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If you’re screening candidates on experience or technical skills, you may be making a mistake. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that curiosity and problem-solving are the two traits that separate great hires from mediocre ones, and neither one can be taught from scratch. Most agency skills, from writing a press release to running Google Ads to using AI tools, can be picked up on the job. Curiosity and problem-solving are different: people either arrive with some baseline capacity for them, or they don’t. Gini makes it about AI, where ever-evolving tools and audience behavior reward the people who keep asking questions instead of coasting on routine. The two discuss how to actually screen for these traits in a couple hours of interviewing. Gini leaves 15 to 20 minutes at the end for the candidate’s questions and reads a lot into what they ask, or whether they ask anything at all. Chip changes up the order entirely, opening by asking the candidate what questions they have for him before he’s asked anything himself, and he’ll throw a candidate’s own question right back at them to see how they handle being put on the spot. Both dismiss scenario-based questions and interview theater like “what animal would you be” as close to useless. Gini also flags a habit she’s trying to break on her own team, being “Gini-GPT,” where people default to asking her for the fast answer instead of working through problems themselves. [read the transcript] The post ALP 315: The top two traits for new agency hires appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

A strategic narrative is a critical asset for any organization. It is the overarching story that explains where an organization came from, what it stands for, where it is going, and why that direction matters. Grounded in the organization’s purpose, values, vision, and strategy, it provides a common foundation for communication and helps employees and other stakeholders understand how they fit into the larger story and why they would want to be part of it. In this episode, Mark and Shel dig into strategic narratives, why they are so important, and why so many organizations seem to dismiss their importance. Links from this episode The Strategic Narrative (from Shel’s blog) Strategic Narrative (from Engage for Success) How To Build A Strategic Narrative That Inspires And Aligns Raw Transcript Shel Holtz: Mark, how are you doing? Mark Dollins: I’m good, Shel. How are you? Happy Sunday on the West Coast to you. Shel Holtz: Thanks, and happy Sunday on the East Coast to you. Mark Dollins: Thank you very much. We’re loving it. We’re getting close to Labor Day. Shel Holtz: It’s getting there—a day off for us. I find strategic narratives to be a fascinating topic. They’re well established in theory. You can’t pick up a book on communications, internal or external, and not find strategic narratives in there. Engage for Success, the UK employee engagement movement, lists a strategic narrative as one of the four enablers of employee engagement. And yet, in 21 years of consulting on internal communications, I was never asked to be involved in developing or evolving one, and one was never given to me as part of the package when I was preparing to work with a client. I think the theory is more prevalent than the actual practice. Is that what you’ve found? Mark Dollins: I think that’s true. In fact, when I’m working with clients, I always ask them, “What is your story?” I could go online and say what I think their story is based on what they’ve put on digitally managed channels, but when I ask them to tell me their story, often there isn’t a lot there. Pardon the pun, but it’s the North Star. It is the single most important element for any communication because it’s all about purpose and mission. If you can’t make that really clear, it’s hard to tell a story about it. Shel Holtz: I remember when I was working on the strategic narrative where I work, I had to explain that we weren’t inventing something. We weren’t going to introduce concepts that we’d have to get employees to buy into. We were creating a package containing all of these statements and philosophies: our core values, purpose, mission, vision and strategic plan, all baked into a narrative. Where did we come from? Where are we today? Where are we going? Wouldn’t you like to join us on this journey? Mark Dollins: Exactly. I did a little research and found that the word “narrative” comes from the Latin narrare, meaning “to relate,” and gnarus, meaning “knowing.” It’s all about attaching meaning to the facts we’re presenting. That’s really important for any kind of North Star narrative because everything comes from that. Shel Holtz: I thought we would talk about the strategic narrative as an element of communication and the role the internal communicator plays in it. I was surprised in my research to find that sometimes these are delivered fully baked to the internal communicator, who is told to convey the narrative rather than play a part in developing it. Mark Dollins: Bummer—as if we have nothing to add to it. We’d have to be involved. There’s no question, because we work with internal stakeholders. If the external message doesn’t live up to, inspire or align with the internal experience, we’re wasting a lot of time and energy. Shel Holtz: Right. It’s particularly important because the narrative gives you the “why” behind everything. You should be able to connect the stories you tell to the narrative. More importantly, as you’re developing those stories, the narrative should be their foundation. They should all be consistent. What you want to avoid is having your salespeople tell one story while your investor relations team tells another and your CEO delivers a keynote telling a third. These should all be the same story. Mark Dollins: They absolutely should. You’re raising an important point about the connection between a narrative and a story. Let me give you my framing of it. I believe the narrative is a never-ending story. It is your North Star. It takes place over time and doesn’t have an ending. It presents the very big picture. It is usually purpose- and vision-driven, and it’s inspirational. It gets to the heart. It gives people a reason not only to understand the “why,” but to ask, “What’s in this for me? Why should I care?” As I said, it really has no end. That’s a narrative in my framing. A story is a proof point connected to the narrative. It addresses a specific problem, issue or opportunity. You use the traditional elements of storytelling. That may include a hero or a catalyst and an antagonist. You’ve got a conflict, a turning point, a resolution and, importantly, a lesson to be learned. It often highlights the hero’s role, and you can decide whether that’s the company, internal communications, HR or whoever the story is about. At the end of the day, there’s a hierarchy. It starts at the top with the narrative. Then it gets to what I’m going to call the capital-S Story—the presentation, event or other thing you’re going to communicate. Within that are the proof points: stories with those traditional elements. I often advise clients to think about this connectivity, but it has to start at the top with the narrative. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. I’ll give you a great example. I work, as you know, for a commercial general contractor, and one of our value propositions is that we’re a client advocate. You won’t find a big commercial contractor that doesn’t say that: “We’re on board with the client. We’re there to help them realize their vision. We’re not going to keep secrets. We’re going to be upfront and fill them in on everything that’s happening. We’re committed to transparency.” Claiming to be a client advocate is not a unique marketing approach. But if you look at our strategic narrative, you learn from our history that two of our founders were general contractors—and also developers. In other words, the client perspective was represented in the organization’s leadership, rather than being someone you worked with only externally. When we talk about being a client advocate, we can say it’s in our DNA because two of our founders were clients. We were founded with this philosophy. We’re different. If that finds its way into the interviews the business development team conducts after being shortlisted for a project, it makes a difference. That’s why having the narrative is important, but so is making sure people pay attention to it. Mark Dollins: I love that. Exactly—it’s got to be real. The other thing about narratives, and I think you’ll agree, Shel, is that they change over time. It doesn’t mean they change fundamentally. The mission and purpose remain the same. But as organizations go through change, they have to evolve the narrative that goes with them. I’ll give you a quick example. Pittsburgh International Airport launched a $1.8 billion new terminal last November. The narrative the leadership team developed positioned it as more than an airport. They looked at positioning themselves as a leader in aviation and a driver of economic growth for the region. Those words are really important because they stood the test of time. The airport announced it was going to build the new terminal. Then it entered what I’ll call the narrative’s second chapter: We’ve done all the groundwork, but now we have to start building it and preparing our people. They developed the Smart Plan Forward, a five-year journey with a clear destination: creating a smarter airport. They said they were going to enable, empower and equip their people to innovate and collaborate in the name of change, and that was why they were taking a customer-first approach in everything they did. It took the original narrative—“We’re building this airport, leading the aviation industry and creating economic growth for the region”—and said, “Now we’re going to do this part of it,” while staying true to the original narrative. The new terminal had a very powerful and successful opening last November. It was fun to watch the airport develop, launch and then update the narrative as part of an overall change in its positioning within the aviation industry. Shel Holtz: It’s interesting that you bring up change as a catalyst for evolving a narrative. My research indicated that most strategic narratives are actually developed during a time of change, as part of a change communication effort. If we’re going to explain the change, we need to tell the story of where we came from, where we are today and why we’re making this change now. So let’s establish that narrative. For organizations going through some sort of change—which is everybody—I think it’s a good reason to start. Mark Dollins: Everybody is going through change. You’re right. The big issue most organizations miss in the narrative—and I didn’t give the whole narrative in this example—is the burning platform. Why the hell are we going through this change? What’s at stake? There’s a way to engage people in the work they’re doing and the mission, but especially around change, there has to be a reason. What happens to us as a team, institution or organization if we don’t make this change or pivot? What’s at risk? On the other side, what’s the opportunity? How do we position ourselves in a much better, more competitive way? These are clear things that have to be part of the narrative, and they’re often missing. People love telling stories, but the stories are so independent. They’re proof points of a hierarchical narrative that explains the bigger picture. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Something else is that the narrative needs to be packaged, and maybe repackaged, in multiple ways so it’s useful to different people. I think a lot of these are developed with executives in mind, so that when a CEO, CFO or executive vice president communicates with stakeholders, everybody is on the same page and tells the story from the same foundation. But managers need to be able to tell those stories in ways that work for them. If it’s just a polished speech, it isn’t going to work. Mark Dollins: You’re raising a good point about litmus-testing it—not just with managers, but with the front line, because those employees are going to be your toughest sell. It will pass the sniff test or it won’t. They’ll say, “That’s just BS. It doesn’t match my experience. I don’t believe it. I don’t trust it.” We’ve worked with clients who did exactly that. They pressure-tested the narrative by asking, “Do you see yourselves in this, and do you believe what we’re saying?” When you go to frontline employees and they say, “That’s it. That makes me want to come to work and reminds me why I go through all the stuff I have to deal with in my job. I’m all in,” you know you’ve got it right. It does happen when you hit the right tone, words and framing, and frontline employees can say, “I see myself.” You’ve got a winner, as long as you use it in the right ways. But you’re right: It has to pass the sniff test not just for senior executives, but for everybody. Shel Holtz: It has to pass the sniff test, for sure, but it also has to be adaptable so everybody can use it. Right now, for example, we have employee advocacy programs. We’re asking employees to go out and tout the company to their communities. If they’re telling a different story from the one the talent acquisition team is telling, people can detect that. Mark Dollins: Right. There’s an opportunity for internal communicators not just to develop the narrative, but to help the organization use it. Usually, when I’m working with clients, step two is getting people in a room and talking about what the narrative is, why we use it and how they can use it in their ongoing communications. Let’s work through some examples. Let’s look at a presentation you’re making or an email you’re writing. There’s language we want you to use that is consistent with the narrative and helps you position the issue of the day, the priority of the quarter or the strategy of the year within it. Otherwise, the narrative is left as words on a page: “How nice. I get it. I’m like everybody else.” But you’re not telling people how to engage with and use it. It’s a critical opportunity for employee communicators to say, “Hold on. It’s not just about developing and releasing the story. It’s about making sure people know how to use it.” Shel Holtz: Exactly, whether you’re a senior executive or a frontline individual contributor. That’s an important point: How does an individual contributor use this, beyond making sure they’re not out of step when posting on a social network? I think one answer is that they’re going to understand where they fit in the big picture and in the context of where everybody else fits. A good strategic narrative should let you see where you are in the story. If you can see yourself, you can probably also see the vendors you work with, the suppliers, customers and other stakeholders. It should make it easier to relate to their experiences with the organization, too. Mark Dollins: When I was at DuPont, we were in the process of doing this megamerger with Dow—a $130 billion deal. The plan was to bring together two major companies in the industry, divide the assets and then launch three brand-new companies. It took two years, so we had to develop a really clear master narrative about what we called DowDuPont: Why are we bringing these two together? Very quickly, to your point, Shel, we had to launch narratives for each of the new spinoff companies so employees could see themselves in what was then DowDuPont, but more importantly, in one or more of the spin companies. People in corporate groups, especially, didn’t know which company they would be spun off to because everybody was working for everybody while the companies were being brought together. The real point is that you have to be able to see yourself in the narrative. That was one of the questions we asked as an ongoing metric: “Do you see yourself in one of the future companies?” It was a way of assessing engagement during a period of change and transition with a lot of unknowns: “I don’t know which of the three companies I’ll be assigned to, and I have to keep working, but I’m excited about all three—or at least one or two of them—because the vision for why we’re doing this, where it can go and the opportunities for employees are pretty darn exciting.” It was a critical element and something we measured. It contributed to an important ongoing metric for assessing how engaged our employees were and how communication was helping us. Shel Holtz: Right. The fact that a strategic narrative encompasses both internal and external stakeholders means that, as an internal communicator, you may think there isn’t one when somebody in marketing has actually created one. It may not be publicly available. It may just be something they’re using. Mark Dollins: Or somebody has created one without you—or without the company—which happens. That’s what a narrative is. Somebody takes the facts and applies their own interpretation to them. If no one in your company is doing it, trust me, someone else is. It may not be to your liking. Shel Holtz: Before you set about creating one, ask around to see whether one already exists. I happen to believe it should be right there on the intranet, or whatever platform you’re using to make things accessible to employees. They should have access to it. I think it should be addressed in new-hire orientation so everybody knows what it is, where to find it and when to reference it. Mark Dollins: This might sound obvious, but communicators also need to be trained to use that narrative. It’s shocking how often communicators don’t know their organization has one or don’t know how to use it because nobody has ever talked to them about it. That’s another opportunity for internal communication professionals: What does our own function know about how to use this narrative continuously in ways that advance the organization’s cause? There are lots of opportunities beyond the narrative itself for communicators to help their colleagues and the organization use the story. Shel Holtz: It’s also important to make sure you’re treating this as something strategic, not tactical. Some of what I’ve seen positioned as strategic narratives is really just guidance for message consistency—and that’s not this, right? Mark Dollins: No, you’re absolutely right. This is foundational. I look at it as the base of any communication strategy you’re building: What is your story, and how does everything you do after that connect to it? Without it, you have an unstable base from which to communicate. Nobody wants that. Shel Holtz: We’d love to hear about listeners’ experiences with strategic narratives. If you have one, we’d love to see what you’ve got. I was fascinated when, before getting into the nitty-gritty of our strategic narrative, I spent some time talking with the person on Workday’s communications team who was responsible for developing its strategic narrative. The CEO unveiled it at the company’s big show—its version of Salesforce’s Dreamforce. This was the European edition. I think he said there were 8,000 or 10,000 people in the audience when the CEO said, “This is our strategic narrative.” There was some real investment by the organization. Mark Dollins: How did it go over? I’m fascinated by that because I always think launching it to everybody is a critical decision. What happened beforehand? Was there alignment with senior leadership? I’m always interested in knowing what took place before a big event with a cast of thousands at which you’re unveiling your story—and, importantly, what happened immediately afterward. I’d love to hear more. Shel Holtz: I don’t recall what happened immediately afterward, but senior leadership was involved in developing the narrative, so he worked closely with them. He also reached out to rank-and-file employees to make sure it worked. It’s almost like a vision or mission statement. If you create it in a vacuum, in the rarefied air of senior leadership, and then tell everybody else, “This is our mission,” only to have employees look at it and say, “No, it’s not,” that’s a problem. Mark Dollins: Right: “What company is that? It’s not mine.” It sounds like he did a good job of pressure-testing it. I’d love to know more about how it was rolled out beyond that. The hardest work is done beforehand. It’s about getting alignment and making sure you’ve got something that feels right to the organization. Then the question becomes: How do you sustain this effort and make sure people know how to use it? Think about recruiting. How do you deliver that message to potential employees? How do you onboard them and make sure it’s part of the process? What happens afterward? How is the narrative used in town halls with your CEO or senior executive team? How do you keep it alive and sustain it? Otherwise, like values, it becomes words on a page. Until it’s applied—and applied regularly—the meaning begins to fade. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. It’s a matter of introducing it well so everybody understands what it’s for and how to use it, and then maintaining it through an ongoing communication cadence. Mark Dollins: Right. It’s not just an event. Events are fine for introducing it, but the hard work really comes afterward. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Thanks, Mark. I look forward to talking with you next time. Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. Always a pleasure. The post OTSP #7: No Story? No Strategy. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Fandoms are not synonymous with audiences or communities. The difference: Fans’ identities are tied up with the team, artist, product, or other object of their passion. It’s not surprising that marketers are chasing fandoms, in hopes of turning their brands into something people are genuinely excited about. But not everything is a potential flashpoint for a fan base. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore what distinguishes fans from members of other audiences or communities, how brands might leverage them, the wisdom of trying to spin up a fan base, and why fandoms might rebel against attempts to use them for marketing purposes. Links from this episode: WTF are fandoms, and why are marketers chasing them? Consumers as Brand Fans: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda Using the TCCM Framework Social media and fandom How community is redefining Media & Creative in 2025 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28. 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 [email protected]. 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 528. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. There is a new word making the rounds in marketing circles these days, and that word is “fandom.” Obviously, fandom isn’t anything new. Beatles fans constitute a fandom. Star Trek fans are a big fandom. Sports teams have had fandoms for as long as sports have been around. What’s new is the idea that fandom should be a marketing strategy. Marketers are paying attention because a fandom represents something considerably more valuable than an audience. An audience is passively watching you. That notion led Jay Rosen to write a 2006 post titled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” describing the shift away from a one-way mass-media model to a networked model in which people who once passively consumed information can now publish, respond, organize, remix, and distribute it themselves. That’s not always necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is. A community gathers around a shared interest, but a fandom goes even further. Fans incorporate that interest into their identities. They create things, develop rituals and inside jokes, recruit other people, recommend things to one another, and sometimes defend the object of their fandom with remarkable enthusiasm. One definition I particularly like comes from an article in Digiday: Fandom is where attention turns into identity. You can probably understand why marketers find that appealing. Advertising can buy attention. It’s much harder to buy identity. It’s harder to buy belonging, advocacy, or voluntary engagement. There is some evidence that fandom deserves to be treated as something distinctive. A systematic review published last year examined 38 marketing studies involving brand fans and concluded that fandom has moved from the margins of consumer culture into the mainstream. Brand fans really do behave differently from people who merely buy a product regularly. There is another reason fandom has suddenly become attractive: The media environment has fragmented spectacularly. People aren’t gathered around the same handful of television networks, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations anymore. They’re scattered among TikTok creators, YouTube channels, Reddit communities, Discord servers, gaming platforms, streaming services, group chats, podcasts, and sports communities. We could keep listing niches all day long. Instead of asking, “How do we reach women ages 25 to 44?” marketers can potentially find a group of people who are already intensely interested in something relevant to the organization. That changes the communication challenge. You don’t approach a fandom as an audience waiting to receive your message. You’re entering somebody else’s existing culture. That culture already has leaders, vocabulary, expectations, and history. It has ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t. Increasingly, creators are among the people who have earned credibility within those cultures. The strategic question isn’t, “Which influencer can deliver the biggest reach?” It becomes, “Who actually has standing with these people, and do we have a legitimate reason to be here?” That last question is one I think organizations should spend much more time considering, because fandom is in danger of becoming a bandwagon. Whenever marketers discover something people genuinely care about, there’s a temptation to turn it into a technique. Community, authenticity, purpose, and engagement have all become marketing techniques. Once every agency presentation starts promising to “activate fandom,” that’s probably the time your Spidey sense should start tingling. You can’t manufacture a fandom just by announcing that you have one. Nor is every organization capable of inspiring fandom. Nobody necessarily wants to build part of their identity around an electric utility, payroll software, an insurance company, or the manufacturer of the toner cartridge in the office printer. How many true HP fans are there, really? That doesn’t mean those organizations can’t have excellent customer communities. They can create useful resources, cultivate advocates, involve customers in product development, and provide terrific experiences. There are plenty of organizations that do these things well. But calling every highly engaged customer a fan doesn’t make fandom a meaningful strategic concept. It just gives customer engagement a trendy new name. There is another danger: Brands may identify an existing fandom and assume its passion is available for rent when it probably isn’t. Fans can tell when a company has wandered into their community because somebody in marketing spotted a cultural trend. Borrowing the language, memes, or symbols of a fandom without understanding them can make a brand look less relevant, not more. The more intensely people identify with the community, the more protective they may be of it. After the animated television series Rick and Morty made McDonald’s discontinued Szechuan sauce into a fan obsession, McDonald’s embraced the phenomenon and announced a one-day return. But stores received extremely limited supplies. Fans lined up for hours, and some traveled considerable distances, only to find that no sauce was available. The resulting anger produced protests and the hashtag #GiveUsTheSauce, and McDonald’s ultimately had to apologize. The mistake wasn’t offensive cultural appropriation. It was a company correctly spotting a fandom but badly misunderstanding its intensity—and failing to deliver the experience it had encouraged. I like one test suggested by the material I was reading: If the brand disappeared from the activation, would fans still say that what happened made their community better? That’s a pretty demanding standard. Your contribution might be access, useful information, an experience people couldn’t otherwise have, a genuine role for fans in developing something, or help that enables creators to do better work. Merely inserting your logo probably doesn’t qualify. It also means fandom isn’t likely to be an especially good short-term campaign strategy. These relationships require cultural fluency and sustained participation. If the budget disappears after the quarter ends or management expects an immediate conversion metric, conventional marketing may be the more sensible choice. There are plenty of examples of companies getting this right. LEGO supports its AFOLs—Adult Fans of LEGO—and an existing culture rather than pretending it invented that culture. Harley-Davidson didn’t merely accumulate loyal customers. It helped riders organize around a shared identity by creating the Harley Owners Group, or H.O.G. It provides chapters, rallies, riding challenges, a magazine, events, and other opportunities for motorcycle owners to interact with one another. Even the pumpkin spice latte gave Starbucks an opportunity to turn a seasonal beverage into a fall ritual. The company created a private Leaf Rakers Society Facebook group for enthusiasts, which grew to more than 26,000 members. Starbucks didn’t invent the pumpkin spice latte ritual or the anticipation surrounding it, but it certainly learned how to play along. What should communicators do with all of this? First, don’t begin by asking, “How can we build a fandom?” Start by listening. Find out whether communities already exist around your organization, its products, the problems it solves, or interests adjacent to it. Second, distinguish an audience from a community and a community from a fandom. Don’t inflate ordinary engagement numbers into evidence that people have incorporated your brand into their identities. Third, if you enter an existing fandom, learn its culture before trying to influence it. Identify the people who have earned trust there, including creators, and involve them rather than treating them as distribution channels. Fourth, look for ways to enable participation rather than merely generate impressions. Give people opportunities to contribute, create, influence, and connect with one another. Finally, measure whether the relationship persists when the campaign stops. Are people coming back? Are they creating things voluntarily? Are they recommending you? Are they talking to one another rather than just talking to you? Ultimately, fandom isn’t something a communication department creates. It’s something people decide they belong to. If organizations remember that distinction, fandom could be a genuinely useful way to think about relationships. If they don’t, it may become the next marketing buzzword we spend a couple of years enthusiastically putting into PowerPoint decks before moving on to the next one. Neville Hobson: You addressed this a bit, but what’s the difference between a community and a fandom? When does one become the other? Shel Holtz: The key differentiator is that the members of a fandom incorporate the object of their interest into their identities. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me—and probably half the listeners to this show—that I’m a Deadhead. I love the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead merchandising makes a ton of money, and I buy some of that stuff. I recently received a scale model of the Wall of Sound, the massive audio system the band toured with in 1974. It’s 3D-printed and even has a little Wi-Fi speaker built into it. It was a birthday present, and I just love looking at it. It’s part of that fandom. I’ve read an entire book about the Wall of Sound. I’ve probably read 20 books about the Dead. I was listening to a 1985 concert on my drive to the office this morning. I am a fan. That is part of my identity. The Grateful Dead isn’t just a band I like and whose music I sometimes listen to. I may be part of a community of people who like Elvis Costello, for example, but that doesn’t make me part of an Elvis Costello fandom. I don’t incorporate that particular artist into my identity. That’s the real differentiator. Neville Hobson: That’s a good explanation. Identity is the key, based on what I’ve been reading as well. Are marketers suddenly so interested in fandom because traditional ways of reaching audiences are becoming less effective? Shel Holtz: That’s my take. Marketers are desperate because some traditional means of reaching and engaging people have vanished, some have transformed, and most have fragmented. They’re looking for magic bullets. You read one or two articles about how an organization leveraged a fandom, and suddenly the response is, “We’ll turn our customers into a fandom, too.” But I just can’t see someone becoming a fan of their electric utility. You’re a customer. You may even be an enthusiastic customer for some reason, but I’m never going to incorporate the PG&E brand—Pacific Gas and Electric—into my identity. Ever. Neville Hobson: Here’s a slightly rhetorical question prompted by your comments about Deadhead fandom: Can a brand genuinely become part of a fandom, or does the relationship become transactional the moment the brand begins mapping and monetizing it? Shel Holtz: I think both things can be true. A brand can become part of a fandom if it approaches the opportunity in the right way. First, there has to be a genuine connection to that fandom. I’m trying to think of something that would connect naturally to the Grateful Dead fandom. It might be a guitar brand or one of the nonprofits affiliated with the band, such as Rock the Vote. If you listen to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, the band’s podcast, it has done a deal with Dogfish Head Brewery on the East Coast. The brewery makes Grateful Dead-branded beer. They have thought it through and developed the connection and relationship so they can reach the fandom through the podcast. That may lead people to flock to the beer and talk about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll become fans of the beer. They may become consumers of it, perhaps even regular consumers, but the company is leveraging an existing fandom. I think there are also opportunities for brands to build fandoms. Some happen naturally. Consider a car brand. There are Mustang fans. They love their Mustangs. They attend Mustang rallies and car shows. That reminds me of the brouhaha we discussed many years ago, when Ford sent a cease-and-desist letter to a fan who ran a discussion board. It wasn’t about the Mustang, though, was it? It involved a pickup truck. Neville Hobson: I think it was the pickup—the Ranger. Shel Holtz: The Ford Ranger, that’s right. The Ranger Station was the name of the site. Ford sent the cease-and-desist letter, and the site’s owner posted a note saying, “I have to shut this down. I received a cease-and-desist letter from Ford.” The fandom erupted. This was an organization that had a fandom but didn’t recognize its power. Ford could have been leveraging it to expand the customer base. There are opportunities to identify existing fandoms that may revolve around your products, services, or company. More often, though, it will be something adjacent to your business that you can tap into. You need to understand the culture. You need to know who drives it and understand its rituals and jargon. You can’t parachute in and announce, “Here we are. We’re going to tap into this fandom. Aren’t you excited that we’re here?” People will simply say, “No, we’re not. Go away.” It’s definitely worth considering, but it isn’t a magic bullet. For most organizations, I think it’s ridiculous to assume they can develop a fandom around what they do. Neville Hobson: I agree. We’re touching the edges of a discussion about a shift from authenticity—which is unquestionably overused in marketing—toward reciprocity. Does a brand have to earn the right to participate in a fandom? If so, what does it have to give back? There’s an interesting communication principle underneath that question: Don’t begin by asking what value the community can create for the organization. Ask what value the organization can create for the community. What do you say to that? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. That’s how you build credibility and relevance within a fandom, unless it’s a built-in fandom involving something like the Ford Ranger or Ford Mustang. If you have identified an existing fandom that isn’t centered on one of your products but has a genuine connection or relevance to your business, it may be worth investing the time, effort, and money required to ingratiate yourself with that community. How do you do that? You might make access to the object of the fandom a little easier or give fans access to the right merchandise. Ask what you can do to make their fandom more meaningful or more fun. Then you may be accepted, and fans may consider doing something for you—which is obviously one reason you became involved in the first place. You have to be strategic rather than simply jumping in and saying, “We connected the dots. Look at our connection to this fandom. Don’t you want to help us sell our product?” I fear that’s what will happen with a lot of marketers who read about this and think, “There’s a solution for me. I’m going to jump all over fandoms.” Neville Hobson: I struggle a bit to see the precise gap between community and fandom. When does one become the other? I understand the examples you’ve given: the Grateful Dead fandom and The Ranger Station, for instance. Shel Holtz: And the Adult Fans of LEGO. Neville Hobson: That one, too. But do these groups actually refer to themselves as fandoms? What do their members call themselves? Shel Holtz: Well, they call themselves Adult Fans of LEGO. The “F” stands for “fans,” so they do. Would members of Harley riders’ groups—the H.O.G.s—call themselves a fandom? Probably not. They would probably call themselves H.O.G.s, but they’re definitely a fandom. I remember working for a company in the early 1990s whose vice president of compensation and benefits was a Harley owner. He rode with his club every weekend and wore a Harley jacket to the office—and this was a pharmaceutical company in the ’90s. He was a fan. There’s no question about it. He wasn’t merely a member of a Harley community. Being a Harley rider was part of his identity. Neville Hobson: This is rich territory for marketers to get wrong. Forgive me for beginning with the cynical perspective, because I can also see the opportunities available to organizations that do it well. But are we trying to manufacture something that doesn’t need to be there? I don’t particularly like the word “fandom,” although I’m not part of a fandom myself. I belong to many communities, but I’m now wondering about the difference for me personally. Do I see any of those groups as part of my identity? Not really. I probably haven’t encountered one that produces that “wow” for me. Is fandom a manufactured opportunity for marketers, or is it genuinely something worth investing in? Shel Holtz: Again, I think both things can be true. We’re going to see a lot of marketers try to manufacture fandom because it’s a buzzword making the rounds. But some organizations will have a lightbulb moment and realize, “We have a fandom. We’re just not leveraging it.” Imagine if Harley-Davidson had never organized local chapters or created clothing people could wear to express their fandom. What if the company had said, “We sell motorcycles. If our customers want to form clubs and ride around, that’s fine—but they had better not make clothing with our logo because that’s a copyright violation”? Harley-Davidson probably wouldn’t have the identity it has today if it hadn’t recognized that it had a fan base it could support and leverage. The same is true of Adult Fans of LEGO. The company produces kits that clearly aren’t intended for little kids snapping together a few bricks. Some contain thousands of pieces and cost hundreds of dollars. Those are definitely products for adult fans. As long as you listen to fans and nurture the relationship, there can be value in it. Fans have a relationship with the object of their passion. Organizations need to examine that relationship and ask: Are we strengthening it? Are we reinforcing it? Or are we merely trying to exploit it? Neville Hobson: Exactly. Shel Holtz: That’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Some advisers are telling agency owners they don’t need to know AI all that well themselves. They suggest owners go deep on AI for a month or three, then pass the day-to-day to the team and move on with life. In this episode, Chip and Gini explain why that’s backwards, and how owners who step back from AI are making a mistake. Chip’s argument is that AI doesn’t fit the usual delegation model because it’s moving too fast and touching too much of the business to hand off after just a few months of study. Gini agrees, noting that advice which made sense six months ago is often stale today. Both connect this to credibility with the team: Chip compares the situation to a non-technical manager overseeing developers, who then gets disrespected because they don’t speak the language. Gini says her own coaching works because she’s in the tools constantly enough to give specific workable advice. They also describe pushing AI into something closer to a personal operating system than a work tool, from Chip wanting an assistant that catches him contradicting his own past positions, to Gini’s agent that calls her out when she takes on work she said she’d delegate, telling her flatly it’s not the best use of her time. The episode closes with the advice that staying curious personally is what keeps owners sharp enough to lead a team through a tool that keeps rewriting its own rules. [read the transcript] The post ALP 314: Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision. Also in this long-form episode for August 2026: An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre’s untimely death. Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven’t returned the feeling. Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequential could be a requirement to strip from its social media platforms the devices that addicted young people, many of which have become standards for social media. Will social media as we know it change in the wake of the verdict? Some companies are compensating employees who join the ranks of influencers and creators sharing content about the companies’ products and services. It sounds like a good idea, until you look at the labor, HR, and legal issues that arise. In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working? Links from this episode: ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts I Just Ran My Thesis, Written in 2014, Through an AI Detector Hayden Panettiere’s Old Neutrogena Story Resurfaces After Her Death Neutrogena Faces New Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death Hayden Panettiere Dead: Clip of Star Discussing Neutrogena Dropping Her Over PPD Resurfaces Neutrogena Under Fire Again for Dropping Hayden Panettiere After She Revealed Postpartum Depression Struggle Neutrogena Faces Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death. How Should the Brand Respond? Hayden Panettiere Said Neutrogena Dropped Her Over Postpartum Depression. Now Fans Are Boycotting Neutrogena Faces Backlash Over Hayden Panettiere’s Postpartum Depression Claims Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling. Reddit Fades From ChatGPT Citations No More Doom Scrolling or Instagram Stories? A Meta Trial Loss Could End the Social Media We Know Meta Trial Could Spell the ‘End of Social Media as We Know It’ LinkedIn Adds an Option to Report ‘AI Slop’ I Just Had a Deeply Alarming 45-Minute Sync With Our Talent Acquisition Team Gap Inc. Opens Creator Program to Employees Gap Inc. Expands Cross-Brand Creator and Social Advocacy Program to Employees Employee Creators Are a New Brand Strategy Inside David’s Bridal’s New Commission-Based Ambassador Program for Creators and Employees David’s Bridal Ramps Up Its Creator Strategy Why Starbucks Is Betting on Employees as Creators Why Brands Are Inviting Their Employees to Be Creators Why Major Retailers Are Turning Employees Into Content Creators: Billo Should Brands Build Creator Programs From Their Own Employees? 32 Experts on the Risks and Payoffs Links from Dan York’s Tech Report: Publisher Traffic Falls 33% Globally as AI Overviews Reshape Search In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click Time Has Started Serving Ads to AI Agents Perplexity Blocks Time’s Ads Being Served to AI Agents LinkedIn Adds a Button to Report AI-Generated ‘Slop’ LinkedIn Says Its ‘AI Slop’ Button Is Working The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28. 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 [email protected]. 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 527 for August 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, you’re back in your office. It’s good to see you back there again. It must mean that the heat wave has broken there in the UK. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has. I’m enjoying a temperature of low twenties in here with the air conditioning on. It’s very nice. And beats what we’ve had with thirty plus upwards. Not good. But it’s been an interesting few weeks and on a number of levels. One of the highlights, in fact a big highlight, was the fact that when Laura and I and our grandkids and my daughter were visiting California at the beginning of August in Novato in Marin County, we met for lunch. We came into the city and you and I and the whole crew got together and we had a phenomenal time at that lunch, didn’t we? Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did at the Waterbar, right on the waterfront on Embarcadero Neville Hobson: Nice place. Shel Holtz: Overlooking the Bay Bridge. And it was fun to be able to have you sit in there, this wonderful building, and to say we built this because the company I work for Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Did build the structure that the Waterbar is in and the steakhouse next to it, that whole complex. So that was fun, even though that was before my time that we built that. But it was great to see you and Laura. It had been since 2019. Neville Hobson: A while. Shel Holtz: And it was just delightful to meet your daughter after having heard about her for so many years. And to meet your wonderful granddaughters. They’re terrific. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well, you made a big impression on them because they talked about you a lot afterwards. But it was it was good. I mean, it as we’ve both said, you know, in real life face to face can’t beat it. But this is the next best thing on video. So it was great catching up and enjoying a delightful lunch over a few hours. The wine was super that we had. It was Californian wine if I’m not wrong, Shel. Shel Holtz: Stag’s leap, if I remember correctly. Neville Hobson: Okay, no Spanish Rioja there. So that’s good. And we did enjoy our week overall, even though some of the circumstances weren’t quite as we had originally planned it. But it was good to, from my point of view, certainly, where a change is as good as a rest. So a change of scene coming over there I found extremely beneficial to recovering from some of the health problems that I’ve been having prior to that. So enjoyed it a lot, Shel, and we gotta do it again soon, I hope. Shel Holtz: Yeah, Michelle and I were talking about the fact that we need to get back over to the UK. So it won’t be won’t be next year. We already have our vacation next year plotted out, but maybe twenty-eight we’ll cross the pond and come see you. We’ve not been to Somerset, so need to make Neville Hobson: Okay, we’ll make a pencil note. Yeah. Shel Holtz: That journey. Neville Hobson: Yeah, this is this is quite something to experience for some assets. There’s a lot. Yeah, I look forward to that if we can if we can swing it, it’d be great. Shel Holtz: But we’re not gonna talk about personal stuff for the entire show. We will Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: Be talking about stories in the news that have a connection to organizational communication and technology. And we hope that one of them at least sparks a comment from you listeners. And there are a number of ways that you can comment on. This show, the first is to just leave a comment in the comment field in the show notes at the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork. Com. You can also leave that comment on the post where we share updates on episodes that we have published, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky. We share on all of them. And you can leave a comment there. We check those for your comments. You can send an email to FIR comments at gmail. Com and attach up to a two-minute audio file. If you would like us to play it, we would be happy to. You can even record that. No fuss, no mus, right there on the FIR website. We use a service called SpeakPipe. It has a tab on the right-hand side of the page that says send voicemail. Click and record, and I’ll get that. And there’s also the FIR community on Facebook where you can not only leave a comment but engage with other listeners. And yeah, lots of ways that you can share your comments and become part of the show and drive the content. We have some comments in this episode to share with you. Also, your reviews are very Neville Hobson: Super. Shel Holtz: Much appreciated wherever you have the opportunity to rate and review podcasts. That’s a great way for others to Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm. Shel Holtz: Discover FIR. Neville Hobson: Let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long form episode five twenty three for July published on the twenty seventh of july, You shall reported on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining brand sovereignty in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. In FIR 524, on the 3rd of August, you addressed the topic of whether managers are ready to lead an AI fluent workforce or not. Too many indicators suggest they’re not. The subject of workslop. Was our topic in FIR five twenty five on the twelfth of August, with mounting evidence that it can create long term problems for companies. We discuss the latest research and share our thoughts on what businesses can do about it. And we have one comment. Shel Holtz: Yeah, from Mike Klein, who said, Of course, organizations have been clocking externalities as productivity gains since the time they started clocking anything at all. Neville Hobson: Okay. In FIR five twenty six, we added our thoughts to the growing debate about Anthropic’s new watermark feature that’s rolling out on Claude. That episode was published just last week, actually. We discussed one firm’s new AI writing policy and its four guiding principles for employees, which make far more sense to us than trying to detect a watermark. And we have some comments on this one. Shel Holtz: Yeah, Suzy Urjavik Parker wrote that this will never apply to me as a professional communicator because my writing is mine and mine alone. I don’t outsource any of it to a technology destined to destroy the environment, our water resources, and the creative process of humanity. Here’s to everyone saying no to this nonsense. And Ike Piggott, in a reply to Susie, said, let me search online and see if someone has written the thing I want so I can copy it. Is plagiarism. Yet for the AI evangelists, let me ask for a smoothie blend of hundreds of plagiarized documents is somehow fine. Feels like idiocracy is nigh. And Patrick Coyle in an independent comment said, No, we should definitely be asking, Did you use AI to write this? So a lot of people continue to object to this at a fundamental level. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I you’re right. I noticed that myself even. So the debate will continue, in my view, the wrong topic to be debating. It’s not it’s not doesn’t carry the same importance or weight as the one people should be talking about, which is the content that is produced, guidance on how to do it well and do it right. So, you know, this debate will continue for quite a while, I’d say. So yeah, now you’re up to date on FIR episodes. Shel Holtz: Great. Now let me bring you up to date on Circle of Fellows episodes. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. I usually moderate these and when I’m not available, Brad Whitworth does that. We have published episode number one hundred and thirty one. This is a monthly program, so you can imagine how many of how long this has been going on to get 131 of them out there. This was on the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations, the fact that so many journalists are starting their own media companies with Substacks and YouTube channels and the like. And what does this do to pitching and the notion of reaching out to reporters in order to get coverage because the audiences that these media companies have is much smaller than the mainstream media. So it was a great conversation with Diana Degan, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka. And Jennifer Waugh. The next episode is the first of a two-parter, and it is coming this Thursday. And it will feature Adrian Cropley, Bonnie Caver, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and the leadership moment for the communications profession. So should be a good, robust discussion. And I as I say, we’re doing that in two parts. There will be four. Different fellows picking up part two of this in September. So now you’re all caught up on previous episodes, on Neville’s travels, on Circle of Fellows, and we’ll dive into our six stories right after this. Neville Hobson: So our first story is an interesting one, I find. Three people died, around 200 homes were destroyed, and millions of dollars were at stake. And an expert witness hired by 3M to help defend the company and the resulting litigation turned to ChatGPT to help write his expert report. That alone might raise questions, but it isn’t really the extraordinary part of the story. According to reporting by 404 Media, The expert, Josh Autenrieth, told ChatGPT that he had been retained by 3M and asked it to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M. More remarkably, he instructed it to show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion. In other words, this wasn’t here is the evidence, help me analyze it and determine what happened. It was much closer to here is the conclusion. Help me build the argument that supports it. And we know this because his ChatGPT conversations became part of the legal discovery process. The prompts reveal something else rather astonishing. Autenrieth reportedly has about 20 years’ experience in gas detection. Yet at one point he uploaded a photograph of a gas detector to ChatGPT and asked, What am I looking at? According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that detector was central to the entire case. There are obvious questions here about professional standards, disclosure, and the appropriate use of generative AI in expert testimony. But I think that’s a bigger question for organizations. AI can make it extraordinarily easy to construct a persuasive argument for something you’ve already decided to believe. Give it enough documents, tell it the conclusion you want, and ask it to assemble the strongest case. That’s not necessarily analysis, it can be automated confirmation bias. And if organizations increasingly use AI to support decisions, strategies, investigations, and recommendations, how do we distinguish between using AI to help us discover what the evidence says and using it to manufacture a convincing justification for what we already want the answer to be? And one more thought if your AI conversations might eventually be discoverable, perhaps we should start thinking about prompts, not simply as instructions to a machine. But as records of our reasoning. There’s an awful lot to unpack here, Shel, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: There certainly is. And at its core, this is a governance story. I don’t know if Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: This expert witness was an independent contractor or if he worked for somebody. But at some level you need to have that governance that gives you the rules about how to use this and what you are going to retain. I mean this is why legal needs to play a part in that whole governance conversations because they understand the rules of discovery from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they understand what kind of challenges can arise when in a lawsuit the other party has access to all of those prompts, all of those conversations that you’ve had with a large language model. So you need to have governance around this to begin with. The other issue that leaps to mind is that output could be three pages of highly polished slop that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because it answered the question he set out to have it answer, he’s perfectly happy with it. I wonder if he challenged it at all. Did he put it through a any kind of a red team? I’ve I spent days creating a communications red team skill in ChatGPT. And I can run anything through this. I can run a detailed communication strategy through it. I can run a three-paragraph email we’re sending out on behalf of the CEO through this. And it puts it through all of these various levels in order to challenge what I’m saying here. What’s a fact and what’s an assumption? How are different audiences within the organization likely to react to this and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, first of all. Front loading the outcome that you’re looking for is dangerous enough. Leaving that paper trail there for a belligerent legal team to find is another level of bad. But then just assuming that the output is perfect and relying on that without putting it through some kind of challenge, I think is dangerous. I think this was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. Neville Hobson: Yeah. The thing I find extraordinary, frankly, is did anybody at the client check any of this? Was there a human client in the loop? I wonder. There’s something else too to mention that the Futurism also reported on this as well as 404 Media. They’re they reported that over three hundred and fifty pages Of ChatGPT activity were turned over in the discovery process. And I’m thinking to myself, what this suggests to me, apart from the obvious things, is that this was someone who didn’t quite understand how ChatGPT works in terms of what it retains, how it retains it. And the other side did. So when they did the discovery, they knew what to look for and how to ask for it. So it still comes back to Probably the legal team at three N. Did they not rehearse this? Did they not know what this expert witness was going to be asking or going to be presenting? I from reading the four media report, this all came out during the presentation of by the expert witness in the lawsuit. So it came unknown to anyone. I mean, goodness me, that’s no way to run a defense in a lawsuit of this magnitude, it seems to me. So, I’m surprised it’s not got more coverage than it has, actually, but it is extraordinary that this actually happened, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m not surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention because it’s, my God, another law story where somebody used ChatGPT and it bit in the ass. You know, we hear those pretty frequently. The difference here though is that it’s expert witness testimony, and Neville Hobson: Right. Shel Holtz: How discovery played a part, that I think should get people to pay attention to this. And you know, why would 3M not dig into it deeper? I can imagine, I’m just making this up. I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine, you know, you’ve worked with an expert witness for decades. They’re great. They have helped you win multiple cases. And now this person has discovered ChatGPT. You don’t know this as the legal team. You’ve been working with this guy for years. He’s been Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: Fine. So you just accept the outputs that he produces based on that experience and the trust that has built up. The only difference being now he’s made life easier for himself by employing a large language model. And there the trouble begins. So I think we’re gonna need to start needing to ask for disclosure from people that we have worked with a lot. Hey, you know, we’ve been working together since before there was generative artificial intelligence. Are you using it? How are you using it? Let’s go over this to make sure that we’re covered. I think you’re gonna need to ask that of pretty much every supplier these days. Neville Hobson: I totally agree with that, Shel. I think it hasn’t happened. Obviously they didn’t ask any of those questions. So you’ve got a kind of fault, if you will, at the client for not asking those kinds of questions. Maybe a maybe it’s a comfort thing that think everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry about this. But you’ve raised the point quite well, I think, that the time has arrived now where you need to audit everything. You need to be clear in your mind. So you’ve got to go through the what if. You’ve got to, you know, what’s the what could happen if that will guide you in terms of what you need to do with the people you do business with or who you hire to help you do something such as an expert witness in a lawsuit, where the consequences are not minor at all, the outcome of this if it goes against you. And use an all an expert witness who. Is great because you’ve worked with him before, but is completely current with the right way of doing all this is an ethical issue here too. So that’s something I think you need to add to-do list to make sure that you are clear with the people you’ve hired to work with you that they are on board with the right way to do this. That may well come into play in terms of your own policies about third parties working for you as contractors or some other manner, that how they use AI needs to be declared. And you also then the obvious, you need to put in place the checks and balances that the human in the loop activity we’ve talked about a lot on this show. Shel Holtz: Yeah, it’s a vendor AI audit is a new requirement. That’s inventory all the vendors we work with and check on their AI practices. I mean, what if you work with a freelance writer to supplement your own staff’s ability to crank out copy? You’ve been working with them for years. They’ve only recently started using AI. They need to disclose to you how they’re doing that so that you know what you need to be looking for when you’re reviewing their content. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Boy, this opens up a Shel Holtz: What it comes down to. Neville Hobson: This opens up a an eyebrow raising area, it seems to me, because I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that hardly anyone’s doing that. Shel Holtz: I would be surprised if I surveyed twenty c communicators, if I found one whose organization was auditing all of their suppliers and vendors for AI practices, that would that would surprise me. I don’t think this is one Neville Hobson: Boy, boy. Shel Holtz: That has seen the light of day yet in terms of general awareness. Neville Hobson: No, my I agree. Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, Neutrogena is in a genuine crisis right now. The kind of almost impossible to game out in a tabletop exercise because it didn’t start with anything the company did, you know, yesterday or this week. It started with something that has been on the record for some time, discoverable with a two minute search. It’s been up there for more than a decade. You may have known Hayden Panettieree from a TV series called Heroes. I didn’t. I guess I’m cultural culturally illiterate or maybe I’m just old. But I saw my daughter had Neville Hobson: You’re not a you’re not a you’re not a you’re not you’re not a Gen Z shell, that’s the point. Shel Holtz: That’s a problem. I’ve you know, I think I’m glad I’m not. I hope I just didn’t offend all the Gen Z Gen Zers in our audience. But my daughter had posted an RIP to Hayden on Instagram. So as I was reading about all of this with Neutrogena, I had to reach out to my daughter and say, Okay, tell me who this person was. One thing she was, though, was the face of Neutrogena, the spokesperson for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015. Not long after she gave birth to her daughter, she went on live with Kelly and Michael and talked openly about her postpartum depression. Panettieree said that what that’s what got her dropped by Neutrogena. They said that they viewed her disclosure of her postpartum depression as a violation of their morals clause in their contract. She told the story again this past May while promoting her memoir, generating some mild but manageable backlash at the time. Then she died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found unresponsive at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina. There were no signs of trauma, no signs of foul play. The cause of death, last I checked, was still pending, although there are indications of some kind of overdose. The internet, though, went straight back to that interview. And within days, the phrase Neutrogena boycott was trending, and the stock of its parent company, Kenvue, that used to be a Johnson unit, took a real, but not necessarily a substantial, hit. But for four days, Neutrogena didn’t say anything. And this is interesting because they responded within hours to an unrelated advertising flap involving Tate McCrae. And no, I don’t know who he is either. Shameful. I know. But the point is that this wasn’t a company that doesn’t know how to move fast. It just chose not to on this one topic where speed and empathy probably mattered most. And by the way, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are front and center in the news right now with the trial of Lindsay Clancy making headline news. She’s the former news nurse who killed her three children, then tried to kill herself, paralyzing herself in the process. She sought help for a rapidly worsening postpartum mental health crisis, and the system failed to identify and treat the psychosis that ultimately overwhelmed her. And of course, society here in the US is kind of polarized over this case. But with that going on, Neutrogena should have been able to see how its firing. Of the celebrity back in 2015 might have sparked renewed attention. Anyway, this past Thursday, Neutrogena finally posted a statement on Instagram. They were deeply saddened. They were proud to have partnered with her. And the line getting the most attention, we understand that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time. And then they promised a significant investment to a postpartum support health partner. Details to come. And notably, they turned off comments on the post itself. So, what do crisis professionals make of all of this? Molly McPherson of NBC News said that it isn’t a press release problem, it’s an action problem. The company faced one of these unknowns in crisis management, but still could have planned to be empathetic. It cost Neutrogena four days of the narrative being written entirely by other people. Two LinkedIn reactions from communicators get exactly what’s wrong with the response. Jerry Corbett, former chair and CEO of PRSA and now CEO of Red Flag, and a past guest on FIR, wrote for Strategic Magazine the day before Neutrogena broke its silence that a corporate crisis does not always begin with a new event. Sometimes an old decision returns under circumstances that give it new meaning. His point. Was that the silence itself became the story. And Erica Cardina, a PR manager, went further on LinkedIn. Her critique, the moment to acknowledge this was in May when she was still there to receive that acknowledgement. We were proud to partner with her. Ring’s pretty hollow given why the partnership reportedly ended, and we understand why we made her feel unsupported is corporate cushion cushioning. Her suggested fix, just say we failed to support her because that’s what it was. Then there’s the comments being switched off. And as Erica put it, you can’t publish a statement about accountability and immediately shut up shut the door on the conversation. By August, she argued it read less like accountability and more like a brand trying to contain damage. And people can tell the difference. Communicator Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: Lacey Haynes commenting on Jerry Corbett’s post raised a related gap. The donation pledge is easy money unless it’s a really substantial amount and backed by real executive commitment. And what would actually reassure people is a stated policy on how Neutrogena will support its spokespeople going forward, not just a one time gesture because of something we did in the past. So, what’s the lesson for us? Real quickly, three things. One, your discoverable history is your risk profile. Assume anything a public figure has said about your brand anywhere at any time is going to resurface at the worst possible moment and plan for it before that moment arrives. Two, silence is never neutral, and neither is turning off comments on the statement meant to address it. Both say we’re managing this and not we’re listening. And three, soft language reads as evasion. If your statement needs a phrase like we understand we made someone feel X. Ask whether the plain version we failed her is the one you’re actually avoiding and why you’re avoiding it. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very sad tale, itself. But these revelations about Neutrogena and going back just over a decade to what they did to literally get rid of her, how they reacted at that time, and then now all this has come out and the lack of response. So they are in trouble in the court of public opinion without any doubt. Cynics would argue does it’s it all blow over. Does it really matter? Well, yes, it does matter. You’re if you’re a public listed company in particular, it could affect your stock price, which you notice their parent company has taken the hit. But it will have a negative effect on people’s perception of you and your brands. When they’re out in the pharmacy or wherever buying products and they’ll r recall this perhaps if they’re fans, they definitely will have a negative reaction to you. So I just found it Extraordinary. Some of the things you said, Shel, such as publish what they did and then turn off all the comments. There’s one of the reports I read, I think it’s in the independent newspaper, talked about posts on Reddit that have attracted thousands of r responses and likes and so forth and upvotes, all that. That’s there for all to see for time immemorial, I would say. And they’re not part of the conversation. So I’m not gonna try and second guess what they might have done in crisis communication planning, except to say it doesn’t look they had a plan ready for this eventuality. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we say this pretty much every time we do a crisis communication story about a company that blew it. We ask was a communicator in the room when any of these decisions were made? Did they just choose to not listen? But to those who would say that this will all just blow over, and we hear this a lot is you know, all crises are transient in nature. Well, remember this is now part of your permanent record too. So in five years, when Neutrogena gets into some sort of a dust up with another spokesperson or an influencer or a creator that they’re paying, people are gonna remember this. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna do a quick search and they’re gonna find it and it’s gonna re-emerge and just add fuel to the fire. You see, they did this before to this woman, and they bought everybody off by making a contribution to a nonprofit that deals with postpartum issues. And then they went along their merry way and now they’ve abused another person that they had on their on their payroll because they didn’t change their policy to how they treat their spokespeople when they went through this before. So it’s Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well Shel Holtz: Just waiting to happen again. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I just performed a completely unscientific experiment. I just opened up Google and typed in Neutrogena. We’ve got sponsored results is the first item that appears in the in the in the in Chrome from Neutrogena. Explore our range, as it says, and link to something provided skincare results. Then the very next thing is Neutrogena responds backlash after Hayden Panettiere dies. And then there’s links galore to media stories about this. And that’s just entering the word Neutrogena. And beyond that, you know, it’s got it’s got a link the way Google’s now doing all this. More news, you click on that, and you get pages of this stuff. Then further down, if you scroll, you’ll then start seeing links to some of their products. But If you land on the page and the first thing you see is the is what happened with this woman and how they dealt with it, you’re likely to kind of explore that a bit, I suspect. Not a good look for them at all. Shel Holtz: No, it’s not. It’s a classic crisis communication. Is it existential for Neutrogena? Probably not. But I can see that the particularly among this actress’s fan base, there are probably people who are simply going to switch to a competitor’s product a and be done with Neutrogena. At this point. So you’re gonna you’re gonna lose some faith with some of your existing fans, you’re gonna lose trust. And you’ve pretty much established an approach that you’ve taken to this sort of thing that I think is underwhelming and unsatisfactory for a lot of people who are looking for more from an organization like this. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So, the obvious question I’d ask you is if you were advising Neutrogena, what would you advise him to do now? Shel Holtz: Well, now it’s all reactive and it’s I mean this is after Neville Hobson: It is Shel Holtz: The proverbial horses left the pu proverbial barn. But at this point I would I would come right out and say the our previous statement was inadequate. We take full responsibility For our actions. We should not have there clearly somebody suffering postpartum depression is not a violation of a morals clause. That was inappropriate. Here is what we are doing by way of our policies with spokespeople going forward to make sure that we treat our spokespeople fairly i in the future. And this is what we are doing in order to support. People who are suffering through postpartum issues and challenges, because we wanna play a part in this in order to try to make up for our transgressions thus far. Neville Hobson: So neutrogen, if you’re listening, there’s some good advice there for you. Shel Holtz: Yeah, they w they’re not listening. Neville Hobson: Well, I mentioned Reddit in that story, and that’s the heart of our next story, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. So, 20 years ago, when companies were first trying to figure out social media, we used to give them some fairly simple advice. Don’t walk into somebody else’s community and immediately start talking about yourself. Listen first, learn the culture, understand why people are there. And if you eventually join the conversation, contribute something useful. That holds true today, as it did 20 odd years ago, but apparently we’re having to learn all that again, it seems to me. Because marketers have suddenly fallen in love with Reddit, according to the Journal. And there’s a p very particular reason why. According to the Journal’s report, Reddit has gone from being something of an afterthought in many companies’ digital strategies to one of the places marketers desperately want their brands to appear. We’ve talked about this a number of times on FIR o over the past year, the rise of Reddit as a literally a number one place to see discussions about you and your brand. It’s interesting what the Journal says, and the reason for it is not simply because consumers use Reddit, but because AI does. Reddit conversations turn up extensively in the material that AI systems use to answer questions. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which running shoes to buy, which software to use, or whether a particular company is trustworthy, what people have been saying on Reddit could help shape the answer. Naturally enough, marketers have spotted that opportunity. Unfortunately for them, Redditors have spotted it too. When jewelry company Brilliant Earth have advertised for a Reddit strategy manager whose job included shaping conversations. That would cascade across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision making, moderators of the jewelry subreddit immediately raise the alarm. One described Reddit as possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback. And that gets to the fascinating contradiction here. The more valuable authentic human conversation becomes to AI, the greater the commercial incentive to manipulate that conversation. And the more brands try to manipulate it, the less authentic and therefore potentially less valuable it becomes. Some marketers have already approached are already approaching Reddit exactly as you might fear. So those old behaviors have never ever gone away. The journal found agencies operating brands dozens of Reddit mentions every month, using accounts that appear to be legitimate community members, and even promising services involving negative comments. But some companies have discovered another approach. Don’t market. Audio equipment manufacturer, Sonos, built goodwill by having an identifiable company representative help people with technical problems and translate corporate announcements into ordinary language. There in itself, by the way, is a lesson for communicators. How about trying to communicate in the first place in ordinary language? So investment solutions and services firm Fidelity created communities around useful financial discussion and information. And Reddit itself says brands should arrive with three things: utility, humility, and respect. Which sounds remarkably like the advice we were giving companies at the beginning of social media over 20 years ago. There’s an AI story here, certainly. There’s a marketing story. There’s also a communication story about authenticity, community, and trust. But as AI makes genuine human conversation increasingly valuable as a source of information, are we about to see an escalating contest between the people creating those conversations and the organizations trying to influence what those conversations tell the machines? And if marketers succeed too well, do they ultimately destroy the very thing they’re trying to exploit? Welcome back to social media circa two thousand six. Shel Holtz: Yeah, which is exactly the same as social media twenty years ago in terms of what organizations should be doing. Of course, what organizations should be doing and what they do frequently are misaligned. But i every couple of years we report on a story that leads me to invoke Christopher Barger and the time that he spent at General Motors running their social media team. Because if anybody understood how to do this well, it was Christopher. And this was long enough ago that social media was basically the blogosphere. This predates all the social networks. But what Chris did was he had members of his team assigned to the various car blogs that wielded a certain amount of influence. I remember Jalopnik was one of these. There were there were several of them. But the instructions they had were very clear. He says, You’re not parachuting in from GM. I’m here to help. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong with what you just said about one of our vehicles. Their role was first to listen, second, to participate in conversations where they had expertise that had nothing to do with General Motors, just be a member of the community and participate and build the connection with the other people in the community. And when GM comes up, At that point, you’re already known. You’re trusted. You’re not the spokesperson from GM. You’re Bob, right? And now you can comment, and people are going to listen to you because you are on equal footing with other members of that community. That’s the way to do this. Dell was another great example. They had that, you remember that, that listening center. I don’t know if anybody still has these, but those. High-tech futuristic mission control like social media listening centers would use an algorithm to surface discussions that were taken to the appropriate department in the organization for action. And then the person who was in that community would be able to solicit more information, then come back and say, okay, we’ve listened to you. There was one particular case where there was a lot of discussion about why this particular Dell laptop cost so much more than a different model when the only difference was that it had been loaded with bloatware. And you know, they took it to the team that was the product management team for that for that particular product and they looked at the argument and they said, you know what, they’ve got a point. And so they dropped the price and they were able to go into the community and say, Well, thank you for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening. You’re absolutely right. And we’re taking action, we’re lowering the price. How do you imagine the community reacted to that? I mean, 100% positively. So there is a way to engage in these communities. Should your organization be on Reddit? I don’t know, is your Community on Reddit? Are your fans on Reddit? Are your customers on Reddit or other stakeholders or thought leaders and influencers? Is there a good strategic reason to be there with your brand or your organization? Maybe. Should you be there just for the GEO? I don’t think so. And in fact, this was just in the news. From July 18th through August 7th of this year, Reddit accounted for an average of 3. 83% of ChatGPT search citations. By August 14th, that had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0. 52% through this past Monday. That’s an 86. 4% drop. So according to the Axios piece where I read this, they’re suggesting that you shouldn’t pin all your GEO hopes. On one mythical unicorn. Now, who called it a mythical unicorn? Our friend Steve Rubel, who is an executive vice president for Media Insights and Measurement at Burson these days. That mythical unicorn, he says, doesn’t exist. It’s a long game, and brands need to be engaged on many different channels. Some will go up, some will go down based on citations. But doing yourself reputational damage by misbehaving in a social network. Just because you think that’s where your citations in AI results are gonna come from, man, that’s just dumb. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean I would say, you know, if you’re not already on Reddit or another place that’s relevant to where conversations are happening about your brand that’s relevant to you, it’s gonna present you with a with a huge hill to climb to establish a credible presence now. I’ve already seen some examples, I’m not gonna mention any names, of companies who are doing this, going about this utterly the wrong way. Going, doing literally what you said not to do earlier. You know, hey, I’m here from X, company, not X, but Company X or whatever. Let me know what’s bothering you and try and help, that kind of thing. Whereas it would be better if you are Bob from X. Who’s got a who’s got a passion and a strong interest in whatever the topic might be, that’s relevant to that community, joins that community and doesn’t do anything for three months except listen to what people are saying. Might like something or upvote something, and he’s already filled out a comprehensive profile describing himself, where the focus is on him and his passion, not Him and who he works for. And it’s kind of like a by the way, I also I work for so and so. But these are this is just me here. Either way, that was what I would recommend to anybody. And with the with the caveat, it’s gonna be hard work to establish a presence now if you haven’t already done one. And if it’s kind of not perceived to be the kind of behavior you would expect from your company, your work is even harder in that case. But Flip it over and say it’s never too late, indeed, better too late than never. So I would say you know, it this is worth listening to what these examples show and look back at two thousand six to see what people are doing, and join the conversation the right way. Shel Holtz: Yeah, the other example that we can take from back in the Jurassic era of social media would be Frank Eliason in the Comcast Cares account on Twitter, where they were actively searching Neville Hobson: Yep, another good example. Shel Holtz: For people complaining about Comcast, and then not going in to tell them they’re wrong, but going in to tell them, let me see if I can help you with that. You some people were a little creeped out, you know. You’re monitoring me. But most people Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Were delighted that somebody was being proactive, not waiting for. Me to pick up the phone and deal with the labyrinth of customer support and instead reaching out when you’ve identified that i’m having a problem with a solution yeah i think most people are very grateful for that so Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So there’s lessons to be learned here from just twenty years ago, but even that, this isn’t like was invented twenty years ago. This has been since the days of forums, that this was good behavior to exhibit on those old forums that were control freakery writ large, those forums. But if you were there you as Bob from Company X Hey, you know, it’s chatting with people about the things they’re interested in, you would have stood good stead in building relationships. So the medium may ch the mediums may have changed and social attitudes certainly have changed. But the these fundamentals of listening, getting to understand people’s issues, making an effort to come across as genuinely interested in helping them. Stan we’ll stand you in good stead no matter what. Shel Holtz: Well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, I’ve been reading all about the LinkedIn option now. A little pull-down menu from the three dots that you can signal that you think that something is AI slop. I haven’t used it. The only thing I use there on a regular basis is not interested, as LinkedIn seems to be populated more and more bipartisan political posts that have absolutely no connection to business whatsoever. I don’t mind a political post on either side of the aisle as long as there’s a connection to business because that’s what LinkedIn is for. But if it’s just a blatant partisan attack, I don’t yeah, and I do this with people who are posting positions I agree with. I am on LinkedIn for the business connections, for the business thought leadership, for the business reporting. And if it’s if there’s no connection at all, I’m not interested. And I find that I’m able to adjust my feed. The more I click that, the less of that type of thing I see. And LinkedIn goes back to being what I joined it for in the first place. But I have not yet clicked the one that allows you to identify this as AI slop. Have you done that yet? Neville Hobson: No, I’ve not encountered I’ve not actually encountered anything that made me search for something to report it at all. I tend to ignore all of this stuff, Sean, to be frank. I rarely proactively do anything only. If I get a pop-up saying, Do you like this? Sometimes I might. Particularly no, there’s one thing I do is report stuff. Please block this. I’ve seen this too often. And I asked me a reason why. Often it’s just not of interest to me or I see it too often. I always get fine, we’ve taken it off, won’t appear on your feed anymore. Great. I should do that more often now that I think about it. But you know, it’s fine. And I see as Dan mentioned, i in one of the I think it’s TechCrunch he refers to, reporting that this seems to be working. Now I’ve not looked into any more detail about how do they know it’s working, but I mean, hey, great. If it is, it’s good. But I think it’s so arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, a button, this is AI slop. I mean that is so generic. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I saw dashes, it must be AI slop. Neville Hobson: Amazing. Shel Holtz: All right. On Tuesday this past week, Meta went to trial in Oakland, facing a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. This is being led by the attorneys general from my state. This is Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, also Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. These are the lead plaintiffs. They’re claiming that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook kids, and that Meta knew it and hid it. Meta itself told the told the court the penalty calculation could run as high as $1. 4 trillion if they are found liable for everything that they’re being accused of. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. I’m sure that’ll go extremely well. So is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. The dollar figure is mind-boggling. I mean, I mean, imagine if Meta had actually wind up paying Over a trillion dollars. I mean, what would that do to the organization’s future, its finances? But there’s a lot more at stake here than the existential threat to Meta. This isn’t a personal injury case, it’s a consumer protection case, which means the states aren’t just asking for money, they’re asking the judge to order Meta to actually rip features out of the product. We’re talking about infinite scroll, video autoplay, disappearing stories, beauty filters, algorithmic feeds for minors. And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. A Los Angeles jury already found Meta and Google negligent in a similar case back in March. They awarded six million dollars in damages. And California’s attorney general said flatly that Meta is just first in line. YouTube and Snap are already facing their own lawsuits. So, what do people who study this think will actually change? Well, Kate Winnick, a principal analyst at Forrester, called this potentially the end of social media as we knew as we know it, and drew the comparison a lot of people are drawing to the big tobacco settlements of the 90s. Her prediction isn’t that social media will disappear, it’s that the product gets harder for young people to access and the cultural conversation around it shifts the way it did with cigarettes. She also expects competitors like Snap to make preemptive changes rather than wait to be sued themselves. Analysts covering the advertising side of this are already sounding a warning. A Storyboard 18 analysis this week made the point that engagement has always been the currency of social advertising. More time in app means more advertising inventory, more data, more monetizable moments. If courts start forcing platforms to strip out The very features that maximize engagement, that inventory shrinks, particularly for younger audiences. DesignRush put it even more bluntly for marketers. Platform risk is becoming brand risk, and agencies need to start factoring regulatory exposure into media planning the same way they’d factor in a supply chain risk. So practically, what should you be doing right now? Social is a centerpiece of your strategy. Well, stress test your channel mix before you’re forced to. Don’t wait for a verdict to ask what happens to your plan if Instagram Stories or infinite scrolls simply isn’t there anymore. Start modeling these things now. You also should be shifting your measurements of success. The engagement as currency model, time spent, scroll depth, session length, is exactly what’s on trial. Start building your reporting around qualified reach, completed views, and actual brand lift, not raw time on platform. So your metrics don’t collapse the moment the underlying mechanics change. Also, if your brand targets younger audiences at all, start scenario planning for tighter age verification and access restrictions now, rather than reacting when a court order lands. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s exactly what the states are asking for. And fourth, and here’s the one that I think is particularly comms specific, not just marketing specific. Get ahead of your own internal conversation about platform dependency. If your organization’s quietly let one platform become the backbone of both your marketing and your external communications, the trial is your prompt to ask leadership: what’s our plan B? Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: And are we building it now, or are we just waiting for the verdict to force our hand? Obviously, we don’t know how this trial ends. It just started. It’s expected to go on, I think, six weeks, is what I heard. But the lawyers, the analysts, and Meta’s own court filings all agree on one thing. Whichever way it goes, it’s a signal event for the whole industry, not just for Meta. Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. I agree. It’s got a lot of attention over here too. And I think that’s partly or primarily it’s because it’s Meta. And it’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole parade of apps behind it that everyone uses in one way or another. So the speculation my god, is this the end of Instagram? I see people talking about that. But I add a dose of cynicism to some of this shelf, to be honest. In that we’ve been here before with threats of lawsuits, that’s the end of this or whatever it might be. I can’t imagine that Meta is going to go down the tubes with a one trillion dollar financial penalty. I just couldn’t see it happening. Look at look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica back in twenty eighteen. I mean, that was a scandal beyond the pale. Nothing really happened to them. I mean it was business as usual and they repeated some of the bad things that they did. Not long ago, even. So it needs something a lot more existential threat like than a trillion dollar fine. Petty cash. It’s not even you know, it’s only twenty five percent of the US national debt under Trump, so it’s not a big deal Shel Holtz: Ha. Neville Hobson: Really, you know. So it’s it’s nevertheless it is serious without doubt. And one good thing of it is it’s drawing attention to some of the things that you know Meta are now talking about we’re gonna do something about. Here in Europe and specifically in the UK, there’s a lot of talk. It’s constant, although it’s died down in intensity in recent weeks, about the damage to young people, particularly preteens who are active on these platforms. And I saw a news story the other day that OpenAI is rolling out a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT for teens, for users under 18, that they say has stronger built-in safety protections. I mean, I don’t know what message they’re trying to get out here, but why haven’t you done this before then? With stronger built-in safety protections? Why isn’t that in place for everyone doing this? So I think from a comms point of view, Meta and everyone else who are suddenly scrambling to make announcements what they can do. Be wary of talking about that we’re doing this dedicated thing to address you know concerns about safety protections all that kind of stuff because that’s what you’ve been resisting for decades. And Sally don’t now try and play the good guy. You’re not the good guy. This lawsuit demonstrates that quite clearly. And I think it’s interesting to observe what happens. That could this spread out into something mega, I mean truly mega. In parallel I see other interesting things going on. I saw a story just the other day saying that in the midst of all this, it’s rumored that MySpace is about to make a comeback. Now Shel Holtz: I saw that. Neville Hobson: If they yeah, if they are looking to do something like they did back in the day, that might appeal now, actually. I’ve still got a MySpace account by the way. I haven’t visited it in a long time. But So this is kind of in the midst of one of the reasons I think why it’s getting attention, in the midst of society level concerns that we’re seeing manifesting itself in some of the opinions pressure groups have here in the UK, certainly, often run by women who you can’t truly genuinely argue against what they’re saying. Although some of them are argue against it. That there’s no proof, where’s the evidence? And you know, it doesn’t match our data, all that kind of stuff. And I think it will need a groundswell, I think, of public opinion to be behind some of the criticisms. Again, cynicism kicks in here because we’ve seen this before and nothing really happened. So I’m not sure whether this will make any difference, again, depending on what happens. And as you say, this is only just kicked off. So I did see because one of the TV station the news channels here, Sky News, covered the opening of the trial outside the courthouse in where is it in LA or somewhere in California, is it? It might have been new yeah, San Francisco. Okay. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think I think it’s up here. I th I think it’s in Oakland. Yeah. Neville Hobson: So and it showed there’s a picture of the courthouse. It had all these rosettes, red, white, and blue, hanging off the balconies. And it gave the razzmatazz show that’s very American. You wouldn’t see that happening over here. But all these women talking about and strong opinions, and they were credible in some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t, you know, misery being on display here. These were people who had strong opinions. They can see an opportunity to highlight their case and I think they’ll get attention if they do it the right way. So add that to the mix. I Other than that, we don’t really know much more because it’s only just starting. So but it will be definitely an interesting story to keep an eye on. Shel Holtz: Yeah, even if the court fines one hundred percent for the plaintiffs in this case and one hundred percent against Meta, they’ll appeal. And the appeal will take a couple of years and then that can be appealed. And you know, how many times can you appeal? This will be years before there’s a resolution. But I Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Can see you know, when all of this plays out, that the change to social media could be substantial. And it’s the analogy to tobacco that I think makes me feel that way because it took forever to change attitudes about tobacco. But it is not socially acceptable now. After Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: Piecemeal laws, I mean it was first you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants and people were up in arms about that. And but you take that for granted now. You’ve you get rid of the advertising that’s aimed at kids, Joe Camel, for example. You get rid of the cartoons, the cool camel smoking an unfiltered cigarette. And you’ve really shifted societal attitudes about tobacco. And I could see the same thing happening over the long term with the same type of approach taken. So if it starts with not letting kids take advantage of the features in the social networks that they like, you know, just removing those, making it harder for them to access some of this stuff or just removing it from the platform altogether, then those platforms become less desirable, the kids aren’t there. Who’s left? You know, us. Yeah, how appealing are we to marketers as a target? And everything sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, I over the long term I can see this having an implication. Do I think in Neville Hobson: Yeah, I Shel Holtz: Six weeks there’s going to be a finding and suddenly social media as we know it is gone? No, I think that’s absurd. But I do agree with you. Meta’s not the good guy in this case. I think in the previous cases that have been tried, and there was the one in California earlier, there was also a bigger one. I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Where it was literally hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay, that the Discovery found emails that supported the case, that they knew that this is what they were doing. They did it deliberately and they didn’t care that they were addicting kids to these platforms. And I assume that same evidence is going to be introduced in the current trial. So yeah I’d be surprised Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: If this one suddenly and miraculously goes Meta’s way. So I think this could be the start of some significant changes Neville Hobson: No. Yeah. Shel Holtz: To the way social media is offered to people and the kind of influence this that it’ll have. And by the way, could be excellent timing for MySpace’s return to come and say, hey, you know, we’re back. We’re the social media that always took safety seriously. Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Shel Holtz: And if what you have been hearing about Facebook troubles you. Rejoin us and come visit MySpace Island in Second Life too, you know. So Neville Hobson: It’s funny, I was watching about a month or so back now, a video I’ve got. You’ve seen this, I know. Thank you for smoking, Shel Holtz: Mm-hmm. Neville Hobson: About the lobbying industry of tobacco, booze, and I’ve forgotten the other one, firearms. It got me thinking, and mentioned it popped into my mind again as we were discussing this, that I seen recently here in the UK editorial articles or maybe placed media. I haven’t paid too close attention to it. About the upcoming likelihood that the only product, the only tobacco product that doesn’t carry any health warnings on them at all is cigars. And that’s about to change. And Shel Holtz: Hmm. Neville Hobson: These ugly announcements about cigar smoking will kill you. Stop smoking now, all that in black letters on a white background that obscure the packaging. The interesting argument I’m seeing though is that the it’s to arguing about this is such a shame because some of the designs on cigar packaging is iconic from a century ago. And we’re gonna lose all this, and this is bad. I’m thinking I see a lobby event happening here. And I wonder what they’re gonna crank up in Meta’s defense, specifically relating to social media, how they’re gonna address this. But be sure this is gonna crank up. Shel Holtz: When I when I was a kid, we all kept our little memorabilia in cigar boxes and they’re gorgeous. The designs are spectacular. And Neville Hobson: Beautiful. Shel Holtz: I don’t know where I got them from because my dad did not smoke cigars. He was a cigarette man. Lucky Strikes, I remember that very, very well. But yeah, we all had cigar boxes Neville Hobson: Boy, boy. Shel Holtz: And that’s where we kept our little collectibles. Neville Hobson: Yeah, as you do. Shel Holtz: Yeah. Neville Hobson: Well, that was that’s an interesting story though, Shel, nevertheless. I think it’s only just starting, as you point out. The trial is just getting underway and revelations are going to emerge and see how it develops. So I’ve got an interesting one here that the title of it, well, what can I say? I mean, the as I wrote about it on LinkedIn, it’s an AI story that stopped me in my tracks. That’s the only way to describe it. When I came across it just a few days ago. And I and I want to put an important caveat around it before I introduce the topic. So It originated in a post on X. I haven’t been able to independently verify that every detail happened exactly as described. It may be entirely literal, it may be embellished or maybe partly be intended as a cautionary tale. But the organizational behavior it describes is absolutely worth talking about. The author of the tweet says he joined a meeting with his company’s talent acquisition team to discuss their new AI-driven. Resume screening system. And apparently it was working brilliantly. The team reported that the software had reduced time to hire by 60% in a month. Think about that as a management KPI for a moment. 60%. If you’re sitting in the executive suite looking at a dashboard, that’s a sort of number that gets people’s attention. The technology investment is working. Productivity is up. Hiring is faster. Great result. Except the author asked another question. What exactly had they told the AI to optimize for? The answer was digital natives with high runway potential and a useful energy. So he asked them to look at the demographics of the candidates the system had rejected. According to his account, it had rejected 100% of applicants who had graduated from university before 2010. Suddenly that spectacular 60% productivity improvement looks rather different. But there’s a line later in the story that I think is even more revealing. When the potential discrimination problem was pointed out, because that’s really what you’re talking about, age discrimination. The HR manager apparently argued that the AI made the decision, not her. So the company was insulated from liability. We’ve delegated the decision, therefore we’ve delegated the responsibility. And that to me is one of the most dangerous misconceptions organizations can have about AI. And if this example is typical, this is not uncommon. I bet you that is the case. It’s really dreadful. You can delegate a task to an AI system. We’ve talked about this on the show before, Shel. You can automate a process, you can allow an algorithm to make recommendations or even decisions, but you cannot automate away accountability. There’s another aspect of this that I think should concern communicators in particular. Look at the language supposedly used to instruct the AI system. Digital natives, high runway potential, useful energy. Those are exactly the kinds of expressions that can float around organizations sounding like harmless jargon or management shorthand. Put them into an AI system, making consequential decisions about real people, though, and suddenly language isn’t just describing organizational culture. It’s operationalizing it. The machine is turning the euphemism into a decision rule. And there’s something else here that connects to a much wider problem we’re starting to see with AI adoption. When an AI system produces an unexpectedly good result, our instinct is to celebrate it. Perhaps our instinct should sometimes be to investigate it. If productivity jumps 60%, what happened? What trade offs produced that number? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? Because automation doesn’t necessarily eliminate discrimination, bad judgment, or flawed organizational assumptions, it makes them scalable. And here’s a final comment from the tweet author. I’m currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4, 000 resumes, those ones that the system had rejected. So here’s the question I’d put on the table, Shel. If an AI system delivers a spectacular improvement in a business KPI, Whose job is it to ask what the system had to do to achieve it? Shel Holtz: I think that needs to be baked into the governance, doesn’t it? We’re right back to that Neville Hobson: Yeah, it does. Shel Holtz: Governance model and the policies. I mean, we’ve talked about this recently. I mean, my productivity could absolutely skyrocket because I delegated a report, let’s say, to AI. I gave it a thin prompt. It gave me this highly polished five page report. I give it a quick once over and I send it along. And I’m now able to take the time that I would have spent researching and writing that report, doing other high value things for the organization, and the organization can now tout that we’ve had this productivity gain. Meanwhile, the department that I sent that report to is looking at this and going, wait a minute, this reads real well, but there’s no substance here. I need to validate whether there are things that are accurate here. So what happened, I merely shifted. The work to the department that received my output rather than me creating a useful, rel well-researched, well-written document. So, yeah, the first thing I want to question is how are they measuring productivity? The second question is, what are these people doing with their time? Now that they have saved that time by using AI? Is it just more you know, mundane rote work doing, you know, more AI agent management. Or they actually, I mean, you know, we talk about where I work, and I’m on the AI committee. We just wrapped up an AI survey of our entire employee population. And what we have found is that out in the field on the actual construction projects, the people who are saving time with AI are one, spending more time with the client, engaging with the owners, building that relationship, building the trust, and they’re spending more time out on the project, walking the project, doing safety walks, doing project walks, talking to the subcontractors. This is high value stuff that an AI can’t do. So we were really happy to see that in our survey results. We can say okay that what they’re spending that saved time doing is high value strategic stuff that matters to the organization. So yeah, I think, you know, what are you measuring and how are you measuring it need needs to be part of this conversation. Neville Hobson: Okay, yeah, I d I don’t disagree with that at all. I think though what concerns me about this is the fact that you had an employee involved in the recruitment process who with a straight face argued that AI made the decision, not me, so hey, you know, what can I do? And the author of the tweet Did the right thing, I think, which is investigate the re rejects to see, you know, what clues can he as to why they we were rejected. Yet he knows the answer because the prompt they were given was, you know, those high runway potential digital natives useful energy. And so that’s what it worked on. And I think the what I find strange, if this is a true story, and I have no reason to doubt it’s not, even though this. Only this tweet that you have to go on. No one asked and again I can’t say more than that because I don’t know what the structure is of this organization. Where the kind of curiosity was that would have produced things like what happened if it’s productivity this productivity jump, this is extraordinary. What trade-offs produced that? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? They didn’t have anything to guide them on that by the looks of it. So this comes back precisely to the point you made. This is a governance issue. There’s things they should have in place that clearly are not. If this guy hadn’t accidentally encountered this, I mean, I shudder to think if he hadn’t had that conversation with that talent acquisition person in his team. This would have remained undiscovered and they would have blissfully gone about, wow, this is fantastic, this productivity gain. And yet there’s something fundamentally flawed, it seems, that you give this kind of prompt, you get the behavior we understand that it did to reject all these other applicants and produce the outcome that it gave. No one questioned anything, it seemed to me. So there you got a problem at the high level in the organization. And this is a pattern we see in many of the stories we’re reporting, Shel, over the past few months, where you look at the story that developed that led us to talk about it, and you think there’s something missing here at a at a management level in the organization that shouldn’t be missing. And we’ve had the obvious one about the human in the loop, but this goes deeper than that. This is fundamental and this is worrying. Shel Holtz: It is. And I mean we could we could spend a whole show talking about talent acquisition and AI being used to screen resumes and the like, which is problematic i in its own right. I mean, what do most organizations using the AI to find. It’s the candidates who have the appropriate degree from the right university, that they’ve got the right keywords in their CV, they have the appropriate technical skills. None of these things are predictors of success in the organization, in life. I’m reading a book right now, by the way, highly, highly recommend this book. It’s having a profound impact on my thinking. It’s called Robot Proof by Vivian Ming. She’s a fascinating character. But this book is extraordinary in the approach that it takes to ensuring that humanity remains relevant and thrives when AI is there handling all of these routine tasks that humans are no longer required to perform. So she points out through her work in recruiting and in education, the predictors of success are things like social intelligence, perspective taking, communication and collaboration, the ability to solve novel problems, comfort with uncertainty, and deeply human capacities that increase in value as AI gets smarter. These are things that are predictors of success and wealth and happiness and the ability to be creative and innovative on behalf of an organization. And we’re not looking for those things. So I mean, these are all conversations that I think we need to be having out there is, you know, I mean, just an AI that is faster at looking for the wrong things that recruiters have been looking for decades and decades. That’s not the approach we need to be taking. We need to be rethinking all of this stuff based on the data that’s available to us. And that’s what Vivian Ming has and shares in this book is the data that she has processed through machine learning tools since long before there was a ChatGPT. Highly recommend this book. And by the way, the book also has the best footnotes I have ever read. Neville Hobson: There’s also much think of you know the HR person saying that the AI made the decision, not me, of something that Shel Holtz: You made a decision to use the AI, right? Neville Hobson: Well back in April, February and April, in fact, Sylvia Cambi and I ran a couple of workshops for IBC on ethics in AI. And we gave some case study examples, and one of them is very relevant to this conversation, this is the example of Workday that is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiffs who were suing Workday allege that AI systems used in talent acquisition resulted in discriminatory outcomes. It’s the concern isn’t simply bias in one decision, it’s systemic exclusion embedded in the design of it. How ranking, filtering, and screening models operate at scale. So what happened, just as one little example, is that someone who was studying all this that came up with the details discovered that there are examples where someone applied for a job and within literally a minute they got a reject email. And there are examples where the reject emails are sent at 2 a. M. In their time zone. That lawsuit is still going on. It’s raised questions about oversight, fairness, transparency, and even vendor liability. So it’s certainly relevant to this story if you’ve got someone arguing that the AI made the decision. But it’s discriminatory and arguably from what we know, the human was behind it, yet the AI made that decision. That’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears. So this is quite serious, and the Workday one I think is even more serious, the way it’s it seems to be playing out. But nevertheless, these indicate again, as I mentioned earlier, that we’ve got examples in organizations where things aren’t working right, things aren’t being done well, and you kind of wonder what else is going to emerge that we didn’t know about until someone discovered it. So these are things from a leadership point of view. That we need to pay attention to be proactive in setting in place the ground rules for this. So it’s not about guidelines or any of that kind of thing. It is about the fundamentals of AI leadership. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re probably not getting the best candidates in the door at the same time, which ultimately that’s what we want. And the way these things are working right now, they’re creating problems and probably leaving us with less than the optimum new hires. Well, retail has a new marketing playbook, and brands are turning their own employees into influencers. Gap. Is the clearest example. In January, it opened its year-old creator program. It had previously been reserved for outside influencers with at least a thousand followers. They’ve opened it up to its own corporate distribution and store staff. Employees can now earn commission and free product for posting about Old Navy Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Those are the Gap brands. Gap says the original program had already reached 154 million people across nearly 30, 000 posts. David’s Bridal did something similar. They launched David’s Style Squad, these are store associates, earning the same 5 to 15% commission as outside creators, with top performers up to 20%. A progress update from Modern Retail in April said the program had grown past 250 active ambassadors with roughly 500 applications. Starbucks has gone even further still, building the Green Apron Creators program from scratch and piloting a custom TikTok tool to share ad revenue with baristas. And Staples got here almost by accident. A store associate who went viral talking about their printing services became such an asset that the company leaned into it rather than shutting it down. And you may remember that we talked several years ago about a guy who worked for a paint company who was doing, I think it was either Instagram or TikTok videos, and they fired him for doing that, even though he was a hardcore brand ambassador who was getting people to buy the product. And he ended up getting hired by a competitor, Go figure. But why are brands suddenly taking this position of inviting their employees to become creators. Why now? And the answer is trust. Audiences are tuning out anything that smells like an ad. And the most credible person a brand has is someone who already works there. We’ve told you this for years and years that your employees are your most credible spokespeople and that it comes out in the Edelman Trust Barometer too. Employees almost also come cheaper. Than an outside creator roster. And the content has a built-in supply chain. A barista or a store so you can film something in 10 minutes with product that’s already just sitting there on the shelf. But the people covering this are flagging real problems. Digiday’s reporting this month points out that you can’t just flip a switch. There’s no consistent model for whether content happens on the clock or off the clock. Or what happens when a store manager needs someone running the register instead of chasing down that viral shot? One marketing exec told Digiday, most employee content is unusable, and finding the ones who are actually good at it is like panning for diamonds. There’s precedent for how badly this can go too. Amazon’s FC ambassadors, which was launched in 2018, to put warehouse workers on social media during a labor conditions controversy. Drew accusations of astroturfing and questions about whether some accounts were even real employees. Then there’s the legal exposure. Employment attorney Mark Conkl said that the moment a company starts directing what employees post or ties compensation to participation, it’s no longer enthusiasm, it’s work. And every employment law that applies to work applies to that too. That includes the FLSA. Filming, editing, and monitoring comments at nine at night can be compensable time, voluntary label or not. It includes overtime math, if stipends or engagement bonuses aren’t folded into the regular rate correctly. It includes discrimination risk if creators get picked because they look good on camera rather than by documented objective criteria. And it includes labor law, a creator policy That reads as don’t say anything negative can legally chill employees’ protected right to discuss wages and working conditions. Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: So here’s my advice, and it splits two ways depending on which hat you’re wearing. If marketing is building one of these programs, your job is to get legal HR and marketing in the same room before it launches, not after the first viral post. Sort out compensation, selection criteria, and IP ownership up front. If you’re the one being asked to sell this internally, be honest with employees about what they’re actually signing up for. Real hours, real tax and wage implications, and a real trade-off between building the brand’s audience and building their own. And if marketing pitches you a program without any of that groundwork done, that’s the time to push back loudly, before it launches, not after that first lawsuit. Neville Hobson: Yeah, quite interesting, isn’t it, Shel? We’ve talked about this before, some time ago. And that example of the paint company is interesting. I think attitudes, strategies and so forth have will have changed quite a bit since then. I think the paint company was Sherwin-Williams, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. It could be. Shel Holtz: Think so. Although that may have been the one he ended up going to. I could look it up. I don’t remember. Neville Hobson: Could be. Yeah, could be. I it reading the story in one of the links you shared in Retail Dive that talks about Gap and David’s Bridal, it’s actually quite interesting. This is now, this is not a kind of a an aside, like a little aside project. This is a this is a significant aspect to their to their brand management and general marketing, where employees are part of the process that rewards them for their actions. It makes sense. I don’t have any critiques on this at all, even. I can understand some concerns certainly surrounding people saying we do authentic storytelling. You know you can say that, but you need to convince people that is the case, authentic storytelling. I think there’s a difference between people with passion who happen to be employees of your company. Talking about your brands out in the marketplace, as opposed to people with passion or employees, you’re now gonna pay to do this. So that’s kind of losing something in the picture, it seems to me. So there’s a fine line to walk, I think, in how you communicate authentic storytelling. Because is it authentic because you’re paying them? Because When they’re doing this before and now they’re being rewarded. So I’m not saying that’s not a not a good thing. You need to be clear in how this is perceived. Shel Holtz: Yeah, sure. This is not an employee advocacy program. To be clear, Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: This is not an opportunity for employees to share content and to put their own spin on it in their networks. Employee advocacy programs have been around a long time. They can be very effective. We have one. We use one of the tools that’s available out there to manage it. But nobody gets paid for these. I mean, some of them, you know, y you have leaderboards and you may have campaigns with prizes for who’s on top of the leaderboard each week during the campaign. That’s not the same thing. The creator programs Neville Hobson: No, it’s not. Shel Holtz: That we’re talking about grew out of the whole influencer movement where these people get paid to promote the product. And basically what they’re doing is saying, hey, we’re gonna give our employees the same opportunity we’re giving the creator community out there. And it just doesn’t shake out that way because of employment law and because of everything else that I mentioned. And by the way, that was Tony Piloseno. He was an Ohio college student and a Sherwin-Williams employee, so good memory. He built a huge TikTok following posting paint mixing videos using Sherwin-Williams products. And in 2020 they fired him, citing misuse of company materials and creating content on company time. And he was hired by Florida Paints, which embraced his social media creativity and gave him a role producing content for the brand. So that was that story. Neville Hobson: Show and Williams loss, without question. They missed the point entirely. But to be fair, that was back then and that was probably a common view. You’re wasting time on our dime and we’re gonna fire you. But you know, I was reading the retail dive piece that I mentioned on Gap as well. And interestingly, the VP of marketing, his comments about why they’re doing this. Our employees know our brands, our products and customers better than anyone. Absolutely. By expanding the program to eligible employees across our offices, we’re giving them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing our brands to life through authentic storytelling. That doesn’t gel with me at all, that description, I have to say. It’s it’s forced this is a marketing activity basically. So y the word authentic doesn’t work well there, I think. Anyway, they have had some success without doubt. They talk about the program has now reached nearly hundred and fifty-four million consumers across thirty thousand posts, according to the press release that the GAP issued. I mean, that’s no small beer, without doubt. So it’s a good result. So I guess the answer is to for me, I’d want to take a look at this in six months’ time to see what it’s looking like. Shel Holtz: Yeah, but in the meantime, I think the advice stands. There are labor, legal, and HR implications in doing this. And if you just let marketing launch it without having looked into that and addressed it and invited HR legal and y any labor relations specialists Neville Hobson: Presume they did all that. Shel Holtz: Into the room, I don’t know. Could have just been marketing. God knows we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. Where marketing just releases Neville Hobson: It’s true, yeah. Shel Holtz: Something to the wild, right? Like snatch up these bargains faster than a gator can snatch up a child, you know? Neville Hobson: Extreme example. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Well, I think it I think it’s interseeing. Shel Holtz: Yep. That’s stuck in my mind. Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s good seeing all this, I have to say. And as long as they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna bite back at them, as it were, all to the good, but need to see more evidence of success and that word authentic being used properly. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’d be very interested if any listeners work for organizations or have clients that are have embarked on this kind of a program. I’d love to know what kind of safeguards were applied to that, what kind of conversations were held with HR and Legal and how it’s going. So let us know. So our next monthly episode of FIR, our long-form monthly episode for September, will drop on September twenty-eighth. Monday, September twenty-eighth, which means Neville, you and I will record it on Saturday, September twenty-sixth. We will be here with our Neville Hobson: Yep. Shel Holtz: Short form midweek episodes beginning not this Monday, but next Monday. In between those monthly episodes. So we hope that you will all watch for those announcements and or just subscribe to the podcast and they’ll show up in your podcast player. And until we see you on our next episode, that will be a 30 for immediate release. The post FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it. The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon, who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform. Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most. [read the transcript] The post ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through the risks of your team using Shadow AI and how to respond without overreacting.Continue Reading → The post ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Veteran communications leader Mark Dollins joins "On The Same Page" as co-host. Mark and Shel address the "voice" leadership applies internally, as opposed to (or consistent with) the voice they employ with external stakeholders. Should it be the same? How different? What considerations drive the inside-the-company voice? And why does it matter?Continue Reading → The post OTSP #5: Finding Your Leader’s Voice for Internal Stakeholders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency.Continue Reading → The post ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of "On the Same Page," Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn't, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences. Continue Reading → The post Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that the bar for genuine human interaction has dropped so low, clearing it will make you stand out.Continue Reading → The post ALP 310: In the age of AI, people skills matter more than ever appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss how AI is allowing agencies to increase their PESO Model capabilities.Continue Reading → The post ALP 308: Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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.Continue Reading → The post FIR #516: Your New Shadow Website appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini cover the practical and emotional side of client departures, from the moment you get the news to the lessons you take away.Continue Reading → The post ALP 307: What to do when a client “fires” your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In the second of our special Circle of Fellows discussions, Brad Whitworth moderated a panel to discuss the remaining three chapters of the book, “The 7 Cs of the New Communication Compass.” The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, joined Brad, along with the IABC Fellows who authored the three chapters: Zora Artis, who wrote the “Cohesion” chapter Cindy Schmieg, author of the “Collaboration” chapter Shel Holtz, who penned the “Community” chapter Continue Reading → The post Circle of Fellows #128: The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass, Part 2 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into the numbers and find the gap between how owners think they’re using AI and the reality of what’s happening inside their businesses.Continue Reading → The post ALP 306: What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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 7.0Continue Reading → The post FIR #515: Agents Everywhere appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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.Continue Reading → The post FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as more than just a content machine.Continue Reading → The post ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this episode, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich look at the sacrifices owners make on behalf of their teams and why those sacrifices often create more problems than they solve.Continue Reading → The post ALP 304: Stop making sacrifices your agency doesn’t need you to make appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Guests Karen Swim and Michelle Kane join Chip for a conversation covering the topic of AI's impact on solos and small agencies.Continue Reading → The post CWC 113: How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

How the Washington Post and the New York Times handled their digital properties over the past several years, and what are the best models for successful future online journalism.Continue Reading → The post FIR B2B episode #159: A tale of two newspapers appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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. 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 [email protected]. 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 (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.

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. 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 [email protected]. 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 @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.