, but they still appreciate the show. Now, shift that concept to business and you get sophisticated business audiences that are able to recognize that experiments also. Come with an agenda most of the time.

Think about a startup founder presenting experimental results to venture capitalists. The VCs know the startup team likely designed the experiment to favor a particular outcome, but they don’t view this as deceptive. As one VC told carp. It’s a feature, not a bug. The ability to structure compelling experiments demonstrates a founder’s strategic thinking and persuasive capabilities.

These are qualities that investors actually value now. So how does all of [00:02:00] this translate into the practice of PR and marketing? Keep in mind, transparency about experimental limitations doesn’t diminish the their persuasive power. In fact, acknowledging potential biases while still delivering valuable insights can enhance your credibility.

The goal isn’t to present. Perfect unbiased data, which let’s face it rarely exists in business context anyway, but to generate useful information that helps decision makers make their decisions while advancing strategic objectives. Now let’s pivot to the second approach, using experiments themselves as content to influence consumers and external stakeholders.

We’ve seen a lot of really great examples of this strategy in action considered Dove’s real beauty sketches experiment. They had an FBI trained forensic artist drawing women based on how they described themselves and then drawing the same women based on somebody else’s description. What they found was [00:03:00] that the women described themselves as being much less attractive than objective.

Third parties who didn’t know them, who described them. This generated massive engagement and reinforced Dove’s brand positioning around authentic beauty. Another example, remember Blend text? Will it Blend series? This started as a simple product demonstration and it became a viral sensation. They blended everything from iPhones to golf balls.

The experiments weren’t just tests. They were compelling contents that showcased product benefits and entertained audiences. There was re’s opt-out side campaign, which offered another masterclass in experimental marketing by closing stores on Black Friday and tracking outdoor activity, REI turned their businesses business experiment into a movement.

The campaign not only generated immediate buzz, it created a lasting impact on the perception of people have of the brand. Now for PR professionals, these examples [00:04:00] highlight an important evolution in how we think about experiments. They’re not just tools for gathering data or making decisions.

They’re opportunities to create compelling narratives and build deeper connections with audiences. The trick is to design experiments, serve multiple purposes. You definitely wanna generate those useful insights, but you also want to create that shareable content. Now this approach requires careful consideration.

For experiments to work as content, they need three key elements. They need authenticity, transparency, and relevance. It has to feel genuine, even if it’s designed with persuasion in mind. The methodology and limitations should be openly acknowledged. That’s transparency and most important, the experiment has to resonate with your audience’s interests and concerns.

This trend is likely to continue growing as consumers become more sophisticated and demanding of evidence-based claims experiments. Give us a powerful way to demonstrate value while engaging the audience. The [00:05:00] challenge is to find creative ways to turn research and testing into stories that drive both understanding and action.

So don’t limit your experiments to the ones that you conduct behind closed doors. The AB tests that of course we’re gonna continue to do, but you should consider how your testing and learning process become. Part of your story, could your product development experiments become content? Could your market research be turned into shareable insights?

The answer to these questions might just lead to your next breakthrough campaign. Yeah. A lot to think about there. Shel, the first thing that struck me, listening to what you were saying and indeed, I think Rebecca Kapa has done a super job with this in her studies that she mentions in that Harvard Business Review article, how experiments can play different roles in business.

But what struck me was, isn’t this something that. Businesses have been doing for years. Would it not be called thinking out loud, perhaps? Literally doing your experimentation in the open. Maybe they don’t [00:06:00] call it experimentation, because this strikes me as something that isn’t this what businesses have been doing for quite a while.

I think to some extent businesses have been doing this, but I don’t think that they’ve been doing it as a strategy. I think somebody in the marketing or the advertising department has an idea, Ooh, what if we had a sketch artist do this? As opposed to saying what experiments were conducted as part of our product research or our market research.

We can turn into content. So I think the difference is, yeah, there, there are great examples that Dove example is several years old. BlendTech you remember Will it blend? That’s what, 10, 15 years ago? So you it’s not new to see this employed. I just think it’s new to think about it in the context of experiments as.

A marketing asset to say what experiments have been conducted as part of the research for this product or service or brand identity, or whatever it is that the [00:07:00] campaign is focused on. Or what experiments could we conduct that would provide compelling evidence that would convince a skeptical audience while also entertaining them?

I think it’s considering experimentation as the focus of a marketing effort that Rebecca Karp has brought forward. Got it. So the Harvard article mentions that her in their words that her research comes at a time of consumer skepticism. And she, it also mentions that the audience the experiments cop talks about tend to be other business leaders.

They don’t expect such experiments to be exhaustive. So what do you think need needs to happen to make it far more strategic in the organization? Is there a particular thing communicators need to do to get this into a strategic approach as opposed to either not happening or happening in a limited scale that’s not no one [00:08:00] knows about?

On the internal side, I think it’s pretty much what we have been doing all along. I, yeah. One of the items that I read talked about the fact that, you’re going to do an AB test in order to convince somebody that you should be going with A and not B, frequently, you’ll make a really great, let’s say headline and B not so great a headline.

Yeah. So that. The movies shows your bus who are gonna make the decision will say of course a tested better, let’s go with a right. Yeah. So again, it’s performative. From the external standpoint though, no I think it comes down to stakeholder analysis. You really need to know your audience. Yeah.

As you mentioned, the article talks about an increasingly skeptical consumer base. In terms of the product that we want to sell or the service we wanna sell, or the brand that we want people. To appreciate what is the basis of that skepticism and what kind of. Experiment, could we conduct, what kind of [00:09:00] research could we present that would convince them, oh look, the data shows that this is true.

Okay. I’ll be less skeptical and consider a purchase. I’ll consider doing business with that organization. Design the experiment to address the source of the skepticism as opposed to just saying, Ooh, here’s a cool experiment that would look good on film and convince nobody of anything.

That makes sense. You mentioned Dove and of course they’re almost like a, poster chart for experimentation in public. I really am wondering why we don’t. Seem to do this more in organizations and do them publicly so that, is it fear of failure in public or is it that it’s, there aren’t smart people like there are in Dove?

Is it as simple as that? I think it may just be more habit and laziness. A lot of things to change. There needs to be pain, right? Oh my God, this isn’t working anymore. We need to do something different. We talk about this when we talk about the adoption of [00:10:00] technology by public relations organizations, whether they’re internal or agency.

Why would we learn a new technology when our billings are high and our clients are happy? It’s not until money is taken off the table by a boutique that. Learns how to make websites or do social media or whatever it might be that the public relations people say, oh, we’d better learn how to do this because either the clients are demanding it or they’re hiring other people besides us to do it.

So I think it’s the same thing here. Where is the pain that’s going to drive people to try something different when the approaches that we’re using now seem to be selling product? Yeah so then it comes down to perhaps the art of persuasion. Actually prior to that, it would come down to, do you see this I whole notion of experimentation or say, project X that we’ve been working on for a while.

Why don’t you do this with Project X? And therein is the hurdle that everyone seems to fall at. [00:11:00] If that’s true. Is it? I, that’s a good question. But perhaps we need to undertake an experiment to convince the powers that be, that experimentation would be a good communication or a good marketing approach.

I can see it from a PR standpoint where you’re not trying to sell, where you’re just trying to persuade that here’s an experiment that helps. Persuade you that this is the appropriate approach to take? Yeah, so in the strategic planning where you’re looking at the strategy that you’re going to employ in order to achieve the goal one of those strategies might be to present the results of an experiment that demonstrate the value of what we’re talking about.

So it’s thinking about it at that stage of your planning that I think might get the ball rolling on this type of thing. I’m, it comes to mind that the kerfuffle that arose in recent weeks over Jaguar, the car maker and the reader design of their logo and the introduction of concept car I.

That [00:12:00] created a huge amount of online chatter with opinions being ventured every which way you like on what a disaster it was. What are they thinking of, they’ve ruined the brand, et cetera. And then a few, I would call them smarts in Rebecca Rebecca’s cop description who said, hang on a second.

This is actually quite good. They are reinventing this. It’s a whole new approach, et cetera. All that’s been going on, this to me is in this realm now. Of course, not knowing anything about what the plans are they might say to me, you’re crazy. This is totally not that. But it looks like it to me.

This is in the do area. It seems to me of some really keen. Ideas are being are executed with significant resources behind. This is not like a quick petty cash operator. There’s se serious budgets behind this kind of thing, and it either fail or not, but they’ve got, I suppose you could argue from a brand point of view a whole lot of conversations about the brand [00:13:00] has been has been mentioned in mainstream and social media globally.

And that may be what is their goal, perhaps? I don’t know. But that’s big scale, right? And not everyone’s able to do that. So what about little things that might work in niche markets? And again, to your point earlier you mentioned you, you need to understand your audience. Exactly. I’m just wondering what’s really, what is preventing people doing more of this?

Or is it simply that it is a niche no matter what Rebecca Kas research shows, this is just a niche idea. It’ll never gain major traction. Yeah. A couple of thoughts. First on the Jaguar side that could well be an experiment, but it would be a different type because they’re not presenting the results of the experiment to the public.

Not yet. They’re engaging the public in the experiment. It’s covert experiment. We’ve decided to experiment with a new logo to see what kind of reactions we get from the public if that indeed is what they did. In, in terms of smaller organizations doing this, a again, I think it just doesn’t occur.[00:14:00]

To people. You don’t need to spend a ton of money. BlendTech spent whatever it cost to buy the item that they blended. They didn’t have a huge studio set up. It was all pretty simple. They needed one of their blenders in a golf ball, one of their blenders and an iPhone.

Most companies can afford the budget to do that sort of thing. So again, I think, when you’re doing your strategic planning, if your strategy says we’re going to. Use an experiment to present. Experiment results in order to help persuade people that this is the solution that they wanna, that you know they wanna spend money on.

Then when you’re developing your objectives being measurable approaches that you take to achieving the strategies that you’re putting in place. One of them would be that the experiment can’t cost more than. $20,000. That would be part of the measurable element of the objective that you set so that you can, stay within your budget.

But I would think that a couple of good [00:15:00] communicators could look at the whatever it is that they’re trying to communicate and come up with some ideas for experimentation. And if you can’t, you can always just go ask Chachi pt. Good advice there. Shel, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #440: Experimenting for Influence appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

There is a common thread among many of the predictions and trends posts that typically blossom across the web as the year draws to a close: AI agents are poised to revolutionize (a word we don’t use lightly) work in 2025. The frontier AI models — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and a few others — have captured imaginations and led to various uses throughout the business world. But these chatbots, which deliver answers to natural-language queries, will pale compared to agentic AI, which sets off to complete tasks that require multiple steps autonomously. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel delve into agentic AI and its possibilities for communicators, along with five other digital marketing trends.

Links from this episode:

Top 2025 digital marketing trends: AI, MMM, and more
Greg Isenberg’s list of agentic AI possibilities on LinkedIn

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 439 of four immediate release. I’m She Holtz. And I’m Neville Hobson. We are close to Christmas, the time of year when marketers, communicators, and everyone comes out with predictions and trends for 2025, the come following year which is that year, we have one here.

We’ve talked about a couple recently, and this one’s actually quite interesting. Last week Google celebrated 25 years of they say transforming how we search and discover and shared its vision for the top marketing trends shaping 2025. From smarter tools like AI powered marketing mix models to the rise of shoppable video, Google says, the future promises more intuitive, ethical, and consumer centric approaches.

We’ll explore these trends right after this. We will also see AI agents simplifying complex workflows and mindful [00:01:00] marketing addressing consumer decision fatigue. These trends reflect a pivotal moment where technology meets responsibility, paving the way for a more sustainable and inclusive marketing future.

Google’s insights highlight six key digital marketing trends poised to shape 2025. Let’s look into what this means for businesses and marketers alike. The first one, the evolution of marketing mix models and is a statistical analysis tool that helps marketers evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and determine how different marketing tactics impact sales.

Media fragmentation and budget constraints, mms are becoming smarter, faster, and more granular. Tools like Google’s Meridian, a highly customizable modeling framework enable realtime transparent insights into cross channel performance. Second, AI agents as simplifiers. These will revolutionize data management enabling seamless integration of [00:02:00] multimodal information for business operations.

These chief Simplifier offices as Google dubs them simplify complex workflows and improve efficiency. This slots right into all the buzz and the hype and the talk in recent weeks about AI agents and how that is crucial in 2025. Third rise of shoppable video. Social commerce continues to grow with shoppable YouTube videos offering consumers seamless purchase options.

Brands are encouraged to integrate product feeds, turn ads into storefronts, and partner with creators. Fourth, mindful marketing for decision fatigue with consumers. Overwhelmed by information brands should prioritize hyper-relevant consented data to create meaningful, simplified marketing experiences that alleviate decision distress.

I was actually conscious shell when I was looking into this, all the buzz phrases that pop out in this decision. Distress. Great one, isn’t it? That’s a new one to me. Fifth AI driven app [00:03:00] marketing. The focus shifts from app installs to in-app engagement with AI powered features, enhancing user experiences and driving specific actions such as purchases and content discovery.

And sixth ethical and sustainable marketing. Ethical imperatives, including sustainability. Transparency in AI generated content and inclusivity are essential for long-term consumer trust and brand loyalty. So these trends reflect a shift towards more personalized, ethical, and technologically integrated marketing practices.

These are themes that are threaded through some of the conversations we’ve had in recent months in previous episodes of this podcast. You can take a look a bit more closely at some of these. One that strikes me as pretty key. I perhaps, based on my focus on what others have been talking about, AI agents as 2025 is the year forward, as I mentioned, is precisely this AI agents as [00:04:00] simplifies.

It strikes me, that is a nice phrase, chief simplify officers that you can really. Equate that to, as Google calls it, a representative advance transformative advancement in 2025, building on the foundation laid by large language models in 2024. So that’s one I think that we ought to be paying very close attention to.

What’s your thinking shell about these trends? I think they’re all spot on. I don’t disagree with any of them. The marketing mix model, I think is inevitable just based on the fact that this is data that’s available and it’s really just a matter of having the AI tools that can analyze it and, prompting them or setting them up to analyze effectively all of the different inputs against the output.

There’s so many different. Marketing elements that can be factored into these models. It can deal with time, it can deal with place, it can deal [00:05:00] with content. Just all kinds of different inputs and which ones are having impacts on the company’s sales. And the company’s bottom line yeah, is, it’s pretty clear that AI can simplify that and speed it up.

I the age agentic AI is what really excites me. These days. And as you probably know, Google launched Gemini 2.0, the first model in that family of models yesterday. And it is AgTech. That’s the whole point of the 2.0. And there was a post on LinkedIn. I don’t remember who shared this.

I copied it and. Saved it without noting who it was. I only saw it because our friend Jeremiah Ang was commenting on it. But it was just a list of some of the things that Agentic AI is going to do for you. And it’s things like imagine your acquisition agent runs 50 meme accounts simultaneously, testing hooks across different niches, including a thousand posts daily until it finds.[00:06:00]

What hits your research agent analyzes a hundred thousand tweets per hour. Finding unmet needs and feature requests that no one’s building for your content agent creates 200 unique hooks daily across X, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Learning from each response and optimizing for what works. And this list goes on and on.

The idea that you can assign. A task to an AI and it just goes out and does it, regardless of how many steps it takes and how much time it takes. Some of these things you’re probably looking at hours, days. Some of them could take weeks and it’ll come back to you if it has a question as it’s going through this process.

This is. Probably the most dramatic change that we’re going to see computing bring to work and life since the introduction of the pc. This is going to be huge and a among these trends that you listed this is the big one. This is the one that think people are gonna be latching onto.

Now think how quickly it’s going to [00:07:00] change is. Going to be a question of how quickly adoption happens in organizations and based on what we’re seeing so far. Probably not overnight, right? Because you’re still gonna have people dealing with the governance of these things and the security issues and the like.

But ultimately this is a really big deal. Yeah I Google talk about that at length and in fact the use of the word agentic. I saw a number of people talking last week and I was actually chatting with some folks on this very topic that’s predicted to be, you know how things are the word of the year for 2025.

I was curious myself even that I, I realized I knew the word and the use that’s being applied to now is apt for, its. Definition of, what is the word agentic. And according to many dictionaries including this one dictionary, which is actually the one that writes it in the most simple English something that behaves like an agent able to express or expressing agency or control of on one’s own behalf or on the behalf of another.[00:08:00]

That’s pretty good reference. I think there are though it surprised me, many who think it’s a made up buzzword. No, it’s not, no, it actually says it quite well. And a, an ai an agent ai, but Google there’s one man who contributed to this particular topic. Guillaume Rockets. He’s Google’s senior director of marketing for Google Cloud in emea, Europe, middle Eastern Africa.

He says, these intelligent systems, process multimodal information, that’s text, voice, images, video, and enabling them to reason, adapt and manage complex workflows. And in marketing, and this was a key focus of what Google’s talking about. They addressed the challenge of siloed data across disparate systems.

So AI agents simplify tasks like creating data lakes and streamlining operations. That’s an enterprise perspective. He gives some examples which I thought, yeah, this makes total sense. So many others will be doing this. Kingfisher he talks about, that’s an international home improvement company with 1900 stores owns brands like BNQ in the uk [00:09:00] screwfix integrated enterprise data with AI powered search tools.

And so created a system that improves access to critical information, both in customers and employees. Sounds very straightforward, that simple description, but. As you pointed out, and indeed as they referenced earlier these agents have characteristics that enable them on their own to reason, adapt and manage those workflows, and that you can’t underestimate how phenomenal that would be.

Set aside concerns people express, which I’ve seen being talked about on LinkedIn quite a bit. Is when they go outta control. This is some, this is a kind of a common strategy, not if, but when we have a problem. Be prepared for sorts of weird stuff to happen. But the reality is that the benefits are huge from this if you are able to implement and execute on this quite carefully.

Rock is Google’s Rockus says that ar ai agents are becoming increasingly accessible. To allow organizations to integrate advanced [00:10:00] intelligence seamlessly into their operations without overhauling existing systems. So they’re expected to play a central role in enhancing efficiency and adaptability across industries during 2025.

It’s a very optimistic view. I think you are right. There’s this, none of this is suddenly gonna happen, but you are seeing. The Kingfisher example being replicated and not being, horns being tooted, just casually you see references to this. If there’s now gathering momentum that is focused on these trends then you’ve got a lot more people paying attention to it, a lot more learning what others are doing.

And would like to hear a lot more about this during 2025, I’d say. Oh, absolutely. And going back to this, list of examples that this LinkedIn contributor shared. I’ll find out who it was. Credit him appropriately in the show notes. I just can’t get to it. Right now. But he makes the point in this post that what previously required 20 people and 2 million in salary now [00:11:00] happens automatically with 2000 in agent costs.

One founder becomes as powerful as a fund startup. Customer acquisition becomes predictable, growth becomes systematic. And I don’t think any of that is is incorrect. One thing to keep in mind about AG agentic AI is that it has computer vision. That means it can see your screen and it can take control of your mouse and your keyboard.

And it can sign into applications and. Create things and post things. One of the things that he offers here as an example is your content agent. Your community agent welcomes every new user personally. Handles support tickets in seconds and turns feedback into feature priorities.

Your email agent writes and tests 50 different sequences, personalizing every message based on user behavior. Your analytics agent spots trends before humans could adjusting strategy in real time. This is all stuff that you’re gonna be able to do. This doesn’t require [00:12:00] hiring an outside agency or.

Working with your IT team, these are things that, that, you know if you just take the time to learn how to use these and, if you have access to the tools, which, let’s face it. Yeah. Some of them are gonna be part of your $20 a month Gemini Pro account or your $20 a month Chachi PT Pro account.

You can start creating these agents and running them. So. The benefits that you’re gonna accrue from this in terms of your own productivity and the efficacy of your efforts is, it’s to be right there on a plate in front of you yeah. It’s vital to learn this.

We talked when OpenAI first released Chat, GT 3.0 that, uh. People are worried about whether this is going to take their job and the standard answer was no, it’s not going to take your job. But somebody know who knows how to use it will. That’s more true now than ever with the rise of the agents.

Because if it can do the work of [00:13:00] 10 people that took 40 hours before you don’t wanna be one of those 10 people. You wanna be the one who’s controlling this. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure we’ll see that kind of concern being articulated more and more during 2025. But I’m equally sure that we are gonna hear more from companies experiments.

We’ll hear what they’re getting, and they’re likely to be the large enterprises more than not. More often than not. But I would see. News emerging more than we’ve seen on the on the professional services side of businesses such as finance definitely communication, advertising, public relations, et cetera.

I’m intrigued to know something I read last week, and I didn’t bookmark it unfortunately, so I can’t remember which company it was talking about, was an experiment on an employee communication. Using AI agents on a limited scale in one division of this company. We’re gonna hear lots about that, I’m sure.

It’s all good. I think [00:14:00] though, the thing I would pay attention to is amongst the critiques and the critics, as it were, is the ones that are really informed opinion rather than. Would you call it worse than click bait, attention grabbing, negative stuff. We’re gonna see a lot of that too. So misinformation as I would describe that.

So latching onto the people who are informed. And I’m hoping that we’re gonna see more public speaking about these events, seminars, webinars, you name it, on the progress of all of this. Not from, just from the likes of Google, ’cause I’m sure we’ll gonna see lots of that, but from people actually at the coalface.

Implementing this stuff. So I’m keeping a close eye on LinkedIn, in particular, what people are saying there about this kind of topic. But I agree with you that this is the big one of all the ones that Google mentioned the mms, I think are key shoppable video. I’m not convinced about that, but I’ve not looked into it.

That’s. To me haven’t, isn’t that what we’ve been seeing all along? They talk about YouTube [00:15:00] and I’m sure that’ll play a big rubble. What about some of the other players, TikTok being one notwithstanding the potential of them not being able to be used in the US sometime quite soon. Newer ones, niche.

Video channels are emerging. So mindful marketing this phrase for decision and fatigue and decision distress. Yeah. The people are overwhelmed, so they need hyper-relevant data that absolutely is the case. So if that, we see that. I improving in 2025. That’ll be a damn good thing. I would say AI driven app marketing.

So shifting from app installs to in-app engagement. Yeah. So not just go and install our app. It’s what does it give you when you have done that? So focus on the, you’ve got it. This is what it’ll do for you. So AI featured AI powered features. I saw something the other day. I have a Samsung phone running every.

Everything’s the latest versions of everything. And I keep now getting these emails from Samsung about check out this AI feature in your Galaxy phone. [00:16:00] And I’ve been experimenting with some of it, and some of it is, whoa, really interesting. Others is okay, if I was a gamer, I’d really be interested, but I’m not.

Point is though that these things are happening. So the ethical and sustainable marketing, that to me fits right into the thing we’ve talked about quite a bit. Which is precisely that ethical approaches to business that people are interested in doing business with, an organization that has an ethical approach, a sustainable marketing.

Absolutely no more. I read a story the other, just the other day about a vegetable or a fruit grown in I think Argentina. It might, was a South American country that’s then air freighted to Thailand for processing and wrapping and packaging, and then shipped back or to the US for selling in supermarkets.

That to me is insane. Think of the carbon emissions apart from else, but the inefficiency of that. Oh, I guess it’s the most cost effective way currently to do that. But is it sustainable? No, it’s not. Is it ethical? Arguably, I probably say it probably isn’t. So [00:17:00] those are now issues in the midst of all this.

So maybe agent AI or AI agents as chief simplifier officers will play an even bigger role in businesses. I remember being in a gift shop in Hawaii and looking at a box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts and seeing that they were packaged in Torrance, California. So they shipped to the macadamia nuts, grown in Hawaii to California.

They put the chocolate on it there packaged it up and sent it back to Hawaii to be sold in the. Probably the most cost effective way of doing it, but sustainability, ethical, et cetera. Sustainability, yeah. When it comes to sustainability and decision quality and things like that I, again, I think the agen AI is going to play a huge role here.

Because if you look at the decision quality and decision fatigue, think people, the way people are thinking about that now is based on the chatbot AI implementations that we see where you can share some data with it and it’ll do some analysis. I think [00:18:00] that’s great, but I think that it can also, perform the tasks that the communicator or the marketer has been assigned to do or needs to do.

From the outset with guidance from the marketer rather than just, yeah. Oh, I’m at this stage now where I need to analyze some data. Just start at the beginning of the project and tell the agent to do it, and then you can make adjustments along the way. You can tell it to check in. Each key milestone so that you can assess what’s done and ask it to make adjustments if necessary.

But, using the agents in these situations I, I think that’s what’s gonna turbocharge. All of this stuff, not just pouring more data in and doing the analysis that we’ve been able to do for the last couple of years. Yeah, I agree. Looking forward to 2025 in that case. Yep.

No question. And that will be a 30 for this episode of for immediate release.

The post FIR #439: Agentic AI Tops Digital Trends for 2025 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It doesn’t seem to be a big deal at first glance. A Google AI Overview answers a search query at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Beneath it, all those traditional links and snippets are still there. However, analyses reveal that many people are reading the AI Overview and calling it quits — they never click a link to visit a website. That’s concerning to organizations that have relied on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to drive traffic to their pages. In this short midweek FIR podcast episode, Neville and Shel look at the data and the trends and recommend actions communicators can take to ensure their web properties still get attention as the shift to AI search continues.

Links from this episode:

How brands can stay competitive as AI Overviews transform search
New Report Shows AI Overviews Trends Are Stabilizing
How Google’s AIO Is Affecting SEO
How to monitor brand visibility across AI search channels
Alphabet Inc. (GOOG)’s AI Overviews Impact: Traffic and Engagement Drops for Publishers
Will AI search suck the personality out of your brand?
The impact of AI on keyword research and SEO optimisation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to four immediate Release. This is episode 4 38. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shell Holtz. Search engine optimization. SEO has been a foundational activity for marketers and PR practitioners for decades now, but there’s a transformative development that’s reshaping how organizations communicate online.

Google’s AI powered search results known as AI overviews. It’s having a profound impact on search and SEO. We’ll jump into this in detail right after this. Let me set the context. In May of this year, Google launched AI overviews in the US fundamentally altering the search landscape. These aren’t just featured snippets or knowledge panels like the ones we’ve been seeing for a few years now.

They’re sophisticated AI generated summaries that appear at the top of search results providing comprehensive [00:01:00] answers. I heard this referred to once as one true answer when. Amazon’s Echo was first released and I think we did an episode on that. But these are answers to users queries. While this creates a smoother user experience, it’s presenting really unprecedented challenges for brands, for publishers, and for communicators.

Google’s testing a new ad format with AI overviews that’ll create opportunities for brands to reach users. At the moment they need information, but. Those aren’t available just yet, and the impact of AI overviews has been significant. Early data reveals that publishers are experiencing five to 10% decreases in traffic since AI overviews launched.

This might not sound dramatic, but some news outlets are reporting substantial drops in engagement, and the trend is expected to grow as the technology becomes more widespread. We’re seeing the acceleration of what’s known as the zero click phenomenon. Users getting the answers directly [00:02:00] from Google’s AI summary without ever visiting a website.

Now, I know we’ve discussed this before, but here’s a wrinkle that makes this a relevant opportunity for communicators. Right now. When brands are cited as sources in AI overviews, they frequently see increased click-through rates and longer site visits. This suggests that while overall traffic might decrease the quality of traffic is.

Improving. That’s quality over quantity. Users who do click through are more engaged and interested in deeper insights. Now, this shift is forcing organizations to rethink their digital communication strategies. The traditional SEO playbook is being rewritten. Smart brands are adapting by creating comprehensive, authoritative content that AI systems recognize as valuable sources.

They’re moving beyond keyword optimization to focus on establishing genuine thought leadership and authority in their space. To maintain [00:03:00] visibility in this new landscape, organizations need to consider a multifaceted approach. First, focus on creating high quality, brand aligned content that offers unique insights and genuine value.

Second, invest in digital PR and authoritative mentions. Third, develop sophisticated monitoring systems to track performance across AI powered search channels. Fourth, diversify your digital presence beyond Google to include other AI powered platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest to reach your audience.

Fifth and perhaps most critically build strategic relationships with key industry publications that AI systems frequently cite as authoritative sources. That’s a new approach to media relations. Sixth, take advantage of AI powered ad solutions to ensure your campaigns remain effective in the changing search landscape.

Finally explore alternative methods to engage consumers like interactive content and personalized [00:04:00] experiences to make up for potential declines in traditional website metrics. Now, here’s what’s particularly fascinating. We’re seeing the emergence of a new specialized role in communication teams. AI Search Channel Specialist.

These professionals work at the intersection of SEO Digital PR and content creation, understanding both the technical aspects of AI systems and the strategic elements of brand communication. Now the need for this expertise is clear, given that AI overviews synthesize information from multiple sources, which can dilute individual brand identities and make it harder for users to attribute content to specific brands.

Ensuring clear attribution within AI generated content is crucial to maintaining brand identity. Something an AI search channel specialist should be able to do. The implications extend beyond just search visibility. The shift is fundamentally changing how organizations need to think about their [00:05:00] digital footprint.

The era of creating content primarily for search engines is giving way to an age where authority, authenticity, and genuine expertise matter more than ever. Looking ahead, organizations that will thrive are those that embrace this change while maintaining their authentic voice. The goal isn’t to gain the AI system.

It’s to genuinely provide valuable enough information that AI systems NASH naturally recognize and amplify your expertise. Yeah. Interesting. That’s a good way you’ve explained that. I think, we have talked about this before, and I think the reality is, as I understand it certainly is that the the likelihood of more zero click searches is not a likelihood, it’s an inevitability, I believe.

Why would you click through to the website if you’ve got. Your answer right there in the search results. You’re not gonna do that, in which case you will see the brand owner is definitely gonna see a drop [00:06:00] in visits from search to the website. So the limited attention I’ve given to this topic actually shall shows.

That the people I’m seeing in the SAO business in particular talking about this actually presents new opportunities. If you tailor your search texts and everything else that shows up you’ve got to do things very differently to how you were doing things before. And in fact one of the articles you shared on this smart company as firm in Australia talks about that, and you actually mentioned it, I believe, create for users, optimized for Google, not create for search, create for the people searching.

That requires a rethink. And it talks this piece talks about the long-term, SEO, addressing the user experience and investing in high quality brand-led content. Sounds great. When you read a text telling you this how do you do that? That’s where you need people such as that expert you mentioned and SEO.

Savvy people who can advise you on this kind of thing, but there’s more to it than that [00:07:00] though, although that is quite essential, I would say so I, I think maybe this is one of those things that is on the very close horizon that no one’s really paying too much attention yet, that now is the time to do this.

I would say. Yeah, definitely. Now is the time to do this, given the fact that the acceleration of all of this is pretty rapid. I think the other thing that is really important to consider here and that I mentioned in the introductory remarks is the need to. Take the same approach to AI that we’ve taken with search engine optimization.

We studied what the keywords were that people were searching on. Now we have to study what are the sources that AI systems that people are using are routinely going to When they’re sharing information, I’m sure that eventually there will be a service that will help with that, but right now I think we’re on our own to figure out which.

Media outlets, which [00:08:00] influencers are being cited by. Chat, GPT by Perplexity, by Gemini, and by Claude. And the open source models like llama from Meta because those are the places where we’re going to have to direct content. And as I said, this is a shift in our media relations mentality.

It’s not just a matter of how many, column inches we get. There’s a. Blast from the past, call ’em engines, how much share of voice we get. It’s in which publications. It’s through which services. Because if they’re not the publications and the services that are finding their way into the answers that these AI systems are providing, then it’s not going to be as useful to you.

It’s not gonna produce the kind of results that you need. If you were investing time in SEO before so I. Recognizing where we want to get our information published who we want distributing it is something that’s gonna require a, a lot of thought. [00:09:00] Yeah, I think so. You are already seeing this.

And this is on a simple basis. I think just from my experience I see in chat GPT, but Plex has always been like this since it started, which is citations that’s now in chat, GPT, and I’m not meaning just the specific search. It’s in everything. You give it a prompt, tell yourself or do something and come back with a result.

It includes. Links to the sources. Perplexity does it better. In that it’s a lot easier to find that. I think though. Maybe this brings to the fore then that there needs to be ’cause it’s just from a user point of view, greater care in checking out the sources. So for instance, don’t just that blindly.

Oh, this link, it’s got links there. Great. It’s okay. Check the links. I had the experience just a couple days ago where I did something and I checked the link and had nothing to do with the question. So I think. How do they come up with an answer then? If you’ve got a bad source in there that it’s citing, it’s not perfect.

We know that it’s not perfect, so you need to check it. I’ve never [00:10:00] stopped doing that. Even if I’m happy with a result, I will still check it. Search, actual search I. I don’t tend still to do that. With chat. GPTI do that definitely with perplexity. Gemini not so much either, but I tend to stick with perplexity in chat GPT from my gender AI use typically.

But this is, this has a new dimension to it and I’m thinking that, you are searching for something. And again, thinking back to previous discussions on this topic, we’ve had that what does it mean to you? You need something that you are searching for and there’s gotta be something that’s gonna stimulate you to click through to the website, which is not.

The future. That’s not the future scene. I don’t see it. So maybe what brands need to consider in addition to what we’ve discussed, is how to and maybe this is at the heart of the content that, that they need to create. How do you present your information that satisfies the user? That still gives you.

A value from [00:11:00] that which traditionally you’d count on a visit to your website or whatever the destination is that you choose, you’ve gotta find another way of doing that now. And that’s at the heart of doing this for the user, not for Google. So maybe this is another challenge for the SEO business as a whole on this is a radical change that’s approaching us, it seems to me.

And they don’t seem to be ready for that. No, I don’t think they’ve caught up with this at all, frankly. I think they’re still in that mode of protecting their existing business model. But I think that there’s a, there’s just so much going on here that organizations that remain mired in the old world of search engine optimization are gonna be scratching their heads at this lost.

Traffic. Yeah, I worry about media organizations that rely on visits for revenue. It’s somehow organizations are gonna have to find new ways to entice people to their sites in [00:12:00] addition to the work that they’re gonna need to undertake in order to show up in these. Snippets these AI overviews that Google is presenting.

Now, the other thing is that if these don’t produce the kind of results that people are looking for, we may see greater uptake of perplexity and chat GPT search. And if that happens, it’s the same result. We need to get into AI results as opposed to the 10 link search engine results page that we’re so accustomed to.

I think that is exactly what’s gonna happen. Shell, I think perplexity and Chat, GPT and others who are coming on board with this this approach are going to be major beneficiaries of the shift that’s started already. They’ll refine their models to make it even more attractive from a user point of view.

I think Perplexity has probably got the edge on that right now. Track GPT is still from, again, anecdotally what I hear, not seen as the [00:13:00] kinda replacement for Google, whereas perplexity definitely is seen that way. I haven’t really used it except when it first is announced that it had the search capability actually for search.

So maybe I’ll try it again to see what benefit it gives me. I think they perhaps need to differentiate the. In the interface box because it’s not clear. Yeah. Basically there’s just a new little button there that says search that you have to click and that’ll give you a search result. Yeah. And it’s not quite clear why so that needs to be better, better done, I think.

But perplexity is definitely ahead on that. So if I want to search and I’m doing something in chat, GPTI tend to switch to perplexity to do that. I do too. Although I have used the search on chat GPT and I’ve been fairly pleased with it. Happy with it. It’s much better than the early reports were when it was delayed in its launch.

Because it wasn’t producing really good results. So the work that they did paid off, yeah. Okay. So there’s definitely work ahead for SEO folk, I think. Yeah. But also brands. And I would say for the brands it’s also gonna be harder work because [00:14:00] loading a blog post with keywords is one thing.

Creating really valuable thought leadership content is harder and will take more time and more effort. But that’s really what’s required. If the AI’s gonna pick it up and say, this is good, valuable content that I’m ready to share in response to this query that I just got. Yeah. Yeah. We’re still, this is still early stages we’re at with this, and it’s not polished from what Google’s doing and certainly not polished it by any means.

It’s still being developed these features, this overviews feature. So it’s still, I think. Anyone’s guess what, what’s gonna happen with this? But I would say that the longer this uncertainty goes on or this kind of volatility stage wreck goes on, the more the user, people like you and me, for instance, or anyone for that matter, is literally in charge now because you can go someplace that offers you what you want, like perplexity, [00:15:00] for instance.

It’s, as the, as one article I was reading says, fortunately, SEO industry is quite adaptable and is, and can change rapidly. They’re gonna have to do that, I would say. And sooner rather than later. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #438: Google’s AI Overviews Are Upending SEO appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Research finds that corporations no longer see AI as a novelty; it’s a full-blown business tool, one that is so critical that its development is mostly being done in-house. In the November long-form episode of “For Immediate Release,” Neville and Shel review new research about AI’s place in the business world and among employees. Also in this episode, we take a look at social media in 2024 — a consequential year — and what to expect in 2025. Beutler Ink has published its principles for ethically engaging with Wikipedia. Companies will twist themselves in knots deciding whether, and how, to respond to social and political issues that arise during the next four years of the second Trump Administration. Bluesky’s growing popularity, and an open API, has led to a burgeoning collection of third-party apps. And Coca-Cola misfired with an AI-generated holiday commercial…or did they? In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at the post-Twitter social media world, Bluesky’s looming challenges, X’s reminder that it owns your account; the impending court decision on the TikTok ban, and Australia’s new law banning social media for children under 16.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

How Are Companies Really Using AI? A New Report Has Answers
How generations feel about AI at work
Employees Are Open to AI, But Want Businesses to Support AI Literacy
The Year Ahead in Social
Think Forward 2025
Trump’s return sparks a high-stakes communications test for corporate America
Kim Clark on LinkedIn: Axios affirmed why Janet M. Stovall, CDE and I wrote our book, The Conscious Communicator
Setting the Standard: How Beutler Ink Champions Ethical Wikipedia Consulting — Beutler Ink
FIR Interview: William Beutler on PR and Wikipedia – FIR Podcast Network
Ethics Statement | Beutler Ink + Wikipedia | Beutler Ink
The Ultimate Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky
Autoblue – Easily add Bluesky to your WordPress site
Adding Bluesky-powered comments to any website in five minutes
Chat Catcher lives on – NevilleHobson .com
AI Ads Can Look Weird. Coca-Colka Keeps Making Them Anyway.

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Bluesky adds 1m new members as users flee X after the US election
Bluesky user count hits 20 million and continues to grow: What to know about the platform
Exclusive: Threads adds 35M new sign-ups this month
Bluesky now displays replies by ‘hotness’
How decentralized is Bluesky really?
X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts
TikTok Ban Ruling Expected Soon
Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate
Techmeme coverage of Australia’s social media ban

Coca-Cola’s AI-Generated “Holiday Magic” TV commercial

Decision Tree for Public Statements on Social and/or Political Issues

Transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome to for Immediate Release. This is the monthly long form edition, episode 4 3 7 for November, 2024. I’m Neville Hobson coming to you from crew Kern Somerset in England. On a time when the weather’s weird as usual. We have high temperatures at the moment compared to snow.

We had a week or two back, but here we are with another episode. And boy do we have topics here. We do, I’m Shell Holtz in Concord, California. It’s California. It’s sunny and nice. That’s why I live here. Yeah. Nice. We do have a great episode for you today. We will be talking about social media in the year that is wrapping up and the year ahead.

We will look at the realities of generative artificial intelligence in the workplace today. Get beyond the hype and look at where things actually are ethical. Wikipedia editing is on our docket [00:01:00] today, as are the challenges the companies are going to face speaking out about social issues in the next four years.

Gosh, I wonder what’s happening in the next four years. We’ll also take a look at the growing ecosystem of apps for the social network, blue Sky and Coca-Cola’s advertising disaster. Dan York is here with terrific report and we will get into all of that after we do a quick rundown of the short midweek episodes that you ha may have missed since our October long form monthly episode.

Indeed, and we’ve only done three since the last monthly. But, and we’ve been busy. Yeah, there have been some time pressures, I must admit. But three’s good. Some great topics we talked about. So the first one, episode 4 34 that we published in November the 13th, was looking at the reports and what people have been saying about the.

The analyses following the US presidential election [00:02:00] and that fact emerged, or a view emerged that mainstream media and social media willed of far less influence than they have in the past and influences and podcasts helps sway. So we talked about that and the impact on communicators way for way beyond the election.

In fact, interesting topic we talked about. Episode 4 35 on November the 20th that talked about that topic. That is a recurring topic these days it seems, which is return to work. But this was the mandated returns was the theme of this one. And talking about the reasons executives give to their employees why this is important.

Talked about the serendipitous opportunities people miss if they don’t come back to the office and they need to boost productivity, which coming back to the office does. And of course there’s alternate views on that. That’s one of the reasons we talked about this. And indeed you had the example of a financial services company that has seen IPOing increases in performance metrics since listening to its employees and adopting a puzzle.

Let [00:03:00] it’s them, choose where they want to work. No mandated back to the office. That was a good one, and I think you’ve got a comment on that one, Cheryl. We do from Diane K, who said that the episode was timely. Given the move to return all federal employees to full-time in office, I suspect that’s a way to reduce the ranks more than anything else.

She wrote in a comment to the LinkedIn post on that episode. Interesting. So then episode 4 36 that we recorded just a week ago actually. That again Blue Sky. We’re gonna talk about Blue Sky, as you mentioned Shell at the beginning in this episode. And this was a midweek short episode just on Blue Sky.

That it was an interesting one that talked about what they’re trying to do how they’re growing it what’s important to them. And we looked at the potential of Blue Sky and whether communicators should consider establishing a presence for the competitor for other companies or clients and why they should do that.

A timely topic without [00:04:00] doubt, that’s the reason we did it. ’cause I keep seeing nothing but blue Sky being mentioned across mainstream media in the UK now has got that attention. So it’s definitely on an attention roll without any question. So that was a good one. We have a comment for this one too, don’t we?

Actually, two. The first one from our friend Lee Hopkins in Adelaide, Australia said totally agree joined nine months ago was Oh, underwhelmed ignored it. Now in involved with it because more and more of our tribes are appearing on it. And our friend Donna Papa Acosta said, same for me. I’m sure many have that view.

I see people talking about that themselves in post on Blue Sky. And just in case anyone didn’t know this, you and I joined Blue Sky during the during the private beta in 2003 2023 I should say. And it was a tool that. Sat there and we didn’t really do much whilst we were paying attention to threads at that time.

I I know, but suddenly, this has really kicked off [00:05:00] since beginning of November, coincidentally around the time of the US presidential election and Trump being the winner, an exodus, big time. Not the sense of closing down and moving, but moving and maybe keeping things back there. Things have evolved from that now and it’s certainly something that is getting attention from 7 million subscribers to 23 million in the space of a couple of months.

So this is no idle thing. Is it? The next big thing? That was something we talked about. That remains to be seen, but it’s a, it’s an interesting topic and a hot one for communicates without doubt. So the other thing we did in November was publish a new fi interview. On the 6th of November.

We published this. This was with Monique Nik. Her name will be familiar to you if you are focused on internal communication in particular. But we had a great conversation with Monique, didn’t we? Where she talked about trends, AI and authenticity and internal communication quite a bit about her book that she had [00:06:00] published a few months back.

But that was a really good conversation with Monique. It was, and we had a co a comment on that one too. This from IABC and Mina’s official account saying this is what IEBC is about. Members connecting, sharing insights, and inspiring others globally. It must have been talking about Monique and me, since you’re not a member.

Also wanna let everyone know that circle of Fellows has been posted as it is every month. Episode number 110 focuses on executive communication. I was joined by four IEBC Phil Fellows Alice Brink, Julie Holloway, Marianne McCauley, and Bish Mukerjee joined us from India to talk about executive communications that is up now on the FIR Podcast Network, both for video viewing and for listening.

As a podcast, there is a Circle of Fellows feed that you can subscribe to. Oh, episode 111 is coming on December [00:07:00] 19th at 11:30 AM Eastern Time. We will be talking about communication, serving as a foundation. I’ll be joined by Russell Grossman. He’s from over there in the UK with you, Neville. Theo Mary Car, Caras Martha Muzyka and Neil Griffith, who’s also UK based.

Again, December 19th. That’s a Thursday at 11:30 AM Eastern Time. I’ll be moderating that panel. I’m looking forward to it. I, it’s a, it’s an intriguing topic. I think it leaves us a lot of latitude for discussion. It should be fun. And now it’s time to jump into those stories that I listed at the beginning today.

But not until we’ve had an opportunity to sell you something.

I think most of us would agree that 2024 has been a tumultuous year in many areas of society in our lives, but our focus on social media in this topic, we’re gonna talk about wide ranging events in that landscape have characterized [00:08:00] 2024 threads hit 270 5 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg.

The turbulence and sharp decline of x formerly Twitter, the sudden emerges of blue sky as a compelling alternative, racking up 23 million users in a matter of weeks, as I mentioned earlier, and the rise of movements like Brett Summer redefining online culture. It’s been nothing short of a seismic year for social media.

As platforms rise and fall and user behaviors shift in real time, the need to anticipate the next wave of change has never been more urgent. Two standout reports from Batten Hall and we are social published just a few days ago, offer us unique lenses through which to understand each shifts in the year ahead.

In social, Batten Hall highlights the importance of social first strategies, AI driven insights, and the growing role of private digital spaces like messaging apps. At the same time, we are socials Think Forward 2025. The Livable Web Special Edition shines a [00:09:00] light on cultural and emotional trends such as users craving deeper connections, rejecting polished perfection, and seeking moments of joy in an overwhelming world.

Let’s unpack some of the key ideas from these reports and explore what they mean for communicators. Batten Hole predicts a shift where social media will no longer be an add-on to marketing strategies, but the primary focus in 2025 being social first means ensuring social platforms drive the entire user journey.

With ai, evolving the potential to refine messaging, protect communities, and unlock predictive insights will be transformative. However, brands must also navigate the rise of dark social spaces, those private networks where authentic personal engagement can thrive. And as users increasingly migrate to platforms like Threads and Blue Sky, the social sorting process will reshape the digital landscape, forcing communicators to rethink where and how they connect with audiences.[00:10:00]

On the cultural side, we are social emphasizes a broader emotional evolution in digital spaces. Gen Z rejects the polished, curated ideals of the past in favor of unfiltered authenticity, finding connection in chaotic, relatable content like Charlie X’s breadth Summer. Meanwhile, amidst global crises, many users are turning to lighthearted, low stakes interactions online, celebrating small luxuries, embracing wholesome hobbies, and seeking relief through uplifting content.

This trend compliments the rise of intentional consumerism where audiences increasingly cherish sustainability and meaningful use of what they already own over relentless consumption. We’re also seeing the growth of modern myth making where fans actively engage with hidden narratives and Easter eggs in brand storytelling, strengthening their emotional ties.

Finally, the push for new intimacies signals a shift back to the social roots of social media with users [00:11:00] craving more personal communal experiences in their digital lives. Together these trends highlight a social media ecosystem that’s becoming more strategic, more emotional, and more human communicators will need to adapt their strategies, not only to follow technological advancements, but also to align with shifting cultural values and emotional needs.

So as we take a look at these predictions, shell, do you have any trends mentioned here or others even that most resonate with you? There are several here that resonated with me. One being using the social space as a primary focus. I think that is important, but I don’t think that it is an all or nothing proposition.

I, I. I’m thinking about the fact that more and more people, particularly among Gen Z and millennials, are getting their news from Instagram and TikTok. The question is, where are the influencers who are presenting that news, [00:12:00] getting the news that they present? A lot of them are reading news. On TikTok, there are hundreds of people who have lots of followers who all they do is read news stories out of magazines and newspapers.

So if we stop. Getting our content into magazines and newspapers. Then the influencer influencers who are reading that are gonna read stuff that in which we have no share of voice. So I would not ignore the mainstream press. It’s just a reprioritization that I think we need to look at. Another one that really struck me is the need to get involved in private digital spaces, the WhatsApp groups.

Really attracting more and more young people who want to have the network, but they wanna have it with a group of people that they wanna interact with and not the whole world. And tools like WhatsApp and Snapchat allow them to do that. So how do we break through to those folks? So I these are trends that I think are absolutely coming [00:13:00] and, the social network that I still don’t hear people talking about very much. Ev everybody’s talking about blue sky and there’s a good reason for that. I’m not saying that it, we shouldn’t, and it’s not important, but Reddit is still there. Reddit is still one of the top visited sites on the web and tremendous influences wielded there.

I don’t know that it’s at the same level it was when they called it the front page of the internet. And when Buzzfeed was the hottest thing on the planet, they were getting the stories they were gonna do based on what was trending on Reddit. But it’s still an important place with some very granular communities that are not difficult to join.

And, if you’re a communicator looking to wield influence over people wielding influence over people on Reddit, it’s not a bad idea, but nobody talks about it. On the topic of Reddit, I’ve been user of Reddit since what, 2006, 2007? Active recently in particular. But I think it, it’s, I agree with you by the way, [00:14:00] but isn’t it really to do with.

If your audience is there, then that is where you need to go too, because you need to go where your audience is, but Right. And therefore, Reddit’s definitely not a kind of mainstream destination for everyone, again, depending on your audience. So I look at some of the some of the subreddits I’m participating, and these are niches.

These are absolutely not Oh, mainstream. They’ve got big numbers, no question. Did, I saw a report just yesterday saying that in the uk, Reddit has now got more action going on than any other social network that needs to be nuanced a bit in terms of understanding who is there actually, is it is it your millennial group?

They’re not there. It’s the Gen Zs there. But which topic? ’cause in this group over there, it’s actually full of boomers. So it’s a very complex network that needs you to be I think very clear on who you, your audiences are there. And if they’re there, then that’s where you need to be.

I think every organization should find out if there are subreddits that include [00:15:00] people talking about their space, and then analyze is this a large enough community that it warrants our attention who’s in this community? It doesn’t need to be large if these are all serious influencers. Who are taking what they learned through their interactions on Reddit and sharing it elsewhere to large audiences.

This is what used to happen with Buzzfeed, and I just think that the, by the way, the other thing is that I’m noticing more and more of my Google searches are pointing me to Reddit conversations where the answer is particularly on how to issues, because there are a lot of those out there.

There’s, subreddits around the Meta Quest VR headset. There’s subreddit. There’s subreddits for virtually every digital product out there where the fans of it and people who are wrestling with them are interacting with one another. So it’s actually driving traffic. Google drives traffic to Reddit.

So another reason to consider that another thing that you mentioned was unfiltered [00:16:00] authenticity. And I think that’s. Something that people really need to be paying attention to. We do something where I work. It’s a takeover Tuesday where young project engineers, this is an entry level position in the construction industry.

Take over our Instagram account and showcase whatever project they’re working on. And this is on Instagram stories and they’re pretty popular. There’s something about having these young employees talk authentically, but enthusiastically. It’s genuine authentic. Enthusiasm and it comes through that I think people really appreciate.

And, in terms of our audience, which, we’re not trying to convince people to build their $600 million building with us by watching an Instagram story. We’re trying to convince engineering students to come work for us. And it’s pretty enticing stuff when you see somebody just a little older than you just outta school a year or two, wearing their PPE out on a an active construction site, waxing poetic about how great this project [00:17:00] is.

That type of thing goes a long way. And I think companies would do well to consider that kind of, curated employee generated content. Yeah. One thing always surprises me when we talk about this kind of thing. Surely this can’t be like, oh, that’s a good idea for a listener. This is not a new thing.

This is what you should be doing. Always. Surely knowing your audiences, tailoring your communication to them, engaging with them in ways that I’ll use the word authentic, which has many meanings depending on a number of factors. So maybe this is part of it that what goes around, comes around in the sense that we are hearing in these reports, particularly from we are social or Bat Batten Hall too, for that matter, on the desire from certain origin, particularly younger generations for meaningful communication with brands, let’s say.

So the perfectionist the slick production values, created content that has been at the forefront for years. In fact, I was thinking today, looking [00:18:00] at on, on one of the TV channels that day, I actually watched, I. Terrestrial TV for a long first, for a long time seeing. We’re seeing now all the ads from the cosmetics firms and these are slick movie quality productions with celebrities doing the voiceovers.

And I often wonder, and I’m thinking this more now, who on earth relates to that? Normal people don’t really, maybe it’s aspirational. Again, I’m not gonna do an heavy analysis, but that surely is what we are moving away from. This is what the survey, these results of these reports tell us. People are looking for more honest, more relatable.

Messaging from brands they’d like to engage with, that they can actually believe. And that is not believable. Those amazing lifestyle ads for cosmetic brands. So I wonder why the hell they do that And they must make money at it, sell more stuff at Christmas. That could be it. They’re trying to reach the people who can afford those perfumes and colognes, right?

And that’s not, that’s gotta be it necessarily. Gen Z. That’s gotta be it right now. Johnny Depp isn’t gonna appeal to [00:19:00] anybody in Gen Z anyway, right? I don’t know if you’ve seen him. It’s gotta be the case. Yeah. Cologne. Yeah, he’s a pitchman now. What can I say? One other. Trend that you mentioned that I was intrigued by was this craving for communal experiences.

And I think there’s another opportunity. We used to have a lot of organizations that had departments focused on promotional activities. I remember when I worked at Mattel, we had hot wheel races and malls all around the country, people getting together and doing stuff together. And I don’t read about that kind of thing that much anymore.

And I think there are opportunities for brands to arrange activities and events for people to get together in the real world and do something. Imagine the Instagram photos that will come out of things like that. And, in the scheme of things, not the world’s most expensive approach to marketing either.

No, I think that’s what we are social refer to as new intimacies in their report [00:20:00] where people are craving deeper connections and seeking online spaces that foster community driven interactions. What does that mean for community? Goes well you’ve pretty much nailed it. Leverage niche communities and personalize your engagement strategies.

And I think, again, this seems so obvious, but focus on creating spaces where audiences feel seen and valued and that’s not new. But this is, again, something that we need to be doing more of in this changing environment. So there’s lots to take away in these reports, by the way. Batten Halls is a well produced, easy to digest, and in the content sense way, in the way in which it’s Pres presented.

So if you go to the website, fill out the form, and you’ll get a PDF version. We are socials. On the other hand, there’s what I called an everything reality presentation. There’s video, there’s animated graphics, animated texts, even talking heads popping up here and there only available in your browser.

So that’s a whole different proposition. It actually got me thinking a lot, the contrast between the [00:21:00] two. Maybe we are social as they absolutely at a Gen Z audience, at the exclusion almost of anyone else. If you want a nice comfortable PDF, you can read at your leisure. You’re not gonna get it. This is real time in the moment.

You’ll see this and you’ll need to have your headphones on or your speaker on because it’s an audio visual presentation. It’s very well done. Different approaches, they’re different topics, but they’re very complimentary both from Bassen Hall and we are social. I think they had a really good job presenting all of this as other reports have come out too in the past couple of weeks.

And you’ll find ’em if you search on similar themes, what’s been happening in 2024 for social media and what’s coming in 2025 and what you need to pay attention to. And a bit of overlap in all of them, but these two did strike me as definitely worth paying attention to. And there are, there will be links in the show notes.

No, no shortage of what’s coming in 2025 posts out. There’re the season, aren’t we? Shall this is the time for everyone to do their report? Yeah. Yeah. And also on, on we are social it’s a, it’s an unspoken final [00:22:00] comment that to their presentation, which is, if this is what we did to present our own report, imagine what we could do for you.

Nice one. The landscape of workplace AI adoption has undergone a pretty remarkable transformation over the last year. Speaking of looking back, organizations have moved beyond the g whiz phase into serious implementation and experimentation. According to comprehensive new research from the Wharton School and Marketing consultancy, GBK Collective, we’re witnessing what could be characterized as AI’s coming of age story in the enterprise.

Let’s start with the headline number that. Really grabbed my attention. 72% of companies now report using AI at least weekly for work purposes. That’s nearly double the 37% reported just last year. Now, what’s particularly fascinating is where this growth is happening. While you might expect IT departments to be leading the charge, we’re seeing dramatic [00:23:00] increases in adoption instead across all functional areas, including departments that were previously hesitant, adopters like marketing, operations, and hr.

This is entirely consistent with the message I’ve been sending as much as I can. This isn’t like Workday, where it implements software. Everyone will be using pretty much the same and can train everyone the same on how to use it with generative ai at this point especially use of the frontier models like Chat, GPT, Claude Gemini, every individual and department has to figure out for themselves how it’s gonna help.

Speaking of organizational structure, though, one of the most intriguing developments is how companies are adapting their leadership to accommodate AI Integration about one in five organizations, 21% to be exact, have now created Chief AI Officer. I. Physicians, we’ll see how long that lasts. I imagine there’s been a significant decline in the number of Chief Metaverse officers over the last couple of years.

I have to say, I still shake my head [00:24:00] at how loosely so many organizations imply the officer label anyway, the vast majority of companies, 91% are keeping their AI strategy development in-house. They’re not relying on outside consultants. This suggests to me that organizations are viewing AI not just as another tool to implement, but as a core competency they need to develop internally.

It also suggests there’s gonna be some serious consolidation among all those AI consultancies that have cropped up. The employee’s perspective has evolved significantly as well. Remember the early days when workers viewed AI with a mixture of anticipation, amazement, and trepidation that shifted fairly dramatically.

Today, 90% of employees see AI as skill enhancing rather than job threatening. That’s up 80% last year. I’m sorry, that’s up from 80% last year. The shift in perception from replacement to enhancement is crucial for successful adoption. I am, however, still [00:25:00] detecting reluctance to use it among a lot of employees, even millennial and Gen Z employees, largely due to personal security concerns.

What I find particularly telling is that about half of enterprises currently have few or no restrictions on AI usage in the work workplace. This repre represents a remarkable level of organizational trust in both technology and employees judgment. In using it, however, it’s worth noting that larger organizations tend to implement more stringent controls.

Only 15% of companies with annual revenue over $2 billion allow unrestricted AI use, suggesting a more measured approach. As the stakes increase, it may be in these companies, you’ll find those employees who won’t use it for fear of getting in trouble or use it, but don’t tell anyone for fear of getting in trouble.

Investment patterns tell an interesting story too. While 72% of companies plan to increase AI budgets next year, 57% anticipate these increases will be moderate [00:26:00] just between one and 10%. This suggests we’re entering a phase of more calculated ROI focused deployment rather than spend at all cost approach that we saw in the early adoption phases.

What we’re witnessing comes down to AI’s transition from a speculative technology to a practical business tool. The key now will be how organ organizations balance enthusiasm with pragmatism and innovation with responsible governance. It is interesting. You, it reminds me something you mentioned there about Chief AI Officer, we talked about that, the kind of expansion of c-Suite job titles quite a few times, maybe at least two episodes.

We’ve talked about that recently. And this strike struck me when I heard you say it. This is an example of that. Here we go again. You said how long it will last. That’s the thing. Yet for many organizations, I’m sure that is what they’re gonna have to do to get this on, get traction with this whole topic rather than being done piecemeal.

But it is [00:27:00] interesting. The Wharton report, I was reading the summary as you were talking. They are concluding that, and this will be like yeah. Type response you might have to this, which is what they’re saying. Organizations will keep experimenting with AI to figure out how it works best for them.

Yes. That’s what they should be doing. And you’ve got some metrics in here which kind of emphasize the value of doing that. It’s interesting, one thing they note as it evolves so will other technology required to make it more usable and practical, such as voice interface. So there’s a lot of things happening in parallel that may not be apparent when you first think about how am I gonna use AI in the workplace?

But also one thing it relates to what you said employees perhaps using a tool that without telling anyone because it’s not authorized, that’s exactly what’s going on in many organizations and the companies that. Don’t open that up in a better way than this are the ones who are likely to suffer, I would say.

Because what happens, [00:28:00] it’s inevitable. I was thinking back to some, something someone told me not long ago, that they’re not allowed to use chat GPT in the workplace. So what they do is download a copy from the website under a different name, even the student if you like, and they use that for their work stuff.

By contrast in a large organization where chat, GPT and others like it offer, what do we call ’em, an enterprise version of their tool, that’s a wholly different animal to the consumer version that you just download off the website. So you end up then through through bad policies in the organization is how I pitch it in a sense how I describe it.

Opening yourself up to all sorts of risks by not. Having a, an effective way that recognizes people’s concerns and enables them to do something about it rather than blanket, you’re not allowed to do this, and so they go ahead and do it anyway. That says a lot about the organization. That’s a different avenue to explore, but trust and belief [00:29:00] and all that stuff is in there and that’s lacking in that situation.

That’s dangerous to my mind. There’s lots to think about in this. It seems to be what a lot of employees are also doing is getting the chat CPT app on their personal phones. And it’s similar. Yeah. They just use it in a lot of organizations at this point, what employees have access to is Microsoft Co-pilot which is a difficult tool to parse considering the many flavors of co-pilot. But there is the base co-pilot that just comes with Office 365. That basically gives you an interface that is chat PT four. Oh, that’s, Microsoft does not have their own frontier model. They’re investing billions and billions in open ai.

And so this is what employees are using is chat PT for, even if if the company is saying you can’t use chat CPT they’re using co-pilot. So I think it’s interesting that organizations think that they’re preventing something bad [00:30:00] from happening. Although when you go through copilot.

Your queries your prompts don’t get saved and used as training fodder for future models. So that’s one reason companies may want employees to do that. I think those organizations that are saying, we don’t want you using chat, CPT use copilot employees should shrug and say, fine, because it’s the same damn thing I am.

I, I don’t use copilot. I have, Microsoft 365 subscription, all that. But I don’t like the style of it that’s the reality. And it may well be the best thing since Slice Brent, which I do not believe. It is quite well for employees who have no choice though. It’s there. They can use it.

But if you have choice I think I’d use something else, but it’s the landscape shell that’s basically it. There’s so many, ways you can use a generative AI tool. And there are many generative AI tools out there. To me that reinforces the reality in an organizational setting to [00:31:00] set out very clear guidance to employees on what to use, how to use, when to use it, and why without being, read the 65 page instructions on what you gotta do.

Don’t do that. People aren’t stupid. You gotta trust people. Although I hear people arguing that you can’t trust people. That’s a hell of a place to be if that’s your belief. We’ve done a ton of communication around AI where I work and employees know that it’s there. They know they have access.

What they’re asking is, okay, how do I use it? So we’re now planning some lunch and learns around effective prompting and things like that. I think this is what communicators need to be doing is one, they need to be. Promoting the responsible use of generative AI in the organization, highlighting whatever policy is in place, letting people know what the risks are, letting people know what the organization’s plans are for advancing the use of Gen ai, but also helping people figure out how they can figure [00:32:00] out how to take advantage of it.

In their jobs, how to write good prompts, how to figure out which tools are appropriate for you how to figure out how to identify those workflows in your job where AI can make you more productive, make you more effective, make you more creative. If that’s what’s called for. The more we do that and the more we share stories of employees who are doing it, the more everybody’s gonna get it and say, oh I can do that.

And start using it. So I think we have a very important role to play on the internal communication side of things. Totally agree. Opportunity for communicators. I have no question. We all know what Wikipedia is, the encyclopedia anyone can edit founded by Jimmy Wales back in 2001. I use it daily. Not often, not consciously.

If I’m searching for something, whether I do ask the question in Google, increasingly less likely [00:33:00] these days, or via perplexity, which is my preferred alternative to Google for the kind of how do I, where is, what is et cetera type questioning or even what’s the phone number of the pharmacy? It’s your favorite one, shall I know.

Wikipedia shows up still in typically in the top five or six search results, again, depending on what it is that you’re searching for. So it has evolved. It is a phenomenal resource. And it has, I have to say just. Because it fits in what you’re saying. I use it mainly when I’m watching tv.

For example, we watched a six part documentary about Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy Wars, and they talked about Kate Elder. And I said, yeah, I wonder if that was the same elder as Katie Elder in the movie, the Sons of Katie Elder. And I said, I’m gonna go to Wikipedia and find out. And I do that all the time.

When I’m watching anything with a historical context, I’m always using Wikipedia in front of the television. You’re a good use case. Shell. That’s a good use case. [00:34:00] In the organizational communication context, Wikipedia has a big role for communicators. And one of the things we’ll talk about now, and it’s a topic we have talked about before, and particularly going back some years is a valid topic ethical.

Editing of Wikipedia. So we’re gonna revisit this using the example of Butler Inc. And I’ll explain what Butler Inc is in a minute. So to set the scene a bit Wikipedia’s been a foundational pillar of the internet for over two decades from its founding. It’s the fifth most, most visited website globally.

Still. I remember it’s being claimed that for some time it’s an invaluable resource for billions of people. It’s a, it is critical in shaping public perception, often appearing at the top of search results. Additionally, it’s vast repository of information is a crucial source of training AI models. And by the way, it’s worth mentioning because some people think there’s only an English language version.

There’s not, there’s I think, 300 different language versions of Wikipedia, all of [00:35:00] different sizes in terms of content of what they have and how much of it. But Wikipedia’s, open and collaborative Nature poses unique challenge for communicators and PR professionals while its guidelines prohibit those with conflicts of interest from directly editing entries.

The temptation to bend these rules has led to controversies and mistrust between the Wikipedia community and corporate interests. We’ll revisit the topic of ethical Wikipedia entry, focusing on Butler, Inc. A digital agency that has set the gold standard for navigating this complex terrain. Founded by William Butler, a widely regarded expert in public relations for Wikipedia.

Euler Inc. Has pioneered ethical practices that aligned with Wikipedia’s principles such as neutrality and transparency. Earlier this year you and I shall had the opportunity to interview William in an FI interview where we explored the evolving relationship between Wikipedia and the PR industry, the growing influence of AI on Wikipedia’s ecosystem, and the nuances of ethical editing.

And by the [00:36:00] way, we’ll have a link to that interview in the show notes in an article published on the 25th of November. Butler, Inc. Set out their commitment to four core principles for engaging with Wikipedia. The first is neutral point of view, ensuring that all edits reflect a balanced and fair representation of the subject.

Second, transparency, disclosing conflicts of interest and intentions to the Wikipedia editing community. Third, collaboration, working with volunteer editors instead of circumventing them or attempting to exert control. And fourth, respect for Wikipedia’s rules following the platform’s, policies and guidelines without exception.

These principles speak to Butler Ink’s values in upholding the highest ethical standards. When engaging with the encyclopedia and this community of volunteer editors, they form a framework, not just for Butler ink’s work, but also as a model for how PR professionals and organizations should approach Wikipedia.

They demonstrate that ethical editing is not only possible, [00:37:00] but essential for maintaining trust between Wikipedia’s editors, readers, and the organizations that seek representation on the platform. In the article, William reflected on these guiding principles and how they have shaped Butler Inc’s success.

By prioritizing collaboration and transparency, the agency has avoided the pitfalls of unethical practices such as covert editing or promotional bias, which undermine Wikipedia’s credibility. But Inc’s work has proven that ethical consulting is not just a choice, it’s a responsibility for anyone engaging with Wikipedia.

This topic resonates deeply with me as I’ve directed projects in recent years requiring strict adherence to Wikipedia’s policies, ensuring neutrality and transparency. The But Inc model exemplifies how communicators can navigate this challenging space building trust with the editing community and their clients.

These principles should be the benchmark for anyone working on Wikipedia, setting a standard of ethics that others must follow. [00:38:00] So I’d like to hear your perspective shell, on the importance of these core principles. How do you think PR professionals can adopt these as benchmarks to foster credibility and alignment with Wikipedia’s ethos?

And what lessons can we take from butyl ink’s approach to ethical editing, especially given the increasing influence of AI on the platform? That’s two questions there. Actually. I thought there’s two questions You may have to remind me of the second one after I answer the first one. I think that these are.

Blinding flashes of the obvious. These are things that we have known for a long time. Butler Ink does a wonderful job of embodying these in its practice. The challenge is, I think, getting this information into the hands of people who are planning to, or needing to engage with content on Wikipedia.

I think there are organizations that routinely engage with Wikipedia. They’re big brands, for example, they have lots of products, lots of [00:39:00] trademarks. They’re in the news a lot what have you. But I would think that most people who engage with Wikipedia do it once, right? Somebody reaches out and said, Hey, did you know that the listing for your company shows your last earnings report from 2008?

And so you get in touch to try to see if you can get that updated and it can be a struggle they’ve never heard of you. You’re, you’re new to the platform. I went through this recently and I know how to engage with Wikipedia. I’ve been using it as long as you have.

I’ve done entries in the past. But they had our former now retired, CEO listed and as the head of communications, I didn’t want to go in there and make the change. I can’t do that. And so I went into the talk section and I explained I pointed to an article from a third party news source announcing the change in the CEO and absolutely nothing happened.

I had to go back in there and beg three or four times before somebody actually made that change. It can be [00:40:00] tough for somebody who doesn’t do this routinely to stay on top or even be aware of these rules. How do you get this information into the hands of people who are maybe doing this for the first time and maybe haven’t paid attention to the nuance in the, in, in the rules that Wikipedia has established?

It is not easy without doubt, and that’s something that has been a thorn in the side of Wikipedia ever since it. Was unveiled my experience. What you did was the right thing. By the way, you don’t try and edit it. You go through the talk pages and set out, make your case, declare your conflict of interest.

And I found my experience you have an account on Wikipedia. You create a profile page yourself, setting out who you are and why you’re, and if you’ve ever edited. Emphasize all of that. And so you say to people, look, go look at my profile. I’m legit and declare the interest.

And there’s ways to do that are the Wikipedia approved ways. My experience when I started doing this some years ago now is it’s labyrinth to understand the policies and guidelines. [00:41:00] It truly is seriously difficult, which is one reason why Butler Inc. In particular is doing well in this area because they have expertise from working with done tons of clients internationally on the pro policies and procedures.

I got an education on that, on a project I worked with with Butler Incon that required me to know how to do all this. And boy, that was a, an education, but it’s actually quite straightforward in, in following it. The difficulty, I think, or a difficult, not the only one, there are many is and Bill Butler mentions this in his article.

There are organizations out there and there are PR professionals out there unfortunately, who are quite willing to bypass where they can and go in and directly edit even. Through students intentionally bypass, they know the rules intentionally and bypass them anyway. Yes. Intentionally do that.

And that’s something Bill mentioned is a major issue that that we still have to overcome. I would argue this is certainly not [00:42:00] condoning it. This is people we’re talking about and it’s the good, the bad and the ugly in every community. And this is a reflection of that I think. There were issues 15 years ago now, probably 12 to 15 years ago now.

Where things came to a head. This was mainly in the uk I think between Wikipedia and pr, where there was a complete breakdown. Any kind of relationship, communication after a number of severe scandals through big. Well-known named agencies who were uncovered to have been lying through Wikipedia entries and falsifying entries in competitors pages of their clients.

And isn’t that where crew came from? Was all of those issues? I don’t remember the name, the big names. There was some big names. No Crew was the corporate representatives for the Ethical For Ethical Wiki. Yeah. Phil Gomes started that was Phil Gomes who started that. Yeah. And that was not as because of this, but this is one of the highlights of, but the point I’m making is that there were strong efforts made in the UK directed by the CIPR.

To engage with [00:43:00] Wikimedia Foundation about this. And I took part in that as a neutral. Interesting. This a neutral participant to bridge the gap. Philip Sherick was the other one. We made a presentation to a board meeting at Wikimedia Foundation and that led to the first, if you like, policy for PR professionals developed by the CIPR not long after that, which has then evolved into sixth edition or something.

So now. It’s difficult for anyone to say, oh, I didn’t know how we have to go about. Yes you do. If you are a member of the professional body, like the CIPR in the uk, and even if you’re not, you can access these guidelines that tell you these are the steps you need to take to do this. It ain’t rocket science to understand the process.

What is rocket science is actually understanding the process. If you had to wade through. Each of the pillars, if you will, on neutral point of view, declaring conflict of interest and a raft of others that are all to do with transparency and truthfulness and honesty. It is labyrinth and if you are [00:44:00] unlucky to then engage with the editor community, the volunteer editor community, and not hear anything forever.

Or you get one of them who’s just arrogant as hell ’cause they do exist. You have to realize to another thing that this whole structure is volunteer driven. So if you don’t hear anything, there’s not someone central. You can go and chase and say, Hey, what happened to my, it isn’t like that. You have to keep repeating it and you’ll find avenues and workarounds to get allies to make your case for you.

That requires a lot of time and hence why firms like Inc are doing well. I. Though that we are in a time when, again, those surveys we just talked about on authenticity, et cetera, is always been important in a case like this I honestly don’t see how anyone who is a practicing public relations or communicator, let’s say and a member of any of the well-regarded professional bodies could approach Wikipedia in anything [00:45:00] other than following absolutely all these principles and guidances.

And yet there are people who aren’t doing that. It needs to be, I think, emphasized that you shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. You need to understand the right way to do this. It ain’t difficult except understanding it, it is difficult. I’ll keep this short since it’s my broken record routine because there are PR people out there who.

Have not been trained who do not belong to an association, who do not feel compelled to abide by a code of ethics, who are unprincipled in their approach to their job and do it any damn way they want to. And until we come to the realization that practicing PR people must be certified and are at risk of losing that certification, and as a result losing their livelihood will continue to have PR people who will do this any damn way they want, regardless of what [00:46:00] the rules are and regardless of what resources are available out there.

Agree. I’m gonna that off my soapbox now. No, that adds to that bigger picture. We’ve talked about, I wrote about this myself on my blog a month or two back on the real issues that ought to be addressed, please, in the profession. That is to do with its credibility and this is absolutely the heart of it.

But in the meantime, for the 90% of PR professors out there who are honest, reasonable folks, I would say Wikipedia has a place in your role if you’re acting, if you’re working for. Large clients in particular, but not exclusively so that it is worth finding out how to address things and indeed to, to anyone.

Take a look at your own company’s Wikipedia entry page. Go and look at what it says about your company. Do you recognize that? And again, put out of your mind any notion of marketing talk. This is neutral point of view wars and all bad things that happened. That’s part of your history. You can’t cover that kind of thing up.[00:47:00]

So it requires reeducation for many people to get into this. The core issue though that we’ve been discussing here is just, concluding point to mention that the ethical approach is the only way you can do this as a PR professional and sleep at night basically. So this is what you need to do.

But Inc. Sets make it a good case. They’ve published their ethical guidelines and they note they’ve always had this, but they’ve never published them publicly. They’ve now done this. And if you read that, you’re thinking, yeah, we could do this, we should do this too. In which case you’ve got your blueprint there to do something greeting she and Nevo ever.

This was all around the world. Is Daniel coming at you from Shelburn, Vermont And this past month I’ve been looking a lot at where do people go in a post Twitter world? Because Twitter, of course is not Twitter anymore. It’s X and it’s a different company, a different vibe, a different thing. And now, controlled by Elon Musk and in the wake of the US presidential elections, I.

Where X was used particularly in [00:48:00] support of the campaign of Donald, of now President-elect Donald Trump. And where Elon Musk himself was very adamantly, pro-Trump, many people are starting to question, is X the place I wanna be? For some people it is, and I think it’s important to recognize that some people are finding that X still does what they want, still has the audience and is still there.

But for others, they’re saying, eh, I think I want to go somewhere else. The Guardian was one of the big ones that made this change and announced very prominently that they will no longer post on Elon Musk’s ex from its official accounts, but others are looking at that too. The challenge, of course, as communicators is that we’re moving into a much more fragmented world.

The interesting part about Twitter was that you could connect with people from all across pretty much all sectors of our society in different ways. And now we’re moving into places where it’s not that easy. It’s different, blue Sky and Threads were two of the big [00:49:00] recipients coming out of this election season.

Blue Sky had announced first that they’d added a million new members as people left X and they later announced that they’d come up. They were now at 20 million users for of the platform. Of course, threads rolled out, commented that they’ve been getting over a million people a day in November signing up, they’d have had over 35 million.

Take that blue sky where Threads and Mark Zuckerberg had announced in an earnings call that they had over 275 million users of threads. So, it’s a big player in that space. Where do you spend your time? Who’s there? Where’s your audience? These are questions that are there. I’m over on Macedon, which also saw an uptick, but not at the same scale as these two platforms, but, and I recognize it’s not for everyone there, but that’s where I’m at, and this is all happening in this space right now.

One of the reasons I haven’t been as excited about Blue Sky, people have asked me, why aren’t you just joining in like everybody else [00:50:00] is? Because it’s another centrally controlled platform now. It is, it has the promise of decentralization. And that’s one of the interesting parts is that it was developed spun out of Twitter by Jack Dorsey to go and create a decentralized social media platform.

And Jay Grabber, who’s the CEO, she and her team have done a fantastic job with developing a very, compelling platform. But it’s not quite where I would personally like it to be. There’s a great article by Christine Lemer Weber about how decentralized is blue sky really, which dives into technical pieces talking about how.

It has a promise of decentralization, but many parts of it are still centralized right now. You, there isn’t, you can’t move your account. Mine is Dan York. You can’t move that to another blue sky server in the same way you can like in Macedon, where you can move to a different instance in different server and work with that.

It’s not there yet. There’s some key components and [00:51:00] pieces around discovery, around messaging that still require the centralized services. And Blue Sky’s a company, they’ve taken some venture capital funding, which is a common way to grow, but VC companies typically want an exit. They wanna have some kind of return on their investment at some point.

And so this leads typically to the ification of other platforms that we’ve seen, whether there’ll be some method of getting that return back for the investors. Blue Sky’s also done some things like changing around the way the displays are. It used to be just reversed chronological. Now they’ve introduced.

Displaying replies by how hot they are in terms of interaction, engagement, so there’s some different pieces and parts that are moving in there, so I’m a little wary. And on top of this, we were reminded that we don’t control the handles, the account names that we have on, these social networks that are centralized.

If you’ve been paying attention at all to what’s been happening here in the United States, Alex Jones’s, [00:52:00] Infowars media sites have been up for bankruptcy due to his legal issues and with conspiracy theories and other stuff that’s been going on. The Onion purchased is in the process of purchasing all of that, coming outta the bankruptcy auction.

And that included some of the X handles and stuff. X made a legal filing saying, wait a minute, X owns every account. It can do with them, whatever it wants and it can go and do that now. Sure it’s their platform, they can control that. But it’s a reminder you are not in control. And that to me is the part that I think I worry about with some of these new platforms.

I want to be in control of my own destiny in some form, which is again, why I am partly spending a good bit of my time on Mastodon, where I have some more control. But we’ll see where this all shakes out. Speaking in platforms, tiktoks obviously a big one for short form video as we know, and it’s been under fire here in the United States with a law [00:53:00] that required its Chinese parent company by dance to dis to divest of its company, of TikTok in order to stay active in the US That’s gone through a chain of legal pieces and now it’s at a court in the in Washington DC where in theory, the first week of December, by Friday, December 6th, we’re supposed to hear a verdict, which will say, is the law valid?

Does TikTok have to divest or. Or not probably, regardless, it’s gonna go on up to the US Supreme Court. But anyway, we’ll see where that all goes. There could be changes coming to TikTok and how it’s working. A final thing, pay attention to what’s happening in Australia right now. They just passed a law banning children under the age of 16 from all social media platforms.

There’s a lot of vagueness in the law. It doesn’t actually specify which platforms. There’s a bunch of pieces. It doesn’t say how to do it. It doesn’t say how you’d limit somebody to Australia. There’s a whole host of [00:54:00] issues with the law, but they’ve put a stake in the ground that said nobody under 16 can access these platforms.

And it’s getting a lot of press right now, and it could change a lot of how we interact and engage with people and everything else. There’s a host of issues around that I could go into at great technical length around why this is broken and why it won’t work. Just geographic blocking doesn’t work.

Geographic location the means aren’t there. In theory, the law says that that you’re somehow gonna be able to be age verified without showing a government id. So who knows? The key point is watch what’s happening. The law is supposed to take effect a year from now, so in late 2025, and they’re gonna be doing some trials of different technologies and things, but a lot of other countries and states here in the US and others are looking at this.

And so pay attention to what’s happening in Australia because out of this will be some of [00:55:00] what will probably be brought into other places of the world. With that, I’m gonna wrap this up, send it back to you, shell and Neville, you can find more of my write audio and writing at Dan york, me and talk to you soon in December.

Bye for now. Thank you so much, Dan. Great report as always. Good collection of stories a couple that jump out at me. Having read about the band that Australia has imposed on people under the age of 16 for using social media I just can’t see that working. I don’t see how they’re gonna police that at all.

Be interested in watching how that unfolds. And I am very curious to see how that court decision shakes out on. TikTok although I don’t expect TikTok to go anywhere regardless of how that case ends up, because the Trump administration comes into office in January and Trump has on the campaign trail expressed his reversal [00:56:00] of opinion.

And then I was fully supportive of TikTok, which means that, it was Congress who passed the law that said it would be banned if it wasn’t sold by sometime in January, 2025. But it’s up to the Trump administration to enforce that ban. And he could easily just instruct the powers that be not to enforce it just to ignore it.

And it will just continue rolling along as it has. So interested to see how all of that turns out as well. But great report, do appreciate it. And speaking of that second Trump administration, which is. Coming in corporate America faces a critical strategic challenge, and that is when and how to engage on sociopolitical issues.

Companies are working hard right now to avoid being caught unawares as they were during Trump’s first term. When events like the 2017 Muslim travel ban Trump to nearly a hundred tech CEOs to speak out [00:57:00] against the policy. The dynamics are markedly different this time around as DEI, consultant Anne-Marie Malecha notes, during Trump’s first term, a tight labor market gave employees significant leverage in pushing companies to take stance.

Today’s economic environment has shifted that balance of power, potentially giving companies more latitude in choosing their battles. That’s likely why you’re seeing so many companies here in the us abandoning their DEI practices and goals. Walmart being the latest and one of the largest to make such a pronouncement after the George Floyd murder.

There was so much pressure to right a wrong that companies quickly fell in line around their employees sentiments. Today with right-wing extremists like Robbie Starbuck framing the narrative and employees with fewer levers of power to pull, companies are just as quick to cave to pressure and revert to.

Pre George Floyd practices a particularly valuable framework for navigating these decisions has emerged in the form of a [00:58:00] comprehensive decision tree that’s being shared among corporate communications teams. This model begins with a fundamental question. Is there a precedent? From there, it guides organizations through crucial considerations like whether the issue impacts business operations or stakeholders, whether it violates corporate values and whether employees’ rights are in immediate danger.

The framework’s strength lies in its nuanced approach to both proactive and reactive scenarios. This framework has been published in an article about this issue in Axios, and we have a link to it in the show notes, but I’m gonna walk you quickly through just one. Path in, in this decision tree Starting again.

Is there precedent? You have yes and no options. So let’s say the answer is yes. Then it says address changes with key stakeholders. But if the answer is no, then it asks the question, are you changing course? If that’s the case, then the questions are, does it impact employees? Does it impact [00:59:00] business operations or shareholders?

And does it impact corporate missions corporate values or mission? So let’s just walk through. Does it impact employees? If the answer is no, a statement’s likely not needed. If the answer is yes, the question is, are they or their rights in immediate danger? If the answer is no, then the question is, are employees calling for a response?

And there are options there, yes, but not in ma in mass, no. And yes but then the the answer is yes to are there are they, are their rights in immediate danger? If the answer is yes, then internal communications are recommended. If the answer is unclear, it says, consider internal communications that acknowledge the issue, offer support for employees even if a stance is not being taken at the moment.

Now looking ahead, companies are particularly focused on policy areas like immigration, healthcare, and trade that could directly impact their operations and workforce. A lot of these are also preparing for [01:00:00] response strategies in case they become targets in culture, war debates, or social media callouts, and that’s a possibility that is growing given the Trump approach to governance by tweet.

The key insight emerging from communication experts is that companies should prioritize issues where they have both authority and something meaningful. To add to the conversation, and I might add a dog in the hunt, as Janet Stovall and Kim Clark arguing their depth model approach, organizations must develop their own authentic voice rather than simply following the crowd on every issue.

The depth model, by the way, stands for dialogue, education, purpose, transparency and Humility, a framework to help organizations communicate effectively on DEI and social justice issues. By fostering authentic and strategic conversations. It’s out of their book, which is titled, and I love the title, the Fine Art of Not Saying Stupid Shit.

Anyway. The Smartest Strategy may be [01:01:00] establishing clear processes now for evaluating when and how to engage rather than trying to predict specific scenarios. The whole Trump thing is around chaos, right? Makes it hard to predict. So with the potential for rapid policy changes and social media confrontations, having a robust decision making framework could improve could prove invaluable in navigating the complex landscape ahead.

This decision tree is a good place to start. It’s in the Axios report and we have a link to it in the show notes. Yeah, it is useful. Listening to what you were saying, how you were describing all this show it struck me that I. The landscape has changed in that, a kind of decision tree like this reflects the times when the the structure was such that you had a model structure to follow and everyone knew that, and it was all fine.

Not anymore. You mentioned what AX has talked about govern the governance by [01:02:00] tweet. That’s definitely the landscape and it’s fast and it’s comes out, comes blindingly out of your left field where you don’t expect it to come. And you’ve gotta react quickly and there isn’t time for a chain of approvals to be gone through.

So you need to change your structure. That’s gonna affect everyone and I. Just, I got no research. I’m gonna, I’m gonna share with you saying, because it says so. Hey, my feeling is we’re gonna see this. You’ve got Musk and the scene. He’s gonna have a role in this what’s it called? This department for reducing employees in the federal government, whatever it’s called.

You’ve got him there and you’ve got a raft of people from what I’ve been reading, appointed who was like a DJ on a radio station. Someone else who was some whatever with no political experience. Fox News host, right? No political experience and strong agendas. They’re all either anti-vaccine or they don’t believe in any of this stuff, or it’s all rubbish and it’s lies and everything else.

And it’s the Democrats who are behind all the.

You might [01:03:00] have a policy, and I wonder this is likely to happen. I’m sure that you know us, the new government’s in place from January and announcements are made about this happening or that happening, and then Trump goes and posts a post on his true social network that’s completely the opposite to that.

So what’s the federal government gonna do? The spokes scrambled around and change it. And I think in a short order, you’re gonna see what you believe and who you’re going to pay attention to. And this is chaos coming. Yeah. But more, more relevant, I guess to the, to our conversation on this topic. This is global.

This is not just American companies need to figure this out because you’ve got already, I’m seeing almost daily people talking about if Trump does this for the, the tariffs if there’s a trade war coming and this company’s gonna do that, and how are we gonna do this?

You’ve got that. As part of the scenario, and it may be second or third person down the track as it were, compared to the primary audience, which is in the United States. This [01:04:00] does affect everyone effectively. I would say wherever you are, if you are a communicator, you need to be cognizant of these developments and these trends or these movements, whatever you might wanna call them, in preparation for what’s coming after January.

And Trump is signaling, already thinks I’m gonna do this when I’m inaugurated or after I’m inaugurated. So you’ve got, on the one hand the dire stuff that we hear about, which is deep mass deportations out of the US You, you’re hearing people say that can’t happen. So you’ve already got chaos surrounding that.

How’s it gonna happen? Who’s gonna do it? Is it gonna happen? What about, what are you saying? Are you gonna deport everyone? Including all those legally settled, Trump doesn’t seem to make much distinction overall this, no one else is able to fill the vacuum. So we are looking to, I. Chaotic period.

And if I were a communicator in a senior role in a big organization, I’d be having attention paid galore to all of this and enabling me to be able to [01:05:00] make, to provide counsel to the senior leaders of that organization. Because you have to be prepared for the un unpreparable basically. Yeah. He hasn’t he doesn’t take office for seven weeks and he is already created this kind of chaos.

He’s already getting all the attention. He had a phone call with the president of Mexico and he gets out there and says she promised to deal with the border and she had to come out and said, I never said anything like that. That’s right. He’s just continuing to make shit up. I think, and that’s chaos.

I have a feeling he does, I think he does a lot of this and he’s laughing to himself as he’s doing this thing. No, he knows what he’s doing. Yeah. Yeah. He does. But getting back to the corporate side of this since I don’t want it to just become a biased political diatribe what organizations need to do in their planning, and it wasn’t covered in any of the material I read on this is considered that shift in the media that you use to get your message out.

This is not just to deal with sociopolitical issues during the Trump administration. Look what happened during the [01:06:00] campaign. We addressed this in one of our midweek episodes in the past month, that podcasts wielded undue influence in social media. Very little this time around. Nobody talked about, the Russia or China.

Influenced social media feeds and the like, having influence. We didn’t hear about the sending people to a rally that didn’t exist and things like this just didn’t come up. The DeepFakes didn’t play that big an issue. Everybody was worried about that. Social media. It’s because the attention has shifted to other sources of information and as we are planning those.

Statements, those positions where we do feel compelled to take a position then we have to consider how are we gonna do that? Are we gonna be talking to influencers? Are we gonna have them on deck ready to help us on our behalf? Are we going to have podcasts we can reach out to and get our spokespeople onto episodes to discuss it?

Podcasts that have [01:07:00] audiences that we wanna reach. So we really need to be rethinking the priorities that we have for the media that we’re going to use. Sending out a tweet these days may reach the audience. You distinctly don’t want to reach with these types of things. So I think it’s time to be rethinking our media hierarchy.

Anyway, this is a particularly urgent reason to jump on that. Yeah, we’ve got less than two months to get prepared for this.

Let’s talk about Blue Sky for a change. I’m sorry. Blue sky. Blue sky, that new network. We have talked about Blue sky and you can’t really escape from this in terms of what’s happening with this. Most people, I suspect, don’t care at all. And I probably still quite happy on Twitter or X rather.

Some are just blank not doing anything. But in reality, this is a shift in the landscape of of how you engage with people on social media, across social networks, and it’s worth adding this. [01:08:00] Topic, this kinda subtopic to it all, which is the growing apps ecosystem. So tools that you can use to do certain things in blue sky or use its data to do or whatever.

It’s quite interesting because we’re seeing this emerging quite quickly as a haven for developer creativity. That echoes the app building energy we saw in Twitter’s early days. And that was, in my mind when I was thinking about this topic. This reminds me of the 2007, 2008 period. Twitter was founded in 2006.

I joined in December that year. And in a sense, not a lot happened for six, seven months or so until developers suddenly started doing things and things began to pick up in a very interesting way in terms of functionality, in terms of enjoyment of what you were doing and how you could achieve things that otherwise you couldn’t.

If developers had not got involved, Twitter was a developer friendly. Service at that time. So those early [01:09:00] days are very much an echo. While platforms today, like threats have yet to nurture innovation like this, blue Sky’s fostering an expanding ecosystem of third party applications and tools.

This open approach to development is a crucial differentiator, creating exciting opportunities for both users and developers. A, an emerging hub for this, it’s not. Topi built yet, but it’s emerging. Is the Blue Sky directory launched in November by Muhar Ikal, a prolific creator with a history of building impactful side projects according to his bio, the directory aggregates tools, apps, and community resources, making it easier for users to navigate and maximize their blue sky experience.

Al was inspired to create the directory after noticing the lack of a centralized resource for tools and starter packs within the Blue Cut Sky ecosystem. In his words, like everyone getting active here, I’m looking for resources to help me make the most of the platform. I found a couple of GitHub repos and blog posts with lists of [01:10:00] tools to get started, but not a great directory.

So I’m gonna build one. That’s how it started a few weeks ago. Currently, the directory includes really useful sections curated by him, startup X. This is a new thing that features custom feeds and user collections, people that people have created that are tailored to specific interest and communities and are very useful for new people coming to be sky and suddenly find there’s a place or there’s a tool they can use that includes other users and you can follow them straight away, all in one place, sub attune to your own interests.

Lists which provide themed, shareable groups of accounts or content for easier engagement, that the, there’s a directory of those clients, meaning apps, third party apps showcasing alternative apps for accessing blue sky, such as gray sky and deck blue. If you use TweetDeck in the ages, in the days of Twitter pre and post 2010, by the way, deck Blue will be very familiar.

And there are utilities [01:11:00] tools like the Blue Sky Feed Creator that lets users build custom feeds without coding knowledge. So IQ Bal updates the directory dynamically incorporating new tools and PAC shared across the platform. His approach demonstrates the power of user-driven development, and the commitment to making Blue Sky an accessible and resource rich environment.

This openness has also inspired developers outside the directory to innovate in unique ways. For instance, I recently started experimenting with Auto Blue, a WordPress plugin by Daniel Post, a WordPress developer that automatically shares blog posts to blue sky. Seamless integration of blogging and social media underscores.

Blue Sky’s potential to become a hub for creators. We might see a resurrection of the bloggers fish because of stuff like this. Another standout is Blue Sky comments, which allows comments on a blue sky post, but a blog entry to appear directly on the blog itself. This reminds me a lot of the functionality of tools like Chat Catcher for Twitter created by Shannon Whitley in 2008, [01:12:00] which I used to unify social conversations around my WordPress blog post back then.

So again, the parallels between early Twitter I. Early blue sky are, I think, quite marked. This is not X, this is nothing to do with the toxicity on that platform. This is harking back to the embracing of innovation and ideas and openness to enable things to work for lots of people. I think it’s phenomenal.

So these tools highlight that spirit of creativity and openness in Blue Skyes develop a community, a stark contrast to the closed ecosystems of competitors like threats. By encouraging such innovation, blue Sky is cultivating an environment that empowers users and developers to shape the platform collaboratively.

So question view then. How do you see this renewed app building energy, influencing Blue Sky’s growth and positioning in the social media landscape? And what can we learn or what can other platforms take from this approach to fostering third party innovation? Do. I think [01:13:00] what I it’s really smart on Blue Sky’s part to allow this, there is a case to be made that Twitter took off because of the creation of all of these third party apps that they allowed through an open API tweetbot, terrific Phoenix, TALEN for Twitter tweet deck, a huge one Echo phone.

And then there was the integration of Twitter into other tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. They’ve been shut off of Twitter because of the closing of the API. And I think that’s why I. I’m wondering if some of these third party developers are a little nervous because the owner of the platform can decide arbitrarily at any moment that we’ve gotten big enough, we want all of the views coming through our apps and not third party apps for the variety of reasons that they would have to do that.

And keep in mind that blue sky started with Jack Dorsey. I know he’s not [01:14:00] involved anymore, but his DNA is still in the organization. In fact, when he brought in the CEO of Blue Sky, she’s the CEO now, it was to create a federated approach for Twitter. And as she dug into the code, she said, I can’t do that, but I could do that with a new social network.

So he funded the startup of Blue Sky. That’s how it got started. His DNA is there I’d be a little worried that. Any third party app is not long for this world. Once it becomes more advantageous from a business perspective to control all of the apps rather than have all of the third party apps that help them build their user base.

I see where you’re coming from with that. I wouldn’t have that worry in the sense that you say Dorsey’s DNA is still there. I don’t think it is. It was at the very beginning, but this is not. What you see now is not what he envisaged back then, because this was gonna be part of Twitter. This is part of how Twitter would evolve.

[01:15:00] But from what I’ve read he got impatient with things, certain stuff he didn’t like. So he quit and he left. So Jay Graber, the CEO, interesting woman reading a bio in the background. And you’re right, others have said this too. Oh yeah. But what happens if they suddenly say, sorry, we’re closing everything.

I don’t believe they’re gonna do that. And I feel. That what I see there and what I hear this is not the same environment as Twitter at the time they did that when Dorsey was still there, by the way this is a different place in my opinion, and I think that you hear it and you think, fine keep an open mind on it then.

But I don’t see this at all. And I think any of these developers who are building stuff take a huge risk in that case. And they’re willing to do it. I’ve not seen anyone really seriously making the claim that, watch out. You’re gonna lose your shirt because they’re gonna do this.

I’m not seeing that. But I think more positively, as you yourself noted, that this is truly extraordinary, that they are enabling this, which is great. [01:16:00] And if they’re doing this so that they can say, thanks a lot guys. We’re now gonna do this in the road. I don’t believe they’re gonna, that hope I’m right.

I hope you’re right too. But business is business and businesses make unpopular well, there’s ethical s in their own self interest and there’s not ethical business. Yeah. I think I, if I were advising an organization who asked me the same question, I’d say there the, there might, that’s the possibility.

Keep in mind, take it into account in your planning in that case. Yeah. Yeah. Keep in mind that their goal is not to make money through advertising, but through fees for extended services and that’s what people are speculating about, and they have indicated that is something they’re under considering, but it’s not set yet.

They’re not making any money, by the way. It’s not like every startup. Yeah. They’re no they’re getting investor dollars, making a nickel from they’re not making money, they’re not making profits. No. They’ve got money to keep going and pay the staff and stuff like that. Yeah. But this is very early days.

This is only just now taking off. Yep. I’d have a very open mind about what speculation is about. What’s I wouldn’t avoid as a user, I wouldn’t avoid using any of these tools. When Twitter shut down [01:17:00] access to the tool that I was using, I just switched to another one that they, was a Twitter.

Based tool. And it was fine. I didn’t like it as much, but I could still participate on the platform. So take advantage of these while they’re there and if they indeed never close the API and allow this ecosystem to continue to grow, that’ll be great. If they don’t, we’ll deal with it with, I think there’s things about their plans we don’t know about.

Oh, clearly there’s things about what possibilities are. Maybe APIs will change in terms of how we regard them, how people might use them. There are too many no unknowns. And then to quote a famous American politician, there are a lot of unknown unknowns that we don’t do know about. So there, there’s a question mark over a great deal of this.

So it’s a leap of faith, I suppose you could argue, but I think that in the spirit of of support that yeah. Listen to what people say about that. Make up your own mind. But in the meantime get to know what you can do with this. And [01:18:00] if blue skies suddenly turn around in six months to a year and say, we’re actually gonna do that, then your worst fears will have arisen.

I don’t believe that’s gonna happen. One of the things that was discussed recently on Blue Sky was Coca-Cola’s Holiday commercial. When Coke released its holiday advertisements this year, they weren’t expecting the firestorm that erupted. Their decision to use AI to generate its highly anticipated Christmas commercial sparked immediate controversy, particularly among advertising and marketing professionals who labeled the results as soulless and disastrous.

The controversy highlights attention that has been growing in the worlds of advertising and marketing. On one side, are creative professionals committed to human artistry and Hollywood quality production values. On the other are companies eager to demonstrate their technological prowess to Wall Street, particularly through high visibility holiday campaigns.

Coca-Cola’s approach is particularly noteworthy working with three AI [01:19:00] focused agencies. They created multiple versions of their classic 1995 holidays are coming commercial now. The company maintains that this wasn’t about cost cutting, but rather about personalization. They can now target 12 different US cities with customized versions of the commercial, each showing local landmarks local to that city, which yeah, makes sense as a sound reason to use ai.

That’s the same thing we’ve been talking about with your CEO delivering remarks at a town hall in America in English, and then being able to. Create that video with them saying the same things in all the languages your employees speak around the world. It’s AI enhanced dubak for all practical purposes.

But the feedback came from people like Al Hirsch, a TV series creator who commented on X fun fact. Coca-Cola is red because it’s made from the blood of out of work artists, and that tweet had nearly 700,000 views. [01:20:00] Other comments read Pepsi. Now’s your chance to make a live action ad bashing on Coke for using AI and nothing like celebrating the spirit of Christmas with the most solace commercial possible.

Even Shelly Palmer, advanced media professor at Syracuse University and digital marketing consultant said that it sucked. Now, Coca-Cola issued a statement, and I’m gonna read the whole statement. It’s a full paragraph here. The Coca-Cola company has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays and content, film events, and retail activations for decades around the globe.

We are always exploring new ways to connect with fans and experiment with different approaches. This year we crafted films through a collaboration of human storytellers and the power of generative ai. Coca-Cola will always remain dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology.

That was a big screw you to everybody who was complaining about the ad, but here’s where we get a twist in the [01:21:00] story. While advertising professionals mocked the badly rendered logos and shiny faces, consumers mostly seemed unfazed the flood of insulting comments on YouTube. Notwithstanding research from System one shows the ads scored really well with viewers who either didn’t notice or didn’t care about the AI generated imperfections that horrified critics.

Now this disconnect points to a broader shift in advertising. As pr, the car, Coca-Cola’s, global head of generative AI suggests, and I would note that he’s the global head, not the Chief AI officer. Much of the backlash may reflect industry professionals anxieties about their own futures. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has already transformed its advertising approach, shifting 60% of its media budget to digital and creating thousands of contextually relevant content pieces measured in real time.

And we’re not seeing the same level of complaints around all of those. While advertising purists [01:22:00] may yearn for the days of, I’d like to buy the world a Coke, consumers appear ready to accept AI generated content as long as it maintains emotional resonance. And that goes back to a point you made Neville in, in the look ahead about what consumers are looking for from social media.

This suggests we’re witnessing not just a technical evolution, but a fundamental shift in how brands connect with their audiences. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with that last sentence. She I have to admit I yawned, when I heard about all the criticism, it reminds me of what’s been going on here in the UK over the past couple of weeks about the rebranding of Jaguar, the car maker, new logo that has had everyone from politicians to celebrities to whoever complaining they destroyed the brand venerable British brand.

My goodness, what’s going on? But they’re holding firm and basically doing the same kind of response idea as you suggested CO’s doing. I just wonder if [01:23:00] the critique is mostly from industry people, IE advertising folks and so forth, and yet the consumers that the ad is aimed at, like it how do you deal with that?

What do you do? Is that not the same perhaps as. The Hollywood movie comes out, the critics absolutely slam it, but it goes on to make billions in the box office. Do you care what the critics say in that case? I think that’s when you issue a statement like the one the Coca-Cola did that said, we’re fine with this.

This is very consistent with our history and we’re gonna keep on doing it. Yeah, I’d not seen the ad. I’ve just dug it out now on YouTube and I see all the 3000 comments, including the top of the list. Is that one you mentioned about Pepsi, now is your chance to make a live action. Ad bashing coke.

You are a multi-billion dollar company. Says one comment, hire some animators. Yeah I get it. I get it. I can’t really say much, so I have not having seen the ad, I’m gonna take a look at it. Yeah. I read probably four or five articles about this because when this erupted, it really erupted.

And [01:24:00] so I read several articles and then I went and found the ad and watched it, and I shrugged and I said, I don’t see what the big brouhaha is here. I should say. I don’t see what the kerfuffle is here. It seemed fine to me. I had no issue with it. And if I was just, sitting back on the couch watching a football game and during the commercial break that commercial came up, I would not lean forward and go, Hey, that’s really lousy AI they used there.

I, I, unless. Unless you’re in the industry then you would, yeah. Yeah, this may be if I was worried about my job and I saw that, although I have to tell you, if I didn’t know that had been produced using AI and I watched it casually during a commercial break and a football game, I wouldn’t have wondered, I would’ve just said yeah, there’s another animated Coke commercial, so I may actually, it’s more than one ad, right?

There’s a series, because I saw some maybe 12 versions of it. Okay. I saw I saw something the other day on, actually on Blue Sky, which I looked at for about 10 [01:25:00] seconds before I my phone rang. And so I didn’t, which was an animation of a giant Santa Claus in a store leaning behind him and picking up a Coca-Cola truck and placing it on the street outside, and the truck then drives away, and I first thought was, that’s ai.

I said to myself, that must be part of it though. I don’t recall that particular scene, but I’ve only watched it once. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll, because it’s on YouTube, I’ll embed that video in the show notes for this episode when I get around to doing the show notes. When you get around to the show notes, it’s a, it’s an interesting situation.

And I think like the Jaguar situation I mentioned what I see the outcome from this, the immediate outcome from this is that the brand is getting huge attention. Everyone is thinking about Jaguar cars and even the ones who aren’t commenting I’ve not seen a huge amount of support. I’ve seen lots of people saying, look, get over this for God’s sake.

It’s a, it’s just a car logo. It’s actually more than [01:26:00] just a car logo. So you might have the same with the Coca-Cola thing. But nevertheless, bottom line, the brand’s getting a lot of attention. Who was it who said no publicity is bad publicity? This could be in that scenario.

People are thinking about Jaguar, so that can’t hurt. But yeah, I remember the discussion with Mitch Joel years ago about the fact that when radio emerged, a lot of Vaudeville theaters went out of business because the entertainment shifted to radio. And the same thing. It’s happened hundreds of times for various reasons as innovations have taken root and become default ways of doing things to suggest that AI is not going to become a typical and regular component of video production is ridiculous.

So get used to it and figure out how to make a living in that world. It actually applies to general areas we’ve talked about, which is, oh, you are a [01:27:00] copywriter and using AI to write some of your stuff. That it fits into that area too. Oh, you, we can’t have this. You need a copywriter to do.

There’s still that thinking there. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying that things are evolving quite fast in these areas and it would be a grave error, I think, for any organization or individual to say, to just dismiss and say, you can’t use that for that purpose. And maybe part of it is articulating the underlying fear of change the underlying belief.

In many cases it’s probably true in some that. Deploying this technology in that industry is gonna lead to job losses. And you can do the thinking yourself to think of a certain role. One, one thing I think a lot about when I see the recycling crews coming around the neighborhood to empty the recycling, if ever there was a job desire for robots, that this is it.

And those six guys in this brand new truck who do a great job their days are numbered. Is the thought I have sometimes. So [01:28:00] is that bad? I don’t know. It’s change and at a time when every industry, everywhere is struck for money and resourcing all this stuff, these are an inevitability about some of this unpleasant though.

Much of it is. It’s people we’re talking about, right? Yeah. This is part of that. It seems to me. The other thing to keep in mind is that as jobs are lost, jobs are also going to be created. Different 30 years ago, how many web developers were there? How many social media consultants and employees were there?

How many companies had departments that were, digital? How many podcasters were there? It’s, that’s right. And podcast advertising services. And yeah. This is creative destruction. This is the way it works. It’s been that way for, centuries the old buggy whip manufacturer complaining about automobiles.

It’s this, just, this is the way the world works. So tune in next. Tune in next time for more good news about what’s happening in our world. And that will draw this episode of four Immediate Release [01:29:00] to a close. Our December episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, December 23rd. We will be recording that the Saturday before.

In the meantime, I hope that you will drop us a comment. The way most people do that these days is commenting on the LinkedIn or Facebook posts that we offer up to let you know that a new episode’s available. We also post those on threads on Blue Sky on Mastodon. We haven’t talked about Mastodon in a while, but we do.

Share our posts there. And there are other ways to comment. You can send us an email send that email to fir comments@gmail.com. Attach up to a three minute audio if you would like. We haven’t had one of those in ages. So you know, that’s because Kim Hansen retired so we don’t get audio comments anymore.

You can record that audio comment directly from our website at fir podcast network.com. There is a send voicemail tab on the [01:30:00] right. Just click that you can leave a comment on the show notes at FI comment or FI podcast network.com. And we do hope that you will leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts so that new listeners can find us and that dear listeners will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #437: AI Takes Root in the Workplace appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Bluesky — the Twitter-esque social network that has suddenly started attracting refugees from Elon Musk’s X — had its start when Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey asked software engineer Jay Graber to introduce federation to Twitter. She told him she couldn’t, but she could create a new social network based on a new federation protocol called AT, a decentralized foundation for public social media. At first, Bluesky was an invitation-only network. Many of those who scored invites were underwhelmed. But a surge of migrations from X has reinvigorated Bluesky, which is also adding features as a further incentive for people to join and stay. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss Bluesky’s potential and whether communicators should consider establishing a presence for their companies or clients.

Links from this episode:

Bluesky’s Boom: Are We Watching the Next Big Shift? – NevilleHobson .com
Journalists Are Leaving X for Bluesky. Will They Stay There?
Bluesky Is Growing Up. Maybe Too Fast.
Benefits of an open network
Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge
Mass X-odus: professionals desert Elon Musk’s network
Number of users on Bluesky
How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth
Journalists Are Leaving X for Bluesky. Will They Stay There?
Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
CIPR to Cease Engagement on Twitter
PRovoke Media Will No Longer Post on X
‘Growing space for connection’ – why charities are finally moving to Bluesky
X-odus: Should Your Company Leave X?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 2.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw transcript:

00:00:00] Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 436 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz. And I’m Neville. Hobson. In this episode, we are gonna talk about Blue Sky. It’s something that you probably will have heard of. It’s a social network. The new Challenger one in the news hugely. This past week, today, blue Sky, surpassed 22.7 million users.

That’s a significant leap from 7 million. Just three months ago, disillusioned users are migrating from x former Twitter in search of healthier online spaces. This surge mainly since the US presidential election, early this month and widely reported across mainstream and social media during the past week highlights a broader shift in professional and organizational engagement as users abandoned platforms that feel no longer serve their needs.

Are we watching the next big shift in the media landscape, or is this simply the latest fat? We’ll share our thinking [00:01:00] right after this.

Blue Sky’s rapid growth presents both opportunities and challenges. Casey Newton, the platformer noted yesterday that the platform faces significant hurdles in scaling its infrastructure and implementing robust content moderation systems to ensure user safety and trust as blue sky expands. Balancing its decentralized ethos with these operational demands will be critical.

Organizations too are taking note. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations, CIPR in the UK under CEO Alistair MCC Capra announced it would cease engagement on X immediately due to concerns over the platform’s direction. The CIPR set up an account on Blue Sky yesterday complimenting its established presence on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Similarly, Paul Holmes, founder of Provoke Media stated that his publication will no longer post on x. Reflecting a growing trend among professional media outlets. The Guardian’s decision last week to stop posting new content on X marks a pivotal moment in how [00:02:00] major media organizations are rethinking their social media strategies with over 27 million followers across its accounts on X.

This isn’t a small shift. It’s a significant recalibration of priorities for one of the world’s most respected media outlets. Charities and advocacy groups are also finding a new space for connection on Blue Sky. According to Civil Society News, many charities are setting up accounts on the platform, leveraging its community driven ethos to engage audiences authentically.

The scientific community has been quick to embrace Blue Sky as well with Science magazine reporting that researchers and academics are increasingly using the platform to share knowledge and collaborate. This migration underscores Blue Sky’s potential as a hub for professional and intellectual discourse.

We’re also seeing political communities making moves. Political engagement on social platforms is often a key indicator of their relevance and staying power. Blue Sky’s adoption by UK Labor Party members of Parliament and discussion among influential [00:03:00] voices in the European Union about Blue Sky’s potential role are significant developments.

These shifts highlight the platform’s growing appeal as a space for public discourse, one that feels safer, more transparent, viable, and far less chaotic than X on whether organizations should leave X entirely. Luke Brinley Jones, founder of OST Marketing, argues for a balanced approach. In his piece on the Exodus, he highlights the importance of carefully weighing the cost and benefits before making such a move, noting that abandoning X prematurely could leave organizations out of important conversations.

Blue Sky’s decentralized framework and user-friendly design have attracted praise, but its long-term viability will depend on its ability to address scalability and trust. As Casey Newton noted, the Columbia Journalism Review has highlighted how American journalists have found blue Sky to be a promising alternative to X.

Though retaining their engagement will depend on the platform maintaining its unique appeal without succumbing to the [00:04:00] challenges that plagued its predecessor. And what about threads? Meta’s Ex Challenger that now boasts over 275 million users is not getting the same attention and buzz as blue sky with its vibe, open, creative, and refreshingly free of the corporate polish.

That makes threads feel well a bit lifeless by comparison. Yet Meta says Threads is now getting over a million new signups every day, and X has over 600 million monthly users at the moment. Blue Sky is tiny by comparison. Still, blue sky feels like a place where people actually do want to be, and we’re already seeing a third party app ecosystem taking shape.

A definite sign of strong interest from the developer community. The energy on the platform is unreliable, and the moment is hard to ignore. I think it’s fair to say that if blue sky keeps surging, it’s hard not to see threads slipping further into the background, no matter the numbers. Looking ahead the next few months will be crucial for Blue Sky.

The platform must navigate its growing pains while continuing to [00:05:00] attract and retain users and organizations. Its ability to scale responsibly while preserving its community driven ethos could well determine whether it becomes a viable alternative to x. Or just another chapter in the ever-changing social media landscape.

What do you think? Shell, is Blue sky poised to become the next big thing, or will it fade like so many others? I think it depends on the steps that they take going forward. They can, it depends. Good answers certainly stumble and it depends. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. They certainly could stumble make some mistakes that drive people away or slow their growth.

On the other hand, they could take steps that attract more people. They seem to be. Taking the approach of slow and steady implementation of new features adopting some of the ones that are popular over on threads. One of the things that I think is going to drive its adoption. Is that they’ve taken a hands off approach [00:06:00] to the content that people share.

Both on X and on threads. They are tamping down posts with links in them. They don’t want those. What made Twitter, what it was the real time nature of people sharing information. People used Twitter. To find out what was happening in the news because it’s where news broke and it’s where journalists were sharing links to what they were reporting or.

Giving you heads up on what they were reporting. And you can’t really do that on threads because the algorithm is not real time. It’s more geared toward, social fun stuff. And without links rising to the top on X, you’re not gonna be able to do it there either, even though. There are still some journalist communities that have not made a move from x.

I was listening to a podcast just yesterday on my way home from work where they were talking about the fact that the whole national [00:07:00] football league sports reporting community continues to thrive on X. It has, nobody’s made the move over to either threads or. Blue sky. This is all happening at the same time that we’re seeing a tremendous fragmentation.

We have generations that are more inclined to spend time in their groups on WhatsApp or on TikTok. So are we gonna see Blue Sky become the next Twitter? I have serious doubts that anybody, regardless of what they did could. Assume that kind of popularity because people have too many options and they have their preferences.

They like what they like. There were fewer options back in 2007 when Twitter was first introduced, it was the first Microblogging tool and people gravitated there the real time. Nature of it made it very exciting compared to some of the other options that are out there. Even [00:08:00] if they do have 600 million over on X monthly users that’s a drop in the bucket.

Compared to what the 4 billion on Facebook. All these things are relative. But it will continue to grow. And the other thing I wanted to mention real quickly is that its federated model is mostly aspirational at this point. There are not a lot of servers that have been set up with the AT protocol.

You’re seeing more of that with the activity pub protocol. From Mastodon. There are a lot of instances that have been set up which is the one that threads uses, which is why we’re seeing that kind of cross-posting through threads, but you’re not seeing a lot of it. It, it is pretty much a monolith right now, even though that protocol exists.

Just this morning, by the way, I was reading a website that explained how to set up an at server and it’s involved compared to. Process. This is not for the casualty or the average user. Certainly not. And in fact, I think the point about mention [00:09:00] numbers, I think we need to stop mentioning these numbers because that’s not the important thing.

Twitter’s rather blue sky is not suddenly gonna overtake Twitter and eclipse it. It’s simply not possible. It’s totally and your point about, football league and others who are massive on. X and haven’t ported over that is absolutely the case with many others. So I think to put this in the correct perspective, this is not like a sudden tsunami about to happen.

Of all these people suddenly gonna flood over to blue sky. I can’t see that happening. It’s it. If things are moving, there is definitely something in the air. On the examples I mentioned on who is leaving or who is in fact more significantly, I think, is to talk about who is setting up shop on Blue Sky rather than who is migrating from x.

Most of these people aren’t closing down X, they’re still there in one form or another, which to me is a sensible thing. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and his behavior and the interference he does, and all these [00:10:00] stuff that he seems to do that upsets a lot of people. Reality. There are people using x in their millions.

As ways of keeping in touch as ways of alerting people about something, whether it’s an event or a disaster or some other thing. The weather even. All that flight information isn’t suddenly all gonna migrate. So this is for, I think for those who feel they just don’t want to be on X anymore and want to be someplace more pleasant.

And I would argue from experience. Blue Sky is a much more pleasant place. It’s not the same as XO got 600 million against 22.7. Of those 600 million, what half are bots probably. And the other half are mixture of nice people and some pretty nasty characters in there too. So it’s that kind of difference yet.

Something is shifting. The sands are moving. It seems to me when you’ve got things like the vibe is changing too. Yeah. You mentioned about the AT protocol. So I’m testing something which I’ve just installed. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, which is a plugin for WordPress. [00:11:00] That when you post a blog post, it’ll also share it to Blue Sky.

We already have that with threats. Now we’ve got something like this on blue sky. That’ll appeal to a lot of people. Another one, not WordPress specific, lets you host your comments on Blue Sky. That appeals to me hugely reminds me of the outstanding work Shannon Whitley did back in before 2010 I think it was, where he created tools that, had huge takeup. And I look back on my blog in those days and find it’s absolutely cram full of comments made on Twitter that were then posted to the blog as well. And that was a, actually it was a plugin that Shannon created. So if we can get to that area, then that adds, I think, momentum to a platform that would make it easy to to attract attention from a lot of people.

We are early days. This is early. Early adoption days. Where we’re at currently. So this is not mass migration time at all. Yeah. But the other thing that I think will drive [00:12:00] adoption is it’s not the media coverage it’s getting now, which is all about how people are. Migrating from X, it’s the media coverage is gonna get when the media starts reporting news based on posts on Blue Sky and you have enough influential people moving to Blue Sky from X saying things that the media might want to cover, that you’re gonna see and increased volume.

Of you remember how you used to see tweets all the time embedded in news coverage of events. You still do on the websites, you still do, but you’re gonna start to assuming that they’re gonna allow you to. Do that. I’m sure they will. You’re gonna start to see the blue sky posts, whatever they’re called.

I don’t, what do they call it? No do not use the word skeet. Whatever you do, it’s a disgusting word in my opinion. I, you didn’t hear me say it, did you? No. I said it. So did no, I don’t up yet. She. No one’s set that up yet. No one has set up embedding from from Blue sky too early days.

You can always do a screen grab if you needed to. Yeah, but the point is to [00:13:00] do it like you do it with Twitter or X doesn’t exist yet. You can’t do it. But that’s something they should consider because they are the real time. Their algorithm does not favor anything. No, it does let you follow a list.

I mean there’s Blue Sky books and writers and things like that. I did, by the way, love, I have to share. It was a tweet from Austrian Air Airlines. Yeah, that was a good one A few days ago it chose a flight attendant. With her arms out, like she’s pointing to the exits. And it says, we took a moment to locate our nearest exit, and the exit is not ex it’s the logo for XIT.

And beneath that, in very small type it says Austrian is closing this account effective immediately. So I think there are brands that are actually taking advantage of leaving X to. Make an exclamation point of that action. Yeah. But this is, this is, individual steps here and there, which get media attention.

It’s not gonna drive huge people to, to leave without question. But [00:14:00] like I said, this is, to me, the feel is there is a shift, there’s something in the air, something is moving. It’s not mass, it’s not a migration, it’s not an exodus of some say, although to individuals that you see it as an exodus. That’s fine.

It’ll coexist. You and I have talked about this quite a few times before that whatever we feel about X, like I mentioned, Elon Musk himself, the way he’s, he, depending on your point of view, ruined it or whatever he is done to it. It’s not gonna suddenly vanish as far as we can see right now.

Although anything’s possible tomorrow, who knows what he might do or not do. In the meantime, we have this alternative place that is attracting a huge amount of tension right now, and it’s being driven in mainstream media typically, and echoed in social and then reverberated back into mainstream.

I’m seeing media stories in some of the UK media talking about who’s saying what on. Blue sky. That’s because it’s a news story. Not because a matter of course they’re gonna do this. And the other thing you mentioned about threats not being a news place. Yeah. They actively [00:15:00] discouraged news in those early days.

And wouldn the surface news stories. I think they made a huge mistake doing that, frankly, because you didn’t get. Media, people, journalists, and anyone else going to thread at all? You didn’t at all. That’s beginning to change. I saw an announcement this morning, my time that thread had announced that now you can customize the feed.

What is your default rather than this for you? Stuff that, that. Pushes stuff out. You don’t want to wanna see really, or you don’t know whether you do, the algorithm thinks you might, you can now choose your own. They’ve pinched that idea from Blue Sky according to all the reporting I’ve seen about it.

In which case, what does that signify? Are they getting a little nervous about Blue Sky? Possibly. They’ve upped the ante and some competition’s good in that case, so it is still. Early days, you, we cannot say that this is the ex successor at all. We are seeing something that many people, including me, for that matter, find quite attractive.

Up until now, threads has been my primary social network. It still is, but Blue Sky is looking increasingly [00:16:00] attractive from my point of view. And I don’t see some are people talking about there’s too much US politics there. The magazines are in there. I don’t see any of that stuff. I really don’t.

So is that an algorithmic thing or is it because I’ve chosen feeds of what I pay attention to, which is not. The stuff that has, that you can decline seeing some of the stuff or the people you follow? As well. Some of the people I follow don’t talk about that kind of thing, or there’s one person who does, you’ve gotta have someone in there so you know what you don’t wanna be seeing.

It is very much like Twitter, 2008 period, as I see it, frankly. It’s a pleasant place. That was what that was like back then. Before algorithms, before the advertisers got in, before the ugly people got there. And the cesspit it is now is a different thing. It is not comparative. So it is interesting and I’m seeing people building lists a useful tool in blue Sky as a good half dozen I’ve seen of communicators of different.

Plays a lot of overlap between them. There’s a big one on internal communicators, a huge one on PR [00:17:00] people. And these you can get hold of and keep ’em yourself as well. And in which case you could follow just those if you wanted to. I like following things I don’t know yet because that’s how you get interesting stuff as well as the stuff you can avoid, but you’ll know it when you see it.

So it, it’s got that air of Twitter in those early days. The exploratory, the experimenting times, it’s good. Yeah. And get better as they add more features and tweak it. And I find that I’m spending more time on blue sky than I am on threads these days. Yeah. Just because I tend to find more interesting stuff there now.

And I suspect that’s the algorithm not pushing stuff down that I would be more interested in. Yeah, we’re here where I work we’ll be opening a blue sky account. We don’t wanna miss out on this just because of the 20 seconds it would take to cross post something there. Yeah. That’s actually what I would suggest to anyone who’s wondering, I work for x, y, Z company, what should I do something there?

Set up an account. Don’t close anything else. Yeah, just try it out. See, join things, talk to [00:18:00] people, see what it’s like, get a handle on it and make your decision then and see what others are doing that would be a smart move that would apply to any new social network by the way. That’s worth doing.

I think so. We’ll watch this with great interest. And also as people are creating those. I was gonna say is people are creating those topic driven lists. Find out where people are talking about things that your customers are interested in and join those conversations. Yeah, so we’ll keep an eye on this.

They’ve got some serious work to do. Casey Newton said that quite well, I think, and particularly on moderation and filtering out really vile content. And his interview with the guy who runs the trust and moderation team, there is quite. Eyeopening, quite insightful. I did read that, where he shares some insights on literally the issues they’re having to deal with, which is a microcosm of what the bigger networks are having to deal with.

Except of course the big one, Twitter, who doesn’t seem to do anything because they haven’t got the staff anymore. So they’re talking on Blue Sky, ramping up the [00:19:00] moderation team to currently 20 people to a hundred plus. And it’s still, maybe that’s a drop in the ocean because as.

Keep attracting new members. If this continues this wave, then they’re gonna need to do probably more than that. So it’s quite a challenging time for them, and I think we need to kinda recognize that this has got risks if you go there where you might get something. They did talk today about some overzealousness in preventing some of this stuff by suspending accounts that.

Just got caught up in the way. ’cause they mentioned a word that the algorithm actually is not the right word ’cause it has the wrong connotation. But they’re using a tool that is designed to spot and call out prohibited content. Stuff that, that doesn’t meet the parameters that humans can then look at.

So it’s used by many companies from what I read in an article. So I think awareness of this behind the scenes is useful to know as they’re building out something that. Will be trustworthy. I see people saying, yeah, but is it I’m worried about if I go there, I’ll see all this bad [00:20:00] stuff I see on x.

I think it’s unlikely. It’s worth a shot. Mind you, I think to just give it a go and do it carefully. Yeah, you have to be serious about content moderation. There are things that you just can’t allow. Even x can’t allow, child pornography on its site. So you’ve gotta be looking for all this stuff.

Blue Sky I think I read that the EU says it’s out of compliance with eu. Was it privacy rules? I think yeah. That’s a, they got work to do. They only have 20 employees. I think that’s a red herring shell. They’re not even the size in terms of use in terms of users how many they’ve got and all that stuff.

They don’t meet the minimum standard where the EU would pay attention to them. So this is a red herring. They did respond to that, by the way, by saying that they just looking for some help to identify who they should talk to. The eu. So they don’t have an office anywhere there. There you go.

I don’t think they do have an office. Yeah so does say EU has a website that makes it easy to find who to talk to and customer support. Yeah. Oh yeah. Anyway, they only have 20, they’re startup and they [00:21:00] employees, they haven’t got, they haven’t gotten themselves established yet. They’re only a startup.

They have only 20 employees that are full-time. They have no revenue stream. Everything that they’re getting right now is investment. They’re not talking about advertising as a means of producing revenue. They’re talking about subscription fees for special features and the like. So we’ll see how that all shakes out.

But yeah, it’s definitely worth watching. And that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #436: Nothin’ But Bluesky (and TikTok and Threads and Instagram and WhatsApp…) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Among the many post-election analyses flooding media channels are reports that mainstream media and social media wielded far less influence than they have in the past. Instead, influencers and podcasts held sway. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel break down the reports and discuss the impact on communicators far beyond the election and politics.

Links from this episode:

Borkowski Media Trends: US Election Special
Donald Trump’s America: Reflections on a Country in Flux – NevilleHobson .com
Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind
How AI shaped the 2024 election: From ad strategy to voter sentiment analysis
Victorious Trump campaign spent far less on social media than in 2020

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #434: Podcasts Defeat Mainstream Media in 2024 U.S. Election appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Blogs have been with us for 30 years, which qualifies as “something old.” In this long-form episode of FIR for October, we’ll examine the state of the oldest social media category. We’ll also examine the state of generative Artificial Intelligence, which has been around, for all practical purposes, since November 2022, which makes it “something new.”

In this episode, we’ll also explore Reddit’s potential as a channel for government agencies and businesses to engage with stakeholders during a crisis and which agencies and brands are already there. Intuit’s chief communication officer didn’t like the direction a podcast interview with his CEO took, so he demanded the podcast trim the parts he didn’t like. Was he justified? The news media has gained a reputation for clickbait, but it recently took a dark turn. And, executives justify their return-to-office push by citing the need for greater collaboration and connection among employees. But does having everyone in the office produce those results? We’ll look at the research.

In his Tech Report, Dan York (joined by a special guest) shares details of a VC investment round for Bluesky, and how competitors like Mastodon reacted.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

Is Reddit the Future of Crisis Communications?
From the technology community on Reddit: Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode – we declined
Intuit Asks The Verge To Delete Part Of Interview With Its CEO; The Verge Declined
Katherine Ross (@byKatherineRoss) on X (on the Intuit podcast episode)
Streisand effect (Wikipedia)
2024 Blogging Survey: Trends and Insights from 12,000+ Bloggers Over 11 Years
The milking of Liam Payne’s death for clicks won’t do Reach plc any good long-term
What Employers Get Wrong About How People Connect at Work
The State of AI Report (introduction)
The State of AI Report
Welcome to the State of AI Report 2024

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users
Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social) (Mastodon’s founder responds)

Raw transcript:

[00:00:00] Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 433 of four immediate release, our long form episode for October, 2024. I’m She Holtz in Concord, California. And I’m Neville Hobson in Kruer Somerset in England. My new physical location as of two or three weeks ago, glad to be here. Kko, how do you spell that?

C-R-E-W-K-E-R-N-E. I never would’ve. Guess that in a million years. It’s a delightful part of southwest England. You’ve heard of Glastonbury? No doubt. That’s north of where I am. The English Channel South Coast is about 20 minutes to the south of me. , it’s a lovely part of the country. It rains a lot and I see tractors everywhere that I go.

Big ones ’cause farming country here. But we’re pleased to be here. And you have grandchildren there? Yeah. The family. That side of the family is here. All of them and the grandkids. I’ve seen more in the last week than I have in the last six months. It’s absolutely [00:01:00] delightful to be here for that reason.

Well, glad that you have finally made the move. I knew that was a long time coming. Yeah, it was. And I’m in my new, uh, in my new garden studio office. I’ll have something more to say about that in a blog post soon with photos. I hope indeed. And your move is one of the reasons we only had two short midweek episodes between the September long form episode and this one for October.

You have been moving house, as you say, in the uk. We just say moving. Yeah, and I have been away. I was at the Public Relations Society of America’s big annual icon conference the week before last. And this past week I was in Houston at a fascinating meeting of the construction communicators round table, an informal group of top communicators from about 20 of the nation’s [00:02:00] builders to get together , and talk about common communication issues.

And it was wonderful. I had a great time. I learned a lot. I should say I learned more there than I did at the PRSA conference. . It was absolutely worth going and, , it’s just been a busy month , for both of us. It, but I’m certainly glad to be back at the microphone. Me too. Yeah, me too.

When we recorded the, , I’ll mention this in a minute. When we get to the episode review, the one episode we did in between the beginning of October and today, I had moves, but I didn’t have any of my normal day-to-Day equipment, set up the computers, the microphones, nothing. So I recorded on a laptop, , with earbuds.

Uh and would you believe the, , laptop microphone? And when I listened to the recording after it, the LD wasn’t that bad. Did you have to do any editing with that? It was a considerable amount of editing. Your audio was, fine. It was absolutely [00:03:00] usable. But it did sound like it was coming through a third rate microphone, and I ran it through the Script’s Studio sound feature.

This is one of their Yeah. AI features. And it came out sounding wonderful. Yeah. This is an amazing, I had no idea that it could take, a telephone call sounding recording. Yeah. And make it sound like you had been sitting at a $400 microphone. A wonderful, that’s to hear Wonderful feature on the script.

Good to hear. Good to hear. I did think, hoping that it was great quality original recording, but now I know that Dell’s laptop microphone’s are crap, basically. I gotta tell you, when I listened to yours, I said, it’s all right. It’s a short midweek episode. It’s, yeah, it’s fine.

I had one of those ones where. When we signed into Riverside, , to do the recording, I didn’t notice that the microphone had defaulted to the one that’s baked into the camera and the audio wasn’t that good. , and if I had known that running it through Studio Sound, the [00:04:00] script would’ve fixed it. I.

Absolutely would’ve done that. That’s good to know that, Cheryl, I must admit. Good. So these two episodes that we have done since the September monthly episode, four, three oh 4 31 was on October the second. , we dove into PR weeks, the Evolution of Influence Report, exploring their dynamic shifts and how.

PR professionals exert influence in today’s fast changing landscape. It was a good discussion we had with that one. And then jump forward just over two weeks to October the 18th, and episode 4 32, the one that you had to do the audio editing with my recording. , CEOs and other senior executives are increasingly expected to nurture a presence on social media, especially LinkedIn, which has seen a 35% increase in c-suite professionals in the US over the last five years.

That’s where communicators need to step in. We said helping leaders find the most comfortable way to engage authentically online. That’s a key word there. Authentic. So that was [00:05:00] a good discussion. I actually did a follow up. Blog post myself, , with some further thoughts on that. But, in my mind, the authenticity is the kind of paramount word.

It’s worth a listen to that episode. It was pretty good, wasn’t it? And I know we got some comments somewhere amongst all this, haven’t we? We did, , got two comments on episode 4 32, 1 from Kerry Sullivan who said, leaders need to be present in order to attract and retain talent. They also need to write and show up in their own voice language is how we recognize one another.

Finally, if a leader isn’t confident enough to show up online, they’re probably not resilient enough to lead through anything more complex than a steady state business. And then we had a comment from Monique Nik who said, , many execs and public figures I know get others to do their content and approve it themselves, or only post once a month or so in, in a team photo.

Do you think it matters who actually creates the content or only that it aligns with the brand and is seen as authentic? So it’s an [00:06:00] interesting question from there’s Monique, there’s a whole topic. We could discuss that and maybe we will. With Monique, right? We might talk about that with Monique.

This is a great opportunity to let everyone know that this coming Tuesday, we are going to be speaking with Monique for an FIR interview. If you’re not already subscribing to the FIR interviews feed head over to FIR podcast network.com and subscribe. You don’t wanna miss this one. Uh she is among other things, the author of a new book, called Internal Communications in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

So looking forward to that conversation. We do have one additional comment. This is from an episode that goes back before our September episode. Sally Gch left a comment on this, and just by way of context, I should say that, as part of , the topic for that episode, rather than do the I [00:07:00] ident myself, that’s the little.

32nd introduction to the episode. At the very, very beginning, I wrote it and then had 11 labs produce my cloned voice. Reading it, it was apropos to the episode, and Sally said, as soon as the intro started, I thought Shell’s voice sounds different than something is off. And finally, is that ai, my brain got almost too wrapped up in trying to figure out what was wrong.

To take in what you were saying, it bothered me in a way that the synthesized voice of Google Maps doesn’t, and that in turn makes me wonder whether generative audio and video needs to be more real or less real to avoid the uncanny valley. , and it is actually an interesting point if it tries too hard to be really authentic.

Is that too distracting? Does it need to be? Inauthentic enough, obvious enough that it was [00:08:00] AI produced, that you go, oh, it’s an AI voice. Okay, I can now sit back and pay attention to what’s being said rather than, that’s really weird. Or discomforting, whatever. But, , it’s, it is an interesting point , that Sally makes.

Also wanna let everybody know that we have a new circle of fellows available on the FIR Podcast Network. This was an episode dealing with change management participants included ZORA artists, PRI Bates, Todd Hattori, and Cindy Schmid with Brad Whitworth. Moderating this one because I was at the PRSA conference and the next.

Circle of Fellows is scheduled for November 21st. It’ll be at 1130 in the morning, , Eastern Time. This is on executive Communication and leadership. Alice Brink, Bish Mukherjee, Julie Holloway and Maryanne McCauley will be the panelists for this one. And I will be moderating again, back in the [00:09:00] moderator’s chair.

And, , it should be , a great conversation. And if you’re able to participate live in real time, we love engaging with those people who are on the call with us. , but if not, it’ll be available as both a video replay and an audio podcast here on the FIR podcast Network. And that means that it is time to jump into our stories of the month, which we will do with vigor right after this, when there have been.

Natural disasters or other things that governments have needed to communicate. It became sort of a defacto rule that you would do some of that communication on Twitter. This was the place that Breaking News was communicated, and even if they didn’t have the audience that say, a Facebook has. They did have the attention of the media, and this tended to help [00:10:00] get the word out.

You had people who were looking for breaking news, but you also had journalists there who could turn it around and present it through their channels. So what are we doing today? Imagine that you represent a government trying to communicate critical information after natural disasters. We’re talking about the essentials, how to apply for FEMA assistance, updates on recovery efforts, basic safety information.

You would think press releases, press conferences, and social media posts. In today’s landscape, though, those channels aren’t necessarily. Going to be completely effective. Traditional media audiences have grown more and more fragmented and polarized. TV viewers are divided, and people’s social media feeds are clogged with a mix of algorithm filtered content and distractions.

The government’s posts on Facebook might not even make it to the people who need them. Instagram stories have limited reach for this purpose, and on TikTok or [00:11:00] X, which if you’ve been following, is what they’re calling Twitter these days with fewer people and less revenue. Anyway, these messages get lost in the noise, drowned out by conspiracy theories or just never seen or ignored well.

Reddit has stepped in to the rescue. This might not seem like the most usual platform for this kind of content, but it’s increasingly significant. In response to hurricanes, Helene and Milton, the White House chose Reddit as an outreach medium. Posts appeared in subreddits like R North Carolina and our Georgia aimed at directly communicating with communi communities in need.

Now, I know Reddit’s not the typical channel for a government to use to communicate. It’s known for its niche communities. Canid exchanges, occasional brand disaster. Ask me anything that go awry. But Reddit does something, , rare. In today’s online world. [00:12:00] It offers a level of genuine human engagement moderated by community members and not by algorithms.

The shift highlights a move toward, , thinking about Reddit, which has been a last resort. Up until this point, subreddits like these let basic communication that might otherwise get swallowed up on traditional media outlets happen. And this isn’t just about governments. Take Sonos for example. This is the smart speaker company.

they. Issued, , an app update that caused all kinds of problems. It really upset a very loyal community of customers and a Sonos employees started posting regular updates on an unofficial subreddit to engage and appease these frustrated customers. It worked well enough that eventually the CEO stepped in, showing up where the audience was engaged and paying attention.

So is Reddit the future for crisis communication? , [00:13:00] probably not the way you would think, but it’s becoming a really important back channel. Where real unfiltered information can be shared. It’s not without issues. Reddit’s reliance on unpaid community moderators is under strain. There’s actually been something of an uprising of sub redditers due to some pricing decisions that the company made.

There has been an influx of bots and spammers that threatening to erode the authenticity that gives it value, but it still stands out as one of the few online spaces where important messages can still reach and engage audiences. So for us as communicators, platforms like Reddit, may. Soon play a bigger role in crisis communication and brand management strategies, especially as traditional channels struggle with engagement and trust issues.

So if you’re not engaging on Reddit, maybe it’s time to start. It’s an interesting. Development. I think, I mean I’ve been on Reddit at least 15 years, [00:14:00] not very active there. I participate in maybe 15, 16 different, subreddits of things that are, , mostly personal interest, but a couple of business related things.

And I’ve always found it, , useful. , I’m conscious too that some I visited and had been part of. I’m no longer simply because of the awfulness of some of the people in those places. So this is, you mentioned the risks. Yeah. There are significant risks. if you went into Reddit in a major way, I would say, or had something that was controversial that you dunno what you’re gonna get.

, is that different to others? Well, I think it is. And maybe not Twitter, X whatever. , but it certainly is, so you’ve gotta take that into account. Isn’t it true though that, , any argument about is this the right platform? Is almost wholly dependent on, do you understand your audience? , is that where they are?

Or is that where people are that you would like to get to know? So you’ve gotta have those questions down Pat. I think, , the White House one’s interesting. , the example that, the article that [00:15:00] I, , that you linked to talks about those hurricanes, , that, , I’d actually love to know why they decided this as opposed to continuing using X.

, did they not feel, that given the audience they’re trying to reach this very specifically in that part of the us, , maybe they felt, I dunno what they felt, , X couldn’t deliver. I don’t know that they did stop using X. They might have added Reddit to. Post on X. Yeah, that’s, it’s possible. I don’t know, maybe they didn’t, but No, sure.

But that’s possible, isn’t it? But the other example you mentioned, Sonos, I found really interesting. , particularly di diving deeper into the article. , it mentions, , that this guy who was, , the kind of representing, , Sonos Keith from Sonos is his handle, , was diligently, dutifully and patiently according to the article, , posting on the brand’s unofficial subreddit.

, after that app update you mentioned, I remember reading about that update. It [00:16:00] really did en rage, people with genuine rage, not internet rage. This was real stuff. Unhappy, unhappy. He was there daily doing messaging, all that stuff. So they hated the company, but they didn’t hate Keith and he carried on and engaged with people.

Next thing, , the company’s CEO headed over to where Keith was. And had a great time because of Keith. Now that is fascinating. So it reminds me of the story we talked about maybe some years ago, shell, about the, kid who, what was it? Sherwood Williams or the big paint company and he was doing stuff there with the imaging and creating graphic.

They fired him. So he was picked up by a competitor. ‘ , ’cause outside the control of , the control freaks at the company basically. So this interest, well let’s go further back than remember. Remember Frank Eliason with Comcast Cares on That’s right. Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, in the other days, unsanction, he was just doing it on his own.

Yeah. And he ended up with a team of what, 11 or 12 employees early days. [00:17:00] This is recent and yet conceptually I think it’s not different. , so that, well you argue that wasn’t a crisis per se. , so I, I would say the question , is not so much for crisis communication specifically, or that it could be for that the future crisis communication, a future, maybe it’s your overall engagement, whether it’s in a crisis or not.

So we’ve got the examples of a crisis. So, , to me it’s like if you could answer the questions, do you know your audience? Is this where they are? Then that itself would be a reason why you wanna be there. Or maybe in the case of the White House, we don’t know if that’s our audience, but we do know certain types of people we wanna reach.

Probably are there. So let’s go there. I mean, maybe, I dunno, I’m guessing here. EEE Exactly. If there’s a subreddit for a state or a region, yeah. You’ve gotta believe that some people are there and if this is where this information is being doled out, other people will spread the word. You can go to other communities and say, Hey, there’s some really good information being shared in [00:18:00] the Georgia subreddit.

You should come over here and partake of that. Yeah. So it, it could build the audience. But going back to what the article said, I really believe it’s the fact that , it’s community moderated and there’s no algorithm. So it’s an opportunity to get the word out and engage with the people who care about this information without the platform getting in the way of that communication.

Yeah. That makes total sense. I agree. Good example. I think, so we have an interesting story here that is about. Well, egregiousness is one word that comes to mind. , stepping over a line, , from a communicator’s point of view, this is a story of, , Intuit, , and a podcast and someone wanting to erase part of it after the recording that didn’t like it.

So this was a recent episode of The Decoder podcast that’s a publication of The Verge, , where Nle Patel, who’s the [00:19:00] editor in Chief of the Verge and host of decoder, interviewed Saan Zi. Who’s the CEO of the Global Financial Technology Platform? Intuit, the interview is especially notable due to a request after the recording from Intuit’s Chief Communications Officer Rick Heinemann.

To delete a portion of the discussion, the Verge refused the request. So the Verge believes Intuit’s request reveals the ethical considerations at the heart of its editorial standards and ethics is something they played a, they blew a big trumpet about. In the decoder episode, Gazi responded to questions about Intuits lobbying against simplified tax filing processes in the us.

Specifically, the Verge raised concerns over Intuits lobbying history, which aims to protect its paid service. TurboTax from direct competition with free government-led filing options. When questions turned to Intuits lobbying activities and history of misleading free, quote unquote tax filing claims, [00:20:00] Azis firmly denied the portrayal.

Following the interview, Intuit’s CCO Rick Heinemann labeled the exchange as inappropriate and demanded that the verge remove the contentious five minute segment. Citing raised voices and overlapping dialogue is distracting the vote. Refuse citing. Its strict editorial independence and commitment to transparency.

The publication maintains that interviews should remain unaltered to preserve journalistic integrity, and it saw no basis for the edit beyond potential discomfort over the pointed questioning. The segment ultimately add uncut, placing the issue of corporate influence on media and editorial ethics front and center.

As Nle Patel explained, the Verge follows a clear non-negotiable editorial policy focused on journalistic ethics, transparency, and accountability. It says its long maintained an ethical stance that prohibits interviewees or their representatives from reviewing, approving, or altering published content.

By [00:21:00] refusing to delete the segment, the Verge says it underscored its commitment to maintaining an unfiltered public record, which it viewed as particularly relevant in this case due to the public interest surrounding tax reform and Intuit’s influential lobbying efforts against simplified free tax filing options.

Their decision to release the verbatim transcript was a trapped a step towards total transparency. They said enabling the audience to form their own opinions on the contentious interaction. There are a number of issues with this that we could discuss for a while. For starters, is the intervention of Intuit CCO in demanding a deletion, an egregious step over a red line.

What’s your take? She. Yes, yes. It’s in the word greatest step over a red line. I can’t be any more unequivocal than this. He was wrong. , and the verge was right in this, , you agree to do an interview. On a podcast, that’s no different [00:22:00] than agreeing to do an interview with a reporter from a mainstream newspaper.

The only way you get to say you can’t use the information that was shared in that interview is if you get the agreement from the journalist at the beginning that this is off the record. And I can’t imagine that anybody doing a podcast would get an off the record agreement from the podcaster. I mean, imagine one of our interviewees.

Yeah. This, I’m, I’m happy to go on FIR interviews, but, , it’s gonna be off the record. Okay. Or on background, maybe. , no. there, there is absolutely no justification for this. And anybody who’s graduated from journalism school should understand this. I am astounded that somebody who has attained a chief communication officer level in an organization thinks that they could get away with nonsense like this.

It’s ridiculous. Yeah. , that, that was my, no, that was my thought as well. Shell, I’m thinking [00:23:00] the Verge, like many publications, , whether they’re so-called new media or traditional media doesn’t really matter. You have, , policies you publish about your standards, your terms and conditions of use, all that, , and nowadays is very common for publications, whether they’re mainstream media, social media, even.

Even business blogs, so that matter, still a publication go into some detail, , about their ethical approach and accountability and responsibilities, et cetera. So they have all that. It’s public, so it’s not like , the, these people did an opportunity to see it. , I’m wondering whether they had something as simple as a literary disclaimer form that the interviewee sites, , I remember, , business podcasts I’ve done for companies always have those for guests, which make it quite clear what the ground rules are different.

If, let’s say the Verge had published something that was totally wrong, , , if something had happened that it was totally wrong, that might have been different perhaps, but they didn’t. And I’m wondering whether, and again, we’ve only got the words of how it was written about the CCOs kind of [00:24:00] demanding they do this and it was stepping over the line and all that.

If, if he went in with that approach, no wonder they said. we can’t really say these words on a podcast, family podcast like this, but they dismiss that out of hand. Maybe if he tries to negotiate something, he may have got somewhere, but I doubt it. He, like you said, she surely he should have known better than to do this for goodness sake.

So that, that makes disappointed if someone in a senior role like that making something like this become then the story, which is what this is. , but totally wrong and you shouldn’t ever even try to think of doing some of that after the event. Unless, like you said, you’ve got agreement about something beforehand or it’s serious.

It’s, it really is a mistake and you can justify your intervention and try your hardest to get it changed. But this was ridiculous. A few thoughts. One, I agree if he had gone to decoder and said, gosh, I. The CEO’s kind of unhappy about that [00:25:00] last five minutes and is asked if it’s possible, or I’m gonna ask on his behalf if it’s possible to trim that off.

And they’re probably gonna say no, but you’re probably gonna get farther and maintain a better relationship if you make it a request rather than a demand you have no standing, no basis , for making a demand. Now, however, that this has become the story, every journalist dealing with the communications department at Intuit’s gonna go into it knowing that this is a possible outcome and they’re going to treat into it differently.

And yeah, probably not in a good way. So I could see that. You gotta wonder what he was thinking. Intuit’s a big company. They get coverage. They have clout. So yeah, I think this is gonna affect the perception of the public based on the way that the media reports on them as a result of this.

Yeah, one thing that struck me thinking it through was the fact that this request, , stemmed from a disagreement [00:26:00] over the portrayal of a lobbying practice practices and not from factual inaccuracies. That’s the key thing to me, highlights this kind of conflict between public relations interests and transparency of information that impacts consumers of this particular case.

So their desire into its desire to control damaging dialogue. That’s how I’m reading this, , points to the influence corporations are gonna seek to wield over media portrayal, which you shouldn’t do that. There is another issue here that amazes me and that is that nobody should have been surprised that this point of discussion came up.

People have been talking about this. John Oliver did a segment on this on last week, tonight, years ago. People know that Intuit lobbies to maintain the ability to make money from tax preparation software when most people would like the IRS to provide that [00:27:00] software free, to make it easy for them to file their taxes and.

He should be prepared. The CEO , should be prepared to address that question. Is he not media trained for heaven’s sake, right? if the CCO is upset about this, what he’s probably really upset about is that he hadn’t prepared his CEO to answer this question and engage in a conversation about it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

No. That exactly , is a point , that, , I was thinking about as you were saying those words. How briefed was he? , maybe they didn’t see this as serious, which is why the hell are you doing it? In that case, every interview that you do, particularly if you know you’ve got a skeleton that ain’t in the closet, it’s right out there that people are gonna be asked about.

Surely they should tell. What if they ask about this topic, Mr. CEO, here’s what you need to, well, you didn’t tell ’em what he’s gonna say. Look, here’s the pros and cons of this. Do you refuse to talk about it? No, you can’t do that. Is it one of those situations where you could say. The best person to talk about this is this person can go there or deflect it in some way, but you need [00:28:00] to be prepared.

and like you said, they obviously weren’t if he were media trained, he would’ve been able to take that question and say, let’s look at three reasons why this is a good thing. First of all, it’s a better product than what the IRS is ever going to be able to provide.

Second, third, you do the threes. And you bring it around back to your talking points and then the podcaster moves on. The interviewer moves on rather than making it contentious. , looking through that script, it, it, it seems to me that it was the CEO who started to take that off the rails a bit.

Yeah. He wasn’t prepared. No. , and that’s shocking. Really is, yeah. Neville, I know that you continue to do a fair amount of blogging. I do. I don’t, I haven’t had the time. My, my blog, , sits there. I cross post the monthly episodes of [00:29:00] FIR there and not much else, but there are plenty of people who are still blogging and you, and they are, , the basis of the 2024 blogging survey that was published by Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media published on LinkedIn, interestingly, as opposed to in a white paper downloadable report, , a microsite now it was a LinkedIn article.

, the surveys in its 11th year, it draws on insights from over 12,000 bloggers and offers a comprehensive look at evolving blogging trends, tactics, and results. It’s a really rich. Report for content marketers who are looking to understand what’s working in content strategy and, where their emerging challenges are.

So let’s take a look at the key takeaways I have. Eight of these. And Neville, I thought what I would do is go through ’em one at a time and get your thoughts on each one. [00:30:00] the first one deals with the traffic challenge and zero click platforms. A zero click platform would be something like perplexity, where you get the answer thanks to what somebody published on a blog, but you never have to click through to the blog in order to get it because Perplexity has given it to you.

, this is one of the most critical challenges bloggers are facing. Driving traffic is a key challenge. Only 20% of bloggers are reporting strong results driving traffic, and that’s down from 30% just five years ago now, the decline largely stems from platforms like Google and social media increasingly keeping users on their sites leading to a rise in zero click.

Content marketing expert, Rand Fishkin suggests that content marketers need to rethink what success looks like, shifting their focus from traffic volume to building loyal niche audiences through methods like gated content or newsletters. This zero click phenomenon is reshaping strategies, [00:31:00] encouraging marketing marketers to nurture smaller engaged communities rather than depending on high traffic numbers alone.

Your thoughts, Neville? I’m kind of different how I use my blog, , since I reboot, relaunched a thing effectively last July. I don’t do this for monetary gain. I don’t do this for, , a kind of strategic approach to engagement. Indeed, there’s no, you can’t comment anymore on my blog. I disabled commenting about four years ago actually.

I don’t, I have different focuses. I get this though. I do understand this. I don’t, I’m not bothered at all by zero click and at all. , I’m quite happy for people to read my content that shows up in a perplexity search or they get it because of Google. Even Google search. I’ve seen blog posts, I’ve written show up in Google results sometimes.

So what benefit do I get from that? It’s kind of like, , my content is out [00:32:00] there. , unlike the days you and I talked about many over a decade ago, if content scraping was a big thing back in the, , late. Teens, the late zeros, , late, what do you call it? The two thousands. , not too bothered about that.

Don’t, yeah, I don’t see it much these days actually. Zero cake doesn’t bother me, but I understand why it does concern others. And indeed, we’ve talked about this in a recent podcast episode, so I do understand that. I’m not concerned by that. If I were doing this. Wearing a hundred percent a business hat and seeking some kind of engagement or recognition or reward that might bother me where I would be concerned about the traffic.

I do pay attention to traffic, to Google Analytics, to rank math, which is one of the SEO tools that I use, and I do pay attention to that so that also they guide me in terms of some of the keywords I might use, but it’s not front of mind. I tend to write naturally. So I know many people like that. By the way.

some running business blocks too, a hundred percent business blocks, , have similar thinking. [00:33:00] So to me , that’s how you can demonstrate authenticity, which is a significant thing that I care a lot about, the authenticity of content that you come across. There’s no hidden agenda, and I have critics who tell me everyone’s got a hidden agenda.

I do not believe that. And to which they call me terribly naive still, but hey, I don’t care, to be honest, shall so This is. An issue without doubt. And , I don’t believe that it’s gonna end well for anyone who believes zero issue, a zero click is going to go away sometime soon. Or it doesn’t matter anymore if you are a business looking for results that way.

’cause it will matter. So what do you think of the alternatives that are suggested here? Like, , switching to, a Substack style newsletter or gating your content? Don’t, I don’t buy any of those, options at all, but might be different. If I wore a business hat Substack, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to use Substack.

And that’s all to do with the behavior they have exhibited with extremist, , content. Right. , that’s why I [00:34:00] said a Substack style. Got it. Got it. Well, yeah. Okay. , I use, I have a newsletter. That’s actually, , just WordPress that, , you sign up and you get emailed Every time I publish a new post, that’s all it does, and I see interesting engagement from that newsletter that otherwise wouldn’t be the case.

And I don’t pimp anything or push anything I. It’s free. And I’m not making any money outta that. That’s fine. I’m quite happy with that. I think that is something though, to explore. I, I hear lots of people talking about, I’m gonna do a newsletter and monetize my content. I remember using that phraseology 15 years ago and it produced results back then.

I mean, you and I had sponsors in the early days of podcast that, , was, worthwhile. , now today things are very different. , you have to be focused, I think, more on authenticity than ever before. There are so many people writing stuff. Much of it is drl Again, that’s subjective. I then look at the click bait stuff, like the story that, , in this episode we’re gonna talk about, , [00:35:00] that is, is everywhere you look.

How do you tell if something is real? , that’s another big issue. So, , these are all issues. She seems to me, did I answer your question by the way? Did that answer your question? Oh, yes, it did. Thank you. ,we’ll move on to the second key takeaway, , increase the increasing role of artificial intelligence and content creation.

, AI has become mainstream in blogging. 80% of bloggers are using it in various stages of content creation. , most are using it for idea generation headlines, outlines only a small percentage are relying on it for complete drafts of their posts, but the impact is mixed. While it boosts efficiency, it hasn’t yet translated into significantly higher engagement.

There are voices in the industry like Christopher s Penn and Mark Schafer who are pointing out that bloggers are navigating a steep learning curve, experimenting at this point in ways that accelerate their processes while [00:36:00] preserving authenticity and unique voice. I, I do assume you’re using AI at some level , in your blogging.

Oh, , utterly, , to generate ideas, to summarize articles. I don’t use it. I tried it. I don’t use it as I see some people talking about it, which is to literally ask it question, give me a good idea. I can blog about this topic. I don’t do that. , I, when I tried it, I found every single thing I tried with that is absolutely not what I would write about and the way in which it proposed I write.

So no, I don’t waste my time on that. But ideas, yes, in terms of, , an idea I’ve already got. How to flesh it out further, I might ask it. I often ask chat, GBT plus. a kind of a, here’s this thing, ask me questions about this. , what I’d like you to do is come up with a way in which I can talk about X on this topic.

And I found that helpful in every case that on how I use it, these are idea generators, hence generative ai, not creators of the overall [00:37:00] content that I’m gonna publish. I have yet to publish an article except one or two, which I’ve mentioned on my blog as part of my experimentation wholly generated by the ai.

And boom, there it’s, nah, that, that’s not what you should be doing. And looking at some of the metrics here, I find quite interesting. , the biggest percentage I see in the, , list given about how Blogger is using AI was, is 40, 54% using AI to generate ideas. And that’s 11% since the last time they did the survey.

Yeah, that, that makes sense. 40% to write outlines. , I’ve done that a couple times and. , not as good as, , as saying, for instance, to chat GPT and even perplexity sometimes, , write a draft of this topic, 400 words or 600 words, , in a couple of paragraphs, , or, , actually, I don’t tend to use the word, paragraph.

Let’s say give word counts. And that often, particularly in the case of chat, GPT, steers me in the direction that , I decide I want to go to you. Arguably, you could say if you [00:38:00] hadn’t done that, you’d have had to go in a different direction possibly. I would’ve had to think of all that myself, which is what I used to do.

I don’t see this any different at all, by the way, as using a colleague to bounce ideas off, , or, , as the phraseology goes, getting the intern to write a draft, this to me is no different to that. Happens to be. A bit of software. Yeah. I have baked AI into various parts of my article writing or post writing workflow.

So it’s become a habit that at this stage I’m going to use ai. , one of the things that I’ve done a couple of times is I have taken my notes, , from an interview and I, I do use a note taking app. I use auto ai, but in, in these cases, I didn’t, I was sitting there with my laptop interviewing somebody.

This is for a personality profile, and I found I just didn’t have the time to write this feature article. So I took my notes and I gave them, I, I think it was Claude, but I don’t remember for sure which one I was using. [00:39:00] And I said, here are my notes from this interview with this person. Here’s a little bit more information.

, write a first draft of, , an employee profile. , and it did a surfaceable job. I would say that I rewrote it. I’m not gonna say that I edited it heavily. It was a complete rewrite, but it took me probably half the time it would’ve taken to write it from scratch. It did not sound like a, nobody would look at this and go, oh, AI wrote this.

Because like I say, it was a complete rewrite. I don’t know how long I would spend on this, but the, I get that the longer you write it and the greater the depth of your content, the more it mentions you get better results. I don’t see what they mean by better results. Do they mean by more clicks, inbound links, , amplification, or what?

What does better result mean, do you think? I’m presuming it means more. Views and higher levels of engagement. I don’t have that data, but those are the results that I would consider to be better as a blogger. Yeah. [00:40:00] Yeah. , yeah, I guess so. what would I think about? , thinking about a couple of posts I’ve written recently, one of which got significant attention and sharing.

, it was a topic that seemed to resonate and some key people had shared it, and that drove more traffic to it. So that wasn’t a designed approach. If I write this way about this topic and they targeted to that kind of person, I didn’t do any of those things. I just write, , as I said in the description of my blog when I relaunched it.

This is a place to think out loud and get other people’s thoughts too. not necessarily in conversation here to spread the word. If. But there’s no strategy behind it for me. , so I’m not sure what that means. , better results either way. I get the connection between the longer, , your longer articles that are well thought through, hence the four hours, , likely.

, and I often find that when I’ve written a post from, say it’s had input from one of the ais in terms of structure, , [00:41:00] and looked at the first draft that I’d written and often do that and ask it, critique this, suggest how I could improve this. Something simple like that. I don’t give it to complex, requests.

Always comes back with, at least here are four things you could do. And often they’re typical things like, more subheadings or add some images or something to break it up. , but often not always the you think, oh, that’s a damn good suggestion that leads then to me to do something more. So I get, I sometime have spent four hours, but my time typically is a couple of hours.

, if that , on a 900 to 1200 word post, I tend not to count too much, but I think, and so what do I get out of it? , I look at the traffic, from, , Google Analytics in particular and see this post has got that much attention. Fine. , rarely are they comments. These days, except on some social networks, but that’s often not to the post.

, that’s if I’ve amplified it particularly on LinkedIn. [00:42:00] Although I do find, , threads is actually working pretty well in that regard too. But I’m actually not doing it for that reason. She, understand obviously, people, , publishing from a business point of view are doing it that way. I’m not, but I, I get why that’s important.

So I think that’s a good point to make, to show, to outline how long the typical blog post and that relationship between length and time spent, you can connect to better results, I guess. Yeah. It also says to me that there’s a thirst out there for longer form. Content if longer blog posts are producing better results.

But let’s move on to the fourth key takeaway, which is, , around blogging frequency and SEO impact. It’s interesting that while posting frequency has dropped, quality remains high. Fewer bloggers publish multiple times a week with a growing trend toward monthly updates, which, in the early days of blogging, people would’ve said, ah, you’ll never gain any traction posting once a month.

, but it remain. SEO [00:43:00] remains, , vital as consistency and freshness contribute to better ranking and traffic performance. Madi French and SEO strategist highlights the importance of maintaining regular updates and aligning the search intent to achieve visibility, especially in competitive spaces. Are you paying any attention to SEO.

not to the extent that this suggests, no, , not really. , but I think, , it is interesting about , the, the correlation and effort and performance you published more often and more likely to report strong results, quote unquote strong results. Yeah. That makes sense to me. Monthly blogging is more popular, but less effective than ever.

Reminds me of Richard Amo when he started his 6:00 AM blog. It was once a week, , every Monday at 6:00 AM his time. , I dropped into, , this year at times one, two posts per month. And then sometimes, I think it must have been August the, so-called Quiet Month, in which case probably the worst time to publish content you want people to get at.

I think I publish like six posts. I try, I tell myself, publish one a week. [00:44:00] It actually turns out about once every two weeks that I publish something, but I don’t feel any pressure to do that. So I have a long list. I’ve always had this shell. You’ve, you are the same, I’m sure. I’ve got a long list of ideas to blog about.

There’s like 20 items in there. I never get to half of them. You never know. Something might spark. So I use Evernotes, , particularly to note down topics I’d like to write about and usually it helps. , biweekly is the minimum for content performance. This, , this report says, , publishing 10 to 12 posts per year won’t cut it.

I’m sure that’s true, but, , I get skeptical about, stuff that talks about longer content, is therefore equal to greater success and spending more time on longer content. And then you’ve got this, , biweekly, not monthly, , more often than likely to report better results. Stuff like that depends what you’re measuring, I suppose.

Depends what your goal is. But, , I know businesses who are. Once, twice a month and are consistent at it. , what results are they getting out of it? If it’s thought leadership, [00:45:00] perhaps, , is it amplification elsewhere? You need to do an analytics report on that kind of thing. I think it’s good to see, , blogs still alive and well in spite of, , some of the downside of all of that, which is useless content, clickbait type content, , that you see employed by some media tabloids in particular.

, you see that reflect in some blog posts along with, and again, this is my kind of tired cynicism. , sometimes shell that you look at some con you think, why on earth did you even. Publishes drl. And that’s very subjective, and it’s cruel sometimes to say that. I wouldn’t say that to anyone. You often think it, I often wonder, do people say that about my stuff?

Sometimes I wonder, I’ll never know unless someone tells me. , I don’t go out and ask people. But, , it’s good to see blogging. It is not going away. This Fiori with WordPress I don’t think is helping anything. , with a fight with WP Engine. And then this whole argument about who owns the intellectual property rights to WordPress, , et cetera, , I see a lot of people, , what does that mean a [00:46:00] lot?

Maybe 15 or 20 over the past few weeks saying, I’m quitting WordPress. I’m gonna go to Ghost, or I’m gonna go to some other service, or whatever. Yeah. I suppose inevitable. Are we at a time then for the shakeout in the tools and the platforms that we’re using? To write blog posts. Has a definition of blogging shifted?

I suspect it has , the original definition of, reverse chronological content and you have tracks and the track backs and pings and all that stuff. It’s all automated now. , and I think it has changed in that regard. So if you are using a blog like I am, which is, the simplest way I can describe it is to think out loud, not to pitch anything, not to persuade anyone to a particular course of action overtly, where I can register an algorithmic outcome from that.

I have no interest in doing any of those things. Thinking out loud. Might get some comment from someone. I’ve had some interesting reactions to some of the content recently, like a week or two after I published it. Someone’s encountered it via LinkedIn or Facebook. So I enjoy though those are serendipitous in my book and [00:47:00] that’s definitely makes it all worthwhile.

, let’s go through the remaining four key takeaways, in a lightning round in the interest of time. The fifth is that content formats and, , the power of original researcher in play how two guides remain the top format for bloggers. The survey suggests that original research and collaborative content, like interviews yield the strongest engagement.

Nearly half of respondents reported conducting original research, which significantly contributes to perceived authority. And SEO Jay B the content strategist underscores that original resource is more resilient against AI driven content as it provides unique insights that readers can’t find elsewhere.

Then we have, , the six takeaway influencer collaboration and editing process. Successful bloggers are often those who work closely with influencers and editors. About half of the respondents collaborate with subject matter experts on occasion, and a small successful group does that [00:48:00] Consistently.

Bloggers who involve editors in their process report better results. There’s Amanda Milligan, director of Content Strategy. Who points out that these collaborations create organic authority boosts and improve content quality by integrating , multiple perspectives, making it more valuable and credible.

The seventh key takeaway, , around video and multimedia use, , the use of video and blogs has doubled since 2015, but only about 25% of bloggers consistently use it. Those who do report positive impacts on engagement and reach, aligning with broader social media trends, which where users increasingly prefer video content will.

Reynolds is an industry expert. He advises that marketers prioritize video considering that platforms like YouTube and TikTok continue to grow. Even if bloggers themselves aren’t maintaining videos, potential or maximizing videos potential just yet. And the final takeaway is around analytics and measuring success.

bloggers who consistently [00:49:00] track their analytics are two and a half times more likely to see strong results, but only 20% of bloggers admit that they, , don’t or can’t measure their content’s performance. , Karen Hopper, an analytics expert, stresses that reliable data allows content creators to refine their strategies and demonstrate value, especially as marketing budgets come under closer scrutiny.

So those are the key takeaways. , any thoughts on those Last four, Neville? Yeah, I, the one that struck me was, what a blog is putting in their articles, , visuals, , I’ve always had that. Every single post I publish has a hero image on it. It’s there. And it, I tend to use metaphors a lot and often generate them from, an, , generative AI tool.

, I don’t look for, perfection in terms of photorealistic images, they’re metaphors. I want to use, typically, I’m actually a big fan recently of, , Adobe, , Express that has Firefly built in and stock images built in. So I probably, funny enough, I use one on a, on the post.

[00:50:00] I mentioned at the beginning of this episode about, , additional comments I made to that article. We wrote, we featured in An episode. So I used , a picture of a board, , of a, , a c-suite example, young people. And I then noticed after I’d used it about three or four days later, that the woman front of image, attractive young woman, , is holding pencils in both hands.

I noticed that you gotta pay attention to these things, but, so in any case, I use images. , looking at the metrics here that virtually all bloggers add images to their content. , some bloggers use a lot, small minority adds seven or more. Again, depends on what you’re writing. I don’t do that, but a hero image, something to break it up again, depending on it.

Subheadings I use a lot too. I don’t use video a lot. And it’s interesting. Video , is getting huge attention, but not in blogging. Partly I suspect, , it’s often not easy to embed a video. I. Unless it’s on YouTube, some places don’t do this, and I’ve seen blogs including one of my posts recently, where you don’t control that content.

So [00:51:00] something happens to it. You don’t get it in the embed working. , the worst one is ones that say, you’re not allowed to watch this in your country. Stuff like that. So the permissions aren’t right, so you have that risk. , when I publish myself about episodes that you and I create, I always include an embedded, an embed from Libsyn that will play it and link back to the show notes page.

I tend to do that a lot of visuals and make it a, an interesting visual visit so the user experience is better. That’s, I care about stuff like that and the user interface. I just don’t. Thank So I’m may, I may or may not be , a really good example to, to have this discussion with you because my, , my, , attention on this and what I believe is worth spending time on is not the same as , your typical business block.

So, Jay Bear, for instance, would probably hate talking to me ’cause I wouldn’t be able to converse with him about the same things for the same reasons. But everyone’s different. , and I think, you share your thoughts. Thought leadership is something that I pay attention to. Not the phrase so much, but the act, [00:52:00] the demonstration of that as others perceive it.

So when I get comments to things are right, , I pay attention to that , when they come in. So. That’s my take on it, by the way. I just read this week that Midjourney has released an update that allows you to edit the images that it creates. Yeah. You could have told it to take the pencil out of one of the woman’s hands.

That’s it. That’s worth knowing. She, I should try Midjourney again. I’ve not tried it for a while, but, part of it is a journey. The experimentation , we are having, , what you and I talk about, what others talk about, what others talk about when they listen to what you and I are talking about.

it’s a bit like the , notebook, LM tool that , we tried out on, , experimenting on creating a podcast. A lot of excitement about that I was terribly excited about. It’s all gone dreadfully quiet since then. And I think, , that people realize, perhaps the initial excitement, this is not the intent of this tool.

This is not a viable solution to create a podcast unless you are creating something that you use in a podcast that you’re creating now that I could see for. There may be options for that kind of thing. [00:53:00] Greeting Shea Neville, and FR lists all around the world. It’s Dan York. Greetings coming at you from Shelburn, Vermont.

Actually, not in my home office. I’m in LaMarche and I , have a special guest right here. Charlie, Bernie, I’m so excited to be here. How are you? Charlie has been a devoted member of our FYR chat that we’ve had on on Thursday afternoon Yes. That anybody can join, but just a weekly Zoom chat that shell maintains, and some of us get there together for about a half an hour and talk about social media and everything else.

Yeah. So what are you doing up here in Vermont? Well, first of all, this is for you, Jeff Davis. You can join too. I’m, I’m visiting. Thank you, Dan. I’m visiting my daughter Isabel, who teaches at the University of Vermont and coaches debate. So Charlie’s, uh, when he was coming up here, he dropped me a note. Yeah.

And so we’re, we’ve had a nice coffee and conversation hanging out here at this, uh, little cafe and, uh, figured I’d go and do this. So, um, one thing I was gonna talk about today was that, uh, blue sky just announced that [00:54:00] they had a, do you use Blue sky? No. Okay. No. Where do you spend your time actually on social media these days?

Uh, a lot of time on LinkedIn, to be honest with you. Okay. I’ve, I’ve experimented when my wife was, uh, at, under the Weather a year ago, I experimented with TikTok and I have 500 followers. They’re mostly bots, uh, on TikTok to talk about podcasting and some of the stuff, stuff I did in my booking and a little bit on Instagram as well.

That’s more TikTok followers than I have. I, I’ve also played around with it a little bit. Yeah. But haven’t done a whole lot there. Yeah. That kind of stuff. So I’m not sure it’s worth the time, but I’m there, you know, so, and, and Instagram, I tend to keep an Instagram presence on behalf of PO Bill Media as much as anything else.

So the, uh, yeah. Yeah. My and my daughters are, one is really into TikTok and one is really in Instagram reel, so that’s kind of where they, they absorb a lot of life, but, you know, with the, with the move away from Twitter and x, Sony Evil gone to, to LinkedIn Right. Has been a big beneficiary. Right. But also, you know, mastodons where I spend my time with Fred’s.[00:55:00]

Mm-Hmm. Blue sky, all this. So Blue Sky has, uh, just been taking a little bit of, you know, getting some attention and flack because they accepted a, a round of investment that had $13 million, which the big, the big player in it was a company called Blockchain Capital, which is a, a, a blockchain, cryptocurrency kind of company.

And, and now, I mean, if you go back, you know, Jack Dorsey was behind the creation of Blue Sky and that stuff. Right. And he’s big into that whole world. Yeah. So this should not be a surprise on one level, but, but Blue Sky talked a good bit about how they’ve, they’ve grown, they’ve opened it up. They now have 13 million people.

They’ve, they’ve got Federation, they’ve got some people doing separate servers using this, the AT protocol as they call it. Mm-Hmm. They’ve got, um, custom feeds. They’re gonna be building more stuff that they’re doing. So they’re talking all about what they’re, what they’re trying to do here. And so that’s, uh, that’s their big news.

They’ve got a a, a lot of things happening, a lot of stuff going on that has not been universally well received because many people have been saying, you know, Hey, [00:56:00] here we are. This is the acidification, you know, is coming at some point. Because here we go with, with that. And over on Mastodon, where I spent a lot of time, there’s of course been a lot of commentary around, you know, here we go, VC investing, all this stuff, right?

And, uh, Eugene or Eugene Racho, who’s the kind of the co-founder or the founder of Mastodon, he had a post that said, Mastodon is financed by crowdfunding instead of venture capital. Not because we don’t know that venture capital exists, not because we don’t have bills to pay and not because venture capital isn’t willing to give money to new social media platforms.

VCs don’t want a sustainable business. They want a big exit. Every VC backed business is on a timer to deliver or die. And, and that’s true. That’s but true. It’s a, it’s a great. Soundbite because it’s absolutely true. You, it is absolutely true. I’ve worked at a couple startups that were VC backed and you had a timer.

Yeah. You had to, you know, this was your, your schedule that you had to go and do. It’s crazy. So, so that’s [00:57:00] kind of the big, the big thing. That’s, um, it’s a big deal. Yeah. It’s going on. So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. You know. We’ll, uh, we’ll, blue Sky, sky, the timer just started on blue sky. Right. Will they deliver what their, what their investors need?

Yeah. Or not, so, um, so you were telling me a little bit earlier when we were talking too. Mm-Hmm. You use a product called Riverside FM to record some of the podcast that you take. Right. And you were telling me about some of the cool new stuff. So maybe what is Riverside fm? Well, Riverside, so of course with the, with the, the pandemic and quarantine, we had to use much more zoom, much more remote podcasting, uh, than we ever did before.

We were doing it before sending out kits, sending out com, Rex lines, but then everybody got very used to Zoom. We built studios every got. Most people, and it’s talked about on this show, got better microphones, better headsets for their Zoom calls at Home. Riverside is is a step above Zoom and when I was at podcast movement a couple months ago, [00:58:00] the crew at Riverside told us they were coming out with a whole bunch of AI developments, better tools inside the unit.

So we did two hours of just the staff at Pod Media last week running through all the advancements that this new update in Riverside has. I couldn’t possibly list them all here. The AI searchability, the transcription, you can do word search, you can create social media assets, you can fine tune those, do them by topic.

It’s, it’s absolutely overwhelming. We are thrilled by these new tools, which most people aren’t using, but we are using now as of of today. What’s an example? So it’s a real advanced what’s, yeah. What’s an example of one of the tools that used to take you hours, but now you can do an in minutes? Well, let’s say you and I do this and I’m gonna go back and try and make a 62nd clip based on Blue sky.

I’ll take this audio and or audio and video back to Riverside and, and say, create a [00:59:00] 62nd clip on the word blue sky. I don’t have to do any of the work. All I have to do is the post editing, which you might have had to do after one or two people. Found that clip sourced the clip, it might give you five different versions of that that you can choose from.

And then do that sort of super editing process so you don’t have to search. Find the time. You don’t have to mark. Mark down the time when you were having that conversation like we used to. Oh yeah. Oh, at three minutes and 20 seconds. I did. I was talking with Dan about blue sky, none of that. It’s all taken care of.

So you just go and say, I want make me 62nd clips on Blue Cloud blue or blue sky and goes, wow, that’s really cool. Including, including subtitles. I mean, all the bells and whistles that we do manually can be created. You still can’t take the person out at the end of the editing process. Right. ’cause as, as you guys have talked about, as we’ve talked about, there are errors.

You can’t just post that. Right. ’cause then it blames on you, but it does take out the first edit, maybe the second and third. Wow. Then you’re in there going, [01:00:00] okay, does it sound better if I cut it here or there? But that first draft is taken care of for you on the podcast, on the social media assets.

That’s just one of the features. It’s really, really, really robust. That’s cool. Riverside do com. Well, I gotta wrap it there for the show, but, uh, it’s great to see you Charlie. Nice to meet. It’s great to meet after knowing you virtually for so long that I know it’s a face to face know. Look for our selfie.

There you go. Well, thanks. Uh, she Neville for, uh, this opportunity to talk and say a little bit more people. You can find more about that at Riverside. Ff and Charlie, where can people find you on social media? Well, as a result of listening to for immediate release, for many years I started podcasting and now run a media production company called Pod Ville Media.

So Pod ville Media one word.com. And please look me up or I’m just Charlie at Pod Bill Media. All right. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Thanks Deb. Yeah, thank you. Back to you. She Neville. Bye for now. Just a little PS I was recording that with [01:01:00] Charlie in the cafe using a new device I got called the Holly Land Lark, M two wireless lav mics.

They’re two little round circular microphones that you can just put on the shirt with a magnetic thing. They go to a connector. In this case that was going into my iPhone. There’s also A-U-S-B-C and also a connector. It can go into a, a camera or an audio device. But I was quite pleased we didn’t even use the noise cancellation feature that, uh, that is also there.

So again, it’s a Holly Land Lark M two, if you wanna play with something new, very inexpensive, very nice. thank you so much, Dan. I cannot tell you how it warms my heart to hear you talking with Charlie, Bernie. I saw the photo that you shared as well of the two of you together. , just knowing that FIR brought people together who would’ve never otherwise met, is just a wonderful feeling.

And, , also, of course, the [01:02:00] content of the report was interesting. blue Sky. Yeah, I’m spending very, very little time on Blue Sky. I would say threads between the two of them has really captured my attention more. , but , this investment, , might, boost their fortunes. So our next story, it follows a tragic death of Liam Payne, the former member of the One Direction Boy Band who fell from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Last week, a local news platform in the West Midlands in the uk owned by reach PLC, posted over 80 articles within 72 hours each. Aiming to garner online engagement. This was nothing less than the strategy of milking Liam Payne’s. Death for Clicks says Dan Slee, an award-winning, communicated with decades of experience in public sector communication in the media.

He argues that this highlights a shift in local journalism, which now prioritizes clicks over community relevance and sensitivity. This approach led to substantial [01:03:00] backlash with nearly half of the comments on the local news platforms article, expressing frustration at the perceived exploitation of Payne’s death.

Many readers criticized the flood of coverage suggesting it was disrespectful to Payne’s family and intrusive. SLE points out that modern news platforms like Reach PLC, prioritize digital metrics over traditional reporting resulting in loss of trust. This specific example of using repetitive emotion driven headlines reflects a widespread shift across local media where the focus is now on high traffic content rather than nuanced storytelling.

Slee emphasizes that while the if it bleeds, it leads mantra, once sold print papers. Today’s readers are quick to spot sensationalism. They expect higher standards from news outlets, particularly in times of tragedy. Tragedy in essence, slee cautions that reach PLC’s approach risks alienating its audience in the long term.

He suggests that while this strategy may succeed in the short term for engagement, it [01:04:00] ultimately devalues the community connection that local journalism wants upheld. Building on Dan s Lee’s critique author and crisis PR consultant, mark Bakowski adds a powerful layer about the consequences of this media machine on celebrities themselves in an opinion piece in The Guardian.

While Slee critiques reaches tactics as commercially unsustainable, Bakowski suggests that such practices are ethically fraught, diminishing the humanity of public figures like pain. Together these perspectives offer a comprehensive view. While outlets like reach exploit celebrity news to maximize engagement, they contribute to a dehumanizing culture that disregards the wellbeing of those at its center.

This combined perspective emphasizes that today’s media, by constantly feeding on the lives of celebrities, not only risks alienating audiences, but also enforces an unsustainable cycle of scrutiny on public figures. As Slee warns of the audience backlash against relentless clickbait, Bukowski’s insights encourage [01:05:00] people to consider the emotional toil on celebrities and ask if a change in how we approach celebrity culture is overdue.

Together they argue for immediate landscape, and that balances engagement with respect and empathy, acknowledging the impact on both audiences and those in the spotlight. A remarkable story in some regards. , just the chutzpah of a, of an organization to take that approach, , around something so tragic, , and yet unsurprising, , especially with the sensationalism that so many publications feel is necessary in order to draw eyeballs.

, unfortunate. But I think it’s just the way things are these days. You mentioned the old, if it bleeds, it leads mantra and that hasn’t changed. you’re, you’re no not going to see a story about, you know, it was a sunny day and people walked in the park. , the media is attracted to those types of stories in which people are [01:06:00] hurt or bad things have happened.

, that’s not gonna change, but this is different. , this is almost the glorification of a tragic event as opposed to, , incessant coverage of that event. This wasn’t more reporting or more analysis. , this was just hammering people with the fact that it had happened. And I can see why their audience was not happy with it.

This particular company reached PLC, published a number of tabloids in the uk and a swath of local newspapers up and down the country. , they’re in the news for a different reason. It’s , very related, I think, which is , the whole business model is geared to. Clicks on questionable content, on articles that lead you to click, they’ll talk about something happens in, in, in an industry and this particular company is gonna do X and they mention the company, you gotta click to get more information.

I’ve seen some people talking about, , the way in which they treat their employees, the reporters in particular [01:07:00] where they are incentivized to just literally churn out. Sheer volumes of content, , day in and day out, and manufacture stories where frankly there is no story. If you look at some of these papers, , I dunno what it’s like in the US shell, but local media in this country, broadly speaking, you go to a local media website and you are absolutely surrounded with popups, ads, the works and stuff popping up all the time, encouraging you to sign up and do this or whatever.

, and the illustrations within an article are typically third party, other articles from the likes of Tabula and those kinds of companies that sell this kind of content. So you know that your visit is being tracked inside out and back to front and upside down every time you click something. So they are, they seem to be at the forefront of this.

And so I expect to see more news like this criticizing reach PLC. , but like you said, the cynicism kicks in quite easily. Is anything really gonna change? I admire Mark Bukowski’s encouragement., to [01:08:00] think about this more than we tend to. And he’s written, , actually his article is really , worth reading.

, but will it move any needles in any meaningful way for anyone? I, I wonder, so is this something that regulators need to do anything about? I honestly can’t see that. it’s the business model. The people running this business are the ones who need to be in the frame for accountability. It seems to me.

Yeah, this won’t come as a surprise to anybody, but I did hear a journalist, I think it was at the PRSA conference, re recalling the days where they could spend all day working on a story, working their sources, getting more quotes. Yeah, getting more information, putting Polish to the finished product.

Now they’re expected to turn out five, six stories a day just to keep that flow of clickbait coming. Even the journalists aren’t necessarily happy with this, but it is sadly the state of affairs because there has to be a way for media companies to create revenue, otherwise they’re not gonna be able to.

Produce this content. And despite the fact [01:09:00] that there is, I understand low trust in the media, these are the folks who go out and spend the time, using up their shoe leather, , getting the facts. Getting the details, yeah. , and reporting them in coherent ways that are meaningful to people.

There, there has to be a way to maintain this. Is it public funding? I don’t know. , but there, there has to be, , a model for maintaining professional journalism. Not that I’m gonna call the publication that you highlighted, , professional journalism. Well, they get paid to do it. Right.

So it’s professional journalists, just not good professional journalism. No, this is the landscape, shall I agree with you? And, and it’s not a pretty site. That’s a fact. Something needs to happen. He says, , I dunno what though. Over the past few years, a lot of workers have become increasingly disconnected from their roles, from their peers, even from their employers.

We’ve seen this in trends like Quiet, quitting, and the Great resignation, both of which were topics here on FIR. For some, this fractured relationship is partly a [01:10:00] reaction to the uncertainty and isolation that was brought on by the Covid Pandemic, which fundamentally altered the way we work. In response, there are a lot of leaders who are asking employees to RTO, that is return to the office, believing that being physically together will foster better connections, drive collaboration and boost engagement.

And I have heard this from a number of people throughout the business world that, with people working remotely in hybrid, there’s less of that. Serendipitous encountering of somebody in the hallway where the conversation leads to a brainstorm or the solving of a problem. We need to get people back in the office, but according to the NeuroLeadership Institute and Akamai’s, latest research, physical presence alone.

Probably isn’t gonna deliver the results that you’re looking for. Forcing people back isn’t necessary necessarily a solution to disconnection. In fact, it [01:11:00] can backfire. Productivity can decline, and organizations risk losing some of their most seasoned employees. So how can organizations truly foster connection?

The researchers propose what they call the Clear Model, an acronym that breaks down the workplace connections into four types, colleague, leader, employer, and role. So let’s quickly review these. The Colleague Connection is what most of us envision when we think of a workplace connection relationship we have with our coworkers.

Colleague. Connection enables trust, support, and collaboration. Embracing both individual and team performance. Leader Connection looks at our bond with our immediate leaders who play a significant role in shaping. Our work experience, a good manager provides opportunities, clarity and balance Feedback research shows it up to 70% of engagement variants can be con attributed to the quality of this connection.

The employer connection considers the alignment between the employee and the organization’s mission and values. [01:12:00] This connection can be pivotal in shaping how meaningful and fulfilling one’s work feels, and the role connection. This is inspired by the concept of flow. A role connection is about how well a person fits with and enjoys the job.

It’s the engagement and clarity an employee feels in their specific role, knowing how their efforts can advance them personally and professionally. , these four elements suggest that connection is multidimensional, not a one size fits all. Solution. Leaders should consider this model when implementing return to office policies.

Take a mandate that only prioritizes colleague connection. It could inadvertently strain leader connection if employees feel their autonomy is being overlooked. That’s one of those intrinsic values that people hold dear employer. Enroll connections might also suffer if people feel undervalued or micromanaged simply for showing up in person.

And in fact, if you decide not to go the return to office route, the clear framework. Pretty clearly shows us that [01:13:00] nurturing all four connection types creates a stronger workplace connection. Even if people aren’t necessarily coming to the office. You might adopt a patchwork principle that accommodates different ways of working for different teams or individuals, rather than a single blanket policy.

But businesses are wrestling with low engagement, , wrestling with rapid change, diminished trust. It’s really important for leaders to recognize the nature of workplace connection and approach, approach it with intention and the clear framework, which by the way, came out of a Harvard Business Review article, , is an opportunity to rethink the workplace, aligning it more closely with the diverse needs of the workforce that we’re coping with today.

Yeah, that makes total sense. And one thing struck me from the Harvard Business View article, , is how things change over time. And, the precise wording that caught my eye, our connection preferences can also wax and wane depending on what’s going on in their lives. Change a big life events.

Someone got [01:14:00] married, perhaps, , takes up a hobby, , that materially alters their desire for partnership at work. , and I’m also thinking that this whole thing about working from home in particular arose during the pandemic and the strong efforts made by companies everywhere to, provide an appeal for employees to do that, to finance their offices home equipment.

And that’s now four. Since that happens suddenly reverse gears. , you gotta come back to the office. Now , you’re talking about material effects on people, again, wrenching them outta something they now got used to with the encouragement of their employer officially, even if some managers don’t like it.

, and indeed we were talking earlier that, , some managers are just blinked at this. Totally. You’ve gotta come to the office. I don’t believe any of this stuff at all about the benefits work at home. Nothing works except you physically being in the office. That doesn’t all go well for employer employee relations, particularly if that’s a senior person talking like that.

I [01:15:00] get the clear analogy. , but , , the article does go on about, the consequences if employee employers insist on return to the office, a blanket return to the office. We’ve talked about this before. We’ve written about it too. And I’ve seen lots of articles, , that tend to pop up , when some companies in the news, ’cause they’re insisting everyone goes back to the office.

I’m not. A kind of a wholesale action like that anymore if I’m judging it by what’s not being reported anymore in the mainstream media, let’s say. It’s not something I’ve paid huge attention to recently to get a sense of how serious is this return to the office thing, , as a mass return.

I don’t see that happening. But nevertheless, it’s, , it’s troubling when you hear people still saying that nothing happens outside the office, so you’ve gotta come back. That’s simply not true anymore. , not only because of the changes that have happened since the pandemic, but that just isn’t true. I like to think this is true.

I haven’t researched it, but I was in a session, , at a conference, I think it was at the IEPC conference in June where the speaker [01:16:00] said there’s actually no empirical evidence at all that being in the office leads to these serendipitous encounters in the hallway that produce brainstorms or problem solutions, at a rate that’s any higher than other means of doing it.

That , it’s just a myth. I would say if it’s so planned , and strategized, and it ain’t serendipitous in that case, these are chance encounters. I remember, yeah, I used to be a smoker. I haven’t had a cigarette since 1991, but I used to be a smoker. , and some of the best conversations I ever had was outside at the ashtray because you had to go outside and there were people from all different departments there.

And man, the information exchange , was terrific people that you wouldn’t be talking to otherwise. This is why I always like to tell clients, I say, if you really wanna know how information moves through this organization, go hang out with the smokers outside. , but does that lead to solutions that are going to produce revenues, , or solve big problems for the [01:17:00] organization somehow?

I doubt it for all those conversations that I had out at the ashtray, I can’t remember one of them. Leading to something big, , whether it was me producing that outcome or somebody else who was out there having a smoke. like you, I was a smoker. I didn’t stop actually until 2008, so that’s a good 15 years or more longer than you.

But I remember one job I had actually, it was at Mercer, , actually where my boss’s boss was a heavy smoker. And, catching up with him in the smoking group was always very beneficial, very relaxed, , and it was nice to have a chat with him. But the other thing, it may have been the only place you could go catch up with him, right?

You couldn’t get in to see this person. Otherwise, , those were the serendipitous moments I remember. I must have been anyway, this debate is not gonna go away anytime soon. This whole thing about come back to the office or not. We look forward to talking about it again in the upcoming episode, I’m sure.

Our final story in this month’s episode is [01:18:00] another report that we’re gonna take a look at. , but this is, , not like the blogging report. This is about AI and, , unlike the way you conducted that one, she, I’m not gonna talk so much about , the content of this report. We have a link to it , in the show notes.

It’s a big read. With a huge amount to unpack, , much of which, , is gonna be complex to many communicators. And indeed, that takes away the focus of what we want to focus on in this, which is, , something that’s utterly relevant to communicators who are seeking to understand AI’s business landscape. So the state of the AI report is what it’s called, published in mid-October, just a week or so ago.

, shows an industry at a turning point with AI expanding into new domains and redefining sectors while grappling with significant challenges around regulation, sustainability, and safety. , as I mentioned, it’s a big read, but this breakdown is. Geared, I hope to helping us [01:19:00] communicate is understand what’s actually important about this and what takeaways we can get from support without actually reading it.

So we are here to help you with that, but I encourage you to read at least the executive summary and then dive into some of these segments ’cause it is worth the takeaway. So the first of these five key insights, , is that AI is increasingly relevant across industries that were not traditionally tech heavy.

It moves outta the tech landscape entirely. So communicators should prepare to bridge these interdisciplinary opportunities, crafting narratives that resonate with diverse fields from healthcare to engineering. The second, the emergence of content creation. Startups suggest a new array of tools for business communicators, particularly in video and audio.

However, as model and hardware costs remain high, it will be crucial for communicators to advise on the cost benefit equation and to gauge the sustainability of AI driven solutions. Third, with regional regulations growing, it’s essential for communicators to articulate [01:20:00] compliance measures and to guide stakeholders in navigating the complex regulatory landscape.

Communicators have a role in demystifying these laws and explaining their business impacts, especially in Europe and the us. One tip I’d add to that is something I did. If you take for instance, the eus , AI law, I’ve forgotten the formal title of, it’s a massive document and ask chat GPT plus to summarize it all and highlighting certain things, , it will do that.

It will give you something digestible that you could take away from, or start to develop further and ask more questions to fine tune this. It will even do things like, tell me what this means from a professional communicator perspective, once you define what that kind of audience or persona is, actually is very handy.

, the fourth one. Is trust building around AI will be essential as companies emphasize deployment speed communicators can support transparency efforts by addressing safety and ethical considerations. This proactive approach [01:21:00] will help allay public concerns and sustain consumer confidence in AI products.

And the fifth one, increase adoption and retention of AI products indicator maturing market ready for long-term solutions Communicators have an opportunity to spotlight customer success stories and articulate the distinct advantages of new AI-driven products. So to summarize, overall communicators should be prepared to guide stakeholders through AI’s growing complexities, crafting messaging that clarifies both its transformative potential and the responsibilities it entails.

What do you reckon? Shell, isn’t it interesting that so many people are worried about job loss as a result of AI being able to do the work that they do? And indeed, there have been copywriters who have been laid off from advertising agencies because AI has taken that on. But if you look at this report and, uh some others like it.

For communicators who are strategic, , and who [01:22:00] are paying attention, AI is job security. There is so much that communicators can do to help organizations adopt, , and maximize , the potential of, , and use AI ethically. That this should keep us , very busy, , on top of our, our regular duties.

I, think it’s the first technology I have seen, and as you know, I’ve been paying attention to the technologies that impact communication since desktop publishing. But I think if, if we’re. Just staying current with all of this and developing a solid understanding, not just of how it can be used to write and create graphics, but the impact on the organization and how it can impact the organization, , both from the outside and the inside, and encouraging employees to use it effectively.

And the list goes on and on. , there’s just [01:23:00] a ton of work for us to do and we can demonstrate to the organization that we’re the ones to be doing it. These five points are made are just these, there’s a lot more you could dive into in this report. I just plucked out what I felt would’ve been, , some obvious ones to communicate.

They’re all to, all of these are aligned with what , you’ve just been saying. So yes, there is opportunity and it doesn’t really require anyone to tell you what to do. you, if you are a communicator, you’ve got a golden opportunity here to grasp this and take it to that next level that will benefit your organization.

Impress your boss, and, your job will be secure. This is as secure as any job can be, but it’s, it’s opportunity knocks. Yeah. And it, it’s important for communicators to read reports like this and. Ethan Malik’s book and follow him online , and follow Chris Penn and listen to some of , the better AI focused podcasts.

, I was just at , this meeting of construction [01:24:00] communicators. I was at, two of them had gone to Macon, , the marketing AI conference, which is just getting rave reviews. People love this thing. And, , the guy who runs that organization and one of his senior leaders do a weekly AI podcast, but I think , it’s just the two of them talking, but it’s excellent , what they cover.

So there are resources out there that make this easier to stay up to speed than there were with previous technologies. So really need to jump into those. And that’ll wrap up this episode of Four Immediate Release. You Dear Listener, have not heard the technical problems that we’ve had because I will have edited all of those out, but this has been a very challenging episode.

, our next episode, we’ll be doing the midweek shorter episodes now that we’re both back in the office. Although I will be gone for one week. I am speaking at an internal comms conference in Toronto the week after next, but we’ll get several of our midweek episodes up. Our next long [01:25:00] form monthly episode will drop on Monday, November 25th, so we’re recording that on the 23rd.

In the meantime, we hope that you will comment on anything you have heard here or on any of our midweek episodes. There are a number of ways to do that. The way that most people are doing that these days is by leaving a comment on the LinkedIn announcement of the Post, but we also announce those on Blue Sky, on threads, on Facebook, on Mastodon.

So whichever one of these you follow, , leave a comment. We’ll find it and we’ll share it. But you can also send an email to fir comments@gmail.com. You can attach an audio file or record one on the FIR. Podcast Network website. Just click the record voicemail at the right hand side of the page and we will play your audio.

Man. We haven’t done that in ages. Nobody’s sent us any audio. Sent us [01:26:00] audio. , and you can also leave a comment in the post, on FIR podcast network.com. , and we hope that you will leave a review and a rating, , wherever you get your podcasts. And that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #433: Something Old, Something New appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

CEOs and other senior executives are increasingly expected to nurture a presence on social media—especially LinkedIn, which has seen a 35-percent increase in C-suite professionals in the U.S. over the last five years. These executives are also expected to be authentic in their online engagements, even sharing some details of their personal lives. Professionals also expect their leaders to speak out on pressing societal issues. It’s rare to find an executive who is comfortable displaying vulnerability. That’s where communicators need to step in, helping leaders find the most comfortable way to engage authentically online.

Links from this episode:

Power and influencers: CEOs on social media
Authenticity is the New Trend for CEOs to Forge Stronger Connections, According to the Weber Shandwick Report
Why being “real” is the new power play for CEOs

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #432: The CEO Authenticity Balancing Act appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel dive into PRWeek’s “The Evolution of Influence” report, exploring the dynamic shifts in how public relations professionals exert influence in today’s fast-changing landscape. We break down the seven key themes revealed by the survey, including the growing challenges of decentralization, the increasing importance of AI in PR, and the ever-present threat of fake news and deepfakes. Join us as we unpack these insights and discuss how communicators can stay ahead of the curve in maintaining consumer trust, authenticity, and influence in a digital-first world.

Links from this episode

New Notified/PRWeek Survey Sheds Light on the Evolving Nature of Influence

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #431: The Evolution of Influence appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Much of the content in this monthly long-form episode of FIR spotlights rising trends in marketing, including employee influencers, Gen Z’s rising power as influencers, the role of influencers in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and AI’s growing presence in the marketing space. All of this is raising alarms about the need for marketers to be transparent and laser-focused on what matters to their stakeholders. Also in this episode: the dominance of chat podcasts and Dan York’s money-focused Tech Report.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 28.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

NotebookLM Drives AI Audio Conversations That Feel Human – NevilleHobson .com
Gen Z powers the rise of the corporate influencer
Will This Be The First Influencer Election?
How to Do Meme Marketing, According to Memelord Jason Levin
What is Meme Marketing and How to Use Memes to Boost Brand Voice
What is Meme Marketing? Strategy, Benefits and Example
Case Study: Learning a lesson in meme marketing with Unstop & Flipkart GRiD
Silence, brand: Why McDonald’s meme marketing is a flop
Why this meme marketing agency avoids hiring ad agency professionals
Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will
The podcast listening habits of registered voters — Voxtopica
How to Embrace Authenticity in a World Craving Transparency
Products Labeled ‘AI Powered’ Could Alienate Consumers, Study Finds
How Brands Can Embrace Authenticity in a World Craving Transparency
Why being “real” is the new power play for CEOs
Americans Want Labeling for AI Content

Links from Dan York’s Report:

Introducing live video in the Substack app
Substack is trying to turn its writers into streamers
PE & Trademarks
WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org
The WCUS Closing I Wish We’d Had – Brian Coords
WCUS: Freedom Isn’t Free – James Giroux
Social Web Foundation Launched — How In Is W3C on Fediverse? – The New Stack
On the Social Web Foundation
Launch of the Social Web Foundation

The post FIR #430: Influencers, Memes, and AI Boost Marketing Transparency Mandate appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Debunkbot was designed to talk people out of their beliefs in conspiracy theories — and it works. To discuss this remarkable chatbot, we turned to PDF2Audio, which creates an audio podcast discussion (or summary or lecture) from any uploaded PDF. It’s not Google’s NotebookLM, which features a similar capability within a more robust note-keeping tool, nor does it replicate the easy-going, conversational flow that Notebook LM delivers. However, it offers multiple voices, avoiding the sameness of NotebookLM’s outputs. Both tools — though jaw-dropping — have flaws, but given that the technology is just months old, it’s not hard to imagine what it will be capable of in the next few years.

Links from this episode:

Durably reducing conspiracy theories through dialogues with AI
Meet ‘DebunkBot’: Can AI truly combat conspiracy theories?
How an AI ‘debunkbot’ can change a conspiracy theorist’s mind
NotebookLM
NotebookLM Drives AI Audio Conversations That Feel Human (Neville Hobson)
Christopher S. Penn’s LinkedIn post on NotebookLM
PDF2Audio

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #429: Fake Podcasters Discuss Real Debunkbot appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Edelman, the global PR agency, has vetted the current crop of AI tools, winnowing out those not enterprise-ready, categorizing them, and identifying those that excel at various tasks. Given the dozens (if not more) of new AI tools that appear every day, this can be a big help to overwhelmed communicators who can’t take the time to try out every app that looks potentially useful. Does the report measure up to its promise? Find out in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Edelman’s 2024 AI Landscape Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #428: Which AI Tool Is Best For What? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

When OpenAI released Chat GPT 3.5 in November 2022, conversations about virtually any other technology were sucked into the vacuum of space. Venture capitalists and other investors shifted priorities overnight, sinking billions into Gen AI and often turning their backs on other endeavors. That and the colossal failure that is Meta’s Horizon Worlds fueled a belief that the metaverse is dead.

It is not. Considerable work is still being done while well over 1 billion people use existing metaverse technologies. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at the state of the metaverse, which is more vibrant and active than you may have thought.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #427: The Metaverse Lives! Just Don’t Call It The Metaverse. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“Share of model” refers to the frequency or prominence with which a particular brand, keyword, or phrase appears in an LLM’s responses to user prompts relative to competing brands or related terms. It measures how often and favorably an LLM mentions or discusses a specific entity or concept in its outputs. Marketers and PR practitioners were accustomed to measuring share of voice in search results as part of the SEO efforts. As searches shift to generative AI models, a new approach is needed. Hubspot has just introduced one, and Neville and Shel take a look at AI Search Grader in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

AI Search Grader
AI Search Grader: A New Era in Brand Awareness and Sentiment Analysis
From SEO to LMO: HubSpot launches the first free tool for AI discovery
FIR #417: As AI Adoption Grows, Is Share of Model the New Metric?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #426: We’ve Got Your Share of Model Right Here appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The desire to stand out has declined significantly over the last 20 years, according to a new study. That has serious implications for society, business, and communicators. Meanwhile, shutting off comments on your social media channel could have worse repercussions than putting up with comments you don’t want to see. Also in this episode, The fediverse is gaining traction, which leads one commentator to wonder if it’s time for governments to set up their own instances. Corporate boards are bracing for more anti-DEI backlash, but does that mean they’re backing away from their goals? Gen Z’s enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s U.S. presidential bid is no accident, as her campaign cracks the content code, notably on TikTok. Generative Artificial Intelligence is changing the search engine optimization (SEO) game. In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on new Threads features, Spotify and YouTube taking Apple’s podcast crown, the photo manipulation capabilities of Google’s new Pixel 9 line of phones, and one company’s stand against AI.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

Fediverse for Freedom
Fewer people want to stand out in public than 20 years ago
Corporate boards brace for DEI backlash
DEI efforts may be under attack, but companies aren’t retreating from commitments
FIR #418: These Are Our Rock-Solid Beliefs – Unless You Don’t Like Them – FIR Podcast Network
Research: What Happens When Influencers Turn Off Comments
You’re Wrong, Joel Spolsky & Dave Winer, Blog Comments Have Incredible Value
Inside the Gen-Z operation powering Harris’ online remix
Content is king at the DNC
Kamala Harris’ Campaign Is Launching a Twitch Channel
How the Harris Campaign Beat Trump at Being Online
US election: Meet the Kamala Harris influencer army
Kamala Harris’ Campaign Is a Windfall for Influencers
‘Hottie’ Dems and Chappell Roan stans: meet the 200 TikTokers who scored access to the convention
57+ MILLION VIEWERS: Massive TV and Online Viewership for Night One of Democratic National Convention
The Evolution of Search: 5 SEO Trends in 2024 and 2025 [+ New Data]
Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn: I have said it before, but marketers need to think about how to advertise

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

Meta’s X rival Threads gains multiple drafts, audience insights and more
Meta lets you cross-post from Instagram and Facebook to Threads. Here’s how to do it.
Threads confirms it is experimenting with ephemeral posts
Apple Loses Its Podcasting Lead to YouTube and Spotify
No one’s ready for this
Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products

Raw Transcript (from Riverside.fm)

Neville Hobson:
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 425 of Four Immediate Release. This is the long form monthly edition for August 2024. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:18)
And I’m Shel Holtz. We have six fascinating stories to discuss over the course of this episode. We’re going to be talking about some interesting activity in the Fetiverse. Whether or not people want to stand out is a fascinating research report that could have serious implications on communication. Great stories beyond that. Dan York is here with a tech report talking about

some activity on threads, among other things. Before we jump into all of that though, Neville, let’s review the episodes that we’ve recorded since the last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:02)
Yeah. Yeah, we have recorded not as many as the previous month. We recorded three episodes since the last monthly episode 420 from July. So let’s start with that one. That one was the lead topic in that episode was that company CrowdStrike and that dreadful internet outages that occurred that had significant consequences around the world.

We asked how well did CrowdStrike handle its crisis? And we looked at their response and shared what some crisis experts have said and had that discussion ourselves. And we have a comment, don’t we, Shale?

Shel Holtz (01:46)
We do from Michelle Garrett, who goes by PR writer gal on threads, where we shared the episode on threads and asked whether CrowdStrike has handled their crisis communications well. She said, I haven’t listened yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb regarding did CrowdStrike deliver by saying no.

@nevillehobson (02:08)
That would, I would say, be a valid view at the time she made the view. I think they’ve actually, it’s turned out where they’ve actually done quite well in terms of crisis communication, wouldn’t you say?

Shel Holtz (02:21)
I think in terms of how they have handled this from a communication standpoint, yes, I think they’ve done an admirable job. They’ve made a couple of missteps, the gift cards, as the coupons as a mea culpa, I thought was a misstep, but overall they have been candid and open and accessible and honest about what happened and what they’re gonna do to fix it.

@nevillehobson (02:32)
coupon.

So episode 421 that we published a week after that, Gen .ai is paying off individual employees. We dug into a Gartner report along with a Washington Post study that ranks how individuals are using generative AI. And we have a comment for that too, don’t we?

Shel Holtz (03:08)
We do. Steve Lubeckin wrote that it seems like it’s reminiscent of the early days when companies wouldn’t let you use certain software and employees figured out ways to bootleg the software they needed to get the job done. I’m even seeing this with companies that block business units from using video platforms like Riverside FM but allow vendors to use it on behalf of the employees.

@nevillehobson (03:31)
good comments, Steve. So 422, we recorded that one and published it a week after that, 14th. Could AI be the nail in the coffin for the billable hour model, we asked. We examined the state of consulting in the AI age. And really it was to do with killing that model.

We had some slightly different views on that, think, show that we’re broadly in agreement that something is shifting, moving from time based fee structures to outcome based fee structures that are based on what the client, let’s say, as an example, estimates the value the work you’re going to do would give to his or her company and you work out a fee on that basis.

I’m not seeing, you know, a stampede to change, but you this is change and people don’t like change. It might take a while, but an interesting idea. We don’t have any comments to that one. And then 423, which we published just a week ago, titled as op -eds fade into history, where does thought leadership belong? And we discussed the state of thought leadership and the channels communicators may not be considering. And we do have a comment.

Shel Holtz (04:47)
from Frank Strong, who said the statistics were interesting. I certainly find Wall Street Journal opinion pieces are ungated. It’s not all of them, but maybe the ones they think everyone should read. That probably helps with the visibility, which is probably true. It’s not that op -eds are going away entirely. It’s just that a number of publications are either eliminating or shuttering the opinion sections. So there are fewer of them, but the Wall Street Journal…

Op -Ed space is prime real estate and I’m sure it’ll be with us for years to come.

@nevillehobson (05:21)
I noticed that in UK mainstream media too, opinion pieces, many, in newspapers like the Times, the Daily Telegraph sometimes, The Guardian tends to be completely open. They don’t block you, they kind of nudge you to sign up for free so you can access all the content. But the Times, the Sunday Times have started doing that.

which is, think, a good move. I subscribe to US papers like the New York Times, which give you the option to gift an article. But I’ve noticed too, like you said, the Wall Street Journal recently, I don’t subscribe to the journal. And of course, you get disappointed when you go somewhere and presents you with the login or register. But recently, there’s a couple of things I’ve been looking at, which are open completely. Bloomberg’s another one. They’re the gatekeepers par excellence of Bloomberg. But recently, I’ve seen a number of opinion pieces.

that are open. So maybe they are looking at the way the land is lying in this regard.

Shel Holtz (06:22)
Yeah, and it’s important to note that publications, media outlets that publish opinions don’t necessarily publish op -eds, which are opinions from people from outside the organization. Now, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, they’re going to publish op -eds. In fact, some very noteworthy politicians have been publishing op -eds lately as we’re in our endless presidential cycle.

But that doesn’t mean that all of those publications that used to do it, which would be the prime targets for a lot of thought leaders out there. And this includes, by the way, trade publications and industry publications that just don’t have the financial resources to maintain those sections anymore. Those are drying up. So I think it’s still important for communicators that work with thought leaders or manage thought leader efforts in the organization

find alternative channels for that content that produces the same kinds of results, gets the same kind of visibility.

@nevillehobson (07:25)
sense. So I’d also like to mention that we are restarting or kickstarting, let’s say, the FIR interviews podcast. This is a separate podcast. So if you subscribe to this podcast, you won’t get the interviews, you need to subscribe to that one separately. But we started the interviews in July 2006, long time ago.

Shel Holtz (07:50)
you

@nevillehobson (07:52)
It’s a separate podcast I mentioned to present conversations we host with newsmakers and influencers from the online technology and organizational communication worlds. That was the description we had back then. I think it’s still largely accurate now. I mentioned we’re kickstarting it anew with new episodes planned on a monthly basis. Our first was on August 12th, mid August with Pete Paschal, founder and CEO of the Media Co -Pilot. We explored the intersection of AI and media with a focus on how

Generative AI Influencers, Social Media Journalism and Brand Engagement. Next month, September, we’ll publish another episode, this one with Esri Karlovaak, a UK -based consultant on international multidisciplinary projects in business innovation and stakeholder engagement with clients that include UN and EU agencies, arts and cultural institutions, non -profit organizations and a wide range of businesses. I first met Esri about 15 years ago when we were both active in IBC volunteerism.

He’s also a keen advocate for science fiction as the literature of new ideas. And that’s the focus of our discussion in that interview coming up. While it doesn’t predict the future, he says, it can improve how we think about and prepare for the future. He’ll expand on that thought in our conversation. He’ll also tell us about applied SF and how a genre typically associated with entertainment can work in other ways. So don’t miss out on FI interviews. Sign up or…

to subscribe to the feed, go to firpodcastnetwork .com slash fir dash interview so you won’t miss a thing. You should be able to pick it up too on wherever you get your podcasts, whatever app you’re using or platform you’re using. But it’s definitely good. We’re keen to get this going again because we’ve got a list already of some really interesting people, including ideas we have to revisit some of the folks we interviewed back at that time.

from 2006, say to 2016, and a bit later, perhaps, who’ve got updated stories to tell, I’m sure. So look out for more news on that. But like I said, FIRpodcast .net, sorry, FIRpodcast.

Shel Holtz (10:04)
firpodcastnetwork .com slash.

@nevillehobson (10:06)
Yeah, that’s the one. FIRpodcastnetwork .com slash FIR dash interviews. That’s where you go.

Shel Holtz (10:14)
And you say that we’re going to do this monthly and that’s the plan. But if we have the opportunity to talk to somebody, it arises and it’s just too good to skip, then we may end up doing more than one a month. You never know. That wait and see. We did record an episode of Circle of Fellows in August. This is on the

@nevillehobson (10:27)
We may, you never know. Stay tuned.

Shel Holtz (10:38)
topic of raising AI, which focused on getting AI up and running and thriving in your organization. So we had a great international panel, Adrian Cropley, Sue Heumann, Mary Hills, and Robin McCasland. It was really an invigorating conversation. We had a lot of people participating in real time. So we were able to incorporate their questions and comments into the conversation. So.

If you are working with your IT department or in the IT department and trying to get people to adopt AI in the organization, this is a good episode to listen to. The next one is coming up on September 19th at noon Eastern time. I am going to be away for that one. So Brad Whitworth will be the moderator and it’ll be talking about mental wellness and how communication leaders can maintain their mental wellness amidst all the stress.

of the job. Participating in that one will be Amanda Hamilton Atwell, Ginger Homan, Andrea Greenhouse, and Mark Schaeffer. So that will be a good episode too, and a bit of a divergence from the topics that we usually look at on Circle of Fellows. I’m happy to see mental wellness being addressed more frequently and in more forums these days.

@nevillehobson (12:00)
Terrific. So I guess we dive into our conversational topics now. So I’ve got the first story, which I find this really fascinating, Shell. Last week, I wrote a post on my blog that discussed the unraveling of X, I described it, suggested by a large migration of UK users from that platform, mostly to threads and blue sky. The trigger.

was the riots in the UK in early August that have made headlines globally, where social networks, X in particular, played a major role in stoking the unrest. Elon Musk’s supportive comments of the rioters stimulated disgust among many people here, which directly influenced the migration and included a number of members of parliament. The post prompted some discussion, mostly on threads, including one comment from my friend Andy Piper, a technologist, writer and podcaster.

He was a developer advocate at Twitter for nine years, leaving in early 2023 after Elon Musk finalized his acquisition in 2022. Before Twitter, he spent 10 years as a technical consultant at IBM and was involved in various open source projects. Today, he supports the Mastodon open source projects with developer relations and community building tasks. Andy’s comments suggested the idea of creating a sovereign owned and operated Mastodon instance for the UK parliament.

He then followed up on that with a blog post on his blog titled Fediverse for Freedom, in which he discusses in detail the importance of governments owning and operating their own social media platforms, such as a Macedon instance or any Fediverse compatible activity pub based service. He argues that relying on privately owned platforms gives corporations undue control over national communication and data.

He speaks of growing interest in Fediverse platforms and technologies like Mastodon from several national governments in Europe and the EU itself. Many of these institutions are already running their own social media instances, he says, and actively encouraging their politicians to use them. He highlights how the EU has already embraced decentralization through Mastodon and emphasizes that the UK should follow suit to ensure digital sovereignty, protect democratic processes.

and maintain control of a public discourse. He says, if governments are concerned about the dominance of privately owned online platforms, they have a responsibility to run and own their own. Andy acknowledges the challenges and considerations to this idea, including the financial and technical resources required to maintain these platforms and the need to ensure wide discoverability and engagement. Additionally, there are complexities in determining who should be allowed to have accounts.

on these sovereign platforms. For example, while it makes sense for members of parliament to have accounts, would it be extended to political parties or other entities? He underscores that while these challenges are significant, the importance of maintaining democratic integrity and avoiding corporate chokeholds on communication channels outweighs these concerns. So what next? To take Andy Piper’s idea to the next level, a feasible course of action could be to form a coalition of UK government officials

digital policymakers and technology experts to initiate a pilot project to establish a sovereign Macedon instance for parliament. This would involve securing funding, setting up the infrastructure and defining clear guidelines for participation. The goal would be to demonstrate the benefits of digital sovereignty and expand the model to other public institutions, ultimately creating a decentralized government operated social network that safeguards democratic communication and public trust. Could a call to action like this happen?

As Andy notes in a comment in his own post, I’m just staking out the ground that an open standards based decentralized and not privately owned set of capabilities is better than handing over those channels to a private third party. So it seems to me that this is worthy of greater discussion if a pilot project is reaching too far at the moment. As the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Shel Holtz (16:15)
think this is an outstanding idea and I fully support it. I would love to see it implemented elsewhere around the globe. think, I mean, it solves a lot of problems. And the fact that we have the Fediverse available now is what makes this feasible because not a lot of people are going to add a new social network.

@nevillehobson (16:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (16:39)
to the ones that they are already engaged with. They’re not going to say, the UK government has a social network. I think I’ll go sign up there and make sure I can check that every day in addition to Facebook and threads and whatever other networks are already following. But here, because it’s in the Fediverse, they can see it where they are and stay on top of this information. And presumably the information would include things like, please be aware of this misinformation.

that’s being shared. This is the official instance of the UK government. And we’re telling you that this is not for real. This is a deep fake or this is Russian influence or whatever it might be. having that authoritative voice coming from an own service in the peso model, what they’re doing right now by being on threads or what have you is it’s shared.

just like any social media, you’re sharing somebody else’s space, but suddenly you’re doing the same kind of engagement in the same kind of platform, but it’s now owned media. And I think that’s a big deal. I think there are a lot of questions that have to be addressed. Not only does the party participate, what about staff? For example, I think about the US maintaining a mastodon instance or setting up an instance of one of the

other services that accommodates the Fediverse and is every Senate aide going to be able to participate? Every House committee employee, not the elected officials, but the employees who work there. So, I mean, they’re the ones doing the research. They’re the ones writing the legislation and writing the reports. So they have a lot to contribute. On the other hand, nobody elected them. So, I mean, there’s…

these types of issues that I think would have to be overcome and dealt with. And it would obviously be instance by instance that those things are considered. And you also, of course, have, are you going to have states with instance and within the states, are you going to have cities with instances and counties? You could end up with an awful lot of instances, but for people who care about what that particular entity is doing legislatively, regulatory wise,

I think they’d be thoroughly pleased to be able to follow them just like they used to follow on Twitter, but know that what they’re looking at is authoritative. So I love the idea.

@nevillehobson (19:14)
Yeah, I find it extremely appealing, I must admit. Here in the UK, of course, I’ve already anticipated what’s likely to come with this idea in some quarters. we have this big thing in the UK that people call the nanny state interference from government, know, too much interference in your daily lives and rules and regulations and stuff. So I can imagine the calls call outs on this. Yet, you’ve you’ve mentioned something I think which is

Shel Holtz (19:31)
Yeah, yeah.

@nevillehobson (19:43)
probably three levels up, i .e. this then becomes a huge entity that has got all these different people and groups on it. That may well be where it goes to. But starting out though, and the pilot idea would make it very straightforward, I think, to prove the point or not, or disprove it even, that this is worthwhile and address the critics.

So you’re not rolling it out suddenly to all at once. This is, you know, everything everywhere all at once kind of approach. This is actually a pilot where you might start with a group of MPs, but your point, I think, is a valid one. This should also include the staffers, the support infrastructure for those members of parliament and others, the, you know, the people who work behind the scenes in government, particularly in central government. And that’s where it sits for a while, until you prove the value of it.

I think the key thing about it, which Andy does take pains to point out, is the trust aspect to it, which is totally aligned with addressing misinformation, disinformation and fakery at large, where because it’s on the Fediverse, anyone who has an account to handle at the Fediverse location at the instance, is still able to engage and talk to anyone else out there, anywhere else on the Fediverse.

And now as we see coming, and indeed, Dan York is going to talk about this in his report about the developments at threads to connect things more with the Fediverse, that we now have the opportunity, and it didn’t exist until now, as an easy means to do something like this that is private on one hand, but at the other hand is very open because it’s connected to.

public feds of us, but you’ve got the safeguards there. It’s almost like a by osmosis, you got a transparent two way process to it, but you control in a way that people have belief in the authenticity and the trustworthiness of the entity that you’re representing. So you’ll have a member of parliament could be you know, I’m not saying this is a domain name, it could be parliament dot social, it could be something dot parliament, whatever, whatever the technical aspects of it.

are that make it worthwhile. I’ve not seen examples, Andy mentions these in his post, of institutions in the European Union who are doing this already, decentralized social network of their own. I’d love to see examples and hear how they’re going with those. But I do believe that, you know, I say to myself, why not do a pilot? Talk about it, sure, but get something going, it can be a very small group.

Why not try it out? This seems a great idea. And like you said, Shell, this is not the ideas coming out of the UK and relate specifically to the UK parliament. This could be anywhere. And I think, you know, does it could it suggest perhaps that we suddenly end up with something that would be seen by many to be it was like a parallel internet? Maybe. Is that a bad thing? I mean, the internet is arguably in a precarious

precipitous position of being splintered by state actors, by governments, notably Russia, China, for instance. Would it not be a bad thing if this was somehow embraced that way? again, that’s a bigger argument, perhaps, down another route. But this does have merit. think this idea is definitely worth talking about.

Shel Holtz (23:15)
Yeah, I’ll be accessible over the Internet. It’s not like you’d have to find a different way to connect to a whole different network. But one of the things that I think would be vital to making these things work would be to be very clear about what the role of this network is. Otherwise, I mean, if we had a U .S. Senate instance that had Republican and Democratic senators in it, it would turn into, in short order, some

@nevillehobson (23:42)
Ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz (23:45)
pretty vitriolic back and forth on this or not.

@nevillehobson (23:48)
Or not, or not as the case might be. I’m optimistic here, I’m optimistic here, okay.

Shel Holtz (23:54)
Yes, let’s let’s be optimistic. But I mean, in any country where there are two opposing factions sharing a network, that’s not the point of this. Right. It would have to be clear this is for sharing information and soliciting feedback from our constituents. This is this is not a partisan type of.

@nevillehobson (24:14)
Right, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be just that because you could have private aspects to all of this because you’re behind your own firewall in a sense that so you the rules of engagement you might set out. And maybe the and I’m thinking of taking getting everyone to shift from this toxic place we call X now that is not fit for purpose and looking at some of the comments I’ve read from some of the MPs who have quit.

And more significantly, some of the general folks who’ve migrated away and arrived on threats, set aside some of the rather hysterical comments about things, but some sensible comments. And even some from people saying, you know, I’ve given up 80 ,000 followers on X to come here and I’m starting over. What a sense of relief that kind of comment is repeated everywhere. And I’m thinking this could well be a way to

to kickstart a change in the toxicity that we’re seeing notably on X. It’s not the only place, but X by far is way out there. Even its proprietor is part of the toxicity and maybe and he’s not going anywhere anytime soon unless his investors boot him out. mean, reading in financial press about some of his investors are not happy at all with the 44 billion that they lent him. So who knows what’s going to happen there? But

I’m seeing things that, you know, he’s cancelling, he’s closing down all the operations in Brazil because of some legal rulings down there. doesn’t like it, right? We shut down. So you’re treading on as a user, particularly a business user or a political user on a platform, that treading on very thin ice, it could all suddenly cave in or suddenly restrictions will happen. It’s not a place for the future at all. So this could well give impetus to

people migrating en masse to a better looking place as long as it strikes, hence a pilot to see. This is not a rushed thing. This might take a while.

Shel Holtz (26:14)
And I think that you’re starting to see on threads the formation informally grassroots of a lot of communities. There’s journalism threads. I’ve been posting to internal comms threads and communities are building around these and people are introducing themselves. They’re saying, hi, journalism threads. I’m a reporter with, so that’s happening on threads where I see these instances having some real value is coming out and saying, let’s say we have a US Senate.

@nevillehobson (26:32)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (26:42)
instance on mastodon. It would be saying today, Senate Bill 47 was introduced. These are the authors. Here’s a link to where you can read the whole bill. But in essence, this is what it’s designed to do. We would like your input. Let’s have some public comment. And it wouldn’t necessarily replace other channels for public comment. But you might start getting a lot of engagement from people who haven’t participated.

through the more onerous channels and the more formal channels that are available to people. So I think for listening, this could be a really powerful thing and government could stand some listening.

@nevillehobson (27:09)
Yep, you might.

Yeah, they could everywhere. Absolutely. I think it definitely is a great idea that Andy’s taken the time to write his post. I would encourage you to visit his blog, read the post, we’ll have a link to it in the show notes and see what you make of it and add your voice to is this worth it.

Shel Holtz (27:39)
Well, there are certain aspects of business that depend on people wanting to stand out and be noticed when designing certain types of products. Think fashion or cars, for example, product designers appeal to the desire of customers and prospective customers to stand out from the crowd. Ditto consulting services in a lot of instances, even something as simple as a gymnasium appeals to people who want to look good.

And when we market these products or services, we rely on everything from user -generated content to influencers, all people who have taken steps to distinguish themselves from the crowd. So what would happen if we suddenly learned that people are more interested in being part of the crowd than standing out? That’s a growing number of people, according to a new study that tracked over a million people’s desire to stand out or be unique.

from 2000 until 2020 and found a dramatic decline. This study provides some of the first evidence -based data comparing people’s motivation to stand out in today’s hyper -digital world compared to the early 2000s. The study looked at three dimensions of uniqueness, concern about how other people are gonna react to what you say or do or share, desire to break the rules, and the willingness to defend your beliefs in public.

All three facets declined, but the most dramatic were people being hesitant to defend their beliefs publicly. That fell 6 .52 percent and becoming more concerned with what people think about you, which fell 4 .28 percent. The status suggests that individuals see that expressing uniqueness might compromise their ability to fit in with others or may even lead to being ostracized. The lead author of the study is William Chopic.

an associate professor in the psychology department at Michigan State University. And he says, a 6 .52 % decline is a dramatic population change in as short as 20 years. Our data confirms a lot of institutions, lot of intuitions that people have. It’s not just in their heads that we inhabit punitive spaces. Indeed, people are afraid of drawing too much attention to themselves, potentially because doing so leaves them vulnerable.

or at risk of being ostracized or canceled. This study acknowledges that people have valid fears and concerns about standing out so much so that they’re willing to, they’re less willing to do so. Now the researchers say that this decline in wanting to stand out has major societal implications. According to Chalpik, it’s really important to have people willing to go against the grain, say the occasional unpopular thing, challenge groupthink, highlight the need to compromise with people different than us.

and not cover up the diversity of options and opinions and people because they’re too scared to stand out. Withholding who we authentically are by trying so hard to blend in can ironically backfire and lead to guilt, anxiety, and sometimes even more animosity between people. Now, the societal implications are considerable if people aren’t willing to stand out, but communicators have their more immediate concerns. If you need to encourage people to stand out, what can you do?

Well, you can create campaigns that encourage customers to showcase their unique style or creativity. People may respond to a request more than just motivate themselves to put themselves out there. You can work with your influencers to get them to encourage their followers to stick their necks out. You can share stories from stakeholders that express their uniqueness or how they stand out, even if they didn’t think that was the point of the story. Encouraging reviews and testimonials is another way.

to get people to put themselves out there in a more benign way, contests or another. Neville, I know you’re not too concerned about standing out, but how would you go about getting someone else to, who maybe used to be more willing, but is now being more circumspect about it?

@nevillehobson (31:42)
It’s a good question. think I would start really by saying, what do we mean by standing out in public? I’ve never looked at it this way, I have to say myself even. So I don’t really think about doing something that makes me stand out. I do think about things that I’ve got a point of view, and I’m not afraid to express it, even if it might not be popular, although that’s rare, to be honest, I don’t do politics publicly in public spaces.

rarely, I might comment on as I did at the UK election, talking about poll results and stuff like that. But I certainly tend not to venture opinion about this or that person or this or that policy about a company or a government agency or whatever it might be on a public place. And the last place I’d even consider that is X that’s effect. But I do tend to kind of show my true self if you will, in private groups.

notably on LinkedIn and sometimes on Facebook. Facebook ones tend to be more personal stuff that really does interest me. know, automotive, software, WordPress, a lot of that. And so I don’t see it as standing out. Maybe that’s, I’ve never really looked at that way. And I truly don’t care about what people think of me at all. I don’t, I honestly don’t. I could care less.

in the broad sense, not to sound too kind of arrogant or silly about it. But I don’t post myself on the basis of I hope someone’s going to like this and therefore by some by some some kind of subconscious method, they’ll like me to know that never occurs to be that kind of thinking. So to your point to your question,

someone who’s not doing this, it truly would be a it depends. It certainly isn’t Hey, you need to get out there and expose yourself more to different opinions and so forth and join in conversation online. I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone at all. It would depend on the like the famous it depends answer. What your goal is, what is it that you’re going to engage in conversation with what you expect to gain from it. But the survey is interesting. I have to admit when I was reading it, the

talk about being canceled or being ostracized. mean, really, that to me sounds pretty extreme. I’d certainly see that as probably a good thing if it was to do with someone who did something really bad in others’ eyes or was a jerk or something. good example might be, for instance, currently a hot topping in the news in the UK, a footballer in a Premier League team, now a presenter on one of the BBC shows and the sports.

presenter amongst across a wide range of media outlets. I was fired by the BBC last week. It was all a bit mysterious over complaints made about sexually oriented messaging sent to female colleagues. And he denied it and get lawyers on you. So this made the headlines for three or four days. And now today is all apologizing, say you made a mistake. It was very silly. Then I’m reading online.

that this that company that company three other companies all cancel the contracts the PR agency who handled him have fired him as well and his reputation is gone. He has been canceled without any doubt. But that was because he did something that goes against the norms of accepted behavior everywhere, particularly in this current climate where again, this is the power of social networks that amplify the reaction to someone who does something really bad.

So there’s that and that I see fits definitely in this, but that’s an extreme example. So from a business point of view, particularly, think, you know, I’d say to someone think twice, be careful if you’re going to go out there and put yourself out there as I’ve got an opinion about X and here it is. One reason I tend not to do that is just simply observing what happens to others who do do that on a public channel like X.

that you get the trolls, everyone with a grudge, you name it, or just nasty people pile in. And I think there’s absolutely no benefit to anyone to be part of that situation at all. So I think you need to be really careful doing this.

Shel Holtz (35:54)
One of the things that this study didn’t get into that I could read was the cause for this decline. And I have to wonder if the heightened vitriol in social networks has something to do with it. mean, 20 years ago, 24 years ago now in 2020, when they started tracking this data, you could get out there and talk about how you feel about something, what you think about something, your opinion without

@nevillehobson (36:08)
Yeah, I bet.

Shel Holtz (36:23)
worrying too much about being trolled for it or attacked or vilified for it. On the other hand, I think back to things that were going on in 2020, go, no, that was happening back then. mean, this is not new. And then I remember I was listening to an episode of a podcast. It’s a podcast I love called 99 % Invisible. And they were talking about the paint color for cars. And

the fact that these days there are really only about four or five colors available. And the most popular color, you want to guess the most popular? I think this was in the US, but I would suspect that it might be true in the UK. What’s the number one selling color of new cars? It’s white. And I remember when I was growing up, cars were all colors. It was the full spectrum of the rainbow.

@nevillehobson (37:11)
What? Yeah.

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (37:21)
And now you got white, black, gray, tan, maybe a metallic blue or something, but not a lot of color. And why? It’s because, and they were explicit about this, the experts that they had on this episode, they said, because people don’t want to stand out. They don’t want to be the red car on the road. They want to look like all the other cars on the road. And when I was growing up, everybody wanted to stand out. They wanted their car to be different.

@nevillehobson (37:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (37:51)
So there’s probably something else going on here that is not necessarily to do with trends in social media.

@nevillehobson (38:01)
Yeah, I think it is a societal issue. think it talks about the survey, you know, the facets they talk about declining, the most dramatic people’s being hesitant to defend their beliefs publicly. And then there’s a bit about being concerned about what people think of the hesitant to defend their beliefs publicly is in my example, you don’t do that because you will not have reasonable comments challenging you.

You might get lots agreeing with you, but you’re going to get an awful lot who are in false rage and outrage attacking you to the extent that it’s now common to hear people saying that, know, I’ve canceled my, I’ve shut down my account and so forth because I said this and said that and I started getting death threats or even message people say, we know where you live. mean, God, this has really got to that state. So that, right.

Shel Holtz (38:56)
flat out doxing you and sharing where you live.

@nevillehobson (38:59)
Right, and I think this is likely to be a significant reason for that decline.

Shel Holtz (39:05)
For communicators, again, this is a trend. It’s a 20 year trend. It’s precipitous. The numbers are significant. And if your products and services rely on this, or if your marketing relies on it, it’s just something to start thinking about.

@nevillehobson (39:23)
Well, in episode 418 of this podcast in mid -July, we discussed how a company called Tractor Supply caved into pressure from a politically motivated activist to abandon its values, leading some employees to quit and diverse members of the company’s customer base to speak up. We were quite critical of the company’s U -turn on DEI, that’s diversity, equity and inclusion. Titling the show notes for that episode, these are our rock solid beliefs, unless you don’t like them.

Well, it’s more in a similar vein, according to a report by Axios published on the 22nd of August. The report highlights how corporate executives and boards are intensifying their communication strategies to brace for potential attacks from activists, increasingly linking business performance with DEI policies. This preparation is driven by the growing political and social backlash against DEI initiatives, which Axios says have become a contentious issue in the corporate world.

Many companies are finding themselves under pressure as activists argue that DEI policies may negatively impact business outcomes, leading to more aggressive scrutiny of these programs. Some corporations in the US, such as Harley Davidson and John Deere, have already started to scale back their DEI commitments in response to the pressure. Axios says this trend suggests that the business community is increasingly concerned about the potential risks associated with maintaining robust DEI initiatives.

in the current polarized environment. Axios’s report suggests that for many public companies, the question is not whether they will face attacks related to their DEI policies, but when. As a result, there is a heightened focus on how these companies communicate about their DEI efforts, both internally and externally to mitigate potential fallout and maintain stakeholder confidence. But does this reflect a complete picture, I wonder? DEI efforts may be under attack.

But companies aren’t retreating from commitments, according to the results of a survey reported in USA Today in July, that you discovered, Shel. So maybe the overall picture is more complex than it appears.

Shel Holtz (41:32)
Yeah, I think what you get is a lot of reporting by anecdote when a company the size of a John Deere, a Harley Davidson, Microsoft is another one that has announced that they were closing up some of their DEI departments and shifting their focus. A lot of it based on their claiming that they have achieved some of those goals. I don’t know if that’s necessarily accurate. I think if you ask some of the…

protected classes in the organization. they’ve achieved equity, they might push back on that. But the study from USA Today was conducted by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals and your cause from BlackBod and shared exclusively with USA Today found that 96 % of corporate social impact professionals in 125 major companies

say DEI commitments have either stayed the same, that’s 83%, or increased, that’s 13%. So across the business spectrum, it doesn’t seem that this anti -woke backlash that has led these companies to retreat is having that big an impact on that many businesses. However,

Nearly a third of the executives that were surveyed say they are describing DEI work differently now. 17 % said they talk about it less with people outside the organization. So I think people recognize that this is a contentious issue and how they frame it externally in conversation. They’re being a little more cautious about it, but they are continuing to pursue.

pursue those DEI goals internally. And the reason is, I am convinced this isn’t what is reflected in this report, but I have to believe it’s because it’s good business. It’s because you get better results when you do this. Your company performance is better. Your productivity is up. Your culture improves. I’ve never heard an organization say,

that we got better business results. I’ll take that back. know Tractor Supply actually had their stock price go up when they did this. I’m not sure what that says about their investors. So there are outliers and anomalies in this case, but mostly what you see in the data is that diversity pays off. And that’s why I don’t see this as a woke issue or an anti -woke issue. It’s just a good business issue.

@nevillehobson (43:54)
You

Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I was reading the USA Today story that you’re referencing, and I’m actually a bit surprised Axios didn’t didn’t didn’t take in some of the stuff in this survey that the USA Today is, is commenting on their report came out in July accidents came out just a few days ago. So it’s puzzled me a bit, because USA Today does go into detail, for instance, about john Deere, talking about what they are now doing. What

What is the backlash producing? That’s quite interesting. It’s missing from Exos’s report. So maybe they just plucked that bit out, which seems to be what they’ve done, I think. But it does mention, though, that in the examples of those who are changing behavior as a result of the backlash, that they’re stepping away from being open and talking about their DEI initiatives.

that were all a big deal until very recently. So they are worried about this kind of publicity, I suppose, and activism that is going on. That’s reflective, I suppose, think about what we just discussed in the topic prior to this, that it’s kind of fits into that too, about the concern about you be attacked for something. And it’s noble what you’re doing, and it’s worthy, and yet there’s a pile of people externally who will hound you because of it.

and come up with all sorts of statistics and support articles to show why you’re bad. That’s new, I suspect, in the sense of it’s now completely scalable and global. Anyone with an internet connection can read all that kind of stuff. So it is a backlash. And indeed, USA Today talks about DEI policies were rushed into existence in 2020 and 2021, and they’re now increasingly out of the microscope. So maybe there’s something in there about, these rushed out too fast?

The interesting thing though, I think in the USA Today report as well, I mean, it’s all very interesting, is the alarm bells that I see, as opposed to hear, I I see alarm bells in what they’re saying, is what’s going to happen if Trump wins the US presidential election. The headline in their subhead piece talks about Trump and Vance talk about dismantling DEI. And he’s promised to reverse

as he calls it, the Biden administration’s woke equity programs, as Trump describes them. Every institution in America is under attack from this Marxist concept of equity. Good grief. So that’s what’s coming if this guy wins. And so I think this is possibly also a factor in organizational behavior to the activism, perhaps. don’t know. It’s probably more complex picture than that, Shell, but it certainly isn’t good.

Shel Holtz (46:50)
Yeah.

I suspect if you ask Donald Trump to define Marxism, he wouldn’t be able to give you a coherent answer. But this is an interesting

@nevillehobson (47:04)
Which is worse if he wins because he’ll be in office having a clue what he’s doing, right?

Shel Holtz (47:08)
That’s right. But this is an interesting tightrope to walk because on the one hand, you do have these forces that have framed this as an anti -woke activity, trying to put an end to DEI. They have framed all kinds of negative outcomes from DEI that I don’t believe are accurate or even honest.

@nevillehobson (47:13)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (47:33)
But it has led organizations to want to be more quiet about it. On the other hand, who are organizations recruiting from right now? The answer is Gen Z. What is the number one most articulated value of Gen Z, diversity and inclusivity? So it seems to me that at least for your employer brand, you want to be out there touting these things because that’s what matters to the generation.

that is graduating from college and coming into the workforce in droves right now. So it seems to me that if we’re going to try to avoid being the subject of kid rock blowing up our products with high powered weapons by a lakeside on X, and on the other hand, we want to appeal to the best and the brightest coming out of universities, you’re gonna have to talk out of both sides of your mouth and it’s.

@nevillehobson (48:15)
Thank

Shel Holtz (48:27)
going to be interesting seeing how we manage to do that. My recommendation is if these are your values, stand up for them. Screw the anti -woke mob.

@nevillehobson (48:40)
Well, interestingly, again, in the USA Today piece, they have this interesting little paragraph here. They say last week, and this is July, so it’ll be in July, the Society of Human Resource Management said it was dropping the word equity and would use the acronym IND. Their CEO, Johnny Taylor, told USA Today in May that his organization planned to lead with inclusion going forward. So inclusion, not diversity.

that could be significant that shift in perception and behavior. So factor that into what’s going on.

Shel Holtz (49:12)
Well, they each mean different things. the idea that D, E, and I are all synonyms is ridiculous. Otherwise, it would just be D.

@nevillehobson (49:15)
Right. They do.

That’s part of the argument, isn’t it? mean, this isn’t helpful though, it seems to me, to the overall picture of it all. So it’s under a threat. So yeah, there we have it.

Shel Holtz (49:27)
No.

@nevillehobson (49:42)
So can say, well, before we continue, I need to go to the loo. So let me just put you on pause on the audio and I’ll be back.

Shel Holtz (49:46)
Go for

@nevillehobson (51:19)
Okeydokey.

Shel Holtz (51:22)
So you’re gonna pick up on Dan’s report, right?

@nevillehobson (51:24)
yeah, yep.

Thanks, Dan. Great report. In particular, what you talked about on threads and the Fediverse. I’ve been experimenting a bit in the past week, actually, on seeing what happens to threads posts when they get spread out across the Fediverse via Macedon in particular. I’ve still got some work to do on that. It’s still very much technically focused. And so most people aren’t going to want to get involved in that.

The big deal, think, is that the lack of being able to reply to anyone who comments on your threads post they see out there in mastodon somewhere. You see the fact that someone on the Fediverse has commented. That’s all it can tell you. And finding the comment and your original post is really a challenge, as I’ve discovered. So that needs to get better, and I’m sure it will. So I think when I see people criticizing all of this, just be patient because Meta are working at this.

And as you pointed out, Dan, they’ve been adding a lot of functionality recently. So this is not a standstill project. There’s nowhere near finished yet. And more good things are coming. A big one to me is Fedover sharing of WordPress posts via threads that takes that will be doable from the 28th of August, so it’s in a few days time. So that means you publish a post on your WordPress blog and set up the function that does this.

It’ll post it to threads. can do that now, in fact, but then it will then send it on its further journey out to the third of us from threads, which currently doesn’t happen. Now, that could be a big deal that gets your content out there automatically. You don’t have to do an awful lot. The only worry I’ve got about some of this stuff, such as being able to simultaneously post messages to, you know, multiple channels such as buffer introduced on threads, blue sky and Macedon simultaneously.

Do you really want to do that? I often think about, I’ve got Fedover sharing enabled on my threads account. It’s only available in a handful of countries, if I recall correctly, UK being one, the US has always been available. And it’s a useful feature, but sometimes I wonder, is that what I want to be doing? Here’s my post on threads and there’s that same post that’s then out there on Macedon somewhere. I have a plugin for Macedon on my WordPress blogs, I end up with two, I got to switch one off, but things like that.

You need to have a better choice on how to deal with that. It needs to be more easy for users to use. But it’s all coming and it’s really good hearing what you had to say about ThreadStand, so thanks.

Shel Holtz (54:07)
Here’s a fun fact. Disabling social media comments can negatively impact the reputations of online influencers and public figures. First off, let’s acknowledge that public figures, Oprah Winfrey, Selena Gomez, they’ve restricted access to their social media comments in response to online criticism. This decision makes sense. Those in the public eye are often highly scrutinized and disabling comments can be a first line of defense.

just to protect their mental health. But the influencers you’re working with, whether they’re internal, like an executive thought leader, for instance, or external, you should think twice before agreeing to let them shut off comments because they don’t like hearing what people think. We know about the unintended consequences of disabling comments from research. It was shared in a recent Harvard Business Review article.

Across seven studies, it was found that online influencers ranging from digital content creators to celebrities turned influencers are perceived as less sincere, less likable and less persuasive when they disable their social media comments. Participants in these studies who saw the posts with disabled…

time codes too.

Participants in these studies who saw posts with disabled comments rated the influencer on average as less sincere, likable, and persuasive compared to those who saw the same posts with enabled comments. What’s more, it was found that participants were less willing to engage with influencers’ affiliate marketing when comments had been turned off. That means they’re not going to click to buy whatever it was that that influencer was pitching. So how should influencers manage their comment sections?

The article identifies three important considerations. First, understand the importance of being open to audience feedback. Consumers tend to feel like they have personal relationships with influencers, and some even come to regard them as friends. Establishing a perceived sense of intimacy with their followers allows influencers to gain their audience’s trust and increases their persuasiveness, but these benefits come with greater expectations from their viewership. Second,

disabling comments is worse than leaving comments publicly visible, even if they’re horribly negative. While you may be trying justifiably to shut down the onslaught of negative feedback, especially after a personal transgression or a public humiliation, doing that just produces the opposite effect. Finally, if your influencers find themselves needing a break from the feedback they’re post produce, advise them to be transparent about that.

It’s worth noting that online influencers disable social media comments not only to avoid negative feedback following a specific incident, but also just to protect their wellbeing. Fortunately, the article shows that consumers can be empathetic to those needs. In fact, two of the experiments show that the backlash against disabling comments is weakened or even eliminated when influencers are grieving a personal loss, say the death of a family pet.

or transparently acknowledging the need to take a mental health break. Influencers have become targets of online negativity and how they respond to this feedback that can have important ramifications for their personal brands and the effectiveness of their endorsement of your brand, your product, your service. We need to be strategic in how we handle their wish to avoid hearing what their followers think.

@nevillehobson (57:59)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I read this article, I scanned it, let’s say when I saw it come out, I assumed it was talking about things like blog posts, where you turn commenting off and it’s not. Now I’m reading it again, listen to what you’re saying. This is about posts on social networks, not about stuff like blogs or websites. That would be a different thing if it were. And I agree with much of what I heard you outline here about disabling comments as well. And I think

just my own experience on things that I’ve done recently, I’ve commented on or wanted to comment on what someone has been saying and it’s not possible to do it. So you’re frustrated, where are you gonna go to give you a point of view? You don’t and that might therefore would impact what I thought about that person or why they turned it off. Probably because of the trolls and the hate is what I would think possibly. So it’s…

This does make it quite clear and has some credible data to back it up, I think, where it talks about the importance of being open to audience feedback. And I think that is the kind of number one. Indeed, it is the first one of the list that you read out and understand the psychology of it. I can see this. Consumers often feel they have a personal relationship with influencers and some even come to regard them as friends. And I can see that in some of the people that I follow who have large followings on places like Instagram.

So turning it off, yeah, I can see this. So it’s good to see this kind of thing. I think if you need a break, be transparent, that again makes sense. But in the context of the big thing, I’m going back to the conversation we had earlier in this episode talking about, you know, being visible and standing up for your own beliefs, et cetera, and the risks of that. And I think you’ve got to take that into account as well about

being transparent wholly about why you’re taking a break, for instance. I I remember as you will show back in those early days of social media, when you know, I used to do it, the tool called foursquare in particular is check in everywhere you went. And anyone, yeah, anyone who had either good or ill will against you would know your movements, everything.

Shel Holtz (1:00:08)
Be the mayor.

@nevillehobson (1:00:17)
And it became not fast realization, but shortly over time that this wasn’t a good idea to be so open and transparent because there are people out there who will bear you ill will. And that was, you know, milestone marker to the innocence and openness of social media in those early days. And now here we are 20 years later, 25 years later, even, that you wouldn’t think

of doing such a thing, you would be very guarded about what you share publicly, most sensible people would. Even privately, you don’t know what someone’s going to do with that information. And so nowadays, for instance, you’ve now got screenshots and all that kind of stuff people can do. And these are tools everyone has access to. And it’s very easy. Back then, it wasn’t. You needed special tools and not everyone had them. So be transparent. I think, you know, I saw something on

X the other day, by the way, I do pay attention to what goes on at X, but it’s about once a week I go in there to look at something specific or more frequently if it’s something I’m researching. I noticed something the other day from someone who’s an artist posted on X that a pet had died, a favorite pet, member of the family, very emotive post. The comments would make you sick. They truly, truly would. Evil people with disgusting comments.

That’s the risk factor on a platform like that. Don’t see it on Facebook, although it does exist, but not to that extent, not like that. So you’ve got to be careful. I wonder, indeed, I guess my point is to say, I’m wondering if this is strictly true in the totality of what the Harvard Business Review’s report is saying, given that, that we talked about, about standing out, et cetera.

The risks are quite high, quite significant in doing that as a matter of course. Maybe that needs to be mentioned in here as well.

Shel Holtz (1:02:14)
Yeah, and of course the study did point out that having the negative comments is actually not as bad as shutting everything down in terms of the perception that it creates among your followers. But I just found a post, I was remembering you were talking about shutting off the comments on blogs, which is fairly routine these days. I know Seth Godin is among the folks who has a blog that you can’t comment on, but I remember

Back in 2007, Dave Weiner shut off the comments on his blog. He said, this is a place for me to share my thoughts. In fact, he said, see if I can find it here. He says, yeah, basically he said, you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be.

@nevillehobson (1:02:55)
But did he say like, I don’t care what you think, this is my place?

Shel Holtz (1:03:05)
expressed and if you know history the most important ideas are often the unpopular ones. That’s what’s important about blogs not that people can comment on your ideas and as long as they can start their own blog there will be no shortage of places to comment. That’s what he said if you want to comment do it on your blog. The problem is that there’s no connectivity there. Am I going to follow a link and go read the post that he’s talking about or do I want to see what people think about the post that was there?

And the quote I just read you was on a post that was written July 30th, 2007 by Rand Fishkin under the headline, You’re Wrong, Joel Spolsky and Dave Weiner. Blog comments have incredible value. So this is hardly a new argument. It just seems to have shifted from blogs where publishing without comment has become fairly routine to social networking spaces where engagement with comments seems to be the whole point.

@nevillehobson (1:04:00)
Yeah, it’s true. And I think when I was recently, I kind of rejigged my own blog, a new design, all this stuff. And when I was preparing for all of that, I was looking through some of the earlier posts in the pre 2010 era. And almost every single one is absolutely peppered with comments, including the track backs and the ping backs. That’s a hallmark of blogs, particularly WordPress. And that functionality, by the way, still exists.

And that’s where discussions took place, but they were all connected. And that was where you had polite discourse. Rarely was it, certainly nothing like you have today. So we had a shift and as you said, it’s now moved to this and now the debate is talking about this. I actually hadn’t thought about it until we’re this discussion that you could turn off comments on places like Instagram, Facebook. I’ve never done that. I didn’t know you could. I’d never thought about it even. So.

Yeah, that’s changed the landscape quite a bit. think the ability to do that, the fact people are doing it, is a big shift.

Shel Holtz (1:05:06)
Yeah, so just something to keep in mind in your communication planning. If you’re working particularly with executives who would rather not hear it for a couple of weeks while they’re busy with something else, for example, just have this in your back pocket is data to share. You you can turn it off, but it’s going to have an impact on how people perceive you.

@nevillehobson (1:05:25)
Yeah, good point.

OK, in the upcoming US presidential election, Democrat Kamala Harris’s campaign. Had you heard about that, Shel? OK.

Shel Holtz (1:05:33)
I’m sorry, there’s an election?

No, I’m one of those people who doesn’t pay attention until after Labor Day.

@nevillehobson (1:05:41)
Yeah, we had one in the UK, by the way. Did you know that? We had one in the UK recently.

Shel Holtz (1:05:44)
I think I saw that on a news crawl. That’s right. John Oliver probably mentioned it.

@nevillehobson (1:05:48)
On the comedy show. Well, in the US. Yeah, yeah, he would have done. So in the US, Kamala Harris’s campaign is not just targeting Gen Z voters, many of whom will be voting for the first time is redefining how political engagement happens online. I found this a really interesting aspect to political campaigning and communication. What Kamala Harris’s campaign is doing both

she herself and her role, but her communication team and what they have enabled. This is really quite interesting. And the Gen Z targeting is significant. The Gen Z is often called the first digitally native generation. We’ve said that quite a few times. It represents a critical voting bloc of young people born between 1997 and 2012, who grew up with smartphones and social media, making them a key demographic for shaping the election outcome.

Unlike her Republican opponent Donald Trump, who traditionally tapped into the internet’s darker fringes, Harris’s team has mastered the native formats of platforms like TikTok, Gen Z’s most favored digital space, with a team of young influencers and strategists, nearly all of them under 25. The Harris campaign is leveraging memes, trends and viral content to connect authentically with younger audiences. This strategy was evident at the Democratic National Convention last week.

where over 200 influencers offered an intimate behind the scenes look, further amplifying Harris’s message. Harris’s digital presence isn’t just about following trends though, it’s about creating them. For example, the Brat meme, inspired by British singer Charlie XCX’s album, embodies confidence and a bold carefree attitude with its lime green cover art and aesthetic, traits that resonate strongly with Gen Z. The Coconut Dream meme, based on a viral quote from Harris,

has also been humorously embraced by her supporters. By strategically co -opting these memes, the campaign has significantly enhanced Harris’s appeal to younger internet savvy voters, driving massive engagement that far surpasses Trump’s efforts. Furthermore, the strategic use of influencers at the DNC exemplifies Harris’s innovative approach. These influencers, credentialed alongside traditional media, provided a personalized, immersive experience for their followers.

bridging the gap between politics and everyday life in a way that resonates with the digital first generation. The campaign’s metrics are a testament to its success. Over 57 million viewers across TV and online platforms for the first night of the convention, with 30 million views on content created by influencers alone. This level of engagement suggests that Harris’s digital first strategy could significantly mobilize younger voters, potentially tipping the scales in the upcoming election.

As we move closer to the election on November the 5th, it’s clear that the battle for the White House is being fought not only on the ground, but also across social media feeds where Harris currently holds a significant edge. This campaign is not just about winning an election. It’s about reshaping how digital strategies can be used to engage and mobilize voters in the digital age, setting a new standard for future campaigns globally. While the Harris campaign’s digital strategy is clearly leading the way,

It’s important to remember that this election is far from decided. With over 70 days still to go, the race remains incredibly tight and many influential Democrats are cautioning against overconfidence. A lot can change in the final stretch, making every move in this digital battleground crucial.

Shel Holtz (1:09:26)
Yeah, this campaign is not going to be one with memes. In fact, I even saw a headline, I think it was in the New York Times, it was yesterday or today that said joy is not a strategy because people have been talking about how this has been a joyful campaign. But the fact is it’s a campaign where every vote is going to count, every vote is going to be needed.

and getting young people out to vote. And this is a block that traditionally doesn’t vote. And they certainly were not enthused about Joe Biden, rightly or wrongly. So the fact that they are motivated to engage with some pretty interesting content that is being created by some pretty savvy digital media people is perhaps what’s going to get them out to vote and maybe even out to volunteer. Knock on doors.

make phone calls, write postcards, all those things that volunteers do as part of the ground game. And you got to hand it to them for actually understanding what resonates with Gen Z. I did hear and I don’t remember where I heard it. was on a podcast or on a news program.

But the Harris campaign’s media expenditure is 75 % digital. Only 25 % is TV. That is a complete reversal from what every campaign has been before this. So they get how important this is. And it doesn’t hurt that both candidates, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, come off pretty well.

in these types of videos. Tim Walz has been on TikTok for a while as predates any even consideration that he might be on a national ticket. So he’s been out there at county fairs holding pigs. And, you you’ve probably seen the one with his daughter where he says, we’re going to celebrate with a hamburger. And she says, I’m vegetarian. He says, Turkey then. And she says, that’s meat. And he says, not in Minnesota.

@nevillehobson (1:11:38)
Very good.

Shel Holtz (1:11:41)
You know, and there was one from some retail shop. I think it was a pizza place. And it was the pizza place that shot the video, but it was him having this really, really natural conversation with the people in the shop. And I just saw that last night contrasted with JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, going into a donut shop and having a really kind of strained and unpleasant interaction with the staff there.

So the fact that they know how to do this, they know how to come off well in these videos. There was another one that I heard went viral. was just Kamala Harrison and Tim Walz having a conversation about when she called him to inform him that he had been her choice for vice president, but he didn’t recognize the phone number. So he let her go to voicemail.

The conversation was very natural and authentic. And by the way, what’s number four on the list of things that matter to Gen Z that they value authenticity and individualism. So they’re right on top of this. And I think this is going to bring a lot of people to the polls who might’ve otherwise sat it out.

@nevillehobson (1:12:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think you’re right. Absolutely. I think that’s worth a point emphasizing that they truly get this they do much better than their opponents. From the people in her campaign team, they’re all youthful, they’re all active themselves on all the platforms that they’re using. They have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. And they have a strategy that they can execute on.

One of the links you’ll find in the show notes is a report on CNN that has profiles, if you like, of people in the campaign is most interesting to read that where you’ve got you’ve got comments like one staffer talking about their role is to build the windmill and the the current Vice President Kamala Harris, her role is to blow the wind.

I think, yeah, that’s a good kind of metaphor, I suppose. But it actually is true, they are building the infrastructure to communicate and the means by which you can get a message is out, and she’ll have help doing it. But the bottom line is she is the prime messenger. And she is very believable. The Guardian had a terrific analysis of interviews with some of the influences at the DNC. And I want to mention, I want to quote a couple of them here, because they had some interesting things to say.

One called Alexis Williams, a TikToker with 262 ,000 followers on that network. She posts about fashion, STEM and social justice. She emphasized the challenge of bridging the gap between Gen Z and older politicians at the convention, noting that while young influencers understand the appeal of using trendy musical jokes, older politicians often don’t get it. She also highlighted their unique access, which often surpasses traditional journalists. So they were getting

into places that some of the traditional journalists couldn’t get into. Corey Aversa is a 51 year old publicist and content creator from Philadelphia with 130 ,000 followers on TikTok described his content style as making viewers feel like they’re right there with him, capturing the excitement of being up close to VIPs at the convention that connected with the Gen Z followers in his network. Heather Gardner, a 36 year old TikToker.

with 394 ,000 followers on that network, pointed out the distinctiveness of influencer content, which offers a more personalized and varied perspective compared to the predictable coverage of mainstream news outlets. She stressed though that good vibes alone aren’t enough. The content must also be insightful and educational, and I would add, delivers perhaps an unspoken call to action to get out there and vote. So.

You look at these elements of what’s going on and you can see they truly have something that the other side don’t seem to. That said, you know, this is the picture now, 70 days out. And I would be very surprised indeed if the Trump campaign is kind of sat on their hands until November the 5th. So they’re going to come out with something, who knows? Hopefully for the Democrats, it’s just Trump ranting. If they get smart and do strategy, that could be a problem.

But this is really interesting seeing how they have done this at some significant scale of mobilizing almost an army of supporters to tell Kamala Harris’s story as well as she telling it, but telling it in their words to their communities and engaging directly with them with the confidence that they, they got permission, B, they got connections and the support to do it. And they believe they can do this and they are.

This is really quite phenomenal seeing this unveiled before our very eyes.

Shel Holtz (1:16:40)
And lest anybody think we’re just sitting here gushing about a Democratic candidate, I would first remind everybody that Neville’s in the UK and doesn’t have skin in this game. But second, this is a communication podcast. And what the Harris campaign is doing is a clinic for any marketer looking to try to appeal to Gen Z. You got to look at the authenticity of the kind of posts that they are contributing. You’ve got to look at the people that they are.

bringing into their camp to post on their behalf. You’ve got to look at how fast they are moving to jump on memes that have emerged out of popular culture, like the brat thing with Charlie XCX, like the coconut tree meme. They’re capitalizing on things. And by the way, some of these are things that their opposition tried to turn into a negative, but they had already jumped on it and turned it into a positive. So

There are lessons to be learned here and applied outside of the political arena. And I don’t care if you’re the most rabid Trump supporter, if you’re a marketer and you’re not paying attention to the way the Harris campaign is appealing to Gen Z, then you’re gonna be less effective on your job.

@nevillehobson (1:17:39)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (1:17:56)
Well, what’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet in this episode? Let me think here. AI. The rise of generative AI is accelerating everything it touches in the tech industry by orders of magnitude. AI -powered search engines like Perplexity are gaining mainstream momentum. And what’s feeling the pressure as a result of all of this? The age -old industry of search engine optimization.

@nevillehobson (1:18:02)
you

Shel Holtz (1:18:26)
Now, before we dive into the trends that will drive SEO for the next year or so, let’s take a quick look at how search has changed in the last three decades. There is a search expert, he goes by Demib, that is Mikkel Demib Svensson, who recalls the switch to mobile, which was first prophesied around Y2K, shortly after the introduction of

the wireless application protocol that allowed mobile devices to connect to the internet. It was another decade before Google adopted a mobile first philosophy and content publishers adopted mobile friendly user experiences. Now, DMIB sees upwards of 90 % mobile traffic in certain verticals like women’s fashion. So what trends should marketers and communicators be keeping an eye on in 2024 and 2025? Here are five things to watch.

D -MIB calls AI a fundamental shift in technology that is maybe as big, maybe even bigger than the internet. He points to AI powering chatbots, search engines, Google AI overviews, and more. In a HubSpot survey of over 100 US -based SEO professionals, 73 % either strongly or somewhat agreed that AI tools, features, or solutions are becoming an important part of the company’s SEO strategy.

So what are the trends communicators should be paying attention to when it comes to driving traffic to their websites or getting eyes on content? Well, first there’s zero click search. With the launch of Google’s AI overviews in May of this year, zero click search shifted from theoretical concern to waking nightmare for some people. However, DMib, he’s that search engine expert, believes that a zero click world is not likely to happen as people still want to buy products that are actually only available

on certain web shops, and they want perspectives from various news outlets. Still, we’ve been living in the world of one true answer ever since Amazon unveiled the Echo line of products. We talked about this whole one true answer concept a couple of times on the show when the Echo was new. So I’d still be trying to get my company name in those AI generated results. I can’t remember where I read this. I think it was a LinkedIn post, but the author said,

He was astounded when he asked a number of prospective customers who contacted him how they learned about his company. And they said it was in an AI chat bot’s response. Remember, AI scoops up web content. So the more you’re out there on the web in the right context, the more likely you are to show up in the response to a Gen. AI prompt. And that leads us to the next trend, which is ranch style SEO. Clear Scope CEO Bernard Wang

made ripples in the SEO world with a blog post he called, Why Ranch Style SEO is Your Future -Proof Content Strategy? Huang says that rather than focusing on long, in -depth articles, publishers should disaggregate content into precise, digestible pieces that strategically align with the user’s search journey. This goes hand in hand with advice that we’ve seen about follow -up search intent, which is the next point. Amanda Sellers, HubSpot’s manager,

of EN blog strategy emphasizes that the importance of considering follow -up searches is growing. Even with the increase in zero -click queries, some users won’t be satisfied with the initial answer and will refine their journey with follow -up searches. Anticipating follow -up search intent is key to content strategy in 2024 and 2025. And I would add that the experts out there on

using ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and the other frontier large language models are all telling us, don’t type in a question and then use the answer. Have a conversation, use follow -up questions. You get additional information. It could include what your organization strove to get into those search results. Next trend is video SEO. Expect more growth in that area as consumers increasingly turn to YouTube.

to research their pain points and seek human perspectives. Rory Hope is HubSpot’s head of EN growth and says that SEOs should be monitoring the search results pages for target keywords and topics to see which ones have video carousels and coordinate with media teams to create relevant video content. The through line in these trends is that AI is driving a lot of change in the search landscape, but SEO is alive and well, and the human element is still vital to search.

To accommodate these new trends, our experts recommend that… Yeah, it’s not our experts.

To accommodate these new trends, experts are recommending that marketers and SEOs write for their audience, embrace AI -based tools, monitor search engine results pages for target keywords and topics with video carousels, and deepen their topical coverage and sharpen their editorial angles.

@nevillehobson (1:23:49)
all eminently sensible suggestion shell. I was struck by one thing reading the HubSpot article right at the very beginning where they introduced the idea of how the search landscape has changed and talk about when Google search appeared in 1998, which it did. I remember when it came out, I switched immediately from, I think, AltaVista I was using could have been one of those others, but this was magical to today. But the interesting thing was a one line comment in that intro.

An entire generation has grown up never knowing a time before Google. That’s our Gen Z. So it’s fascinating. The evolution is very interesting, I think. The trends, the zero click search thing, I’d never really kind of thought deeply about that, but I can see why that is important to pay attention to what’s happening in that area. I think the…

Shel Holtz (1:24:25)
This is true.

@nevillehobson (1:24:47)
Other point to me that’s that stood out. What would decrease search traffic in the next six months? This is in line with what we’ve been talking about in recent episodes of the in between episodes, a short form ones we do in the week. Decrease search traffic in the next six months, generative AI chatbots 13%. That would decrease search traffic. That’s interesting. And that I think is in alignment with what we’ve been talking about with with

with what was it called, Shell, the tool that Google launched that you mentioned, Google interviews or something, or wasn’t that? Anyway, you know the one I mean. So I think also one other thing that did strike me too, what will improve search traffic? yeah, that was the thing, it was overviews, yeah. Social media search engines. And we’ve seen what’s already out there, and notably perplexity, where you can ask it,

the kind of questions that we’re now seeing the others coming up with. It’s not actually it’s not strictly social media, but it’s becoming more significant. And your point you mentioned about having a conversation with your search tool. I do that. I’m sure you do as well. think I know you do even. I just don’t use Google at all. Even what’s the phone number of the dentist that I’ve forgotten. I don’t I don’t do that. Although I must admit, you then get more information than you need in the answer from perplexity if you do that.

but it’s fast, I do voice a lot. I ask them audio audibly the questions. And by the way, Perplexi’s mobile app is really good. So these are all factors into all of this. And I think the numbers are definitely worth paying attention to. I’ve not read the whole report, but I will take a look through it.

Shel Holtz (1:26:37)
Yeah, and I think, first of all, I do use Google still. There are times where I say I’m looking for a good brunch near me and it’ll pull up Google Maps and have the markers on it and show 10 restaurants and I can. But yeah. I’ve been trying to hold that back.

@nevillehobson (1:26:58)
A bit of editing there.

Shel Holtz (1:27:05)
So let me start that again.

So I do still use Google. I’ll ask for, you know, good brunch near me and it’ll give me the Google map with the markers on it and give me 10 listings and I can move through them pretty seamlessly. I don’t find the perplexity does anything even remotely like that. Also, I am on the waiting list for OpenAI’s new AI, generative AI search tool that is in alpha. And I guess some people are in there using it, but I haven’t gotten an invitation yet. I can’t wait to…

Give that a try.

@nevillehobson (1:27:41)
I’m on the waiting list too, it’s not yet launched in the UK, so I don’t know when it will be, but they told me I’m on the waiting list.

Shel Holtz (1:27:48)
Right. It’d be interesting to see what approach they take, how that compares to perplexity. Perplexity has just announced, by the way, that there’s going to be advertising. They’ve struck some deals and we’re going to start to see that really soon. But I do think unlike what this expert in SEO said in the HubSpot article, that zero click is an issue. Yes, if I do a search that takes me in perplexity,

@nevillehobson (1:27:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, two -four.

Shel Holtz (1:28:16)
to or in Google where I get the overview that provides me with a great answer that now I want to buy the product. Yes, I’m going to have to click through to that site. Absolutely. No, duh, as they say. But if what I’m looking for is instructions on how to factory reset my Google Pixel phone and what comes up is here’s step one through five and that will do it for you.

I’m not clicking through to anything. That’s what I was looking for right there. And I think increasingly that zero click response that you’re going to get is going to satisfy most people. So that becomes an issue. I think getting your information, getting your content, even your links into these results is going to be an increasing area of focus. And there’s going to be more and more tricks to do that.

@nevillehobson (1:28:55)
Yeah, it will.

Shel Holtz (1:29:13)
and maybe even advice coming from the AI organizations on how to do that, the same way Google has always offered advice on how to get into their search results, which have always been fairly ethical. They weren’t telling you here are workarounds to get irrelevant content into somebody’s search. was being current. Keep updating your content. Make sure that the keywords are in there and not gratuitously that they are contextual.

And every time they do an update to Google, they’re going to tell you, here’s what’s changed and here’s what you need to do to accommodate this. So I’d love to see the AI tools start offering that kind of guidance.

@nevillehobson (1:29:55)
Yeah, I agree. I think it’s inevitable though, the evolution path. You said it, you search for something on one of these tools, whether it’s perplexity or chat, or whatever it might be. And if it gives you, what are the five steps to do X, or you don’t say what are the five steps, how do I do X? gives you step one, do this, step five, boom. You’re not gonna go anywhere else from that point.

And that is inevitable. There’s no point in saying, well, that shouldn’t be. That is how it is. It will improve. So on the one hand, you’ve got the the traditional search engine, if I can use that way of describing it, that need to up the game in that sense. Sounds an unfair point, but without the detail, but that’s what they need to do. But is it just that? What about the companies? I don’t know how it works, Shell, to be honest, but I remember the experience I had when I first wrote

a review of perplexity back either late middle of last year or early this, I can’t remember offhand. And I had screenshots comparing this search term I did on Google, this search term is perplexity. The Google one was pretty, pretty bad. And I know it has improved a bit since from my own experience even, but the search term gave me was a car, I think it was to do with electric vehicles or hybrids or something like that. So it gave me in Google links to

some car manufacturers websites and indeed some local dealers to where I am. And I clicked on a few of them, just took me to a sales page or this is the new model. And I think this does not anywhere come close to addressing my search term. Perplexion on the other hand, gave me an essay, almost a novel on the answer to my question with all the links to the various sources that I went to. thought, wow, this is the future. that’s, but I’ve yet.

Your point about restaurants and things, I’m a bit peculiar because I never do that. I never say what’s a good place to eat near me. I just never ask a search engine that question. Sometimes I’ll look for something on Google Maps that’s related to that. I don’t just generally go to Google. I mean, Google Maps. It’s usually when I’m in the car, I ask that kind of question. And I get great results with Google, actually. And in fact, Google is Google Assistant, but the

AI one Gemini is coming to Android Auto. And I have kind of mixed views about that from what I’ve been reading in some of the tech press. Nevertheless, this is the evolution that’s coming. And so it’s changed the landscape without any doubt. And I don’t know what the answer is going to be to those folks who are looking at their web traffic and finally it’s plummeting because no one’s coming to the website. Don’t know what the answer is.

Shel Holtz (1:32:35)
The answer is to find other ways to attract that traffic to your website. Stop relying on Google because that’s going to be less and less effective. And that’ll do it for this episode of for immediate release. Of course, we will be here with short midweek episodes between now and Monday, September 23rd, which is the date of our next long form monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (1:32:38)
Up you go.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got it.

Shel Holtz (1:33:02)
We do hope that you will comment on the episodes that we post, including this one. You can email us your comment. Just email it to fircomments at gmail .com. You can attach an audio file to about three minutes long. You can record that audio file right on the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork .com. You’ll see a little button that says record voicemail or send voicemail. I don’t even remember what it says, but you’ll see it. It says voicemail.

Click that and you can record up to 90 seconds if you want to record more than that record more than that and we’ll Marry those files together and play your comment but you can also do what most people are doing which is Comment when we post an announcement that an episode has been shared we do that on LinkedIn Facebook threads blue sky mastodon Not Twitter anymore not X. We’re not there anymore. Sorry about that

We also have a Facebook group for the FIR Podcast Network. Please join that group. You can share your comments to the posts that we shared there. And you can leave a comment in the show notes on the FIR Podcast Network website. And as always, we are grateful for your ratings and reviews wherever you get your podcasts. It’s a great way to let other people know about FIR. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #425: Stand Up, Stand Out, or Shut Down? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

As we reported nearly a year ago, communication’s influence is growing among organizational leadership. However, in many companies, executive acceptance of communication may be taking a worrisome turn as additional responsibilities are being tacked onto the communication role, including sustainability and DEI. Is this because some companies see a natural synergy between these roles? Is it because the roles are viewed as soft, less important, and easily lumped together? Whatever the reason, it’s worth wondering whether coupling these roles dilutes the communication executive’s ability to do either well. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore the trend of coupling communication with another C-suite job.

Links from this episode:

Chief communications officers are absorbing more corporate functions, new report
New report: Communication’s growing influence in the C-suite
FIR #361: Is There a Seat at the Table in Corporate Communication’s Future?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #424: The Rise of the Hybrid Communication Officer appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Op-eds pay off. According to one analysis, New York Times opinion articles get 37 percent more readers than the newspaper’s general news coverage. Wall Street Journal op-eds attract 571 percent more readers than its general news. (That’s not a typo. Five hundred seventy-one percent.) However, more and more news outlets are shuttering their opinion sections or severely reducing the space available for op-eds. Celebrity CEOs may well be able to pitch op-eds, but this channel is no longer an option for the leaders of most organizations. Many leaders are turning to LinkedIn to share their insights. Is that the only option? In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the state of thought leadership and the channels communicators may not be considering.

Links from this episode:

Thought leaders flock to social media as opinion sections shutter

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #423: As Op-Eds Fade into History, Where Does Thought Leadership Belong? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville and Shel both spent time at a global Human Resources consulting firm in addition to their long tenures as independent consultants. At the core of all consulting is the labor-intensive work that takes time, and time is money. Every consultant has an hourly billable rate, and even when quoting project fees, those fees are based on the hours required to complete the project. This model has been under strain for decades, leading to concepts like “value-add,” in which hourly fees are supplemented by the additional value the consultant supposedly brings to the project (which is, after all, supposed to be reflected in their hourly rate). Now, AI may be the nail in the coffin for the billable hour model, in addition to fundamental consultant structures and offerings. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the state of consulting in the AI age.

Links from this episode:

The Business Consulting Industry Is Being Disrupted, and Nothing Can Stop It
How AI is Changing the Consulting Game – NevilleHobson .com
Re-evaluating consultancy pricing in the age of AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #422: Will AI Kill the Consulting Billable Hours Model? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The End of the Generative Artificial-Intelligence Bubble
The End of Investors’ Generative AI Honeymoon
Will Generative AI Really Pay Off?
Generative AI Seed Funding Drops 76% As Investors Take A Wait-and-See Approach
Is Generative AI Worth the Investment?

These are all headlines from the last several weeks suggesting, as Gartner believes, that generative AI has arrived at the trough of disillusionment (the low point in Gartner’s technology hype cycle). This skepticism can be attributed to the fact that there haven’t been any breakthrough products that have produced huge revenues. Instead of companies making big investments in AI, individual employees are using free or low-cost tools independently.

While those enterprise tools are undoubtedly coming, employees using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Copilot are seeing big gains in productivity and even creativity. A new report from Microsoft — which looks at Copilot use by 6,000 employees in more than 60 organizations — reinforces this view. In this midweek episode, Neville and Shel dig into the report, along with a Washington Post study that ranks how individuals are using generative AI.

Links from this episode:

Generative AI in Real-World Workplaces (Microsoft report)
What do people really ask chatbots? It’s a lot of sex and homework

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #421: GenAI Is Paying Off for Individual Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A faulty software update caused the biggest IT outage in history, affecting everything from commercial airline flights to hospitals. The crisis communication demands on CrowdStrike were enormous. How well did the company acquit itself? Neville and Shel look at the company’s response and share what some crisis experts have said. Also in this episode, there’s increased reporting on the strike between journalists and media relations professionals. People are still searching on Google, but they are not clicking on any of the results, creating headaches for websites that need visitors to survive. Ogilvy has introduced a service to deal with rogue influencers. A newsletter has made its way into the fediverse as social networks like Threads continue to expand their fediverse presence. NATO is taking its case to the public in a novel format: a graphic novel. In his tech report, Dan York shares his thoughts on the U.S. Supreme Court decision dealing with content moderation and why it’s important for communicators, the release of WordPress 6.6, and the CrowdStrike outage.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

Mark Borkowski on the journalist-PR rift (LinkedIn)
‘So many damn follow-ups’ – journalist Jay Rayner slates ‘unfocused’ PR outreach
By the Numbers: What journalists really think of your pitches – PR Daily
Beyond the battlefield: rethinking the journalist-PR dynamic in modern media
2024 State of the Media Report | Cision
Key Crisis Communication Learnings from CrowdStrike Falcon Disruption
CrowdStrike backlash over $10 apology voucher for IT chaos
1 big thing: CrowdStrike strikes out on comms
Louis Corriero CrowdStrike Commentary on LinkedIn
Microsoft blames EU rules for allowing world’s biggest IT outage to happen
Could international standards have prevented the CrowdStrike incident?
CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage
From CrowdStrike: To Our Customers and Partners
Neville’s Post on CrowdStrike Crisis Lessons
2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360
Ogilvy launches service to deal with rogue influencers
Michelle Garrett (@prwritergal) on Rogue Influencers on Threads
Rob Cottingham (@robcottingham) on Rogue Influencers on Threads
The dark arts social media influencers are using to get your likes
Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse
Threads adds more fediverse features but its integration faces headwinds
Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter
Mastodon debuts feature highlighting journalists on the fediverse
Fediverse Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO)
NATO 2099 graphic novel imagines the future of the Alliance
NATO 2099
NATO 2099 Press Release

Links from Dan York’s Report:

US Supreme Court Upholds Right of Websites to Moderate Content – Internet Society
Global Tech Outage Demonstrates Need for Resiliency in Software Systems – Internet Society
WordPress 6.6
Falcon Content Update Remediation and Guidance Hub | CrowdStrike

The post FIR #420: How Well Did CrowdStrike Handle Its Crisis Communications? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The headline is a bit dramatic but it was hard to pass up the “Shadow” reference. In fact, Shadow AI refers to employees covertly using generative AI tools at work without IT, HR, and other departments knowing about it. A recent report found vthat 27.4% of the content employees fed into AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini was sensitive, a 10.7% increase from a year ago. The most sensitive data types shared with AI tools are customer support (16.3%), source code (12.7%), research and development material (10.8%), and unreleased marketing material (6.6%). HR and employee records represent 3.9% of sensitive information uploaded to AI chatbots, including confidential HR details, employee compensation, and medical issues. Neville and Shel examine the problem and the role internal communicators can play in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

WTF is Shadow AI?
Cyberhaven Report: Surge in ‘Shadow AI’ Accounts Poses Fresh Risks to Corporate Data
Shadow AI: how employees are leading the charge in AI adoption and putting company data at risk

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For years, Tractor Supply has touted its values and how firmly it has committed to them, as demonstrated by the fact that the Tennessee-based retailer recently set new targets, having already met the ones it established in 2018. But a vitriolic campaign by a right-wing podcaster led the company to summarily abandon those values, leading some employees to quit and diverse members of the company’s customer base to speak up. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss how firmly a company should stand up for what it believes, especially as political divides threaten organizations’ ability to do what’s best for the business.

Links from this episode:

Tractor Supply retailer drops diversity efforts, and employees quit
Black farmers’ group calls for Tractor Supply CEO’s resignation after DEI cuts
Lessons From Tractor Supply’s Sudden Reversal On Its Commitment To DEI
Tractor Supply’s Customers Cheer as It Dumps ESG, Says Survey
Tractor Supply may have thought it solved a big problem. Now it has a few more.
DEI Might Be Dying: John Deere and Microsoft Make Big Changes

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #418: These Are Our Rock-Solid Beliefs — Unless You Don’t Like Them appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Share of voice, share of search, share of conversation—brands are forever measuring their share in whatever space they want to dominate. Now that people are seeking answers from generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, brands will need to know whether they show up in the responses these models deliver. There is already a proposal to call this measurement “share of model.” In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel will explain what it means and how brands can get the same out of GenAI models that they have been getting out of Google (i.e., share of search) using SEO techniques.

Links from this episode:

‘Share of model’ is the new marketing measure for the AI era
Share of Model: A New Metric for Marketing Strategies
Understanding Share of Model: a vital metric for progressive marketers
Marketers Are Tracking a New Metric: Share of Model

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #417: As AI Adoption Grows, Is Share of Model the New Metric? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Maven is a new social network that eschews likes and follows — the features of other social networks that induce stress and anxiety in users who feel compelled to grow their numbers rather than have meaningful conversations. But if brands can’t build a follower base or measure engagement on their posts, is there a use case for establishing a presence on Maven? Neville and Shel look at the possibilities in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Maven
Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress
All you need to know about Maven, the social network with no likes and followers
Reviving Social Media Interest with Maven’s AI-Powered ‘Serendipity Network’
Anxiety-free social media? Maven thinks it has a formula for it

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #416: No Likes, No Follows, No Stress! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The UK Post Office scandal is a stark example of leadership and communication failures. When a faulty computer system was implemented, it erroneously flagged financial discrepancies, leading to the wrongful conviction of numerous subpostmasters for theft and false accounting. Instead of addressing the software’s errors, the Post Office’s crisis communication strategy focused on concealment and covering up misdeeds. This approach exacerbated the situation and severely damaged the organization’s reputation and trust. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss how transparency and accountability should have been the focus of leadership and how other companies’ crises could have been instructive for the Post Office’s leaders.

Links from this episode:

Opinion: Public relations lessons from the Post Office scandal
British Post Office scandal (Wikipedia)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #415: A Staggering Failure of Leadership and Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Organizations need to adopt policies and communication strategies based on the acknowledgment that remote/hybrid work is here to stay. The current state of play is rooted in an assumption that it’s temporary, creating tensions between workers and leaders and leaving pre-pandemic company cultures in shambles. In a survey conducted jointly by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and the USC Annenberg School of Communication, communicators shared their views about how remote/hybrid is going four years after it was thrust on organizations and its impact on the internal communication function. These results were presented on June 26 at a session of the IABC World Conference in Chicago. A press release is set for distribution the week of July 1, with survey results available soon after.

Links from this episode:

Check back for links after the survey has been released

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #414: Companies Treat Remote/Hybrid Like It’s Temporary. It’s Not. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We are told, “AI won’t take your job.” Instead, “Someone who knows how to use AI will take your job.”

Tell that to the scores of copywriters who have already lost their jobs to generative AI. With ChatGPT and its competitors in the frontier LLM space being used to write more than anything else, agencies and organizations are figuring out how to craft prompts that turn out decent copy. Some copywriters are figuring out how to stay relevant, though, including taking gigs improving the copy these AI tools churn out.

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine these trends and wonder what they mean for other communication jobs.

Links from this episode:

AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Future of Copywriting
The Impact of AI on Copywriting Jobs in the Next 5 Years
Facebook post on using an AI tool instead of a ghostwriter
Don’t Be Naive, AI Will Take Jobs, by David Armano
Marshall Goldsmith’s AI Bot

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #413: AI Is Coming for Copywriters appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

You work for one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. You’ve been told that taking a voluntary separation package from the company is in your best interest. When you agree (not that you had much choice), you’re asked to sign an agreement that not only won’t you disparage the company, but you’ll use the language provided to you to let your colleagues know why you’re leaving (nothing bad about the company) and how great your time there has been. With more than 330,000 employees in this company, won’t anybody think identical farewell messages from multiple employees find this a bit suspicious? That’s what happened at PwC, our lead topic in this monthly long-form FIR episode for June 2024.

Also in this episode: Megainfluencers charge as much as $1.5 million for a single post. Could you do better with a bunch of mico and nanoinfluencers? New studies are out from Deloitte and McKinsey on the state of AI in the workplace. AI avatars and coworkers are starting to show up in some companies as the tools to create them get easier to deploy. Publishers worldwide have been hit by Facebook deleting posts that have been inaccurately identified as spam. And your favorite brand that showed such commitment to that social cause a few years ago? They don’t care about being “woke” anymore.

Dan York is focused on policy in his Tech Report, looking at age verification laws that are popping up all over the place, Canada imposing a tax on streaming services (after a less-than-optimal experience with a link tax), and a U.S. Supreme Court Decision is due about content moderation.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

PwC asks for silence from departing staff in programme of UK job cuts
Neville Hobson on LinkedIn: PwC Forces People Out and Then Tells Them to Fib in Their Farewell Emails
The Long Tail of Social Media Influence
Deloitte Generative AI Survey find Adoption is Moving Fast, but Organizational Change is Key to Accelerate Scaling
State of Generative AI in the Enterprise 2024
The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value
Is It OK to Use AI Avatars in Employee Communication?
Asana introduces ‘AI teammates’ designed to work alongside human employees
Publishers around the world hit by Facebook labelling news as spam
Shel’s LinkedIn post about Facebook removing FIR updates
Your favorite brand no longer cares about being woke

Links from Dan York’s Report:

New York Passes Legislation to Ban Addictive Social Media Algorithms for Kids
Mississippi is the Latest State Sued by Tech Group over Age Verification on Websites
Canada Imposes 5% Tax on Streaming Services to Fund Local News and Diverse Content
Link Taxes Backfire: Canadian News Outlets Lose Out, Meta Unscathed
Can You Kick Trolls out of Your Online Forum? U.S. Supreme Court to Decide

The post FIR #412: Don’t Let the Door Hit You on Your Way Out appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Several studies seem to suggest that a small cadre of “supersharers” was responsible for spreading 80 percent of “fake news” on X (formerly Twitter) in 2020. Further, by removing these supersharers from the platforms they use to spread misinformation and disinformation, the number of lies appearing on the social network plummeted. What’s more, another study found that most people aren’t swayed by online misinformation and disinformation. As a result, all the panic about online misinformation and disinformation could be overblown.

Or not. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the data and what’s missing to reach a conclusion about communicators’ role in addressing what’s true and what’s not online.

Links from this episode:

The misinformation panic may be over
Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020
AI image misinformation has surged, Google researchers find
Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy
Are concerns about misinformation and disinformation online overblown?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #411: Are We Unnecessarily Panicked About Online Disinformation? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

PRovoke Media broke a story about at least 11 fake profiles of people who listed a PR recruitment firm as their employers. LinkedIn removed them as fakes—an action with which the business-centric social network is all too familiar. So far, no other media outlets seem interested in the story. Still, Neville and Shel wonder about the motivation behind the profiles — under other circumstances, fake profiles can easily be used for illicit purposes — and the amount of effort organizations will need to take to ensure profiles listing them as employers are legitimate.

Links from this episode:

LinkedIn Removes Fake Employee Profiles Tied To PR Recruitment Firm

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request the credentials in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #410: Who’s Behind All Those Fake LinkedIn Profiles? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Despite the excitement over the possibilities generative AI provides, it was easy to predict that doubters would insist it’s just a fad — the same naysaying we heard about email, the web, social media, podcasting, live streaming, and a host of other digital technologies. In this case, the reports conflict with other research showing rapid adoption, even if we’re not anywhere close to widespread consumer use of gen AI tools, which nobody expects after only 18 months since ChatGPT 3.5 was unveiled. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel compare the reports and look at the potential for communicators to fall behind with yet another important technology.

Links from this episode:

Is AI all a fad? A new report suggests very few people are using tools like ChatGPT and the hype is being misconstrued for actual public interest
What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news?
New AI tools much hyped but not much used, study says
Forward Thinking on the brave new world of generative AI with Ethan Mollick
A.I. Promised to Upend the 2024 Campaign. It Hasn’t Yet.
How Tech Journalists Are Fueling the AI Hype Machine
TikTok: AI fakes, abuse and misinformation pushed to young voters
Workers are secretly using AI on important tasks over fears it makes them look replaceable, new Microsoft and LinkedIn research finds

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #409: Just Another Fad appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

PwC has released a detailed report analyzing over half a billion job ads from 15 companies representing over 30 percent of global GDP. The goal: unearth empirical evidence of AI’s impact on jobs. The results are remarkable, if unsurprising. For example, the analysis found 4.8 times higher growth in labor productivity in AI-exposed sectors and 25 percent higher skills change in AI-exposed occupations. Jobs that require specialist AI skills are growing 3.5 times faster than all jobs. Neville and Shel report on highlights and discuss the multi-dimensional impact on communicators in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

AI Jobs Barometer
Ethan Mollick’s LinkedIn post on Google’s research on AI and worker productivity

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #108: AI’s Impact on Jobs, Quantified appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Links from this episode:

AI Jobs Barometer
Ethan Mollick’s LinkedIn post on Google’s research on AI and worker productivity

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #108: AI’s Impact on Jobs, Quantified appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

White-collar employees everywhere are embracing AI, even if they’re using their own accounts and not telling their colleagues or bosses. This widespread adoption of AI among workers is already creating challenges for managers, who traditionally evaluate their team members based on outputs that may now be coming in whole or in part from an AI. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore what this means for managers and the internal communicators who recognize them as a discrete audience.

Links from this episode:

AI is already changing management — companies must decide how
How AI is supercharging work right now
Thirst for AI knowledge drives growth in executive courses

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #407: AI Is Changing How Managers Manage appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Among a flood of AI announcements in the last week — including remarkable advances in ChatGPT — Google’s move to produce narrative results called “overviews” instead of web links caused the most consternation. Neville and Shel break down all the news and focus in on Google’s overviews in this long-form episode for May. Also in this episode, a Baidu executive wound up in hot water after remarks that offended employees and customers; Australian media manipulated a photo of a member of parliament, launching conversations about ethical use of AI when it comes to photos; Apple misfired on both an advertisement and its apology, but Bumble’s apology is a prime example of how to apologize for a miscalculation; and a lot of venture capital money is going to companies offering apps that provide people with AI companions. In his Tech Report, Dan York, looks at evolutions among social media alternatives, a renewed interest in online communities, and Google’s new AI-generated answers.

Links from this episode:

Introducing GPT-4o (YouTube video)
Hello GPT-4o (OpenAI announcement)
Introducing GPT-4o and more tools to ChatGPT free users
OpenAI debuts GPT-4o ‘omni’ model now powering ChatGPT
OpenAI’s latest chatbot jokes and pretends to blush
OpenAI debuts GPT-4o ‘omni’ model now powering ChatGPT
ChatGPT’s new voice welcomes interruptions
With OpenAI’s Release of GPT-4o, Is ChatGPT Plus Still Worth It?
Claude is now available in Europe
Amazon-backed Anthropic launches its Claude AI chatbot across Europe
Google IO
Google’s broken link to the web
Everything Goole Announced at IO 2024
Google rolls out AI Overviews in US with more countries coming soon
Google Takes the Next Step in Its A.I. Evolution
Google rolls out AI-generated, summarized search results in US
It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It
Google unleashes AI in search, raising hopes for better results and fears about less web traffic
Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down
Google’s New Search Engine Is Bad News for the Web Economy
Google is “reimagining” search in “the Gemini era” with AI Overviews
OpenAI’s Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded
Baidu executive tells staff: ‘I’m not your mum’
Chinese PR boss says sorry after glorifying work-till-you-drop culture
PR executive reportedly departs China’s Baidu after comments glorifying overwork draw backlash
PR executive at Chinese tech firm Baidu apologizes for comments seen as glorifying overwork
Meet the woman taking on AI, its ‘fake’ models and alarming beauty standards
Monique Zytnik’s LinkedIn post on AI manipulation of images
Apple’s ‘crush’ advert annoys people across the generations – that’s why it misfired
A rare misstep by Apple – “we missed the mark”
Why Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is so misguided
Apple apologizes for iPad “Crush” ad that “missed the mark”
Apple’s Crush ad (YouTube)
Bumble apologizes for its anti-celibacy ad fiasco
Artificial Intelligence ‘Friends’

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Threads tests Tweetdeck-like interface
Bluesky to add DMs, video support, and in-app custom feed curation
Bluesky product roadmap
Trunk Tidbits from the Mastodon Blog
X Pushes More Users to Communities
Reddit Reintroduces Its Awards System
Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress
Google’s broken link to the web
Google’s new “Web” search gives text-only results

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 17.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #406: Alas, SEO, We Knew You Well appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Just how much influence do online influencers wield? According to a Sprout Social report, nearly half of all consumers make purchases based on influencer recommendations, and influencers appear to nobody more than Gen Zers. Those born between 1997 and 2012 — the oldest of whom are now in their mid-20s with increasing buying power — are even partial to AI-generated influencers, casting doubt on the importance of authenticity (and even how authenticity is defined). Neville and Shel break down the report and explore what it means to marketers in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode

Influencer Marketing | Success
Gen Z mostly doesn’t care if influencers are actual humans, new study shows
Gen Z curious about brands utilizing AI influencers: Study
New Research Reveals Influencers Significantly Drive Purchasing Decisions – Company Announcement

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #405: Gen Z’s Connection with Influencers appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For several years, bolstered by research showing the public trusts business more than any other institution to address societal issues, companies have taken positions on everything from the environment to LGBTQ rights. As the U.S. population grew more polarized, though, those on the other side of a company’s position made things increasingly difficult for those organizations. Yet companies understand that the younger workers they want to attract put a high premium on working for purposeful organizations. Some companies are finding an alternate approach to fulfilling that need by turning to a not-so-new activity: company-sponsored volunteerism.

Links from this episode:

Seeking engagement and purpose, corporate employees turn to workplace volunteering
Corporate Advocacy in a Time of Social Outrage
Company Bosses Draw a Red Line on Office Activists
Unleashing the Good in Your Workforce: 10 Ways to Encourage Employee Volunteering
Examples of robust workplace volunteer programs in the UK.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #404: Purpose Without the Peril appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The author of an AI-focused newsletter suggests that companies need to establish discrete ethics policies for using Artificial Intelligence (AI). With all the codes of ethics out there designed to address anything and everything, is this really necessary? Neville and Shel don’t see eye to eye in April’s monthly long-form FIR episode. Also in episode 403, there’s a new beauty pageant — just for AI-generated women. While critics pile on with their disdain for this idea, the Dove brand is coming at AI-generated beauty differently, which you might expect if you’ve followed the Unilever company’s 20-year-old Real Beauty campaign. TikTok needs to find a non-Chinese buyer or be banned from app stores in the U.S. if the new law can survive the challenges it will surely face in terms of freedom of speech. Peter Shankman revived his free email service, Help A Reporter Out, under a new name. He had previously sold the service to what is now Cision, and Cision has essentially killed it. So Peter re-invented it as Help Every Reporter Out. Imagine an accountant who failed to use AI to review financials when the AI might have caught a fraudulent entry the accountant missed. Could that accountant be held liable for not using AI? It’s a question every profession should be pondering. And you may find yourself working alongside a synthetic employee before too long. In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at 20 years of editing Wikipedia, WordPress’s announcement of a new way to develop sites locally, Mastodon’s establishment of a U.S. nonprofit, the status of Threads’ integration with ActivityPub, and the Internet Society’s post on the internet and climate change.

Links from this episode:

Making the Case for an AI Marketing Ethics Policy
Technology Trust Ethics (PDF from Deloitte)
World’s First AI Pageant To Judge Winner On Beauty And Social Media Clout
Exclusive: World’s first beauty pageant for AI women is announced
Read comments on the AI Pageant on the Facebook House of Marketing & PR community of practice
Dove pledges to not use AI models in lieu of real women in its advertising
The TikTok bill passed. Here’s what PR pros need to know.
Andy Lambert on LinkedIn: I honestly didn’t think this would happen; The US TikTok ban has been passed
ByteDance would shut down TikTok in US rather than sell it, sources say
Congress passed a TikTok bill. Will the US really ban the app?
TikTok User Statistics 2024: Everything You Need To Know
Everything TikTok users need to know about a possible ban in the U.S.
19 Ways TikTok Changed America
LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-like video feed in its app
Help Every Reporter Out
Christopher Penn on LinkedIn: Using Google Gemini with Help Every Reporter Out (HERO)
It will soon be negligent not to use AI, Master of the Rolls predicts
Speech by the Master of the Rolls: AI – Transforming the work of lawyers and judges – Courts and Tribunals Judiciary
Building Your First Synthetic Employee
Synthetic Employees, your Ai colleague

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor
WordPress announces “Studio”, a new way to develop sites locally
Mastodon forms new U.S. non-profit
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse
Threads on Mastodon and The Bright Future of the Fediverse
Threads Has 150 Million Monthly Users
The Internet and Climate Change (from the Internet Society)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #403: Does Marketing Need a Separate Ethics Standard for AI? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It has been five years since Google Plus closed down. While it never amassed the number of users of some of its rivals, many called it home and were cast adrift after its demise, unable to find an alternative that offered the same features and vibe. One Google Plus user lamented the loss and reflected on the lessons learned from her attempts to find a new social network to call home. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss the fragmented nature of social networks and how the fediverse might one day resolve issues like those faced by refugees from Google Plus, Twitter, and other social networks that were no longer available or suited their needs.

Links from this episode:

Five years after the demise of Google+: reflections on social media
11 social media trends you need to know in 2024 (Sprout Social)
Americans’ Social Media Use (Pew Research Center)
How social media network fragmentation will impact your 2024 strategy (Sprout Social)
Fediverse (Wikipedia)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #402: Your Favorite Social Network Just Shut Down. Now What? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While public corporations employ (or contract with agencies that provide) media relations professionals, government agencies are likelier to have Public Information Officers (PIOs). Agencies, however, are not the only entities with PIOs, who differ from media relations practitioners by virtue of their engagement with multiple external stakeholder audiences, not just media. PIOs have plied their craft for NGOs, educational institutions, civic organizations, religious institutions, and even some big corporations.

Like those in media relations, PIOs are meant to be the first point of contact for a journalist seeking information, interviews, or answers from an organization. Journalists, however, are complaining that, over the last couple of decades, PIOs have been obstacles rather than conduits, hindering their ability to do their jobs instead of helping. It has gotten bad enough that the Society of Professional Journalists is leading a formal, orchestrated campaign to get PIOs to clean up their act; publications like the Columbia Journalism Review and organizations like the Poynter Institute are among many who have gotten onboard.

In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville look at the SPJ’s argument and discuss whether the PIO (and media relations) profession needs to change or if they’re just whining about organizations’ PR representatives just doing their jobs.

Links from this episode:

Public information officers (Society of Professional Journalists)
How to deal with obstructive public information officers? Challenge them. (Columbia Journalism Review)
SPJ research suggests that a surge in PIOs negatively impacts journalism (Poynter)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #401: The Battle Between PIOs and Journalists appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In a LinkedIn post, Techcrunch Sr. Enterprise Editor Frederic Lardinois lamented the ineffectiveness of an event-related press release he received. To date, 42 comments have agreed, many condemning the utter uselessness of press releases and the incompetence of those who produce them. Neville and Shel understand their frustration based on the poor quality of most press releases but defend the practice, when done right, for various reasons in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Frederic Lardinois on LinkedIn: I understand that PR is hard, but when you’re making an announcement (or maybe dozens, if you’re hosting a major event)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post Love Them Or Hate Them, Press Releases Can Still Deliver Value appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Google is ending third-party tracking cookies on Chrome, the last of the major browsers to take this privacy-enhancing action. Without these cookies, advertisers could see as much as a 70-percent decline in revenue from online ads. What are the alternatives? Neville and Shel break it all down in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Massive changes coming to Google Chrome threaten to reshape the modern internet
Google Chrome allows end to data tracking cookies
Google turns off cookies for 30 million Chrome users, and that’s just 1%
Four months in, here’s the rundown of Google’s Chrome cookie conundrum so far
Google starts work on the 2nd phase of Third-Party Cookie Deprecation in Chrome (YouTube)
Google to Fight Cookie Hijacking With Encryption Keys for Chrome Browser

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #399: No More Cookies For You appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making significant strides in various domains, and voice technology is no exception. OpenAI, a prominent player in the AI industry, has recently announced Voice Engine, a groundbreaking development in AI text-to-voice technology that will create natural-sounding voices based on a 15-second clip of your (or anybody’s) voice. OpenAI claims Voice Engine will deliver unparalleled realism and naturalness in computer-generated speech, surpassing the capabilities of existing solutions offered by companies like 11 Labs.

In this short midweek episode, we delve into OpenAI’s voice technology and explore its potential applications across different industries. We also discuss the ethical considerations that communicators need to keep in mind. We discuss the potential for misuse, such as the creation of convincing deepfakes and the spread of misinformation, and highlight the importance of responsible development and deployment of AI voice technology.

Links from this episode:

Voice Engine – Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices
OpenAI Can Re-Create Human Voices—but Won’t Release the Tech Yet
Hume AI
How to Clone Your Voice With 11 Labs

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #398: The AI Version of Your (or Anybody’s) Voice appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“Thought leadership” is a term that gets bandied about a lot. (A Google search for the term produced over 100 million results.) You have to question whether everything labeled thought leadership actually is, suggesting the quality of thought leadership leaves something to be desired. In fact, a recent study from Edelman and LinkedIn finds doubts about the quality of thought leadership but also reveals that when it’s done right, it can be huge dividends for organizations, from building trust to driving business. Neville and Shel share some of the study’s findings in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
7 takeaways from a study on B2B thought leadership; why it works or doesn’t
Never stand still: Keeping ahead of competitors through thought leadership
What Thought Leadership Is and What It Should Never Be
The value of corporate thought leadership
12 Companies That Lead the Way in Thought Leadership

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #397: Some Thought Leadership on Thought Leadership appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

AI-powered tools like Perplexity are replacing Google as the go-to search resource for a growing number of people. Even AI tools that are not focused on searching the web, like Microsoft’s Copilot and Claude’s pro version, provide links to resources in their results. Is it enough to dethrone Google, which has held sway over search for decades? Some say yes, while others question whether AI is best for the variety of different uses to which people put Google. Neville and Shel are not in complete agreement on this one.

Links from this episode:

Is the Era of Search Engines Coming to an End?
Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms
Is Google’s 20-year dominance of search in peril?
The Future of Online Search: A Closer Look at Perplexity AI (by Neville Hobson)
Perplexity is ready to take on Google
Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google
As AI Expands, Public Trust Seems To Be Falling
Financial Times tests an AI chatbot trained on decades of its own articles
Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #396: Will AI End Google’s Search Dominance? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We have expectations from our use of social media, but in two recent studies, there is evidence that the outcomes we expect aren’t necessarily what we get. Also in this episode, we look at Gini Dietrich’s latest update to her PESO model for using various media channels in integrated communication efforts, the schoolkids who are bringing back print (along with advertisers, marketers, and others), insights from the 2024 Ragan Communications Benchmark Report, the kerfuffle that ensued when Merriam-Webster posted on Instagram that it’s fine to end a sentence in a preposition, and Glassdoor’s exposure of user names without their consent. You’ll also hear a follow-up to our story a few weeks back about the resurgence of NFTs. In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at Threads’ entry into the fediverse and Reddit’s IPO, among other things.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

A Few Social Media Influencers Are Shaping AI
Report Finds No Correlation Between Social Media Engagement and Content Readership
The Newly Refreshed PESO Model™ Graphic and Process
The Newly Refreshed PESO Model™ Framework and Process (LinkedIn)
Gini Dietrich on LinkedIn: The Newly Refreshed PESO Model™ Framework and Process | 27 comments
A 2024 PESO Model™ Primer for Communicators
The Ultimate Guide to the PESO Model™
How print got cool again
The TikTok Influencer Who Is Making Newspapers Cool Again
A 23-year-old is single-handedly getting Gen Z hooked on newspapers and print media
Bobby Ross Jr. on X about print being cool again
The resurgence of print advertising
Magazine Resurgence
The Resurgence of Print Marketing: Unveiling Its Impact on Modern Campaigns
Executive Summary of Ragan’s 2024 Communications Benchmark Report
Merriam-Webster says you can end a sentence with a preposition. The internet goes off
A matter of trust: “Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent.”

Links from Dan York’s Report

Threads has entered the fediverse
Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media
Reddit IPO: The company is ready for more AI and advertising, says CEO

The post FIR #395: Extra! Extra! Read All About It! (In Print!) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Companies whose boards include a member with marketing experience deliver higher investor returns than those whose boards lack marketing expertise. That higher return increases among companies losing market share. Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) threaten the path to board membership by dramatically reducing the number of marketers? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks 95 percent of the work marketers do could become AI tasks. (Of course, the number of boards that take advantage of that marketing expertise — and improved returns — is very, very small.) Neville and Shel delve into these issues in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Board members with marketing experience improve shareholder returns by 3%
When and How Does Board-Level Marketing Experience Impact Firm Performance? (PDF)
Sam Altman Says AI Will Handle “95%” of Marketing Work Done by Agencies and Creatives
The Problem With AI Headlines
30 ChatGPT Prompts For Middle Managers In 2024

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #394: Marketers, Boards, and AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new type of influencer, known as “Jinfluencers,” is emerging in the media landscape. These influencers, who combine the roles of journalists and influencers, are gaining attention and challenging traditional media outlets. The media landscape has become fragmented, catering to niche interests and creating opportunities for trusted sources with loyal audiences. However, concerns have been raised about whether influencers can uphold journalistic standards. Neville and Shel explore the pros and cons of publishers embracing jinfluencers in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

As influencers replace journalists, a ‘jinfluencer’ is born

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #393: Will Jinfluencers Eclipse Traditional Journalism? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Unsavory and nefarious things happen in the Dark Social Media. But Dark Social is not exclusively a place for ne’er-do-wells, criminals, and extremists. Dark Social includes messaging apps, private discussion groups on popular public forums, and even email. An increasing share of conversations about brands is taking place on the Dark Web, according to new research. How can communicators monitor it and influence the conversation in their favor? Neville and Shel dive into Dark Social in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Why marketers can’t ignore dark social media
What Is Dark Social and How Can Marketers Use It?
Dark Social in 2024: Here’s Why (and How) You Should Track It
What is dark social media and how can communicators use it?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #392: Going Below the Surface into Dark Social Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Match Group wanted the world to know it had secured 1,000 business licenses from OpenAI. In a press release, the company claimed that giving employees access to the full suite of ChatGPT tools has not only improved productivity but also altered the culture. The company disclosed in the press release that it was written by ChatGPT and edited by the company’s communication professionals. Opinions about the propriety of using AI to craft press releases run the gamut. Neville and Shel consider this broad range of views in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode

Match Group Teams Up with OpenAI to Spark a Love Affair with Innovation
Match Group inks deal with OpenAI, says press release written by ChatGPT | TechCrunch
Master the Art of Writing Press Releases with ChatGPT
PR Newswire’s Definitive Guide to Crafting an Engaging Press Release

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #391: Match Group Swipes Right on AI-Generated Press Release appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Based on the plunge in the value of NFTs last year and the evaporation of business on NFT exchanges, it would be easy to think these tokens were just a passing fad, like Pet Rocks and Beanie Babies, especially given the resounding death knell produced by media. But NFTs never left, with companies like Starbucks and Nike continuing to invest in them, fashion companies continuing to use them, and artists continuing to offer their work via NFTs. The prices are rebounding, too — even among the silly pixelated avatars selling for millions of dollars. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore the resurgence of NFTs and what it means for communicators.

Links from this episode:

Starbucks Odyssey’s community lead sees NFTs as the best way to build brand loyalty
Bitcoin NFTs make comeback in weekly sales, flipping Ethereum
Someone Just Bought a CryptoPunks NFT for $16 Million in Ethereum
NFTs, a Punchline During Crypto Bust, Attempt a Comeback
Bitcoin NFTs help Magic Eden cross $100M in sales
Why Solana’s new token extensions are a ‘game-changer’ for NFTs
The Zen of NFTs: 33NFT’s 33 Day Drop Bridges Art and Mindfulness
NFT utility continues to captivate fashion and luxury brands — NFT Paris
Why NFTs Will Make a Comeback in 2024
Are NFTs dead? Not at Art Dubai
Reddit NFT Avatars Surge Past $1.5M in Daily Trades on Polygon
How the Blockchain is Reshaping Gaming, NFTs, e-Learning, and Trading

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #390: The Fall and Rise of NFTs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The list of CXO titles is proliferating. The addition of chief culture officers, chief AI officers, chief data officers, chief wellness officers, chief diversity officers, chief learning officers, chief experience officers…the list goes on…has increased the size of C-suites across industries. There is strong evidence that larger executive teams can be less efficient than smaller ones. They result in increased complexity and bureaucracy, communication and coordination challenges, reduced accountability, and greater opportunity for conflict. Neville and Shel discuss a BBC report on the issue and explore some alternatives to traditional structures in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

How the C-suite got so bloated
Guide to alternative management structures
The Ultimate Guide to DAOs (with 10 Examples)
How DAOS Are Changing Leadership
DAOs Would Flourish in Business with More Lawyer Participation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #389: Bloated C-Suites (and Some Alternatives) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

GenZers are recording their firings and layoffs, and the videos are going viral on TikTok and elsewhere. This is shining a harsh spotlight on organizations’ approach to letting people go, and it’s not pretty. What’s worse is how some companies plot to avoid being subjects of these videos. Also, in this episode:

Bluesky has taken its first big steps into the fediverse as two protocols battle it out for supremacy in the 21st century of the VHS-Betamax wars, but there may be alternatives in play.
Most big legacy news organizations are blocking the crawlers OpenAI sends out onto the web to collect content to train its models. This has implications for AI’s ability to deliver news in response to prompts, but it also has implications for journalism.
The ethics ratings of virtually every profession have fallen in the U.S., regardless of the industries in which these professionals might work. Does this put the onus for strengthening ethical behavior on professional associations, and what, exactly, can they do about it?
LinkedIn offers users an “Open to Work” badge to let others know you’re seeking new employment. Does it work, and are there other consequences for showing so blatantly that you’re looking for a job?
The Apple Vision Pro is out, and while marketers are exploring ways to deliver their messages in mixed-reality environments, a lot of people are sending their headsets back to Apple and looking for a refund.
In his Tech Report, Dan York shares his thoughts on the Bluesky announcement. He also discusses how Google is killing independent websites, Google’s $60-million payout to Reddit so it can train its models on Reddit’s content, Reddit’s plans to go public, and WhatsApp’s introduction of markdown-style formatting.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video tool
YouTube video featuring all of OpenAI’s Sora demo videos
Bluesky opens up federation, letting anyone run their own server | TechCrunch
Dave Lee (@davelee.bsky.social)
bluesky (@bluesky) on X
bluesky (@bluesky) on X
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media | TechCrunch
Can’t decide between Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr? Nootti’s new app lets you post to all three. | TechCrunch
Twitterrific’s team is back with Tapestry, an app for tracking social media, news, RSS and more
Gen Zers are recording themselves getting fired in growing TikTok trend
Ted Merz, CFA on LinkedIn: A friend told me a story about a guy in finance who recently got… | 167 comments (LinkedIn)
“Watch Me Get Fired” Videos Are Going Viral: 7 Tips for Employers to Navigate New Trend | JD Supra
A corporate employee sparked a workplace-etiquette debate after posting a 10-minute TikTok seemingly showing herself getting fired
Viral layoff videos reflect a sea change in work culture
Most big legacy news publishers across 10 countries are blocking OpenAI’s crawlers, report finds
How many news websites block AI crawlers?
Neville Hobson (@nevillehobson) on Threads
Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.
Which professions have the most honest people, poll results may surprise you
Disillusioned Americans are losing faith in almost every profession
How to improve ethics in the workplace ¦ cHRysos HR Solutions
What You Can Do to Improve Ethics at Your Company
Is Using LinkedIn’s ‘Open to Work’ Badge Helping or Hurting Your Job Search?
Apple Vision Pro and digital marketing—how brands can win on a new frontier
Why So Many People Are Returning the Apple Vision Pro
Apple Vision Pro vs. Meta Quest—how marketers view the competing headsets
Council Post: What Apple’s Vision Pro Means For AR And VR Advertising
Revolutionizing Media Marketing: The Impact of Apple Vision Pro
I recorded spatial videos to view on Vision Pro and Quest 3 and you can download them

Links from Dan York’s Report

How Google is killing independent sites like ours – HouseFresh
Google working on new ‘content-forward’ ways to surface more Reddit
Reddit files to list IPO on NYSE under the ticker RDDT
WhatsApp adds new text formatting options to improve messaging

The post FIR #388: Watch Me Get Fired appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A long list of A-list companies from across the spectrum of industries have embraced Artificial Intelligence in a way that is raising eyebrows: monitoring employee emails and posts to messaging and collaboration services like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Privacy experts are raising red flags over the trend. When CNBC reached out to these companies about how they’re using it, only two replied, suggesting the others would rather avoid public attention on disciplinary actions taken as a result of the AI’s surveillance capabilities. Meanwhile, research finds that employees who work for companies that engage in surveillance suffer mental wellness consequences. Neville and Shel discuss the trend in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
Companies use AI to monitor workers—45% of employees say it has a negative effect on their mental health
Is your company using AI to monitor you while you work?
Major companies are reportedly using this AI tool to track Slack and Teams messages from more than 3 million employees. Privacy experts are alarmed.
AI employee monitoring will only burn bridges in the workplace
How Do Employees Really Feel About Their Companies? (2015 Wall Street Journal article)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #387: Sentiment Analysis, Risk Mitigation, or Big Brother Surveillance? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In a LinkedIn post, internal communications thought leader Monique Zytnik wonders if there is not enough specificity in the “AI” label. “It’s like trying to have a conversation about different animals and only being able to use the word animal. One person is talking about lions and tigers 🦁and the other about cute chicks 🐣 but you’re only using the word animal,” she writes. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel tackle Monique’s question and explore some real-world business uses of AI that were included in a Microsoft article Monique shared in her post, examine the pending European AI regulations Monique mentioned, and look at some other recent AI developments.

Links from this episode:

Monique Zytnik’s LinkedIn Post
How the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act will affect professionals | Legal Insights Europe
EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence | Topics | European Parliament
AI: EU agrees landmark deal on regulation of artificial intelligence
Google Just Killed Bard and Replaced It With Gemini. It’s More Than Just a Name Change

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #386: Is AI Too Generic A Label? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing all manner of things. It should be no surprise, then, that it is bound to revolutionize online searching, which has been dominated by Google. A new search engine, Perplexity, threatens Google’s dominance by delivering answers in narrative form with links to the resources from which the narrative was derived in two forms: annotations without the text and tiles that appear above it. Nowhere in evidence are the paid (and often lower-quality) links that occupy most of the first search engine results page these days. But how often will you click one of those links if Perplexity gives you the information you need? Neville and Shel have both become devoted Perplexity users and discuss it in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Perplexity
Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. (The New York Times, paywalled)
Perplexity AI: Here are 10 things to know on search platform
The Future of Online Search: A Closer Look at Perplexity AI (Neville’s blog)
Why I Switched From Google Search to Perplexity (Shelly Palmer)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #385: Amazing Search Results That Drive Little Traffic appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

People are spending less time on the big open public social networks, opting instead for closed communities, hidden away from public scrutiny. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the phenomenon and share their thoughts on the challenges this presents to organizations trying to reach their stakeholders through social media.

Links from this episode:

The end of the social network (The Economist, paywalled)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #384: Social Networks Shift Away from the Public Commons appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Back in 2012, business executives thought the most important traits to exhibit when interacting with stakeholders included things like forcefulness, a blue-chip pedigree, and physical attractiveness. No more. A repeat of the study 10 years later found that inclusiveness, a “listen to learn” orientation, and authenticity are among the new traits for a strong executive presence. Neville and Shel discuss the evolution of executive presence and communicators’ role in helping their leaders adapt in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The New Rules of Executive Presence

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

The post FIR #383: Leadership Traits Aren’t What They Used To Be appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, claims it has successfully implanted a device in the brain of a human subject who is recovering well. These devices are designed to enable severely disabled individuals to manipulate computers with their minds, moving cursors, typing, clicking, and so on. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but, like AI, it seems destined to become just another fact of life. The implications for society are huge, and there are considerations for communicators. Neville and Shel speculate about the concept and what it means for business and society in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Neuralink
Elon Musk’s Neuralink implants brain tech in human patient for the first time
The Pros and Cons of Neuralink on Humans – Presence Secure
Neuralink: Beyond the Hype and Into the Science
The future of Neuralink: The boundless potential and the disadvantages of brain implants. – Cesova
Neuralink: Debating the pros and cons of future tech
The President’s Analyst (1967 film)
Interface, by Stephen Bury (1995 novel)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #382: Brain Implants Are a Thing Now appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It happens every January, as surely as the Tiffany ball will drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve: Edelman has released its annual Trust Barometer with a focus on the public’s views on innovation and the pace of change, along with the usual dimensions of trust the survey tracks every year. Neville and Shel examine some of the study’s core findings and reflect on their meaning for today’s communication professionals. Also in this episode, Neville and Shel discuss a court case in the U.K. in which an employee was told she could not work remotely and had to return to the office, along with other developments in the whole remote-hybrid-return-to-the-office battle; a global advertising conglomerate did something remarkably creative with synthetic media, demonstrating some of the positives that are possible with AI-generated hyperrealistic video; and a scandal 20 years in the making has erupted in the UK thanks to a four-part docudrama. In his tech report, Dan York reports on WhatsApp’s launch of voice updates, Threads’ plans for integration with the fediverse; generative AI developments, and a couple of milestone anniversaries.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Links from this episode:

2024 Edelman Trust Barometer
2024 Edelman Trust Barometer: Business has best chance to reverse widening gap between society, innovation
‘Trust’ Takes Another Hit
Trust Barometer: Innovation Fueling Divisiveness
Trust in media: UK drops to last place in Edelman survey of 28 nations
Employees are being influenced by Gen Z colleagues to reexamine the workplace, study finds
Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats
UK judge rules against FCA manager who wanted to work from home
L’Oréal CEO says remote staff have ‘no passion, no creativity’
The return-to-office wars are over — here’s who won
Home workers lack social skills, warns recruitment giant
WSJ News Exclusive | Remote Workers Bear the Brunt When Layoffs Hit
How Publicis used AI to create personalized videos for its 100,000 employees
Post Office IT scandal underlines need for a reset in corporate communications
British Post Office scandal (Wikipedia)
The power of Mr Bates vs The Post Office in bringing about justice
Fujitsu apologises for its part in UK Post Office scandal
Fujitsu may have to repay ‘fortune’ spent on Post Office scandal, Chalk says
‘The timing was impeccable’: why it took a TV series to bring the Post Office scandal to light
Mr Bates vs The Post Office: why docudramas have the power to inspire real social and political change

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

WhatsApp launches voice updates and polls for Channels
The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams
How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse
404 Media on AI-generated spam and why they Need Your Email Address
The LLM Misinformation Problem I Was Not Expecting | RIPE Labs
Jan 15 – Wikipedia’s 23rd anniversary – Wikipedia Day
Hello. The Apple Mac @ 40
Watch Steve Jobs reveal the very first Macintosh on this day in 1984 | Macworld

The post FIR #381: The State of Trust in 2024 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

When the word came down from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that investment companies could offer Bitcoin ETFs, Vanguard shrugged off the opportunity — but didn’t make an effort to let its investors know, leading to high volumes of online criticism and some investors closing their accounts. Neville and Shel dig into the communication failure in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Jody Lowe on LinkedIn asks communicators for their views of Vanguard’s handling of its Bitcoin spot ETF decision
Vanguard’s decision to shun bitcoin ETFs triggers backlash — with some customers moving to crypto-friendly competitors like Fidelity
Vanguard Shuns Bitcoin ETFs, Faces Social Media Backlash From Crypto Enthusiasts: ‘Have Fun Staying Poor’
One place you won’t find a bitcoin ETF: Jack Bogle’s Vanguard
Cathie Wood Criticizes Vanguard’s Stance on Bitcoin ETFs
Vanguard Blocks Spot Bitcoin ETF Trading, Prompting Some Investors to Close Accounts
US bitcoin ETFs see $4.6B in volume in first day of trading
What are spot bitcoin ETFs, and what’s the story behind the SEC’s approval of the story behind the SEC’s approval of these products? (Perplexity)
Bitcoin price falls 15% following launch of ETFs

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #380: Vanguard Leaves Investors Twisting in the Wind appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

When blogs first got hot, every December, it was the rare PR agency and independent communicator that didn’t feel compelled to post their predictions and assessments of trends for the new year. That practice has not slowed down. Rather than try to find and read through them all, just sit back and listen to this short mid-week episode of “For Immediate Release.” Neville and Shel will summarize key 2024 trends drawn from a number of sources.

Links from this episode:

2024 Forecast: Seven PR Trends That Will Matter This Year
PR Trends 2024 – The Hottest PR Trends in 2024
Council Post: Six Trends In Public Relations To Watch Out For In 2024
How Publicis Used AI to Create Personalized Videos for Its 100,000 Employees

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #379: Top Communication Trends for 2024 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Deepfakes! Volumes of disinformation generated at scale! Hallucinated information shared as fact! Inherent bias underlying official communication! The number of crises people can imagine AI creating continues to grow. But do AI’s abilities to aid in crisis communication outweigh these risks — especially if we find ways to minimize or eliminate the risks? Crisis expert Philippe Borremans has released a study, “Artificial Intelligence in Crisis Response: Perspectives from Communication Experts,” that begins to identify the multiple ways AI can do some heavy lifting during a crisis. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at the study results and discuss AI’s potential during a crisis.

Links from this episode:

Philippe Borremans’ LinkedIn post introducing the report
Download Philippe’s Report
Philippe on LinkedIn
RiskComms
The State of AI in PR 2023(MuckRack Study)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #378: AI for Crisis Communications appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Back on January 3, 2005, Neville and Shel released the first episode of “For Immediate Release.” That was several months before Apple introduced podcasts to iTunes, an event that is widely associated with the rise of podcasting’s popularity. Our best guess is that there were about 400 podcasts available at the time. FIR was the first to focus on PR and communication. Since then, we have produced over 1,200 episodes of the show, along with FIR Interviews and a couple of other spinoff shows.

While the newest episode is officially episode #377, we reset the episode numbering back in 2015 when we retired the show name, “The Hobson and Holtz Report,” at episode #824. Add them together, and this is actually our 1,201st episode. It also marks the beginning of our 20th year of podcasting.

In this anniversary episode, we briefly recount FIR’s beginnings but spend more time on podcasting’s status today and where it’s heading.

Links from this episode

For Immediate Release episode #1, January 3, 2005
After a Year of Pullback, Podcast Industry Hopes to Regroup In 2024 — With an AI Boost
9 Podcast Trends to Follow (2024-2026)
Perplexity’s Response to Neville’s Podcasting Prompt
“How to Do Everything with Podcasting,” Shel and Neville’s 2007 book on Amazon U.S.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #377: Two Decades of Podcasting appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years,” writes Anil Dash, “in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.”

That power, Dash believes, is a shift from big companies like Meta and Google back to individual users. Among the trends that have Dash believing this pivot is imminent are the nascent fediverse, the failure of X (formerly Twitter), court rulings that will open up alternative app stores, the rise of new networks (like Threads and Bluesky), and the rise of AI as a search alternative.

What could a reshaped internet look like, and how can businesses continue to take advantage of it when traditional means of customer connection become less and less effective? Neville and Shel consider the possibilities in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again
Internet and social media users in the world 2023 | Statista
Facts and Figures 2023 – Internet use

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #376: Is the Internet Pendulum Swinging Back to Weirdness? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Volumes have been written in the last year about how to apply ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to the practice of public relations and organizational communication. In this midweek episode, we let ChatGPT speak for itself about how it can enhance communicators’ work — and whether communicators are at risk of being replaced by AI.

Shel is solo in this episode, so he interviews ChatGPT to ask about its processes for press releases and other PR writing and editing, its non-media and non-writing capabilities, ethical considerations, crisis communication functionality, and much more. Hear ChatGPT in her own words articulate the best approaches professional communicators can take to optimizing their work with an AI collaborator.

Links from this episode:

Nomad podcast episode featuring an interview with ChatGPT

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat each Thursday at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request the credentials in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #375: ChatGPT Speaks for Itself About Its PR Capabilities appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

German publisher Alex Springer — which owns Politico, among other media properties — has inked a deal with OpenAI, which means ChatGPT will be able to include news in its responses to prompts. Debate over the pros and cons is robust, and there are implications for organizations trying to get their news into the mix. In the December long-form episode, Neville and Shel explore the ramifications and possible next steps. Also in the show:

Starbucks has suffered vandalism and other blowback based on disinformation shared online. Is the iconic coffee company handling it well?
The presidents of three top-tier universities gave cringeworthy testimony before a Congressional committee. Who counseled them before their appearances?
Researchers worked with generative AI tools to develop a strategic plan for introducing a new service to a metropolitan community. How did it go?
There will be a lot of elections across many countries in 2024. How will AI affect the outcomes?
People want media organizations to disclose when they use AI in the preparation of reports. How much does that affect their trust of the content?
In his tech report, Dan York dives deep into movements in the fediverse.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 29.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Links from this episode:

ChatGPT: News articles will be used to train AI models
OpenAI strikes ‘first of its kind’ deal with publisher Axel Springer to use its news content in ChatGPT
The New York Times’ first director of AI signals key role the technology will play in news production
OpenAI partners with major news publisher Axel Springer
Partnership with Axel Springer to deepen beneficial use of AI in journalism
Starbucks wages a battle against misinformation amid stock struggles
Starbucks CEO says ‘We stand for humanity,’ looks to separate company from Israel-Palestine statements by labor union
Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) on X
Crisis communicators face blowback after disastrous college hearing
Major Harvard Donor Len Blavatnik to Pause Donations to Harvard, Report Says
Can GenAI Do Strategy?
Prompt Architect – an update
2024 is world’s biggest election year ever – and AI experts say we’re not prepared
States are lagging in tackling political deepfakes, leaving potential threats unchecked heading into 2024
2024’s election cycle faces risk from deepfakes
FIR #352: AI and Elections – Should We Panic? – FIR Podcast Network

Links from Dan York’s Report

Enter the Fediverse
Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com
Bluesky posts are finally visible if you’re not logged in
Dan York (@danyork.bsky.social)
Wikipedia (@wikipedia@wikis.world)
Wikipedia Year in Review

The post FIR #374: Getting Your News from AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The speed with which media companies are announcing moves into the fediverse is accelerating, with Flipboard and Mozilla among the latest to signal their plans to support federation protocols. While most consumers are shrugging over the idea of decentralized social networks, the actual benefits will be evident once the protocols are implemented and people are able to take advantage of them. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel break down what the fediverse is, discuss the competing protocols, and explain what it means for users and social media managers.

Links from this episode:

Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse
Flipboard Begins to Federate
Can ActivityPub save the internet?
Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) on Threads
Tom Warren (@tomwarrenuk) on Threads
Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future
X’s rivals, from Threads to Bluesky, are seizing the moment to make decentralized social media the new norm and fill the Twitter vacuum
Tumblr’s ‘fediverse’ integration is still being worked on, says owner and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #373: Has the Fediverse Reached a Tipping Point? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The rise of “non-credible publications” and the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence have fueled a surge in disinformation attacks aimed at businesses. Knowing where to look for this potentially harmful content and how to prepare your organization to address it proactively can help your company avoid a lot of grief. Neville and Shel explore some recent research and outline recommendations for communicators in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Corporations Are Juicy Targets for Foreign Disinformation
China’s Spamouflage Disinformation Campaigns: A Threat to Private Business?
Comment: How green hushing is leaving companies vulnerable to deep fakes
Former Harvard disinformation scholar says she was pushed out of her job after college faced pressure from Facebook
Disinformation is part and parcel of social media’s business model, new research shows

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #372: More Disinformation Targets Companies appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

How much should a company’s employees know about AI? Some companies are now looking for employees who can bring a range of AI skills with them for virtually any job the company has to offer. In this short midweek episode, we discuss how companies like software firm Deel and furniture site ufurnish.com are using AI tools like ChatGPT to boost efficiency. For example, they use AI to write website copy, code, and even employee performance reviews. Experts say AI adoption is accelerating, with job posts that reference AI skills doubling over two years globally. However, they caution that AI still requires human supervision, and biases in the underlying data could lead to discrimination if not managed properly. AI is starting to transform workflows, but true transformation requires rethinking processes, not just optimizing what already exists. Are employees ready? Are companies helping them get ready?

Links from this episode:

What do employers expect staff to know about AI?
How Deel Uses Deel: The Story Behind Deel AI

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #371: Employee AI Competencies appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Most organizations have remained silent about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Leaders don’t see how any reference to the war is relevant to their companies’ operations, purpose, or values, and they can’t imagine any statement would satisfy everyone. Yet most employees want to hear from their leaders about the situation. Research found that trust in leadership rises considerably when they do speak up. But what employees want to hear from leaders, particularly their immediate managers, is not which side leaders are on. Neville and Shel discuss employees’ expectations in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Employee Confidence in Senior Leadership, Culture, and Engagement Soars When Leaders Communicate Effectively About the Middle East Conflict, New Research Finds
How leaders can respond to the crisis in Israel and the Middle East
Conference Board Report: As the Conflict Deepens, Communicators Remain Central to the Corporate Strategy
How Should You Be Supporting Your Staff Amid the Escalating Conflict in the Middle East?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #370: War, Managers, and Empathy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In Paris, commercial murals on walls are permitted only without logos or product images. Oatly, the non-dairy milk company, was entering the French market and planned an out-of-home (OOH) campaign that involved wall murals. Intent upon showing their product without violating the law, the company turned to a guerilla marketing effort that has gone viral. Neville and Shel explain in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode

How Oatly bent Paris ad rules | LinkedIn
Ad of the Day: Oatly hacks outdoor murals in forced perspective stunts
How Oatly Bent Paris Ad Rules with Their Hilariously Brilliant Viral Mural
Guerrilla Marketing Statistics 2023 – Emerging trends to help your brand

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #369: Outdoor Guerilla Marketing Campaign Goes Viral appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

PRSA has released a set of guidelines to govern the use of Artificial Intelligence by public relations professionals. The association has used its Code of Ethics as a roadmap. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore the recommendations — and the landscape of AI ethics guides for the PR profession.

Links from this episode

PRSA Releases Guidelines for AI Use
Promise and Pitfalls: The Ethical Use of AI for Public Relations Practitioners
PRSA Code of Ethics
IPRA | AI Guidelines

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #368: AI and PR Codes of Ethics appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Individual employees can reap a clear benefit from participating in online social networks. The companies for which they work also benefit from smarter employees who can reach out for help that can speed up the completion of projects. New research suggests that the company’s advantage goes deeper depending on how many employees participate robustly in these networks. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel share the research and discuss what businesses need to do to tap into that benefit.

Links from this episode

The Network Effect: Why Companies Should Care About Employees’ LinkedIn Connections

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 25.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #367: Innovation Thrives When Employees Engage in Professional Networks appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Pundits are proclaiming social media dead (or dying), and they have data to back up their beliefs. If it’s true, what does it mean — for society, for networking, and for business? Neville and Shel examine the evidence and trends and discuss the implications at the 7:03 mark of the monthly long-form episode for November. Also in this episode:

ChatGPT pauses new signups and other news (32:25)
A look at ChatGPT’s GPT Builder (38:57)
The state of news on social media (1:00:42)
Generative AI and journalism (1:12:54)
A high-profile executive’s fake Twitter accounts (1:17:07)
In his Tech Report, Dan York talks about Twitter’s woes, WhatsApp news, Automattic backing off Tumblr growth, and the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year (51:28)

Join our Discord! Email fircomments@gmail.com for an invite.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Links from this episode:

Is Social Media Dying? What That Could Mean for Marketers
First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Social media is doomed to die
Sam Altman (@sama) on X
OpenAI Status – Incident History
OpenAI pauses ChatGPT Plus sign-ups as capacity exceeded
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman departs the company and leaves its board after a board review found he wasn’t “consistently candid in his communications with the board”
Neville Hobson (@nevillehobson) on Threads
OpenAI has put ChatGPT Plus sign-ups on pause
Introducing GPTs
With GPT Builder you can create your own personalised ChatGPT
Neville Hobson on LinkedIn: With GPT Builder you can create your own personalised ChatGPT
Personalized A.I. Agents Are Here. Is the World Ready for Them?
The Best of OpenAI’s New GPTs, Ranked
The 23 Best GPTs of 2023 (Weekly Updates)
Is Threads winning the war with X?
Twitter’s decentralized offshoot Bluesky now has 2 million users
Social media traffic to top news sites craters
Instagram head says Threads is ‘not going to amplify news on the platform’
Blue-Checked, ‘Verified’ Users on X Produce 74 Percent of the Platform’s Most Viral False or Unsubstantiated Claims Relating to the Israel-Hamas War
The hate speech problem on X: a test of conscience for users and brands
Telegraph journalists told use of ChatGPT will result in same sanctions as plagiarism
ChatGPT six months on: Insight from 12 news leaders on generative AI and journalism
Global State of the Media Report from Cision (PDF)
HBO Chief Casey Bloys Concedes Fake Twitter Accounts Were a “Very Dumb Idea”
HBO Bosses Used ‘Secret’ Fake Accounts to Troll TV Critics
The Hand That Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped (Published 2007)

Links from Dan York’s Report

How 13 news publishers are using WhatsApp Channels
WhatsApp Privacy Checkup: Know the features and how to use it
WhatsApp releases new security features to protect users’ IP addresses
WhatsApp is adding a new way to voice chat with large groups
WhatsApp Adds New Audio Chat Option for Groups
Mark Zuckerberg Taps the Strengths of WhatsApp
Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp is the ‘next chapter’ for Meta and could become a bedrock for business messaging
Tumblr is betting big on going small
Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site
‘Hallucinate’ chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year
Hallucinate is Cambridge Dictionary AI-inspired word of 2023

The post FIR #366: DIY GPT appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

RyanAir has a reputation: For the lowest airfares in Europe, you’ll get where you’re going with the bare minimum of service. The airline’s social media accounts — notably TikTok — have done a brilliant, irreverent job of setting expectations for anyone planning to fly on RyanAir, which the social media manager’s skills were first-rate. When he left the company — reportedly because of its cultural shortcomings — he abided by the 90-day quiet period, then applied his social media skills to share his experience. His posts (not surprisingly) made headlines. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel break down what this might mean for RyanAir.

Links from this episode:

Ryanair social media manager resigns over company culture
Lessons from Ryanair on the art (and rules) of going gonzo on TikTok
Ryanair: How a budget airline took off on TikTok
Neville Hobson on LinkedIn: Ryanair’s Legendary Social Media Boss Quits, Makes Dramatic Exit
FIR Interview with Edelman’s Radina Russell

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #365: RyanAir’s Social Media Chief Doesn’t Leave Quietly appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Internal communicators have long known how important employees’ immediate supervisors are to the communication process. Based on the results of a new study, communicators need to shift their focus. Managers still need to serve as a conduit of information in both directions, but there’s an even more important role they play that communicators are best suited to help them learn and apply. Shel and Neville discuss the study and its implications for internal communications professionals in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

How leaders communicate with employees sets the tone for a respectful workplace culture

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, November 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #364: Managers’ Most Important Communication Role appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A review of the trove of articles about how brands have addressed the conflict in the Middle East suggests that there is no way to satisfy everybody, even for brands that opt to say nothing at all. Neville and Shel explore the peril of speaking out, even as expectations continue for companies and their CEOs to address societal issues. Also in this monthly long-form episode:

The closure of Pebble (formerly T2) has implications for the entire fractured social media ecosystem
A global PR body has ratified 10 principles for the ethical use of AI in PR and communications
LinkedIn influencers are becoming a force to be reckoned with
A poll from MIT explores key decision points for deploying AI in the enterprise
Silicon Valley appears to have given up on news in social networks

In his tech report, Dan York shares details about the flailing of Twitter, changes in Threads, WhatsApp channels, and Automattic’s purchase of Texts.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Links from this episode:

Artificial Intelligence in Public Relations and Communications: cases, reflections and predictions (Edited by Ana Adi)
Pebble, the Twitter alternative previously known as T2, is shutting down
Twitter clone Pebble is shutting down just five weeks after a rebrand
The Pebble falls: A ‘friendly’ Twitter replacement closes its doors
Pebble, the ‘Twitter killer’ social media app, meets an abrupt demise and shuts down after 10 months
The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
Bluesky for Journalists
X usage plummets in Musk’s first year as owner
Brands Play It Safe On Israel-Hamas Conflict
Brand Safety Controls Are Demonetizing Publishers’ Israel-Hamas Coverage
Israel-Hamas war fallout spilling into workplaces
McDonald’s Caught in Crossfire of Gaza Conflict
Restaurant Brand Whose Founders Fled Nazis Targeted Over Israel Ties
How brands are responding to the Israel-Gaza war | News | Campaign Asia
MediaDailyNews: The High Cost Of Misinformation For Brands, Publishers, Platforms
WGA West Apologizes for ‘Tremendous Pain’ Caused by Its Silence on Israel Attack
Global PR body ratifies 10 ICCO Warsaw Principles for ethical use of AI in public relations and communications
LinkedIn influencers are a thing now—and brands like Intel and Hootsuite are courting them
Influencers and CEOs take their brands to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is becoming the home of executive influencers
LinkedIn influencers face scrutiny over disclosure norms and legal compliance
Why is 20-year-old Linkedin now ‘cool? We’ve not changed, says editor-in-chief
Generative AI deployment: Strategies for smooth scaling

Links from Dan York’s Report:

X launches two new subscriptions to boost your replies
Twitter/X is now charging a $1 annual fee to let new accounts post
Elon’s X Rolls Out Voice and Video Calls
X to take on newswire services with new product, XWire
Threads is adding polls and GIFs as it continues to chase X
WhatsApp Channels: Everything You Need To Know
Streamlining Communications: Automattic Acquires Texts.com

The post FIR #363: Is the Israel-Hamas War a Communications No-Win Situation? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

T2 rebranded as Pebble because when tossed in water, pebbles create ripples (except in the song “Ripple,” in which “there is no pebble tossed, nor wind to blow”). The microblogging social network created by former Twitter staffers never created enough ripples to sustain it. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel lament Pebble’s passing, consider the reasons it is shutting down, and ponder what it means for the post-Twitter social media landscape.

Links from this episode:

Pebble, the Twitter alternative previously known as T2, is shutting down | TechCrunch
Pebble, a Twitter alternative that launched during the Musk era, is shutting down
Twitter alternative Pebble — previously known as T2 — announces shock closure
Twitter Alternative Pebble, Formerly T2, Is Shutting Down Due to Low Usage

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #362: Why Did Pebble Sink? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new study from Edelman polled hundreds of Fortune 500 Chief Communication Officers about the future of corporate communications. The results include some surprises, including the scope of the CCO’s role and what they’re spending their time on. The study also addresses the old canard about the communicator’s quest for a “seat at the table.” Neville and Shel dig into the report in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

2023 Future of Corporate Communications Study
Key learnings from Edelman’s Future of Corporate Communications Study – Ragan Communications
New report: Communication’s growing influence in the C-suite

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #361: Is There A Seat At The Table in Corporate Communication’s Future? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

At a school in southern England, a headmaster worked with an AI developer to create an AI “robot” named Abigail Bailey to serve as his “headteacher,” giving him advice and helping with planning. He has another AI “robot” named Jamie Rainer serving as his head of AI after advertising for a human to handle the job. Can the same principles be transferred to the CEO of an organization? Find out in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

Prep school appoints AI chatbot as its ‘principal headteacher’ (paywalled content)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #360: Your AI Chatbot Confidant appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

OpenAI is rolling out the ability to have a spoken conversation with ChatGPT. Meta is making it easy to converse with the likes of Tom Brady and Paris Hilton (who have lent their voices to the effort). An AI chatbot called PI was built to let you discuss personal matters. Companies are rolling out AI girlfriends. (That can’t end well.) It’s all part of what Casey Newton calls the “synthetic social network,” and it’s the topic of conversation between Neville and Shel in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

The synthetic social network is coming
Inflection AI, Startup From Ex-DeepMind Leaders, Launches Pi — A Chattier Chatbot
AI Chatbots—With Careful Guardrails—Can Help Treat Depression And Anxiety
Watch: AI girlfriends are here and they’re posing a threat to a generation of men | CNN Business
Artificial Intimacy: How Generative AI Can Now Create Your Dream Girlfriend
AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #359: Your New AI BFF appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

EY (formerly Ernst & Young), one of the “big four” accounting firms, has launched EY.ai, which is (according to a press release) “a unifying platform that brings together human capabilities and artificial intelligence (AI) to help clients transform their businesses through confident and responsible adoption of AI.” Separately, EY has introduced EYQ, an AI assistant for its 400,000 employees. Neville and Shel discuss the news — and how likely it is that EY’s competitors will follow — in this short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode

Matt Holder CIIC on LinkedIn: #ey #ai #employeeengagement #betterworkingworld
EY announces launch of artificial intelligence platform EY.ai following US$1.4b investment

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #358: EY Goes AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) has been widely available publicly for less than a year, but the public relations industry has moved quickly to assess its potential and begin the process of implementation. How is it going so far? A brief from the PR Academy looks at the state of AGI in PR. Also in this monthly long-form episode:

Acast has risen to the top of the business podcasting services heap
Despite political pressure, marketers continue to focus on diversity
Gen Z journalists are not like their predecessors. What are their values and priorities?
Deepfakes have been a concern for years. Deepfake scams have finally arrived.
Website owners are looking for ways to block AI web crawlers from vacuuming up their content.

In his tech report, Dan York looks at Mastodon 4.2 and the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.

Links from this episode

Briefing: AI in PR – PR Academy
CIPR’s AI reports
Acast Subsidiary Brand Podchaser Launches AI-powered Predictive Language Modeling
Slip.Stream inks music licensing partnership with podcast firm Acast – Music Business Worldwide
Warner Bros. Discovery Inks Podcast Deal With Acast for Multiple Brands (Exclusive)
Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
Marketers Maintain Focus on Diversity Despite Outside Pressures
The Legal Assault on Corporate Diversity Efforts Has Begun
HP Demands Ad Agencies Diversify Their Workforces
General Motors Vows to Send More Advertising Dollars to Black-Owned Media Companies
EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation
‘Challenge Accepted’: Mehdi Hasan Checks Elon Musk’s Wild Claim About Hate Speech
What PR pros should know about the newest generation of journalists – PR Daily
Deepfake scams have arrived: Fake videos spread on Facebook, TikTok and Youtube
FIR #133: Narcissism, Consumerism, and Activism – FIR Podcast Network (our first deepfake reference)
Why publishers are questioning the effectiveness of blocking AI web crawlers
Medium hopes to stop AI bot crawlers from scraping content

Links from Dan York’s report

Mastodon 4.2: A New Search Experience and More!
Mastodon’s latest release makes the open source Twitter alternative easier to use
Mastodon 4.2.0 – Post Toots Every Day
Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family
WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon
How to Connect Your WordPress Blog to the Fediverse
How to Follow WordPress Blogs From Anywhere on the Fediverse

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 30.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #357: A Status Report on AI and PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It’s easy to believe that the internet has already demonstrated its disruptive capabilities by pointing to everything from the transformation of the audience to publishers and the rise of disinformation. However disruptive these changes are, they are mainly uses of technology to do things we were already doing — just doing it more easily and efficiently. Real disruption — the invention of entirely new processes and approaches — could take years, decades, even centuries to manifest, according to Jeff Jarvis in his new book, “The Gutenberg Parentheses”. But we are starting to see early examples, and TikTok is the platform on which they are appearing. We’ll share these examples, and provide more insight into Jarvis’s book, in this short midweek episode.

Links from this report:

TikTok is the most popular news source for 12 to 15-year-olds, says Ofcom
The 23-Year-Old Getting Her Generation Hooked on … Newspapers?
This TikTok Influencer Is Translating the News for Gen Z – and They’re Listening
How TikTok is reshaping the American cookbook
This Woman Is Going Viral For Translating The News For Gen Z, And Millennials And Gen X’ers Love It Too
Gen Z loves the newspaper (on TikTok)

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 2 (but it will be the September episode).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #356: The Long Arc of Network Disruption appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short-form episode, we look at how hashtags have evolved over time and what’s next. Proposed by Chris Messina in 2007 for use on Twitter, hashtags were initially meant to categorize and connect conversations on social media platforms. However, in articles published on Medium in recent months, Messina explains his belief that hashtags have become a tool for spam and abuse, manipulated by algorithms to promote content. He suggests that it may be time for a change in how hashtags are used.

Neville outlines Messina’s six ideas and the potential future for a tool that has underpinned much utility and value for 16 years in how people connect topics, conversations, and other people on social networks, not only on Twitter.

Links from this report:

Chris Messina Wikipedia page
The problem with the problems with hashtags – August 13, 2023
Hashtags in the Sky – June 27, 2023

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 2 (but it will be the September episode).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The post FIR #355: The Future for Hashtags appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The court of law is not the only place where reputations must be defended. Increasingly, it’s also in the court of public opinion. In response, British law firm Schillings takes on the PR industry by setting up its own agency for clients seeking a different way to manage their reputation. In this short midweek episode, Neville solo (Shel is away) discusses what it means for the PR industry and considers the challenges and opportunities for both professions.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 2 (but it will be the September episode).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Links from this report:

Law firm Schillings takes on PR industry by setting up its own company (FT paywall)
British Libel Law Firm Schillings Sets Up PR Agency (PRovoke Media open access)

The post FIR #354: Law and PR Combine to Protect Reputations appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Generative Artificial Intelligence has a lot to offer bloggers, from easier research to better SEO. It can also let people crank out torrents of posts. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the benefits and risks AI presents to bloggers and whether blogs are more or less important in the AI era.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #353: Blogging in the AI Era appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Generative Artificial Intelligence is poised to become a wild card in upcoming elections, most notably the 2024 presidential election in the U.S. Its primary use will be the creation of disinformation. But can voters be swayed by this flood of new content that (let’s face it) joins the flood of disinformation people have been creating without AI? Neville and Shel look at multiple sides of the issue in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 2 (but it will be the September episode).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Link from this report:

How worried should you be about AI disrupting elections?

The post FIR #352: AI and Elections — Should We Panic? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Can there be too many podcasts? That's just one question a panel of podcast luminaries answered for The Hollywood Reporter. Neville and Shel highlight key comments and discuss the direction podcasting is taking and whether it remains relevant for organizational communicators in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #351: No Such Thing as Peak Podcast appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The spectacular success of the Barbie movie has led Mattel to plan more than a dozen movies based on its brands, including Hot Wheels, Barney, Polly Pocket, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, and American Girl -- not to mention a full-blown theme park (with a Barbie Beach, Hot Wheels rides, and a massive He-Man and the Masters of the Universe laser tag arena. Mattel's competitors are also making plans for movie versions of its products. Movies based on toys are nothing new (we've seen multiple Transformers movies, GI Joe movies, and a He-Man flick). But Barbie raised the bar. Will the inevitable flood of toy-branded movies rise to that level or just be the schlock we've come to expect? Neville and Shel dissect the possibilities in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #350: Success Breeds Imitation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

"Pity Marketing" is having a moment. Multiple reports have surfaced of people sharing tales of woe, mostly on the X (formerly Twitter) social network, leading many who see the posts to pull out their wallets. Could the same technique work for bigger brands? Also in the August long-form episode of "For Immediate Release":

The Associated Press has published its AI guidelines for journalists
Big advertisers are rushing to take advantage of AI
Gartner has pegged AI at the peak of inflated expectations
Motion identities are now a requirement for brands
Brands are starting to sound alike on social media

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on Twitch's plans to roll out blocking, new features on Threads, developments with Mastodon, a new fediverse report, and scientists scaling back their use of X (formerly Twitter).
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #349: Marketing’s Pity Party appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Prosecraft was a useful site for wanna-be fiction writers. It violated no copyright rules and did nothing that should have been upsetting to authors whose works were included in the site's library. For several years, nobody gave it a second thought. But as AI has raised worries among creatives, some authors jerked their knees and demanded their works be removed. The loss of Prosecraft is bad enough. The chilling effect could be worse. Neville and Shel discuss the potential consequences of AI panic in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #348: The Consequences of AI Panic appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney made headlines when they bought the Wrexham Association Football Club. Since then they have poured cash into the team and applied business savvy to build a global fan base for the obscure Welsh club. Among the tactics employed was a digital media strategy focused on entertaining storytelling centered on team members and coaches. Can that approach work for other sports teams or businesses that don't have the star power of a Ryan Reynolds to draw attention? Neville and Shel discuss the story in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #347: Digital Media, Star Power, and Wrexham appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In 1995, MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte predicted "The Daily Me," a digital newspaper that would feature articles that aligned with the interests of each individual reader, leaving out news a well-rounded person might need to know. Now, courtesy of AI, a company is planning to develop a daily 30-minute newscast with AI-generated anchors sharing coverage of stories based on each viewer's interests. The concept can be useful where audience segmentation is important but also raises some serious questions, which Neville and Shel ponder in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #346: The Daily Me, Video Version appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Longtime FIR listener (and one-time contributor) Bernie Goldbach asked Neville and Shel how they find quality conversations. That opened up a discussion about sources of information for staying current on communication and technology trends and how those habits have changed over the years.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #345: Sources of Information appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

AI rewrote 50 of the best-known brand slogans, and survey respondents preferred the AI version 48 percent of the time -- even Apple's "Think Different" slogan fell to the AI alternative. Also in this AI-heavy monthly long-form episode:

Newsrooms are adopting standards for using AI
Google is pitching an AI news-writing tool to major media outlets
How should newsrooms be thinking about AI?
A study of more than 5,000 ChatGPT conversations reveals how people are using the chatbot
Maybe AI isn't coming for everyone's job after all
An NFT platform has launched a limited-edition print magazine
What's behind Twitter's poop emoji PR?
In his tech report, Dan York introduces himself to Threads, Mastodon analytics are now available, Vox is ending its CMS, a look at Llam2, worries about AI cluttering the web with useless content, and a new podcast to try.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #344: Sloganeering with AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new activist tactic is targeting individual businesses, concentrating all of the movement's energy and resources on forcing that one business to bend to the group's will. These instances are usually based on business practices that reflect the company's values, such as support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. How the business responds has a direct impact on the experiences of employees who interact with customers on a day-to-day basis, especially in retail and other customer-facing sectors. How communicators can help both the company and employees weather these storms is the focus of this short midweek FIR episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #343: Employees Caught in Activism’s Crossfire appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Meta's Threads, a new micro-blogging platform, is now available to anyone with an Instagram account, and there has been no shortage of people willing to give it a try. Only about two weeks old, Threads is already the subject of speculation about its future. In the meantime, brands and journalists are jumping onto the platform. Should your company or brand be there, too? Neville and Shel share their thoughts in this short midweek "For Immediate Release" episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #342: Pulling at Threads’ Seams appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the world of influencers, brands pay for influencers to say what the brands want them to say. In the case of Shein, what they wanted them to say appears to be at odds with the facts. In this case, the blowback targeted the influencers more than the brand, calling attention to the gloss the company wanted to put on its tarnished reputation. Will every follower of an influencer know every time they're hearing a manipulated message? We explore the Shein story and its implications in this short mid-week episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #341: Influencers Amuck appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

All the signs are there, according to observers. As one tech publication put it, "Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an 'AI editor' expects 'output of 200 to 250 articles per week.' ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with 'AI-generated junk.' Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and 'AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.'"

Is the worst-case scenario inevitable? Neville and Shel explore the possibilities in this short mid-week episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #340: Will AI Destroy the Web? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The hype around the metaverse rises and falls, but Second Life is 20 years old and continues to draw users and make money. Neville and Shel explore the reasons Second Life enjoys its ongoing modest success in the June monthly long-form episode of "For Immediate Release." Also in this episode:

The state of digital news raises concerns for the public's news literacy, how companies can get their news into the hands of stakeholders, and what "news" means to people today.
The political assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is producing polarization among employees and, in some companies, questionable decisions by leaders.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have an impact on every department in an organization. That makes it a key focus area for Chief People Officers.
The merger of the PGA and the LIV golf tour caught many players by surprise. They should have been a top priority.
The metaverse, contrary to popular opinion, is not dying while AI rises. In fact, AI is breathing new life into the metaverse.
In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at the Jetpack AI Assistant for WordPress users, why thousands of subreddits are going dark on Reddit, and why we should pay attention to Canada's C-18 Online News Act.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #339: Still Virtual After All These Years appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Public relations, both in academia and in practical application, has always been seen as a business practice. A new study produced by researchers from the Missouri School of Journalism and Penn State argues that community activism employs PR strategies and tactics. By recognizing community activism as a form of public relations, traditional PR professionals can incorporate some of the things it does better, including listening and taking a long view. Neville and Shel dive into the research in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #338: Adding Activism to PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new survey finds that 90 percent of Americans don't trust influencers. What does this mean for the multi-million influencer industry? And where can brands turn now, since the old celebrity approach also doesn't carry much weight with consumers? Neville and Shel fill you in during this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #337: Is It All Over for Influencers? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Multiple studies confirm that Americans (like most of the rest of the world) have lost their trust in the media. But people get their news and information from somewhere — or, as a Gallup/Knight Foundation study finds — someone. “Public individuals” attract followers who turn to them for news and information based on a number of qualities, ranging from likability to subject matter expertise. Many of these public individuals host shows on mainstream media outlets. What does this mean for PR professionals looking for the right outlet to pitch? Neville and Shel break down the study in this short midweek FIR episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 18.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Following Public Individuals for News in 7 Charts
From Institutions to Individuals: How Americans are Now Looking to Public Figures for News and Information
Turning to the Names We Know: Show Hosts and Journalists Top Individuals Followed for News
Why Do Americans Turn to Individuals for News and Information? Personality, Trust, Perspectives Outside the Mainstream
How Brits get their news

The post FIR #336: Trust, Likability, and Confirmation Bias appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

BBC Verify is the venerable broadcaster’s latest effort to combat disinformation. With a staff of 60 journalists, Verify will provide details about the BBC’s own reporting and debunk disinformation it finds online (as it has already done with a photo purportedly of a Pentagon bombing that was, in fact, AI-generated). Are there lessons in the BBC’s approach that communicators can apply to their companies’ online activities? And will other media outlets follow suit, even as they slash budgets and newsrooms?

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 18.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

No, a viral photo does not show an explosion near the Pentagon
BBC News puts transparency at its heart with BBC Verify
Explaining the ‘how’ – the launch of BBC Verify
How BBC Verify found and analysed Russia’s defences
Marianna Spring on Twitter
Satellite analysis by BBC Verify has uncovered some of Russia’s extensive defences as it prepares for a major Ukrainian counter-attack.
BBC launches new 60-journalist team to counteract fake news

The post FIR #335: BBC Fires a Shot in the Disinformation War appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The number of change initiatives companies impose upon employees has skyrocketed from two per year in 2016 to 10 in 2022. That has left employees with a serious case of change fatigue, increasing the likelihood that these initiatives will fail. Shel and Neville look at data from Gartner and advice on how to better handle the surge of change programs, many of which companies are undertaking in response to challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Also in this episode:

Web3 has never captured the public’s imagination. The lingo of Web3 may be partly to blame.
Over half of public relations practitioners lack confidence in their data literacy skills. That’s a problem when the simple but useless AVE metric is no longer the communicator’s fall-back metric.
The pandemic influenced the ways companies communicated with employees, leading to a shift in the elements of communication that lift organizations’ internal brands.
A quarter of Twitter users don’t expect they’ll be using the platform within a year.
The uproar over perceived or real copyright violations inherent in the Large Language Models used by generative AI tools is poised to find its way into laws and regulations.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 18.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Web3 Needs Better Words
Over half of PRs lack confidence in their data literacy skills
How COVID-19 Influenced Internal Communication
Study Shows that 25% of Twitter Users Don’t Expect to Still be Using Twitter in 12 Months
Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives
Why Harry Potter is the copyright timebomb under generative AI models

Links from Dan York’s Report

AI in your pocket: ChatGPT officially comes to iPhone with new app
Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles
G7 Hiroshima Leaders’ Communiqué | The White House
SCOTUS declines to address Section 230 protections and shields Twitter from liability for terror-related content
TikTok Users Sue Montana, Calling State Ban Unconstitutional

The post FIR #334: Employees Really Do Hate Change appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

“Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the internet,” wrote journalist and author Evan Osnos. That has proven to be true time and again. It undoubtedly will be true of using generative AI in marketing and communication. But will it be true every time we use AI? Even when we’re just using it as a tool, like a calculator? The challenge of establishing guidelines for disclosing the use of AI is the subject of this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

How media agencies are tightening brand safety and transparency measures as influencers tap AI

The post FIR #333: When to Disclose That You’ve Used AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The volunteer editors responsible for Wikipedia content are divided over the role ChatGPT and other generative AI writing tools can or should play in the creation of articles for the online encyclopedia. Their struggle is most likely being repeated in businesses around the globe.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

AI Is Tearing Wikipedia Apart

The post FIR #332: Wikipedia Editors in Tug-of-War Over AI-Authored Articles appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The recent releases of Agent-GPT, AutoGPT, and BabyGPT have taken ChatGPT to a new level. Rather than simply responding to user prompts, these tools identify a series of tasks that must be completed to achieve a goal and then completes them autonomously. It’s still early days, but the potential is huge. So is the growing risk of bad actors using these tools for nefarious purposes. We discuss these recent developments in this short mid-week episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Hype grows over “autonomous” AI agents that loop GPT-4 outputs
AutoGPT: How To Make AI Do Everything For You
What is Auto-GPT And Is Now The Time To Freak Out About AI?
What is Auto-GPT and why does it matter?
Auto-GPT and BabyAGI: How ‘autonomous agents’ are bringing generative AI to the masses
A profile of and interview with deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who shares why he now thinks neural networks represent a “better form of intelligence”
AI ‘godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google
There’s an AI for That

The post FIR #331: AI Completes Tasks and Raises Fears appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

If your generative AI prompts aren’t producing exactly what you want, there’s help — for a fee. You can buy pre-written prompts from prompt marketplaces like PromptBase and Prompt Attack or hire a prompt engineer through services like Fiverr. We dig into this newly-emergent cottage industry in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Inside the Lucrative New Business of Selling AI Prompts
How to Make Money Selling Prompts for AI Art Generators – Metaroids
How to Buy and Sell AI Prompts
The wild world of PromptBase, the eBay for generative AI prompts
Best Marketplaces to Make Money by Selling Your AI Prompts
The 7 Best Ai Prompt Marketplaces for selling Midjourney or ChatGPT prompts
Midjourney Make Money With AI Selling Prompts (Udemy course)

The post FIR #330: Help Wanted. Prompt Engineer. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Imagine posting to your favorite social network, the one you want your brand to be associated with, and having it appear for all of your followers in the social networks of their choice. It could be possible if the ActivityPub standard continues to spread the way it has been lately. And that could be an important evolution given the meltdown that Twitter is undergoing. Those are just two of the stories in the April long-form edition of the “For Immediate Release” podcast. Also in this episode…

The “have a go” era of podcasting could be coming to an end, depending on how you interpret the data
LinkedIn is going through some changes that not everyone likes
A coalition of 500-plus ad agencies is taking a stand against fossil fuels
A song reportedly produced using AI imitated the voices of some A-list artists, and the music industry isn’t happy
Dan York reports on the demise of Spotify Live, some Twitter news, Wikipedia’s one-minute video, and more

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

No Brainer – An AI Podcast for Marketers
Podcasts: Is the ‘have-a-go’ podcaster era coming to an end?
Podcasts as a Source of News and Information
41+ Podcast Statistics For 2023 (Listeners & Market Size)
Can ActivityPub save the internet?
Making ActivityPub Your Social Media Hub for Mastodon and Other Decentralized Services
Automattic acquires ActivityPub Plugin
Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps
Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down Mastodon is just the start—here comes the Fediverse
A Creator of ActivityPub on What’s Next for the Fediverse
How LinkedIn is changing and why some are not happy
21 LinkedIn Best Practices for Business Professionals to Follow for Success
Aht, Aht—Don’t Do That! These Are The LinkedIn Etiquette Tips You Need For 2023
Six kinds of LinkedIn messages you should never send
The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social
Is Twitter finally dying?
Twitter begins removing blue checkmarks from all legacy users
Neville Hobson on Twitter
In a campaign called #BlockTheBlue, some Twitter users, including popular ones like @dril, are asking people to block anyone who subscribes to Twitter Blue
About profile labels and checkmarks on Twitter
More newsrooms bail on Twitter as Musk meddles with account labels
NYT editor says company won’t leave Twitter
WBUR backs NPR by leaving Twitter after Musk’s ‘state-affiliated’ labeling
CBC ‘pausing’ Twitter after ‘government-funded media’ label
Sweden’s Public Radio Ceases Activities on Twitter
What Is Hive Social? The Twitter Alternative You Should Try
Why can’t Twitter and TikTok be easily replaced? Something called ‘network effects’
Why Are So Many Twitter Alternatives Struggling to Succeed?
Here’s a first look at Bluesky, the decentralized social network from Twitter’s cofounder
Post, a publisher-focused Twitter alternative, launches to public
Substack launches its Twitter-like Notes just days after Twitter throttled Substack links
A new Twitter alternative is trying to lure users about to lose their old checkmark
Over 500 agencies have now pledged to cut ties with world’s biggest polluters
AI song sounds an alarm in music
An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World
The Music Business Will Never Learn

Links from Dan York’s Report

Another social audio company bites the dust – Spotify shuts down Spotify Live
The legacy blue checkmarks are finally going… unless of course Elon pays for them to keep the illusion that celebrities pay for Twitter Blue
Twitter shuts down the automation that enabled the National Weather Service and many other public service accounts
Wikimedia has a sound logo
Wikipedia’s one-minute videos
Microsoft drops Twitter from its advertising platform

The post FIR #329: Post Once, Socialize Everywhere appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Traditional wallets are stuffed full of cash, credit cards, debit cards, and identification. Crypto wallets have only held public and private keys needed to trade cryptocurrencies. Users are increasingly filling their crypto wallets with NFTs and other digital assets. It won’t be long before digital wallets hold crypto, NFTs, digital assets, and your credit cards and identity verification. The only physical wallets you’ll see will be in museums. Why communicators and their clients/employers should care is the subject of this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Stop Calling it a Wallet
The Crypto Wallet: Unlocking Digital Identity
Microsoft to integrate crypto wallet into browser
Elizabeth Warren is pushing the Senate to ban your crypto wallet
The Wallet Wars Are Not About Money, They Are About Identity
Over a third of UK’s online transactions used digital wallets | Computer Weekly
Playing With Crypto? You’ll Need a Wallet (or Several)

The post FIR #328: What’s In Your Crypto Wallet? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

During the pandemic-related lockdown, with everyone but essential workers working from home, companies had little choice but to inform employees that their employment was being terminated using Zoom, Teams, or other digital channels. Now that people are back in the office, full-time or under a hybrid model, many companies have retained the practice. Some have asked all employees — even those working in the office — to stay home during a layoff so those who are being terminated can get the news remotely. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss whether this approach is here for good and, if it is, whether there are implications for companies engaging in the practice.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Layoffs via Zoom, once novel, will outlast the pandemic
Work From the Office, Get Laid Off at Home
Layoffs over Zoom? McDonald’s takes a big risk with its reorganization

The post FIR #327: Laid Off In The Comfort Of Your Own Home appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Can the metaverse survive? Is this the Metaverse winter? Is the metaverse dead? Headlines like these appear across media as attention — and investment dollars — shift from the metaverse to Artificial Intelligence. Is the metaverse really destined for the trash heap of tech history? Neville and Shel take issue with all the doom and gloom in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

The Metaverse Is Quickly Turning Into the Meh-taverse
Is The Death Of The Metaverse Exaggerated?
Rumors of the metaverse’s death have been greatly exaggerated
No, the metaverse is not dead – it’s inevitable
‘The metaverse is dead; long live the metaverse’: emerging tech’s table of elements
Three challenges the metaverse will need to overcome
Metaverse: ‘Assuming you need a VR headset is just repeating Meta’s assumptions,’ author says
How Epic is “doubling down” on its vision for the metaverse
The Internet Is Ruined. The Metaverse Can Still Be Saved
Over 7,000 Players Successfully Converged in Yuga Labs’ Otherside Metaverse ‘Second Trip’
Decentraland Metaverse Fashion Week attendance plummets 76% amid ‘worrisome’ trading volume
The emergent industrial metaverse
Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech. Metaverse: 10 years to get to the Plateau
What is New in the 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies
FIR #273: What Is The Metaverse? It’s A Network – FIR Podcast Network

The post FIR #326: The (Metaverse) Winter of Our Discontent appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Coca-Cola is one of the first companies to demonstrate a big commitment to generative AI, launching a contest that requires contestants to use both of OpenAI’s public tools: ChatGPT and DALL-E 2. Neville and Shel discuss the contest and some other brand experiments with generative AI tools in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Coca-Cola invites fans to create AI art with its iconic imagery
Coca-Cola brings Old Masters to life with AI
Coke launches ‘Create Real Magic’ AI art contest using GPT-4 and Dall-E 2
Genius Brands to Release First AI Generated Children’s Series Utilizing Artificial Intelligence Tools, Including OpenAI’s
Nestlé Brand Is Latest to Venture Into Brave New World of AI Art Direction

The post FIR #325: Making AI-Generated Brand Magic appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Some PR pros think you should withhold original research, infographics, and other original content from a pitch to a journalist. Others think you can share it, but only under some circumstances. Still others think it best to give reporters what you have. Neville and Shel explore the various recommendations in this short, mid-week episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Link from this report:

Should PR Pros Include Original Research In Pitches? 15 Comms Leaders Weigh In

The post FIR #324: Pitching Original Content appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

All generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) works fundamentally the same: AI neural networks learn from large training sets, gleaning patterns from the contents of those training sets in order to create original content based on their understanding of those patterns. When the companies behind those AI tools use content available on the web for training, do they need to ask permission from the content creators? You and I don’t. We can look at as much as we like and learn as much as we can. Is it the same for AI training sets or is it something else altogether, more akin to Napster using existing music without compensating the artists? Neville and Shel are on opposite sides of the debate. Also in this episode:

The University of Iowa’s school of business has introduced a program to teach students how to tell stories. Storytelling is a crucial business skill that few businesses value. Communicators can help change that.
A BBC football analyst — a contractor, not an employee — made some partisan remarks on a social network and was punished for violating standards by which employees are required to abide. It reopened a long-dormant discussion about social media policies.
Did Silicon Valley Bank communicate too little, contributing to its failure? Or did it communicate too much? Is it possible the bank did both?
ChatGPT and Midjourney have both been upgraded and the updates are substantial. Midjourney images are scarily photo-realistic and ChatGPT can now create a web page — Javascript included — based on a sketch of a wireframe. And that just scratches the surface of these updates.
Microsoft has introduced Co-Pilot, the tool that will let users of its software tap into the power of Artificial Intelligence.

Dan York shares news from WordPress, WhatsApp, the world of ChatBots, and more in his Tech Report.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 22.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

U of Iowa business school students build storytelling skills
Storytelling in Business: How to Create Engaging Stories | Darden Ideas to Action
Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership
Business Storytelling Coaching and Consulting | Leadership Story Lab
The Moth
The Moth Podcast
Ros Atkins on… Gary Lineker and the BBC
Gary Lineker to return to Match of the Day as BBC announces review of social media rules – BBC News
BBC to review social media rules for all staff in bid to resolve Gary Lineker row
BBC to review social media guidelines after reinstating Gary Lineker – SportsPro
Gary Lineker: BBC to review social media guidelines
Guidance: Social media (from the BBC)
Lineker-BBC row: survey shows how different outlets approach their staff’s social media presence
Communication Choices Played a Major Role in Sinking Silicon Valley Bank — CommPRO
SVB collapse was driven by ‘the first Twitter-fueled bank run’ | CNN Business
A battle royal is brewing over copyright and AI
Devalue or Defend: Generative AI, Artists, and the Law
AI and Image Generation (Everything is a Remix Part 4)
Rob Wolf on LinkedIn: #midjourney #ai
AI-imager Midjourney v5 stuns with photorealistic images—and 5-fingered hands
What to Know About ChatGPT-4 and How to Use It Right Now
The makers of ChatGPT just released a new AI that can build websites, among other things
GPT-4 Developer Livestream
5 jaw-dropping things GPT-4 can do that ChatGPT couldn’t | CNN Business
Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work – The Official Microsoft Blog
Microsoft details how AI will change its Office apps
Microsoft announces Copilot: the AI-powered future of Office documents
Microsoft adds AI tools to office apps like Outlook, Word
Clippy evolved: New ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot’ uses AI for text creation | AppleInsider
WalkingCat Twitter Thread with Copilot Video

Links from Dan York’s Report

WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse | TechCrunch
TechScape: Finally, the UK’s online safety bill gets its day in parliament – here’s what you need to know | Social media | The Guardian
WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief | WhatsApp | The Guardian
Review of the Computer Misuse Act 1990: consultation and response to call for information
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez Contradicts His Own Bill and Department Officials in Effort to Defend Bill C-18
Just Because ChatBots Can’t Think Doesn’t Mean They Can’t Lie | The Nation
Yes, Section 230 Should Protect ChatGPT And Other Generative AI Tools | Techdirt

The post FIR #323: Outright Theft Or Fair Use? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Network outages. Fleeing advertisers. Disaffected staff. News reports of abusive behavior. Rents in arrears. And news feeds are increasingly swamped with posts from trolls and bots. Things are not looking good for the bird site. But if it fails, what’s the alternative? The fediverse is questionable. LinkedIn is solid, but its focus is on business. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky is coming, but it’s federated, too. Is there anything out there that can serve the function Twitter does? Neville and Shel examine the situation and explore the alternatives in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Twitter can’t protect you from trolls any more, insiders say
BBC One – Panorama, Elon Musk’s Twitter Storm
Twitter’s Revenue, Adjusted Earnings Fell About 40% in Month of December
Twitter revenue plunged in December as advertisers stayed away after Elon Musk’s takeover, report says
Twitter hit by another outage as Musk complains platform is ‘so brittle’
How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday

The post FIR #322: If Not Twitter, Then Where? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the laundry list of mistakes and missteps from Norfolk Southern in the wake of the disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, what stands out the most is that the company seems to be making it all about them and not the people suffering the fallout of the crisis. (At a town hall meeting, a company representative kept repeating how awful everyone at Norfolk Southern felt about the incident. Nobody in East Palestine cares how anybody at Norfolk Southern feels.) You have to wonder if they’re getting and ignoring good crisis counsel, if the counsel they’re getting is bad, or if they’re not getting any professional input at all.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

More Crisis Lessons In The Aftermath Of Norfolk Southern’s Train Accident
Norfolk Southern CEO defends railroad’s response to Ohio derailment | CNN Business
Norfolk Southern Fumbles Its Crisis Response
Norfolk Southern blames misinformation for its derailed response

The post FIR #321: Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Crisis Comms appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Artificial Intelligence is already embedded in daily life, from product recommendations based on past purchases to playlist suggestions. If you use a smartwatch or health-monitoring wearable, you’re using AI. The leap demonstrated by recently released generated AI apps suggests that future developments are going to come at an accelerated pace. We’ve also seen amazing robotic developments. (Have you watched a recent Boston Dynamics video or checked out Loona, the robotic pet that was the hit of CES in January?) Mix the two, bake for a decade, and imagine what you’ll get.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

The chores AI will do for you within a decade
I made ChatGPT my secretary for a week – here’s how it went
International Baccalaureate lets pupils use ChatGPT to write essays
A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job
Public Awareness of Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Activities

The post FIR #320: The Chorebots of 2033 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A lot of company leaders believe a return to the office is a prerequisite to raising productivity and employee engagement metrics. A look at the data seems to reveal exactly the opposite: Productivity rose near the start of the pandemic and plummeted when companies began demanding employees come back to the office. Engagement numbers also fell well after the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to the premier engagement researcher. The world of work has changed, whether senior leaders understand that or not, which puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of in-house communicators.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Employee engagement tops PR priorities
The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it
Disney employees fight mandate to work at offices four days a week
U.S. Employee Engagement Needs a Rebound in 2023
The World’s Workplace Is Broken — Here’s How to Fix It

The post FIR #319: Return to Work Mandates Damage Engagement and Productivity appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Mainstream and tech media alike have filled their pages with headlines about disastrous demos, worrisome uses, fleeing users, and evaporating investments. Is it all true? Or is it a combination of clickbait and a failure to understand what’s really happening? In the February long-form episode of the “For Immediate Release” podcast, Neville and Shel look at generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments, mostly having to do with ChatGPT and Microsoft’s integration of it into limited-release versions of Bing and Edge. Also in this episode:

With all the AI coverage and some media still paying attention to the Metaverse, reporting on NFTs and other aspects of Web3 seem to have fallen off the radar, but there was a big Web3 development when the world’s largest pharmaceutical company invested big money in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that was launched to circumvent big pharmaceutical companies.
To read the coverage, you would think that all those people who signed up for Mastodon when Twitter became a less desirable platform are fleeing faster than high school students when the bell rings after the last class before summer vacation. But are they really?
Most of the metaverse reporting that suggests investment is drying up and business interest has cratered is based on a false premise. There’s plenty of movement and investment in the metaverse, assuming you understand that it’s a network, not a place.
New research finds that a fast-growing number of podcast fans would rather watch a podcast than just listen to one.
In his tech report, Dan York also looks at third-party Mastodon apps, how Roblox plans to use generative AI, the opening of a new Federal Trade Commission Office of Technology to fight “AI snake oil,” and the upcoming Supreme Court hearing that could have a profound impact on communicators and our ability to publish information online.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Artificial Intelligence

Opera’s building ChatGPT into its sidebar
Reddit thinks AI chatbots will “complement” human connection, not replace it
The accelerating use of generative AI may prompt U.S. action
Generative AI is here: How tools like ChatGPT could change your business
Google employees criticize CEO Sundar Pichai for ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of GPT competitor Bard
How to Use ChatGPT to Save Time and Make Work Easier
4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hate speech
11 Disadvantages Of ChatGPT Content
Real estate agents say they can’t imagine working without ChatGPT now | CNN Business
Chatting with Bing Chat, codenamed Sydney and sometimes Riley, feels like crossing the Rubicon because the AI is attempting to communicate emotions, not facts
Microsoft’s new ChatGPT AI starts sending ‘unhinged’ messages to people
You can jump the waitlist for Microsoft’s AI Bing chat. Here’s how.
Why is ChatGPT sending Bing users ‘unhinged’ messages?
AI image generator hit by $1.8 trillion lawsuit from Getty Images
How Nestlé is using AI to set creative rules for its 15,000 marketers
The new Bing & Edge – Learning from our first week
Generative AI Can Help You Tailor Messaging to Specific Audiences
How PR agencies are using AI
Exclusive: Microsoft’s Bing plans AI ads in early pitch to advertisers
Microsoft says Bing chats will now be capped at 50 questions per day and five per session; after five questions, Bing will prompt users to start a new topic

Web3 and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

VitaDAO: Pfizer-Invested Longevity Research, A New Paradigm for Decentralized Science?
What are the applications of NFTs in supply chains?

Mastodon Update

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

Metaverse Update

Will metaverse and tech make people lazy? Experts respond at Dubai summit
Whatever happened to the metaverse?

Podcasting Update

New podcast creation has fallen off a cliff
Podcasting could be in for a rocky 2023
Podcasters First Wanted Your Ears. Now They Want Your Eyes Too
Riverside.fm twitter thread featuring infographics

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Analytodon, service for Mastodon engagement statistics
Generative AI on Roblox: Our Vision for the Future of Creation
Generative AI on Roblox (YouTube video)
A Century of Technological Evolution at the Federal Trade Commission

The post FIR #318: AI, Mastodon, the Metaverse — Headlines vs. Reality appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Influencer marketing is a multi-billion-dollar industry, with Instagrammers and TikTokers with large followings pitching products in exchange for cash and other considerations. In response, some on Instagram and TikTok have taken to slamming those very same products — for free. It’s a trend that’s on the rise.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

The rise of the anti-influencers
De-influence marketing – what’s it about and what are the issues
Will deinfluencing be the trend to kill influencer marketing?

The post FIR #317: The Rise of the De-Influencer appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Before Twitter, before Facebook, there were blogs. People who shared an interest in the blog’s theme congregated there and had conversations. The general tone was positive, even when people disagreed. As the social media space deteriorates and Twitter’s future is in doubt, storyteller and freelancer Monique Judge suggests a return to blogging as the primary means of online social engagement. Is such a pivot possible? Neville and Shel share their thoughts in this short midweek episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Bring back personal blogging
Diversity Vs. Merit: It’s A No-Brainer (Shel’s post referenced in the episode)

The post FIR #316: Back to Blogging appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In a lot of companies, the PR and communications functions live under Marketing. For a variety of reasons, that is not the best approach. Marketing, after all, has a distinct role to play in short-to-mid-term lead generation and other outcomes based mostly on paid outreach. PR, on the other hand, is all about earned media designed to build reputation and promote thought leadership. Someone needs to sit at a senior level to ensure these efforts and other communication functions, like advertising, investor relations, and community relations, are coordinated and consistent. Call that person the Chief Communications Officer. Is it time every company anoints one? Neville and Shel explore the issue in this short midweek FIR episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Why 2023 is the year of the chief communications officer

The post FIR #315: Does Every Company Need A CCO? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Are written and spoken recommendations received equally? Contrary to what may seem logical, they are not, according to new research. In this short midweek FIR episode, Shel and Neville explore what the study’s findings could mean for how marketers and communicators wield influence over the decisions people make.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Effective Recommendations Are Better Heard Than Seen

The post FIR #314: Show Or Tell? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

There’s a perception that people in their 20’s, raised with digital technology and accustomed to more effective messaging technologies, simply don’t use email. Could that spell the beginning of the end of this clunky, 50-plus-year-old business tool? Neville and Shel consider the possibility in this short, midweek FIR episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 20.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

‘They’re 25, they don’t do emails’: is instant chat replacing the inbox?
Of course Gen Z check emails — we’d be fired otherwise
Business Practices That Refuse to Die #44 (YouTube)

The post FIR #313: Will Gen Z Finally Kill Email? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Everything old is new again, the saying goes. Despite touting the idea of a press release as a destination being a new idea, it actually dates back about 15 years — and retains all of its value. Neville and Shel explore the idea of defeating paywalls with destination press releases in this monthly long-form episode of “For Immediate Release.” Also in this episode:

Follow-ups to stories about Artificial Intelligence (AI) interns and facial recognition used for nefarious purposes.
The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer — and whether Edelman can claim to be trust experts
A roundup of news and commentary about ChatGPT
A decline in Mastodon users
Dan York’s Tech Report, which looks at some Twitter changes, good news for Mastodon users, a Mastodon instance for Medium users, Getty’s lawsuit targeting the generative AI image tool Stable Diffusion, Wikipedia’s new look-and-feel, and WordPress’s upcoming 20th birthday.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Codeword hires the agency world’s first ‘AI interns’
Judge blasts James Dolan’s facial recognition bans from MSG: ‘Stupidest thing ever’
New York Lawmakers Protest Madison Square Garden Over Facial Recognition Controversy
Lawyers Barred by Madison Square Garden Found a Way Back In
How press releases can break through paywalled news
2023 Edelman Trust Barometer
The world’s biggest PR firm claims to be an expert on trust – but is it?
Recruitment team unwittingly recommends ChatGPT for job interview
Microsoft Plans to Build OpenAI, ChatGPT Features Into All Products
Opinion | How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach
Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.
You’ll Be Seeing ChatGPT’s Influence Everywhere This Year
For PR, Is ChatGPT An Asset Or Threat?
People are already trying to get ChatGPT to write malware
Teachers Are Absolutely Loving The Student Who Made A Tool That Shows If Your Essay Was Written By AI
ChatGPT-4, the Fined Tuned Version of ChatGPT-3, Might Prompt a Major Shift
An AI writing tool generates a layoff letter as bad as a real company would write! (Should we worry?)
CEOs at Davos are using ChatGPT to write work emails
AI and the future of work: 5 experts on what ChatGPT, DALL-E and other AI tools mean for artists and knowledge workers
Search & Performance Marketing Daily: Portland Shop Uses ChatGPT To Tell Family Stories On A Startup Budget
ChatGPT and generative AI are the talk of this year’s Davos forum
Chatbots belong in our classrooms
ChatGPT will force school exams out of the dark ages
Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around
Mastodon Users Have Started Fleeing the Platform
Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around
The decentralized technology inside Mastodon
Mastodon Users (account that displays number of accounts)

Links from Dan York’s Report

You can pin a List and then swipe to it in the Twitter app
The next Twitter update will remember which view you are in and come back to that
Twitter’s new developer terms ban third-party clients
Twitterrific: End of an Era
Buffer adds Mastodon to its social media management platform
Medium Embraces Mastodon
Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content
Wikipedia Gets a Fresh New Look: First Desktop Update in a Decade Puts Usability at the Forefront
Highlight: Exploring Wikipedia’s new user experience (UX) – danyork324 on Twitch
WordPress turns 20 in 2023

The post FIR #312: The Social Media Press Release Redux appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Library TikTok is growing — organically. Librarians are meeting teenagers where they are, on TikTok, with videos that attract their attention and lead to library visits and more reading. Can this unorganized, grass-roots approach translate to marketing and communications? Is it looking at the idea of “influence” through a different lens? Neville and Shel explore the idea in this short mid-week episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Librarians Are Meeting Younger Readers Where They Are: TikTok (New York Times)

The post FIR #311: What Communicators Can Learn From Librarians appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Working from home has become more commonplace in the wake of the pandemic, with executives who once believed productivity would plummet now reconciled to the fact that remote work, for the most part, has little impact on productivity (unless, as is the case in some organizations, it actually boosts employee outputs). And a lot of employees are thrilled to be working from home. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t getting a little stale. A Harvard Business Review article suggests remote workers might want to consider making some changes to their routines. The article even inspired Neville to take action he has been considering for a while. It’s all part of this short mid-week FIR episode.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Is It Time to Shake Up Your WFH Routine?

The post FIR #310: Shake Up Your Work-From-Home Routine appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel tackle a question from listener Kris Hansen about developing a metrics dashboard for her organization’s leadership.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

AMEC’s Valid Metrics Framework: Magic Measurement Bullet? (PR News)
AMEC’s Interactive Integrated Evaluation Framework

The post FIR #309: Measuring Stuff That Didn’t Happen appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The virtual worker industry is booming in China. For about $14,000 a year — 80 percent less than it cost just a year earlier — you can get a three-dimensional virtual person to handle everything from tours to customer support. With expectations that the industry will grow by 50 percent annually for the next three years, the arrival of virtual persons in the West is inevitable. Neville and Shel dive into the industry in this short midweek episode of “For Immediate Release.”

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Companies are hiring virtual employees for $14k a year in China
Companies can ‘hire’ a virtual person for about $14k a year in China
Baidu Unveils Its Metaverse of Custom Virtual Humans
China’s Virtual People Industry Booms as Companies Turn to Digitized Employees
Chinese companies pay $14,000 a year to virtual people to work for them

The post FIR #308: Here Come Virtual Workers appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Keurig Dr. Pepper has stirred up a controversy by issuing an RFP that included payment terms of 360 days. While some big PR and advertising agencies may be able to wait a year to be paid for their work, it’s most likely a non-starter for small and minority-owned agencies. (If most big clients turned to one-year payment terms, even the big agencies might have difficulty accommodating the requirement.) The agency world has united in its condemnation of the move, and Keurig Doctor Pepper’s response is tepid, to say the least. Neville and Shel discuss the situation in this short midweek episode of “For Immediate Release.”

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 23.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

VoxComm Issues Red Alert to the Industry Responding Keurig Dr Pepper’s 360-Day Payment Term Request (VoxComm)
Keurig Dr Pepper’s Message to PR Firms: We Don’t Value You, Leaders Say (PRSA)
Keurig Dr Pepper Demands 360-Day Payment Terms in RFP (Adweek)
Keurig Dr Pepper called out for demanding 360-day payment terms in PR tender (Marketing Interactive)
Outrage over 360-day agency payment terms—Keurig Dr Pepper’s plan highlights issue for industry (AdAge)
UK ad body slams 360-day payment terms demanded by Keurig Dr Pepper (The Drum)
How PR Agencies Should Handle Egregious Payment Terms Like Keurig Dr Pepper’s (PR News)
Keurig Dr Pepper stands by payment terms after backlash from trade bodies (PR Week)

The post FIR #307: We’ll Pay You…In A Year appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It’s not unlikely that you have been mispronouncing some well-known company and brand names like IKEA, Hyundai, Porsche, Bayer, and Adidas. Some brands use common mispronunciations as the foundation for a marketing campaign, as Hyundai has undertaken in the UK. Neville and Shel explore some of these campaigns and examine the broader issue of hard-to-pronounce brand names in this short midweek episode of the “For Immediate Release” podcast.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Hyundai changes UK pronunciation of its name to follow global norm
Mispronunciation of brands – does it matter?
Hyundai | The Dawn of a New Hyundai. (YouTube video)
How To Pronounce Popular Brand Names
20 Mispronounced Brand Names and How to Actually Say Them
30 Famous Brand Names You’re Probably Pronouncing Wrong
Krispy Kreme reminds Brits how to properly pronounce name in UK
You’ve been schooled: L’Occitane teaches US shoppers how to pronounce its name
Name Your Brand with a Global Audience in Mind

The post FIR #306: Brand Name Pronunciation As A Marketing Ploy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A petulant venue owner is using facial recognition software to keep people with whom he has issues from entering his spaces — including a mom with a Girl Scout troop. Also in this monthly long-form episode of the “For Immediate Release” podcast, Neville and Shel discuss the value of virtual goods and whether brands should start taking them seriously; business schools are exploring the potential for teaching in the metaverse — especially classes about digital technology; it hasn’t been a great year for metaverse activations, but at least brands are learning; it has been a year since Lush closed its Instagram and Facebook accounts, which means it’s time to see how that decision turned out; and the better ChatGPT (the AI text-generating chatbot) gets, the more worried some people get about its impact on truth; and Dan York shares a year-end Tech Report with a range of updates including using WordPress for newsletters, WordPress’s State of the Word 2022, and Tumblr Live.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Are virtual goods the next big category for brands?
Virtual goods are untapped opportunity for brand growth: study
Metanomics: How Generation W Will Create A Virtual Market Worth US$5 Trillion
Razorfish Finds 70% of Web3 Early Adopters Value Virtual Goods as Much, or More Than, Physical Products
Business schools explore teaching in the metaverse
Learning From Metaverse Missteps
‘People see why we came off now’: Lush has no regrets about quitting Instagram and Facebook
Lush shows it’s time for an anti social media policy
Madison Square Garden Uses Facial Recognition to Ban Its Owner’s Enemies
Pouring Through a Crisis: How Budweiser Salvaged Its World Cup
AI chatbot could spell doomsday for truth
How to spot AI-generated text
‘The Return of the Crawling Evil,’ a Sci-Fi Story Created by Robots
AI-Created Comic Could Be Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection
Could an AI Chatbot Rewrite My Novel?
This Bot Will Argue With Your Internet Provider For You and Get You a Cheaper Bill
Steve Coulson Tweet on Schools Banning ChatGPT

Links from Dan York’s Report

Automattic Promotes WordPress.com as a Platform for Email Newsletters (and provides improved support)
State of the Word 2022: A Celebration of the Four Freedoms of Open Source
State of the Word 2022 Recap
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg
Announcement: Introducing Tumblr Live
Tumblr Live Overview & FAQ

The post FIR #305: We See You And You Can’t Come In appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Social media consultant Arik Hanson wrote recently in a LinkedIn article that companies should consider devoting some of their LinkedIn activities — 20 percent is the volume he suggests — to matters of interest to employees. That’s because data shows that 30 percent of a brand page’s engagement comes from the company’s employees. In this short mid-week episode of “For Immediate Release,” Neville and Shel discuss the opportunity for communicators to reach employees on LinkedIn, along with the challenges and possible pitfalls.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Are employees the forgotten audience on LinkedIn?
38 LinkedIn Statistics Marketers Should Know in 2021

The post FIR #304: Reaching Employees Through Social Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

One list includes 50 potential Twitter replacements — none of which will offer every one of Twitter’s features and none of which includes everyone you’re currently following on the bird site. How do you decide where to go when you conclude that maintaining your current Twitter activity is no longer feasible? Neville and Shel sort it out — with a focus on Mastodon — in this short mid-week episode of “For Immediate Release.”

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Mastodon (social network) — Wikipedia
Mastodon Features That Twitter Should Steal (but Won’t)
What Fleeing Twitter Users Will—and Won’t—Find on Mastodon
The new face of Twitter verification (from Neville’s blog)
Mastocomm (the communications instance Shel set up)
Twitter suspends Mastodon account, prevents sharing links (response from Mastodon)
Twitter Suddenly Reverses Course on ‘Policy’ That Banned Links to Competing Social Media Sites
Shel’s Twitter exchange with Guy Kawasaki

The post FIR #303: The Quest for a Twitter Alternative appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

New York Times columnist and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote recently that the crypto crash is far worse than even the direst descriptions and that it is proof that blockchain was never a viable technology. At the same time, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon sees value in blockchain technology, but only if companies like his control it. The truth is, blockchain is thriving outside of speculative crypto investing. Neville and Shel explore blockchain’s future in this short midweek episode of “For Immediate Release.”

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s Asides blog is also available.

Links from this report:

Opinion | Blockchains, What Are They Good For?
Mattel Creations Launches Digital Collectibles Marketplace
Argentina Organizes National Blockchain Committee to Implement State Level Strategy
Goldman Sachs and the return of ‘Blockchain not Bitcoin’
Blockchain Is Much More Than Crypto
While Crypto Erupts In Chaos, Financial Firms Quietly Use Blockchain To Solve Real-Life Problems
The Best Examples Of DAOs Everyone Should Know About
IBM on Blockchain: Building trust and boosting the bottom line
Advantages of Blockchain: 8 Worth Considering
SEC Charges Samuel Bankman-Fried with Defrauding Investors in Crypto Asset Trading Platform FTX
Starbucks details its blockchain-based loyalty platform and NFT community, Starbucks Odyssey

The post FIR #302: Blockchain’s Widely Exaggerated Demise appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

ChatGPT is the latest buzzworthy Artificial Intelligence tool. Released just this month by OpenAI, ChatGPT has stirred up a considerable amount of conversation, much of it about experiments people have conducted, while others now seriously question how much longer writers will be employable. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at ChatGPT from the communicator’s perspective.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 26.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. Neville’s “asides” blog, Outbox, is also available.

Links from this report:

The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT (New York Times)
I asked ChatGPT to write about itself in my style, so I didn’t have to
Stephen Waddington on LinkedIn: ChatGPT on Public Relations Excellence
I couldn’t resist asking ChatGPT how to play cricket. Now I get it!
Explaining NFTs with ChatGPT

The post FIR #301: A Communicator’s Look at ChatGPT appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In New York, pay transparency is required by law. It will also be a requirement in California after January 1. There's a lot of good that can come from pay transparency, but for organizations with cultures unready for it, the consequences could be dire. Are companies enlisting their internal communicators to help lay the groundwork for this level of disclosure?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #300: Communicating Pay Transparency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Despite the forecasts of some pundits, it is still too early to predict Twitter's complete collapse. Still, it is not outside the realm of possibility. (Since we recorded this episode on Saturday, November 19, CBS has halted its activity on Twitter, blaming Elon Musk's "turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company," according to Variety. It is worth considering the consequences of Twitter's demise. How big a loss to society at large would it be? We can take that idea one step further. With Facebook experiencing its own declines and Gen Z demonstrating a preference for smaller social networks over broadcast-style social media, what would happen if social media completely faded into the background? Also in the November episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report:

Thousands of Twitter users are migrating to Mastodon, a Twitter-like interface with some important differences, the key being that it is not owned by a single entity. Instead, it is a federation of Mastodon "instances" (including one Shel has launched for communicators). The fediverse could be awesome, one report suggests, assuming we don't screw it up -- and average users are able to figure it out.
Gallup has released a study on how connected people feel to others, whether it's in person or online. It's a field of study that has gotten scant attention in the past and the results could be useful to marketers.
There's some nation-building going on in the metaverse, with one Pacific island country building a digital twin to preserve its heritage as global warming raises sea levels, threatening to completely submerge it. Another country -- a physical entity not yet recognized by the global community of nations -- is working with an architectural firm to build a metaverse version that it hopes will be the primary place its citizens interact.
Whether you believe it is ethical or not, there is a fair amount of ghostwriting going on in the social media space, notably with ghostwriters cranking out LinkedIn thought leadership posts for executives. But there's more than that, with one social media ghostwriter, for example, earning close to $200,000 so far this year writing mainly Twitter DMs for employees. We'll dive into this emerging cottage industry.
Dan York's Tech Report is a buffet of topics this month, ranging from the fate of Twitter Spaces to Walmart's Augmented Reality effort, and from enhancements to TikTok Live to Google's "Live View in Maps."

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #299: From the Metaverse to the Fediverse and Back Again appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While things are not looking good at Twitter, it is not yet time to characterize it as the social network's death spiral. Still, speculation is fun (and inevitable), and one of the prospects about which some people are speculating is the impact a Twitterless world will have on social listening activities. Neville and Shel explore the possibility -- along with some other potential fallout should Twitter shut down -- in this short midweek episode of "For Immediate Release."
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #298: Social Listening in a Post-Twitter World appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The Scottish city of Stirling is investing in the creation of Augmented Reality (AR) layers throughout the city, available on a free dedicated app, to become what they claim is "the first augmented reality city."
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #297: A Stirling Example of Augmented Reality appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Twitter and Stripe both laid off employees last week. The contrast between how these layoffs were conducted is striking. One CEO went to great lengths to ensure the employees remaining post-layoff would feel the least amount of survivor's guilt and be ready to move forward. The other didn't seem to care how survivors felt. Neville and Shel examine these approaches and some of the other fallout from Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in this short midweek episode of "For Immediate Release."
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #296: What Elon Musk Can Learn From Patrick Collinson appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The post FIR #296: What Elon Musk Can Learn From Patrick Collinson appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville attended NFT.London, the UK version of the NFT.NYC, which has been held since February 2019. There, he attended sessions that covered various topics, but he was particularly struck by those addressing the value-add potential of NFTs as well as their community-building characteristics. He reports from a semi-quiet corner of the conference in this short mid-week episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #295: The Value-Add Potential of NFTs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The post FIR #295: The Value-Add Potential of NFTs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It's not exactly a news flash that Elon Musk now owns Twitter (Chief Twit, he calls himself). Does he know what he's gotten himself into? It's doubtful, according to much of the evidence we've seen so far, in addition to some stinging commentary.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #294: What Hath Elon Wrought? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For virtually all of its 22 years, Wikipedia has confined its technology to the wiki, which was already nearly 10 years old when the online encyclopedia was introduced. But some big changes are in store, including the use of machine learning, all in service of enticing more people to become editors.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #293: Big Changes at Wikipedia appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The post FIR #293: Big Changes at Wikipedia appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

To hear the media talk about it, NFTs are overpriced works of digital art on which a lot of gullible people will lose bundles of money. In fact, NFTs have utility far being investments, and savvy marketers are figuring it out, right down to local car washes. Neville and Shel share a handful of stories about such applications in this short midweek episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #292: The Sure and Steady Evolution of NFTs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

AI tools that turn text prompts into images, video, and music are definitely cool, but they get a boost in utility when incorporated into a larger tool designed for a specific purpose. Omneky is one such tool, designed to improve the effectiveness of your social media ads. One element: DALL-E 2 is baked into the software, helping you create images that align with the software's assessment of your current and previous ads.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #291: Adding AI to Applications appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The first graphic format for the web to gain widespread adoption was the GIF. Even the advent of better formats replaced it for graphical display, it gained new strength through animation; what was once called an "animated GIF" became just a GIF. But today, for multiple reasons, the end appears nigh for all but the most die-hard fans. This short midweek episode is an homage to the GIF.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #290: Alas, Poor GIF, We Knew You Well appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

New data suggests a lot of bloggers are employing practices that are the opposite of those that deliver results. Shel and Neville dive into the data from a new blogger survey. Also in this episode: Microsoft is bringing the DALL-E 2 AI graphic generator to Office 365 via a new app called Designer, as well as a tool called Image Creator that will be deployed through Bing and Microsoft Edge; virtual influencers, already a big deal in Asia, are making inroads in the US, performing in concerts, signing record deals, and pitching products for brands; Edelman's CEO, Richard Edelman has given an interview in which he outlines his vision for the future of PR and his company; the category of meme creators is heating up but a lot of these people aren't happy with Instagram's rules; a new Danish political party is being led by an Artificial Intelligence.

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on more digital services copying others, including yet another "stories" feature, this time on Signal; Facebook is dropping support for its Instant Articles mobile format amidst a decline in its support for news in general; meanwhile, TikTok is becoming more of a news source; and a volunteer opportunity awaits those interested in working with the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #289: Bloggers, AI, and The Future of PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

October 11, 2022, was not your typical day at the UK House of Lords, where Ai-Da, a humanoid robot artist, delivered testimony in response to questions posed by peers. The testimony came as some of Ai-Da's original artwork was displayed in a museum. In her answers, Ai-Da was candid about AI's threat to human artists but was also realistic about the role technology has always played in art. In this short mid-week episode, Neville and Shel review the testimony and explore some of the issues Ai-Da raises.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #288: A Humanoid Robot Artist Gives Testimony appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Some companies were experimenting with internal podcasts -- for employees only -- before companies sent employees home to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Faced with reaching and engaging employees who now never interacted face-to-face with their colleagues elevated the value of a podcast, which could establish a personal connection. At the same time, podcasting had gone mainstream, making more employees receptive to listening to one from their employer. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel look at some of the companies that have adopted internal podcasting and how they plan to evolve them in the new post-pandemic world of work.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #287: Internal Podcasts Gain Momentum appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We read everywhere about increased productivity resulting from the remote work the pandemic forced upon companies. In fact, that increased productivity is leading several companies to adopt remote or hybrid work as the new status quo. But research conducted by Microsoft finds that not everyone agrees with the assessment. Managers are not on board with the notion that remote work has led to greater productivity, and the gap between what managers believe and employee perspectives is considerable.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #286: Managers Believe Remote Work Produces Lower Productivity appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

You have a business initiative, an organizational change, a new value proposition. Success depends on getting employees aligned around the vision and the path to get there. Could small group conversations be the means of achieving that alignment? A new study suggests it's at least worth a shot.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #285: Alignment Through Conversation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

From experimentation, ideation, and storyboarding to producing the actual images to be used in an ad, advertising agency creatives are finding Artificial Intelligence image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion instantly useful, saving time and money without sacrificing the end results. Does this spell the end of the graphic arts business?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #284: Ad Agencies Embrace AI Art appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The post FIR #284: Ad Agencies Embrace AI Art appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Neville and Shel were together in person to record this episode, which focuses exclusively on leadership communication. The recording happened on Neville's dining room table as Shel and his wife were on a two-week vacation in England and Ireland.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #283: Communicators Helping Leaders Lead Through Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The post FIR #283: Communicators Helping Leaders Lead Through Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A lot of the communication with customers for which businesses once used email has transitioned to text messaging -- along with communication among friends, families, and pretty much everyone. To some extent, that even includes employee-to-employee communication. Whether it's SMS messaging or a messaging app like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram, people increasingly prefer the functionality and speed of response with text messages. Email isn't going anywhere but its uses may be diminishing.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #282: If You Need Me, Text Me appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Advertising on the Web is two-dimensional, with a consumer on the outside looking in. In the Metaverse, consumers will be active participants in virtual worlds, participating directly with virtual objects and one another. That opens the door for entirely new forms of advertising. In this short mid-week episode, Neville and Shel discuss what advertising might look like in virtual worlds and some of the technical, ethical, and legal challenges that organizations will face selling their wares to denizens of these immersive spaces.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #281: Advertising and Marketing in the Metaverse appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

"Quiet quitting" is all over TikTok, with mostly Gen Zers talking about their disdain for going "above and beyond" at work. Is this really anything new, or is it just the first time a generation has used a label to share their feelings online? Or, as some suggest, is it that most Gen Zers entered the workforce during the pandemic when the boundaries between work and life were not clear and now that companies are getting back to what executives perceive as normal, they don't agree with the expectations the company has of them? Is this even confined to Gen Z? Neville and Shel look at "quiet quitting" in today's short mid-week episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #280: What’s Behind the “Quiet Quitting” Trend? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

According to a new PwC survey of 1,000 senior U.S. business leaders from across industry sectors, businesses have bought into the inevitability and utility of the metaverse. The study also surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers who are less aware and enthusiastic than executives are. Also in this monthly long-form episode of "For Immediate Release":

Gartner has released ins 2022 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.
Consumer trend experts anticipate the impact web3 will have on consumer trends.
Ukraine has perfect the art of advertising in support of its resistance to Russia's invasion.
Each quarter, Microsoft adjusts the language it uses to advise the investment world of its ambitions.
One CEO who had to lay off staff took to LinkedIn to explain how hard it was on him, including a selfie of him weeping over it. Was it effective?

In his Tech Report, Dan York recounts his experience with Reddit's new social audio tool, looks at "snipping," a new Twitter Spaces feature, and explains a Google update designed to elevate "helpful content."
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #279: Business Buys Into the Metaverse appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

As news media outlets that traffic in the written word -- print and online -- economic pressures have led to more repurposed content and less original material. What impact does this have on trust in these media sources, and is there a role businesses and their communication teams can play?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #278: For Every News Outlet: Churn, Churn, Churn appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

More and more people are experimenting with a growing collection of Artificial Intelligence-based graphics tools. Some of these tools produce stunning images in a variety of artistic styles, leading some to wonder if art directors will generate their own images rather than continue to pay for graphic design services. Neville and Shel discuss the possibilities in this short mid-week episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #277: Do Graphic Designers Have A Future? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Remember Microsoft Tay? The 2016 Twitter chatbot suffered from a concerted effort to teach it all manner of vile things, prompting Microsoft to withdraw the service and apologize. That experience is top of mind for pretty much everyone talking about Meta's new chatbot, now available in public testing in the U.S. The developers behind BlenderBot 3 insist that they, too, had the Tay experiment in mind when they developed the process for teaching this new chatbot to behave. In fact, the beta is designed so people can report when it says something inappropriate that it may have learned from another user. That information is used to teach it what is not appropriate. Will it work?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #276: Should I Tay Or Should I Go? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Brands have been tripping over themselves to jump on the Web3/metaverse/NFT bandwagon, but few have articulated a strategic and comprehensive approach at the level Starbucks has. In this short mid-week FIR episode, Neville and Shel look at how Starbucks plans to build loyalty and community using these emerging tools, along with some other organizations that are starting to give Web3 similarly serious looks.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #275: Will You Have An NFT With Your Coffee? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

According to one definition, unbranded content "isn’t specifically about your company but is relevant to your industry or product in some way." There are unbranded videos like this one from WREN, an online clothing retailer. Released in 2014, it's a film in which the filmmakers asked 20 couples who had never met to kiss. The only reference to WREN is at the very beginning of the video, "WREN Presents." There isn't even a link to the retailer in the film or on its YouTube page.

And there are entire unbranded websites. We even interviewed Ike Pigott from Alabama Power about Alabama News Center, where Alabama Power's involvement is barely noticeable.

There are sound reasons for brands to produce unbranded content. From the perspective of the audience reading or viewing the content, is it underhanded? A failure to disclose? Does it matter? Neville and Shel have differing points of view in this short mid-week episode of For Immediate Release.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #274: Is Unbranded Unethical? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

If you peruse search results for "the metaverse," it will seem like half the content you find focuses on defining it. At Nvidia, executive Richard Kerris thinks it's pretty easy to define. "The metaverse is not a place," he says. "It's the network for the next version of the Web." Neville and Shel explore that definition and related developments in this short midweek FIR episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #273: What Is The Metaverse? It’s A Network appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Research conducted by Google found that nearly 40 percent of Gen Z are using Tik Tok and Instagram for search instead of Google. It's a real-world example of significant shifts exhibited by this group of 10-to-22-year-olds. By 2025, they will represent 30 percent of the workforce and be a considerable presence in the consumer marketplace.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #272: Tick Tick Tick Tick Search appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A lot is fueling the debate over whether workers should be able to continue working remotely, at least some of the time, or get themselves back to the office. The debate pits workers against leaders, and the assumption is that it's just a matter of how each side perceives what's best. But anthropologists see another factor at play: most leaders come from a different generation than those employees who want remote or hybrid work to become the new normal.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #271: Work-From-Home and the Generational Divide appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Topics up for discussion in the monthly long-form episode include the following:L

Are holograms about to go mainstream?
There is outrage over revelations of massive wrongdoing by Uber. Will everyone keep riding them anyway?
Uses of NFTs are expanding far beyond collectible artwork for investment purposes.
How Wikipedia remediated dozens of fake articles could be a lesson for the rest of the world.
Bad guys are extorting gift cards in exchange for removing negative online reviews.

Dan York's report explores NFT adoption by Reddit and Snap; Instagram's move to let creators confine posts to subscribers; Facebook's test of multiple profiles; Twitter's latest innovations; and mobile live-streaming with Starlink.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #270: Disgust, Convenience, and Reputation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Soon golfers and fans of the sport will be able to interact one-on-one with the legendary Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus. Well, not Nicklaus himself, but his digital twin. Nicklaus spent hours in a studio having every facial expression and gesture recorded. The first digital twin will be of his 37-year-old self, but more are planned. And rest assured, Nicklaus won't be the last celebrity to make himself "available" as a digital twin in the online world. And there's more to digital twins than celebrities.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #269: Doppelgängers Everywhere! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While some assume NFTs are on their way out as the value of digital artwork has plummeted, brick-and-mortar retailers are increasingly finding ways to offer the ability to mint NFTs right in their stores. In this episode, Neville and Shel look at some of the latest developments in the evolution of collectible NFTs.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #268: NFTs in the Checkout Lane appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For years, Ernst & Young auditors have been cheating on an ethics test required for them to retain their Certified Public Accountant status. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has levied a record $100 million fine, both for the cheating and the Big Four accounting firm's failure to assist in the SEC's investigation. Now that it has all gone public, what can E&Y do to rebuild trust among its clients and the public? Neville and Shel share what reputation experts have to say along with their own recommendations.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #267: Rebuilding Trust After An Ethics Scandal appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Big Four accounting firm KPMG has committed $30 million to the metaverse in order to establish an "innovation hub" and train employees so they will be prepared to work with clients as the metaverse becomes a more common interface. Like many organizations, KPMG is citing breathtaking figures as it predicts the metaverse's eventual value. Neville and Shel discuss KPMG's move, various metaverse valuations, and other metaverse-related news and information in this FIR short.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #266: How Many Trillions Will The Metaverse Be Worth? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

As the economy cooks, inflation ratchets up, and interest rates rise, some companies are faced with laying off staff. As we have moved to remote and hybrid work, how those layoffs are handled is changing. But is it ever a good idea to lay someone off over Zoom or Teams? And if so, are there good and bad ways to go about it?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #265: Fired Over Zoom appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

From the title of this episode, you might think we were talking about company sources going on background when speaking to a reporter. (Quick advice: Don't. Either be on the record or don't talk to a journalist.) But that's not what this episode is about. Instead, we're talking about Zoom backgrounds (or Teams, or Skype, or Webex, or Google Meet, or whatever). With flexible work the order of the day in many organizations, is it time to give serious consideration to what people see behind you in a call? There's a book (that's right, an entire book) on the subject. We cover it in 15 minutes.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #264: On Background appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the monthly long-form episode for June, Neville and Shel consider a Google employee's claim that the company's AI has become sentient, the reactions the claim has provoked, and what it might mean for business communicators. Also in this episode:

Is being in the office really the only way for employees who don't normally work together to encounter one another?
The tangled truth about NFTs and copyright
Now that the metaverse is gaining momentum, it's time to consider how to market and communicate there
Should you spend any more time developing your personal brand?
The state of PR is changing

In his tech report, Dan York talks about countries that want to change the Internet from a "permissionless" place to one where you have to pay for access to users.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #263: It’s Alive! (AI, That Is. Or Is It?) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the tech industry, there's a trend: Rescinding offer letters as a cost-cutting measure. In this short episode of "For Immediate Release," Neville and Shel explore the PR and internal comms repercussions of these moves.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #262: You’re Hired! Or Not… appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the tech world, companies are rescinding employment offers in droves as a cost-cutting measure. In this episode of "For Immediate Release," Neville and Shel explore the repercussions of these actions on a company's reputation, both internally and externally.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #262: You’re Hired! Or Not… appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

As it faced a unionization effort, Tesla contracted with a PR agency (where one of its communication directors once worked in an executive capacity) to spy on employees, including those in a semi-private Facebook group, an activity one academic found unethical. While there is nothing wrong with a company monitoring employees' online activities, there are lines that should not be crossed. Was one of those lines crossed in this case?
Continue Reading →

The post Crossing the Line When Surveilling Employees on Social Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

We all know that leaders should strive for authenticity. What does that mean, exactly? It's easy to say authenticity is being who you are, but when you're meeting with a department that is struggling to succeed, are you the person who rocks out at concerts? The one who coos little nothings in the ear of your significant other? There's more to authenticity than just being genuine. Communicators need to understand the nuances since most leaders don't have the time for a graduate-level course on the subject.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #260: Grappling With Authenticity appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new mid-year Trust Barometer is out from Edelman, and the news is excellent for most things Western (and bad for all things autocratic). Who in the West didn't fare well? Companies that have opted to continue doing business in Russia.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #259: Trust Rises in Companies That Left Russia appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Communicators worldwide covet a seat at the leadership table (wherever that mythical table may be). But if executives don't even want you to brief them on issues that matter to them, that seat will never materialize. In this FIR podcast short, Neville and Shel discuss how to give an effective executive briefing -- and get one step closer to that seat.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #258: How to Brief an Executive appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For the past several years, momentum has been building as more and more organizations -- recognizing public expectations that they take steps to address social and environmental issues in the wake of declining trust in other institutions -- articulate strong positions on issues ranging from climate change to transgender rights. Then came the leak of the U.S. Supreme Court's abortion decision, indicating the Court will overturn 50 years of precedent with Roe v. Wade. The response from the corporate world has been tepid. In this monthly long-form episode, Neville and Shel look at the few organizations that have spoken out and how some are taking internal measures rather than public-facing positions, while most remain silent.

As if that's not enough heavy discussion, we also spend time looking at the culpability of social media that provide access to live-streamed footage of hatred-motivated mass shootings, from Christchurch to Buffalo.

Also in this episode:

A Facebook executive has released an 8,000-word analysis of the metaverse, arguing that Meta can't own it, and nor can anyone else
The hybrid work model that many companies have adopted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic means an end to many employees being forced to participate in mandatory "fun" activities. Is that a good thing?
New research finds that employees are experiencing notification fatigue, and it's worse than Zoom fatigue or email fatigue
There's a correlation between a CEO's reputation and that of the brands in their companies
Dan York's report focuses on TikTok, including a spate of new features and a look at some of the video-sharing app's plans

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #257: Purpose Vs. Polarization appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The COVID-19 pandemic created a host of new communication pressures on company leaders, so they, in turn, leaned on their communicators, who evidently came through for them in a big way. The result: increased influence in the C-suite, according to a Gartner survey. Neville and Shel have questions.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #256: Comms Influence in the C-Suite appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Micro-learning is the formal label for the upbeat, music-backed TikTok videos that demonstrate how to accomplish tasks on Excel, Microsoft's ubiquitous spreadsheet tool. The videos are racking up billions of views and the influencers behind the videos are making fistfuls of cash. Microsoft played no part in getting the video trend started; the company is just taking advantage of what the influencers are producing. Lessons abound for companies and communicators.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #255: How TikTok Makes Spreadsheets Cool appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Google used a short video to tease a feature for its Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that could be AR's killer app. They don't look bad, either.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #254: AR You Ready? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Search "blockchain" and you're sure to find plenty of commentaries that proclaim the core Web3 technology doomed. It can never work, they say, and they outline a broad range of reasons. Yet blockchain is already managing processes in the background -- some of which you may already be using in your own home. Neville and Shel explore some of the ways blockchain-based technologies are becoming everyday tools and what this means for communicators.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #253: Blockchain In Your House appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Matthew Rechs confesses that he was not a great manager at first but he learned some fundamental rules that will benefit anyone who hopes to be more than an old-school boss. For internal communicators, Rechs' "promises" -- first published as a series of tweets -- can serve as the foundation for a targeted effort to elevate effective management in your organization.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #252: Managers, Not Bosses appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

POAPs are getting to be a big deal, with Warner Music inking a deal with the organization behind them. Never heard of POAP? It's the Proof of Attendance Protocol, used to mint a special kind of NFT that serves as proof you were there, whether it's a concert, a conference, or some other kind of event or activity. Their use by businesses is inevitable. Even internally, companies can award POAPs to employees who attend the town hall, for example, some of which could wind up being highly coveted. In this episode, Neville and Shel break down POAPs and their potential for organizations, especially those looking to engage Gen Z-aged individuals.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #251: Proof of Attendance appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Nissan and Toyota are entering the metaverse, one with a focus on employees and the other targeting consumers. They join some other auto manufacturers that have already established a metaverse presence. Fidelity Investments is also setting up shop, as is Vanity Fair. And these are a drop in the bucket among the businesses staking metaverse claims.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #250: Go for a Drive in the Metaverse appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

For those who are weary of the staged, curated images people share on social networks like Instagram (as if their lives were truly that enviable), BeReal wants to be the antidote. It is finding favor with the college-aged crowd but there could be untapped opportunities for businesses to participate, too.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #249: Getting Authentic with BeReal appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Cross-posting your social media posts is a great way to extend reach and get more bang for your image/video/text buck. It can also backfire when not done well and some platforms actively discourage it. Neville and Shel share some thoughts on cross-posting in this episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #248: Cross-Posting Do’s and Don’ts appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Mining big data is a routine activity among many organizations. That’s exactly what a company called Hiq was doing with data it obtained from public LinkedIn pages. LinkedIn sued and now an appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling determining that such web scraping is legal. The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will... Continue Reading →

The post FIR #247: Permission to Scrape appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the April edition of The Hobson and Holtz Report, Neville and Shel discuss these stories:

The advertising industry weighs in on an Ogilvy policy banning influencers from photoshopping their images
A metaverse company plans to offer a form of immortality with its "Live Forever" mode
Coca-Cola is offering a limited-edition drink that tastes like pixels and includes a Fortnite code
Corporate America seemed bound for a more purposeful existence. Has it all fallen by the wayside?
Elon Musk believes in unfettered free speech, a key reason he wants to buy Twitter. Is it a good thing?
Research reveals consumers care more about how a company donates than how much

Dan York's Tech Report covers how the Russian war against Ukraine is splintering the Internet (along with other tech-related fallout from the invasion); Wikipedia's decision to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations; how much Jack Dorsey's first tweet -- initially purchased as an NFT for $48 million -- attracted in an auction; the state of the Ethereum merge; TikTok's rollout of AR capabilities; Spotify's rebranding of its Clubhouse clone; and more.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #246: Who Wants to Live Forever? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Google's nascent MUM technology could evolve into a chatbot replacement for search engines. For some searches, that's fine. For others, it's beyond problematic.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #245: Chatbots for Search? It Depends. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Twitter tweeted a tweet on April 1, leading a lot of people to believe it was an April Fool's prank. That got it more attention than it otherwise might have. Was it just luck or a well-planned ploy?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #244: April Fool’s! Or Not. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

LinkedIn has added a host of new tools for creators. Some look valuable, including better content analytics, profile video tools, and a subscriber bell for update notifications. Others, like the newsletter options, need work, and even that may not be enough to attract subscribers.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #243: New Creator Tools from LinkedIn appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A new study suggests that saying nice things about your competitor (notably on social media) can lead consumers to spend more money on your brand's products and services.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #242: Can’t Brands All Just Get Along? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A public kerfuffle between two journalists on Twitter revolved around whether journalists need to establish a personal brand. The fact is, everybody already has a personal brand; the question is how you approach the maintenance of that brand in a social media world. Neville and Shel explore the elements of personal brand-building in this episode.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #241: Your Personal Brand, Journalist Edition appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Radio Shack and Better.com can rest easier these days, now that P&O Ferries has established a new low for how to lay off employees. Outrage is evident everywhere from government responses to citizen protests and tweets from horrified social media users. The fallout is just beginning, yet P&O's leadership just doesn't seem to give much of a damn. What's a communicator to do?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #240: You’re Fired! Get Off Our Boat! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

New U.S. regulations may require companies to disclose both the impact of their operations on climate change and the risk they face from global warming. With similar requirements already law in the U.K., communicators need to consider the best way to protect their companies' and clients' reputations as this self-reported information goes public.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #239: Communicating Climate Risk appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Russia's invasion of Ukraine tops the coverage in the March edition of The Hobson and Holtz Report, the long-form monthly "For Immediate Release" podcast, with a look at the motivations for companies to cease their operations in Russia, the use of an AI deepfake as an element of Russian disinformation, and the White House's appeal to TikTok creators to help offset propaganda; Dan York shares his thoughts on the internet in Ukraine and Russia. Also in this episode: an update on the UK's Online Safety bill; why the revelations about Ronn Torossian's ethical misdeeds should lead the PR industry to finally take steps to clean its own house; the top technology trends of 2022, according to Accenture, and why Clubhouse may have launched the social audio movement but may not be around long enough to reap the rewards. In his Tech Report, Dan York shares news from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and looks at proposed web usability guidance from the U.S. Justice Department.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #238: Deepfakes and Other Weapons of War appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, in somewhat cryptic fashion, that NFTs are coming to Instagram. Speculation about what that means is running rampant, with some proclaiming that NFTs will become the next social layer and may "prove to be the catalyst needed to usher in a new wave of crypto users."
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #237: Are NFTs the New Social Layer? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It's easy to fall into the assumption trap: assuming the right message is always about outcomes. In the case of research conducted about organizations dealing with the prevention and countering of violent extremism, promoting outcomes didn't produce the intended effect -- in fact, it could actually produce unintended negative results. Building trust with key stakeholders required a different approach. It takes a professional communicator to conduct the stakeholder analysis that will surface this kind of information, but many organizations continue to believe they can handle communications without professional assistance.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #236: Crafting the Right Message appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Russia is experiencing a stampede of companies exiting the country, either permanently or temporarily, in support of Ukraine and in some cases under pressure from consumers and shareholders. Is there a case for remaining in Russia and how much damage can a brand sustain by staying?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #235: Is It Tenable to Keep Doing Business in Russia? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

With declining trust in media, many media outlets have found themselves in the position of reinforcing and re-explaining what it means to be "on background" and "off the record," because too many organizations and their PR representatives don't seem to understand it -- or they do understand it and are wilfully abusing it. Neville and Shel take a look at the extent to which some news organizations are going to make their positions clear.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #234: You’re Always On The Record appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While some of us are immersed in Web3, most Americans are pretty clueless about it, according to a new survey. But survey responses also reflect dissatisfaction with Web 2.0, identifying issues Web3 is meant to fix.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #233: Wondering About Web3 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

One DAO -- a Decentralized Autonomous Organization -- is taking its visual brand very seriously. And true to its nature, Cabin DAO has decided to decentralize the creation of its brand. As DAOs grow in popularity, expand the scope of their focus, and become a routine approach to some kinds of business activities, could decentralized branding become more common?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #232: Decentralized Branding appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

A Gallup-Knight Foundation survey finds a precipitous decline in the number of Americans paying attention to national news. For many organizations, some national news provides important context to company decisions and actions. Is it incumbent on businesses to make sure their stakeholders know that news? And given that 25 percent of Americans get news from podcasts, is audio a key channel for delivering pertinent news?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #231: Are All Companies In the News Business? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

After learning their company was planning a cloud-based NFT service, a group of Salesforce employees sent a letter to leadership expressing their vehement opposition. They are part of a growing backlash against NFTs, objecting to everything from their impact on the planet to the scammers and fraudsters they attract.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #230: Employees vs. NFTs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

It will not go down in business history as one of the most consequential mergers or acquisitions of all time, but The New York Times' acquisition of the extraordinarily popular word game, Wordle, has produced an avalanche of criticism and even threats to cancel subscriptions. There are lessons here for any organization acquiring a company with an engaged fan base, and even for companies planning to make changes to existing popular products.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #229: Much Ado About Wordle appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Conventional wisdom argues that silos in business are bad, preventing knowledge and information from spreading beyond the silo's walls. When it comes to returning to work, proponents of all hands on deck in the office insist that remote work creates silos and all but eliminates the opportunity for chance encounters that lead to new ideas or shared knowledge. A new study from Harvard, which analyzed billions of employee emails from 2020 and 2021, found that silos did solidify but that the results were actually positive.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #228: Rethinking Silos appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In February's long-form Hobson and Holtz Report, Neville and Shel spend more than half the show with news and commentary about a variety of Web3 elements, including the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, cryptocurrency, and blockchain -- all of it from the perspective of the impact these fast-emerging technologies will have on public relations and organizational communication. In the first part of the episode, the focus is on three non-Web3 stories:
- How to make a good first digital impression
- The communication industry's responsibility for addressing non-binary and trans matters
- The UK's online safety law undergoing revisions to stamp out illegal contentIn his Tech Report, Dan York reports on "static videos" becoming a thing on Instagram, a British band's protest against Spotify's algorithm, a Twitter test to send DMs by bypassing the DM button on your profile, Wired's review of the messaging app Telegram, the release of WordPress 5.9, and a new project Dan's working on.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #227: DAOS and Crypto and Blockchain (Oh, My!) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Deloitte, the global consulting firm, has launched "Unlimited Reality," a practice designed to help clients "harness next-generation strategies, tools, and technologies to create and connect virtual worlds for industrial, workplace, enterprise, and consumer contexts." In other words, Deloitte wants companies to engage with them to find their way into the metaverse. Neville and Shel discuss what all this means and look at the role the metaverse is beginning to play for enterprises.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #226: The Metaverse Goes Corporate appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

As interviewing job candidates switched from in-person to video during the pandemic, some candidates have been paying shills to stand in for them. Others have shelled out money to be fed answers to interviewers' questions. Neville and Shel dive into one case of a job candidate who had someone else interview on his behalf and discuss ways to detect this unique and baffling new fraud.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #225: Bait and Switch appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

What does it take for a business to get attention on TikTok? In the case of Duolingo, the language training app, it's a giant green owl and the kind of content that is outside most organizations' comfort zones. Neville and Shel review the program and talk about how going viral on TikTok requires a different mindset than any other social media channel.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #224: Viral and Unhinged appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

LinkedIn labeled its news item, "Do we have a failure to communicate?" The article expanded on details shared in a Bloomberg article that found "after so many fits and starts, employees are losing faith that their managers can get this right." What employees believe managers can't get right is the return-to-the-workplace agenda that has created headaches for all involved. Employees are feeling uneasy with all the changed dates. Fully three-quarters of executives believe they are being "fully transparent" about their remote working policies but less than half of employees agree, according to one survey. In this episode, Neville and Shel take a look at the story from the communicator's perspective.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #223: COVID, Return to Work, and the Growing Trust Gap appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

An artist is selling NFTs of Hermès Birkin bags which (unsurprisingly) provoked a response from the company in the form of a cease-and-desist letter. The artist, Mason Rothchild, has fired back, claiming he has a First Amendment right to create art representative of the world around him and suggesting that NFTs represent an evolution that Hermès should be part of. Do the legal precedents favor Hermès or Rothchild?

Note: Since we recorded this episode OpenSea has removed Rothchild's art from its NFT marketplace.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #222: NFTs, the First Amendment, and Trademarks appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The world's first multicultural podcast agency network has signed a multi-year deal with McDonald's to produce custom segments and content feature McDonald's menu items along with specialized targeted ads. It's not the first business Pod Digital Media has signed, suggesting companies are interested in reaching diverse audiences through podcasting. It makes sense, since podcast audiences are pretty diverse -- unlike the ranks of podcast hosts.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #221: Filling the Podcasting Diversity Gap appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the January Hobson and Holtz Report, Neville and Shel dive into the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer. Also in this episode, disinformation is now available as a service -- DaaS; we review some journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions for 2022; TikTok and LinkedIn are both copying successful features of other social media services but adding their own twists; authenticity in virtual communication doesn't mean what you think it does (according to one researcher); organized labor is having a moment in the U.S., which should lead internal communicators to rethink some of their strategies. In his tech report, Dan York looks at Twitter Spaces' capabilities, the rebirth of Tumblr, Instagram's test of a chronological feed, Instagram and TikTok testing subscriptions, and some reports on NFTs.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #220: Pssst. Wanna Buy Some Disinformation? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Selfridge's -- the high-end UK fashion retailer -- is making NFTs available at its retail stores. It's not alone. Can NFTs at the Walmart checkout counter be far behind?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #219: Get Your NFTs at a Brick-and-Mortar Retailer appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The Walt Disney Company's parks division is looking for two part-time, on-site TikTok creators to generate content. The Disney Parks Experiences and Products account on TikTok may be the official account but there are also hundreds of Disney influencers sharing videos, too. When it comes to this kind of content, though, we still mostly hear about Instagram, even though Disney has far more followers on TikTok than on Instagram and Twitter combined. What does this mean for other brands?
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #218: Disney Is Auditioning TikTok Creators appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The Associated Press has announced it will launch an NFT marketplace for some of its most iconic photos, including some that have won Pulitzer Prizes. The possibilities for other businesses are mind-boggling.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #217: Would You Buy an NFT of a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photograph? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The "For Immediate Release" podcast is joining the Marketing Podcast Network (MPN), the new podcast network from Jason Falls. What does this mean to current listeners? Not a damn thing. The podcast will continue to be available on the FIR Podcast Network and your current subscription will work just fine. But we wanted to let you know about the MPN and why we're making our show available there. Listen for details.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #216: FIR Joins MPN appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

This is the first of our new shorter episodes that will complement the monthly "Hobson & Holtz Report." Today, Neville and She share their thoughts on trends that will affect communicators in 2022.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #215: Communication Trends for 2022 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the December Hobson and Holtz Report, Neville and Shel make a few announcements about the future of the show, including an imminent listener survey and plans for short conversations multiple times per week in addition to the monthly flagship show. Also in this episode: A Facebook executive blames society for misinformation and absolves MetaPKAFacebook of any responsibility; the top communicators at better.com resigned after the company's CEO sacked 900 employees on a Zoom call they all thought was just another town hall; a British comedian and commentator has produced a documentary that argues social media gins up anger in its users; propaganda-as-a-service is a possible outcome of the introduce of Large Language Model (LLM) software like Jarvis; there's a lot of hype out there about Web3, so Neville and Shel spend a fair amount of time dissecting it. In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at the State of Word and some elements of Web3.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #214: The Hope and The Hype of Web3 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The metaverse is front-and-center in this episode of The Hobson & Holtz Report as the future of the metaverse begins to take shape and businesses start to pay attention. Also in this episode: You.com is a new search engine that delivers clear advantages over Google for anyone conducting research (as opposed to simply looking for the answer to a question), a look at a methodology for businesses to ramp up their TikTok efforts, and Neville shares his observations about the Center Cam webcam. Updates to social audio services are at the heart of Dan York's Tech Report.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #213: Getting Serious About The Metaverse appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Gaming. Blockchain. NFTs. The Metaverse. They are all colliding, creating something bigger than any single one of these platforms. In the October episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel talk about this phenomenon and some of the companies making it happen. Also in this month's Hobson & Holtz Report, Neville and Shel discuss the rise of robo-voices, how some companies are taking a more authentic and organic approach to influence, the widening gap between employees and leaders when it comes to policies for returning to the office, ways to encourage employees to engage and share on an intranet, and whether now is the time to hire a chief metaverse officer. Dan York's Tech Report looks at the recent Facebook outage, Facebook Reels, TikTok's billion-user milestone, Slack Clips, Twitch's code base, and Global Encryption Day.
Continue Reading →

The post FIR #212: When Worlds Collide appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The September installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Apple, Google, and Facebook are all in the news and none of it is good. In fact, some employees are up in arms.
Gartner's Emerging Technology Hype Cycle for 2021 is out.
There are CEOs who won't touch social media with a 10-foot pole. Then there are those who want nothing more than to post a meme that goes viral.
Artificial Intelligence's place in the Gartner Hype Cycle gets its own deep dive.
People tune out bad news for a variety of reasons. Knowing why can help you overcome obstacles and get your message heard.
There's a wide gap between how executives think their companies' cultures have done during the pandemic and how employees feel about it.
Dan York's Tech Report covers a gamut of topics, from LinkedIn ending Stories and Twitter introducing Tips to TikTok enhancing livestreaming and introducing a SiriusXM radio channel.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #211: Come On In! The Culture’s Great! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The August installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Whatever it turns out to be, the metaverse is absolutely coming as the next iteration of the internet
An update on NFTs: They have more staying power than we originally predicted
Unpacking the vicious cycle of anger, hostility, and outrage on social networks
Internal communicators need to get more involved in how managers manage
Shades of Dooced! How a boss discovering a secret blog changed an employee at a company in Belgium

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #210: Dipping Our Toes in the Metaverse appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The July installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Subway employs SEO and SEM to fight reports that there's no tuna in its tuna sandwich
Wikipedia in Arabic and bring books back to Mosul: A brief interview with Ideas Beyond Borders founder Faisal Saeed Al Mutar
Communicating the return to the workplace is a change management challenge
Is the digital nomad dream over?
Don't give up on Clubhouse just yet: The social audio service has done a deal with TED
Is short-form audio the next big social network trend?

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #209: The Great Resignation appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The June installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories: Half of U.S. adults consider who publishes it as the key factor in assessing a story’s trustworthiness Colgate launches its sonic logo How “Zoom” became the “Kleenex” of video calling Business leaders turn to internal podcasts to stay connected with employees... Continue Reading →

The post FIR #208: We’ll Zoom You On Webex appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The May installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Research finds that fear is sometimes a great way to influence people's behavior.
A train company emailed employees they were getting a bonus. It turned out to be a cybersecurity test.
Should brands and marketers pay attention to BitClout?
What, exactly, is the hybrid model that is likely to define the future of work?
Employee activism is taking a number of forms. The employee exodus from Basecamp is one of the latest.
Prepare yourself for the changes in travel
Dan York reports on social audio as Clubhouse releases an Android app, Twitter launches Spaces for everyone with more than 600 followers, and Facebook pivots into audio. Also: Instagram and YouTube updates, and Automattic's acquisition of CC Search.

Continue Reading →

The post About That Bonus… appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The April installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Reuters' website goes behind a paywall
NFTs are still hot as problems (and possible solutions) emerge
Advertisers like podcasts but want better measurement
CEOs and brands are pushing COVID-19 vaccinations
Volkswagen tarnished its already dicey reputation with an ill-conceived April Fool's prank
Is Clubhouse cooling off already?
Dan York reports on Unsplash's acquisition by Getty Images, Wix's challenge to WordPress, TikTok, Clubhouse, and Substack facing competition, Google's revamp of Feedburner, Core Web Vitals' change to Google search ranking, and Instagram Lite.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #206: We’re Both Vaccinated, So Listen Without a Mask appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The March installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, which Burger King learned after one well-meaning but poorly thought-out tweet
Do you subscribe to a podcast or follow it? (Or listen to it?) These verbs may have consequence, especially in attracting new podcast listeners.
Another company has fired another employee who built a following sharing work-related TikTok videos.
A racing drone's 87-second flight through a bowling alley has captured Hollywood's attention.
Neville is trying Timely, an Android-based competitor of Clubhouse.
NFTs -- non-fungible tokens -- are a hot topic right now. Will they become a staple of marketing and communication or will remember them as a flash in the pan in a few years' time?
Dan York has updates on WordPress and Google in his Tech Report.

Continue Reading →

The post FIR #205: Are NFTs Nifty or Not? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The February installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Can anyone moderate podcasts the way we expect Facebook and Twitter to moderate content?
How communicators can make a difference when IT introduces new software or systems
There’s a right way and a wrong way to engage in newsjacking
Can “branter” build long-term brand value (and what the hell is it, anyway?)
A deep dive into Clubhouse, the hot new audio social networking app

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is Sunday, March 14 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch live here.

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to fircomments@gmail.com. Spread the word to your communications community.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Neville’s link blog, Outbox, is available, as well.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Why wellness at work looks different in 2021 (from the Politemail blog)
Can anyone moderate podcasts?
Research: When New IT Systems Shift the Burden onto Employees
There’s a right way—and a wrong way—to leverage newsjacking
Does ‘branter’ ever really build long-term brand value?
The Future of Social Audio: Startups, Roadmap, Business Models, and a Forecast (by Jeremiah Owyang)
The Problem With Clubhouse
Is Clubhouse the Next Big Social Media Platform for Brands?
Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists
Why Is Everyone Talking About Clubhouse?
How Media Companies Can Capitalize on the Clubhouse App
Audio Takes Off During the Pandemic
Mark Cuban is co-founding a podcast app where hosts can talk to fans live and monetize their conversations
The Bull Case for Twitter Spaces
You’ve Been Invited to Clubhouse. your Privacy Hasn’t.
Clubhouse’s Inevitability
Why Marketers Are Flocking to Clubhouse to Tout Their Expertise — and Brands
Burger King Parent RBI Chats with Consumers on Buzzy Clubhouse App
Clubhouse, a Tiny Audio Chat App, Breaks Through
The Wrong Clubhouse App is Getting Review-Bombed on Google Play

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

In League with Murdoch
In the case of Australia vs. Facebook, the Internet is the casualty
America Needs a Public Interest Approach to Solving Big Tech Harms to News
Changes to Sharing and Viewing News on Facebook in Australia
Dan’s initial thoughts on TwitterSpaces
The signup form for joining the list for TwitterSpaces

The post FIR #204: Won’t You Join Us In Our Clubhouse? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The January installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report — which marks the beginning of the 17th year of FIR — includes reports on these stories:

The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer is one of the bleakest yet
Communications and the U.S. presidential transition
Business, communication, and the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol
The future of misinformation
Why CEOs Need to Amp Up Their Social Media Presence
The Heinz bottle competition
Dan York’s Tech Report covers the deplatforming of Parler, the new White House website, U.S. government analytics, and sea shanties on TikTok (and TikTok’s duet feature)

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is Saturday, February 22 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch here.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Neville’s link blog, Outbox, is available, as well.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Listen to FIR #1 from January 3, 2005
Shel’s “Webcor at 50” podcast
Circle of Fellows podcast: A look back at communications in 2020
Politemail report on employees and click fatigue
2021 Edelman Trust Barometer
2021 Edelman Trust Barometer: Plague of Mistrust Follows COVID-19
Technologists Use Facial Recognition on Parler Videos
President Biden Swore In Hundreds Of Appointees On A Zoom Call
President Biden Swears In Day One Presidential Appointees in a Virtual Ceremony (YouTube)
New White House website includes a hidden recruitment message for coders
As Americans Crave Stability After Capitol Attack, CEOs Step Into the Leadership Void
Ben & Jerry’s Calls to “Impeach” Trump as Brands Like Coca-Cola and Chevron Break Their Silence on the Capitol Insurrection
Facebook Forced Its Employees To Stop Discussing Trump’s Coup Attempt
Richard Edelman: CEOs must reassure employees after Capitol Hill riot
Hyatt faces backlash for “harboring domestic terrorists” following Capitol riots
Business Leaders Condemn Violence on Capitol Hill: ‘This Is Sedition’
Online misinformation about the US election fell 73% after Trump’s social media ban
Twitter’s decentralized future
Post Trump, a better system must start in America
Referring Former President Trump’s Suspension from Facebook to the Oversight Board
Twitter thread of Facebook’s Oversight Board
Review of Trump ban marks major turning point for Facebook
How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation
CEOs! It’s time to up your social media strategy
Heinz Asked People to Draw Ketchup, Then Turned the Artwork into Custom Bottles
Draw Ketchup site
Ketchup competition video
Draw Ketchup examples

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Dan’s Twitter thread on deplatforming Parler
The new White House website (created on WordPress)
New WhiteHouse.gov (post by Matt Mullenweg)
Biden White House Sticks with WordPress for Website Relaunch
U.S. government analytics
Example of sea shanties on TikTok (and TikTok’s Duet feature)

The post FIR #203: Insurrections and Sea Shanties appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The December installment of the Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

Twitter’s plans to relaunch verification and what’s next
Clubhouse is poised to become a major social media platform (if Twitter Spaces doesn’t squash it like a bug)
How a company should say, “We’re sorry”
Walmart and others expand their employee advocacy programs while Sherwin Williams fires the only employee engaged in it on their behalf
Euphemisms for getting laid off
Could Substack be a new channel for journalism (including brand journalism)?
Dan York’s Tech Report covers more Twitter changes; screen sharing comes to Discord while Reddit acquires Dubsmash for its screen sharing functionality; Snap and Facebook take on TikTok; Walmart and TikTok introduce video shopping; WordPress powers 39% of the web (and more about WordPress); podcasting turns 20

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is Saturday, January 23 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch here.

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET (though not on Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.). For credentials, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to fircomments@gmail.com. Spread the word to your communications community.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Neville’s link blog, Outbox, is available, as well.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Twitter’s plans to relaunch verification and what’s next
Twitter tests ‘humanization prompts’ in effort to reduce toxic replies
Why Clubhouse App Might Be the Next Major Social Media Platform
Twitter launches its voice-based “Spaces” social networking feature into beta testing
When Your Company Has to Say Sorry, Here’s How to Do It Right
‘A true influencer program’: Inside Walmart’s growing army of employee TikTokers
Fired Sherwin-Williams Paint Enthusiast and TikTok Star Joins Rival Firm to Develop New Paints
Euphemisms for being laid off
Substack: the new journalism?
Substack launches an RSS reader to organize all your newsletter subscriptions

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Twitter bought a startup that lets you virtually hang out with your friends
Discord will be able to screen share from iOS and Android devices starting today
Reddit Welcomes Video Platform Dubsmash to Team
Snap launches a TikTok-like feed called Spotlight, kick-started by paying creators
Facebook publicly launches its collaborative music video app, Collab
Walmart to pilot test livestreamed video shopping on TikTok
Usage statistics of content management systems
Learn WordPress
The moment podcasting came into being

The post FIR #202: We Regret Any Inconvenience appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The November installment of the Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

A spoof airline fooled a lot of people. Experts say it had some good ideas.
A look at some technological behaviors adopted during the pandemic but that are likely to outlast it.
Twitter is the source of some remarkable PR pitch fails.
Digital-only financial services startups are turning to influencers to help build their brands.
Retailers and other brands are pressuring employees to become TikTok influencers for them.
What happened when humans stopped managing social media content? (It wasn’t pretty.)
Dan York’s Tech Report explores Twitter “Fleets,” Google search results and “page experience,” and Google’s new webinars and its partnership with PRX.

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is Saturday, December 19 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch here.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Neville’s link blog, Outbox, is available, as well.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Minimizing email overload for remote teams
The spoof airline that could actually predict the future of travel
New technological behaviors will outlast the pandemic
The Workplace is Dead. Long Live the Workplace.
10 embarrassing PR fails that show how not to pitch
The “Fin-influencer” boom: Why Instagram and TikTok are the new battlegrounds for digital banks
Retailers are pushing their employees to become TikTok influencers
What happened when humans stopped managing social media content
Coronavirus: Facebook accused of forcing staff back to offices

Links from Dan York’s Report

Fleets: a new way to join the conversation
Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search
Google’s new webinars in their partnership with PRX

The post FIR #201: Wow! Mom Air’s Big Launch appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The October 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

A look at how employees are handling life in the pandemic and what companies can do to help
Techlash hasn’t gone anywhere, but it has fragmented
Journalists need training on advanced verification techniques to curb disinformation
Sonic logos and other company-used audio needs to change to reflect broad public sentiment
Tesla has done away with its corporate PR department; apparently, all they need is Elon
Voice connects us to others even more than video — and way more than text
Dan York’s Tech Report covers Snapchat getting sounds, WordPress’s new ability to turn blog posts into Twitter threads, Cloudflare’s automatic platform optimization for WordPress, Spotify podcast promo cards, and the crazy amount of live streaming going on.

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is Saturday, November 21 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch here.

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to fircomments@gmail.com. Spread the word to your communications community.

Shel is moderating a panel on digital storytelling on Wednesday, October 21. Steve Crescenzo is keynoting. The panel includes members of the FIR family Deirdre Breakenridge and Scott Monty, along with nonprofit communication consultant Damon Rawls. It’s free and online at 12:30 ET. Register here.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

A pulse on employees’ wellbeing, six months into the pandemic
The Future of Techlash: ‘Sentiment is Becoming More Fragmented’
Year in a Word: Techlash
Journalists need more training on advanced verification techniques to curb global ‘tsunami’ of Covid-19 disinformation
Why Some Sonic Logos Actually Hurt Their Brands During Covid
Tesla dissolves its PR department — a new first in the industry
Tesla’s Decision to Scrap Its PR Department Could Create a PR Nightmare
What Tesla’s Move to Eliminate Its PR Department Means for the Industry
Type Less, Talk More

Links from Dan York’s Report

Snapchat Now Lets You Add Songs to Posts, Launches With Preview of New Justin Bieber, Benny Blanco Track
WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically
A New Way to Publish Your Blog Posts Simultaneously as Twitter Threads
JetPack 9.0 Introduces Loom Block, Twitter Threads Feature, and Facebook and Instagram oEmbeds
Cloudflare Launches Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress
Introducing (Spotify) Promo Cards
Spotify for Podcasters: Promo Cards
Dan York’s Spotify Promo Card
The Dan York Report on Spotify
Streamlabs & Stream Hatchet Q3 Live Streaming Industry Report

The post FIR #200: Elon Musk Doesn’t Need No Stinking PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The September 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

The new crisis PR: What companies should do when they’re “cancelled”
Twitter’s plans to motivate users to “read before you retweet”
How COVID-19 has changed the way we write content (and engage with video and social media)
The arrival of the NHS contact-tracing app gives a big boost to QR codes
Your company’s history could pose a risk for your reputation
LinkedIn is making changes
Dan York reports on Amazon podcasts, LinkedIn Stories, WordPress news, and TikTok at home and in China

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

The new crisis PR: what should brands do when they’re ‘canceled’?
Cancel Culture Is Real — Here’s What Brands Need to Know About It
Twitter plans to bring prompts to ‘read before you retweet’ to all users
Twitter tweets about its retweet prompt
How COVID-19 changed the way we write content
Engagement with Video and Social Content Soars During Pandemic
Arrival of NHS contact-tracing app heralds return of QR codes
UK government site for creating a coronavirus QR code poster
UK government contact tracing app FAQ
Your Company’s History Can Make It More Valuable—Or More Vulnerable
Major Changes To LinkedIn You Need To Know About
LinkedIn Launches Updated Look, Makes LinkedIn Stories Available to All
LinkedIn Introduces Stories and a Redesign to Create a Friendlier Platform

Links from Dan York’s Report

Amazon Podcasts
All you need to know: podcasts in Amazon Music
LinkedIn Launches Stories Plus Zoom, Bluejeans, and Team Video Integrations as Part of a Wider Redesign
WordPress: Remove Facebook and Instagram as an oEmbed Source
oEmbed Plus (from WordPress)
On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project
W3C is Prioritizing Accessibility Over Its Open-Source Licensing Preferences: Why is That a Bad Thing Again?
Douyin, China’s TikTok, grows monthly active users to 600 million
Internet Way of Networking (as it relates to the TikTok ban)

The post FIR #199: The Cancel Culture Crisis appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The August 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

- Twitter’s new conversation settings (which are not an assault on free speech)
- Instagram’s terrible attempt to duplicate TikTok
- What the coronavirus pandemic will do to our homes and offices
- How the pandemic is reshaping our approach to social media
- Google’s pandemic-related additions to travel searches
- Amazon Web Services lets brands integrate livestreams into websites and apps
- Dan York’s Tech Report covers the release of WordPress 5.5, the TikTok war, the war against app stores, merging messengers, and the demise of Flash

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

The Immediate Future podcast
Politemail’s third consecutive year on the Inc. 5000
Politemails Michael DeRoschers on telling stories with data
New conversation settings are coming to a tweet near you
We Tested Instagram Reels, the TikTok Clone. What a Dud.
Instagram is Reels Complicated Now
Instagram Creators Say They’re Not Switching to Instagram Reels, Survey Finds
This is what coronavirus will do to our offices and homes
With virtual meeting burnout, can companies be remote forever?
Longing for the days of hallway conversations
A PwC exec says the global disruption has accelerated the future of work by 5 to 10 years
Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All
The Office is Far Away. Can Its Culture Survive?
Schroders to allow thousands of staff to work from home in milestone for City
Tired of Zoom calls? Company offers at-home hologram machines
Coronavirus pandemic is reshaping our approach to social media
More than half of humanity now uses social media — here’s what that means for brands
Study: U.S. Adults Who Rely on Social Media for News are Less Informed, Exposed to More Conspiracies
Social media is the most popular method of engaging with brands
What Brands Mean by Brand Purpose
Google adds re-opening and COVID-19 info to travel searches
New Amazon Service Lets Brands Easily Integrate Livestreams Into Sites, Apps

Links from Dan York’s Report

WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”
The TikTok War
President Trump Orders Bytedance to Divest from its U.S. TikTok Business Within 90 Days
Internet Society Statement on U.S. Clean Network Program
Facebook Tests TikTok-Style Video Format on Its Main App in India
Snapchat Tests TikTok-Style Navigation for Exploring Public Content
Techmeme’s Curated Content on Epic’s Battle with Apple
Facebook Says Apple In-App Fees Hurt Businesses During Covid
Facebook begins merging Instagram and Messenger chats in new update
Sources: Google plans to eventually replace Duo with Meet
The rise and fall of Adobe Flash

Raw Episode Transcript (from Descript)

Communicators and Communicurious welcome. You’ve tuned into the August episode of, for immediate release, the podcast for communicators, where this month Neville Hobson. And I talk about a useful new Twitter feature and what people are saying about Instagram reels, the tick talk alternative. We take a deep dive into the changes to work that may or may not result from the Corona virus.

The way we use social media is also changing because of the pandemic. Google has added some pandemic related features that are also quite useful and live streaming. My newest interest is getting a boost from Amazon web services. And Dan York brings us his tech report talking about WordPress 5.5, the war against app stores, merging messengers and the end of flash, along with his take on the tic talk war.

All that and more is coming your way right now on for immediate release, another fine podcast for the fir podcast network. This is for immediate release the podcast for communicators.

Welcome everybody to episode number 190. Eight of four immediate release, the August episode of the Hobson and Holtz report for Monday, August 17th, 2020. This is Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

And this is Neville Hobson in Bracknell in England. And it’s good to be back with you Neville. It’s been all of, uh, I think three days, uh, or two since I saw you on the zoom chat.

It’s true and, uh, four weeks or so since the last time. And in that time we’ve gone through heat waves and all sorts of unpleasant temperatures, which are not really a bad as you get in the U S I know, but it’s been pretty miserable here. I have to say, it’s going to be 105 Fahrenheit here in Concord today, and that is a three degree drop from what it was yesterday.

O M G is one way to respond to that shell. Yeah. In fact, PG and E has notified everybody that they are in a stage two alert, which means people are using too much electricity. And if it goes to stage three, we get rolling blackouts, which I’m so looking forward to. Fun. In any case, we have a terrific show for you today.

We are talking mostly about communication related issues associated with the pandemic, uh, lots to cover, uh, but Neville, before we do that, uh, you were on a podcast that isn’t one of ours recently. That’s true yesterday. That’s a Friday, the 14th of August. When I recorded a conversation with Katie Howell, who’s the CEO of, uh, immediate future, uh, an agency here in the UK.

That’s one of the originals in those very early days of social media. You know, that, that time it was just blogs. We talked about and I met Katie back in 2005 and we’ve been connected ever since. So she invited me to. Chat with her on this particular podcast. It’s coming up, I think in a week or so, it’ll be published.

It’s video and audio. And we talked a wide range of topics of social media brands, trust where it’s all going. We touched on some very interesting topics. I know some of these are close to your heart shell employees as advocates, AR VR, mr. Those lovely three twin acronyms. A tick, tock and reels. So we touched on all of that.

So this is coming up soon. Um, the, uh, media future publishes a series of podcasts, which are worth a listen to a media, future.co.uk/podcasts. I’ll definitely give it a listen. She’s not the only Katie in the UK podcasting a couple of months ago. I was on Katie McCauley’s internal communications podcast.

Okay, cool. Okay. Katie’s are big in the UK. Yeah, I guess it is well before or we jump into our content as usual. I want to thank our sponsor polite mail and they were in the news this past week for the third straight year, they made the inc 5,000 list. Uh, they had three year revenue growth of 154%.

Remember the inc list. Isn’t the biggest companies. That’s a fortune, uh, inc is the fastest growing. And their growth hasn’t been hurt by the pandemic. Uh, I want to read a quote from their founder and managing director, Michael , who said, as the workplace continues to evolve, internal email communications have taken a more vital role than ever before.

Over the last five months in particular, we’ve witnessed internal communications become a lifeline between employers and employees as such large organizations are increasingly turning to polite mails, broadcast measurement tools. To make more informed decisions about the emails they’re sending to employees and overall, uh, this year’s inc 5,000 represented median growth of 165% total revenue of 290.7 billion and more than 582,000 jobs added.

Uh, he also wrote a good piece for Forbes talking about the importance of using narratives when telling data stories, which is something I really believe in. Uh, but what you should do dear listener is visit www polite mail.com, where you can learn more about this enterprise and email intelligence platform for outlook and office three 65, which helps communicators and HR teams measure and improve employee engagement.

And we thank polite mail for their ongoing support of, for immediate release. So that takes us into quite nicely, actually into our first topic, which is I found this quite interesting shell, the news from Twitter earlier this week, uh, that they have. Tweaked what you can do, uh, with your tweets, uh, which looks interesting to me.

Um, now they’re going to let you limit replies who can reply. You can actually connect, troll that flow of a conversation on Twitter. If you want to a Twitter, it says that this is designed to increase the amount of quote, meaningful conversations on quote that take place on Twitter. And to help people weed out abuse and spam in their replies.

There’s rolling out this feature, where you as a user can limit who replies to it has been in beta testing for awhile, and it’s narrowing out to a users of the mobile app on iOS and Android systems, as well as twitter.com on the web. So tweet deck isn’t yet supported. I would note I use tweet deck, so it’ll be handy.

Uh, when it comes to that platform, uh, how does it work? Well, what you notice when you, uh, when you click or tap the little icon to open a new window, to write a text message, you get a small globe icon, which will appear at the bottom of your tweet. And if you do nothing, everyone will still be able to apply.

Indeed. It says everyone can reply. This is the default, or you can tap it. And limit replies just to those who follow you or those who you tag in the tweet itself. So you can have all your followers replying to it if they want to, or just the one or two or three or however many people you mentioned in the tweet itself.

So an interesting aspect of this, which is like a work around that, that kind of is there. I found this interesting if you pick, uh, the third one, uh, so just those who tag in the tweet itself and don’t tag anyone. You can then broadcast the tweet with no one being able to reply to it. So that’s kind of literally like a broadcast message only, uh, which could be of use to some people.

And then we will probably chat about that show. Cause I know you’ve got some thoughts on the value of something like that. So, uh, I found it interesting in the explanations. Twitter’s posted about why they’re doing all of this as well. So setting parameters around those who can reply can help the original poster, cattail, abusive, or trolling replies, or to limit replies to keep the conversation on track.

A beta test feedback has been positive. Twitter said those using the feature. So they felt more comfortable and protected from spam and abuse. People who are limited from replying. So if you can’t, for instance, you can still retweet with a comment and still inject whatever you want to say into that conversation.

But that requires a bit of work and probably most people aren’t going to do that unless they really want to. Some people are criticizing this as you’d expect saying that it implies a curtailing of free speech and free expression where you’re not permitting anyone to respond to these kinds of things.

So you’re bound to get that kind of comment to it, uh, that it might give a stronger voice to those who are actually using Twitter to disseminate abusive information of the cells. By limiting how people can respond. Uh, there are a couple of counter arguments to that though. One is that people can still see and retweet what someone says.

As I mentioned earlier, one way of responding or retreat with a comment can still be pretty powerful. Sometimes such tweets can go viral and be seen even more than the original tweets themselves. So it’s an interesting move. I think it’s really good. I’ve not yet used it. Uh, I’m conscious now, if I’m tweeting on the platform or the mobile app, I see that little globe with everyone can tweet as a default.

I’m kind of anxious to try just not done it yet. I’ve not found anything to do it. I’m going to find something over the next couple of days, just to see, get a sense of how it works. So I think there’s a good move. Uh it’s it’s a. Net positive for the platform. Um, and it’s a good step forward in, in, uh, improving, uh, how you use Twitter overall.

I think what, what’s your take on that show over a little? Um, my first reaction was not about a curtailing of free speech. I think that’s an absurd argument. You can still say whatever you want on Twitter. Uh, well, not whatever you want. Right. But some people are out there big time saying, Oh, this is a it’s salt on freedom of expression.

It’s not because you can still tweet. Uh, there’s lots of ways you can tweet about what somebody else is tweeting. The fact that you can’t comment on a tweet itself is not a curtailing of free speech. I did, you know, my first knee jerk reaction was that it’s not very social for a social media. Platform, but the more thought I gave it, the more use cases I came up with for it.

And the blog post from Twitter also helped me. Conceive of, of, of these potential uses. One of them is essentially a panel discussion. If you want to have a panel discussion, uh, then you can just include the names of the, yeah. The tweet handles the Twitter handles of the three people on the panel with you.

And then they’re the only ones who can reply. And now you can have a conversation that you have. Promoted that you’re going to be having at a certain time for 30 or 60 minutes on a, on a dedicated topic. You want people to be able to comment on that, do what we do on the circle of fellows broadcast, which is give people a hashtag and let them use their own Twitter accounts with that hashtag and monitor it.

So you can go back to your panel and say, Hey, so-and-so just asked this question. What do you think? And the panel can go ahead and respond. I think that’s. A really effective use of this feature. I used it for the first time this morning, not for a panel discussion. I just wanted to limit this to people who follow me.

It was political in nature. It was related to the upcoming presidential election. And I just didn’t want to hear from the trolls. Uh, so, uh, I’ve already seen one person, uh, retweet it. Uh, so yeah, I think my one. A bit of skepticism is that most people probably won’t avail themselves. I love it because it’s an extra step and people are pretty lazy on social media.

They just type and click. Uh, and even if they’re aware this feature exists, they’re not going to think of it. Just like. On Facebook, where you can choose who sees your post, if I’ve set it to public for something, I don’t think to set it back to not public or just friends when I send my next one. And then I go, Ooh, I didn’t want everyone to see that, but it’s just post and click.

So I’m not sure that most people will take advantage of it, but for those who do, I think it’s going to be a useful feature. Yeah. I agree with you. By the way you mentioned it’s not available on tweet deck. It’s also not available on Hootsuite, which is what I use at work. Uh, so I doubt that it’s available on any of the other social media management tools out there.

Um, that could be a limited. Yep. Uh, it could be that it’s just new enough that they haven’t incorporated it yet. Uh, but it could be that they’re not making it available through their API. So. Well, one of the big social media stories in the U S for the last several weeks is president Trump’s announcement that the video sharing app tick-tock has 90 days to sell off its American assets.

Along with any data that is collected in the U S he’s claiming the tick talks parent company that Chinese from bite dance is a threat to national security. Uh, I’ve seen. Reports of a lot of things that tick talk is doing with data that is dodgy, uh, that is a threat to individual products to see that we also face from services like Facebook, which is right here in the U S uh, I think the national security, uh, allegation is, uh, A bit of a stretch.

Uh, but the official order was made just Friday evening. Uh, and this has led some advertisers to hold off on advertising and tick tock, which is going to affect their revenues. Although I did read that the New York Yankees, the baseball team went ahead and launched an ad campaign on tech talk, but you know, baseball won’t be playing in 90 days.

So I think they’re relatively safe. More interesting though, is that it has. People who are posting to tech talk, particularly the, the growing cohort of TechTalk influencers. They’re rushing to alternatives and they’ve got lots of alternatives to turn to the question is, are they any good? And the alternative that made the biggest splash was Instagram.

Uh, they introduced reels as a tech talk alternative, according to a survey 75% of tick tock creators said they’re not moving their content to reels because the algorithm isn’t as good. And there’s no for you page. And if you’ve looked at the, for you page on TechTalk, this is what drives people to share stuff.

Uh it’s where tectonic content. Is launched on to their viral paths. Uh, so this is not available, uh, on reels. There’s nothing like it. And so these influencers are staying put for now, but the worst news about reels came from the New York times. Uh, they ran a story with the headline. We tested Instagram reels, the tick-tock clone, what a dud.

Um, one problem is that tech talk is a standalone app. Reels is a feature inside Instagram. It’s published to the explore tab lab. Uh, one of the coauthors of this piece, Brian Chen said the exploration have is a mishmash of photos, sponsored posts and long form videos. A reels also lacks ticket talks, editing features like song recommendations, automatic clip trimming, which uses AI to speed up video creation.

Uh, the New York times. Internet culture writer. Taylor Lauren said, reels is the worst feature she’s ever used. I want to read just a couple of the statements she made in this article. She said, and, um, you know, pulling no punches here. It’s horrible. Not only does reels fail in every way as a tick tock clone, but it’s confusing, frustrating, and impossible to navigate.

It’s like Instagram took all the current functionality on stories, a tool to publish montages of photos and videos with editors. Filters text and music clips and jam them into a second new complicated interface for no reason. To me, it’s really unclear whom this feature is for tic talk is better in a million ways.

The main one being the tectonics, he moves all of the friction that normally comes with trying to make a good video. On tick, tick, tick talk. You can just a ton of videos like hit select on 17 different videos of all different links. Dump them all into the app and hit a button. Tick tock will automatically select highlights from your videos and edit them in a way to match the beat of whatever sound you choose.

That makes it easy. That makes it Oh, easy to create a really engaging, smooth video in under 10 seconds from a ton of footage. And this isn’t just one opinion from the New York times, Sarah fryer on Bloomberg said Instagram has officially become too complicated, even more complicated than Facebook when it comes to deciding where and how to post.

All right. Now, if you search for tick tock alternatives, you’re going to find a lot of people who are publishing lists. One blogger ranked four of them putting byte on top byte is the new video sharing service from the one of the co-creators of vine. Uh, followed by Triller and Dubsmash reels is at the very bottom.

Here’s my prediction. If tick tock doesn’t divest in time and Trump does ban it, none of these alternatives will become a full blown replacement and the format will recede from its current prominence. And that’ll be a shame. Uh, and by the way, we’re not done talking about tick tock, Dan York folks. This is on Tech-Talk, uh, in his.

Report, which is coming up in just a little bit. Yeah, it is interesting. Shall. I mean, I, I’ve not tried real to myself. Um, I, I use tick tock mostly to listen. I have published some stuff, but I don’t spend enough time in the platform. Uh, and indeed, one of the issues I find with tech talk is so addictive. I mean, I can spend Sunday I’m 20 minutes just watching.

It’s not very healthy. So. Anyway. So, uh, um, I did read a briefly passed across on my RSS, feeds a piece in Digiday the other day. Great headline. There’s no revenue in it. Why publishers aren’t prioritizing Instagram reels. That’s an interesting take. So if that’s picture added to everything else you just said, then this does not bode well for the future of reels at all.

So, uh it’s I thought the New York times piece was. No punches pulled at all very, very clear review. Didn’t come across as snarky or anything. This was factual and yeah, I agree with them not having tried it, but it’s a dud by the way, I have tried it. Uh, and once you get there and start scrolling, they look a little like.

Tick tock videos. Uh, some people clearly are, are either crossposting or opting to go for reels in preparation for the band. And, uh, but yeah, essentially it’s still the vertical swiping instead of the horizontal swiping. Uh, but. You know, on that for you tab on talk. What I find is stuff that I want to look at, and that’s based on that algorithm.

It’s the fact that they look at what you stop and look at and give you more stuff like that. I tend to stop and look at a lot of the cooking. Tech talk videos, these these 15, the second or however long, they are a quick lessons on how to make something. And I’ve done several of those. Uh, so suddenly I’m seeing more of those and this is great.

They have managed to fill that up with stuff that I want to look at. And like you, I can spend 20, 30 minutes going through that. Uh, and look up at the clock and go, Oh my God, have I really been spending this much time? I’m on Tech-Talk I don’t get that unreal. All, it’s just this hodgepodge of whatever people have posted.

Uh, and I spend about two or three minutes there and I go and. Shut it off. Yeah. So, well, it’s interesting. I mean, the, the digital piece mentioned it makes reference in date to the fact that many people who use tech talk are repurposing content and sticking it on rails. And I read that as kind of like.

Testing it out trying it out, but there’s no whole scale shift or anything we’re seeing that is exciting from a, from big brands. Certainly. Uh, so it’s interesting. And if things do pan out, such as that picture, you painted with Trump, et cetera, then yeah. It, it, it, it. It will upset, uh, an embryonic, uh, new ecosystem in process.

It seems to me led by tech talk in the United States, certainly. And that will undoubtedly have repercussions elsewhere, too. Sure. And, you know, interestingly tick tock has also moved well beyond what it started as which was people, lip sinking and dancing and, uh, things like that. Uh, there’s speculation that one of the reasons that Trump is, uh, on its case, Is that, uh, young people used tic talk to spread the word that they should snatch up tickets for Trump’s rally in, uh, Tulsa a few weeks back, which is why it was half empty.

Uh, and it’s actually his fury over that that is leading to his focus on a ban. Uh, claiming that there are national security issues, but we’ll talk more about that later. The idea that these, these social media platforms are being used for something a little new and different these days. Good. So this takes us to a topic which might occupy a lot of our attention this episode.

It’s, it’s, it’s a fascinating one. Um, I’m going to kick it off with a kind of, a little bit of scene setting here it’s to do with, uh, the changes that are happening as a result of, uh, of, of the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 the, the, the actual disease. Um, uh, and it was, uh, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since I saw it the other day.

Uh, on the BBC website and I love the way they told the story, the way they presented it in a pretty interactive way on the website. So, uh, it’s a scenario that, that paint a picture of that painting, which I think is extremely plausible. This scenario. It’s a bit like if you cast your mind back two or three episodes shell, when we talked about, um, uh, the kind of scenario of a year ahead from.

Now, uh, whether the writer wrote this picture of going to work, uh, post pandemic a year on how things were different. And that had a lot of credibility too, in the picture. It was painting this one too, I think does that job. So let me kick this off with a little bit from the piece that BBC wrote. So meet Layla it’s 2025 and she works from home four days a week.

It’s been that way. It’s a 20, 20 lockdown. It’s 6:30 AM. And she’s on her way to work. Laila arrives at her office building at 7:00 AM. Start times at the company where she works a staggered to minimize the number of people arriving at the same time. Her office days are mainly for meetings gone are the days when she’d head into the office to work at a screen.

She can do that at home. Lame employer used to share a much larger office building with several other companies. Now they’re in smaller, newly refurbished premises, all to themselves on the ground floor. Layla pauses in front of a thermal body scan to check a temperature is normal. Yes. 36.5 degrees Celsius.

She passes a camera used for facial recognition, identifies her as a staff member and the security barrier opens at no point. Does she touch anything? Laila is on a contactless pathway. The lift to her office on the fourth floor is voice activated. Touchless technology has replaced grubby buttons. The maximum occupancy is two on the fourth floor.

She walks down a corridor and through the doors, both are wider than before made that way to keep staff further apart and reduce the chances of a virus being transmitted at the door. Lailey uses a hand sanitizer she’s so used to it now that she doesn’t even think about it. She sits down at the desk.

Most of the furniture as well as wall panels and facades is made from anti-microbial material. It’s easier to clean and harder for bacteria to stick to Laila Mexico coffee in the kitchen area where the worktops are also anti-microbial the handles on the drawers and cupboards are made of copper. It’s a costly, but naturally micro propellant material.

The air conditioning system uses UV light to kill pathogens. It also reduces the humidity. To help prevent germs, multiplying, responding to a stream of data from census fixed around the building and wearable sensors used by staff labor’s office used to be completely open plan. Now she’s partitioned off to her left.

There was a clear plastic screen so that you can at least see her colleagues. The screens are removable bolted into fixtures in the floor. They go up if there’s a threat of an outbreak, but come out. If the threats of sights in front of Linda’s desk, the separation has done with plants. The staff got fed up with plastic everywhere.

A couple of years ago, they said it made the office feel like a hospital. Layla prefers the plants. The story goes on into a lot of detail on the routine of her day, but that sets a scene that I would argue is likely to be very common indeed in big urban areas. And of course this picture is set in London, really.

Uh, and, uh, it’s to me it reads, uh, it feels extremely, yeah, plausible. Now of course, there are lots of questions related to this, not the least of which being that this will have a huge, huge effect in impact even, uh, on, on how people, um, travel, how they work, uh, what they do in the offices that are built for hundreds of people.

If not thousands that now have, you know, Double figures, max, probably a people. So what will it do to, um, two offices and other buildings? What will it do if you’re working at home all the time to the suburbs and the rural areas where people are now congregating, what about the future of. Uh, cities and urban environments, uh, travel, uh, the whole big picture.

We touched on pieces that I see increasingly subject to this kind of analytical treatment. So that sets a scene, I think is very, very likely this will. Be a common feature in many places, not necessarily a uniform and universal, uh, but it’s, uh, it, I find it exciting more than alarming shell. I don’t know your view on it, but to me, this is very plausible.

Oh, I am all over the place on this. I do want to share one article. I read in business insider about David Clark, he’s Pricewaterhouse, Coopers, principal, digital strategy and innovation leader. Who said that we can expect to see. These kinds of large scale shifts toward digital collaborate and teamwork.

Uh, even after it’s okay to go back to the office, uh, he says the pandemic has accelerated the future of work by five to 10 years, a quote from this article from him, he says it was already moving in this direction before. But the pandemic actually opened the doors for more experimentation and new ways of working people think of virtual work as a response to crisis.

But what they don’t realize is that there are a lot of good things that are happening out of virtual and remote work. Okay. Uh, now. I work for a construction company. Uh, and the picture you painted of the offices, one that would require the owner of the building to pay for a pretty substantial renovation renovation.

Our offices were renovated a year or so ago. In fact, our. Office our headquarters office in San Francisco just became the 16th office state of California to earn a well gold star certification, which is all about, you know, uh, sustainability. Uh, the idea that the company, the owner of the building would go in and renovate again, uh, to ensure that there is an elevator that only holds two people voice activated, uh, not without regulation.

Uh, I’ve got to tell you it’s it’s expensive. So I think the likelihood of this being a common future, uh, either relies on regulation or, or it doesn’t happen, uh, for a long time, it’s going to be a long period of time where people decide that they need to make the shift. I think, to interject to comment on that show.

I agree with you. Yes. This is not universal. The article doesn’t pretend it is the case even. Um, it does say that it takes place in 2025, so that’s five years away. Uh, and this particular example is a, is a company, I guess we can breed from words describing it. Yeah. Um, is, uh, you know, as a smaller, newly refurbished building or to themselves.

So that isn’t a universal picture by any means. So this will, this will appear in fits and starts. So it’s not every day, but it will appear some people will do this. Certainly the point about regulation. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. That th that’s got to be factored into it. So maybe this might not be 20, 25. It might be 20, 28, but I see it.

Definitely. Yeah. And a lot of, uh, contractors, developers and architects have really been focused on sustainability because that’s where they saw the regulation coming. Yeah. Uh, as a result of more people becoming convinced that climate change is a big deal and we have to do something about it. I mean, you know, we’ve been very active in the field of captured carbon, uh, that there’s carbon in the materials that are used to build.

Uh, and how do we reduce that footprint? Uh, we were involved in the introduction of a carbon calculator for construction, uh, and to suddenly shift. Uh, you know, to veer on a new path, uh, to be, uh, virus conscience in building. I think, I don’t know. I just think that’s going to take longer than five years. Uh, I think there’s another issue here to talk about what that, one of the things that you read out from that article.

Well, since she only comes in for meetings, which means the only people she sees are the people she’s meeting with. And the only thing they talk about. Is whatever the meeting was based on now. See, no dive ran an article that said that people are complaining about first of all, too many virtual meetings, things, uh, which this would alleviate.

If he could come have physical meetings and then go back home and sit in front of the computer, that’s fine. But what they’re also missing is the lack of casual conversations and serendipitous encounters in the hallways. Uh, CEO’s are working to find tools that will maintain culture, uh, while they’re also maintaining productivity.

But they shared a survey that found that people are struggling to say stay focused during virtual meetings, which will eventually have an impact on productivity. And, you know, those hallway conversations are important when you’re sitting at your computer in your home and you get up to get coffee, you may pass your, your spouse or your kid that you’re not going to pass somebody in the company that you don’t see very often and have conversation that might lead to an innovation.

Uh, well, to, to add a comment to that, you, you probably right, but it’s going to happen. That will happen. That there will not be those chances to do that. I’m not saying that’s universe. So here’s a good example. Why, uh, in the more of the UK newspapers today, it talked about Schroders one of the big fund managers, uh, based in the UK, but global.

That, uh, they are, uh, they communicated with all our employees worldwide yesterday, Friday that they are literally getting rid of nine to five and not requiring anyone to come into the office at all. Now, not just during the pandemic, when the pandemic end, you do not have to come into the office at all.

So they are. I’m going to allow thousands of staff to carry on working from home in a radical overhaul of its rules as the newspaper describes it. Um, the footsie 100 investment business has become the first major London institution to tell workers they will no longer be required to come into the office five days a week.

So they don’t expect a return to working life. As generations of professionals have previously known it with far more flexibility, you have aware. And when employees do their jobs, the new rules. Oh, we’re unveiled and an internal message to staff and documents on the company’s internet that I mentioned yesterday.

So that, uh, will that be universe? Who knows? I think it says to me those points you made, I don’t disagree with them at all. They are important, but, but we’ll, we will have to find new ways of doing that. So the physical going to the office and having a serendipitous encounters. If Schroeder’s is an example, that’s very unlikely to be a feature, a tool of work of the web.

Oh yeah. I did read one post. I don’t remember where it was from, but they said, you know, the typical hallway conversation in the working remote world is going to require people to find new ways to deliberately repeat the dots. Connected. The loops closed, provide the. Picture put two, two together, whatever metaphor you want to apply here.

But I did read two wall street journal articles, uh, that questioned this idea of remote work. So we’ll see how long this company keeps this up. Uh, what they say is after, you know, four or five months of this, uh, remote work, uh, cracks are starting to emerge in the work from home enthusiasm projects are taking longer.

Training is tougher hiring and integrating new employees is more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would an offices where they get to sit next to colleagues and absorb how they do their jobs.

The other article asks if company culture can survive when nobody’s at the office, more than half of the 2000 full time, us workers across many industries who responded to a survey. Conducted for Prudential in March and April says, they say they felt less connected to their organizations as remote workers.

And of course, we’re seeing all kinds of tactics to try to maintain culture, but place is an important element of culture and I’m not sure all of these tactics will be all that successful. No, I’m not sure either shell, but I see this is definitely going to pass. This will be part of the landscape, not necessarily everyone, but the nature of, of, uh, of, um, what has happened, uh, globally.

And indeed bring it down on a level. We can, we can actually identify with more in specific countries and cities, uh, is, is a change that is so fast that no one could have imagined this. So as a result of, uh, of this, uh, uh, pandemic. Uh, the deaths, the infections, the horror, the, the, the fear, all of that, uh, it has had an impact, uh, on, on Sundays.

I see lots of people. I hear, lots of people took it. I can’t wait to get back to the office. Uh, this is no good. This isn’t going to work. And then over here, there’s another group that says, no, none of this is the way it’s going to be probably something combining all of it, maybe. But if you’ve got.

Companies like this particular one, I mentioned Schroders and others that I read about who are making quite significant shifts, requiring a, literally a course, correct action in their strategic approach to how they run their operation and make them do the business. Even by. Um, enabling people to not come into an office, then you are forcing a change that has to happen.

I don’t believe for a second that the economies worldwide will collapse because of this at all. I don’t believe that, but it is a radical change and it cannot work for everyone for obvious reasons. You’re talking about the construction industry. For instance, can’t build a building, you’re building a building, a new building for God.

You can’t do it that way. So, you know, manufacturing, uh, you can’t do that, but. Financial institutions communicate its PR you all that, that could work this way. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, there is no way easy answer. It’s a complicated picture. You know, I’ve heard, I’ve heard other stories that people take how easy.

Yeah, it is to hire people in the remote work, then, then having to go through an interview process and then the traditional way. So there’s no commonality of view here. Lots of different views and surveys and it’ll filter through. I think whether it’s a, it’s it. You know, it’ll work for some and probably not for others.

Our summer intern program was problematic, uh, because of the pandemic. Um, and there are lots of industries where, I mean, you know, the meat packing industry yeah. In any factory environment, uh, yeah, I guess it’s going to be problematic, but, uh, in construction, you know, we’ve seen a reduction in that size of the labor force, uh, fewer and fewer people want to be laborers on buildings.

Uh, so there is a move toward robotics. Uh, to get a lot of the construction done. Uh, that’ll be a longterm change. It’s not going to happen overnight. I do want to share one technology I read about though, uh, that’s being touted by the company that makes it as an, as a better alternative to zoom. Uh, it is a Lifesize realtime hologram.

Uh, this, it looks like a full sized, uh, mirror, uh, where the person that you’re talking to is standing inside this machine. Like the one that you get scanned in at the airport, not the. A metal detector, but the one where you put your hands up and, uh, it’s kinda like that. And then you sitting in your room are able to look at them in the mirror as if they’re actually there in the room.

And it’s only $60,000 for one of these. Uh, so a meeting of say five people, plus you would require, uh, six of these. That’s what, uh, over a quarter million dollar investment, uh, they say that the price will drop down to 40,000. Uh, yeah, I don’t know, maybe one day, but, uh, I had to laugh when I saw this, uh, listed as a, as a zoom alternative opportunity knocks for entrepreneurs.

That seems, I mean, it could well be that it could, this. Prompt. I mean, thinking about technologies, uh, that, uh, we’ve seen in the past, that didn’t really work. Uh, not because the technology was no good. Uh, it maybe just wasn’t the time for it. I’m thinking of things like virtual worlds, like second life, for example, that I was in second life the other day.

And it struck me that, um, I I’ve been observing in recent well recent years actually that the, the experience is improving. Every time I go in. The graphics are richer. The, the features of the landscape are more natural looking. The it’s easier to create your advertise. I mean, I can remember it was seriously.

Okay. It’s doing that to get it looking halfway decent. So that could play a role somewhere in it. It may be in the AR VR, mr. Combination somewhere. So think of gaming. I mean, think of that. I mean, I’m talking about the true. The immersive online gaming competitions that we hear about. And people like for instance, that in my mind, cause I use a lot of their products, the unreal engine technology in particular, uh, that is truly eye opening.

And jaw-dropping, I mean, think of all those lovely metaphor that w it’s the immersiveness of that. Yeah. Um, present experiences and forget the fact that it’s a game, it’s the environment that, uh, would, uh, uh, present something quite compelling for some types of organizations and individuals in those organizations.

So could that be part of it, of, um, uh, of the culture? Does it mean that we’re going to see the word. Culture means something different in the coming years. So if it still means the interrelationships and, and, uh, uh, knowledge of, of, uh, engaging with other human beings in the, in the workplace, uh, all of that will mean something different.

Uh, and I think it will require a new type of, uh, of role in an organization to help people understand that environment and become accustomed to it. Uh, and so you, you, you’re going to see. I feel pretty sure of this. You’re going to see a rise of, of this kind of shift organizationally, where new roles are going to appear and people will be, uh, I think a key skill is going to be helping other employees navigate and understand the new workplace of which a huge part of it is virtualized.

For sure. And there are other forces that are going to drive changes to culture. I mean, if you look at blockchain, right. For example, the potential that smart contract max will allow you to get rid of the segment of your employee population and just. Contract with somebody who says, yeah, we can get that done.

Uh, you can check their credentials through the blockchain and then contract with them to do the work, pay them when they’re done. Uh, and you don’t need a quarter of your workforce. That’s going to have an effect. On culture. Uh, but you mentioned the fact that there are technologies that just aren’t ready yet.

Uh, when they’re first introduced, you know, QR codes, uh, would be an example of that. I remember when I was, uh, an independent consultant, I had a big consumer packaged goods company. Where we were experimenting with the idea that at their packaging plants and bottling plants, where the bulletin boards are, you could have a picture of the plant manager that you would scan with your phone, and it would bring up that week’s video, where he would talk about here’s what we achieved this past week.

Here are the issues that we need to resolve. Here’s what’s coming up the next week, a two minute video. The problem was that the people who worked at the plants didn’t have the expensive new phones that could read QR codes. Now, today, every smartphone reads QR code. So what are we using them for? Well, at web Corp, where I work reusing them.

When you go into the office to scan, to bring up the questionnaire about, you know, do you have a fever? Do you feel okay? Uh, where we maintain the logs? Uh, I go to restaurants now where we scan a QR code to get the menu so that you don’t have to touch a menu that the last. Customer touched. Everybody can use cube our coats now.

So eventually these technologies do take root. They do. Uh, and again, it makes me feel that there’ll be a need for, uh, redefining, um, roles, ships to take into account these shifts. It’s going to be well. Is it going to be difficult? I didn’t know whether it’s gonna be difficult. It’s certainly going to be challenging when we, if we pay attention to.

What many people comment on, um, the, one of the big issues with being virtual all the time is the, is the spatial difference. Uh, when you’re looking at two faces on a screen, uh, and, uh, the multiple feet faces on the screen, hearing everyone talking, uh, not altogether, but after someone says something, someone adds something than someone else.

It’s all at the same volume level. And you don’t have differentiators that, that help you, um, relate to that. Plus then there’s a flatness of the, uh, visual perception between it and you are, are, uh, seeing people with the same focal, uh, usage of your eyeballs. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, I’ve been conscious of that myself.

That adds to the fatigue of doing this. I mean, this is a genuine physical reaction to all of this. So we got to figure out how we make that work. If, because of the pandemic, it has accelerated elements of what was already in process, but suddenly it’s rapid likely Layla person at the BBC story, uh, where she’s now working in a refurbished office that’s smaller than before, but it’s got all those features.

Um, does it mean then that. Organizations, aren’t going to be able to offer that kind of a working environment. I come into the office for meetings and stuff like that in the current buildings that have elevators that takes 20 people or doorways that, uh, you know, aren’t as wide as that, or if they are, you know, 25 people go through at once.

So what does it mean to all of that? So it, to me, it’s, we’re on the cusp of something huge. That’s, that’s going to be such a mega change that will require significant expertise to help everyone survival at this. Really? Yeah. I wrote an article for our intranet on zoom fatigue, uh, and did a lot of research on it and, and learn some things, uh, that weren’t immediately evident.

One, is that looking at yourself? Uh, has you performing all the time? You’re always conscious of how you look and that’s exhausting. So I have taken to putting zoom into presenter mode. So only the person who’s talking is filling the big screen. You’ve got the film strip up at the top, but I removed myself from that.

So I don’t look at myself at all the other. And this one really intrigued me is that if you have 10 people on a zoom, Call, you’ve got 10 different backgrounds. When you’re in a meeting with 10 people in a conference room, there’s one background, you’re all sharing it, but now your brain is absorbing all these different backgrounds and perceiving it as a place where you are.

And that’s. Also exhausting. And the recommendation I saw was, you know, all these zoom backgrounds that you can get that are very rich and, and have all kinds of interesting things that don’t do that get something very plain and simple, because that will, uh, reduce the fatigue, uh, that is inherent in having that conversation that way.

Greeting shell and Evelyn, if our listeners all around the world, Dan you’re coming at you from Shelburne, Vermont. And I want to talk about the tick tock war and the war at the app store and all those things. But first the big announcement for me and the F over the third of the web currently using WordPress was the release of WordPress 5.5 on August 11th.

If you have not upgraded, I’m going to tell you, you really should. Some powerful features packed inside of there. Now I’m, there’s so much, in fact, I can’t really talk about it in this report cause there’s other stuff I want to cover. So I’m actually going to spin up, remember fir on technology with 10 York.

Well, I’m going to have a new episode of that coming out. Maybe by the time this episode is published or if not, it will be within the next couple of days. I’ve got a whole thing planned out to talk about, dive in deep and talk about what is so powerful in this release. But I would say if you haven’t upgraded do, do go and check it out.

There’s some tremendous. Speed increases both with the fact that now you have lazy loading images, but also with some improvements to the block editor, there’s now XML site maps, which you may have had before through plugins, like all in one SEO or Yoast SEO, but these allow you to use some of the default configurations in there.

The block editor caught all sorts of new capabilities, some really powerful things, including access to a block directory and much, much more so, more than I can talk about here. So watch for the Dan the fir on technology episode coming at you soon, but let’s move on. The big news. Of course, most recently has been the tick tock war.

You’ve seen this with president Donald Trump. The ticktock had to be, was not allowed to be an app stores, whatever. After 45 days there were so many more things going on. The U S actually announced something called the clean network, uh, program in order to get rid of any kind of connections to China, all sorts of things have been brewing.

As I write this right now, there was an executive order that. Bite dance. The company behind tick talk had to go and sell its assets within 90 days in order to continue having operations in the, in the U S all of these things are happening. And in all of this, in this broader context of this, this battle, With, with China really, and Ben Thompson writing over it.

Statuary wrote a great piece on July 14th, just called the tick talk war, talking about why tick talk has been so incredibly successful, why it has worked, what’s going on out there and, and, and talking about, you know, just the pieces that fit into this puzzle. You don’t quite understand what’s all happening.

Give his article a read. The link will be in the show notes. I would note. This is part of this larger kind of thing happening. And unfortunately, the United States, which has typically been a defender of the open internet is now going in a different form and saying, wait, we want a clean network that doesn’t have any connections to China.

So my organization, the internet society put out a statement around this because we have the U S now suddenly jumping in the bandwagon of. Let’s have a splinter net where every country has it’s own internet. That’s not how it should work. We have a global internet, a global network of networks, and this is where the powerful things happen is that we can have things like tech, talk that emerge out of China and become this amazing sensation and, and, you know, use by millions all around the world.

We need the global internet. So I would encourage you to read more on this. Think about this. Look at us. Of course. With ticktock having these issues, you know, the blood’s in the water for the sharks for all those circling around there. And we’re seeing this Facebook rolled out Instagram reels, which was it’s tick talk competitor.

There’s also news that Facebook is launching a new short video service in India, right within the Facebook app to do this. Snapchat is testing a tick tock style navigation, and YouTube is testing. Some features like this as well. There’s a war going on. We need to pay attention to this as communicators because this format, the tick tock format of short videos and showing in different ways is something obviously that people are enjoying.

We need to understand what’s happening there and what the space is going on. The other thing we, as communicators need to watch is what’s happening right now with Epic games and Fortnite and the app stores as a quick synopsis. Uh, if you put up an app through Apple’s, uh, Apple’s app store or Google play store, you have to give 30% of the revenue to either Apple or Google.

Well, Epic found a way to do it within their game to allow people to buy stuff. And then when Apple removed fortnight from the, uh, from the app store and Google did the same thing, they’ve then taken Epic, has taken them to court is coming up with antitrust. It’s coming up with all these different things for a long time.

We’ve talked about the consolidation of. Power into these app stores and the gatekeeping role that Apple and Google play in different forums. This is one of the first kind of direct challenges and somebody like Epic, who has such a gigantic following with Fortnite can do this. It’s something thing to watch because this is a test of the wall gardens and a push at can, can, is there a way to have them more open and not be so constrained in different ways?

Something definitely to watch because it may play out in a larger space around what our apps may be like and other things now beyond Epic and fortnight, Facebook of course, decided to jump in here too. They put up a thing where they were saying that they will let companies go and do online events that you could pay for inside are in 20 countries, businesses, the ability to charge users for access to live video streams.

So you could do this for like, they, they suggest a yoga class or a seminar webinar or whatever else. But they pointed out that Apple and Google don’t waive the 30% fee for people connecting through from the iOS or Android apps. So again, now Facebook is jumping in with, with Epic games and that same kind of space criticizing the app stores.

Lots more going to be happening in this speaking of Facebook, we’ll talk about merging. We’ve seen Facebook is now merging Instagram and messenger chats. So in some places you may find that suddenly you’re getting a message that Instagram, the messenger there, the direct messenger is now in fact messenger, apparently not all linked yet, but you can see where it’s going.

Rumors were also flying. The Google may be replacing its duo app and Android with the meet app that was formerly known as Hangouts. So all of these things, things merging together as the giants play in the playground. One final note. If you are still using flash anywhere, you should be aware. Of course, by now that it is dying as of December, it’ll be gone, Adobe will no longer supply the player and most of the browsers have removed it anyway, but there’s a great retrospective in ARS Technica talking about how this technology brought about the rise of user experience, focused design.

I’d encourage you to give it a rise or give it a read, think about it. And remember all those days of flash now gone. And with that, I’m going to go back to reading about all these Wars and you can find more of my audio and writing at Dan York dot Emmy. Thanks for listening and bye for now. Well, thanks Dan.

Great report. Uh, I know that my word press has been. Dated because the service where it’s hosted does that automatically. I have to go take a look at some of those features, but in particular, uh, Neville and I are both very excited to see the revival of fir on technology. Looking forward to that very, very much.

Yeah, good to have you take on those tech topics then. I mean, we’re press, it’s interesting. Um, Shell’s comedy in particular because I think most WordPress sites are, are, um, you know, automating in the, in the updating for security fixes and releases. And then of course, we’ve got the plugin auto. Updating that is a, I’m seeing a lot of conversations about that to be aware or not as the case might be, but it certainly is, um, a platform that is, seems to be going from strength to strength continuously.

I forgot the percentage now of how many of the world’s websites are run on WordPress, but it’s gotta be, I don’t know, at least half by now. Surely. So, um, anyway. Great, great report. Well, the pandemic, isn’t just changing how companies are working, uh, whether that’s for the longterm and the short term, it’s changing how we use social media to global web index surveyed more than 170,000 global internet users and found that the average number of social media accounts.

Per internet user has risen from 7.6 in 2017 to 8.1 today. And the amount of time we spend using social media has increased from two hours and 15 minutes to two hours and 22 minutes, even more interesting, 47% of internet users. Now turn to social, uh, even though just a 14%. See it. As a trustworthy source for news, uh, chase buckle trends manager at global web index said the increase in use for news was expected.

In fact, the increase for use of everything was expected. Given the amount of free time we have and fewer opportunities to get out and do anything but that it was startling to see how quickly and significantly the increased intensity of our social media usage has led to changes with our relationship.

With social media, uh, the study found the pandemic. Hasn’t just made changes to the consumption of news. It’s. Also helped revert social media channels back to their truly social origins. Now, the survey comes not just during the pandemic, but also at an inflection point. New digital 2020 July global stat shot report from Hootsuite.

And we are social finds it for the first time, more than half of the world’s total population. Is using social media. And a lot of these concerns that by the way, that’s 3.9, 6 billion people, a 51% of the global population, uh, and consistent with the survey. A lot of these, uh, are using social media as a source of news.

Interesting. That that’s problematic because a Pew research report found that in the U S yes. Anyway, adults who rely on social media for news are less informed and more exposed to conspiracy theories. So boy, uh, one other survey to note this one from Salesforce, which surveyed over 3,500 customers, our consumers worldwide, and found that social media is the most popular method of engaging with brands.

Uh, video content and virtual experiences were also top preferences along with how to digital guides, uh, podcasts were sort of in the middle. Of the list, but at the very bottom lower than digital newsletters and lower than printed materials were blogs, uh, the world just keeps on changing. Good. Doesn’t it just, uh, I read actually another, so it’s interesting that, um, about the shifting, shifting use of social media, there was a report by sprout social, uh, the other day that, um, uh, that I thought had some interesting.

Metrics in there from the findings of, of the folks they interview in the U S uh, consumers will reward brands that share their values on social. Uh it’s okay. When brands are forthcoming about the values and social 58%, the more likely to buy a product services from them, if they share similar beliefs, that makes sense to me, another one brands, risk losing business.

They fail to follow through. As the spotlight focuses on issues of social justice. 55% of consumers expect brands to take a stance that goes beyond corporate statements and monetary donations, such as new corporate initiatives or commitments to specific goals. These expectations are significantly higher among millennials.

So there’s lots more in this survey. You add that into all these pictures being painted and as something brands need to take a, to pay a lot of attention to, uh, as social media. Uh, gets this kind of attention, uh, from consumers. Yeah, there was an article. I hadn’t included it in the rundown, but when you brought that up, I went and found it.

This is from a and a, which is, uh, an advertising association. Uh, the headline is what brands mean by brand purpose. And the subhead says the combination of the pandemic and social unrest has spurred brands and organizations to think a new about what they truly stand for. I’ll put the link to that. In the show notes, but I found it to be a really good, interesting article that it’s, it’s more than just sharing your values.

It’s actually revisiting them at this point and saying, what do we stand for? And, and there are some organizations that are taking that to heart and, and doing a reassessment and, you know, coming out with new proclamations about what they stand for and sharing that on social media and getting good responses.

Okay. So, um, we’ve talked about all about coronavirus and COVID-19 in this episode and his, I think this is our final story on that topic, but an interesting one, nevertheless, to add to your thinking about what about finding out information about what’s going on and it comes from Google. Who are adding the reopening of a lockdown lifting basically.

And COVID-19 information to travel searches. When you search for information about a destination you’re going to, so they’ve already introduced a number of updates to help you get around during the widespread closures and travel disruptions. Now that more cities and places are beginning to open up.

Google is updating searches to make it easier to find details about travel destinations and reopenings. So with the update searches for hotels and flights will show the percentage of local hotels and rooms available. And the percentage of flights that are currently operating Googled trips will also surface statistics about the number of COVID-19 cases at travel destinations and users will be able to filter hotel search results.

Buy properties with flexible cancellation policies. Uh, Google will also continue to show details about travel advisories and other restrictions related to COVID-19. The updates will roll out over the next week or so and appear in Google search results and at Google trips page. Now I’m in the UK and I.

Tried it myself and all of this information is available in the UK already. So which case I would imagine it’s available in many other countries too, certainly in the U S but very useful, indeed looking at the screenshots in this piece on end gadget, where I saw the story reported, where it shows a screen, for instance, showing hotels in a particular city, uh, it gives you link to a travel advisories from a COVID-19 point of view.

It talks about how many hotels, what percentage have availability of spaces? How many, a percentage, again, the flights are operating out of the nearest airport and other useful information trends on COVID-19 infection rates increasing, et cetera. So all of this in your screen, in the search results itself.

So what struck me shell about this primarily was. Two things. One, this could be very useful information that you’ve got all this in one screen. The second would be to me, uh, an important one, the issue of trust and reliance on the data. So you might trust Google as a trusted source of information, but is the, is the data accurate?

And I think that’s something that according to Google as well. So that’s some pressure on all that big data at the backend to be accurate and up to date. And I think that’s quite a challenge. Well, Google has the resources to rise that challenge. I think, uh, even being as done some useful stuff, uh, the also ran a search engine.

Uh, they have a covert tracker that lets you hit the location button and the map shows localized data right down in the U S to the County level. I hovered over Contra Costa County, which is where I live and found out that we have 10,544. Uh, 545 cases of COVID-19 and we’ve had 151 fatalities. Another feature you can run a timeline at shows on a worldwide map with these blooming red circles.

What happened to the infection over time? You can even get a Chrome extension. That’ll give you the latest dates from being on the virus. Uh, I’m not gonna sit here and sing Bing’s praises, but this is. Pretty good stuff. I mean, Mashable says it’s the best Corona virus tracker out there. So I think a lot of organizations are, I don’t want to use the term taking advantage of the virus, but the virus is leading them to develop some really useful, uh, and timely services.

Well, here’s a non coronavirus related story. Uh, the technology that has grabbed my attention lately is, is live streaming. Uh, there’s no question that live streaming is becoming hugely popular, popular you and I have, uh, we know several people who are doing it right. I mean, Joe Jaffe, uh, is live streaming.

Is that every day that he’s doing that? Uh, I’m not sure it’s every day, but it says a lot. It is frequent, uh, and, uh, he lives streams his conversations with guests to multiple channels. Chip Griffin does a couple of live stream shows. He he’s even shown us is brand new studio that he built in his house for his live streaming.

Pretty cool. Dan York live streams all the time. Usually when he’s. Editing in Wikipedia. I get the emails that say Dan York has gone live. And, you know, if I haven’t checked my email, he’s not there anymore. Uh, Dan uses OBS, uh, to stream it’s a S uh, an opensource software package that you can use to manage live stream.

Chip uses V mix, uh, which is, is the one I’m using. It’s a windows only package. Um, he also uses stream yard, which we’re using right now. Uh, although we’re not streaming, we’re just. Using it to be able to see each other and create a backup recording, but chip likes it when he has multiple people on, because the mix is a bandwidth hog.

When you’re got multiple people involved. Um, But I read last week that Amazon web services has launched a new product. That’s going to let brands and businesses set up live interactive streams directly onto their websites or their mobile apps in just a couple of minutes. It’s called Amazon interactive video service uses the same technology you find on Twitch, which of course Amazon owns.

Uh, and that’s where Dan streams by the way is on Twitch. Uh, but with a more personalized approach using Amazon IVs as they’re calling it, uh, the SDK software developer kit and the API APIs, the application protocol interfaces customers can build interactive features into their live streams like virtual chat spaces, votes and polls, moderated Q, and a sessions by buttons for onscreen products and more, uh, Amazon took the step because.

Customers have been asking to use Twitch’s video streaming technology on their own platforms, and now they have it. So expect to see live streaming happening and more places like brand websites and apps, which will only accelerate live streaming’s popularity. I expect probably the other cloud services like Azure.

Uh, we’ll have to follow suit. If a lot of people start saying, I want a live stream to my company’s website, I’m going to switch to Amazon web services. Uh, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon. Eventually made a consumer version available so that a you and I could do this, but yeah, live streaming just continues to explode it.

Doesn’t it, the easier they make it, the lower, the barriers to entry, the more people are going to give it a go and try it out. So yeah, it’s going to grow, isn’t it? Yep. Uh, I, like I say, I’m learning to use it. I’m employing a virtual set, a virtual newsroom. I just have to figure out what it is. I want to live stream.

Uh, then I’ll actually start doing it, but I’m, I’m still learning the software. It’s not an intuitive software and the audience to whom you’re intending it to be available to. Right. Exactly. I don’t see that this currently is something I would want to use for my job. This would be for something more personal fun, but I don’t know what I got to figure out a theme, but I am, I am just, um, And raptured by the use of the software and the ability to do this, that I have to figure out what I want to talk about.

Well, we’ve got food for thought for a few episodes in the future, then here, should I say yes, definitely. And that by the way will be a wrap for this episode of, for immediate release, uh, episode number 198 for Monday, August 17th. 2020. Our next episode will be on Monday, September 26. That’s about a week later than usual, but I’m going to be on vacation.

Uh, the weekend that we normally only would record, uh, but in between you will be able to join us on our fir zoom chats. Uh, these have turned into, uh, Just collegial chat. So I’m not recording and posting them anymore, but you’re all certainly welcome to join if you would like to. And you haven’t joined us before, drop a note to fir comments@gmail.com, asking for the login credentials, and we’ll send them to you.

Uh, we have a group of regulars and that’s chip, uh, and, uh, Dan, uh, and bill spaniel. And you and I, uh, that are, seem to be either every week. Um, but we’d like to get more people involved in this conversation. So if you are so inclined, these are on Thursdays at 1:00 PM Eastern time. Uh, and it’s a lot of fun and Neville you’re with us for half of that.

I do my, my zoom fatigue time. It kicks in halfway through, but plus dinner. Yep. As well, 6:00 PM. UK time. I’d love to have a few more Europeans on the call. So I get out number by all the Americans that say, Hey guys, come on a bit of support here on a Thursday evening. Hey, Stuart, Bruce. We’d like to see you here.

Stephen Waddington. How about you join us? Uh, we also would like your comments because we would like to talk about what you want to talk about. So send an email to fir comments@gmail.com. You can attach up to a three minute audio file. You can even record that audio file directly from the fir website.

Just click the send voicemail tab on the right hand side of the page. It gives you 90 seconds. You can record multiple. Uh, 92nd clips. I know how to put those together, uh, and turn it into a single comment. You can leave a comment directly on the show notes. This episode@firpodcastnetwork.com or share your thoughts on the fir community on Facebook.

And also we appreciate your ratings and reviews. On iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And with that, that’ll be a 30 for this episode of, for immediate release.

The post FIR #198: Instagroan appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The July 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

Emotional Intelligence as an Internal Communications focus
AI avatars as a new tool for training and marketing
The latest TikTok news
What a better social network might look like
The rise of Virtual and Augmented Reality
The staggering jobs challenge the world is facing

Dan York reports on making video calls better, apps that keep copying each other, Amazon’s new live-streaming for influencers, new ways to get the analytics you need, and something nice to look at while we’re all stuck inside..

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

5 Reasons Why Emotional Intelligence Is the Future of Work
In An Era Of COVID-19 Disruption, Brands Must Rethink Marketing As Empathetic Customer Experiences
Deepfakes Are Becoming the Hot New Corporate Training Tool
Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier
This Person Does Not Exist
As TikTok grapples with weightier topics, journalists are tuning in to deliver the news
Meet the Creator of a Viral TikTok Who Caught the Attention of Disney’s Boss
Trump Administration Reviews TikTok for National Security Risks
Byte, the Reboot of Vine, Surges After Trump Claims He Could Ban TikTok
What Is Byte, the App That Just Passed TikTok on App Store Charts?
Facebook readies global launch of its TikTok competitor
Snapchat tests TikTok-style navigation for exploring public content
What a Better Social Network Would Look Like
Virtual Reality to recover in 2021 after falling to COVID-19
Covid-19 is pushing AR forward with three major trends
London’s Brixton Academy to host 360-degree Virtual Reality gigs
The VR Advantage: How virtual reality is redefining soft-skills training
World faces staggering jobs challenge, says Microsoft president

Links from Dan York’s Report

Facebook brings screen sharing to Messenger on Android and iOS
Microsoft Teams’ new Together Mode is designed for pandemic-era meetings
Mmhmm turns your boring Zoom call into a Weekend Update-style TV show
Instagram confirms its TikTok rival, Reels, will launch in the US in early August
Twitter brings Fleets, its version of Stories, to India
Amazon Influencers can livestream on Amazon and earn commissions
Amazon Influencer Program opens to live streamers for broadcasting to Amazon Live
Correction: Apple Safari Will Not Block Google Analytics Tracking
Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked
Simple and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics
WindowSwap

Raw Transcript from Descript

[00:00:00] Shel Holtz: [00:00:00] Greetings communicators, students of communication, those of you who are community curious, and those of you who are just so bored being at home, you’ll listen to anything. This is for immediate release where this month Neville and I talk about emotional intelligence as an area of focus for internal communication, fake videos of real people and fake people are being used for some noble purposes.

[00:00:24] But of course they’re also being used for nefarious purposes. What will people do if tick talk is banned? Like the journalists who have started using it to report the ideal social network is probably unlikely to ever exist, but that won’t stop us from talking about what it should look like. There’s all kinds of movement in the extended reality marketplace and business has a responsibility to train people who won’t have jobs in the coming years without being self serving about it.

[00:00:52] Dan York is here to talk about ways to improve video calls and his tech report along with some other great topics. It’s all coming your [00:01:00] way right now on for immediate release, another fine podcast from the fir podcast network. This is for immediate release the podcast for communicators.

[00:01:35] Hi everybody. And welcome to episode number 197. For immediate release. This is the Hobson and Holtz report for Monday, July 20th, 2020. This is Shel Holtz in Concord, California,

[00:01:49] Neville Hobson: [00:01:49] and this is never helps an then gentlemen Glint

[00:01:52] Shel Holtz: [00:01:52] and we are back for another discussion of communication related items [00:02:00] in the news that, uh, all of you communicators out there may at least I hope you will be interested in, um, In a month Neville, although we do see each other once a week on the fir zoom chats, how you doing?

[00:02:13] Neville Hobson: [00:02:13] Yeah, no bad actually shall not bad. It’s a you’re right. It has been a month since you last did. This seems to, it seems like the whole world has passed before our eyes this month. There’s so much stuff going on on the things around us that we can. Do nothing much about really apart from wear a face mask, it was cause you know what I’m talking about in that case.

[00:02:30] Um, but business wise, things are emerging in many countries here in the UK. Lots of changes with the lockdown that we have had. Um, people are going back to work, uh, restaurants so that we can do open pubs of gain to open, but mostly to do with not drinking inside drinking outside, only food is takeaway only and stuff like that.

[00:02:49] So it’s not coming out. Conflicting information from the government. They’re not very good at communication these days. It seems to me, and we’re now looking at, and you’ve got it in the U S as well. My sit in many other [00:03:00] countries, a lot of talk about is our second wave coming. So could there be for the lockdown?

[00:03:03] So the time of uncertainty continues, basically, I think.

[00:03:07] Shel Holtz: [00:03:07] Well, at least we have the fir zoom chat once a week to, uh,

[00:03:11] Neville Hobson: [00:03:11] get together with people 70. Right. I mean, the fir is a certainty in the world of uncertainty.

[00:03:16] Shel Holtz: [00:03:16] Right? Right. So we are thinking about changing up what we do with the fir zoom chat, because the last one, I mean, I enjoyed the heck out of it.

[00:03:23] It was a nice conversation. Bernie Goldberg joined us and he shared some information that really grabbed me use of Rome, this new note taking tool that I have. Latched onto just since Thursday, I love this thing, but it’s just chit chat and it certainly isn’t worth recording and sharing. So what we’re thinking of doing is communicating early in the week that when we get together on Thursday, we’re going to have a topic and people who want to join us and chat about that topic can do that.

[00:03:53] I think that’ll be worth recording and sharing. We just have to figure out what the topic will be.

[00:03:58] Neville Hobson: [00:03:58] Yeah, [00:04:00] exactly. So stay tuned, dear listeners, early part of the next week for what the

[00:04:03] Shel Holtz: [00:04:03] topic is. And other than that, we’re just going to jump into our content for the week. Right after we hear from polite mail for immediate release is sponsored by.

[00:04:15] Polite mail back in March white male, analyze the volume of emails, broadcast to employees and found more than a 100% increase in the weekday volume of email and get this more than a 1000% increase in weekend volume. And this was in March of the coronavirus pandemic was just starting to drive people from their offices into their homes.

[00:04:38] In may emailed use grew 60% on weekdays and 200% over the weekend, people were spending 50% more time with these emails interested, especially in topics related to the virus and the resources their companies are devoting to it. Other topics that drew employee interest were working from home help with using.

[00:04:59] Tools for [00:05:00] remote work tips on how managers can coordinate their teams remotely and updates on how to access or benefit from the resources and benefits that the company offers. I don’t find any of this surprising since email broadcast communications does tend to rise in response to a crisis, but I can’t remember a crisis that consumed pretty much every company at the same time.

[00:05:21] Like this one has, uh, it’s definitely the case where they work. We were using email pretty liberally for the pandemic, but since then, uh, I’ve started a daily email update that was just designed to aggregate the many items that otherwise would have gone out as separate emails over the course of the day.

[00:05:41] In a blog post politely, male said now’s the time to consider providing all non desk employees with email addresses or with the ability to opt in to company email using a personal email account. And that’s an excellent idea. A polite mail also suggests addressing the accuracy of the [00:06:00] distribution systems, syncing data with HR and active directory systems.

[00:06:05] And providing HR and comms teams with self service list management tools to better serve and target groups of employees by GMO cation, building role and management hierarchy, all good advice. And it’s the kind of thinking you get when you sign on with polite mail, which can help you do all that as part of its email creation.

[00:06:24] Distribution and measurement tool. It’s all just an outlook plugin. So there’s no integration with existing systems or any of that mess to deal with. You can learn all about polite mail and the how they can help you with your internal communications on their website. At of course, www.politemail.com. And as always, we thank polite mail for their support of, for immediate release.

[00:06:47] Well, as you know, I, I do work in employee communications where a lot of our work is aimed at improving the employee experience because of that we help the executive team and the HR department [00:07:00] implement solutions. They’ve come up with like the idea of psychological safety or building stronger internal community.

[00:07:07] One way to support the building of the experience and the strengthening of the culture has been to influence the nature of communication in the company. So it’s more empathetic and emotional. For instance, my colleague, Natalie, just posted a story this past week about a project act. This is a construction project.

[00:07:24] So they’re out in the trailer on the project site. Uh, they threw a surprise baby shower for a project manager. Who’s just. Getting ready to leave on maternity leave. We’re pushing these kinds of stories because I’m taking a cue from marketing research. I mean, just about a week ago, our friend Brian Solis wrote in Forbes that customer centricity, whether you call it CX that’s customer experience or marketing or digital transformation will be rooted in empathy, purpose, and compassion.

[00:07:55] And I don’t see why that would be different internally than externally. I just [00:08:00] recently found this article in entrepreneur magazine, headlined five reasons why emotional intelligence is the future of work. You know, I have to stop and look, anytime anybody refers to anything is the future of work. Uh, mostly these just provoke, uncontrollable scoffing on my part.

[00:08:17] But this one I actually found, uh, Pretty compelling. I forwarded it to the head of HR and our HR business partners. Uh, the article by Ryan Jenkins, he’s the founder of a learning and development software company. I find emotional intelligence as the ability to identify and manage one’s personal emotions and the emotions of others.

[00:08:38] He says, knowing how you’d feel in a certain situation helps you to gauge how others will feel in a similar environment. Thus enabling favorable social interactions and evoking favorable reaction actions from others. And here’s why the article grabbed me based on research. Jenkin says employees who feel cared for by their organization, 10 [00:09:00] times more likely to recommend their company as a great place to work nine times more likely to stay at their company for three years.

[00:09:07] Or more seven times more likely to feel included at work four times less likely to suffer from stress and burnout. That’s something we’re going to talk about again, later in the show. And two times as likely to be engaged at work, uh, Jenkins goes on to outlaw nine five reasons why it is the future of work, or as I’d be more inclined to put it part of the future of work.

[00:09:29] I mean, you know, there is AI for example, uh, is that, um, First, there are deep human needs, especially that of belonging, emotionally intelligent leaders can, uh, extend belonging to their teams. He says, second technology will enhance humanity as the world fills with more sophisticated technology like artificial intelligence, human skills, like compassion and empathy will define the competitive edge of workers and entire organizations.

[00:10:00] [00:09:59] And as the world becomes more high tech. Employees will want more high touch. Third on Jenkins list is the blending of work in life. He quotes the author of a book about embracing emotions at work saying in the moments when our colleagues drop their glossy professional presentation, we are much more likely to believe what they are telling us.

[00:10:19] Fourth, the employer employee relationship is evolving beyond the traditional transactional relationship with employees. And I’m quoting now leaning into the highly emotional aspects of their employees lives, uh, like offering adoption expense, uh, and lengthy bereavement leaves. And finally he says, gen Z is demanding it.

[00:10:40] 18 to 25 year olds have the highest prevalence of serious mental illness with 73% reporting sometimes or always feeling alone. If youth is the future Jenkins rights and gen Z are lonely and psychologically stressed, then the future of work must be emotional intelligence or getting back to employee [00:11:00] communications.

[00:11:00] I don’t think that embracing the idea of emotional intelligence requires us to launch. And initiative. In fact, I’m thinking I can go gorilla with this. Just infusing the stuff we’re already writing with these sensitivities. For example, right now we are seeking out manager behaviors, reflect the way we would like all managers to behave and have them write posts about it on the managers blog.

[00:11:24] So now I’ll just start looking for among the things that managers are doing, those who display. Emotional intelligence and have them write about that move. Wouldn’t even have to call it emotional intelligence. Yeah. It’s just a good management practice. And when it comes to programs like benefits programs, for example, that the company is considering, you know, bereavement leave.

[00:11:45] That goes up to seven weeks, for example. And, you know, another one would be adoption expects as expense assistance. All you have to do is point at the outcome based research, right? Less turnover, higher engagement to get leadership support. And of course there are the [00:12:00] articles that we seek and write out building an emotional empathetic angle into as much as we can.

[00:12:05] We’ll probably actually increase readership. So it’s good for us. So yeah, emotional intelligence probably will be part of the future at work. I can say with certainty, it will be where I work.

[00:12:16] Neville Hobson: [00:12:16] I’m sure you’re right. We may not call it that. And they’re looking at the article. Are you referencing? Many of these things have been around a long time with different labels.

[00:12:27] I suspect when, to me, one of the biggest obvious ones is work in life blending. Then we call that work and life balance. At one time, the other one evolving employer, employee relationships. Those are all things that have been around a long time, but things evolve and the, the kind of needs. Oh, employees and employers change over time.

[00:12:46] Um, but uh, these things are constant, uh, but we need to, I think maybe treat them in a different way. And you talk about yeah. Um, gen Z and what they want. Um, yeah. Yeah. We’ve got to [00:13:00] take account of that. Uh, I would say, um, the issues related to loneliness, depression and mental health are huge today and we have, um, Uh, started conversations about that in the last three to four months, since he found demic broken, the lockdowns happened around the world, uh, cause in our organization we’re all virtual largely.

[00:13:20] And now of course, or have been now of course we’re a hundred percent virtual and very few people going into any offices. So, uh, managing. That, uh, and I’ve had some experience with it. I wouldn’t call it mental health issues. I don’t believe I have any of those, but the kind of loneliness you sometimes feel where you got no one to genuinely reach out to other than a video image, a need.

[00:13:41] I think many people don’t realize that, um, they actually do need a bit of help with, with that. So that could just be talking to a colleague. A sympathetic ear, even a, an informal chat with some expertise in HR, those kinds of things I think are good, but recognizing these needs. And I say I’m thankful the internet society [00:14:00] definitely does that.

[00:14:01] And puts in place programs that, that, that help people, uh, are increasingly becoming, I think something that organizations need to do more of the ones that aren’t doing it. So, I’m not sure I liked the phrase, emotional intelligence shell, frankly. It sounds to me like a manufactured construct used in marketing more than anything else.

[00:14:20] Uh, which doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s not, it’s a good thing. So, so this is a good assessment. Uh, I think of what’s what what’s happening and what we need to be paying attention to in a way that’s a lot more structured than currently is the case, perhaps. So, and it’s not uniform everywhere, but whatever we’ll be, there’s just people we’re talking about.

[00:14:38] Shel Holtz: [00:14:38] Yeah. Yeah. And I think the coronavirus may be what pushes this idea forward. In most organizations, I just wrote an article, uh, about zoom fatigue. And this was for the intranet where I work and the reasons for zoo fatigue, a lot of it is, is what you’re talking about. You’re detached. All you see is a, is a two dimensional face on a [00:15:00] screen.

[00:15:00] Uh, you lose, lose a lot of the connection you have with people by not being in the same room with them. You’re also very conscious of yourself and how you look on the screen because you’re more or less performing. And that puts a lot of stress. Uh, so I think companies are paying attention to the strain that remote work is putting on employees and putting in place.

[00:15:24] Programs and support to help employees through this and when the pandemic ends and people. Those who do return to the office, which I still think will be most, at least part of the time, uh, focus on your emotional wellbeing, wellbeing. I hope is not going to just vanish that companies are going to recognize that there was value in that and therefore this, uh, idea of teaching people to be aware of their own emotions and those of others, and to be able to address that effectively.

[00:15:56] We’ll continue because right now, you know, at least before the pandemic, it [00:16:00] was pretty much, Oh, we have an employee assistance program if you’re having go there. Yeah. But that’s just not

[00:16:06] Neville Hobson: [00:16:06] adequate. No. I mean, I think that’s an interesting point you raised, and indeed, it’s something we will touch on another topic.

[00:16:12] We’re going to talk about a bit later in the show. Um, cause with the changes all around us, uh, that are causing, uh, extreme anxiety and worry among many about the job security and what’s a few, are they going to have a job? And combine that with the stories you keep hearing are these terrific numbers of, uh, of people, companies say they’re going to lay off.

[00:16:35] I saw one the other day. I’m sure it made headlines in the U S more than United airlines laying off 36,000 people, American airlines, 25,000 people over here, British airways, 12 and a half other big companies. And some, some big names are suddenly the shock. They’re closing down entirely things like this.

[00:16:51] So, yeah. Emotional intelligence. Uh, these issues of loneliness, depression of mental health concerns will increase as the [00:17:00] economic impact of this, um, this pandemic Kitsis. Uh, and so, you know, we’re hearing the health story, uh, of course, more than anything, but kind of just sitting there that’s coming towards us like this large tsunami we can’t see yet, or the economic consequences of fallout of all of this.

[00:17:15] So, uh, Saying there’s like assistance programs to help you? Uh, I think the con the, the issue for, for organizations potentially in this, uh, and that means the, the HR folks, the communicators as well, and, and many others, an organization is being completely swamped with issues to manage, uh, that affect employees.

[00:17:35] How are they going to address all of that? I don’t think they will be able to. So we’re probably approaching a time when the kind of help. People will need with loneliness, depression and mental health in particular are going to be quite acute for some, and their employer may not be able to address those things.

[00:17:52] Uh, so this is a, this is a, this is not a good time potentially coming towards.

[00:17:57] Shel Holtz: [00:17:57] Yeah. And maybe that’s a good topic for Thursday, empathy [00:18:00] and emotion and communication. Internal and

[00:18:02] Neville Hobson: [00:18:02] external. Yeah. Zoom chat on Thursday. Okay. Love it. Yeah, that’s a good one. Shall I must’ve met. So, um, let’s flip the, uh, I was going to say flip the funnel.

[00:18:13] Wasn’t that? Judge Evans. Joe. Jeff is the funnel. Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s not flip the funnel then, but let’s flip the flip this topic a bit. Um, I read this really interesting story in wired UK. Um, Uh, early this month about something WPP, the big ad agency is doing that I think is, uh, uh, something that many, many organizations could learn from their experience, but also in the more general sense of what this is all about.

[00:18:37] So here we are in July and they call it the wide story talks about. A WPP is going to be sending some unusual corporate training videos to tens of thousands of employees worldwide, uh, presentable speak in the recipient’s language and address them. I name while explaining some basic concepts and artificial intelligence.

[00:18:56] So it’s personalized to each individual employee, but [00:19:00] personalize, not as you might think, I think dropping the name into a text or something. This is each. Video given to each employee will be addressed to that individual employee. So it’s an original video. Each employee. That’s really interesting. I found the videos themselves will be powerful demonstration of what AI can do the face and the words it speaks will be synthesized by software.

[00:19:23] WPP doesn’t build a massage, but why it says it’s synthetic video training that is, might be called deep fakes, a loose term, applied to images or videos generated using AI that look real, although best known as tools of her harassment porn, or do publicity image generating AI is now being used by major corporations.

[00:19:41] So things like corporate training. So WPP is chief technology. Officer Stefan Pretoria says the ability to personalize and localize video to many individuals makes for more compelling footage than the usual corporate fare. The technology is getting very good, very quickly. He says deep fake style production can also be [00:20:00] cheap and quick and advantage amplified by COVID-19 restrictions.

[00:20:03] That I’ve made conventional video shoots, trickier and riskier. It says a company wide internal education campaign might require 20 different schools, scripts for WPP verbal workforce, each costing tens of thousands of dollars to produce with Cynthia. Uh, that’s a, uh, tech startup in, uh, in London who is providing the technology for this.

[00:20:25] Uh, we can have avatars that are diverse. And speak your name and your agency and in your language. And the whole thing can cost a hundred thousand dollars. He says in this summer’s training program, the languages are limited to English, Spanish, and Mandarin Pretoria’s hopes to distribute the clips 20 modules, or about five minutes each to 50,000 employees this year.

[00:20:45] I mean, this is a thing that’s significant scale. It seems to me, and to personalize the videos this way I find truly, truly fascinating. So the videos are produced with Cynthia Cynthia’s technology. They make video featuring synthesize talking heads for corporate clients, [00:21:00] including Accenture and SAP. Last year, it’s helped David Beckham appear to deliver a public service announcement on malaria in several languages, including Hindi, Arabic, and Kenya, Rwanda.

[00:21:11] Spoken by millions of people in Rwanda. That’s a country in central Africa as synthetic imagery moves into the corporate mainstream big brands and the ad agency will gravy influence how people experience the technology. Pretoria says his company is exploring many uses for AI synthesized imagery with creation so far, including a Rembrandt style portrait and digitally made models, indistinguishable from real people.

[00:21:36] We can do it technically, but we’re going slowly in terms of deploying that to the market, he says, or the article has other examples that talks about including a couple of other kinds, but it’s, uh, that are doing well. I wouldn’t call them a similar, but doing intro things, the corporates in the case of AI.

[00:21:51] Oh, the conclusion I like here quite a bit. Shelly companies WPP general council is working on a set of ethical standards for synthetic [00:22:00] models and other imagery. Including when and how to disclose that something is not in fact what it seems well, you could actually apply that to a lot of advertising.

[00:22:08] Right. But that’s interesting. You have to go that route. I would say to set those ethical boundaries or understanding so that you are able to provide people with the credibility and trust in what you’re delivering, as far as communication. Uh, that they’re not being made fools of. And that’s how people tend to react when they know they’ve been hoodwinked in some way or another.

[00:22:29] Because to me, it’s very easy to do this cause you can, and if you set out the ethical guidelines, then that’s the very least you ought to be doing. But this to me is a milestone moment. It seems to me in terms of how this has been deployed in corporations.

[00:22:45] Shel Holtz: [00:22:45] Yeah. I’m very happy to see this. This is a, uh, Intelligent ethical use of this technology.

[00:22:51] And I think you and I would both agree that these are not really deep fakes. A deep fake is putting somebody else’s face [00:23:00] on the body of somebody who already exists or getting somebody to say something that they didn’t

[00:23:06] Neville Hobson: [00:23:06] it’s depletion purposes it’s for bad things.

[00:23:08] Shel Holtz: [00:23:08] Right. And the software for deep fakes is specifically referred to as deep pig software.

[00:23:13] Right? Uh, this, this is, uh, AI to create avatars essentially, but it’s a great use of that. If you, if you want to see, uh, the potential for this, there is this wonderful website called this person does not exist.com and every time you refresh it, you will see the image of somebody who looks for all the world.

[00:23:34] Like a real person who is not, they were purely created in artificial intelligence. Uh, of course there is a dark side. To this. I just read a Reuters piece this week, uh, about an activist couple who was attacked in an article by a guy named Oliver Taylor. He was ostensibly a student at the university of Birmingham.

[00:23:53] He had published a bunch of freelance articles in one of them. He attacked this activist couple, [00:24:00] uh, they were taken aback by it. They said, Oh no, we’re not terrorists. Like we’re. Being accused of, uh, so they started checking into them. The university couldn’t find any record of them. The newspapers he’d published in he’d pitched them stories cold over email.

[00:24:15] He didn’t ask for any payment, so they didn’t try to confirm his identity, but a couple of them have now removed his articles. Um, it turns out upon investigation. He does not exist even though there is this very realistic head and shoulders photo of him, uh, which turns out to be one of these AI avatars.

[00:24:33] He is exactly what you asked. House intelligence committee, chairman, Adam shift warned last year would be a ventriloquist dummy, uh, who knows who’s behind this fabrication, what their agenda is, but experts did analyze the photo and confirmed that it is not a real person. And I worry about how the use of this technology can cause really serious damage.

[00:24:55] And in this case, it could have, you have ruined a couple’s reputation and, and maybe [00:25:00] even has already done that. Right. But using this for, uh, corporate purposes, uh, for political purposes, you know, the mind boggles at where this could go.

[00:25:11] Neville Hobson: [00:25:11] No. You’re absolutely right. And so therefore you find that I would imagine WPP as one of the kind of showcase examples of how they’re doing this.

[00:25:20] They’ve clearly thought this through and to a significant extent. So it’s been modeled properly. They can look at the costs, see the cost benefit analysis. If you will, and come up with things like to do this, it’s going to save us X. A million probably. Uh, but yeah, looking at what it can do is clearly the driver of why they want to do it creating so many individually personalized video presentations in different languages by that same person to each individual employee out of the population of 50,000 are getting these things.

[00:25:49] That’s no small feat. Absolutely. Right. As you say the potential for, uh, either deliberate middle man. Well, feasance on the part of the organization or more [00:26:00] likely is something happens that they couldn’t control and bad guys got ahold of things or whatever. You gotta be ultra vigilant with this kind of thing.

[00:26:09] So on the one hand. You’ve got the tech that lets you do this. On the other hand, you’ve got the tech that lets you do this full time. I had intent as well. And so they’ve got to protect the employees and the organization against, uh, the fault of the Gates, the risks of that, uh, which the article doesn’t talk about that.

[00:26:26] Of course, I bet you, they are, they must be doing that. So if they’ve got lawyers, uh, working on ethical standards, I would imagine they’ve got all sorts of other. Uh, elements going on so that essentially they can say to employees, and I’m just looking at that audience for the time being that what you see, you know, to help them understand how it, how it all works.

[00:26:46] Uh, you can trust this when it comes from us. Uh, and we are a trustworthy employee employer and would not for a second do something that would place you in harm’s way or in danger or risk your [00:27:00] identity or personal safety or for any other reasons. So what, when you get one of these. You can be sure it is genuine from us.

[00:27:07] That’s a, that’s a pretty big project to undertake, but like everything today, shell with, um, with technology that enables people to do things for good or bad, particularly online, you got to realize that it is for the good or the bad. So you’ve got to pay attention to

[00:27:23] Shel Holtz: [00:27:23] yeah. And yeah, one of the things that WPP did, undoubtedly, if you take the David.

[00:27:28] Beckham example is they got him to sign on. In fact, they undone, we paid him his reputation, right? So is behind this. He knows that he is being turned into one of these videos in order to speak languages that clearly he doesn’t know how to speak, and that’s fine with him. And I think there’s this implicit agreement between the audience.

[00:27:50] And WPP and, and the, uh, channels through which this is being broadcast. Yes. That we understand that this is what’s happening and that’s fine [00:28:00] with us. You know, I hate to use a, a term that is really overused right now, but it’s going to be a new normal, um, it’s when it’s being used to create people who don’t exist in the, and the wool is being pulled over your eyes or David back into saying things, he never agreed to say that’s when we’re in trouble.

[00:28:18] Neville Hobson: [00:28:18] I totally agree with that. And I think then this then presents a significant opportunity as well as a major challenge to get this right and put in place everything I can’t imagine doing to protect everyone from all the possibilities that you can think of that could go wrong with this. Now the reality of course tells you that sooner or later something will go wrong, but you can only do what’s best to the extent that, uh, everyone realizes this is.

[00:28:47] This is, um, the best extent you can do this. And that’s the time when you judge, whether you should then do it. So we’ll see lots more experimentation with I’m sure, by the way, shall I think, um, did we say this was [00:29:00] unprecedented? Let’s not use that word. It’s not unprecedented. Uh, it’s actually something quite remarkable what a, what you can do with this kind of thing, but the risks are high.

[00:29:09] Shel Holtz: [00:29:09] Well, we’ve talked about tech talk before there has been so much news about the app, uh, over the last couple of weeks that is worth looking at it again. Uh, you know, tech talk has undergone a pretty serious transformation from its early days. When I first started looking at it, it was mostly lip sinking and dance videos from really, really young users.

[00:29:29] This was when I was getting up in presentations and saying, how many of you have heard of tech talk and not one person would raise their hand? Uh, how much has it changed? You may ask? Well, according to pointer that the journalism site, uh, journalists are using it to reach a wider audience, they’re using it to find stories and even teach media literacy.

[00:29:48] Uh, one example, CNNs max foster, who’s an anchor and correspondent based in London, started experimenting with it after he saw his. Kid using it. Uh, he started making just [00:30:00] fun videos. He did a lip sync to a song spicy peppermints, and I was a little surprised to see he had 183,000 views on that. So he started doing more serious journalism on it.

[00:30:11] For example, he did one that listed Corona virus deaths in countries that are led by women. Uh, that one has 2.3 million views. Now this, the news video service has a million and a half followers on tic talk. Uh, there’s a link to the pointer article in the show notes. It looks at other journalists who are using it, uh, which is, um, Going well, this use of tech talk by journalists because as one, a USC journalism professor put it, what really tends to work is a genuine member of the community produced in content in that language, in that space.

[00:30:48] And the pointer article says, you don’t just jump into tech, talk and start producing journalism. You have to become a member of the tech talk community first, and people get to know you a little bit, then they’ll [00:31:00] accept your sharing, that kind of thing. Then there’s the tail of Julian Bay. He’s a 20 year old Georgia state university student who shared a video he made on TechTalk.

[00:31:11] He shared it over Twitter, asking people to retweet it enough, enough times that Disney would come calling. Uh, so really create a video in which he. Pulls out a lightsaber and then suddenly he Spiderman and you gotta watch it. It’s great. Um, and Disney came calling, uh, their executive chairman, uh, replied to bass online saying the world’s gonna know your name.

[00:31:33] And of course we can’t ignore the fact that the reason the attendance at president Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Was so poorly attended, was that tech talk users, especially those in the K-pop crowd, uh, used tic talk to spread the word to people that they should snatch up as many tickets as possible in order to depress attendance.

[00:31:54] Uh, my daughter who says the ticktock has helped her survive being sheltered in place. Uh, [00:32:00] so I literally hundreds of these videos. And that may have caught the eye of the presidential administration, which is now studying tech talk with an eye toward banning it. Um, it’s not just because it was used to undermine, Trump’s need for large crowds though.

[00:32:15] It is owned by a Chinese company. Uh, even though they did just recently hire a Disney executive to be their CEO, uh, a deep dive by. Coders into the app found that it really does do some questionable things like accessing your phone’s clipboard. They promised last June they’d stop doing that after it was discovered, but that’s just one of the security issues that’s been uncovered, India, which, you know, they’ve never been best buds with China, uh, has abandoned despite the fact that Indian youth were really the first to take this up in a.

[00:32:48] Big way outside of China. Uh, it has been downloaded 2 billion times. There’s no questioning as popularity in some of the brands marketing on tech talk include guests, uh, the national [00:33:00] basketball association, red bull, Crocs Musinex Kool-Aid and Hewlett Packard. Uh, but users are already trying to figure out what to do if tectonic vanishes from their smartphones.

[00:33:11] One solution that they seem to be migrating toward is. Bite. This is the new short form video app from the creator of vine bite. Hasn’t gotten a lot of attention until now, other than the inevitable stories pointing out that the guy who created vine is out with a, a new updated version called bite. Uh, but just last week, bite downloads, surpassed tick tock.

[00:33:34] Downloads people are getting ready. Uh, and in the meantime, this book is getting ready to launch something called Instagram radio, which is a tech talk competitor. It’ll be in the U S and more than 50 other countries. According to an NBC news report like tech talk, Instagram let’s users make and share a 15 second video clip set to a vast catalog of music like tech talk users can also.

[00:33:58] Borrow and remix [00:34:00] audio from other people’s videos and like tech talk users can see their clips go viral in a featured reels section of the most popular videos. Snapchat’s jumping on board too. They’re testing a new user experience that lets users navigate through Snapchat’s public content with a vertical swiping motion.

[00:34:18] This is something that was popularized on tic talk. And if you use it talk, you know, the more you use it, the more natural that feels compares to horizontal swiping. So a tick tock band we’ll likely just mean migration to an alternative though. I don’t think any of them will use tech talks, algorithm, this dishes up videos based on what you’ve stopped and watched, not so much what you’ve liked and followed, which is why it can be so damn compelling.

[00:34:44] This story will undoubtedly continue to unfold.

[00:34:48] Neville Hobson: [00:34:48] I think you’re right with that. I mean, I tried tick tock when it first came out and, um, I didn’t continue because that’s just not me, that kind of video content creation. Uh, [00:35:00] and, uh, there was other platforms I was actually paying a lot more attention to, so I never really got back into it.

[00:35:07] Um, I look. Into it now and again, and then I dropped out of it now and again, that’s it. But yeah, I see what’s happening with it. Um, I think I mentioned we were chatting earlier, it’s it? It doesn’t seem to have it huge amount of attention over here in the way it does in the U S talking about the bank and alternatives.

[00:35:24] So it’s in the public consciousness more, I think, in, in America than it is over here. Uh, here though, it’s had. Talk recently in the context of the broader political, a conversation about China, uh, who are we in particular and the risks we all confront with China being so embedded in our day to day technology, all that kind of chat.

[00:35:45] Going on. Um, makes me wonder, are we actually sitting on the, on a volcano edge when you think about, uh, you know, Apple products in particular or made in China, think about anything you buy these days ranging from clothing to stuff that you [00:36:00] never imagined it made in China. So, um, it’s a paradox, isn’t it?

[00:36:04] You’ve got the. Political aspect of it and then the commercial aspects. And there’s either a huge, a huge, uh, uh, chasm about to open all their sorted out. But this is geopolitics. So, um, the talk about prohibiting tech doc though seems much more than political return. Does that, how it looks to you show?

[00:36:24] Shel Holtz: [00:36:24] Oh yeah.

[00:36:25] I, I think. They’re looking at it very seriously. Uh, there are genuine concerns. I’m waiting for the, the CEO. Again, an American used to be an executive with Disney to step forward and address this. I mean, this is a for profit organization that is making advertising dollars from big American companies that I think they don’t want to see go away.

[00:36:45] Uh, so I think they would rather stop collecting data on behalf of the Chinese government. If in fact that’s what they’re doing, there’s no evidence to suggest that. Just yet, uh, then lose, you know, these tens of [00:37:00] millions of users and all of that, all the advertising dollars that it’s bringing. Uh, I use it more than I ever thought I’ve would.

[00:37:08] I’ve used the line that I used to use. When I talked about it before people knew what it was, it was, uh, uh, I, I flipped through it and I go, God, this stuff is horrible. And I can’t stop doing it. Yeah. But now what I find is that there are people doing these 15 second rule recipes, um, and I’ve made a few of them and their good work.

[00:37:28] Uh, and because I stop and look at them,

[00:37:31] Neville Hobson: [00:37:31] Ticktock

[00:37:32] Shel Holtz: [00:37:32] delivers more of them. To me, I’m seeing more and more recipes. Every time I go through it. Now there’s something else I have to try. Uh, you know, they’re, they’re basically recipe hacks. There’s, there’s one that is a breakfast case of DIA where you start by putting the scrambled eggs in the box and then laying the tortilla over the top of it and then folding it over.

[00:37:51] I mean, it, it, it works just fine. It’s awesome. Yeah, I’ll take all of these that I can get these, these cooking hacks. So yeah, I think this is what’s driving a lot [00:38:00] of people to use it as they’re finding stuff that just resonates with them because tick, talk’s going to give you more of it when you send that signal that you like it.

[00:38:08] Neville Hobson: [00:38:08] So I must have dropped out just before they started sending you more because I got to the stage you were right. So this is all horrible. And I did stop. So yeah, well it’s, this is. Clearly, it’s got a very serious aspect to it. I think you said it actually, if there’s does fall victim to political maneuvering, uh, what happens to the millions of people who are using it?

[00:38:32] Let’s say it does get banned. I mean, India have banned

[00:38:34] Shel Holtz: [00:38:34] it, right. It’s Bandon

[00:38:35] Neville Hobson: [00:38:35] and dome and have bandit. Um, so, um, I’ve seen some of the reporting I have seen here. It talks about the CEO of ticktock talking about the, gonna change this. And they’re looking into that and, and they’re, they’re intend to do this, or blah, blah, blah, all this kind of talk.

[00:38:49] Um, but I would say again, as far as anyone can make any informed opinion based on political developments going on, it could, because it could all change next week or tomorrow even, uh, will this [00:39:00] actually happen? I wonder.

[00:39:02] Dan York: [00:39:02] Greeting shell Neville. And if our listeners all around the world, it’s Daniel coming at you from a hot and steamy shower, Melbourne, Vermont, where we’re in the middle of a heat wave.

[00:39:10] And, you know, it’s a hot online too these days with so many companies trying to hone in on the fact that we’re all at home because of this pandemic with more and more capabilities coming through all sorts of different, you know, live streaming and video and all this kind of messaging going on. A couple of things that caught my eyes since the last time, Facebook announced that they added screen-sharing to their messenger video calls so that if you’re having a video call through messenger with people, you can now share your phone while you’re on.

[00:39:42] Uh, while you’re on iOS or Android, you don’t have to be on the desktop app. So they, they view it as something that people can connect and be able to share things while you’re online. But. Think about that power sharing from your mobile device right there, where you’re at, where you’re doing things. Now, Microsoft [00:40:00] also rolled out a ton of things in teams this past while, or announced them.

[00:40:04] Some of them are now, some of them are coming. They have a together mode where you all then your avatars can show up in one kind of combined. Virtual background, which I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet. I’m not a teams user, but I could see that maybe it’s a better way to work with it. They also provide some new tools for showing videos or showing slides, showing things while you’re in the middle of a meeting.

[00:40:26] Everybody’s trying to get in on a new way to make meetings better online, which not to be out done. There’s new apps coming around. One that I think shell might’ve, I think shell, you gave this to was from Phil Libin, who was part of the Evernote CEO back in the early parts of things. It is literally M M H M M as something you might say when you’re in the middle of a conversation.

[00:40:51] But it’s Mmh mm.app, but a tech crunch story was talking about it. And there’s a little video it’s only available right now for the most recent version of it. [00:41:00] But it’s pretty slick what it shows I’ve put in for an invite, but I don’t have one yet, but it allows you to go and very easily move around, have, uh, backgrounds have.

[00:41:10] Different, you know, it’s displays, uh, slides, videos, other things going on behind you. Now I do this when I’m live streaming you some using something called studio OBS studio, or you might use this with wire cast or live stream producer, other pieces, but this is looking like it’s trying to make it

[00:41:27] Shel Holtz: [00:41:27] so that you could really do this all within your

[00:41:29] Dan York: [00:41:29] browser in some way or within the app and not in quietly.

[00:41:32] Sure. What’s there. But. Something to watch because it may make that kind of duction values of streaming that much better stay tuned to go and see. Now it’s not just in video conferencing that we’re seeing a lot of activity this time, Instagram again from Facebook. Confirmed that they’re going to be launching there rival to tick tock called reels.

[00:41:55] Shel Holtz: [00:41:55] Yes. R E L

[00:41:57] Dan York: [00:41:57] S. They’re going to be launching that in the U S [00:42:00] and 50 other countries, early August, trying to get in on, on just the buzz around tick and everything that’s happening out there. Now it’s currently launched in India and in some other countries around the world where people can see this and, and work with it.

[00:42:15] India is also where Twitter has been launching fleets, which is its version of ephemeral stories. Can you say Snapchat that is Cohen on their launched. They’ve launched that in India, trying it out in other different places.

[00:42:29] Shel Holtz: [00:42:29] All of these people,

[00:42:30] Dan York: [00:42:30] all of these, these apps and services, trying to converge in different ways.

[00:42:34] Now not to be left out, Amazon of course has also jumped in to, uh, to letting opening up to life streamers, to broadcast on Amazon live. Now you may or may not have been aware that Amazon launched its Amazon live service. I think it was last year or so, really, basically as a home shopping network kind of thing, where you could go on and watch videos about Amazon products, et cetera.

[00:43:00] [00:43:00] Well, now they’ve opened this up through their Amazon influencer program where people can go and be streaming on Amazon live. So yet another platform. So again, communicators, if you’re doing something with companies that are selling something, Amazon, this may be something you want to look in to, you know, how can you potentially be doing live streaming through the Amazon platform to again, help promote the products and things that you’re working with in that regard?

[00:43:28] You know, I mean, obviously it’s all commercial. If you’re on Amazon, it’s actually interesting. When I look at some of what’s on the Amazon live, which you can just go to amazon.com/live. You can see what’s there when a stream is live, it’s kind of twitched, like in the sense that it has a little streaming, um, uh, chat section next to it.

[00:43:47] Other different kinds of things are happening in there in all that space. So lots of stuff happening on there, amazing things to be thinking about as communicators opportunities, for more engagement, for working with your audiences in so many ways.

[00:44:00] [00:43:59] Shel Holtz: [00:43:59] Let me

[00:44:00] Dan York: [00:44:00] leave you with a tip though. Something on something completely different.

[00:44:03] The other thing, you know, I talk about a lot in times is analytics. And I would be concerned. I think we have to be thinking about what comes next for analytics. There was a real concern coming out of Apple’s WWDC that Safari might be blocking Google analytics, and it came out that they’re not writing now, but it was a warning shot that maybe they could, at some point, as people get more privacy aware, there was also a study coming out on July 6th by somebody.

[00:44:36] Who talked about, uh, only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked in the EU. It’s now required. The new guidance around cookies is that you must be able to have people opt out and you must present it in a way there’s more, you can’t just put up that banner that says, click this to continue. You actually have to kind of opt people out before they go on there.

[00:44:59] You know, if you’re [00:45:00] dealing with people in the EU, working with this. You’ve got to give this. And so people are opting out of some of this kind of analytics. Now we’ll say that the

[00:45:09] Shel Holtz: [00:45:09] author of that particular

[00:45:10] Dan York: [00:45:10] story was, uh, is also one of the cofounders behind an interesting service, trying to work with this called plausible analytics.

[00:45:18] It’s plausible, PLA U S I B L e.io. And it’s a, an analytic service that, uh, that does not use.

[00:45:27] Shel Holtz: [00:45:27] Cookies. It uses JavaScript in the browser,

[00:45:29] Dan York: [00:45:29] but it doesn’t put any cookies on somebody’s system. And so it doesn’t have the same need for a cookie banner. Now I’m trying it out on a couple of my sites, to be honest and comparing it with G Google analytics to see, you know, how does it work in that you, you don’t get some of the state that you would, but it’s something to be thinking about.

[00:45:48] What. You know, what, what comes next as people I’ll start to look at ways to PR to protect consumers against the

[00:45:55] Shel Holtz: [00:45:55] overreach that we’ve

[00:45:56] Dan York: [00:45:56] seen with some of the different commercial platforms that are out there. [00:46:00] So check it out, read the stories, look at, think about how can you do analytics differently in some way.

[00:46:06] Let me just leave you with one final thought. A colleague pointed out something really cool. As we all sit

[00:46:12] Shel Holtz: [00:46:12] here in our

[00:46:12] Dan York: [00:46:12] homes. If you go to window

[00:46:15] Shel Holtz: [00:46:15] dash, swap.

[00:46:17] Dan York: [00:46:17] Swip window-swap.com. It’s a way to look out people’s windows. In other parts of the world, brought to you by people across the internet. You can even submit your own, you know, a video and watch what’s there and you could see this kind of cool then it’s time when we’re all stuck inside without any way to travel.

[00:46:35] That’s all for now. I’m going to go back to hot and steamy Vermont here. Uh, you can find more my audio and writing at Dan York dot Emmy, and I’ll talk to you next month. Bye for now.

[00:46:45] Neville Hobson: [00:46:45] So we’re in the middle of July. Uh, in fact, as we’re recording this episode, 18th of July to be precise, just past the middle, halfway through the Facebook boycott month.

[00:46:55] Uh, I think we talked about that the last episode, if I recall correctly, show that, talk about [00:47:00] it. Um, a big advertisers last time I looked is well over a thousand. Companies, mostly U S many global have paused their advertising on Facebook for the month of July in support of the stop paid for profit campaign by some not all, but generally as a kind of a symbolic protest.

[00:47:20] Against Facebook and how they run the platform. That’s putting it in the simplest sense. So this has prompted a lot of talk about social platforms, social networks, generally, uh, and, uh, it caught my eye. There’s terrific story I read by, um, uh, by Willa Raymond’s who’s a senior writer, one zero at medium publish is a great newsletter.

[00:47:39] Um, Um, I’ve forgotten the name, but patterns changing pattern. I think it’s called, uh, email newsletter, which I get it’s good. But he had this really terrific piece that got me thinking quite a bit. The headline was the grab of me. What, what a better social network would look like prompted largely not entirely by, uh, by what’s happened with Facebook.

[00:47:58] So he says the [00:48:00] dispiriting stalemate. In the Facebook advertising boycott coming at a moment of broader social unrest and political permit makes freshly appealing the old question of what a better, healthier social media landscape might look like. If we could imagine such a thing I would add, are you remember Mastodon?

[00:48:17] I mean, it was just one example, I guess in my mind, I’m still on methadone by the way. And Oxford on and. Two or three of the other instances? Well, I haven’t been six months. Last time I looked, I was still there and I’ve acquired lots more followers, but I’ve not done anything. So I need to not do stuff like that.

[00:48:35] You know, join something then vanish for a year. When I come back, it’s still there, you know? I was still in a second life too, by the way, with that. So, um, but a few weeks ago says arenas. So New York times writer, Charlie was our casually tweeted, uh, a version of this question to his followers, not expecting much of a response, odd question, but what are your most farfetched utopian ideas for fixing [00:49:00] social media platforms?

[00:49:00] He asked the stuff that’s likely never, ever going to happen. So that was at the beginning of July. And, um, uh, uh, or Emma says more than a thousand replies later. So I’ve not looked at, um, uh, was L’s Twitter handle since the beginning of July. So it’s probably a lot more than that now. Uh, but more than a thousand replies later, the thread was packed with provocative proposals, which together show that there is not only a tremendous appetite for change, but a constellation of bright ideas for what that change could be.

[00:49:32] So arenas. Uh, summarizes a good handful of these. I’m going to highlight two, two of them caught my eye. Cause I thought I like these a lot. Uh, I look at the, um, the upsides mentioned, I look at the downside and I, I tend to think, you know, uh, will these ever, ever happen? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it. So here’s the first one.

[00:49:51] The idea, make social networks, nonprofits, and the people who propose that idea to individuals called Shane Farrow in Jane and Wong. The [00:50:00] dream is how it starts liberated from the profit motive. Social media companies could stop optimizing users’ feeds for engagement, stop harvesting their data, invest more in human moderation and user support and organize their networks around public spirited values rather than market dominance.

[00:50:18] The downside. Unless you could somehow insulate them from competition with, for profit rivals nonprofit social networks that don’t optimize for attention might risk losing well people’s attention. One can imagine a nonprofit social network becoming the internet equivalent of PBS, serving vegetables to sober-minded holsters while the youngsters flee to fund freewheeling alternatives.

[00:50:43] Interestingly. The next one of the two, the final one I’m gonna mention here, uh, go to go to, um, uh, Willa Ramos’s peace to get the rest of it. And further analysis is it was worth a read. So this one, the idea restrict personal data collection and behavioral advertising. [00:51:00] The proponents are David Carroll and Jason Kent.

[00:51:03] Here’s the dream dismantling surveillance. Capitalism would not only restore users’ privacy and autonomy. It would reduce platforms, incentives to drill ever deeper into our lives and manipulate our behavior. Why it’s Gill at Edelman recently explored in depth how this might play out. And there’s a link in the wired story to that piece.

[00:51:22] Here’s the downside. Less relevant ads, more paywalls, and the hit to small businesses for whom behavioral targeting works far better than the contextual variety. As free social networks become less profitable. We might also see less innovation and competition and less investment expensive human moderation.

[00:51:40] So just two examples. Of, um, what a better social network would look like. What do you reckon show?

[00:51:46] Shel Holtz: [00:51:46] Yeah, I liked a lot of these. I didn’t, I have to say I didn’t care for all of them. Uh, one of these was to ban algorithmic amplification, uh, and you know, scope out of control. That’s what let’s go back to the.

[00:51:59] Tech-Talk [00:52:00] story. The reason you pay attention is that figure out what you like, and they show you more of that. And I can see if we get a nonprofit social network that doesn’t have the, the, the young kids who are off doing more exciting things, uh, and end up scrolling through all kinds of posts people have made and go boring.

[00:52:19] Don’t care. Boring don’t care. Uh, I want to see stuff that appeals to me. And I mean, the, you know, algorithm is not a bad word. I mean, they can be misused, but they can also help. Uh, so that’s when I ha I have an issue with, I think, yeah, if there were a nonprofit. Social network. I should be able to switch to the actual, uh, reverse chronological feed and see what my friends have posted.

[00:52:48] Uh, but I also should be able to go see the stuff that my signals have indicated I am actually interested in, um, in terms of the personal data collection and behavioral advertising. I happen to like [00:53:00] it. Um, I’m not going to talk about the ethics of it. But I like seeing ads for things that I’m interested in and not seeing ads for things that I absolutely don’t care about.

[00:53:10] It needs to get better. I want to stop seeing ads for things that I just actually bought. Uh, but the whole idea of this being tailored to you MI is one of the benefits of living in this. Digital world. Um, there was one though that I really liked, they said stop putting white men in charge. And I just said, bingo.

[00:53:32] Yes. Yeah. That’s not going very well. Is it mr. Zuckerberg? Although, you know, with Sheryl Sandberg, you got to add some white women to that mix.

[00:53:41] Neville Hobson: [00:53:41] Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, I think interestingly, you talk about targeted advertising. I’m the opposite on platforms like Facebook, for instance, I, so we have switched off completely personalized advertising.

[00:53:54] And part of the reason is that they therefore don’t grab all my data [00:54:00] and vacuum it out of the ether for the nefarious purposes. It doesn’t seem to make any difference. I still get served up ads on that. Make me think. They’re tracking me cause I just was there on Sunday. I’m seeing ads for this. Of course they are.

[00:54:12] But at least I feel like I’m controlling something here. So some platforms I do because I want to get the, uh, the personalized dance. Um, but social network typically I tend not to, I think the. The noble ideals or some of these terrific, particularly the nonprofit one that appeals to me hugely, but the downsides clearly indicate the extreme difficulty in doing this as the issue.

[00:54:36] Shel Holtz: [00:54:36] One of the problems with going nonprofit is where do you get the investment to build out the great features of a, of a world class social network? Uh, and where do you get the incentive to spend all of your time trying to create. This, uh, I, I can see altruistic people, well, who wants to, uh, but they do have to feed their families and keep roofs over their heads.

[00:54:59] So, I mean, [00:55:00] I know there are employees of NPR and PBS who make a perfectly good livings, but these are expensive beasts, social networks. You look at what? Yeah. LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook are investing to make these things work the way users want them to work and to provide features that keep people coming back.

[00:55:21] Dan York: [00:55:21] Um,

[00:55:22] Shel Holtz: [00:55:22] I question how much a nonprofit would be able to do that. I love the concept, uh, practically I just wonder about, you know, these are gonna end up looking like very, very old fashioned social networks at some point.

[00:55:36] Neville Hobson: [00:55:36] Yeah. I mean, it’s a big question. This is, this could be another topic for a zoom chat, the following Thursday show, actually.

[00:55:41] But I mean, it seems to me that, um, nonprofits, uh, why not charge people, um, uh, to be belonged to a nonprofit social network. I’m just throwing that out there because there’s other issues that are raised that, that, that, uh, brings forward. I think. In terms of your status as a nonprofit, which jurisdiction would that be anyway, [00:56:00] but I think we have been there before for you.

[00:56:03] And I’ve talked about this many times over the past decade on alternatives to these platforms. So mass Don is the most recent one that comes to my mind because I was a participant in it. I didn’t see it as an alternative to Twitter. Actually. I saw it as like a different place to be. Um, and is suddenly, was that, or is that I should say, um, there’s others too, that that’s come up to serve niche audiences.

[00:56:25] And there’s even one that serves criminals that was busted by Scotland yard a month back that had thousands and thousands of crooks using it. And they. Literally did what hackers do they hacked into their network. They got all the names and addresses the dates of shipments of cocaine, gun trafficking, slavery, the what’s evil stuff, truly evil.

[00:56:45] And they rested a lot of people across Europe. So that was, that was amazing. But at the core of it was this private sector. So network that didn’t have very good security. So, but, um, uh, these are great examples and the ones you, you touched on were on, [00:57:00] um, well Ramos’s fuller piece are also worth looking at the pros and the cons in each case.

[00:57:06] So this is a good, uh, almost like an intellectual exercise. Let’s just think this through a little bit. So for me, it makes social network nonprofits and restricting person data collection where the ones that I would vote for.

[00:57:17] Shel Holtz: [00:57:17] Yeah. Have you checked out PGX tech yet?

[00:57:21] Neville Hobson: [00:57:21] I haven’t,

[00:57:22] Shel Holtz: [00:57:22] this is one Shelly Palmer.

[00:57:23] The, the marketing guy, uh, has as created. I signed on to, and I check it now and then, but basically he said, I want a social network where people are going to talk about things I want to talk about. Uh, it’s a very clean interface. Uh, the people who are participating are mainly, uh, lurking at this point, it seems there are a few who are actually posting and a lot of it is sharing of.

[00:57:45] Media content, but, um, you know, this is the kind of thing that could work where somebody says I’m going to build something that I want people to participate in. So another one to take a look

[00:57:56] Neville Hobson: [00:57:56] at, well,

[00:57:57] Shel Holtz: [00:57:57] I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

[00:58:00] [00:57:59] Neville Hobson: [00:57:59] Yeah. Okay. I mean, anyone could do that really? Couldn’t they, or you and I could do that.

[00:58:03] I wait, we kind of did with ’em. Well, Well, Facebook group, Google plus before that.

[00:58:09] Shel Holtz: [00:58:09] Yeah, but he’s, he’s actually built, built this from the ground up. It is his own unique interface. I have no idea what tools he’s using and he has the following to bring people aboard. So, so far he’s not charging anyone?

[00:58:24] Neville Hobson: [00:58:24] No.

[00:58:25] Okay. Well, lots of, lots of potential though. It seems.

[00:58:28] Shel Holtz: [00:58:28] A research company called strategy analytics is predicting audits in virtually virtual reality markets will recover big way next year, uh, using the label XR that’s extended reality, uh, covers augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. The company predicts total XR shipments, creed sixfold through 2025.

[00:58:51] With her hardware revenues surpassing $28 billion annually. That year, uh, Facebook is ramping up production of its Oculus [00:59:00] headsets, especially the quest, which is the standalone device that doesn’t require you to be tethered by a cable, to a computer. That’s the one I have. And I have to tell you, I use it every single day.

[00:59:10] Uh, mostly I’m working out racquetball and boxing are the exercises I engage in most frequently. Um, the company is looking at growth of 50% from a year ago. If you try to buy one of these things right now, mostly most of the time you’ll find that it’s back ordered. So I’m a little surprised. I, I would think that during the panic with people stuck at home, people would be all over these, you know, just put on a headset and transport yourself.

[00:59:36] Somewhere else that’s gotta be desirable. Uh, just immersing yourself somewhere other than the apartment you’ve been in since March. Uh, how appealing is that? I mean, just yesterday after my workout, I took a tour of Queensland Australia later today. Uh, I’m planning to watch a 30 minute VR movie called gloomy eyes, which is up for an Emmy nomination and the outstanding original interactive program [01:00:00] category.

[01:00:00] It was just ported over to the quest and the buzz over this thing is incredible. Um, I also grabbed another one called traveling wall black, which they described as a cinematic view, our experience that immerses viewers in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans, uh, it’s also an Emmy nominee in the same category.

[01:00:20] Uh, Oculus is giving that one away for free. And one of the things I read about that is that it takes advantage of, of the increased empathy you get when you’re immersed in these stories. Uh, the pandemic is also leading organizations to turn to VR as a new way to deliver what they used to share in person.

[01:00:39] One of my favorite examples is music. For instance, London’s Brixton Academy is hosting a series of VR gigs, uh, working with a concert promoter live nation. And a VR company, uh, that recently produced something called wireless connect, uh, which was held recently, uh, in lieu of the cancelled [01:01:00] wireless festival.

[01:01:01] Don’t know what that is, but there you go, uh, live from Oh two, uh, the Brixton Academy’s thing is going to feature unique live performances from the London venue. We have no idea yet who’s going to be performing. But I love live music. And while some bands have taken to performing at drive in movie theaters, getting a ticket is hard and they’re not exactly going out on tour.

[01:01:26] So yeah, I would definitely put on a headset and watch a show that way. I also don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do an annual shareholder meeting that way or a company town hall. I mean, it was sure beat the heck out of doing it on zoom, uh, which leads me to remind you to check out all of the content out there on zoom fatigue.

[01:01:43] Uh, I think I. Did a search on the phrase, zoom fatigue and found 340,000 articles. Every one of them written since March. Uh,

[01:01:52] Neville Hobson: [01:01:52] my, one of my, one of my posts has gotta be in there that shit,

[01:01:55] Shel Holtz: [01:01:55] undoubtedly, uh, I also had a price Waterhouse Coopers report on [01:02:00] how virtual reality is redefining soft skills training.

[01:02:04] Uh, their research showed that virtual reality can help business leaders upskill their employees faster, even at a time when training budgets may be shrinking. And in person training may be off the table because of social distancing. Uh, VR learners were four times faster to train than in the classrooms.

[01:02:21] 275% more confident of their ability to apply the skills they learned in the training. 3.7, five times more emotionally connected to the content than classroom learners and four times more focused than their e-learning peers. Now while the strategy analytics research as VR hit a road bump, rather than another uptick, as a result of the virus, augmented reality has actually gotten a boost.

[01:02:49] From the pandemic, according to e-marketer more than 83 million Americans interacted with some form of AR at least once a month over the past year. But the Corona [01:03:00] virus has escalated three major trends driving AR adoption into the mainstream. Those are a hunger for unique experiences. Again, the idea that you can do something right.

[01:03:09] Outside the house without leaving the house a demand for differentiated content and a shift in brand strategy. Ivan Markman, the author of the article in campaign us. So that I read about this says the pandemic has cut off brands from a number of ways. They traditionally interacted with tumors. And so they’re investing in the AR experience as an alternative.

[01:03:32] Pushing all this along is the emergence of AR for the web, the use of AR and wearables and connected devices and a surge in the growth of the pool of developers who can develop AR content. So, um, Both VR and AR I think are going to get, yeah, huge. Now this doesn’t mean that I think it’s the fourth transformation that, uh, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel claimed it would be.

[01:03:56] Yeah, it was the next thing. After the phone, people were going to abandon their [01:04:00] phones and walk around with AR glasses on still don’t think that’s going to happen. But as a training tool, as an entertainment device. Yeah. I think they’re both going to be really, really big.

[01:04:13] Neville Hobson: [01:04:13] Yeah, I think you, you may well be right.

[01:04:14] I’ve not immersed myself into it to the extent you have. And to AR uh, I still got a set of goggles that I got from a Swedish retailer here called Plaza Olsen, who are big in Europe. Um, that is the best divisive it’s type I’ve had made a cardboard.

[01:04:34] Shel Holtz: [01:04:34] It’s the one you put your phone in, right?

[01:04:36] Neville Hobson: [01:04:36] You put your phone in?

[01:04:37] Absolutely fabulous. It works great when I pick it up and I see somebody, they want me to try that. So I never seriously got into AI, which now I think about it is rather strange. Cause it’s a kind of thing I, I normally would get immersed into. So I’m actually going to spend a bit more time on it. Just listen to what you’ve just been saying.

[01:04:52] I think you’re right. Uh, I never did, but there’s some things I. Come across quite frequently on new content, [01:05:00] particularly, um, uh, along the lines of the stuff you’ve mentioned, for example tours. Uh, that was one that, uh, I did look at, uh, online concert from a concert hall that was truly quite something seeing it, uh, the, the way in which you could.

[01:05:14] View the orchestra. Um, I, I’m not sure if I thinking back on it, was it a synthesized video anyway? I don’t know, but, but it was, it was something. So I’ll take a look at that.

[01:05:24] Shel Holtz: [01:05:24] Well, the data says that the manufacturer of these headsets that you put your phone in is declining and will decline even more as people get into the headsets, especially ones like the quest.

[01:05:37] Don’t require you to be cabled up to the computer.

[01:05:40] Neville Hobson: [01:05:40] Yeah. Yeah, no, I get, I get it. Of course my, my, my things, but a cardboard, uh, sticking a phone in and it costs me, I think, five pounds. That’s about all. So I was quite happy with that at the time. Wouldn’t cut it for the stuff you’d want to do now.

[01:05:53] Definitely not. Good story that would show I have to say. I’m sorry. So, [01:06:00] uh, let’s see. Yeah. So we’ve come back to actual reality now, uh, with a story, um, that is a bit sobering, but it’s not surprising. I suppose you could say a BBC report again, the headline was the grabber, the world faces. Staggering job challenge says Microsoft president.

[01:06:21] Yeah. And it’s an interview with Brad Smith. Who’s the president of Microsoft, uh, who says that the, this staggering challenge is that a quarter of a billion people are set to lose their jobs. In 2020. So it’s this year between now and the end of the year is already started. And by the end of 2020 250 million people would have lost their jobs around the world.

[01:06:44] Many ones will need to learn new skills to get jobs according to Smith. Or even to hang on to their old ones. As the digitization of economies raises a hat, Microsoft recently announced a plan to deliver skills and training to 25 million people globally [01:07:00] this year, offering training skills, certifications, and help finding jobs.

[01:07:05] They’re going to do this by delivering this training, uh, and the whole thing, skills, acquisition certification through LinkedIn, which they own. And that makes total sense to me to use that platform, very business focused, but Smith said that many jobs in many countries would be beyond the reach of digital retraining.

[01:07:25] Again, I can understand that because some jobs, I would imagine you can’t retrain the job holders for a digital environment. Um, so it’s not the answer to everything, but it’s an interesting initiative that struck me. Um, Microsoft is going to donate $20 million in grants to nonprofit organizations. In this program, as well as free use of services like LinkedIn, which, uh, as the BBC reporter noted will strike many people as fairly small.

[01:07:54] Given this as a company whose value has increased by $500 billion in the past year, [01:08:00] if big us tech looked powerful before, COVID-19 it looks imperious. Now it says the BBC report, just five companies make up 20% of the value. Oh, the S and P 500 index. Does Smith understand why many people feel big tech is too powerful?

[01:08:18] And these reigning in his response? I think people have more questions than ever, and that’s not a bad thing to ensure that technology is a force for good. Governments need to move more quickly to develop technology focused laws while tech companies need to exert some money. Self-restraint fundamentally the responsibility of companies and countries is to make sure that people have the skills to ensure that the benefits, rather than suffering the consequences of the changes being unleashed.

[01:08:45] I think we all need to recognize it. That tech cannot solve everything, but almost nothing. I think it would be solved without us. We need to be at the table. Now the last statement strikes me as a little. Condescending

[01:08:57] Shel Holtz: [01:08:57] serving. Right. Great.

[01:08:58] Neville Hobson: [01:08:58] Yeah. So serving. Right. [01:09:00] But I like to think that. Uh, what Microsoft is intending, uh, is something we need.

[01:09:07] We really, really, really need more organizations to do to do things like this. But as Smith mentions, it’s really, governments are really in the, in the, in the, in the spotlight here. Yeah. In terms of enabling these things to happen. And that would take the form perhaps of things like tax. Thanks for offering these kinds of service, you know, eliminate.

[01:09:30] A value added tax or sales tax or whatever, if you have to pay for these programs or better still subsidize them, these are the kinds of things that, uh, everyone I’ve seen. I’ve seen talk about this in many quarters over the past couple. Well, the month’s about helping people transition. To the new normal that’s coming.

[01:09:48] And again, you mentioned earlier, not that phrase again. Yeah. Slightly different. Meaning this time the new normal that’s coming is going to be something where you need to retrain. You cannot do your job, uh, without retraining, [01:10:00] uh, or your job is likely to disappear. Pierre, in which case you need to find something that’s re skills you and many people need a, I would say actually most people will need help to do that.

[01:10:11] So things like, I mean, going back to LinkedIn again, uh, the LinkedIn learning programs that, uh, that LinkedIn offers started offering, uh, some months ago now, uh, that enable you to access training programs and courses created by other LinkedIn users. And you can also create your own training programs that you can actually deliver to private audiences, EEG.

[01:10:32] Fellow employees in your own company. So, uh, that is a great initiative already that’s in place, but it needs much more than that. And of course, I’m saying these words, uh, as somebody who is living in a Western European country, a developed market with easy access to all of this, I’ve got fast broadband access to many, many people.

[01:10:52] What about those countries that don’t have that? How are they going to get this delivered? And it causes all very. Kind of English language [01:11:00] focused, although it’s not the only language naturally, but what about countries in central and Southern Africa and in Latin America, Southeast Asia who have probably more acute requirements for retraining then that I might have in Western Europe.

[01:11:13] So that’s where governments need to come in. So it’s not just out of initiatives that some would argue a very self serving. Uh, I don’t. Accuse Microsoft at all. Frankly, I think it’s a noble thing that they’re doing, but this is scratching the surface. We need more of this now, but this is a terrific start, I think.

[01:11:29] Shel Holtz: [01:11:29] Oh, absolutely. And I believe that organizations even outside of tech would be well served to develop training programs. For people who are not employees to skill up on the areas of expertise, uh, within those organizations, I guess, as everyone knows, I work in the construction industry now, uh, and there is a shortage of skilled labor out there.

[01:11:52] People don’t want to work, uh, with a hammer, uh, at a saw, uh, outside where it’s brutally hot [01:12:00] or, or, you know, freezing cold when they can make good money writing code in the comfort of a, of an office or their home. Uh, with a keyboard and a monitor and a good internet connection. So why aren’t we out there teaching labor skills, uh, to say the disadvantaged community where people need jobs, uh, you know, we’re not hiring them because they don’t have the skills we’re going to wait for someone else to do that.

[01:12:21] And what kind of reputation do we build when we do that? So I think it is incumbent upon organizations to start providing that kind of training and these tools that are available now, like LinkedIn learning. I think our ideal. For that?

[01:12:36] Neville Hobson: [01:12:36] Absolutely. It’s a good start.

[01:12:39] Shel Holtz: [01:12:39] Well, that’ll do it for this episode for immediate release episode number 197 for Monday, July 20th, 2020.

[01:12:47] Uh, don’t forget our zoom chats fir zoom chats on Thursdays at 1:00 PM Eastern time. And we have. Themes for the next two. Right? We’ve decided that in the course of recording today, [01:13:00] this coming through Thursday, it’ll be empathy and emotion in communication. And then after that, yeah, will be the ideal social network, uh, the following Thursday.

[01:13:11] So. Keep that in mind. And I will definitely broadcast those out over all of the usual social channels to let you know that that’s coming. Uh, also our next episode of 14 immediate release will be posted on Monday, August 17th. So keep an eye out for that. Do hope that you will comment because people have just stopped commenting a hundred a show.

[01:13:33] I remember back in the days, Neville, where we had so many, any comments that that’s what took up the show, who would talk about the things that listeners. Told us in the comments, send a comment by email to fir comments@gmail.com attach up to a three minute audio file. If you’d like us to play it a record, a comment directly from the fir website that send voicemail tap on the right hand side of the page is where you do that record up to 90 seconds.

[01:13:59] If your comment [01:14:00] is longer than that, Record two of them. I swear. I know how to put them together. Leave a comment directly in the show, the notes for this episode at F I, our podcast network.com. Share your thoughts in the fir community on Facebook and please wherever you get. Yeah. Your podcasts. If they have a rating and review function, a rate and review fir so we can find new listeners and until.

[01:14:24] August 17th, that will be a 30 for for immediate release.

The post FIR #197: A Better Social Network appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

This week’s FIR Zoom Chat included a discussion about using streaming software like OBS and vMix.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #12: Diving into Streaming Software appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The June 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

Their appearance on Joe Jaffe’s broadcast show
A report on the all-virtual IABC World Conference
Twitter’s move to let users record and tweet audio
Three new blockchain developments of interest to communicators
Flipboard’s new Storyboard feature
A user email that prompted Merriam-Webster to update a dictionary definition
How Wikipedia became a battleground for racial justice
Facebook’s news tab and Instagram’s rise as a source of news

Dan York reports on inclusive language in technology and big players making big plays in podcasting.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

United Nations: Communicators Can Save Lives. Here’s How.
Joe Jaffe’s Corona TV on YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Periscope
Twitter will let users record and add up to 140 seconds of audio to tweets, rolling out to iOS users in the coming weeks
Your Tweet, Your Voice
Unstoppable Domains Announces Its First Batch of .Crypto Blogs on the Decentralized Internet
Will decentralized blogs make freedom of speech Unstoppable?
New York Times Publishes Details About Its Blockchain Prototype Project
Microsoft’s ION is an Open-Source Bet on Bitcoin
Flipboard rolls out Storyboards as a new way to highlight content
Missouri woman prompts Merriam-Webster to redefine ‘racism’
Luka Apps, 7-Year-Old Boy, Writes Letter To Lego, Gets His Toy Replaced
How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice
Facebook News Tab May Increase News Consumption & PR Impact
Instagram ‘will overtake Twitter as a news source’

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
Turn Your Virtual Hangouts into a Podcast with Anchor’s New Video-to-Audio Conversion
Pandora will tell podcast hosts where their listeners live and how long they listen
SiriusXM Acquires Simplecast; Still in Talks with Howard Stern
Amazon’s Audible Goes Beyond Books to Chase Spotify in Podcasts
Twitch’s Streaming Boom Is Jolting the Music Industry
Amazon To Stream Premier League Games On Twitch & Prime To Encourage Shared Viewing
TikTok Finally Explains How the “For You” Algorithm Works
Google Has Unveiled Some New Ranking Factors for 2021

Unedited Descript Transcription

Hello, communicators, business people, students of communication, and the community curious, you’re listening to for immediate release the first and longest running podcast for communicators, where today Neville and I talk about audio tweets, the pros and cons. There’s been a flood of new blockchain initiatives of particular interest to communicators.

Flipboard has introduced a stories format that holds a lot of promise. We have a great story about a company. Listening to a customer. Wikipedia has become a battleground over the George Floyd story. And we’ll talk about Facebook, Instagram, and news. Dan York share some thoughts on big players in podcasting like Spotify and Pandora.

It’s all coming your way right now on for immediate release, another fine podcast from the fir podcast network. This is for media release, the podcast for communicators.

Well, greetings everybody, and welcome to four immediately. Release episode number 196 of the Hobson and Holtz report for Monday, June 22nd, 2020. This is Shel Holtz in Concord, California. And this is Neville helps them in brick mill in England. And we are here for our monthly review of some of the news and posts and research that has been shared in the last month.

We’ve also been continuing our fir zoom chats. Uh, we, we had a two week break for different reasons each week. But we were back this past Thursday and we are scheduled for the upcoming Thursday. So, uh, if you’re interested, uh, drop us a note to fir comments@gmail.com and we’ll share the credentials with you.

We have a good chat. It’s, it’s a lot of fun. Uh, it’s good to talk to fir listeners, uh, just about what’s going on in our lives. And we think about all the news that we tend to report here on the show. A couple of things to share with you before we jump into our. Stories for the month. Uh, first I just want to remind everybody of something that I shared last month, about how communicators can help save lives, which is actually the headline of an article appearing on the campaign U S website from a couple of weeks ago.

It covers the story that we talked about, about how the United nations launched a unique open, brief for global creatives to create content, to reinforce the behaviors from. People to deal with the coronavirus pandemic in two weeks. From the time they. Presented the brief, uh, thousands of pieces were created, uh, from 143 countries.

And they’re up on the web to be shared. I have been sharing one a day on a Microsoft team that we set up at web court where I work, uh, just for pandemic related conversation. And I’ve decided I’m going to start sharing one a day to Instagram, too. They’re really amazing pieces of art, and you’ll find them@aunitednationsdottalenthouse.com.

A vision of images, a short MP4 is all kinds of great content to share there. Yeah, it was something, I mean, when we talked about that last month, I remember learning through, looking at that before the show was quite extraordinary, the call to action response that they had and the, um, the way in which the folks who organize that were trying to, I think in 30 days, reach a billion people or something was six significant amount of people to get the word out about this really quite something.

Yeah, great example of crowdsourcing. So, um, one other thing to mention is that, uh, you and I shell had a, a great opportunity to engage re-engage if you will, with our. Our old friend, Joseph Jeffy boss, he of crayon where we were all crayon listers back in 2006, 2007. So 13, 14 years ago. And I’m second life featured large in that history.

So, uh, it didn’t feature large in the. Conversation we have with Joe much, or we did talk about it a bit far. This was Joe’s new show, which runs on a live on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Periscope by Twitter. And I think he’s got a couple of other places as well. Um, so, uh, we joined Joe as. Special guests.

And those shows up. If you would like to watch the video, you can also download the audio as a podcast. Uh, we’ll have links to that in the show notes. Um, you had to leave, uh, you couldn’t stay for the long for the, uh, uh, after event party Joe had, which is via zoom. And I liked the technique of that after met, um, that you have the.

The public show, uh, which, uh, has guests or, or an audience let’s say, uh, and the platform Joe used, actually it was stream yard. It wasn’t the same as this one. And let’s you let’s people send in comments while you’re on the air and all this kind of stuff. And zoom was more of a private one. And, uh, there were about half a dozen people in that conversation, which went on for quite a while to talk about some of the things that we discussed in the, in that to show Joe is doing these things, I think, am I right?

Shell daily, if not daily, if not close to daily. Yeah. So he’s putting a lot of work into this, and I think it shows in the, uh, in the, uh, in the result they’re really well done. And of course it is all about Joe and he does this very well. I think so I enjoyed being on that with him and, uh, and being able to catch up with Joe after such a long time and, uh, you know, chat about those days in the context of what’s going on now, basically.

It was a lot of fun, a good conversation. I know he’s had a couple of other former Korean Easters on the show. I believe CC Chapman. He was a good one. So, uh, yeah. Good luck to Joe. I don’t know if these are archived. Can you watch the recordings of these? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the links we’ve got for the show notes.

We’ll we’ll be to the, Oh good. Yeah. I need to bookmark those because he’s had some guests I would have liked to have heard, but the time they’re on is prime work time for me, so, right, right. Can’t do that. Uh, last week I attended the IABC world conference. It had been scheduled to take place in Chicago from June 4th to seventh.

Uh, 14th to 17th, uh, that schedule had been set for a long time. And then of course, Corona virus struck and IBC moved fairly quickly. Uh, I’m not going to say real quickly, cause I remember over on the fellows, Facebook page, we were. Musing about when they might make a decision about what was going to happen.

But, uh, they finally did, uh, make this decision not to cancel the conference, but to make it all virtual. And then they moved very quickly identifying a vendor, uh, and getting it all set up so that it would, it would work well. Um, it was, you know, the same keynote speakers who had been scheduled the same breakout sessions, even the gold Quill.

Awards gala was all virtual and about 900 people registered, which is really not far off the pace for a regular old conference. Usually they get about 1200 onsite and some of them are not paid. Right. Um, but, uh, the, the company that provided the platform was called. In Toronto, I N T R ado. I’d never heard of them before, but they did a great job with this.

So when you sign in, you go to the lobby and from the lobby, you can go to places like the theater, where you find the keynotes and, and the breakout sessions. There was an exhibit hall where you could. Chat with vendors and look at their resources and, and, uh, download materials and watch videos. Uh, there was a lounge, they had five topics and people would just go hang out between sessions and talk about stuff like employee and customer engagement, career and future skills, marketing and brand, uh, and the damn thing.

Just worked really, really well. A few little glitches where people are using their internet connections from home. So there were some bits where you couldn’t hear what they were saying, or they would freeze for a couple of seconds, but nothing overwhelming or anything that broke the deal. Um, I spoke on Sunday at the strategic advisor forum had about 190 people watching a lot of chat going on during my talk, as well as a, a Q and a.

Section where I was able to respond to those. I was skeptical going into this about a four day conference. You attended by planting your button, a chair and watching a monitor, but it worked. And, you know, they also had long breaks where you could actually get out of your chair and go do other stuff. Um, if you didn’t want to stay.

In your chair and go to the lounge. Uh, of course I’d rather have been in Chicago, eating in the restaurants and meeting people in the hallway that I hadn’t seen in years and, and moving between sessions and, and going to the exhibit hall and enjoying the coffee breaks and the like, but if you can’t do that, this ends up being.

A really viable alternative. Uh, yeah, every speaker I think said I’d rather be there in Chicago with you face to face that. Of course. Yeah, we would. But this worked, uh, the content was outstanding. I heard a lot of people talk about how much they got out of the sessions. And one interesting. Uh, aspect of this is that everything was recorded.

Obviously it had this available to people who paid for registration for a year. So it’s not a matter of choosing this breakout session over that one. You choose the one you want to go to live and you have a year to watch all the others. Uh, so you can actually go to every session. Uh, I can also see this being used as a way to make a, a real conference.

Yeah, it’s being held in a venue where people are face to face, but make that available to people who maybe can’t get there, uh, as a second tier of participating in the conference. Um, anyway, uh, I just wanted to tell Natasha Nicholson and the entire IBC team, they did a great job making this thing work.

It would have been a lot easier to just cancel it and. Yeah, right. They went into paid off. Yeah. I’ve heard comments that were very positive about the event. Like you said, shell, uh, this is the new normal though, isn’t it? Uh, so many organizations are moving this way in, in one way or another, from small scale to large scale with quite some sophistication.

Um, like you said, a face to face. This won’t replace face to face. Of course, I don’t believe the ones that I’ve heard about them have paid attention to are trying to do that. They’re not at all recognizing the circumstances in which we are these days and most countries that, uh, uh, you know, travel’s not on, you can’t stay anywhere cause hotels aren’t open.

And even if they were, you’ve got a social determinant, all these complexities. But I guess every company is still trying to work through. So this will be with us for quite a while. It’s not a, uh, maybe a permanent feature for many. So, uh, but the office terrific opportunities I think, to, to bring, um, you know, ranging from what you just said, I you’ve signed up.

To be at this event on a certain date. So you did, uh, but you have access to be able to, to see all the content for 12 more months. So, you know, that was, that’s not a common thing, um, in many conferences and if that’s kind of late available to everyone with, with, with low, low barriers to access, then that’s a good thing coming out of all of this.

Yeah, and I was certainly not going to be the last full conference done that way. Apple is about to host its worldwide developer conference entirely online. So yeah, so this, this is a part of the future. And the other thing you mentioned too, that caught my attention was when you said, you know, some people are dialing in from home as it was.

So the connections weren’t too good. That’s the landscape and we look at TV news. Um, I see TV news. You, you must see similar on us channels. I see that when I look at the BBC news of interviewing someone government minister, let’s say, uh, is in his bedroom. Well, not quite he’s in his home office, which probably has a bed tucked out of camera view with the cat wandering around.

Right. And he’s gone, you know, buds in, or even the white Apple product, uh, AirPods. It is. Yeah. Or, or another brand. Yeah. And the audio quality is a bit iffy here and there, and there’s a lag and then someone else is on and they’ve got a brilliant connection. And then you’ve got others who have invested in, in, uh, in studio presence, type presentation doing well.

I I’ve always found the, a, it just as a small aside on that, the, the journalists themselves, uh, are very engaging when they are on TV reporting. And it looks like they’ve got the same kind of equipment you’ve got in your home office. It’s not that they got really cool broadcasting stuff from the broadcaster.

They’ve got ear buds in there is to, uh, so, you know, there’s a really, really good level though. It seems to me, but that’s, that’s the nature of it. And you find that the value then you you’ll get from the event I suspect is going to be the experience it gives you. That isn’t necessarily totally different.

Um, so you, you end up to your point, you made about sitting in a chair for hours. You’ve got to find a way to engage people in, in, in different ways. Somehow that makes them conclude at the end of it. I’m really glad I went to this. Yeah, and some are doing it by what you’ve been saying. I, I clearly feel that IBC is doing it, the company, they hired to do this for them, uh, and others too.

So it’s an evolving thing. It’s a great market for someone to, uh, to get an edge on this. And by the way, It also highlights something that is critically important, more and more now. And it’s not just a CEOs and other senior people in the organization. If you’re representing an organization, whether attendees at a conference or a speaker and on a video thing, you’ve got to really up your game to present yourself extremely well.

Uh, some people have gone overboard. Uh, I was at an event. Uh, the other day actually, uh, where two of the people there were kind of right in your face with logos and all this crap in the kind of, uh, what do you call it? Backgrounds they had, uh, over the top completely, um, uh, others really, you know, lighting, uh, the cause of the microphone.

Uh, and if you’re doing this at home, Are you going to have to upgrade and pay a bit more for your broadband can actually get decent network speeds. All this stuff is now on the agenda. So interesting time. Yeah. Oh, by the way, one other thing they did, uh, that I was really impressed with was the gold Quill banquet, which has always been a challenge because you’ve got people crossing the stage to get something like 150 awards.

They also give out the special awards, right? The, uh, the Ray Hamlin award and. And the award for best measurement. And then they introduced the new fellows and it’s a three and a half hour event. And they try to find ways to break it up with entertainment. But by the time it ends half the people who were there were already gone.

Uh, so what they did. In order to make it work here was, uh, they presented it as a live stream on YouTube, but it was all prerecorded video. And the whole thing lasted 90 minutes. And I’m thinking I would be willing to sit and have rubber chicken in a banquet room if they did it like this. Right. Instead of trying to stretch it out, you know, the people could cross the stages.

Their names are scrolling by it. It worked really well. I was able to sit and watch the entire thing. They also did special video interviews with the new fellows and they had video features for the best of the best. Um, good job. Good job. Excellent. Well, we do have news to report, uh, today, but before we get to that, uh, I do want to, uh, share some information about our sponsor polite mail.

Uh, you can, uh, visit any companies news or media sites, and you’ll find the occasional op-ed written by the company’s leader. Visit polite males, press center. And you’ll find an entire library worth of Forbes articles written by Michael , the company’s founder and managing director. In addition to his day, job to Rogers has been a Forbes councils member and a member of the Forbes Boston business council, which led him to write articles like internal marketing, what it means and why it’s important, six ways to improve communication with the C suite and how to better manage corporate communications teams.

The polite mail team has also assembled a crisis communication resource center just for the Corona virus, including free templates. You can download for use with outlook, a guide to working from home and an ebook on how to keep your workforce informed. But wait, there’s more, there are lists of articles to roasters has written for business.com.

I ABC and other publications. It’s like a library of communication, knowledge and best practices. And we haven’t even mentioned the blog, which is first rate. You’ll find all of this@politemail.com. Where of course you’ll also find. Polite mail the outlook plugin that lets you design, distribute and measure great internal emails that will improve your internal communications.

So I implore you. Visit polite mail, uh, at polite mail.com and check out all the great resources available there. And we thank polite mail for their support of, for immediate release. So you probably heard last week or last week, it would have been that Twitter has done something interesting with, uh, audio.

Uh, what would your tweets, I suppose you could call them. That’s not what Twitter is calling in though, but yeah. What they’ve done is rolled out a feature currently on test iOS users only. That’s going to happen over the next few weeks to let users record and add up to 140 seconds of audio to tweets.

They say, we’ll add a more human touch to the way we use Twitter, your very own voice. Uh, how does it work? Well to start with you open the. Tweet composer. So in your app, you tap the little icon that lets you start writing. And there’s a new icon that has wavelengths the symbol, like a way for me to get familiar with that kind of thing in audio that’s um, yeah.

So look at it. You think, Oh, that must be, you know, what you press, so you do, you’ll see your profile photo with a record button at the bottom. You tap to record your voice. It’s that simple. Um, once you’ve hit 140 seconds is I found this bit quite interesting. Um, you can just continue talking and it will start a new recording.

So there’s lots of 140 seconds and you keep talking. Once you reached the time limit for a tweet, a new voice tweet starts automatically to create a thread. Once you’ve done your tap, the done button to end your recording, go back to the composer screen as you as normal to, to tweet. People will see your voice tweet appear on the timeline alongside other tweets to listen to you, tap the image.

A playback will start in a new window to the bottom of your timeline, and you can listen as you scroll. You can also keep listening while doing the other things on your phone or on the go. So it’s a, it’s pretty feature full. I thought this was quite an interesting development and I’m looking forward to it.

Rolling out to Android is only on iOS at the moment. I’ve seen a lot of comments about this shell. A lot of it, uh, critical, uh, more of it’s actually very positive. Um, so it’s interesting in particular, one point, which I thought, um, Jason cobbler in vice pinpointed quite. Accurately. How is Twitter going to moderate?

These voice recordings or audio recordings are notoriously difficult to moderate. His says, and Twitter already has a Harrison and white supremacist problem. Uh, there are a few things worth mentioning here. He notes in order to upload audio to Twitter before this update, it had to be linked from a third party platform like SoundCloud or uploaded as a video file.

Twitter is now letting people upload sounds directly, which in theory, isn’t the worst idea in the world. He says, if implemented correctly, it could allow musicians to upload music, podcasts, easy upload snippets, and parts of the world that are used to sending voice memos to upload those as well. For the moment, Twitter, won’t allow people to send voice tweets as replies, which he says is a good thing.

I tend to agree with him as this is just starting out because of what he mentioned earlier about moderation. And I think that’s going to be a big challenge for Twitter to, uh, to address that and see how it does work. Um, One other comment I saw from Patrick Bay, I’m a podcaster who says, OMG, finally, in a tweet, he says, this Twitter is still our voice recordings in tweets.

It is cool in itself, but as a podcast. So this is super duper. Interesting. I agree with that show as a podcast, I was thinking precisely that when I saw this news a list of comments, um, Basically, that would be the main news I would see. Fuck. I see this as a very interesting development. I’m listening to what people say about the risks and there’s Twitter.

Get it right. It could be great if they don’t, then this is going to be interesting. Uh, uh, sorry that it’s only on iOS, that seems to limit the audience for this right now. Uh, and I have an iPhone. In fact, I was complaining about none of this on Android yet. Uh, and then I said, wait a minute. My work phones and iPhone.

And I went and looked and it’s not available to me yet. So it’s still rolling out. Uh, I read one other criticism I found, uh, interesting. And it was focusing on people with disabilities who can’t listen. To audio and, uh, the need for closed captions, which Twitter does provide for video. Uh, Twitter has already apologized for this, uh, and said that they’re exploring ways to make these types of tweets available to everyone.

But critics have said that response was tone deaf, uh, making. Accessible accessibility seemed like an afterthought at Twitter. A one lawyer wrote this in a tweet. He said the Americans with disabilities act was signed into law. 30 years ago. Federal law requires accessibility from the start. You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law, get to roll out an inaccessible feature.

And then only later. Make it accessible. Uh, Twitter has since come out and said, Oh, we’re also looking at manual and auto transcriptions of these, uh, voice tweets and how they can build a dedicated group to focus on accessibility, tooling, and advocacy across all products. So they’re scrambling to get beyond this particular criticism.

Uh, my. Skepticism, I think comes from the fact that Twitter is something I scroll through quickly. I tap on a link. If I want to read the article, somebody is referencing and I don’t know how many people are going to want to stop and take two minutes to listen to something on a tool where they’re used to scrolling and, and getting through stuff very, very quickly.

I mean, the whole point of Twitter was that they were micro, right. Uh, and obviously 120 or 140 seconds is not. A full podcast, but a lot longer than it takes to read 120 characters. Well, you’re right. And I think this is like all things. Is it not? If you’re interested enough in it, then you’re going to click or tap or whatever it is that you do a I’m thinking specifically now to comment on that though, if I’m a podcast, I would love to get people tweeting an audio comment directly.

So that will be interesting. Uh, others who aren’t in Azure are going to ignore it. Now, is this. Is this kind of option optionality as it were a suitable. Is it valid for an organization that’s investing with time effort? Energy and money in developing this extension of the service. If it is like, well, if you’re interested, you’ll use it.

If you’re not, you’ll ignore it. I mean that, but that’s, that tends to be the nature of a lot of their social media stuff these days. Does it not? So I think good for them. Uh, if you’re interested in it, you’ll pay attention to it. If you’re not, you won’t. Yeah. I think one group of Twitter users who will probably get a lot of use out of this is, is celebrities, um, celebrities, athletes, uh, that sort of person who has a fan base who actually wants to hear from them.

Uh, I think the average person out on Twitter, most people are going to go, why would I want to hear them when I can just read them as quickly, but you know, hearing from a rock star or a big movie star who’s out there tweeting now. Uh, probably easier to just talk. God forbid the president of the United States might start doing this.

Hopefully they’ll block him. I mean this about, I mean, I know there’s Jesse, you have an Android or an Apple. I don’t know. He’s on an iPhone. Yeah. But I know a couple of handfuls of folks who do. Literally what I call little soundbite recordings on SoundCloud. And it’s like a minute, um, some, two or three.

So, uh, that’s probably 200 and 140 seconds or whatever. And they could find this quite interesting because what they do is that the kind of news about their latest clip goes out on Twitter and a link to a SoundCloud file. So instead they can embed it straight in the tweet. And the folks who follow them for that kind of content may well, prefer that again, these are all options to me, as opposed to limitations, I think is terrific.

Sure. Yeah. One of the things that might happen if this really takes off is it’ll change the whole infrastructure of how people embed tweets. We’ve talked about this, the fact that newspaper reporters used to have to find the man on the street to do the interview now. Find the man on the street who tweeted about it and just embedded into the article online.

But if the end bed is, uh, a non closed captioned voice tweet, I think that’ll stop because they don’t want to interrupt the flow of the article. They want you to keep reading. The tweet is something you read, but if you stop and listen to somebody else’s audio content, I’m not sure that a lot of newspapers and other news outlets are gonna want to embed that.

No, they probably won’t, but there will be those who do I could see it. Um, Being again, this is the first stages of it. The experimental Twitter will evolve it, that issue you mentioned about, um, uh, you know, or the audio impaired people that say they’ll solve that they will are the biggest issue that I tend to agree with.

The critics I’m seeing all over the place is the moderation thing. Uh, you know, we talk about Trump, for instance, you need the moderate, his stuff. That’s the fact, but it’d be that I’m thinking seriously about bad people, very, very evil people who will use this tool, like others, like other tools to do bad things.

You got to watch out for that. Well, if it’s automatically closed captioned and you get the text of the tweet that should make moderation easier, it will be easier to identify those. Well, the thing that I also read about that, so that’s a good point is that moderation does require if you’re going to do it, I would imagine if you’re going to really seriously do moderation of audio, you’re gonna have to listen to the audio.

There are AI tools that will help you, but probably at the end of the day, it’s going to have to be a human being to make a kind of decision. And you can’t do this over like a, you know, a 20 minute period. This has gotta be pretty quick. So that’s something to solve. Big challenge. I’d say. Oh, the presentation I gave at the IBC conference in order to make an hour and 15 minute presentation, a little more interesting.

Uh, I asked three colleagues to record short videos to explain why communicators should be interested in. Emerging technologies where they have expertise. Dan York did a great video on live streaming, and in fact, he showed people, uh, he was using OBS, uh, the live streaming and recording studio software, uh, that allows you to multicast right.

You can be streaming to YouTube and, uh, Facebook and LinkedIn all at the same time. And, uh, he explained why that’s. Important, uh, Christopher S Penn knocked it out of the park with a video on artificial intelligence. And Phil Gomez did a great presentation on blockchain. Now, each of these were only four or five minutes, uh, but really provided context with voices of people who understood these technologies.

Well, Uh, just before the presentation, Phil got in touch with me and asked if there was time for me to update my presentation, which of course there was not. I said why? And he said, well, blockchain as a communication tool has just blown up in the last week. And there were three announcements. The big one was the New York times publishing details about what it calls its news provenance project.

This is a prototype that uses blockchain to surface a new photos, contextual information on a simulated social media feed. Now, according to the product manager, Pooja ready, uh, writing in a blog post. We wanted to see whether visible contextual information such as the photographer’s name and the location depicted in the photo could help readers better discern the credibility of news photos in their social feeds.

Now for the trial, the time said it built a network of test news organizations, as well as a social media platform that would link them. Uh, the organizations had shared ownership of a distributed ledger. Blockchain and a database between them and could make changes to photo metadata in the database. The end result a ready said when testing our prototype with users, we found that it effectively helped them make informed judgments about photos in a social media feed.

And you know that there haven’t been instances where photos have been shared saying, this is what was going on at this event. And it turns out it’s a three year old photo from another event and another. Location, this would help. Resolve that problem. Uh, the second bit of blockchain news came out of a domain registrar called unstoppable domains, and they’re allowing the owners of the dot crypto domain, uh, to launch decentralized blogs or what they’re calling D blogs.

These can be built. Quickly, uh, and the posts and everything else that accompanies them like videos and images are decentralized on the interplanetary file system. That’s IP Fs, a blockchain based network that would prevent autocratic nations and others from shutting down your content. You are in complete control of your content.

Uh, there are already several blogs up using the system. I was enjoying reading one called Melton’s musings. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Uh, and the third announcement Microsoft launched its decentralized identifiers network on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Uh, it’s called ion I O N it lets users create decentralized digital credentials like driver’s licenses or university diplomas, uh, that could be used to identify them online.

Presumably you would be able to show your phone at a bar and get in because you’re 21. Uh, but I think it would also be usable to show that somebody who’s published something is who they say they are. Uh, you could also use these to log onto websites and apps, which means that I’m needing to have a password might go away or go away more than it already has.

Um, but being able to identify, uh, who wrote what in an article or a video could wind up being huge, especially in this era of deep fakes anyway, after hearing a bunch of chatter over the last year or so about how blockchain was an over-hyped bust, you know, we’re really now starting to see actual movement, the communicators should be paying attention to.

Yeah, those are very interesting examples, shell. I particularly like that last one. You talked about the, the idea of the identifier, although. In my mind, the first thought that pops up of course is safeguarding privacy and data. How, what are the implications for a user privacy data security, um, safeguarding data protecting and making sure it’s not used for wrong purposes, uh, storage of it, all those things.

Um, So this, I haven’t read the article. I have to say, well, Microsoft says that you are always in control of your identity. Um, yeah. So how, how did you know to me it’s like, so how’s it going to work exactly in that case? How would I be in control? But about to me, that’s something that needs to be worked through.

It’s terrific that that’s such a technology. Is within reach of, of doing some of the things they say it would be able to, because you’re right there, being able to prove who you are in a way that’s verifiable by a trusted third party. And therein is the trick. Uh, you know, this says who you are according to who.

So, how do you set that up in a trusted way? That’s something or someone or a tool or a technology verified your identity. So do you trust that? So there’s quite a chain there too, to kind of get get right. But. Absolutely that that’s one of the things that communicators do need to be paying attention to as these things do evolve.

So good examples. I think I’m most excited about the New York times initiative. I think the idea of being able to see the Providence of a photo in a social media feed, uh, would probably wind up leading to fewer people, actually sharing those kinds of images. If they know they’re going to be called out the first time somebody looks at one of those.

No, this isn’t what you’re saying. It is, uh, why bother, uh, it, it could clean up some of those feeds. Yeah. Anything that makes that process trustworthy, I think is great. That’s what this can do. Fantastic. Plus a course, make it seamless and dead easy. Cause right now to do that is Ooh, it’s clicks galore. Uh, and it’s, it takes a while.

So you tend not to, so there’s blind trust in, in, in. And images in particular. So, you know, some of this is a really good idea, I have to say. Yeah. And the other problem is of course, when it’s revealed that the photo is not of what the person sharing, it says it is very few of the people who have seen it as it was shared on social media, get that word.

They haven’t seen that news report. Right? This means everybody who looks at that image in a social media feed would know. Good examples. I have to say. So, um, do you use Flipboard? I wonder, um, it’s been around for a while and the one way to describe Flipboard is a service that lets you curate content in extremely.

Compelling attractive and, uh, useful, uh, audio, visual formats, primarily visual. So you can create a magazine digital of course, that, uh, I see, I pay a lot of attention to what organizations in particular doing this. I’ve been using Flipboard for some years. Uh, I, I’m not typical. I doubt, although I see lots doing what I do in the sense that I use these mostly for my own personal interests.

But I do follow quite a number of, uh, magazine, Flipboard magazines, um, created by organizations to showcase brands, uh, thoughts, uh, activities, you name it. Uh, and many of which I find in themselves interesting, but also the way in which they’ve been put together, uh, and, uh, shared. So that’s been around a while and, and I often wonder why I don’t see more people using Flipboard.

It’s not, instead of something was enhanced, something presents content in a very compelling way to many who would, it would appeal to. So. News just the other day as reported a number of plates I saw at first on tech crunch about, um, a new product that a Flipboard is, um, is rolling out. Uh, I found quite interesting.

So they’re giving news publishers and others. Content curators on the platform, a new way to highlight content through a format called storyboards. So Flipboard is all about what they call smart magazines, which really are ongoing collections. So it’s a periodical that mixes, um, as a tech crunch succinctly describes it, human and algorithmic.

Curation allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up to date on a given topic. Storyboards on the other hand are more of a one time collection of articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, and other media content wise. They may not be that different from everything needs to know about X kind of article, but they give publishers and easy and visually stylish way to put those rabbits together.

According to tech crunch, many publishers have already been beta testing. It. Uh, including tech crunch, who did, um, daily roundups of coverage, uh, coming out of last year’s disrupt conference in San Francisco, they quote a number of other interesting examples of people experimenting with this. Um, uh, a publication called the Agrio created a storyboard, collecting the latest coverage of George Floyd’s death.

I took a look at that and they’re all in one place, uh, with a perspective from the creator. A is a huge amount of content connected in a way that is not the same as how the media or, or separately reporting it. Interesting. A national geographic, you rated the package of new and old stories, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount st.

Helens. They had an interesting twist on how they presented it because it was connected to a link to a pay wall to sign up to a subscription. So if you found the imagery compelling, that may result in that interesting, I felt what they were doing with it. Um, Tech crunch spoke to Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue, who said, this is something curators have been asking for, uh, to structure that curation, uh, better.

He said that storyboards could be a great way to highlight different products and make money with affiliate links, especially as curated commerce is something that will probably play more and more of a significant role in our revenue. He said, Uh, it’s, uh, it’s most interesting, um, that they, tech crunch talks about, uh, what comes with it, which will appeal.

I’m sure to people interested in looking at this detailed analytics you get about how many people are viewing your storyboards. If they’re liking them, are they commenting on them, flipping them via Flipboard, for instance, and much more. It’s all part of a new tool. Called curator pro that Flipboard is rolling out, uh, that lets them do more from their content, including curation tools and analytics.

So lots of coming with this, I think if I were a brand with a story to tell, I’d be looking at storyboards as another. Way of telling that story. Yeah, I absolutely would. I have a couple of magazines that I curate on Flipboard. I have to confess that I haven’t curated them in so long that when I tried to log into Flipboard this morning, it told me they had new security protocols and I needed to re up account.

And I haven’t had a chance to do that, but it’s a gorgeous platform. It always has been. Um, I think I’ve kind of moved to nuzzle for a lot of. What Flipboard does, but Flipboard looks much better. What appeals to me about this? This is their own unique take on a story type of approach and Instagram stories.

Uh, obviously they don’t vanish the whole idea of Instagram stories and Snapchat stories and Facebook stories is, is that these are ephemeral, uh, that once you’ve seen them, they’re gone. And they’re only up there for. 24 hours. Uh, but it’s still taking that approach to, in addition to my regular stuff, I’m going to share with you in this story format.

Uh, and I think it reinforces the reason that we in this profession should be leveraging stories in every way these platforms make available. Yeah, well, it’s worth looking into, so flipboard.com is the place to go and you can find everything it needs to know there. Breeding shell and Evelyn, if our listeners all around the world, it’s Dan York from extremely hot verb, Shelburne Vermont, right now, we’re going through a heat wave, which is appropriate for a summer solstice, I suppose, which is what we have here.

It’s June 20th, the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, which is actually an interesting way to talk about lenses, because the perspective we have is the context is how we talk about things. Right. We talk about the longest day of the year, and we talk about the summer solstice, but that’s of course a Northern hemisphere perspective.

If we were in the South, we would be talking about the shortest day of the year, which is a long way to say, look at this. It says a lot about the language we use and yesterday was June 10th here in the, uh, United States. Which celebrates the time when a union general or a union Colonel actually made it to Galveston, Texas to inform slaves there that they have been made free by the emancipation proclamation two years earlier.

There’s a longer story around all that, but an interesting perspective on a webinar I was listening to yesterday was to say that a lot of that has to do with the perspective coming from the union, from the white view, et cetera, and is, is different from the perspective that would be had by of course, the, uh, the black slaves and the, and the aspects around that in their case, they’d actually been working for two more years as slaves then they had not.

Um, it’s a very interesting way to. Think about how, what is the lens through which we are talking about? Things we, as communicators of course, are always thinking about lenses perspectives, but it’s just interesting to look at what are we doing, which goes to a topic I want to talk about. There’s been a lot of discussion with everything happening here in the United States, in particular, but around the world with black lives matter and so much more around language and how we move to using more inclusive language.

Get hub, which is one of the major places around the world for software development has taken a look at some of the language that’s used there. For instance, when you’re doing something, get hub, you use the master repository, and it’s part of a move where people are looking at some language like master, slave relationships and things and saying.

Maybe there’s a better way to do that. Similarly, things like using black lists or white lists for in the security world or talking about man in the middle of tax, when we could talk about machine in the middle or something like that. My question for all of you as communicators is what are you doing to look at the inclusiveness of the language you are using?

If you haven’t been thinking about that, a couple of links and maybe think about that a little bit. I want to talk an arrest report about the giants that are happening out there in the battle of podcasting from the run of show. I know you shall never have talked about Twitter and there are 140 seconds of audio.

They’re now letting it go. But some of the other big players, Spotify, which bought anchor just recently announced that you can now go and start uploading video files directly into anchor. So you could be having a video chat over zoom or Skype or Google Hangouts or whatever else you can get that recorded video.

And then you could just upload it into anchor and it will strip out the audio and give that to you in an editable form so that you could be able to go and take that and put it directly into your, into your podcast that you run through anchor. Now this again, Spotify who is really trying to become this, I mean, is this giant and podcasting space is, is providing this ability.

You could have this video chat and then just make it easy to get it in there. Now what’s interesting is the other player in the music space, Pandora. Is looking to now get into the podcasting game in a bigger way specifically, they’re now providing better sets of podcast analytics. So you can learn more about where listeners are coming from and so much more.

You need to be part of their free Pandora for podcasters program, which means you need to go in, submit your RSS feed, et cetera, but they’re now getting into play and what’s. Interesting is Pandora is actually owned by Sirius XM. And they’re a little bit of an irony here, right? Because a serious thought that the world would just embrace satellite radio and, and many people have, but podcasts came along and seriously disrupted what was going on with all of the things there.

So. But serious has gotten in with Pandora within the music. And now it’s expanding into that and they directly acquired a company called simple cast, which allows you to go and publish, monitor, track podcasts, et cetera. And so they’ve gotten into that game and, uh, and their, their view is at least from the CEO says.

Most podcasts advertising is very rudimentary and not personalized. Frankly, this area is ripe to be disrupted and improved to which I say, well, that assumes, we want to have ads rather than being why we perhaps left radio for podcasts, but maybe this is just why we can’t have nice things, but stay tuned because Sirius is looking to get into that space.

A lot more Amazon of course, is also a big player in this space and, or wants to be. And they’re now looking to go and buy new content and run it as audible originals. You know, there’s some speculation. They made start to change their business model on audible and start to allow individual shows. They’re also looking to go and push out more podcasts through their Amazon music app.

Apparently they will be adding podcasts as a genre there. So, you know, trying to go up against Google and Apple and all of the space, but speaking of music and Amazon. They also have their Twitch service, which interestingly I’m streaming this out actually through Twitch as I record this, but Twitch is getting into music in a big way.

They’ve uh, it said one story said that in may people spent almost 27 million hours watching live music and other performing arts on Twitch. Um, and, and really looking at how to go and do this and, and enable creators to do that. Amazon’s also going to be streaming UK premier league games on that. So again, if you’re not paying attention to what Amazon’s doing with Twitch and with streaming and audio, you need to, you need to look at that.

Speaking of. Well music and Twitch and streaming and videos and giants, tick tock recently revealed information about how videos wind up on the, for you page, which is if you’ve never worked with tick talk, it’s when you get in there there’s videos that are suggested to you. So if you’re a communicator wondering how to make.

You know, your video work on tick talk. It’s interesting to read about the algorithm and see what’s going on in there because they’ve got a whole number of ways. What they’re doing is they show it to a small number of people and they watch what happens and then they start to go. And, and those are the signals that go in and show what’s there.

Very interesting to read. If you’re thinking about getting into more with tick tock. Speaking of signals, the big news coming out of Google this past May 28th, was that starting in 2021. They are going to be. Incorporating something called core web vitals, which are set of metrics around speed, responsiveness, visual stability, okay.

Which are going to help measure user experience. This is important. This is going to affect the search engine ranking of your content and your websites. So you need to pay attention to is understand it what’s going on because these will be ranking signals starting in 2021. Read more about that and all of that.

That’s all I want to talk about today. Many more things I’d like to talk about, but best wishes to everyone as we continue to work through this pandemic and in sort of the reopening as we’re going through there, I’d remind people that there’s a lot of people looking to understand how to do virtual events and we in the communication space have a lot of ideas around that.

So, thanks again for listening. You can find more of my audio writing at Dan York dot Emmy and back to you shall Neville. Bye for now. Thanks, Dan, always a great report, loved all the conversation about podcasting. And I have to confess that, uh, I am, uh, conflicted, uh, over the moves that are going on right now.

On the one hand, I’m glad to see the mainstreaming of podcasting. Uh, on the other hand, the idea that some of the podcasts that people might like to listen to are now behind a pay wall, and you have to subscribe to a particular surface to hear them. Uh, I don’t care for that. That seems to be contradictory to the original intent of podcasting, which was available to anybody.

Right. All you needed was access to the RSS feed, but I’m really good report. Thanks Dan. Uh, we’ve told stories like this one before, in fact, back in, uh, I think it was 2017, we told the story of a kid who sent a letter to Lego. Um, his dad had told him, don’t take this with us shopping because you lose it.

Uh, and of course he lost, it, wrote a letter to Lego to see if they’d replace it. And, uh, the letter is available on the web. You can look this up. Um, in fact, I’ll even put a link to it in the show notes. Uh, but it said normally we would ask that you pay for a new one. If you lose, uh, your own mini figures and need to have it replaced, my boss has told me I couldn’t send you a new one out for free because you lost it.

I decided I would put a call into sensei Wu to see if he could help me. And he goes on from there. The co the consumer services rep said that sensei Wu said the kid’s dad was a wise man. Uh, and, uh, he would send him an upgraded version of the figure that combined three different figures in one, and the bad guy for him to fight.

And of course this went absolutely viral. Uh, an example of what happens when you listen. To a customer and look for opportunities to engage and take action. And that’s the kind of story that happened earlier this month. Uh, another story of a company listening to a customer in this case, uh, it’s a Missouri woman named, uh, Kennedy Mitchum, uh, a black woman, a recent college graduate who was troubled by the definition of racism in Merriam Webster.

Um, she emailed Merriam Webster to let them know how she felt about it. Uh, their definition of racism by the way, was a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities. And that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Mitcham didn’t believe that went.

Far enough, the 22 year old was also concerned that people frequently turn to the dictionary to argue that something isn’t racist because the dictionary requires a personal dislike of someone based on their race for that to qualify as racism. Uh, this email found its way to Peter Sokoloski editor at large at Merriam Webster, who agreed that the entry hadn’t been revised in decades and that the new definition would be an improvement in the wording.

We have concluded that omitting any mention of the systemic aspects of racism promotes a certain viewpoint in itself. It also does a disservice to readers of all races. He told the New York times activism doesn’t change. The dictionary. Activism changes the language. Uh, so they are changing the definition of racism to include the systemic race of the fact that this perception of one race as being better than another is used to, uh, put one race in power over the other and disadvantage the other.

I love this story on a number of levels, but as a communicator, I love that someone actually read an email. I mean, how many emails must they get? And then they were smart enough to pass it along to someone who is smart enough to see its value and do something with it. And of course now it’s made news everywhere.

Listening has never been more important as a communication activity. This is just another great example of a company that knew how to do that. And by the way, if you’re not following Merriam Webster on Twitter, do yourself a favor. It’s a great Twitter account. That’s an interesting story. Shall I agree with you?

Uh, I also wonder though, um, if Marion Wister Webster is changing the definition of racism, what happens if you go and visit another dictionary and you find it’s a different definition. So I wonder the same thing. Is she going to email the OED? Yeah. Yeah, although, uh, that is interesting in terms of, you know, how many versions of the truth are out there.

If you’ve seen the dictionary as the kind of source of authority and honesty in a particular topic, um, that’s a good story. It actually connects very well. I think to our next story, which is about George Floyd, except it’s not really about Joyce Floyd. This is actually a good example of something that I believe is, is, is a, such an issue these days, which is Wikipedia, um, is.

Uh, a place that is a primary source. People go to people, generally speaking, wherever you are in the world, you search for something. And, uh, the odds are pretty high, uh, in the nineties and eight plus percent area. I’d say that amongst the first or second screen full of search results, you’re going to get is an Wikipedia entry for that phrase or that person or that event or whatever it might be.

George Floyd is no example. And this example of this to me, And the focus of this report is such a key issue today. It’s it? It merits, uh, talking about a bit. So what this is about, what I’m going to mention is, is, uh, the awful thing that happened leading to this man’s death on may the 25th. So it’s very current, uh, and how it’s, it’s, uh, kind of the focus of a humongous battleground on Wikipedia, uh, with different points of view, all centered around.

The notion of neutrality, uh, we compete here, stands itself, proud in supporting that, uh, ideal that the content is a neutral point of view, and it is something that is inherently trustworthy because of the fact that it is curated by such a huge number of people, uh, who try to approach this, uh, with, uh, objectivity and neutrality, uh, at the, at the heart of what they do.

Following a huge, huge, uh, quantity of procedures, rules, and accepted practices that are actually very hard to navigate. When you first encountered this something I’ve been involved in myself in my work, uh, over the last six months on a project on Wikipedia. So, um, this, I found interesting this story show it’s it’s it’s, uh, it’s reported on slate.

Uh, the writer, Steven Harrison, Harrison’s a lengthy report on slate. So I’m not going to attempt to read it or even paraphrase it. I’m only going to quote from some of it, because to me it’s a significant, so, um, The headline, how Wikipedia became a battleground for racial justice, I think is a good one.

And the subhead contributors are rethinking. What Wikipedia is committed to neutrality actually means it starts off with quoting the current Wikipedia article. On the killing of George Floyd. And the key thing here to mention is the word current, because when this was written, uh, his article in slate and published a, about a week or so back, uh, that was current, but one of the natures of Wikipedia is that is only current as you’re looking at it, things change particularly, uh, an event like this.

So it describes what happened to George Floyd. And, um, since that event, A Wikipedia is editors have documented over 460 George Lee, Floyd protests in both the us and abroad. So, uh, editors, and they can be anybody by the way, anyone can edit Wikipedia as it proudly proclaims when he first, uh, land on the homepage.

If you ever go there, uh, that, um, uh, there are ways to do it though, but I won’t go into that cause that take up the rest of the podcast, talking about that, but anyone can do it and you’re a volunteer editor. And so you can write anything and that’s, what’s been happening. People are passionate, uh, many are able to articulate well that that, that tries to be neutral.

But the interesting thing to me is, is as, um, as the article slate by Steven Harrison continues a bit, uh, the updating, uh, such as these. Extra, uh, pages that have been created are the result of Wikipedia is high tempo and decentralized editing process, which gives the internet encyclopedia its extraordinary ability to create and revise content.

Following current events, knowledge, production, at least in the Wikipedia sense is part collaboration and part combat is exactly how I’ve seen it as well. Editors undo one another’s contributions. If they disagree. And then tensely debate proposed changes on the talk page, sitting behind each article in case anyone listening doesn’t realize that a Wikipedia entry.

In other words, a page with an article is the live face that it presents the topic behind that as, as this connects. There’s a talk page. Yeah. Which is where anyone can add a comment, either questioning something or offering a suggestion to change it or whatever it’s a place. Uh, you, you would like to think is a place for civilized discourse.

It is about discourse. Sometimes it’s civilized, but passions run high on, on a number of topics. Take a look at any topics interest you, and you’ll see what I mean. If you look at the talk page. So, um, so people debate these changes on talk pages and with the recent coverage of George Floyd and other victims of police brutality, those debates have often centered on the proper interpretation of what is neutrality.

So neutral point of view is one of Wikipedia core content policies. As I mentioned earlier, it’s often been described as non negotiable. To the extent possible the site’s content is to be written without editorial bias so that it retains encyclopedic character. Last week, the community of editors voted against the proposal to quote blackout the site in support of black lives matters.

If you remember that that was a Tuesday or just over a week. You actually, I think it was shell, the community of editors voted against it. Um, uh, and in part it was due to concerns that it could threaten Wikipedia reputation for neutrality. So it would take a stand, uh, on one side of the debate. And that’s not something that they like to do.

A lot of critics argue that Wikipedia already done that. So what’s the difference. So that debate is still ongoing, quite passionately. I have noted. Um, Harrison goes into a lot of detail here about how editors are working together. Uh, what, what, uh, how they discuss this concept of neutrality. It is defined quite quickly, uh, clearly on Wikipedia.

I found it easy to understand that. But, uh, as Harrison notes, neutrality has also become a flashpoint in debates about language and specifically the names of articles themselves. Editors voted by consensus to change the article death of George Floyd, to killing of George Floyd on June. The second, a few editors suggested that.

Death was the more neutral sounding term, but more editors reasoned that killing was the more factually accurate term. And that the most accurate description was neutral. By definition, that same day, there was a proposal to rename the killing of George Floyd, page two murder of George Floyd, but that was closed by one of the administrators there on procedural grounds.

And that debate is still going on behind the scenes over on the biographical Wikipedia entry for George Floyd. Editors are debating, whether it should mention his prior criminal charges. Those in favor of mentioning Floyd’s prior arrests argue that Wikipedia is not censored. Those opposed argue that highlighting this past on the page will afford that information undue weight since his criminal activity had no relevance to his killing on May 25th.

In the meantime, visitors to the George Floyd biographical page can see the suggestion to merge this entry. Into the killing of George Floyd article via a clear notice at the top of the page. So that debate continues a pace. Some Wikipedians take issue with the word you trust yourself, and this adds serious complexity to this argument.

That group includes Jackie Kerner, a social scientist who specializes on online communities and the free knowledge movement. She explained that she preferred the word balanced to neutrality, and that one of Wikipedia girls should be knowledge. Equity, the just representation of knowledge and people when dedicated user groups like black lives matter, contribute content about racial justice.

They’re helping Wikipedia identify historical blind spots and moving the project closer to achieving balance. This debate is ongoing. I don’t see a solution to this anytime soon. This is one of the natures of something like this, where people are very passionate, different views, uh, are willing to.

Discuss, but not give much ground to that continues at pace. So there’s also the facts as, as Harrison concludes in his sleep piece, how the notion of neutrality can be weaponized by some factions to keep certain knowledge off the encyclopedia. That is also an issue. So. This though highlights the difficulty of meaning and people agreeing over, over what a word or a, or a notion means.

That example you gave of Marin Webster and racism is a good example of this. So that was simple by comparison that this Rose. A bit of light into the processes or Wikipedia. It is hugely complex. This is a good example of that. And it’s not really getting us closer to understanding exactly what happened and what it means, but they’re not having these issues over Britannica that you had knots.

So it, I mean, Wikipedia. Um, is something I find a fascinating concept. Jimmy Wales, the founder, or the one of the co founders. In fact, he’s the co founder. If I’m not wrong back in, what was it? Shell? 2000. Doesn’t want the turn of the century anyway. Create is something truly extraordinary. Uh, and if you think about it, there are.

400,000 plus volunteer editors, uh, in the Wikipedia community globally. Uh, the English language version of Wikipedia is one of only, and I’ve forgotten the number to be honest, I think it’s like 60 different Wikipedia is, uh, in different languages. It evolved over this period. You have issues in reading something in one language and seeing a difference.

Description of it in another language, uh, particularly some of the rather obscure ones, but point is his reality. Um, you search for something online and amongst the search results, it’s very common, more common than not. You will find one of the links is to a Wikipedia article about that, and people tend to rely on it.

Um, I do, I use it more than any other reference source for quick, for quick referencing. If I’m. Is about being utterly certain about something I’ll look at probably four or five sources, but typically I look up something and it’s the Wikipedia entry I go to first. Um, I I’ve seen firsthand through my work experience, the true difficulty in, in, in being clear, absolutely clear in your own mind about neutrality.

And I get the, see how crucial that is to the trustworthiness of Wikipedia and the event like. George Floyd is a global event. It’s got huge attention and this illustrates the complexities of something like that, where no one can actually agree. Yeah. And there are other issues with Wikipedia. Of course, we’ve seen reports that, uh, while there are that many editors, a small percentage is producing most of the content and they tend to be white men, but you know what Wikipedia has actually made some changes to the rules of this, which also bring into, uh, editors, harassing others, uh, particularly new people as a broaden out the community.

So it’s not just a bunch of white men doing this. That’ll that’ll pay off. Take awhile. Um, I remember working with Phil Golmes referenced earlier to set up a Facebook group called, uh, crew the, uh, corporate representatives for ethical week Wikipedia editing that was designed to try to close the rift between Wikipedia editors and public relations.

People who are held in low regard by. Wikipedia editors. Uh, and, and that initiative seems to have faded. There’s not a lot of content in recent years on that Facebook group, even though these issues continue to emerge. Um, and I, by the way, I do enjoy watching Dan York edit Wikipedia on his live stream casts that he does via Twitch.

Uh, but, um, Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s dicey, isn’t it? Because, you know, I could make the argument either way on changing that, uh, article title from a killing to murder. Uh, he has been charged with murder. He has not been convicted. So is it a murder? Well, that’s what they’re accusing him of. Uh, I could see changing it to murder if, if the officer’s convicted, uh, because then the legal system has declared.

Yes, it was. So that’s been. One of the points argues in the talk pages about precisely that. So, uh, that’s exactly how it works, shelled it, to be honest, but your point about, um, public relations is a good one because I was involved with it with the, uh, in the UK, the CIP, our initiative back in 2012 on, uh, helping Wikimedia foundation, which owns Wikipedia, uh, gain better understanding on, on how public relations professionals can be involved.

In editing content and contributing to discussion on Wikipedia is through transparency and full disclosure of all the conflict of interest. And that, uh, that started something very good for both the PR professional and Wikipedia. But that’s eight years ago now it seems to be working reasonably well yet.

I hear often, unfortunately way too often of what I would use. One of your favorite verb shell, the egregious behavior. And she’s not a verb as it, wasn’t an adjective of people who do this kind of thing without disclosing their conflict of interest. And that’s still not what it ought to be. Uh, but it’s things are improving.

So I’m. Conscious of that myself in that part role, I played in all of that, getting that kicked off here in the UK, I think in Canada or Australia were part of that initiative as well. So I’m seeing this going on though. A isn’t about PR in this context, it’s nevertheless, it’s still about conflict of interest, disclosure, transparency, neutrality, objectivity, following the rules.

And if you go to some of the talk pages, I mean, my God, these places are. Truly like battlefields without any question. So, um, it’s complex. Uh, and a lot of people try to figure it out. Uh, and I think reasoned voices are the ones that will win eventually because they are the ones who will gain the consensus for a change or not as the case might be.

And that is what we can beat is all about. Right. And of course collaboration is always messy. I’m sure you’ve seen the graphic of what a swing set looks like when it’s designed by committee. Totally. Yeah. Uh, one last story to share with you about news. Uh, the first of the two items I want to share, it is something we’ve talked about before.

This is the new news tab on Facebook and it is fully functional now. And I do check it out. Uh, Probably should check it out daily, but I don’t, uh, it’s just for U S users. So you, you, you’re not going to be able to see this Neville, but Facebook has, um, approved more than 200 publishers to create news articles that will appear in this tab.

Um, and it’s combining what used to be the today in tab. Um, and it’s a central location for news on. Facebook, uh, and it could make Facebook a significant channel, four news consumption, and this could be a big deal for local news. And this is the thing that excites me the most about it because local news has struggled over the last 15 or 20 years, uh, while the big publications in New York times, the Washington post, the LA times, they have been able to survive.

And in some cases even thrive. Local news has all, but vanished those small town, weekly newspapers that had reporters that would go cover the zoning commission meeting and the school board meeting. It was really the only way that people in those towns had insight into what these public officials were voting on and what they were doing.

And when there’s not a reporter in the room, sharing this with the public, they can do just about anything they want and, and. Probably get away with it. So providing an outlet for that kind of news could be a big deal for publishers who don’t have the resources to, you know, throw a paper newspaper on doorsteps.

Maybe can’t get traction with a website that’s serving a small audience for PR. This means earned media placement could really become more important. Media relations could get a real boost. If, if this takes off now, it’s still new. And most of what I see in the tabs from national publishers, there is a local button.

And however, um, unfortunately when I clicked it, I saw one article from patch, uh, along with the news for Concord or the weather for Concord, California, uh, in the main feed, uh, as I scrolled through it, I did see one article from the East Bay times, which is the newspaper I subscribed to. Um, unfortunately it wasn’t about a zoning commissioner, a school board.

It was about a food truck that was stolen in Emeryville. Um, just. The other side of the Bay bridge from San Francisco. Not exactly what I had in mind, but like I say, it’s new. The potential is still there for local news to really pick up here and for people to have a one tap option to find out what’s going on in their communities.

But if you can’t get your news on Facebook, there’s always another app that is owned by the same company. Instagram is poised to take over Twitter. As a news source, uh, according to the 2020 Reuters Institute, digital news report, uh, the use of Instagram for news has doubled since 2018. The trend is strongest among young people.

In the UK, nearly a quarter of 18 to 24 year olds used Instagram as a source of coronavirus news. Uh, Instagram is now used by more than a third of all people who answered the survey and two thirds of under 25 and 11% use it for news, uh, from the total population, putting it just one point behind Twitter.

Uh, one thing that’s helped is the visual nature of the stories that have been in the news lately. Uh, climate change, the black lives matter movement and the Corona virus have all the massive engagement on the platform. I know where I work at web Corp, we share our news across a number of social media platforms, including Instagram.

And we find generally Instagram’s the one where we get most. Engagement, uh, certainly more than anywhere else. What I haven’t seen is a big shift in where journalists share content. That’s still primarily Twitter. And I think that’s an important component of online news. So we could end up seeing a somewhat fragmented, uh, environment, but still between Facebook’s news tab and the rise of Instagram as a news source, the world of news continues to be shaken up and Facebook seems to be consolidating some of it.

It’s interesting. Isn’t it? That report BBC story. Um, the word trust kind of floats in my mind when I read that more than anything else, who do you actually trust as a new source? So, um, I’ve not seen as you said, that Facebook service cause it’s us only at the moment. Um, but looking at the BBC story, I was struck by, um, the other services they include in their assessment of news use versus non-used news on social media.

And, um, Facebook is the one who’s ahead of the pack here. And I guess I’m not sure whether they’re referring to what you mentioned or it’s just generally the news, but, um, Instagram is quite low down, uh, but. I guess the potential is there for it to increase. Yeah. I mean the more people share news, the more people will see it.

And if people are turning to it for that becomes a source, I’m scrolling through. Uh, the news tab on Facebook right now, I won’t read headlines, but, uh, the sources Washington post the daily beast, NBC news Politico, the New York times, ABC news USA today, the Huffington post business insider women’s health.

People magazine. So they’re big national media outlets. I keep going through looking for please something local because that’s, I see the huge potential here. And, uh, it’s, it’s just not there. Um, But I’m hopeful that it will emerge now that there’s this place for it to go. I can see local outlets filling out the form to become an approved publisher to, uh, this tab.

And because I live in Concord, I would see East Bay news. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think also on the case of Instagram, like anything, um, It’s news. Not as we know it kind of thing. If you’re used to seeing linear news in a news app on your mobile device, text, lots of it. Um, pictures here and there, then that’s not the same as what Instagram is talking about, which is visual.

And if they’re aiming at that as they are, of course, more youthful audience. Um, the, I I’m sure the, you know, the research into those audiences show that simple stories told simply and straightforwardly visual based is what appeals to them. Yeah. In other words, how is the story being delivered to them?

And that that’s, that’s key to it. So, uh, yeah. And, and one of the things that I see on Instagram all the time is content from now this which I’ve always enjoyed. I think they do a great job with video news. And Instagram is the primary place where I find that these days, I know they publish it across all the social media channels, but, uh, Instagram is where I tend to see it.

Yeah. Well, that’ll wrap up this episode of, for immediate release episode number 196 for Monday, June 22nd, 2020. Uh, don’t forget this coming Thursday, our zoom chat at 1:00 PM Eastern time. Uh, Neville. We expect to see you there for about half of it. 6:00 PM. UK time. I’ll be there. That’s all right. Yeah, you got to have dinner.

I can’t, I can’t let my mother six 30 on a Thursday. Uh, but it’s a good chat. And, uh, if you would like to join us, we would love to have you there. Um, in the meantime, we would love to also hear from you about anything that you, uh, would care to comment on that you heard in today’s episode or anything from the world of communication you would like to share with us and listeners send an email to fir comments@gmail.com.

Attach up to a three minute. Audio file. We’ll play it. You can record that audio file just by, uh, going to the fir website and clicking the send voicemail tab on the right hand side of the page, you can record 90 seconds. How about, how about this additional thing, additional opportunity shell. If anyone listening has got the Twitter or do you on the iOS Twitter app, send us a tweet with your audio.

Fir podcast is the handle. That’s right, just at fir podcast. Uh, you can leave a comment directly on the show notes for this episode@firpodcastnetwork.com. Uh, share your thoughts on the fir community on Facebook, and we appreciate your reviews and ratings on iTunes or whatever. App or tool you are using to find and listen to your podcasts.

And that will be a 30 for this episode of, for immediate release.

The post FIR #196: Speak Up, Twitter appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

This week’s FIR Zoom Chat included a discussion of IABC’s virtual 2020 conference and the viability of virtual conferences in general.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #11: Virtual Conferences appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Among the topics in this week’s FIR Zoom Chat: What services companies have introduced during the coronavirus that may (or may not) still be around after it’s all over. Also, Sherrilynne Starkie shares what her museum clients are doing while nobody is allowed in museums, including virtual tours conducted by curators over Instagram Live.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #10: Virtual Tours appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The ninth weekly Zoom conversation with FIR hosts and listeners covered (among other things) how to make Zoom meetings more engaging.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #9: Zoom Better appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In the May episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report,” Neville and Shel discussed how a group of online retailers led by Amazon has come together to pressure the U.S. Congress to save the Postal Service through a highly targeted advertising campaign. Other topics include…

The importance of being true to your brand purpose during the pandemic
New tools on LinkedIn
The evolution of brand movies
How Skype faded while Zoom rose
A challenge from the United Nations for creative types to create visual pandemic messages

Dan York reports on Facebook’s acquisition of GIPHY and the opportunities for communicators to learn more about live streaming.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, June 15.

Links from This Week’s Episode

To All the Purpose-Driven Businesses: We Will Remember You
How PepsiCo Partnered with Actor John Krasinski to Highlight CSR Efforts
PepsiCo Foodservice Launches Four New Initiatives To Support Restaurant Industry COVID-19 Relief Efforts
PepsiCo Finds Empathy Is The New Imperative for Marketers Amid Pandemic Uncertainty
PepsiCo Helping Restaurant Workers Coping with COVID-19
PepsiCo Is First Major Consumer Foods Name to Take a Big Dive Into DTC
Popeyes Is Hiring Musicians to Record its Iconic ‘Love That Chicken’ Jingle
Top AWS engineer Tim Bray quits $1m-plus job over Amazon firing employees
Maintaining Healthy Reputations During a Pandemic
18 Brands Getting In On Virtual Graduations and Proms (With a Slew of Celebs)
IKEA designs forts for children in lockdown
Top 6 Gin Distilleries Making Their Own Hand Sanitiser
LinkedIn adds polls and live video-based events
Brand Film is No Longer a Niche Player
Brand Film Festival
How Skype Lost its Crown to Zoom
Online Retailers Spend Millions on Ads Backing Postal Service Bailout
John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” segment on the US Postal Service
Unsplash Founder Mikael Cho’s Twitter Threat on UN visual crowdsourcing initiative
United Nations Global Call Out To Creatives – help stop the spread of COVID-19
Welcome to the official United Nations COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub
Unsplash Quarantine Images
Unsplash’s United Nations COVID-19 Response

Links from Dan York’s Report

Facebook to buy Giphy, keep its branding, integrate with Instagram; sources say the deal is worth ~$400M, while Giphy was valued at ~$600M in its latest round
Facebook’s purchase of Giphy gives FB insight into how and where gifs are shared outside of its own apps, including device IDs and keystrokes in Giphy tools
How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data
Soundcloud to Launch Live Original Programming on Twitch
Soundcloud on Twitch
Anyone’s a Celebrity Streamer With This Open Source App
OBS Studio

The post FIR #195: Online Retailers Go Postal appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The eighth weekly Zoom conversation with FIR hosts and listeners covered a lot of ground, including a look at Phil Gomes’ collection of mugs featuring the logos of evil corporations from movies. Not to worry, there was lots of communication-focused conversation, too.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #8: Evil Fictitious Corporations appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The seventh weekly Zoom Chat featuring listeners and FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. Sorry; we neglected the begin recording until about 20 minutes into the 60-minute conversation.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #7: Conference Ribbons appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The sixth weekly Zoom Chat featuring listeners and FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #6: Short Memories appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The fifth weekly Zoom Chat featuring listeners and FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz.

Links from this week’s chat:

PwC check-in tool
PWC — Lots of coronavirus management content on the home page
“You Need the Sledgehammer” To Bring Down Infections
Wow, this sums up everything we have been told so far
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Memes

The post FIR ZOOM Chat #5: How We’ll Get Back to Work appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The April episode of “The Hobson & Holtz Report” continues the coronavirus theme from March with conversations about…

Our experience being Zoombombed
The role of social media during Covid-19
How toilet paper companies are responding to online criticism over shortages
Microsoft’s belief that coronavirus will forever change the way we work and learn
The UK Automobile Association’s belief that coronavirus will transform UK work and travel
Emojis in the time of coronavirus
The big data behind Disney’s magic
The good news people are craving and how media is accommodating them
In his Tech Report, Dan York covers his experiments with Twitch TV; improvements to Instagram’s IGTV; Instagram Live, Instagram DM and Facebook Messenger’s arrivals on the desktop; Google’s plan to charge for reCAPTCHA; and Earth Day’s 50th anniversary.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, May 18.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Securing Your Zoom Meetings (PDF)
More top companies ban Zoom following security fears
The Giant Work-From-Home Experiment Has One Winner
Zoom Burnout is Real
PoliteMail’s Crisis Communications Resource Center
PoliteMail’s Research on Email Volume Accelerating with Covid-19 Cases
Do the Right Thing: The Role of Social in Covid-19
We Are Social “Do the Right Thing” Slide Deck
AdAge’s Regularly Updated List of Marketers’ Responses to the Coronavirus
How 5 Toilet Paper Brands are Responding to Customer Complaints on Social Media
What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage
Microsoft thinks coronavirus will forever change the way we work and learn
Coronavirus will transform UK work and travel, says AA
Horizon Media Charts Emoji Use During the Pandemic
Psychologists say using emojis is more important than ever right now. Seriously
Coronavirus Will Delay Release of New Emojis Until 2022
Spread of the Coronavirus Emoji
Big Data Behind Disney Magic
The News Is Making People Anxious. You’ll Never Believe What They’re Reading Instead.

Links from Dan York’s Report

Experimenting with Twitch.tv (are any other FIR listeners experimenting with Twitch?)
Improvements to Instagram’s IGTV (but is anyone using it?)
Instagram Live on the desktop
Facebook Messenger comes to the desktop
Instagram DMs down on the desktop
Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCAPTCHA
Cloudflare Dumps reCAPTCHA as Google Intends to Charge for Its Use

The post FIR #194: The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The fourth weekly Zoom Chat featuring listeners and FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz.

Links from this week’s chat:

Zoom Burnout is Real
Webcam Backdrop (recommended by Kris Gallagher)
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Memes
The Work of the Internet Society Community During the Pandemic
Zoom backgrounds from Unsplash

The post FIR Zoom Chat #4: Zoom Burnout appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The conversation was great until we were Zoombombed, requiring us to tighten up controls on future Thursday sessions. Until we were so rudely interrupted, we were talking about (among other things) preparing now for communicating return-to-work when the shelter-in-place orders are lifted.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #3: Zoombombed! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

Our second weekly Zoom Chat included a robust discussion of criticism leveled at the increasingly popular videoconferencing tool, Zoom, and the response from the company’s CEO.

The post FIR Zoom Chat #2: Zoom and Privacy appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

While many of us are under jurisdictional orders to remain in our homes, we can still get together socially. That’s just what Neville, Shel, and about a dozen FIR listeners did on Thursday, March 26, using Zoom. This roughly 30-minute discussion focused mainly on how work will change in the wake of the pandemic.

We are planning to host conversations via Zoom every Thursday at 1 p.m. EDT. Watch this space (or follow us on social media) for the URL and other details.

The post FIR ZoomChat #1: The Post-Pandemic Future of Work appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The March episode of “The Hobson & Holtz Report” is a coronavirus communications special with Neville and Shel discussing these topics:

How Shel and Neville’s respective organizations are communicating during the outbreak
A study finds employers are the most credible source of coronavirus information for employees
Snapchat, AI, VR, and LinkedIn are all playing their part
Shelter-in-place orders could make work-from-home the new normal
How brands are navigating marketing and social media during the crisis
Zoombombing is now a thing in public Zoom sessions
Dan York reports on the internet’s resiliency during the emergency and on the impending release of WordPress 5.4

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom this coming Thursday, March 26, at noon ET. Join us here. The password is 497764. Spread the word to your communications community.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, April 20.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Employers Seen As Most Credible Sources Of Coronavirus Information
Edelman: COVID-19 Demonstrates the Essential Role of the Private Sector
Snapchat Might Be Best Positioned for the Coronavirus Outbreak
White House’s 29,000 coronavirus papers will be fed to AI experts for analysis
Free VRTL Academy Course
LinkedIn’s coronavirus content builds a sense of community
COVID-19 Could Cause a Permanent Shift Towards Home Working
Farts, cats, naked bodies: People are failing hilariously at working from home
Webcor CEO’s LinkedIn column on the possible future of work in the construction industry
Twitter Provides Examples of Positive Brand Communications Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
How Brands Are Taking Extra Precaution to Avoid Coronavirus Insensitivities
Why Every Brand You’ve Ever Bought From is Sending You Coronavirus Emails
The Best, Worst, and Weirdest of the Random Coronavirus Emails We’re All Getting From Brands
Zoombombing: When Video Conferences Go Wrong

Links from Dan York’s Report

YouTube, Amazon Prime forgo streaming quality to relieve European networks
Is the Internet Resilient Enough to Withstand Coronavirus?
WordPress 5.4 Development Cycle
Block Editor updates for the WordPress 5.4 release
WordPress 5.4 is Coming and It’s Time to Ditch the Classic Editor
Fullscreen mode enabled by default in the editor

The post FIR #193: Zoombombing and Other Coronavirus Tales appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The February episode of “The Hobson & Holtz Report” features Neville and Shel discussing these topics:

The Houston Astros’ owner hosts a clinic on how not to deliver an organizational apology
Oracle workers are the latest to engage in employee activism
Facebook has way more users than Instagram but Instagram is number one in some important metrics
An IPO filing lists the company’s influencers as a potential threat
How brands should handle communications during the coronavirus epidemic
Twitter has changed the face of journalism (for the better)
Dan York reports on resources to help you speed up your website, the Internet Society’s new “Open Standards Everywhere” project, job openings at the Internet Society, and how Google redraws its map’s borders depending on where you are

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, March 23.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Breaking Down the Astros’ Latest Public Relations Meltdown
What to make of Houston Astros owner Jim Crane’s public (non-)apology
Some Oracle Employees Stop Work in Protest of Larry Ellison’s Politics
Employees for Ethics
Change.org petition: Uphold Company Ethics
Kickstarter has unionized, becoming the first tech company to do so as workers organize across the industry
Instagram overtakes Facebook in audience of top 50 brands, study says
Instagram brings in more than a quarter of Facebook sales
Which Instagram Story Formats Really Engage Viewers [New Research]
Instagram Is Adding a New Way to Find and Share Stories that Mention Your Profile
How to Use Instagram Stories in Your Sales Funnel
Instagram prototypes ‘Latest Posts’ feature
Bad influence: When a brand’s social media stars repel consumers
Companies Are Stealing Influencers’ Faces
How should brands handle comms during the coronavirus crisis?
How Businesses Should Handle the Coronavirus Outbreak
Employee communications and the coronavirus: What you need to know.
How should brands handle their comms during the coronavirus crisis?
Six tips for investor communications around the coronavirus
Fake Facts Are Flying About Coronavirus. Now There’s A Plan To Debunk Them
How Twitter changed the face of journalism forever

Links from Dan York’s Report

Front-End Performance Checklist 2020 [PDF, Apple Pages, MS Word]
Fast Load Times
Open Standards Everywhere
Internet Society: Open Communication Positions (work with Dan and Neville!)
Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking

The post FIR #192: The Latest Employee Revolt appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

In what may be the longest single episode of a podcast ever, Neville and Shel present observations and prognostications from 17 of the smartest communication professionals in the business. (But when you consider that we covered 20 years in 2 hours and 20 minutes, it’s actually quite fast. And we might qualify for a Guinness world record!)

If you’ve been listening to FIR for a long time (the show started in January 2005), you’ll recognize some of these voices from the early days. This special episode is focused entirely on the impact of the last decade on communications and what communicators can expect in the Roaring 20’s.

Contributors include Christoper Barger, Gini Dietrich, Chip Griffin, Lee Hopkins, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sharon McIntosh, Rachel Miller, Scott Monty, Christopher S. Penn, Jen Phillips, Eric Schwartzman, Bill Spaniel, David Spark, Mark Story, Andrea Vascellari, Brad Whitworth, and Dan York (not in alphabetical order).

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, February 24.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Subject-Verb Agreement When Using Singular “They”
Subject-Verb Agreement And The Singular They
Christopher Barger’s complete essay

The post FIR #191: Two Decades in 2.5 Hours appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The December episode of “The Hobson & Holtz Report” features Neville and Shel discussing these topics:

Social media lessons from the UK’s 2019 general election
Podcasts will be eligible for Pulitzer Prizes
You may be able to create your own Twitter
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year and the communicators who reject it
The English language is finally losing its grip on the internet
Key digital marketing trends to watch in 2020
Dan York reports on Twitter and decentralization, Reddit’s growth spurt, and TikTok’s top 100 videos

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, December 16.

Links from This Week’s Episode

General election 2019: Five lessons from the ‘social media’ election
Why You Are Missing Out If You Are Not Building A Facebook Group
How A Private Facebook Group Led to Boyfriend Perfume Launching A Car Air Freshener
General Election 2019: Has your local Facebook group been hijacked by politics?
Pulitzer Reveals Audio Reporting Category for Non-Fiction Storytelling
Podcasts Will Be Able to Win Pulitzers — Oh, and Radio, Too
Inspired by The Daily, dozens of daily news podcasts are punching above their weight worldwide
Jack Dorsey Wants To Help You Create Your Own Twitter
Mastodon, the hot new social network like Twitter, sort of
‘They’ named as Merriam-Webster dictionary’s word of the year
Stop grammar-policing the word, “They”
The past, present, and future of the singular “they”
The English language is finally losing its grip on the internet
Internet World Users by Language
Share of the most common languages on the internet
Translate conversations with Google Assistant’s Interpreter Mode
Star Trek’s Universal Translator Version 1.0 is Here
Six Key Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Reddit’s monthly active user base grew 30% to reach 430 million in 2019
Reddit’s 2019 year in review
TikTok Top 100: Celebrating the videos and creative community that made TikTok so lovable in 2019

The post FIR #190: What Do They Want? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The November episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report” features Neville and Shel discussing these topics:

MeWe and WT:Social are among the latest crop of social networks offering serious privacy in an attempt to dethrone Facebook
A new tool lets brands remove negative comments from paid social media posts
QR codes have made a comeback
AI writer completes writing what you started
Telcos hope RCS will inspire you to give up WhatsApp, Messenger, and other third-party tools
Ping raises $13 million to make timekeeping easier for lawyers
Dan York reports on NewsPack from WordPress, the Google Site Kit, PRX and Google podcasts, National Podcast Month, and the New York Times’ look at the internet’s future

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, December 16.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches Twitter and Facebook rival
Privacy Social Network MeWe Reaches 4 Million Members
Inside MeWe, Where Anti-Vaxxers and Conspiracy Theorists Thrive
Facebook Alternatives 2019 – Social Networks That Won’t Sell Your Data
These 5 alternative social networks are the cure for Facebook fatigue
Brands Can Remove Negative Comments on Paid Social Posts With This New Tool
Chick-fil-A boosts app downloads 14% with QR codes, analysis finds
QR Codes and the Holiday Spirit
Mysterious QR codes showing up on car windows help stop burglaries
The Time of the AI Writer
OpenAI Releases Fake Text AI Initially Deemed Too Dangerous Into the World
Talk to Transformer
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to replace SMS with a new RCS standard
How to Check If You Have Access to Google’s RCS Messaging
What is RCS messaging? Here’s all you need to know about the successor to SMS
Lawyers hate timekeeping — Ping raises $13M to fix it with AI

Links from Dan York’s Report

Our Early Review of the Newspack Project from Automattic
Newspack Blog
Newspack FAQ
Chilean News Publication El Soberano First to Launch on Newspack
Newspack announces second set of pilot newsrooms; first U.S. site relaunches on new platform
Google Releases its Site Kit WordPress Plugin Out of Beta
Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites
Podcasting 101
Want to make a podcast? 5 tips to get you started
Podcasting 101: An interview with Sean Rameswaram
National Podcast Post Month
So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped. Where do we go from here?

The post FIR #189: The First Thing We Do, Let’s Ease Timekeeping for All The Lawyers appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The October episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report” features Shel and Neville discussing these topics:

PG&E’s power outages featured poorly planned communication
Iraqis are translating the internet into Arabic
The limits of storytelling for marketing
What the judges thought when an AI-authored essay was submitted to a competition
Imposters are becoming a real problem in the influencer marketing world
Twenty percent of workers accepted a job offer, then ghosted the employer on their first day
Sadness and disgust may be emotions you want to incorporate into your marketing
Dan York reports on new podcasting features Amazon has added to its Alexa ecosystem, cool new features in WordPress 5.3, and the availability of your online services in a PG&E-like power shutdown

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, November 18.

Links from This Week’s Episode

Spread the word: the Iraqis translating the internet into Arabic
Stories Can Be Powerful Persuasive Tools. But It’s Important to Understand When They Can Backfire.
The Economist’s essay contest featured an AI submission. Here’s what the judges thought.
Brands Beware: Influencer Impostors Want Your Free Stuff
Virtual ambassadors cloud already murky legal picture for influencer marketing
1 in 5 workers accepted a job offer and ‘ghosted’ on their first day — here’s why
Sadness and disgust among emotions that drive brand value, says biometric study

Links from Dan York’s Report

- Everything Amazon announced at its Alexa event
- WordPress 5.3 Development Cycle
- What’s Coming in WordPress 5.3 (Features and Screenshots)
How Are Paywalled News Outlets Preparing to Serve Residents in California’s Mega-Power Shutoffs?

The post FIR #188: Tell Me A List appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

View Details

The September episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report” features Shel and Neville discussing these topics:

Voice assistants have reached critical mass (and adoption of smart speakers is soaring)
Thieves are using AI deepfakes to trick employees into sending them money
Electric car owners could be able to choose fake sounds their cars make
Not one PR agency was willing to take on the Hong Kong government as a client
A new podcasting tool makes it easy to fix recorded flubs without needing to re-record
Neville and Shel have a face-to-face chat in Winchester — and you can listen in
Dan York reports on Google’s new algorithm, the low rate of Google search clickthroughs, the private Web Google wants to build (and the one developers want), the search for alternatives to advertising to monetize web content, and news from the WordPress world.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, September 23 (we think).

Links from This Week’s Episode

Descript, the new podcast editing tool
33% of People Are Now Using Voice Assistants Regularly
The Smart Audio Report, Spring 2019 (PDF)
Thieves are now using AI deepfakes to trick companies into sending them money
Electric car owners could choose which fake sounds their cars make under new proposal
Here’s the fake noise the Jaguar I-Pace makes when you hit the throttle
Hong Kong protests: government fails to find PR firm to rescue battered image

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

Elevating original reporting in Search
Google now gives more preference to original reporting in search
Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
Sooner or later, the shark gets jumped
Building a more private web
Web feature developers told to dial up attention on privacy and security
In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default
‘I can’t see how my ads work if I can’t target people’: Confessions of a marketer
Grant for the Web
Automattic Raises $300 Million at $3-Billion Valuation From Salesforce Ventures

The post FIR #187: It May Be A Car But It Sounds Like A Starship appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

For Immediate Release: Recent Episodes

Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz