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

Links from this episode:

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz: I have lots of takes on this.

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson: Something like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is a big deal for regulated industries, because people have to find the canonical information. They have to find the approved information, not necessarily the one that was created for AI. So if you’re doing this, you do need to make sure that what you are creating for AI is official. It is going to present the information that the lawyers have approved, that is going to pass muster with the regulators.

The other thing is that if I can rewrite the text of a web page for the AI version of this that I’m creating, I can put something completely different on that page. And this becomes an ethical issue that we need to watch out for. People might try to game this. I mean, remember the early days of SEO and all of the gaming of SEO that we saw with tags that had nothing to do with what was on the page. They just knew that this was a popular search term, and it would drive traffic there.

We can see the same kind of gaming with this LLMS.txt routing to the AI-compliant pages, with information on it that’s there to get you into the search results, there to get you into the AI summary, not necessarily to give you the same information that you would have found on a web page. So this can be problematic, and I think it’s something that the industry’s going to be watching for.

Neville Hobson: I agree. So you compile your list of “these are the things we need to pay attention to,” but again, in the back of your mind, you’ve got this reality: The technical landscape is still forming. No one has the full picture yet. That would include what are the requirements of this, that, or the other. So assume it’s going to be like we currently have, although I would argue it’s not going to be like we currently have. It’s going to evolve, but that’s going to take time. So you need to do that precisely.

I would say pay attention to experiments like this. And again, this is a media company doing this, so they are publishers of content that might mention your brand. That’s why it’s important to you that you show up in these kinds of search terms as well. So a lot to pay attention to here, Shel, I think, really.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and remember, The Economist isn’t doing this with their articles yet because that’s still behind the paywall. This is all that stuff in front of the paywall. I mean, eventually it’ll get there to some degree, although I don’t know how you do this behind the paywall when it’s just showing up on, you know, Google Search or…

Neville Hobson: No, again, the technical stuff is not worked out yet. They’ll find ways here.

The other thing to mention — I’m glad you mentioned The Economist. I meant to mention this, but the final point in Digiday’s piece, I thought, was really interesting. It’s a reminder, I suppose, that for all the experiments, The Economist sees AI as infrastructure rather than authorship: something to speed up research, workflows, and product delivery, not a shortcut to churning out more copy.

So AI is not going to be writing their content, they say. It will do all this stuff at the back end, if you will, that would enable its journalists, its human journalists, to do the stuff that they do well. That’s admirable. And I think The Economist has a track record of that kind of behavior in its history. So it’s great.

I think it’ll be interesting to see what other major properties do, including the big ones in the U.S., the big ones here, and elsewhere in the world. And I bet you they are working on stuff like this, too. They have to be.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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

Losing a client is never fun, even when you saw the writing on the wall. The only question is how you choose to handle it. 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.

Gini points out that there are plenty of reasons a client could terminate the relationship, which may have nothing to do with your work. Strategy changes, budget cuts, and leadership turnover all end client relationships that were otherwise going fine.

Chip’s advice is to not react immediately. Ask for a couple of days to review the agreement and put together a transition plan. That space lets you get the emotion out before you say something you’ll regret.

Once you have your bearings, focus on making the exit clean. Read your actual contract, confirm the notice terms, and hand over everything the client needs: documents, passwords, contacts, work in progress. Chip is blunt about agencies that fight clients on the way out — it accomplishes nothing and just guarantees a bad final impression. Don’t burn any bridges and you just might see those clients come back or send you referrals.

Finally, be honest with your team about what the loss means for the business. If there are financial implications, say so before people start drawing their own conclusions. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 307: What to do when a client “fires” your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives.

Links from this episode:

• 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer
• 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity
• Why Trust Matters More in 2026 (PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025)
• Employees Prioritize Organizational Stability Over Feeling Valued at Work for the First Time in a Decade, Perceptyx Research Finds
• How To Reverse New Record Decline in Employee Trust
• Employees seek hope, trust from workplace leaders, Gallup finds

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table.

Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table.

Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to?

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said—

Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this.

Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seventh floor. Their food was up there; they never left. And employees hated them—no trust, never saw them. Saw them maybe at a town hall once a quarter or once a year, I forget what it was. And morale, we did focus groups, was in the toilet—no trust, bad culture, all that stuff. The other tale is Schreiber Foods up in Wisconsin. It’s the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of. They’re a dairy company. They make all the cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King. They are global. They’ve got manufacturing plants everywhere. The CEO there was such a fantastic guy. He was on the same floor that we were meeting with the communicators on. And every time I walked out to go to the bathroom, he was never at his desk or in his office. He was sitting at somebody else’s desk talking to them. He knew everybody. And he said to me when I interviewed him, “I try not to answer any work emails till I get home at seven o’clock. My time here in the office should be spent talking to my people. I’ve got to be in meetings, I’ve got to do strategic work, I’ve got to do all that.” But communication wasn’t an effort for him. It wasn’t a checklist item; it was just a constant part of his job. To him, the CEO not worrying about communication was like a CEO saying, “I’m not going to worry about finances.” And it made a huge difference. End of the story, Shel: we took an Uber to the airport, and the Uber driver was a retired former Schreiber employee. He talked about the CEO and how much he liked him. We get into this little airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and we go up to the bar, of course, because that’s what we do. And the bartender’s this 60-year-old woman who’s a Schreiber retiree. We say who we’re working with, and she goes, “Mike! Mike’s my buddy. How’s my buddy doing?” First of all, she worked at Schreiber. Secondly, every time the CEO walked through the airport, he made a point of going to the airport bar to say hi to her. I don’t know if that’s inbred, if you have that skill or not. But even if you don’t, even if you’re an introvert, you’ve got to find the middle ground somewhere. You’ve got to be out there meeting with your employees, talking to them a little bit at least.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are definitely introvert CEOs out there. I’ve met a CEO who said his worst nightmare is having to work a room. But you’ve got to work a room. And if you just can’t—if that just terrifies you—then your number two should be somebody who can do that in your place. I remember I did some work, this has to be 20 years ago, for the International Monetary Fund. So nobody who was in leadership at that time is still there; the directors are all appointed.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: And they never came down and met with employees. The employees really resented this and had a very cynical view of the leadership—except for one, who ate in the lunchroom with everyone else. I was talking to a group at lunch and they were explaining this to me, and they said, “except him,” and they pointed at the guy with his tray. He was at the cashier, chatting with her. And they said, “Not only is he chatting with her, but he knows her by name. And he’ll come here and just sit down with a random group of people who work here and chat with them. Everyone in this organization would follow him into battle. The rest of them? Nah, forget it.”

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think most leaders think communication is something they do. Employees think communication is something leaders are. They see real people. They don’t say, “My God, he’s a great communicator.” They see him and say, “What a great guy. What a great woman.” And I’m seeing the same thing with our work with PG&E—Patti Poppe’s the CEO there. Same way: just accessible, transparent as all get-out, honest, and people would run through fire for her. And I don’t think you have to be Johnny Carson. I don’t think you have to be a huge extrovert. Be yourself, whoever that is, and make an effort to get out a little bit.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, find your strength and leverage it. I mean, PwC’s Trust in US Business Survey found 53% of business executives say they trust the senior leadership team to a great extent. Only 38% of entry-level staff say the same. Entry-level staff don’t know the leadership. I’ll tell you a great story. This was at Mattel, somewhere between 1985 and 1986, when I was doing communication there. The CEO at the time led sort of a town hall. It was in the cafeteria, but the cafeteria wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone at headquarters, so it was manager-and-above who came to this meeting. Everyone else was excluded. And I kept pushing. I said, “We need to get everybody in. I know it’s not big enough, so let’s just do two of them and invite half the people to one and half to the other.” Finally they decided to do this, but he said, “We’re not just going to make it half and half. We’re going to have managers and above at one and everybody below at the other.” So we held the one with everybody below. The CEO gets up, makes his remarks, they do the presentations, and afterwards a group of admins comes up to him. He says, “So what did you all think?” And they said, “This was wonderful. It was great hearing what’s going on. It explains so much of the work that we’re doing that we didn’t understand. We just have one question: who are you?” He didn’t introduce himself. He just assumed that everybody knew who he was. He was the CEO, but they had no clue at that level.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s fantastic. That is great. What I would tell executives is that a lot of them say they have no time for visibility—no time to be out there. But visibility doesn’t mean being everywhere. It just means being somewhere consistently. Employees don’t expect omnipresence. What they do expect is evidence that this guy’s around, this woman’s around, that they care about us—that he’s not sitting up in a suite somewhere making decisions that are unrelated to what we do down here, where we’re doing all the work. They just want evidence of that. They don’t expect him to be at all places at all times, and they don’t expect him to be Mike from Green Bay, going through the airport asking about people’s vacations. The fact that that guy did it was fantastic. But that’s not what they expect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. John Chambers, who used to be the CEO at Cisco, did a couple of things. First of all, they wanted him to do a CEO blog on the intranet. He was dyslexic, and writing was torture for him. You may remember that Cisco acquired the Flip cam—that little camera that had the USB that flipped out of it. You’d shoot your video and then just plug the camera right in.

Steve Crescenzo: I remember I used to use that little Flip cam, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Because they acquired that company, he would take that Flip cam and do selfie videos before the word “selfie” was even out there. Anything that popped into his mind—it was unscripted, top of his head—he would put on his blog. And people loved it. It was like he was looking them in the eye and talking about what was on his mind, what he was hoping they would do, what he was looking for feedback on. The other thing he did was everybody having a birthday that month would get together—I can’t remember if it was breakfast or lunch—with him. He would just wander around and chat with everybody. He couldn’t do this worldwide, but still the stories got around about him doing this.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s funny. You know, Shel, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re counseling all of our executives right now to do selfies with an iPhone, just like this. Thirty seconds, check in. And I always counsel them to just have one point—say one thing. It’s 45 seconds, it’s a minute, stick to one thing, do it once a week, once a month, twice a month, twice a week—whatever you’re comfortable with. But we don’t need a film crew, we don’t need a script, we don’t need a teleprompter, we don’t need lighting, we don’t need any of that. We just need a little bit of effort.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think the authenticity of doing that is a big deal. And, you know, the 45-second, the 60-second clip—we know the younger audience is going to look at that. On my other podcast, For Immediate Release, we talked about the clipping economy and the fact that all of these clips people are doing are what people are watching, not the full-length video. So I’ve started doing clips of this podcast. If you want to reach that younger audience, do those 45-second videos.

Steve Crescenzo: Without a doubt. My son Zach, the third partner of Crescenzo Communications, just did a half-hour presentation in our master class about the younger generation. All that data is there. They’re a TikTok generation. They do reels, they do clips—30 seconds, 45 seconds.

Shel Holtz: Clips, yeah. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikToks.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. And that takes some coaching, though, Shel, if we’re being honest. That’s way out of people’s comfort zones. They’re used to a script, they’re used to perfect lighting, perfect everything. You know what? If there’s no evidence that an actual human being was involved, they’d rather hear the guy stutter and say, “Well, I don’t know about that—let me get back to you.” They want a human being, and that’s becoming more and more important than any kind of polish or corporateness or formality or slickness.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Now, if you talk to executives, they’ll tell you that the number one thing they want from internal communications—the reason they fund internal communications—is alignment. They’re looking for alignment between employees and executives, between the employee population and the company’s business plan, its strategic plan, its goals, its values. Yet Axios did an annual report and found only 27% of leaders think their staff are entirely aligned with the business goals. And worse, only 9% of employees agree that they’re aligned. Eighty percent of leaders think their internal communications are helpful and relevant and provide the context teams need to do their jobs. Only 53% of employees agree. And that’s because executives are saying, “Here’s what you need to tell employees,” and nobody’s asking employees, “What do we need to know? What do we need to hear? What do we need to be exposed to in order to be aligned with what the organization’s doing?”

Steve Crescenzo: Well, first of all, I’ve got to ask you, Shel—as the buzzword hunter—when did “alignment” become the dominant buzzword of corporate communications and leadership communications?

Shel Holtz: I can’t pick a timeline for that, but I know that Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland out of Australia have done a ton of research on this. There’s a body of research from them that’s pretty good.

Steve Crescenzo: Is it really? I’ll have to take a look at that. I just taught a workshop out on the East Coast, a live writing workshop. When I do my writing workshops, I get all their data, all their information—newsletters, executive comms—and I thought I was at a chiropractors’ convention. Everything was about alignment: getting aligned, aligned, aligned, alignment. At some point, when you beat a word to death like that, it loses all power and it starts to just mean everything. So let me ask you, Shel—you’re the smartest guy I know—does alignment mean agreement? Is that the same thing?

Shel Holtz: I think it means that we’re in sync, that we’re working toward the goals that you’ve established.

Steve Crescenzo: So you could say, “I understand exactly where we’re going. I may not agree with it, but I understand it and I’ll help make it happen.” That’s the difference. You’re not going to get everybody in agreement, but you can get them aligned on the direction of the business. I think there’s a misunderstanding between alignment and agreement, and that’s something we need to discuss.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I think that’s important. I’ve always said it’s not our job to make employees happy. I’ll tell you a great CEO-counsel story—another experience that I had. I won’t name the company, because this guy’s still kicking around and I don’t want to hear from him. I’ll tell you when we’re done recording. He was the president of the company, and the company was laying off 10% of its headquarters staff. If you look at layoffs today, by and large they’re done pretty horribly, but they’re not sprung on employees. It’s not that employees wake up, go to work, and suddenly there’s a layoff. The companies are signaling this—a week in advance, two weeks in advance. “We’re going to be cutting…” Even Zuckerberg and Facebook will signal that they’re going to cut 10% of their staff at the beginning of the fall, or whatever. But this guy didn’t want to tell anybody. He just wanted everybody to show up, and somebody would come to the desk of the affected employee, take them to HR, explain what was happening, and then have them escorted out of the building. And the employees sitting next to them—they’re friends, they’ve been colleagues for all these years—they’d be watching and wondering what’s going on, and this person wouldn’t come back. What would that do to morale? And what would that do to trust? Everybody would be waiting for the other shoe to drop: “When’s this going to happen to me?” Productivity would tank after that. So I made the case that we needed to explain to employees what was coming. He didn’t want to do that. He said, “If we do that, it’s going to get into the press.” And I said, “Well, this is a Fortune 500 company in a metropolitan area. You think this is going to escape the notice of the press somehow?” So we finally convinced him to do a desk-drop memo. This was before email, before employees had computers on their desks, so it was printed in the print shop and distributed desk to desk. It was waiting for employees when they came in that morning, so at least everybody knew what was about to come down in the next few minutes. And of course, the local newspaper got their hands on it and ran a story. The president came into my office, slammed the newspaper down on my desk, and said, “I told you this was going to get into the press.” I said, “I told you I knew it was going to, but look what it says in the lead. It says what we said in that memo. If we hadn’t distributed that, if the press hadn’t had that, they would have called somebody who’d been laid off, or they would have called the CEO who retired three years ago, or the senior VP who’s now running a turquoise shop in a strip mall. It’s not like they’re going to say, ‘We don’t have an official announcement from the president of the company, so we won’t write about this.’ Information abhors a vacuum. They’re going to go after those secondary and tertiary sources of information and write the story.”

Steve Crescenzo: They’re going to get their information, and they’re going to be right. It’s just a lack of common sense. It really is. It’s a fear of the story getting out. You know, “Don’t communicate anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.” That phrase has done more damage to employee communications, I think, than almost any other phrase. It’s going to get out, especially with social media now. Things are going to happen.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you can’t control the narrative. Press releases were this fantasy that we were controlling the narrative, as though the reporters weren’t going to get their hands on the press release and write whatever they wanted to.

Steve Crescenzo: God, yeah. You know, is it just me, Shel, or has there just been a rash of horrible, horrible layoff announcements lately? What was the one that was done accidentally—somebody in HR sent it out before she was supposed to? That was just recently in the news. Nike’s message was just awful. I’m seeing layoffs happen everywhere. Layoffs are a part of life. Get out in front of them, communicate them well, and whatever story does come out won’t make you look bad. But when you communicate it horribly—people hear about an email that morning and everyone’s out the door by noon—it just makes the company look bad.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, transparency is just a given these days. The fact that the leaders of the organization aren’t saying something, or they say something that makes employees roll their eyes—what do they do? They go to Reddit, they go to Glassdoor, they talk to their fellow employees on Slack or Teams. If the job of communication used to be crafting the message, today it’s really pressure-testing whether the message is going to survive contact with employees’ actual day-to-day experiences.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I think the old job was crafting messages. The new job is sort of helping leaders survive contact with reality. One of our clients is doing a fun thing: before every major announcement, they try to assign somebody to play Reddit. Somebody’s going to play Reddit. “You’re an employee on Reddit right now. Here’s the message. What are they going to be talking about out there?” Or Facebook, or whatever—pick your social media channel. Somebody should be playing the employee on social media. We spend so much time asking, “How should we say this?” instead of, “Should we say it at all? Does it need to be said? Who does it need to be said to?” We’re so worried about crafting the perfect message. You know what? You can’t dodge it anymore. You can’t dodge reality. People are going to take it, they might misconstrue it, they’re still going to talk about it. That’s the way of life these days.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are a lot of other things we can talk about when it comes to counseling leadership. One that I want to cover before we wrap up here is the channels that they use to communicate, because there are a number of studies that find executives gravitate to the channels they feel comfortable with or think are efficient for them. They’ll do email blasts or all-staff memos, or the really polished, scripted, rehearsed town halls. But employees, especially frontline employees, want something more human. Executives tend to default to email, the intranet article their internal comms people write for them. Employees want face-to-face. They want those short, unpolished videos we were talking about. Anything two-way—an ask-me-anything, or text if they prefer it—would work really well.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, absolutely. You know what? I’ve always found that leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. It’s easy for a leader to have the communicator craft an email, have it come from his office, approve it, and hit send. It’s the old saying, Shel: the biggest danger of communication is the illusion that it happened, right? These leaders need to be told that. Just because you’re the CEO and you hit send on an email because it’s convenient for you doesn’t mean you’ve communicated. Don’t pick the most convenient channel. Pick the channel that employees will respond to the most, that they’ll trust the most.

Shel Holtz: Pick the one that works. There’s a thought. So, Steve, when you walk into a CEO’s office to provide counsel to them for a client, what’s the one thing you’ve found they’re most resistant to hearing about their own communication style? And how do you get them past that?

Steve Crescenzo: Well, that’s a great question, Shel. I think the thing they’re most resistant to is, unfortunately, adjusting to the fact that times have changed. And this is more true with older leaders, but attention spans have changed. Expectations of leadership have changed. This is not 1960 or 1970, where you went to work, you worked 50 years, you got a gold watch, and you went home. People want more information; they want more transparency. The good side of that is they want less corporate polish. Nobody’s ever said, “You know, I wish our CEO communicated less often but with better lighting,” or, “I wish she used a teleprompter.” The hardest part is getting them to understand that authenticity and being human matter more than being scripted and polished. We were working with a client—I won’t say the name because he’s still there—and this was a guy you’d sit in the room with and he was fantastic. Then he’d do his video and it was like he got paralyzed somehow. So we videotaped him one way with a script and a teleprompter, and the other way just talking, with the ums and the ahs and the stutters and the imperfections. And I said, “Which one do you like better?” And he goes, “Go with yours. Go with that one.” And he did, and it was a huge success. So it’s hard to get them to understand that they don’t have to be perfect. Employees don’t want perfect. They want human. Nobody’s perfect. Imperfection is perfection—I guess that’s one way to say it. I just made that up.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they shouldn’t be perfect. So, like I say, there are all kinds of other things we can provide counsel on. We touched on some of them at the beginning. If they’re telling you to communicate something, don’t just go out and communicate it. Tell them, “This is not going to land with employees. I don’t know why you made this decision, but no one’s going to get behind this.”

Steve Crescenzo: That’s what I said in the beginning—that’s why communicators don’t have that seat at the table: because they don’t speak truth to power enough. They take the message from the CEO and they don’t go in there and say, “This is not going to land.” What we should be is their pipeline into the workforce, and we should be willing to bring harsh truths back to them. “Hey, that last town hall: too much PowerPoint, not enough dialogue. People didn’t get their questions answered.” “Hey, that last email you sent out—wow, you took three paragraphs to get to the point.” We need to be the pipeline, and we need to be an ongoing focus group for leadership into the workforce, so that we can constantly give them good advice. And not enough communicators do that, in my opinion.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The listening element is in the outer ring of the framework model. But the point of listening isn’t just so you know—you have to do something with that. Mark Schumann used to run this great program when he was at Sabre, the software company that does the ticket reservation system. He called it the Culture Club. He had hundreds of volunteers around the company, around the world, and once a month—I think it was once a month—he would pull them together in a focus group, usually over Zoom, because it was a global company, but occasionally in person in Texas, where it was headquartered. He would pick one element of the culture and talk to them about it, and then he would record about a three-minute audio file summarizing what he heard and send that to the executive team. So on a regular basis, all they had to do was click play, and in three minutes—sometimes what they heard made them very uncomfortable.

Steve Crescenzo: That is a brilliant idea. Of course, Schumann is brilliant. Love Mark Schumann. Schumann is great.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, he definitely is. But that listening—and feeding back what you’ve heard from employees to leaders so they know how their decisions are going to land—I think is vital.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. That is exactly what a communicator should be doing. But you know what? That takes guts, and it takes work, and you just have to do it. Could it be, Shel—sort of a closing thought—that maybe leadership communication isn’t really that complicated? Less performance, more presence. Less messaging, more conversation. Less talking, more listening. Less acting like a CEO and more acting like a human being. I don’t think employees want perfect leaders. They want believable leaders. And that takes some coaching, because these people are hardwired to think they have to be perfect and have all the answers, because otherwise they’ll lose confidence and credibility. No—you have credibility when you admit you don’t have all the answers and when you’re a human being about it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and trust employees to act like adults. If you treat people like adults, they tend to act like it. If you treat them like children, they’ll act like that. So we would love to hear from you, listeners—any examples you have of providing counsel to leadership, or your effort to get that seat at the table. Whatever you want to share with us, share with us.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, a hundred percent, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Send email to [email protected]. Leave a comment in the show notes on the FIR Podcast Network website, or on LinkedIn or Facebook, or wherever you found out about this podcast. Send us a note. Tell us how counseling executives in your organization has been going, or any great stories you have to share. We’ll share those on the next episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I always feel a little bit smarter after talking to you.

Shel Holtz: I feel the same way after talking to you, Steve. Look forward to the next one.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, well, I’m off to happy hour. My God, it’s 2:36 my time. I’m late.

Shel Holtz: It’s wine time now. Okay, I’ll talk to you next time.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, talk to you, Shel.

The post Episode #2: There Is No Table 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

About the panel

Dianne Chase helps organizations and leaders harness the power of strategic communication to navigate crises, build trust, and drive positive change. With over two decades of experience in journalism and corporate communications, Dianne has developed a unique approach for training and consulting clients that combines crisis management expertise with the art and science of business storytelling. Dianne is an award-winning media, journalism, and strategic communication professional with profound expertise in communication disciplines, most notably crisis communication, issues and reputation management, media training, and executive communication. She is one of two people in the world accredited in the powerful GENIUS Business Storytelling methodology, created by international communications thought leader, Gabrielle Dolan. She is former chair of the International Association of Business Communicators, and author/editor of The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass.

Although Zora Artis began her career outside the communications field, she has had an outsize impact on the profession since entering it more than 20 years ago to as an account director and then strategic planner with branding and integrated marcomms agencies. Since then, she has led her own brand and communications consultancy and served as CEO of a 20-person creative, digital, and strategic communication firm. In 2019, formed her current management consulting practice bringing together strategic alignment, brand, and communication expertise. She has received five Gold Quill awards. Her significant contributions to the profession and the body of knowledge include her original research with IABC colleague, Wayne Aspland, on strategic alignment, the role of communications and leadership – the first substantial research effort for the reconfigured IABC Foundation – and co-authoring a subsequent white paper, “The Road to Alignment,” supported by 27 senior communicators from five continents. Zora has also researched the correlation between strategic alignment and experiences and the impact on stakeholder value and brand. This has led her to develop her own proprietary Alignment Experience Framework. She has also examined gender equity, perceptions, and bias in organizations, and wrote a chapter on this topic for the Quadriga University e-reader, Women in PR. Since joining IABC a decade ago, she has impacted IABC as a volunteer, including roles as chair of the IABC Asia Pacific Region and IEB director; she currently serves as the chair of the 2022 World Conference Program Advisory Committee. A certified company director, as chair of the IABC Audit and Risk Committee she introduced proper risk oversight to the board’s processes. Zora has been honored with the 2021 and the 2015 IABC Chair’s Award for Leadership and was named IABC’s 2020 Regional Leader of the Year. She is also a Strategic Communication Management Professional, Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute, and Certified Practising Marketer.

Cindy Schmieg is an award-winning strategic communicator. Her 30+ years of corporate, agency, and consulting experience focuses on making the communications function strategic within an organization. Cindy now teaches online in the Communications Master Degree program at Southern New Hampshire. She has served in many IABC leadership roles and is today a member of the IABC Audit/Risk Committee and Pacific Plains Region Silver Quill Award Committee, as well as assisting on the IABC Minnesota Annual Convergence Summit.

Shel Holtz, SCMP, ABC, is senior director of Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor and builder based in San Francisco. He is a member of the Global Communication Certification Council and will become vice chair of the Council in June 2026. Shel has written six communication-themed books, and his seventh, “On the Same Page,” a practical framework for implementing internal communication strategies, will be published later this year. He co-hosts the 21-year-old communication-focused podcast, “For Immediat Release.” Shel served for six years on IABC’s executive board and has also been president of the IABC Los Angeles chapter, along with other IABC roles. He has led communications at two Fortune 400 companies and had his own consultancy for more than 21 years before joining Webcor in 2017.

Brad Whitworth, ABC, SCMP, IABC Fellow, is a pre-eminent thought leader, lecturer, and author in organizational communication. He has led global internal and executive communication programs at HP, Cisco, Hitachi, PeopleSoft, AAA, and MicroFocus. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and undergraduate degrees in journalism and speech from the University of Missouri. Brad lives in California, a wine country, and he grows Pinot Noir on his property. A former broadcaster, Brad has made more than 300 presentations to executives, communicators, and university classes worldwide. Brad is a past board chairman of the International Association of Business Communicators and a Fellow of the association. He is one of the authors of The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication and the new IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication: A Global Standard Primer. He chaired the Global Communication Certification Counsel in 2021.

Raw Transcript

Speaker: Well. Greetings and welcome to our monthly Circle of Fellows. This is episode one hundred and twenty eight. That means we’ve been at this for ten and two thirds years if you’re doing the math. Um, and today we’re talking about a new book, The Seven Seas, the New Communication Compass. And this is part two of our exploration of that book. And we’ll be diving into that. My name is Brad Whitworth. I’m your moderator, and I’m filling in for Michelle Holtz, whom you just saw for a moment. Your regular host, shell, is one of the contributing authors to that book. So he’s here as a panelist instead of the moderator, and he’s joined by two other contributing authors, Cindy Schmieg and Zora Artis and the lead author, Diane Chase. And I’ll let them introduce themselves in a moment, just to set the stage for what it is that we hope to accomplish in this next hour. And don’t forget that if you’re watching, you can jump into the conversation at any time. throws your comments or questions into the chat, and we’ll put them up and talk about them with the conversation. Amongst these four great contributors, the seven seas of communication, the new communication compass, um include collaboration, connection, compassion, cohesion, community congruency, calibration. And in episode one twenty seven, we did cover the ideas behind connection, compassion, congruency, and collaboration. So today it’s chapters one, three, four, and five. And just for the record, I’m the contributing author for chapter two. So we got one, two, three, four, five, all right here on the screen. But I’m going to introduce them one at a time and let them tell you a little bit about themselves and where they’re coming to you from today. And we’ll start with chapter one. Um, Cindy. Hi, I’m Cindy Schmieg. I’m typically in the Phoenix, Arizona area, but today I’m in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Okay. And chapter three is the lead author, Diane. Hello. Hello. Diane Chase from Charlotte, North Carolina. At the moment where it’s gray and rainy, but happy to be here. We’ll bring some sunshine and Zora Artis. Well it’s good. It’s good morning from me in Melbourne, Australia. And it is almost light. And it’s definitely gray and raining as well. Chapter five is Shell Holes. I’m coming to you from Concord, California. Uh, where this morning it was great and rainy. Yeah. Since we’re doing the weather report. Yeah. And I’m in California wine country, where we’ve got some big puffy white clouds and some blue sky and a little bit of sunshine. But we had some rain this morning as well. So, um, before we dive into those chapters, I’d like at least Diane to give a little bit of an overview of the new Seven Seas, and I talk about them as being new because I can remember listening to, um, a past iabc fellow, the late doctor Don Ranley, talking about the seven seas that were designed to gain credibility in writing and included clear, concise, complete, consistent, coherent, creative, and correct. Um, but Diane, it seems to me that the, you know, you really up leveled the game for all of us. We’ve gone from sort of very tactical communication, skill set worries of writing, which is still important. But now we’re talking about communication strategy and how teams and leaders behave. So why the seven seas and how did you pick them? Well, you know, I, I have been thinking about the seven seas as, as of communication, as core leadership competencies. And in our uncertain, volatile world, uh, across many, many areas, it’s really more important to elevate and empower and lead communication in a new way. And I feel like these seven C’s underpinned, again, some of the leadership competencies that are necessary in today’s world, not just in today’s world, but in in the future. Our AI driven future. What is that doing to the way we connect as human beings? And that is more imperative than ever. Because if we can’t build relationships through our strategic, authentic, trustworthy communication, we’re going to be subject to whatever AI determines that we do. So I just feel like a new mindset, a new approach, new thinking, and new empowerment for communication professionals and leaders writ large actually is really important. Well, I think it takes it to another level as well. I mean, it’s not just the tools and the channels and the communications that get put into those channels is really creating the communications environment in which all of these pieces come together. And I think communications people are up to that challenge now. So, um, what I love about the book and where you took this was that we’re talking at a whole new level about a whole different set of communication leadership skills. Absolutely. It really does underpin any successful organisation. Having communication leadership have it as a fundamental in your strategic plan, your business plan, your goals, and it it really drives a purpose driven organisation, especially because it’s how you engage people and you’re going to have greater results, greater loyalty, certainly greater productivity for the long term, if you’re able to connect with people through your communication skills as a leader. And I think it also parallels what’s going on on a number of campuses. I know both at Stanford and Cornell, so sort of from coast to coast in North America, um, communication skills are being taught to up and coming MBA students who before they get turned loose on the world or at least being exposed to the you better master this skill set as a leader and use communications as part of, um, everything that you know, besides finance and legal and all the other sort of functional areas. Um, Diane, I’m going to come back to you to dive a little bit deeper into your chapter three compassion. We did talk about it on the last episode. So people can go over there but don’t want to skip you over. What I want to do is sort of go through the book from the front to the back, and we’ll start with Cindy to talk a little about your chapter on collaboration. And I know, um, maybe you could just start with sort of what’s your definition of collaboration as you wrote about it? Well, I think that’s a good place to start, Brad, and to set up collaboration as a leadership skill is another element of the book. But I think collaboration is more than just sharing information or coordinating details, because it’s about building relationships and understanding multiple perspectives and creating outcomes or results. And to achieve these things, you really need a plan, systemic approach to collaboration. And that’s how you can create collaboration as a leadership skill is through that planned approach. You know, I shared a story in the book about I ran into a guy in a restaurant who was talking about, he got an award for collaboration and he worked at a global consulting firm. And I asked him, oh, what did you do to get that award? And he said, well, I don’t know. Now. I said, well, what was on the award? What did it say? And he goes, it didn’t say anything. It just said collaboration. And I just thought that that organization missed an opportunity to create a planned approach to collaboration, where you could bring employees up together to work on collaboration in the system systematic way. Right? So then through that, collaboration becomes a strategy and you hear companies using collaboration as a value and it can be a value. But without that approach and planning for collaboration, it’s not, it really isn’t going to go anywhere. So that value doesn’t mean a lot. Um, so if you have the approach bringing the employees together, you should get better results. And I know Brad mentioned earlier when we were prepping for the call about collaboration tools such as Zoom, Slack teams. And there definitely collaboration tools. But remember, it requires people to initiate the collaboration on all of these. So we need a human approach to collaboration, where we are all working together and creating that environment or culture that is collaborative. Um, and so you say, why would you need this now? Well, collaboration has always been needed, but there is still that continuing return to the office. So we really need to retrain employees on how to collaborate. I guess that really gets to the gist of what was talked about in the book. And of course, I’ve shared a lot of, uh, points that would help build collaboration, you know, through better team building and getting to know each other, relying on each other to, um. So did the time of Covid help or hurt collaboration? I mean, we have new tools to be able to collaborate and we’re able to have different communities that extend in different ways that didn’t exist. But is it a plus or a minus or jury’s still out? I think it’s going to be a plus, but I think there’s a lag time. We have to learn to use those tools better. And we also have to learn to put the human systems back in place to help us become better collaborators. So when we’re using systems like team, there’s a lot of information. There’s a lot of ways to connect people to people. But the value of the human side of it, you know, building the trust, the relationships, the reliance on other people, gaining all the multiple perspectives that has to come back into play when using those tools. Yeah. Um, Meg, go a little bit out of order here because I want to pull in Chelle for a second and have you weigh in because if anybody knows software and platforms and tools and technologies, it’s shell holds. I mean, you are the go to guy on all this stuff. Are you seeing anything sort of in this collaboration space that’s got you excited or scared? Uh, nothing terribly new. I mean, you know, we’ve seen during Covid the rise of Zoom, which is definitely a collaboration tool. Uh, we see Slack and teams which have been widely adopted, uh, they can, uh, under the right circumstances with the right guidance, be very effective collaboration tools. I think nothing beats face to face, but that’s not always practical. In fact, in bigger organizations, it’s rarely practical. Uh, what I’m seeing is, is AI, which worries me a little. Um, I shared with you all a little earlier an article from Business Insider that talked about the fact that employees are now entering, uh, a question into a prompt box rather than getting up and going to talk to somebody who knows these things. So even within the office, when people have come back because of a return to office mandate, they are still isolating, uh, and interacting with a model instead of each other. And, uh, there has been a noticeable and precipitous decline in collaboration happening in some workplaces. You know, shell going back to a different podcast that you were on and you were talking about AI as more of a hybrid, um, partner or employee at work. And I can see that happening because when I was putting the chapter together, I thought, boy, wouldn’t that be slick if you had a bunch of people sitting around a table or somewhere where you were collaborating on a project and there had you have your AI speaker there, and you could just say, hey, wait a minute. What was the results last year when we ran this ad? What happened then? and you could get that real time information. So to help boost the collaborative results. Yeah, I think that would be great. I have not heard a lot of instances of that. Mhm. That use case, but I’d love to see more of it. Me too. Uh, especially as people start talking to their AI more instead of typing to it. I’ve been experimenting with a tool called Whisper Flow that allows you to engage in that conversation more easily with all of your AI tools. So do we have to speak up? Yeah, you can speak up. Okay. But but it will hear you if you whisper for those open office environments so you’re not disturbing the person next to you. MM. Hence the name. Great name. In terms of the collaboration. Chapter two. What I love Cindy is, is the mindset that this offers opportunity for co-creation, which leads to greater engagement and buy in for whatever it is the initiative, the project, or, you know, the business success overall. Yeah, I see these collaboration tools also following the business model anyway. I mean, at one point, we did have the notion that an organization was bringing people together. And what we’ve seen is sort of a satellite version as companies are sort of exploding the value chain and outsourcing different component pieces and sort of shattering that oneness that used to define an organization. Um, you know, somebody outsourcing their manufacturing or they’ve outsourced their R&D or production or sales is being handled by distributors. Um, it used to be a vertically oriented structure to things in which communications was paramount. I think in some ways this, um, sort of new set of collaboration tools. um, sort of represents the way the environment is changing for organizations out there. So, um, there’s some parallel paths there, but I think what you’ve hit upon so well in the chapter is talking about the human side of it. Um, let’s not put aside these tools, but let’s make sure that we in them along with human behaviors as well. And maybe that ties into sort of the chapter three and compassion. And I want to come back to Diane to talk a little bit about that, because I’m seeing a lot of books that deal with that human side of leadership and management. There’s a one that you guys may have seen out there, love and Work by Marcus Buckingham, uh, a best selling book. And our, uh, iabc friend David Grossman has one called The Heart Work of Modern Leadership. So, Diane, maybe you could sort of talk a little bit about, uh, how did caring and compassion disappear from organizations. And why do we have to write books to remind people that that’s part of the equation? Isn’t it interesting, Brad, how, um, you know, historically in a lot of organizations, it’s been personals personal professionals, professional, never the twain shall meet. There’s a firewall, you walk into the office and you leave your humanity at the door. Those days are gone. And when we are engaging with Gen Z and especially upcoming Gen A, they have no time and they will not tolerate that approach in their work and in their personal lives as well. So again, back to the age of AI, when there’s a loss of human to human connection for a lot of people in their work and even in their personal lives. I know we’ve all seen the research about the unbelievable growth in loneliness that people are feeling, especially younger generations. There’s a there’s an isolation that happens, which is not healthy for across any level. Um, in our work, in our personal lives, whatever it might be. So compassion is, is really, I’m so glad to see it elevated as a core leadership skill and an imperative for working in today’s society. So to me, compassion is action. It’s empathy in action. And it’s, it’s something that takes thought. It takes some skill building in terms of we hear about active listening and, and that sort of engagement, but it really takes caring about another human being, whether it’s caring about why maybe they’re, they’re slacking off in their productivity or their engagement, much less, hopefully not getting to the point of undermining the organization’s goals. That happens as well with disgruntled employees. So being compassionate just means elevating the the critical nature of connecting with another human being in the workplace, as well as outside of the workplace. And it takes that idea of, um, sort of employees are our most valuable asset and said, you better walk the talk. It’s not just the words that are important, it’s the actions that take place. And, and you do see some of that in some places. But I think, um, one of the thought I had was, you know, years ago, it was like, don’t worry, the company will take care of you. Um, and there was a little bit more concern and there was a little bit of sort of, um, motherhood and apple pie kind of stuff wrapped around it. Um, and then it seemed to have disappeared where people were distant and it became more businesslike. And nobody I actually had an HR person said, I can never afford to have anyone as a coworker, as a friend, because I might have to take an action against them. So I distance myself from people and I thought, what a shame that they don’t know who their coworkers are and want to be close. Um, wow. You mentioned in the book the Covid period. Um, and maybe you could just explain a little bit of how that may have, uh, sort of opened our eyes to the human side of some people that were more remote and more distant. Mhm. Well, um, back to that disengagement and that isolation piece, which is impacting mental health and, and just productivity, feelings of well-being, personal and professional success. I think again, um, it was kind of a double edged sword in a way, because it created that sense of isolation for a lot of people. introverts were in heaven. But at some point that’s not healthy either. You have to have relationships. You have to connect with another human being. It’s really important. And, um, so the other side of that is that people were beginning to say, you know what? I’m not really going to spend my time and my effort and my talents with an organization that doesn’t see me as a human being and value me as a human being, appreciate what I do and who I am, not just in the workplace, but outside of the workplace. I’m coming to my work with my own set of experiences, my current challenges, and I want to feel I mean, the old, you know, cliche understood and heard and supported. So, I think Covid elevated compassion because of that. And I work for a company that actually measures, um, whether employees feel known, feel loved and feel proud to work for the organization. So the fact that this is a metric that’s sort of being looked at on a regular basis and how leaders are being judged sort of says, yeah, there is room for that in the workplace these days. Um, let me move on if I can, to chapter four and Zora. Um, and I think the sort of the intro to your chapter that sort of like, am I reading about the same Richmond or not? There are many of us who got hooked on TV’s Ted Lasso, and we quickly discovered it really wasn’t a show about sports or Premier League football. It was really about leadership. It was about communication. It was about caring for people. And it all was revolving around this fictional team called AFC Richmond in the UK. But your chapter is about cohesion, is about a real team. Um and it’s the Richmond Football Club. So same sort of name. It’s based there in Melbourne with you and it’s part of the Australian Football League. So different version of football because we do have different versions of that around the world. We have different rules. Um seventeen thousand kilometers away from Ted Lasso’s fictional team. But maybe you could explain how this case study that you have done for this book is about shared leadership and organizational transformation that you describe in the chapter. And what’s, what’s the story behind this case study and what makes it so relevant to this conversation we’ve had about leaders and comms professionals? Thanks, Brad. And I love the fact that your organization does that, that metric as well, because I think that’s something that Richmond Football Club would actually do as well, although I’m not quite sure, but the word love was mentioned quite a bit when I interviewed the CEO. The Richmond Football Club, which is also known as the Tigers, is is a a rules football team. It’s one of the oldest, most supported clubs in the country. And it’s, you know, over one hundred years old. And by twenty ten, the club hadn’t won a premiership, which is what you would call a championship. And in, in in thirty years, they had a huge debt. They had a declining membership down to about thirty, zero zero zero, a fractured culture. And they had this reputation for moving on coaches really quickly because they they weren’t delivering results. So it’s very it was very much performance focused leadership. And it was known for not being a finals contender. And most people had written them off completely. So what happened over the next decade was totally remarkable. And I’m going to admit, like I am a huge fan of this club. However, I looked at it with immense pride and I rode the waves with them for decades. So I had that sense of feeling. And those who are members and supporters of this club had been through that roller coaster of emotion. So for so long. So over the next decade, they had they had set out this huge vision, a really big vision that by twenty twenty, they would, um, win three premierships. They would eliminate all their financial debt and they’d grow their membership from thirty five to seventy thousand. So by twenty twenty, they had won three premierships in four years. And the final one was in twenty twenty. They grew their membership to over one hundred thousand. They eliminated all their debt, and they built what is probably one of the most admired organizational cultures in Australian sport. And then, just as importantly, they face a significant transition where their key leaders and their players moved on and they had to start to rebuild from the bottom of the ladder in twenty twenty four. But what was really interesting, in twenty ten, the CEO created this amazing strategic narrative that he it was a rallying call to the the club, to the organisation, to the players. And he put it out there. And I’ve included that narrative, which he wrote himself in the book, and it’s really quite powerful. And of course, the narrative leaked at some point. And he was just the media just went to town on him. They basically attacked. They said in an interview, one one of well known media commentator said, aren’t you embarrassed? And the CEO said, no, I’m not embarrassed. I’m proud. We have a vision to come to compete and to be the best on and off the field. If we’re not locked into that, we might as well pack up and go home. And he was incredibly passionate. He never let go of that. And that was quite amazing. Um, but what I want to really focus on here is that this is not just a story about sport, it’s about how organizational transformation can happen and how you can, and how you can create that alignment and the cohesion that you need. So it’s not a story about a visionary CEO, although he absolutely was. And he was there for fourteen or fifteen years. It’s not a story about the brilliant coach. And he, he was amazing. Uh, and they stuck with him even though they were losing for the first six years. They were showing improvement, but still losing. And they had a determined president. And the president, um, Peggy O’Neal, was from the South in America, and she had migrated to Australia and wanted to connect with Aussie. So she found herself a team, and that was Richmond. And she became the first female president of an Australian rules football club, which was quite incredible. So all three were really exceptional. But what Brendan Gale, the CEO, was determined to say was that the whole story is actually about shared leadership and that ownership and the accountability that’s distributed across the whole organisation, the vulnerability and the trust that they’ve built really quite deliberately and carefully, the love and the commitment that they had for each other. And they talk about love. And it was for it was that commitment to something bigger than themselves. And they had this incredibly deep connection to their members, to their partners, and to their community. And then they also have that financial and organizational foundation that they built that was made that performance possible. Um, so it’s a story that about any team or organization that needs to perform, to endure and to fight back when things get hard. Well, in your chapter, one of the other things that you do include is this idea of a cohesion cycle that shows organizations are not static. They, they move. And, um, there are four phases and maybe leaders know about them or maybe it’s not even taught in schools, but, um, could you say what these four phases are? And I think one of the things you point out is that a lot of organizations get tripped up and one of them that they tend to go wrong on and, and it has a cost that goes with that not knowing about cohesion cycle. Mhm. Well, when I was, when I was working through the story and looking at what what is happening with cohesion and performance and having that winning culture, but having a healthy culture as well. Uh, and looking at how Richmond went through the fight, through it. It occurred to me that cohesion is absolutely, absolutely not linear. And so I created this cycle because it’s very much cyclical and it’s got four phases. So the first one is creating that shared meaning and momentum. So getting people genuinely aligned around purpose, direction and moving forward, moving as one, building the cohesion and the culture. So establishing trust, uh, the behaviors and the ways that they were going to work today, work together and then sustaining that high performance, which is really maintaining alignment and avoiding complacency. And then the final, um, part of the cycle is the dynamic realignment and the renewal. So it’s adapting when the circumstances change, while you’re still staying grounded in your values, who you are. And that last phase is what I think is where most organizations struggle, because that renewal is asking something different of leaders and the people. It’s asking them to let go of, of what has worked and to sit with that uncertainty and to rebuild. And a lot of organizations don’t necessarily have the patience because it’s about speed or potentially even the self-awareness of where they’re really at. And so the cost of that is quite real. So they’ll either cling to something that made them successful or trying to protect that past rather than focusing on that future, or they might panic and make really reactive decisions that undermine those foundations that got them there. Right. So you’ll see them lose their way to a degree. So when you’re in uncertainty, you need to be able to work through what’s shifting around you with things that aren’t, that aren’t within your control. You need to be able to manage and move with what’s emerging. And that’s that added adaptation and the resilience, um, that Richmond has been putting in place. And it shows what that looks like. So once cohesion fractures under that pressure, rebuilding is a much, much harder task. Um, and when I spoke with the CEO and also with the, their high performing psychologists, high performance psychologist, doctor McLeod, it demonstrated that it’s really hard for them, but they have the real belief and they know what it takes. And the psychologist, doctor McLeod, she actually mentioned that it was really important for the team to learn how to fail. Well, because all the others who weren’t in the championships to date knew how to do that better than them. So they had to relearn things and I had to learn from that failure. So it’s a story that’s really telling you about how you can rebuild as well. And so everyone’s on board. They told their story. They’ve been telling their story well since twenty twenty four. They hit the bottom of the ladder. They’ve been rebuilding. Everyone’s on board with them within the organization, their community, their members, the players, everyone’s on board. So as they’re going through that phase, that ugly scrutiny that they used to get in there, the earlier years of the transformation just isn’t there anymore. So as comms people, what you can learn is that you can have a clear, honest narrative about where you are in that cycle, and that changes how people experience that journey, uh, with you as they move through that with you. Oh, and you’re going to have to keep us posted on the comeback. And I’m sure as a fan, are you a member? I am. Okay, well, send us the scores and keep us posted. And maybe there’s a new chapter, a new book in that. And then for those of us that are, we’re stuck with Ted Lasso. There is a new season of Ted Lasso coming. In case you haven’t seen all the sneak previews that they’re running. Uh, Ted goes back to the UK to lead a women’s football team. So, um, more or less, with the excitement going on there, and this Richmond Football Club has a has introduced a women’s team as well. All right. Well, maybe they’re, maybe they’re borrowing some storylines from your part of the world. Perhaps. Yeah. Um, let’s turn things now to shall. We’ve heard a little bit from you about some collaboration technologies and a few other things, but your chapter was focused on community. And I think you start out by sort of going, you know, there’s this standard standing belief out there that the reason companies exist is to create a profit, to make money. And some might argue that if you don’t have a profit, your company’s not going to be around very long. So it’s not really a nice thing. It’s really a good thing to have, but it’s not the only thing. And maybe you could explain where you’re coming from and how that sets up what’s coming in the rest of the chapter. Yeah. Well, I’ve heard this from a number of CEOs. When talking about a corporate purpose. They say our purpose is to make money. Our purpose is to return a profit to the investors, to the shareholders, to the owners, whoever they may be. Uh, and my answer to that is this is every company. How does this differentiate you in the marketplace? How does this help people understand who you are and what you do? And this is why we have statements. We’ve all heard about value statements and vision statements and mission statements and purpose statements. And I think a lot of organizations go through these as rote exercises without planning on taking them very seriously. I think the smart organizations are the ones that recognize that the profit is an outcome of living their mission well and living their purpose well. If they do that well, they’re going to make gobs of money, along with effective strategic planning and financial controls and the like. Uh, but if all you want to do is make money, you’ll do just about anything to make that money. It doesn’t focus you on audiences on customer segments, uh, or on marketplaces. So if we look at the profit motive as an outcome of, you know, primarily the organization’s mission, uh, then it’s a lot easier to define the approaches that we’re going to take to, to making that profit. And you talk in the chapter also about communities. And you take a sort of I mean, one of the cuts you looked at was this whole notion of generational differences and how they impact, um, the definitions of community, but also sort of the way we go about communicating with these different segments. Yeah. And in fact, it’s a very timely topic. Giving an email thread I was reading just this morning from among Ibcs fellows, uh, and there was an interesting, uh, contribution from one of the fellows who noted that they were no longer participating here in Circle of Fellows. Uh, because the younger demographic, the ones in their twenties aren’t going to sit and watch an hour long panel discussion. And we’re not going to appeal to that segment with, with this show. Now, I feel that that’s not mutually exclusive that the this Circle of fellows panel discussion, um, has value. Uh, even though we do need to find better ways to communicate with the younger demographic, but, uh, especially these days, given the influence of digital media and social media, uh, and the tendency to watch snackable content, we used to call it, uh, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, uh, bite sized content. I was just reading, uh, within the last couple of weeks. I didn’t know these existed before this. Their clip forms, uh, these are companies that pay freelancers to take long form content and create short thirty, forty five second clips out of them that the owners can then post to YouTube shorts or Instagram reels or, uh, wherever TikTok, uh, and monetize those clips. And I was talking at work about this with somebody who said, yeah, I never watched Saturday Night Live. I just watched the clips that get posted. Um, so it’s a real thing. Uh, the attention span is very short. And, uh, one of our new fellows who was in the classroom was saying in this thread that it’s hard to keep the students attention for more than a couple of minutes, that they’ve got their phones out. Uh, and they’re consuming this, this bite sized content rather than paying attention to, to longer form content. So as we look at connecting with communities, whether it’s internal or external, I think that demographic cut is, is really important. And by the way, Brad, um, since I think I’m the one who can see this, we have a comment from, uh, Mirko coming in. Yeah. It says, do you have any suggestions for prompting genuine conversations between colleagues of different generations? Because in my experience, chit chatting about Taylor Swift isn’t enough to bond. Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. Uh, and what if it’s the Grateful Dead? I mean, we can all bond there, right? That appeals to generate. I mean, there are new Deadheads coming on the scene all the time. Uh, Bob Weir believed that it was, uh, that they’d be listening to this music in three hundred years. So, I mean, I think that’s a fine way to, to bond with, with people. Uh, no, I think it’s important that there be some resources available in the organizations to help generations understand each other. Uh, there was a book many, many years ago about communicating with generations. And they had a, a series of, of matrices, uh, that, that explained exactly what the influences were from each generation and what their communication preferences were and the like. Um, I think, you know, updating that and making something like that available. Doing some training, uh, having some opportunities to connect with people from different generations, uh, is important, uh, by and large in the workplace though. Um, I think there’s, there’s more that the generations have in common than, uh, distinguishes them or sets them apart. Uh, and I think when we’re working on a team, when we’re working toward common objectives, it becomes less of an issue and less of a challenge. Yeah. I’ve said oftentimes when I was doing some global communications work that you get people together from all different parts of the globe, and there would be sort of like, you don’t understand us. You don’t speak our language. You don’t know our culture. Um, there’s no hope for you. And it’s like, we’ll get that out of your system because yes, we’re all different. Uh, I think that is not just different countries from which we come. It’s also we’re all wired differently. We’re made up differently. But get out of the system and let’s focus, as you said, on the things we share. And usually the list of what we have in common is, um, a whole lot longer than the, what is different about us because we are all humans. Um, so I think the other one that I would love to ask you about is that some of the values that you talk about in the book that are sort of, there’s the old school corporate values of things like quality and customer service and value for money that tend to show up as objectives for an organization. But they’re also being they’re not being thrown aside, but they’re being joined by others that are as important, if not more important, to other generations. Is that a way of sort of shaping what it is you said? Yeah, I think it is in some organizations. Uh, some are sticking with the old types of values. And then there are those where the values are just words on the wall that have no bearing on the reality in the in the workplace and lead to a lot of cynicism. Uh, employees, uh, but in organizations that take it seriously, I have seen a shift toward the adoption of, of values like trust and community. In fact, uh, community is one of the values of the company where I work. And it’s taken very seriously, both internally in terms of the community of employees and, and sort of the subcommunities that exist within that population, but also the communities in which we work. Uh, you could also look at the marketplaces we’re in as a kind of community, but, uh, if, if you have a value and you know, what do we mean by values? It’s basically, uh, these are the things that we believe that are going to drive our behaviors and our decisions. They’re our are core beliefs as an organization, and if we believe the community is important, then we are going to make decisions around how our decisions affect those communities. We’re going to bring the communities in to some of those decision making processes, and we’re going to support employees in their embrace of those communities, both internally and externally. I think if you believe in communities internally, you’re going to support the creation and the sustaining of employee resource groups. Those those sub communities can come together and engage with each other, but also be a resource to the organization about, you know, our needs, our differences, what we can contribute, what we’re looking for out of the organization, um, as well as providing the time and the resources to go out into the communities where we work. Um, and, uh, make a difference there. Uh, so yeah, I think the same applies to, to things like trust and some of those other values that, that we didn’t see, uh, twenty five, thirty five years ago. You mentioned the word trust there. And I know that Cindy had sent me a note earlier saying that one of her observations from looking at all the chapters and, uh, the whole book was that trust seemed to show up in all seven of the C’s. And maybe, Cindy, you could sort of, you know, how did you see this and connect the dots across the chapters and maybe after you have a chance to talk about it, we could get the lead author of the why did she trust all of us? Right. Well, as I tell my students, trust is needed in every relationship. And we always talk about trust is the ultimate value that communication can bring to the company. Because from there, like shell said, profits result in that in in terms of communication and collaboration, though, if you trust each other, you are much more likely to share information. So you better collaborate and you also want the other person to succeed more likely. So I think that that’s where the core of it comes in is that that trust is so important because it is the top of the pyramid in getting something accomplished between people. And Diane, did you see that as, uh, a subtheme coming through? Doesn’t trust doesn’t start with C, so we couldn’t include it. But, um, how key is it? Absolutely, absolutely. The future of communication depends on trust now more than ever. So trust is just fundamental to success. We are in an age of such a dearth of trust across our relationships in business and outside of businesses. And I think that stems somewhat from Covid. Um, the whole, the whole fake news and all of that really started to spiral spiral, um, this, this lack of trust. And that’s why there’s so much fear. And I believe so much polarization because we’re not trusting each other and we’re not actually communicating with each other in a way that opens up dialogue. We’re coming with our opinions and trying to, to get people to believe what we believe without first understanding where they’re coming from, why they care about what they care about. And back to the whole community building thing. What is it that we can do to find out the motivators we each have Uh, in our lives and build on those and, and build that trust, which is going to lead to all kinds of positive outcomes. Mhm. Can I jump in here, Brad? Please? Um, a couple of things. It occurs to me, and I’ve said this numerous times when I’ve run, uh, when I’ve worked on facilitating workshops with, with organizations about building, uh, culture and values and defining the behaviors and all that sort of thing. And when trust comes up as something that they want as a value, I push back on them. Because to me, trust is something that’s earned through someone’s experience. Um, with, with you, whether it’s as an organization, as a leader, as an individual. It’s not something it’s, it’s that person is granting that to a degree. So it’s not a value per se. It’s an Outcome and the behaviors, uh, it’s what makes you trustworthy. So, you know, are you, have you got that? Are you behaving with integrity? Um, you know, with congruence? Uh, is it, uh, are you accountable? Responsible, all these sorts of things. Do you deliver what you say you’re going to do? So it’s, you know, going back to Jane’s chapter, for example, that is that’s quite foundational. So I would, I would push back on that. And at the moment, what we’re seeing is there’s a huge gap in organizations between leaders and employees, and trust is breaking down. And when trust is breaking down, the employees don’t hear what the leaders are saying. They don’t listen. And so you have to really work on creating the right conditions for people to trust you. If I go back to my chapter in the book, uh, there was an Example of in at the end of twenty sixteen, uh, that football club had again was, you know, deteriorating performance and everyone started to jump on the bandwagon and attack them. Uh, instead of getting rid of the coach, they, he had gone, he had been sent to Harvard to do, um, some work on leadership. He came back and he did the triple H sessions with them. So he increased. He created an environment where he started first and he they shared stories. So they did three stories each. Every single leader in the in the team did that as well as every single player. And then that spread through the whole organizations. So they shared a story about a hero who shared a story about a hardship, some sort of defining challenge, and they shared a highlight for them. So some a moment of joy or an achievement. And they shared that with each other and that vulnerability, that space to be to share something about yourself that’s quite personal, that means a lot to you really created this environment of trust. And that’s where they lifted. And it did that through the rest of the organization. So and it just helped them work better together. They were able to collaborate better. They really had that sense of belonging and community. So trust is fundamental and Cindy is absolutely spot on. It is the common thread that runs through the whole thing. Now we have touched a little bit about on AI, um, artificial intelligence. And um, I loved what film filmmaker Guillermo del Toro famously said a while ago about this. He said, I’m not afraid of artificial intelligence. I’m afraid of natural stupidity. Um, which okay, there’s a lot of that going around these days. What I would love to know is a little bit about, um, you know, we’re now putting things into prompts. Are we going to start putting the seven seas into prompts to help us solve some of these issues that we’ve been talking about across our organizations? And do leaders have instant, you know, if I just give it to copilot, it’ll take care of things for me. Or is AI not a help in things that are so close to human? It could be a thinking partner for you across the seven seas, but at the at fundamentally what we’re talking about is fundamentally human, basically. So, you know, it’s built like a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about, whether it’s, um, collaboration, connection, cohesion, um, compassion, all of that is built through conversations. And that’s very much human, not necessarily the conversations with the AI. It can help you, but it doesn’t give you that it’s not that nuanced. That’s something extra. That’s something that’s unexpected, that will come through a conversation. I mean, people come into the workplace and into relationships because everyone is is unique and different in their own way. No two brains are the same. You know, you’ve got, you know, we’re all built on our own lived experiences, our cultures, our biases, all of that sort of stuff. And we’re bringing that into the conversation. The AI is not going to predict that. Absolutely. That’s that’s back to the human to human connection that still is going to be the differentiator. And humans will really still be driving creativity and innovation. They’ll bring judgment. They’ll bring relationship building that an artificial intelligence platform cannot just just spitballing here. Uh, I could see, uh, just theoretically Taking a PDF of the entire book and training my model on it, and then launching an agent internally to look at the email, uh, archive and look at what has been happening in Slack or teams and other collaboration platforms to identify trends that either, uh, support or, uh, represent examples of the opposite of what is presented in the text of the book so that the humans in the organization can take action on that. But, you know, it provides the context for identifying issues, uh, things that you might be able to leverage, things that you might be able to correct, but you wouldn’t know about them if it didn’t have the context to identify those trends. Uh, based on the principles of the book, just one idea of how that could work. Isn’t that the C in calibration? Yeah, I love celebration authors. Not here. Yes, I would like to add a point to that, that if leaders are going to lead authentically, they can’t rely on the AI to do it for them. They can rely on AI for the background, the information as well described, but they still have to put themselves out there to lead authentically. MM. Is there. Interestingly, I, Neville and I just did an episode of our show about a study that found that increasingly, leaders are delegating decision making to AI, which makes you wonder why they’re getting paid, what they’re getting paid, if they’re not bringing their experience and their thought leadership to, to bear on, on decisions and just delegating them, um, abdicating them to a model. Well, that depends on the type of decision, doesn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, is there a place that one can go besides reading the book to learn how to Navigate the seven seas and how do we get leaders to behave that way? Are they teaching this in schools? Are there classes besides reading? What else is there? I listening to this podcast. Yeah. There you go. I think, um, I think this is a massive opportunity in our world today for, for decision makers across an organization, not just communication professionals, but especially communication professionals to step up to lead. And this is where we can get traction with all of the wisdom from this work, with the thought leaders in our profession and communication to, to really take the strategic approach and underpin that with some tactical keys that can be implemented inside organizations. So, Diane, you have to be happy about this launch in the book and and the impact it’s had so far. It’s your first book. And I know it was not an easy process to get it out and about, but you did reach that number one spot in the Amazon leadership training category. Um, if one is if people want to get a hold of the book, how do they do that? And then any plans for a follow on? Oh great question. Well, you know, the ever present Amazon is the place to go to get it quickly. I, I will be in Toronto at IBC World Conference with some copies for anyone who would like to. And I’ll actually be giving some away at the crisis SIG on Sunday. So if you can be there for that. Um, I have several to give away there. Um, so Amazon there certainly reach out to me on LinkedIn. That’s kind of where I, I live most of the time. And yes, a second edition is rumbling around in my head because I know, um, all of you have had thoughts since since creating your chapters about how even in this short amount of time they have evolved, your topics have evolved somewhat. So, um, stand by. I’m going to, I’m going to give away a couple of copies in my, um, session on the Monday when I’m speaking. So, um, hopefully people come along to that and they can grab one of these awesome books. Okay, we need to get autographs from one another when we’re in Toronto because autographing doesn’t work well. Remote control. Oh, you could auction off a copy of the book that had all our autographs on it. Oh, that would be an achievement. I think there’s an auto pen that does that, right? It could be a collector’s item, for sure. Yeah. Put it on a baseball. Yeah. I’m delighted to have had a chance to converse with all of you and sort of probe a little bit more into what’s in the book. Certainly would encourage anybody to pick this up. And one of the things that I always like to put a plug in, it’s the conversations that take place in the circle. It is books like this that you, if you’re looking at doing certification, um, through the G, triple C for your career, these are the kinds of topics that you need to at least be aware of. And, you know, this sort of discussion and listening to people who’ve been at this for a little while are going to help prepare you for that next step in your career. So a little bit of a plug for, um, the global communication certification, uh, Council and for the book. Um, and with that, I think I would love to just thank you guys. Cindy Schmieg Zoro, artist, Shell Holtz, um and the lead author Diane Chase for taking part in this wonderful conversation. Our next episode of The Circle of Fellows will be taking place in June. Stay tuned. We’ll get you the exact time and date and watch the normal channels. One twenty nine is the episode number. Shall. We’ll be back in this seat, and it’s going to feature members of the new class of twenty twenty six Iabc fellows. Um, and they’re actually being introduced at IVC World Conference. So give them a day to decompress after that and then they’ll be on the program. We also have to thank Anna Willy, who’s our executive producer and our chief fellow herder. Um, and I want to also thank you guys for joining us and, and watching through this session and for the Iabc Circle fellows. I’m Brad Whitworth. Hi. Thanks all. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. Thank you.

The post Circle of Fellows #128: The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass, Part 2 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The SAGA Agency AI Survey results are in, and small agency owners are feeling great about AI. Maybe too great. 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.

The headline figures look impressive: 89% of respondents report regular or widespread AI use, 74% use it daily, and 88% say they’ve seen productivity gains. But Chip isn’t buying it. He questions whether the sample skews toward early adopters, or more likely, whether agency owners simply don’t have a clear enough picture of what “good” AI use looks like elsewhere.

When 53% say they’re ahead of their peers but only 13% say they’re behind, the math doesn’t work. As Gini puts it, they’re probably grading themselves on usage habits, not operational depth.

Next, Chip and Gini look at what agencies are actually doing with AI. Most activity falls squarely into what Chip calls “generative AI 101” — drafting emails, writing social posts, generating blog content. The more interesting stuff is largely absent. AI-assisted design work barely registers.

Only 74% are even using AI to revise or edit content, a number both hosts find inexplicable given how easy and useful that is. Gini’s own example of running an article through an AP style agent before sending it to a notoriously precise editor at PR Daily illustrates exactly the kind of practical, low-friction habit that should be universal by now.

Another data point they discuss is the disconnect between productivity gains and revenue. Agencies report getting faster, but their top-line numbers are flat or down. Gini’s read is that AI efficiency is getting absorbed into existing scope rather than converted into new value.

Agencies are over-servicing clients at the same fees, filling freed time with more of the same work instead of building something new.

On the pricing side, almost no one reported clients pushing for discounts tied to AI use. Instead of a reduction in cost, the larger enterprise clients are asking about data governance, usage policies, and procurement compliance. Chip advises unless your agency has the infrastructure to manage those requirements consistently, that’s a market best left to someone else. [read the transcript]

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 7.0

Links from this episode

• Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare
• AI Copyright Lawsuits Pose Growing Risk for Communicators
• Practical Considerations for Managing IP Risk in AI-Generated Content
• Best Practices for Mitigating Copyright Risks in AI-Generated Content
• AI in Litigation Series: An Update on AI Copyright Cases in 2026
• Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years
• Google Search as You Know It Is Over
• Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage
• Including Podcasts in Your PR Strategy
• Podcast Guesting vs. Traditional PR: What Works in 2026
• U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008
• U.S. Podcast Consumption Reaches Record High: The Infinite Dial 2025
• You Can’t Beat AI.
• Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR
• AI and the End of Billable Hours
• The Clipping Economy: How Short-Form Video “Clippers” Are Overrunning the Internet
• How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet
• The Clipping Economy
• The Case for and Against Clipping
• Inside the “Clipping Farms” Driving Fintech’s Marketing Boom
• Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents
• Businesses Will Have Over 150,000 AI Agents by 2028, Says Gartner
• AI Agents Introduce a New Class of IT Management Challenges
• Why Most Enterprise AI Agents Will Fail — And What Leaders Are Missing
• How Smart Governance Can Contain Agentic Sprawl
• Six Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Agentic AI in 2026
• Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI “Agents” to Use on Unclassified Networks

Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report

• Turn Your Blog Posts Into Podcast Episodes
• Google Search as you know it is over
• Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years
• WordPress 7.0 Field Guide
• AVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026

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

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 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, that’s Pocket Casts. For you, it may be Apple Podcasts or any of the countless places that you can get podcasts these days, including Spotify. So we’re there. We’re on Spotify, as is this podcast For Immediate Release. And speaking of For Immediate Release, Neville, we’ve done a few episodes since the last long-form monthly episode.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, we have published quite a few, four in fact, over the past month. All of them have listener comments and that’s unusual, pleasantly so, every single episode with comments. So let’s run them down. So in the long-form, episode 511 for April, on the 27th of April, our lead story was the tale of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and how in spite of AI policies, training programs and guardrails, a public document went out filled with AI-generated errors. No human in the loop, seems, as we explored what went wrong and what it means for organizations trying to operationalize AI responsibly. We also talked about new evidence that AI is not leveling the workplace, why AI is raising the bar for PR, the rise of slopaganda, and much more. Comments, Shel, on that one?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, a couple, and a couple of responses to the comments. We’ll start with Wayne Asplund who said, for what it’s worth, I have a way I tend to think about this. Simpler work, smarter decisions, better customer outcomes. You should be focused on all three when working with AI. If not, you’re reducing quality and raising risk. The obvious example is what you talk about. If your only care is speeding up work and you’re not focused on the customer outcome, which describes many people, magnify the risk and reduce quality. You reduce the smart side of things too, because you’re not engaging with the content. The model works for all sorts of AI activities. And Neville, you had a response to that. You said, simpler work, smarter decisions, better outcomes is a good test of whether AI is actually adding value or just accelerating activity. The law firm example feels like a case where the first of those dominated: speed and efficiency, but the other two didn’t hold. And that’s where things break down. I particularly like your point about engagement. If people aren’t really engaging with the content, then the smarter decisions part never really happens. It just looks like it does. The balance you described feels like something organizations need to make much more explicit, not just assume. And then we had Philip Weiss who loved the word slopaganda. My thoughts on this are from an earlier post, and he shared the post that he wrote called Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare, and the link to that will be in the show notes. And Wayne Asplund replied to Phillips saying, “some of the creative terms coming out at the moment. One newspaper I read stoked the fear of job losses by talking about the job- the job-pocalypse. And another article I saw used the term e-idiots.” Definitely going to pinch that one.

Neville Hobson: Ha Excellent. Great to have.

Shel Holtz: And by the way, the idiot’s comment reminds me of a T-shirt that I saw the other day that said any fool can use a computer, many do.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, it’s good when we see that kind of engagement, comment discussion taking place in the all on LinkedIn, of course, right?

Shel Holtz: yeah, yeah, although I think I got one or two of these actually off of Facebook this month. I can’t remember which ones, but.

Neville Hobson: cool. Excellent. OK. So our next show, we asked the question, when does AI stop supporting decisions and start shaping them? In episode 512, published on the 4th of May, we explored a provocative idea that AI is becoming the new executive influencer. Some research suggests leaders are already relying on AI for the majority of the decisions. But what does that really mean in practice? We have comments, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Vincent Brunel left a comment saying, accountability question is the one that keeps me up at night when AI shapes the outcome, who actually owns the decision? The algorithm suggested it can’t become the new, I was just following orders. And Dean Landaish, I’ve known Dean, God, I can’t tell you how long through IABC. Having done lots of genealogy work with AI, its use for policy and decision guidance frightens me. Even with safeguards in place, AI systems will eventually tell you what you want to hear rather than facts or even even-handed evaluation. Like the social media algorithms, it eventually feeds you what it thinks you want based on patterns. Aside from writing progressively more restrictive prompts to stop this, I’ve had to go so far as erasing and dumping my user history. I wonder how many neophyte business users will build in proper safeguards to prevent the bias creep that AI builds over time.

Neville Hobson: And next, a Harvard Business Review article about redesigning marketing organizations for the agentic age provided context in FIR 513 on the 11th of May as we explored what happens when AI moves beyond generating content to orchestrating workflows and organizational systems themselves. We discussed examples of using Claude CoWork and AI agents in communication workflows. Work that once took hours now happens in minutes. Comments, right?

Shel Holtz: David Bradfield from up in Toronto. Great episode, Shel and Neville. The shift to the agentic age is less of a tech hurdle and more of an accountability crisis. If a communicator can’t hold an autonomous agent accountable to the brand’s ethical and strategic guardrails, the operating model isn’t just slow, it’s dangerous. I’ve just launched Avalere Advisory, which is very much aligned to the opportunities you cover. The narrative code only works if you have the right cultural upskilling and governance to match. Moving managers from task supervisors to agent auditors is key. I love the focus on the narrative code. It’s something we were building into my last corporate role for our CEO and other executives. It’s the backbone of the unified model communication teams need to succeed. And another comment from Vincent Bruneau who wrote a year ago, this was demos. Now it’s workflow design and organizational architecture. The speed of that shift is what makes the experimentation point so critical. The gap between those who are testing and those who are watching is widening fast.

Neville Hobson: And finally, was Twitter a unique moment in media history rather than a repeatable model? That’s a question we asked in episode 514 on the 18th of May when we explored the growing arguments that text-based social networks are entering irreversible decline, not because text itself is disappearing, but because giant algorithmic public feeds may no longer fit how people want to communicate online. And comments, One comment.

Shel Holtz: One comment from Mark Hillary, who says, of smaller rooms is a good analogy. I have my friends and family on various private WhatsApp groups. This now serves the same function that social media used to perform. As social media becomes more more aligned with entertainment rather than connectivity to a network, everything changes for people who want to communicate to a wide group of people.

Neville Hobson: Brilliant. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Yep, that’s right, and 515 will get underway in earnest here in just a minute, but first I do want to let you know that Circle of Fellows is coming up, the May episode this coming week. It’s the second of our special episodes with Brad Whitworth moderating a panel to discuss the remaining chapters of the book, The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass. The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, is going to join Brad along with the remaining fellows who wrote chapters who weren’t part of the last episode. That includes Zora Artis, who wrote the Cohesion chapter, Cindy Schmieg, who authored the Collaboration chapter, and me. And I actually was the moderator last month. This month, Brad is doing it so I can be there to talk about the chapter I wrote on community. The panel is going to be live streamed at 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time this coming Thursday, May 28th. Participants of the live stream will be able to ask questions, share comments, observations and experiences and be part of the discussion. But if you can’t join us live, there is, of course, the audio podcast and the YouTube replay coming up after the episode has been recorded. So as I said, we’re going to jump into our first report dealing with copyright right after this. I have two reports today that have nothing to do with AI at all. I hope that’ll be refreshing, but let’s start with AI. According to the law firm Davis and Gilbert, 99% of public relations firms are now using AI. That’s a pretty dominant number and it could be a rounding error that would take you up to a hundred percent, I suppose, or maybe there was one company that said, uh-uh, not us. But the top use cases should come as no surprise. They’re using it to write content, take notes and summarize meetings, spark ideas and monitor media. In other words, AI is touching just about everything communicators produce. And while we’re busy adopting these tools, copyright laws have been piling up. Now the specifics I’m about to cover are based on US copyright law, but copyright is a thing in most of the developed world. So even though these cases may not apply in the UK or Europe, principles, at least some of them probably do. So let’s look at an update from the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright published in March that walks through six of the most important AI copyright cases working their way through the courts right now. First, there’s Thaler versus Perlmutter. The Supreme Court denied cert on March 2nd, which means the rule is now settled, at least for now. Purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. Period. If a human didn’t, and here’s some core language to keep in your mind, if a human didn’t make a meaningful creative contribution, you cannot and do not own it. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court ruled last June that training on copyrighted books was fair use, but storing pirated copies was not. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. The fairness hearing happened just this past May 14th, like a week and a half ago. The judge didn’t rule from the bench, she took it under submission, but observers expect final approval any time now, and authors are looking at roughly $3,000 per work. And by the way, I have applied for that relief for several of the books I’ve written. And if I get it, Neville, you’ll get a piece of that three thousand for the How to Do Everything with Podcasting book.

Neville Hobson: ha ha! Twenty years after we wrote it. Yeah, okay. Wonderful. Wonderful.

Shel Holtz: That’s right. But yeah, it’ll still earn you 1500 bucks if this all goes through. Yeah, in Kadrey v. Meta, we saw the same fair use conclusion on training, but a different judge in the same district disagreed with the Bartz judge on market harm. He basically told the plaintiffs they brought the wrong argument and signaled that a future plaintiff who actually builds on

Neville Hobson: Excellent. Look forward to it.

Shel Holtz: An evidentiary case on market harm, showing that AI-trained models flood the market and depress demand for the original works, that could win. Then there’s Disney and Universal versus Midjourney, where the studios are alleging willful infringement of their characters, Elsa, Shrek, Darth Vader, the minions, and ask for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work, plus an injunction and disgorgement of Midjourney’s profits. Now, here’s where the story has often gotten more interesting. Since Norton Rose published their article pointed to the Disney OpenAI deal, the one where Disney was investing a billion dollars and licensing characters for OpenAI’s Sora video app as a sign of two things. First, that formal licensing was becoming the path forward. And second, that every signed deal strengthens the case against AI companies that didn’t license because it proves a licensing market exists, which is exactly the kind of market harm courts look for in fair use cases. Well, on March 24th, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora. The consumer app went dark on April 26th. The API goes dark in September. And Disney’s billion-dollar investment, the so-called bridge between Hollywood and AI never closed. According to Deadline, a Disney insider said simply, the deal is not moving forward. So one of the most cited pieces of evidence that an AI licensing market was emerging, it just evaporated. That makes the legal terrain more uncertain for communicators, not less. You might still be tempted to say that’s an interesting legal story, but it’s a problem for the AI companies and law firms. Not for me, not so fast. A PRSA panel reported in a recent piece on the PRSA site titled, copyright lawsuits pose a growing risk for communicators, quoted Samantha Rothaus, a partner at Davis+Gilbert, who made the point that for communicators, accuracy in AI-generated content isn’t just about looking smart. Inaccuracy, she said, can be misleading and deceptive, and that creates regulatory and legal risk. Another panelist, Michael Lasky, said he sees significant gaps in AI policies and governance within the PR field, and those gaps create significant risk. And Debevoise & Debevoise & Plimpton article from early March written by attorneys who advise marketing and communication clients lays out exactly where that risk lives for us, for communicators, not for the AI labs. And it lives in three places. One, ownership. If your team uses AI to generate a campaign asset, a logo concept, a hero image, an ad headline, and there’s no meaningful documented human contribution, you can’t copyright it. You don’t own it, and a competitor could pick it up tomorrow and use it. And there’s nothing you could do about it. Two, vicarious liability. Debevoise, and I know I’m not pronouncing that name right. It’s the name of a law firm. They flagged this and it’s worth understanding. If you’re using a third-party AI tool, and you are, and that vendor’s model was trained on infringing material, courts have already held in non AI cases, that the company using the tool can be liable too. The rule is roughly this. If you benefit financially from someone else’s infringement and you had the contractual ability to control how they were operating, you can be on the hook, even though you didn’t do the infringing yourself. So the AI provider’s training practices and your indemnification language are now your problem too. Have you read your AI vendor agreement? Do you know what’s indemnified? What’s excluded? And third is output infringement. If an AI tool produces something substantially similar to a copyrighted work, even unintentionally, even because of a sloppy prompt, and you publish it, you can be sued. One analyst made the point that images are especially exposed. Reverse image search trolls are already a cottage industry, and AI is just going to feed them. So what should communicators be doing? Three things, none of them particularly unusual. First and probably most important is to build an IP clearance step into your AI workflow, the same way you’d clear a stock photo image or a freelancer’s contribution. Document the human contribution to anything you actually need to own and read your vendor contracts with your legal team, specifically for training data sources and indemnification carve-outs. The legal landscape is going to keep shifting fast, as the Sora story demonstrates. Communicators who get ahead of it now are the ones who will be in a position to keep using these tools aggressively. Everyone else is going to be playing defense, and defense is a really bad place to communicate from.

Neville Hobson: quite a picture. So I think that actually makes it adds a significant dimension to what we’ve already been talking about, not just you and I, but many, many people we have on this podcast. On the example I mentioned in an episode recently, we talked about the law firm that submitted, it was actually a document to a court in a bankruptcy case. It was a corporate bankruptcy, with big numbers involved, riddled with errors because no one had checked it. So that’s been the focus: human in the loop has got to check it. It’s deeper than that, There’s your kind of, in a sense, your obvious level of foundation of the things you need to do to ensure that you’ve done everything you possibly can to ensure that what you produce using an AI assistant to help you. It doesn’t contain errors that can trip you up because you didn’t check it. Here we got something that makes that even worse sounding, frankly. What troubles me most is the statistic in the PRSA’s piece, quoting the law firms report they did that 99% of PR firms are using AI. And we already know from other reporting that, you know, many of those, I’m not going to say most because I don’t know, don’t have the governance in place to protect them. Do they have a human in the loop? I’m getting very cynical about hearing that phrase because I hear it like it’s a nice thing to say and there’s absolutely no substance behind it whatsoever because we’re seeing evidence and prominent examples. So there are others that aren’t so prominent, but they’re happening where they don’t have a human in So we’ve talked about this before. You had an idea a few episodes back that you need to have verification specialists. Maybe it had got to come to that because not everyone has the ability to verify. And even if you do, what’s the legal implication of that person? Is that the responsible person on behalf of your firm? What if they’re the intern doing that? It’s got to have someone with authority to do that kind of thing. So 99% using AI, the top reason. writing content, 79 percent. That really does make this sound very serious indeed, that you could run into deep trouble. Now, I know you said this is the examples you gave under US copyright law and copyright law is jurisdictional and it’s based on geographies. It hasn’t changed any in hundreds of years in that regard. So if you’re a global firm operating in 20 countries, you need to understand the copyright law in each of those 20 countries. So the risks are high, I would say. And you painted some dark picture there of here are the potential consequences if you don’t do this. But this needs to be part of your thinking. You mentioned as well, reverse copyright trolling to find stuff that could land you with a request of payment for the copyright infringement, stuff like that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the digital version of ambulance chasers.

Neville Hobson: AI-generated images. Right. But that’s part of the landscape, I guess. So it’s something to take seriously. I did note the concluding part from the PRSA story where they’re talking about this same law firm did a survey last autumn. Thirty-seven percent of PR companies they surveyed were developing their own closed proprietary AI systems specific to their clients. Will that protect them? I think it gives a false sense of security because I doubt it would. So you can’t think, I don’t need to use, you know, take your pick, Claude, Gemini, chat GPT or whatever. Even I create a bespoke version of the LLM, I’ll build something unique. If you haven’t got safeguards in for this, it won’t matter. You’re still going to run into trouble. So this is huge, I think. I can see lawyers everywhere rubbing their hands with glee because this needs legal input to this in each of those different jurisdictions of the copyright law.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’ll give you two quick examples just from my own experience in recent days. And by the way, Chris Penn, this goes back a couple of months, but he did publish a post on LinkedIn that gave you a prompt to use in order to check your output for copyright violations. And he said, it may not catch absolutely everything, but if you’re sued, you could pull up the fact that you did that as a good faith effort to ensure that you weren’t violating copyright. It could stand in your favor in a lawsuit, but presumably most of the instances it would actually catch. But these two instances that I’ve experienced recently, was a search I was doing. I use AI for tech support all the time. I find it better than tech support. And I was trying to resolve something. I won’t get into what it was, but it said, if And the language it used was very specific, right? It said, if you’re losing sleep over this, stop. Google has said that they understand that this is a bug. They’re aware of it. All of us are experiencing the same thing. They’re working on it. It should be fixed in a day or two. So I was looking for more information on this. So I went to Reddit and I did a search and there I found exactly that same language in a post that somebody had left in the discussion for this particular software product. So it’s not that Google Gemini had taken that information and put it in its own words. It had actually taken those words from whoever wrote that post and shared it with me as a response to a prompt on Google Gemini. So yeah, if that were copyrighted, that would be copyright infringement right there. And if I quoted it, that would be problematic. The other I shared on LinkedIn, I thought this was a really interesting story about somebody who uploaded a photo, an image and said, is an AI-generated image that I created. I prompted the model to use the style of Monet. And there were thousands and thousands, according to the article, there were like 1.6 million people who said, this is AI garbage, it’s slop, it’s horrible. Here’s what’s wrong with the art, the lighting, the brushstrokes. And then it was revealed it was actually a real Monet. It was not an AI-generated. He just said it was. And I shared that on LinkedIn, got some interesting comments. But one of the comments I got said, all AI-generated art is theft, presumably because all AI-generated art was trained on real art, just like all AI-generated text responses is based on text that it pulled off of the net. But with people having that attitude and the person who shared that comment isn’t the only one I’ve heard say that. You know that there are people out there who are looking for this. As I said a minute ago, the ambulance chasers of the digital era are the ones who are out there looking for something actionable and then going out and finding somebody to represent in a lawsuit based on that. So copyright and AI, especially in this period we’re going through right now with AI backlash in general, I think you’re going to see this activity ramp up. And I don’t see any reason why corporate communications using AI can’t be caught up in some of these legal actions.

Neville Hobson: There is plenty to think about in that case. So moving on to our next topic, if you’ve been following how AI is reshaping search, and I’m sure many of you have, we’ve talked about this on FIR before, including our discussion a few months ago about GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. Then what Google announced at the developer conference recently in May is the next chapter. And it’s a significant one. Two pieces caught my attention amongst the many reporting about this. Sarah Perez’s writing in TechCrunch and a report in the New York Times by Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen. Both cover the same announcement, but from different angles. And together, they paint a picture that communicators really need to sit with. Here’s what Google announced. The search box, that iconic long slender bar that barely changed since 2001 is being overhauled for the first time in 25 years. It is getting bigger, more conversational, and more interactive. But that’s almost the least interesting part. What’s really changing is what happens after you type. Instead, or you even speak, actually, now, instead of a list of links as part of an AI overview, Google will increasingly serve you AI-generated interactive experiences, custom visuals, dynamically built mini-apps, and what they’re calling information agents that work in the background around the clock, tracking the web on your behalf and alerting you when something relevant changes. TechCrunch makes the point starkly. Searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than humans. People will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. The New York Times goes further with a quote from Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers. The open web, said, is on the way out. Now think about what that means for communicators. We spend years adapting our content strategies, first for SEO, then for GEO, trying to get our content picked up and cited in AI-generated answers. But what’s the strategy when the answer isn’t a list of links, isn’t even a text summary with citations, but a dynamically generated interactive experience that never surfaces a source at all? That’s the question I want to dig into. We’ve moved from SEO to GEO, and now we may be moving into territory where there’s no citation game left to play. I’ve got some thoughts about that. But first, though, what do you think, this means for communicators? And what should they actually be doing differently right now?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think communicators need to adapt. We always have. So has the marketing world and the advertising world. When Google first came out, I mean, you know, first of all, I have to say, I think this idea that it’s the end of the open web is utter nonsense. If anybody can go build a website, then the web is open. The question is, can they be discovered? Well, depends on how well they play the game. It could be that they just want to notify their customers that this is where you come to do X, Y, and Z with this company that you have aligned with. So, you know, that could be easy. But, you know, if you want to be discovered more broadly, you’ll have to figure out how that gets done in this new world. There’s going to be a way. I do think some of the things that Google has introduced here are interesting. The agents… I don’t know, man. They just seem to me to be the AI version of Google Alerts. How many of the emails that I get every day are based on the alerts that I have set up for things related to the company I work for and the topics we discuss and the markets that we serve and things like that. I have all of these Google Alerts set up. I’ll be happy to make them agents now on Google, that’s just fine. I don’t see that that’s going to change my relationship with it all that much. It’s going to surface pretty much the same information. I do like the multimodal capabilities that they’ve introduced. You can now include multiple images and things like that in a search. But they’re not getting rid of those 10 links down at the bottom. You just have to scroll all the way past the AI overview, which is getting more sophisticated and occupying more of the page, but those 10 links are still going to be there. In fact, I was listening to the episode of Hardfork that dropped yesterday, and they interviewed Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. And he said, people are always going to want to be able to click a link, especially based on the kind of search they’re running. He says, that’s what Google does. We’re never going to abandon the links, but they certainly have pushed them farther down the page. And we know that the AI overviews have led to a significant decrease in the number of clicks that people are enacting on a search results page. So that kind of traffic has dried up to a large degree. So, you know, even though you can still get to those links, I don’t think that solves the problem for people who want to be discovered on the web. We’re going to have to figure this out. I would continue to look at the AEO slash GEO approach to visibility and also keep your eye on what the search experts tell us as they gain experience with this revised version of Google.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. I’m not sure that the links and AI overviews are going to stay as they currently are. I’m certain they’re not. One of the, in fact, three of the articles I read that go into quite significant technical detail about this are based on people’s interpretation, a lot of what was announced at the Google Developer Conference. So there’s no clean answer yet where this is going. We don’t know yet. But there are a number of directions worth looking at from a communicator’s point of view, I believe. So I’d start with if it means that the citation game, as I might describe it, was fundamentally about being findable. So you are signed, your content is cited, it shows up in AI overviews. So getting your content into the results that humans would click on. But that’s not what’s going to happen here. If agents are doing the searching and humans are acting on what the agents find, the question shifts from how do we get found to how do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from? That’s a subtler form of presence. It’s less about individual pieces of content, they’re more about sustained authoritative voice over time. This won’t happen quickly. So if you’ve not done prep, for overviews, you’re behind the curve on this because when this lands and becomes clear how it’s going to work, I think it’ll attract huge interest, particularly thinking about, we have a, one of the topics we’re going to talk about is on this AI agents topic, that you’ve got AI agents out there while you’re fast asleep or traveling or doing something else when you come back to your computer the next day or the next hour or whatever it might be. It presents you with the answers to your question. And they are unlikely to include links. They will be, in the sense, for many people, the complete answer to your question. You won’t need to click anywhere. That will appeal to a lot of people. So this is doing all the donkey work, as we might say. I think it suggests that owned channels will matter a great deal, not less. So a search as a distribution channel is being restructured. Direct relationships with audiences like lists, communities, podcasts, trusted platform, et cetera, become more valuable precisely because they don’t depend on being surfaced by an algorithm or an agent. The communicators who’ve invested in direct audience relationships are going to be better positioned than those who relied on search-driven traffic. And I think you made the point that AI overviews started something which was lessening click-throughs. And that is going to get even worse with this from a website owner’s point of view. There’s no click. So that whole model will have to change. So I think that said, there’s some other issues here too of interested communicators. The human moment is still the moment that matters. Even if an agent does the searching, a human makes a decision. So the communication challenge shifts to the point of decision rather than the point of discovery. That’s a more interesting place to operate, closer to the outcome, closer to the relationship. One of the downsides to thinking about this is you are still, let’s say, the human in the verification loop. You’ve got to check all this stuff. Do you just believe what the agent’s surface is? We’re not at the stage yet where it’s a bit like, self-driving cars, know, you’re 99% sure it’s not going to crash and kill you. Well, you actually need 100%. You don’t need 99%. And this could be in that kind of area.

Shel Holtz: I’m not even 100% driving my own cars 100% safe.

Neville Hobson: Well, you got it. You’ve got to conduct that. So the uncomfortable conclusion that I take from what I looked into was that some of what communicators have been doing for years, content volume, keyword optimization, SEO-driven publishing may genuinely be losing its value. So the honest conversation with clients and employees is we need to redirect effort from producing content for search algorithms to building genuine authority and direct audience relationships. That takes time and you will not see the benefit of that for a while. In the meantime, you’ve got utter disruption to the existing model heading our way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we definitely need to do that. But I do need to reiterate that as they were making the announcements about the brand new updates to Google search at I.O., they did double down on including reference links. Here’s what I got. Even though Google is transforming search from a simple box of links into an agent driven conversational interface powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, they are integrating reference links deeper into the experience. There’s going to be a split over how that’s done. If you’re getting AI overviews doing a regular search, they’ll still appear at the top of the standard results page and you’ll still get the blue links visible right below it. If you go into AI mode, click the AI mode button. It completely replaces the traditional results page. Within AI mode, websites are either explicitly cited as references within the AI response or they receive no visibility at all as there are no traditional link positions under.

Neville Hobson: Right. So that comes into the area of there’s no clean answer yet. So you’ve got the kind of vested interest vendor saying, well, the link’s going to be down here. I’ve not seen that prominently mentioned in any of the tech reports that I did read. Indeed, I’ve seen one that said this is not prominent at all. Where does that fit then? Or is it going to be parallel? If AI agents are going to be out there on your behalf doing all the search work, you don’t have to do anything. How does that fit? Is it going to be like, well, if I don’t want to use AI agents, I can still use the old search. Is that how it’s going to be? No one knows yet. So this will emerge, I’m pretty sure. And it may well be right that they’re scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. There are all the links I’m used to seeing. I don’t think that’s actually how it’s going to be, matter what they said in the I.O. Developer Conference. We don’t know.

Shel Holtz: or contextual.

Neville Hobson: So you and I are actually doing what everyone else is doing, speculating what it all might be. But there’s some clear direction, such as what I mentioned just now, for communicators in particular to pay attention to here, that you could see wind of change is blowing here. And whether there’s still going to be links at the bottom of the page or there’s an AI overview somewhere else on the page, you need to pay attention to this, what’s changing. The AI agents are going to really change things here.

Shel Holtz: Well, here’s the thing, even if there are links contextually in the narrative of the AI overview or there are still blue links below, people aren’t clicking them anyway because they’re getting that AI overview answer. And we talked about this when they first released the Amazon Echo because they talked about the issue of one. Yeah, we talked about the idea that this is one true answer. It’s not 10 links. And if you don’t like those, you can scroll to the next 10.

Neville Hobson: There you go. Four years and years ago, yeah, yeah.

Shel Holtz: It’s one true answer and you don’t know where they drew it from.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. But I think it’s shifting, though, the behavior, how it works, the idea that you enter a search term, either speak it or whatever it might be, and on the fly, will create interactive visuals. It will do all sorts of things that search can’t do until now. And so you won’t get an AI overview that’s just text. It might have links to it. Whenever links to visual, it’ll have the content there and then, as I understand it from what I’ve read, but hey, it’s not clear yet. So I’m sure we’ll see voices of people that you pay attention, that I pay attention to with some sensible analysis. There’s not enough information to go on yet. The trick I’ve been thinking most about is how do I separate, I won’t call it slot because it’s not, it’s just someone’s opinion that’s not informed from the stuff that is informed. So I’ve got a handful of the latter, and probably scores of the former. I’m trying to ignore all that stuff. To me, this is like the first alarm bell. Alarm is the right word, the first alert bell that you are about to see as a communicator, a fundamental shift in how search works. And it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be pretty. It’s going to be chaotic. So you need to pay attention to this in the right way. And that’s where you need I guess really to find voices that are authority that you can trust to hear how they’re described.

Shel Holtz: Well, let’s switch gears and put AI behind us for a few minutes and talk about something entirely different. Ron Culp’s blog, Culpwrit, ran a guest post earlier this month by Anuj Agarwal with a title that’s hard to argue with, Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage? By the way, I met Ron when he was running comms at Sears when I was doing some internet consulting there. Ron is one of the senior dons of public relations these days, and I do pay attention to what’s on his blog. In his post, Agarwal isn’t talking about having a podcast. He’s talking about pitching your client, your executive, your subject matter expert as a guest on someone else’s podcast. That distinction matters because that’s where actual news is happening. And if you’re not doing this yet, you’re already behind. Now let’s start with the audience math because the case is overwhelming. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026, which they released back in March, 80% of Americans 12 years old and older have now listened to or watched the podcast. 58% listened in the past month. That’s about 167 million Americans, an all-time record. 45% listened in the past week. And among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is now equivalent to broadcast television. I want you to let that sink in. I’m going to say that again. Among 18 to 34 year olds, weekly podcast reach is equivalent to broadcast television. For your client trying to reach younger adults and appearance on the right podcast has the same weekly reach as TV. Now compare that with what’s happening on the traditional media side. Pew Research found that newsroom employment in the US dropped 26% between 2008 and 2020, and that bleeding has continued ever since. Newspaper newsrooms alone are down 57% from 2008. There are just fewer journalists and fewer editorial slots, which means there’s been a shift around where people are finding their content. Your clients still want earned media that channels worth pitching have just expanded. So why is a podcast appearance more valuable than a traditional press hit? Four reasons, and they’re all important reasons. First is the time on stage. A press mention is a paragraph. Even a feature article gives you a few quotes wrapped around someone else’s narrative. A podcast guest appearance gives your client 30 to 60 minutes of uninterrupted access to an audience that chose to be there on a podcast that’s likely to be specialized as opposed to generalized. That’s not just longer, more time. It’s a fundamentally different kind of exposure. The audience hears how your client thinks, not just what they say. They hear the tone, the texture, the moments of pushback. And Nielsen research has shown that listeners trust long-form audio hosts more than they trust traditional advertising. And that trust transfers to the guests by association. Number two is durability. A press hit spikes for a day and then disappears. A podcast episode lives forever. It sits in someone’s back catalog. It shows up in search. It gets clipped and shared on LinkedIn six months later. That’s the long tail at work. And Neville, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, but I get emails from the host of our archive site. Remember, we switched sites at one point and we archive the old site where many, many, many episodes of FIR live and I’ll get emails saying your site has exceeded the allowed site traffic for the month and won’t be accessible until the first of the month. Who’s going and visiting this site that hasn’t been active in 11 or 12 years and listening to those old episodes of the show? 40% of podcasts

Neville Hobson: Hahaha AI agents, I would hazard a guess. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. I don’t know if they’re listening to the episodes, but they could well be scraping that site. But 40 percent of podcast consumers now name YouTube as their primary podcast platform, which means a single guest appearance can produce both an audio asset and a video asset all from one hour of your client’s time. And that’s content you can repackage and repurpose for multiple channels. Here’s the third reason. And this is the one I really want you to hear, because most communicators miss it. A podcast appearance is increasingly how you earn traditional press coverage. Newsworthy things your client says on a podcast get picked up by the mainstream media. And now they’re not just quoting your client, they’re amplifying an extended quote in context and they’re sending readers back to the original episode. Look at Jamie Dimon. A couple of weeks ago, he gave a podcast-style interview at a Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund conference where he warned that the private credit market is worse than people think. That’s a quote, worse than people think. That single cent has generated coverage across Bloomberg, Reuters, Fortune, the Financial Times, and erased about $500 billion in alternative asset manager value the same day. The Jensen Huang interviews, a Stratechery, BG2, the All-In podcast, those generated Fortune and CNBC stories, and they do every single time. Howard Lutnick told the All-In host that, “‘Boeing executives follow me around like puppies,’ because of how he was structuring trade deals.” Fortune quoted that line word for word in a feature on the Trump administration’s trade strategy. The podcast appearance was the press strategy. That’s the model. You’ve got to, you’re not just earning a podcast placement, you’re earning the cascade of secondary coverage that flows from it. And finally, there’s depth of message. An interview lets a thought leader actually develop an argument. In a newspaper, quote, complex ideas get compressed into one sentence, usually the wrong sentence, often the safest sentence. On a podcast, your client gets to explain the why behind the what. That’s where credibility gets built and where the next sales conversation gets seeded. Now, the catch, most podcasts aren’t worth pitching. Agarwal makes this point bluntly, and he’s not wrong, of the millions of shows indexed across hosting platforms. A lot of them haven’t published in months, maybe years. They have audiences that are minuscule. They’ll book anyone with a pulse. Recommending a weak placement to your client costs them time and signals that you’re vetting is getting lazy. So here’s what to actually look for before your pitch. Publishing pattern, you know, at least two episodes a month consistently over the last six months? The guest history, scroll back through 20 or 30 episodes. Who were the guests that they booked? If your client doesn’t fit that pattern, walk away. Niche depth over raw audience size. I mean, a 600 listener show inside your client’s exact industry will outperform a 50,000 listener general business show on almost every metric that actually matters. The host social application. A host who promotes new episodes on LinkedIn extends your client’s appearance for free. And listen to one recent episode before pitching. If the host lets guests just monologue without pushback, the audience tunes out and your client gets nothing. And here’s what your client needs to bring to the conversation. Not talking points, a point of view. One counterintuitive take, one framework that actually gets used, one honest answer to a hard question. Hosts are really good at spotting the difference between a guest with something to say and a spokesperson reciting messaging. The appearances that earn return invitations, produce shareable clips, and get picked up in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal are built on original thinking. The PR pros who figure this out now, who develop a real podcast pitching practice the same way they developed a media relations practice 20 years ago, are going to look like wizards to their clients.

Neville Hobson: That’s quite a landscape you described there, Shel. I think I look at it in a way when I hear all these statistics being rattled off about how many people listening to podcasts, what’s up, my kind of eyes glaze completely because, you know, and then I hear about, you know, the Jamie Dimon of this world and these kind of, you know, CEOs of mega corporations and how they move markets with a phrase that gets picked up in the mainstream media. That doesn’t happen with, you know, as a matter of course for everyone. Amongst all the rubbish podcasts you outlined, where you’ve got minuscule audiences or not, I think about this, if I were advising someone to start a podcast and it was a business that’s a medium sized business, maybe a thousand employees in a not particularly exotic sounding industry, but they’re the market leader and they’ve got some interesting stories to tell. How is that relevant to them, knowing that the CEO of JP Morgan or whatever said something in the FT report, completely and utterly irrelevant and not likely to happen to them. So what would be of interest to a company like that who has, as I say, stories to tell, it’s worth doing something with them for a podcast for all the reasons you mentioned that how they get noticed and so forth. So that’s the trick, finding that relevance to convince them or to pitch them if you like on doing it. I mean, you’ve got some good stuff mentioned in this piece you’ve been discussing that are valid, absolutely would make a good way to pitch it. I did like the section in this piece where it talks about how to build the skill before a client formally asks. And totally. And it got me thinking, it says, identify 15 podcasts relevant to their audience and industry. It got me thinking immediately and this is where AI comes into play. Okay, so we can’t escape. This is about AI as well in this topic. Your example, where the experiments you’ve been doing, where you’ve been looking for podcasts in your industry that take guest speakers or all the criteria you’ve done and you’ve been sending out agents who’ve returned with amazing data. That is exactly how you would approach this. And you get your results fast and probably well, they’re probably definitely more accurate than if you do this manually yourself. So where the guidance talks to you about filter, filter these findings you get from shows that publish consistently and actively except guests, there’s your AI tool to do that for you. So you could apply that to this. And it would probably, again, depending which AI tool using, I would say it will give you things you didn’t know to ask even because you didn’t know, but it would find something. So AI would help you do this without doubt. But that’s not the main trust the story though. The thing you’ve outlined is very good. I agree. I just think you need to make it wholly relevant to your client who is not a Fortune 500 company, who is just a regular business, even with 20 employees, they still got a story to tell. If they’ve got a valid story to tell, there’s a chance that they’ll get noticed. And your goals might well be very different from that mega corporation example that you had, where it might be resistive temptation to listen to the sales guy to say, we want leads generated and I want to get 10 sales out of this. You might, but your goal might be different to that. Still got to be a measurable goal. So talking about our CEO will do a thought leadership piece. No, please don’t go there. You need a measurable goal. It could be leads, it could be something less esoteric than that, quite simple, raise awareness of something that you can measure. Now that then puts it in the area of something that you as a communicator know about measurable objectives. So I think scaling it back to reality is a way to do this, not just look at how many millions of people listen to podcasts, because that to me is a total eye glazing metric for most people.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think the point to be made from the number of people listening to podcasts is just that it’s a valid medium now as influential as TV. You know, if we had made this case 15 years ago, it would have been a tough sell. But the fact is that a lot of people have started to recognize the importance of being a guest on a podcast. I mean, this is something the Republicans figured out during the last presidential election cycle. So I think the scale is important, especially as you look at the numbers of diminishing opportunities in the mainstream press. In terms of Jamie Dimon, yeah, I mean, I made the point that he’s going to get on a general business podcast with 500,000 listeners, a million listeners and make news. But I also noted that for some CEOs, for some thought leaders is probably the podcast that has 600 listeners that’s in that niche area. Now, you mentioned the agent I created. It’s actually a skill. I created this in the Hermes agent platform that is configured when I launch it to go out into the podcast space and find the podcasts that meet these criteria that I listed there. But I’m able to enter the information about the person or the story or the thought leadership concept that I’m trying to pitch. So if, for example, I want to get a story out there with this guy that we have who works on all our airport projects. He is a design manager. He is really good. And he has some thought leadership ideas on construction work airside in active airports. Now, do I want to get that into the construction trades? No. What do I care if builders hear that? I want to get that into the airport trades. where the people who are hiring the builders will hear it and hear about his expertise and hear his thoughts and go, yeah, I think I want to talk to them about our next airport project. So yeah, I have the AI agent set up to go do that. It even does a first draft of the pitch based on what it knows about the host and the content of each of the podcasts it returns to me. But yeah, I have to go out there and make that pitch. I’ve got one going on right now based on a sustainability story. So it’s interesting finding the places where we want that story to go because everybody’s looking for more sustainable ways to build, but how does that affect our reputation? So I have to cue this skill in the Hermes platform to find ones that are going to be of high value for me. But I have no doubt that if my CEO gets on a podcast or that design manager gets on a podcast, and says something really interesting, it’s going to find its way into ENR, the engineering news record, which is the primary trade publication or building design and construction or any of the other trade publications out there. And that’s that trickle down. It’s not the scale of what Jamie Dimon can do, but it’s the same concept exactly just at that smaller, more niche scale.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I think that’s the key thing for me, certainly, is you’ve got to scale it relevantly to your client and their audience and market. The only other thing I’d add to that, Shel, is to let our listeners know, listen to episode 513, where you’ll hear Shel talk at length about the experiments he’s been doing with Claude CoWork, particularly, but also this example that you kind of touched on, as it were. It’s worth the listen.

Neville Hobson: Well, Dan, that was quite a report. I think an excellent assessment of what’s happening with WordPress. I know you’re a big, long time fan and user of WordPress. And so you did a good job in conveying the significant changes from WordPress 7. I think it’s worth emphasizing, and you did make the point, Dan, that a lot of the cool stuff that you talked about, AI-driven in particular, is only on the hosted WordPress, the WordPress.com service, not self-hosted WordPress. So no doubt that will be coming at some point, I would imagine. So

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the FIR site is on WordPress, but it’s the hosted version. And I’ve read about this. I upgraded it to 7 and went looking for these cool features and they weren’t there. that’s Dan’s report clarified that for me.

Neville Hobson: No, exactly, exactly. It’ll come, I’m sure. So thanks a lot, Dan. That was a really, really good report. So our next topic, going now back to the AI, the AI themes we’re following. Yeah, we can’t escape AI at all these days. We know that. But here’s the thing. There’s a Substack writer I follow called Ruben Hassid. He writes a newsletter called How to AI. And if you don’t know his work, He’s worth your time. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. He publishes twice a week. He’s prolific. He’s sharp. And he has a gift for making uncomfortable ideas land without making you feel attacked by them. His latest piece is called You can’t Beat AI. And before you groan at the title, it’s not the piece you might expect. It’s not a doom narrative. It’s actually a remarkably clear-eyed analysis of what’s happening to the value of knowledge work and what to do about it. The core argument is this, AI is getting cheaper at a rate most people haven’t fully absorbed. We’re talking about a 6,000-fold reduction in the cost of AI intelligence over four years, he says. Not twice as cheap, 6,000 times cheaper. And crucially, not just cheaper, smarter too. So your salary is now being compared to a subscription, and the subscription is winning on price. The part in his newsletter that really got my attention was his argument about what this means for how we communicate our value. He makes the point that for decades, time spent was a proxy for quality. If something took six hours, that effort signaled something. It signaled expertise, diligence, craft. But now that production is cheap, now that a decent first draft, a market scan, a slide outline, a campaign proposal, can be generated in 30 seconds or less, time spent is a weak argument. He puts it simply, nobody cares that it took you all weekend. The better argument he says is, I understand the real problem. I knew what to ignore. I found the missing risk. I made the decision easier. I saved the team from doing the wrong thing beautifully. And that lands differently for communicators, I think, because most of us would say, Yes, of course, we’ve always sold judgment and strategic counsel. But here’s the uncomfortable follow-up question. Do our clients and employers actually pay for that? Or do they still at some level pay for the volume of deliverables, the press releases, the reports, the campaigns, and just assume the judgment comes with it? That’s what I want to explore, because if intelligence is becoming a commodity, communicators individually and as a profession, need to get much clearer and much more explicit about articulating what they offer that can’t be replicated for $20 a month. What do you think about all that, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think we’ve been talking about this issue of pricing in the AI era. Yeah, I mean, yeah, even well before AI, the hourly model has been questionable. I’ve shared this anecdote, I think probably five or six times on the show. But for those who haven’t heard it, when I was a consultant, Mark Schumann was visiting us. He worked for the same consulting firm I did at the time. And he was talking about value-add, which I opposed. I said, that should be baked into our hourly rate. And he said, okay, how does the hourly rate factor into the fact that I bring 35 years of experience to this job and I have a brainstorm in the shower that took me 20 seconds. I wouldn’t have had that brainstorm if not for that 30 years of experience, 35 years. But it still produces tremendous value to the client that may make them millions of dollars or save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do you value that 30 seconds it took to have that brainstorm? And I haven’t come up with a really good answer to that yet, except pricing based on outcomes. That said, I have to say that when I was an independent consultant, which I did for 21 years, I had some clients who wanted me on a retainer. And the retainer was so that they could call me when they had an issue. They didn’t want me to produce anything. They didn’t want me to write anything. They didn’t want me to create anything. They just wanted my counsel. They wanted an hour on the phone. So for X dollars, they got 10 hours a month and they could call and say, we’re going through this. What do we do? Or what’s your experience with that? I think you can still charge based on time for that. It’s the time you’re spending on the phone with them. So I don’t I don’t think charging. based on time vanishes, you just have to figure out what your formula is, where you can factor in how much time it took, where you can factor in what the overall value of it is. And then finally, what you can factor in as the ROI that the client has gotten from this, that you can come up with a formula to make a reasonable return for your effort. But the old model of saying, you know, he’s billed out at $375 an hour. It’s going to take 25 hours for this project. Here’s your price. And by the way, if there’s scope creep, we’re going to come back to you and tell you how many more hours that adds to the project. That’s not going to wash anymore. Not not under these circumstances. Especially by the way, I have to say, not when they can go to AI and ask the question before they come to you for that hour of phone time.

Neville Hobson: I think that’s a key. I mean, that’s the key thing. A client might say when you present the proposal, you just outlined, for instance, that they’ll say, you use AI. You’ve told us consistently how you’ve developed skills in how to use the tools that give you the results that you’re seeking. and you have expertise in that area. So if that’s the case, how come you’re me, you’re quoting me X hours at so much per hour at this price? So what’s your AI doing? better question might be, well, what are you doing in that case? So that’s something that we need to figure out. And I don’t think anyone has yet how to kind of Deflect that into the real questions that need to be answered, the real discussions that need to be going on, which is not that. That’s kind of an emotional based one. But the point you made, absolutely true. Anything you’re thinking of doing, the client’s already also looking at the AI tools they use to find an answer to that. They’ll be second guessing you even. In which case, that cannot sustain itself, that kind of model. It’s not going to suddenly vanish, I’m sure. And to your point too, I agree with you that some elements of service that you might provide that others will buy from you will probably still be time-based, such as the retainer model, for instance. Then again, I think your competition is the smart AI model, frankly. So that comes down to the, you you’re being… Your salary has been compared to a subscription now by the client in particular. So again, more change coming to communicators and not just communicate, but I’m focused on this. What does it mean to communicate? I’ve written about this a few times in my blog. I’ve had many conversations with people about this recently on how to counter the interference of AI. As one person put it to me, you can’t, it’s not interference. you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’ve got to learn to make the most of it, ally yourself with augmenting your ability and not just churning out stuff from a chat bot effectively and do what we’ve been discussing in previous episodes about hallucinations and setting out stuff riddled with errors because you didn’t check it. So your methodology has got to shift. And it doesn’t address the base question, which is how do we migrate as a general rule from time-based charging to value-based charging? I hear that question being asked a lot. I’m asking it too, and I don’t have an answer to that yet. So that requires some exploratory analytical conversation. And it may well turn out that there isn’t a single model that works for everyone, although there must be elements that will be consistent no matter what you do. And it requires significant input from your client or your employer to have that conversation that give you as the communicator, the kind of intelligent input you need from the business owner or your employer. What are they looking to achieve? What do they want exactly? And how can this help them achieve that? So we haven’t started any of that yet, other than asking the question. So we need to pay attention to this sooner.

Shel Holtz: yeah, we definitely do. But there’s one other factor to keep in mind here. And this is a phenomenon that I have been experiencing in addition to reading about it. And that is that for all of the productivity gains that we’re seeing from AI, and we are, mean, the time it takes my agent to go out and find those podcasts for me to do that would be hours with the agent. send it off. I go do something else and it delivers the results when it’s done, which is not hours and hours. It’s usually 15 or 20 minutes. But does this mean that I now have an extra day that I can take off because I have got all of my work done? No, I’m as busy as I ever was. I am filling those hours with work for my employer. I believe it is high value work and it’s either figuring out how to do something with the AI or managing those AI agents or creating the agents or skilling up the agents or it’s doing the things that AI can’t do. So yeah, I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And by the way, I know we’re not talking about the job-pocalypse here as we heard it referred to earlier. But increasingly, I know there are some things that AI can replace customer service agents being a great example. I think for most of the jobs out there, there’s elements of your job it can replace. It can’t replace the whole job. And for all of the companies I’ve seen announcing layoffs that are tied to AI, I have not heard one of them say, and these are the full-time agents that have replaced the full-time work that this person did. I think they’re just anticipating what they’re going to be able to do with AI. So I don’t think we’re going to see the job loss that we’ve been talking about because I think they’re going to realize that what we still need 70% of what this person does and he can devote more time and attention to that because the 30% that the AI can do, we’re going to let the AI do. So, the reason I point all this out. is that while companies may for a while think, who needs an agency? I can do all this with AI. They’re going to realize what they’re producing is slop, that they don’t have the time to put in the effort required to generate the right kinds of agents, the right kinds of skills, the right kinds of prompts. They don’t know how to assemble all of this together in a strategy. And they don’t want to take the time to work with AI to do it. my God, this is what agencies are for. I’m going to have an agency do it. So the agencies will take advantage of the AI, but I think there’s still going to be work for agencies to do. There just may be a valley as companies say, the AI can do all this for us before they realize, well, you know what? It really can’t.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess a short answer to this, there’s no single answer to how you do this. There’s no real way of proving value in an age of cheap intelligence, I suppose, to use that way of describing it. It’s going to get cheaper, according to Hassid, I agree, based on what he said in this, but also what I’m seeing others say. But there’s still a role. I think we need to be clear-eyed about what the future holds in this regard. And you’ve mentioned a good point, I think, about job losses and the way in which that’s currently playing out, where people are taking a big hammer to a tool that doesn’t require that at all to solve, where you’re just laying off people. You’ve got some leaders in some organizations who truly do not deserve to occupy those roles in those companies, the way they treat employees in this regard. But you’ve also got some very sensitive, empathetic people who don’t do it like that. So that’s the landscape we’ve got. In the meantime, I would say communicators need to think about this more. Even if you don’t know the answers, OK, compile all your questions then. Then do some research yourself even to find out what others say. Hey, I will help you do that. And at least get this on your radar before it’s too late.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and it is definitely going to get cheaper for no other reason that the AI companies don’t want to be spending the money they’re spending on their infrastructure, especially the power requirements. So they are investing in finding solutions to this, not because they are all deep, sincere environmentalists, but because it’s costly to them and they’d rather not be spending that money. All right, well, we’re going to shift away from AI again for a moment. Here’s a phrase that was,

Neville Hobson: There you have it. I bet you we’re not. Go on then, go on, go on, go on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, bet we are. Well, maybe not entirely. Here’s a phrase that wasn’t in my vocabulary three months ago, the clipping economy. And if you’re a communicator, you need to know what this is because it’s already changing how content about your client or your employer travels and whether you have any control over where it ends up. Here’s what’s happening. A piece from NPR featured a 24-year-old guy in Antwerp, Belgium named Emre Bayraktar. He was working three part-time jobs. He was cleaning cars. He had the night shift at a warehouse. He was making sandwiches at Subway. But in his spare time, he’d take long influencer interviews, edit them into short clips and post them. And one night he got a notification telling him that he’d earned $12 on one of his clips. Two weeks later, he’d earned $2,500. Today, he runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers. 40,000 individuals like him who take long-form content and turn it into short term clips. He runs that network and that’s the model. Streamers, podcasters, brands, even political campaigns post bounties on marketplaces and anyone with a phone and a video editor can claim the bounty by chopping up the long-form content into vertical clips and posting them to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, X. You get paid per thousand views. NPR cited recent bounties at a dollar per thousand views for Major League Baseball clips, $25 per thousand views for an AI startup. Forbes reported that generating a million views through one of these clipping companies, a company literally called Clipping, founded by a guy named Anthony Fujiwara, cost somewhere between a hundred bucks and a thousand bucks. Fujiwara’s company did $7.7 million in sales in 10 months. MrBeast started his own clipping company called Vyro late last year. Ed Elson, who co-hosts the Prof G Markets podcast with Scott Galloway, calls this the clip economy. And his argument is that the clips are no longer promotion for the show, the clips are the show. The live streamer, Hassan Piker, pulls about 33,000 viewers for a typical live stream. His average clip pulls 700,000 views. The clip is 20 times bigger than the thing it was clipped from. And Adam Rosenberg from Digiday says clips used to be the byproduct. Now they’re the product. And yeah, I’ve got personal evidence. This is true. I think I mentioned just recently someone I work with told me she does not watch Saturday Night Live. She’ll watch 10, 12, 13 clips so that she can see the funny bits. So what does this mean for those of us who work in PR and corporate communications? Let’s answer three questions. First, do you need to watch for Clippers using your client’s content out of context? Yes, always. The streamer Tim “TimTheTatman” Betar, told Digiday that being clipped out of context is now the cost of putting anything long-form online. Clippers will pull the line that fits a narrative they want to push and let it travel. If your CEO does a 45 minute podcast and says something deliberately provocative at minute 31 to make a setup payoff at minute 33, you should assume someone is going to clip the provocative part and lead the payoff on the cutting room floor. So monitor for that. Set up alerts on your client’s name across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts the same way you set up Google Alerts 20 years ago. And have a response plan ready because by the time you find the clip, it may already have a million views. Second, should legal get involved? Sometimes, but think carefully before you reach for the cease and desist. Frank Poh, who runs a creator focused law firm called Poh Law, told Digiday that publicity rights are the live legal issues here, meaning your client’s image, voice and likeness being used to sell something without permission. If a clipper is making money off a clip of your CEO, and especially if the clip is being used to promote a product, you have an argument. You have a case, but if it’s a clipper just monetizing views on a clip that’s substantially accurate, you’re probably stuck with the Streisand effect. Going after a clipper with 200 followers can generate more press than the clip ever would. Pick your battles, save the legal response for clips that are deceptively edited, false or commercially exploitative, and let the rest go. Third, and this is the one I expect people are going to push back on, Should you pay clippers to amplify your clients content? Well, here’s the case for it. The Digiday piece pointed to a clip of John Hamm dancing in a club on the Apple TV show, Your Friends and Neighbors, that went so viral that Hamm got asked about it on The Tonight Show. That’s an enormous earned media outcome from a 30 second clip. Spencer Pratt, the former reality star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, is openly running paid clipping campaigns through the Whop platform, and disclosing it, which is the right way to do it. fintech, crypto, and AI companies are the heaviest users of clipping farms precisely because they operate in legal gray areas. Most clippers don’t disclose payment, which means almost every paid ClipYou commission is potentially a violation of the Federal Trade Commission rules. Here in the U.S., the U.K. Gambling Commission has already taken enforcement action. X has flagged the practice publicly. Instagram CEO Adam Masseri put out a video on April 30th saying the platform will crack down on re-uploaders. And if you go down this road, you disclose every payment every time, no exceptions, and you assume that the FTC is reading your contracts. The clip not going anywhere. The question isn’t whether your client gets clipped, it’s whether you have a strategy for when it happens.

Neville Hobson: Well, that’s quite a story, I had not heard about this either. The whole idea of clipping farms or as the NPR piece wove its story quite skillfully in an interesting way about the kid in Antwerp, how he started out and then the other examples in there of these people. There’s not really a flip, but a kind of an alert note. that the ones who are making the real money on this, they say, tend to be the middlemen clippers rather than the original creators. And that, think, is clearly a sign that this is ripe for intervention by regulators and others in companies who see this kind of behavior. So this may well be one of those things that is temporary in the context of that. The idea of clipping, though, isn’t. And so some big names are going to move into this soon, I would guess. But the thoughts occurring to me when listening to what you were saying was, how does this kind of start? How do you find companies to do this? You asked a question not rhetorically on should your employee or client get involved in this? It’s high risk, but potentially significant. return on that risk, think, like the example you mentioned of the John Hamm example. I heard about that. I heard about that without realizing it was because of a clip. So this probably is one of these natural evolutionary steps in the stage of where we are with online communication, online digital communication that is generational largely, isn’t it? If it’s what is it, Gen Z or even Gen Alphas, I suppose. sharing all this stuff to TikTok and other places. I’ve not seen it on Facebook, but again, I wasn’t knowing what to look for. I’d make a point of looking. How do you identify this stuff, particularly if they’re not disclosing anything? Does it look kind of like, that guy posted this really interesting clip, not knowing that he’s a clipper? Definitely, you need to be aware of this from a communicator’s point of view. you’ve looked into this more than I have. So it’s difficult to say more than that at this point. But I think this is a phenomenon. It’s growing. We’re going to see more of this before, in some way or form, it gets regulated. I don’t mean that from an official point of view. But I don’t see this as remaining unfettered for much longer.

Shel Holtz: No, not at all. I mean, figure the kid in Antwerp has what, 44,000 clippers working for him. Then there’s the Whop and the one that MrBeast started. So you’ve got to figure there’s tens of thousands of people out there creating these clips. How many can they create in a day? Probably hundreds, if not more. And they’re probably flooding the Internet. We just don’t see them because we’re not looking for things that are associated with the tags.

Neville Hobson: Incredible.

Shel Holtz: that they’re putting on them. you’ve got to figure that people are seeing clips and assuming that they’re something that was created because somebody was passionate about it or it came from the company or it came from the person whose image you’re seeing when that may not be true at all. Somebody else is making bank off of that without permission and may not even need the permission. But I got to tell you, the next time I get somebody at my company placed on a podcast, assuming there is a video, I will be clipping that podcast and sharing those clips both to raise awareness of what our spokesperson said, but also to drive views back to the podcast so they can see everything that she said. I’ll be doing that. In fact, for on the same page, the new podcast I started with Steve Crescenzo, I am using a service called Opus Clip. That’s what they do is clips. You upload video. And it creates clips with the closed caption type of, here’s what they’re saying in real time. And I’ve been sharing those on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and not X because I’m not there. But we’ll see if it drives any more awareness of the show, but this is real and it’s big and it’s important.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah, I did like the concluding part of the NPR piece where they where someone said, suddenly I realized clips aren’t the promotional material for the content. Clips are the content. And that, to your point on your colleague you mentioned, who doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live, watches the clips so she could pick out the best bits to her, the best bits that she finds on TikTok without watching the show. I do that with some stuff and I never realized, hey, that’s clipping. I didn’t realize that. So that actually got me thinking a bit about something I was doing not long ago with a podcast. I was contracted to a company to produce podcasts. We did a little bit of that. And I remember thinking at the time that the clips are getting more traffic than the actual podcasts. Okay, I have learned from, I should have. paid more attention to that. So maybe we could try with FIR. I mean, I’m thinking one of the reasons we don’t do that, I’m sure from suddenly speaking, just from my point of view in in producing content is I didn’t have time to do it. I have no time to spend. So I would look for something that made it dead simple to just create five clips and I could look at each say absolutely spot on with the have to say Now I need to edit the front and the back. No, no, Just give me that content. Riverside offers that tool, as you know. And maybe there’s something we can do there. But that might be interesting.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I haven’t been terribly impressed with Riverside’s clips so far. That’s why I’m paying separately for Opus, which I think does a better job. And they do give you some editing tools that makes it really easy to clean them up quickly. I picked on the same page for this for two reasons. One is every other week. So I have plenty of time between episodes to do this. And the other is it’s brand new. So we’re trying to gin up awareness. So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t have any metrics on this yet, but I’m really curious to see how it pays off.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, definitely worth paying attention to. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the 15th of May in its CIO Journal section that I think deserves more attention from communicators than it’s likely to get because on the surface it looks like an IT story, but underneath it’s something more interesting than that. The headline is, Companies have a new AI problem. Too many agents. The reporter is Belle Lin and she spoke to technology leaders at companies including Lyft, Davita, GitLab and FICO about a phenomenon they’re calling AI agent sprawl. We’ve talked about AI agents quite a bit recently. So this really is relevant to those conversations. Here’s the situation. As agentic AI platforms have become easier to use, we’re talking tools that even non-technical employees can operate without involving IT. People across organizations are spinning up AI agents. at a remarkable rate. Agents that summarize emails, write briefs, analyze data, automate workflows, conduct research. One company told the journal its 3,500 employees are creating dozens of new agents every single day. Another has over 10,000 agents already deployed. And Gartner projects that within two years, so that’s before 2030, the average Fortune 500 enterprise will be running over 150,000 agents. So that’s the average enterprise multiply that by how many Fortune 500 enterprises around the big numbers. The IT problem is obvious as the journal costs cybersecurity duplication conflicting outputs, but only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place. That’s a striking gap. Now here’s where I think communicators need to lean into this. When you have agents operating across an organization. often invisibly, often without central oversight, summarizing information, drafting communications, automating decisions, who is responsible for the accuracy and consistency of what those agents produce. And when something goes wrong, when an agent produces conflicting results or surfaces inaccurate information that makes its way into a client communication or an internal briefing, who owns that? Who manages the narrative around it? We’ve talked about agentic AI on FI before, as I mentioned, mostly from the angle of what agents can do and why communicators should be paying attention. This story is the flip side of that conversation. It’s what happens when agent adoption outpaces the governance frameworks needed to manage it. And it’s a reminder that governance isn’t just a technology challenge, it’s a communication challenge. Somebody in these organizations need to be thinking about transparency, accountability, and trust. And that sounds a lot like a communicator’s job to me. So we talked about some really serious errors made by organizations by not having the human in the loop, as I mentioned earlier. This, in my view, fits into that conversation, except it’s now become much more urgent if you’ve got this scale emerging, which clearly it is emerging. And what do we do about it? So is it the communicator’s job? I kind of qualify my own question. Sounds like a communicator’s job, but is it? What do you think?

Shel Holtz: Well, partly. I mean, there’s definitely a role here for IT and definitely a role for the senior leadership of the organization. But we absolutely have a part to play here. So I think one of the problems is that a lot of organizations establish their governance, their guardrails, their policies in the early days of Gen.A.I. as they saw employees starting to use it, say, hey, we’d better have some rules, especially since we’re going to adopt it. So many companies that had Office 365 contracts suddenly had access to Copilot and wanted to make that available. So they came up with their governor’s policies before anybody was talking about agents. Well, I can’t say nobody was, I’m sure they were at the AI labs and…

Neville Hobson: Yeah, just one, don’t forget, the journal says only 13% of organizations believe they have adequate governance in place, which means what? 70%, 80%, something percent do not have it in place at all.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, that’s the thing. And I think those are the ones that may think that they do because they spent a lot of time, they worked with legal and HR and they came up with their governance and now we have agents and the governance doesn’t address them. It addresses prompting and it addresses things like don’t put sensitive information into a prompt in a public AI model, doesn’t say a word about agents. So I think one thing we need to look at is revisiting the governance policies that we have. And here’s where a communicator can come into. into play is look at your governance and then propose some enhancements in the great language that only we communicators are able to craft and send those to legal NHR and IT and say, you know, we need to update our governance. Here’s a proposed draft and at least get things kick started. But, you know, not all of the agents are ones where we need to be thinking about them. Although, I think there are some issues where we could get involved, but I work in a construction company. I have project engineers who are doing things like submittals and RFIs, stands for requests for information. And a lot of that, I think there’s potential for agent work. I’m not that interested. If you can be more productive in your job as a project engineer, more power to you. I think where there’s some process. One of the things to worry about is I don’t want every PE spinning up their own agent independently. If somebody comes up with a good agent to do this with, we should be sharing that throughout the organization so that there are consistent results and we don’t have to be worrying about any mistakes or misphrasing or anything that went into the creation of an agent, creating bad results over here on this project, but great results on this one where they knew what they were doing when they spun up their agent. So there should be, I mean, that should be baked into the governance that says we don’t want, you know, 175 agents created by different people all doing the same thing. Where I get worried though is where they’re answering emails, where they’re answering customer service questions. You know, who reviewed the voice and the tone of those responses and who approved the messaging guardrails? When an agent says something wrong publicly, who’s accountable for that? If it’s a marketing message, is marketing responsible or is it IT? Nobody has the answers to this yet. And I don’t think anybody’s asking. We should be the ones who are asking.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s, what a chaotic landscape we live and work in. I think, I agree, Shel. I mean, communicators have a clearly significant role. I could conclude as we’re saying, hey, communicators, this is another thing you’ve got to be getting involved in now in this. This is how you prove your value. So add this to the 15 new things that you now have to get to deal with. Here’s number 60.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I was just blown away when I read this, that the Pentagon staff used Google’s agent designer on genai.mil to vibe code more than 100,000 AI agents in about five weeks. They hold IL-5 authorization. That means they can deal with sensitive, unclassified data. Their chief deputy for intelligence said at a symposium, I’m on team go fast. So if corporate communicators think this is a problem, they have time to think about the military, the actor we’d expect to be most cautious is already at 100,000 agents and accelerating. Now, Gartner in step two of the process they outlined, step two is to build a centralized agent inventory. And that was framed as a technical thing. It tells IT what’s running. But for communicators, we need to know what they’re all saying, what tone, what facts, what brand voice. Our job is to make sure the inventory captures the messaging dimension, not just the technical one. Otherwise you end up with 150,000 versions of your brand voice. And once we’re able to analyze what they’re doing, we’re able to go back and say, hey, you need to adapt, adjust that agent. So it does this instead of that.

Neville Hobson: Well, interesting times ahead as always from everything we talk about here. I would say conclude, buckle up. That’s what I said.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Also something else to buckle up for, we have an interview coming in June. We haven’t had an FIR interview in a while, but we have a returning guest. He hasn’t been on the show in something like 15, 16 years, but Pete Blackshaw is joining us based on some work he has spent a couple of years doing about the role of AI in customer service. it’s going to be a great conversation. I was just blown away by what I read in his post about this. So looking forward to that. Yeah, watch for that in June. Also, of course, coming in June is our next long-form episode. We are going to record that on Saturday, June 21st and make it available on Monday the I’m sorry, it’s going to be on Monday the 22nd. We’re going to record on Saturday the 20th. I think I got that right. Anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward. Yep. No, we’ll be recording actually on Saturday, yeah, the 20th, you’re right. And publishing on the 22nd,

Shel Holtz: The 20th. There you go. Yeah, I can count squares on calendars. But watch for that. It’s coming. And of course, we will have our midweek episodes in between all that. We do hope that you will comment on anything you’ve heard that raised a thought from this episode or from any of the upcoming shorter midweek episodes. You know where to share them. Send them to us at [email protected]. Attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file right off of the FIR website, in which case you don’t even need to email us. We get that. There’s a tab that says send voicemail right there on the side of the page. You can leave comments on the post for this episode at FIRPodcastNetwork.com or wherever we share news about the latest episode dropping, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere except TikTok. right now, and maybe we’ll fix that if we start clipping. And that will be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #515: Agents Everywhere appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines.

Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode.

Links from this episode:

• Are the Twitter clones in trouble?
• Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025
• Pew: Social Media and News Fact Sheet
• Reuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

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: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered.

Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting.

Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits.

At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency.

It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed.

The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices.

The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square.

Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying?

Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want.

So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global public square.

No matter what the likes of Silicon Valley folks seem to think, there is no global public square. Or rather, there are places online that are accessible globally, but they’re not controlled by big platforms solely. Text isn’t disappearing. It thrives in the examples you mentioned — newsletters, Reddit, LinkedIn comments, Discords, WhatsApp, AI chat interfaces — probably 20 more examples you could give. So perhaps people still want text, but they don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. I think that plays a big role in this. They don’t want the manipulation of algorithms to tell them, “This is what we think you want to read.” And that is still very strong on most big platforms today. They want to keep you on the site. They want to keep you engaged. They want you to keep doomscrolling, or whatever it might be. I think that shifts the conversation we should be having. It’s not about the decline of text — it’s that people don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. What do they want? Well, they don’t know what they want, do they? They don’t.

You mentioned LinkedIn — definitely the interesting exception. I think there are multiple reasons why it remains one of the stronger environments for text discussion. I guess I’ll put it as questions, basically. Is it because having something like this — that’s kind of affixed to your professional identity — changes behavior, or rather reinforces “corporate” behavior that is different to how it would be on Facebook or on TikTok or other video platforms? Accountability is higher, reputational stakes are visible, audiences are contextual rather than anonymous. It works, I think, partly because people behave differently when attached to their real professional identity. Hence — you know, I saw one today, someone complaining about Facebook-like posts being published on LinkedIn: “Please stop doing that. This is a professional place.” That kind of comment. So I suppose you could say a useful contrast — to this point about people behaving differently — is outrage-driven engagement everywhere else compared to reputation-aware participation on LinkedIn. I thought that was quite a good contrast to make.

Outrage-driven engagement is very strong everywhere you look, but not on LinkedIn. People really don’t put up with that. So I think you have these elements that take part in all of this — that maybe smaller communities may be replacing mass audiences. And I think there’s a lot to be said in that. The smaller communities that would comprise, for example, niche communities, private groups, curated networks, newsletters, podcasts, creator ecosystems, if you like — much more than these algorithmically driven giant public feeds. I don’t follow much on the other traditional social networks. I prefer my own discovery on things like that. So maybe we’re moving from broadcast social media to relationship-based digital communities. And maybe this is just the start of that — which clearly has major implications for communicators and publishers. We can get into that, I suppose, in a bit. That broadly is what it looks like to me.

I’ve read the Reuters Institute’s report, I’ve read Nieman’s report, which actually are much wider than just talking about the decline of text-based networks, but there’s very much in there. There was an interesting article in Fast Company which looked at Bluesky’s limitations. I thought that was intriguing — what they wrote. The contradiction, they said, was that journalists and intellectual communities (and they define what they mean by that) still love Bluesky, but broader mainstream adoption remains elusive. And that is absolutely true. Little blips here and there of this group or that group moving away from X. Good example in the media: Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, announced, I think last week or the week before, that they have multiple — maybe 20 or 30 — Twitter handles, and they’re all going to shut down, and they’re moving it all to Bluesky. And I think — brave. Reality: X is still the place where significant public announcements are made. Look at what’s happening, for instance, in Iran — in the Iran war with Israel and the US — the propaganda battle between the two is taking place on X, mostly.

Trump, well, he’s got his Truth Social network, but I see people on X quoting Trump a lot. So governments, big corporations — but large groups tend to still be on X, in spite of what many, me included, would see as that being definitely a place not to be because of its toxicity. Deaf ears for that message, frankly, to people who are invested big in a place like that.

But what does it all mean for communicators? Well, you’ve touched on a few things, and maybe that’s something that we could explore a bit. But broadly, that’s what I’m seeing.

Shel: Well, I agree with you about the dispersion. I’m going to stick with the idea that the text-based social networks are in decline. You mentioned the German magazine that is sending all of their handles over to Bluesky.

Neville: Well, no — they are the big broadcasting and media organization, not a magazine.

Shel: Well, I’m sure Bluesky is going to be very happy about that. According to the Platformer article, Apptopia said that Bluesky has effectively collapsed as a competitive threat, with daily users down 96% from January of last year. That’s a pretty steep decline. If you look at Threads, which is turning three years old in July, Casey Newton writes that daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months. After peaking in October 2024, just before the US presidential election, daily users are down 61%, and global monthly users have held up better at 388 million, but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million at the beginning of January of this year. So these are declining.

Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, and people saw what he was doing with it. They talked about, “I’m going to Threads,” or “I’m going to Bluesky.” A lot of them were saying they were going to Bluesky, and they ended up being the left-leaning people who couldn’t tolerate the rise of hate speech and rage-baiting on X. So they went to Bluesky and effectively turned it into a left-leaning echo chamber, with left-leaning people arguing among themselves. Meanwhile, one of the people Casey quoted in Platformer said on X that the extreme right is pulling everybody else further to the right because there’s nobody from the left there to argue with them. So that’s what’s happening in the text-based social networks. They are losing monthly and daily active users at a pretty alarming rate.

Where are they going? Well, the numbers for Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts — the video platforms — are all on the rise. This is where people are going, and in particular, young people. I think one of the reasons LinkedIn is succeeding, in addition to the fact that it has a focus on business, is the fact that their algorithm, at least in part, focuses on who you follow. Whenever I log into LinkedIn, I see people that I know — not everybody who’s posted, but I do see people that I know. When I’m scrolling through Instagram, it’s a couple, but really, it’s trying to send me stuff it thinks I’m going to stick with rather than things from people I have connected with. So that makes me less interested in scrolling through Instagram. But I do find myself, when I see something — a video that’s in Reels and I tap it, it takes me over to Reels (this is on Facebook too, by the way) — I’ll find myself stuck there for a while as I’m looking at more of those short video clips. So they’re onto something in terms of what’s going to grab attention. But what does it mean for the public square? I think that — and we talked about that a lot in the early days of social media — you may remember the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I loved that book. It was so optimistic about the public square and about the ability for people to connect with each other. And I just think that’s fading. That’s not what social media is about anymore. And I think the algorithms have driven a lot of that.

Neville: I have a copy. Well, I think you’re right. Indeed, as far as Casey Newton’s piece goes, that same argument — Twitter traffic has collapsed effectively. Many other people are saying the same thing. The Reuters Institute talks about that. Nieman talks about that. Fast Company doesn’t quite say it in the same words, but talks about the tensions there. I totally agree with that. So I think, though, that it has more to do with the shifts in how people see public spaces to connect with other people. I think it reinforces some views you see about users turning their backs on social media. We’re seeing that a lot, and much of it generational, I’m sure. Commentary about fewer platforms and deeper relationships — I think they mean to say fewer platforms that interest people, or that matter to many people.

Industry reporting is showing that short-form video is dominating attention, as you mentioned — TikTok, for instance, and YouTube Shorts, stuff like that. Great, I get all that. But I think much of it might depend on how you use these networks yourself. And I’m not a big fan of algorithmically driven content at all. And, you know, I use LinkedIn maybe not the same as you. Indeed, my whole approach to it is different to what it was even two years ago, where it was important to connect with others and have people like your content and share it widely and all that. Those things aren’t important to me anymore. What is important to me, using LinkedIn as an example, is to connect with a handful of people whose opinions I really do value. And they are literally a handful — maybe two handfuls. I don’t really care about, you know, stuff getting shared 50 times and all that. So I pay attention to some of the metrics, but not a lot.

And I think, you know, Bluesky — I’m there since the beginning. Threads — I’m there since the beginning. And I’ve definitely noticed a change. I look at it this way, Shel: great, less noise, because there are fewer people in there now, which is wonderful — and new people. In fact, I use Bluesky in particular as a way to surface new people to connect with. Threads, that’s a different crowd entirely. And in fact, Threads is far more of a burgeoning community, let’s say, than other places are. But I think, you know, you kind of pause and look at the big picture and say, “Is this getting wider attention around, you know, for everyone?” Well, of course it’s not. It has very high attention amongst tech journalism, in the media and publishing industry — although both of their needs are different. Tech journalists, and I see this myself, actively discussing Bluesky, Threads, X fragmentation. You see a lot of commentary about that. We’ve just been talking about that. Media publishing industry — they’re concerned about traffic collapse and discovery. Comms professionals — attention is growing. And so our conversation today might be quite timely, especially among people who relied on Twitter professionally, says one bit of research that I pulled up. The general public — it’s very low. Yes, of course it is, because this is not mainstream. It will get there eventually, I suspect. Most users migrate without discussing the macro trend. They just move out of Twitter and go someplace else, or whatever it is. Academia and research are beginning to grow around Bluesky behavior and community structures elsewhere.

So people feel the change, but they’re not talking about it in a way outside these niche areas. Insiders are analyzing the change. That’s what a lot of the discussion is now. But generally speaking, no one’s really fully named the change yet. Is it a decline of text? Is it a decline of social network interest? Is it — whatever, whatever, whatever you think it might be. So I think the question, or rather the focus, isn’t or shouldn’t be on whether Threads or Bluesky are failing or collapsing. That’s the wrong perspective. It’s more, as we’ve mentioned earlier: were Twitter and others like it unique historical moments that you cannot recreate? In which case, are we looking at, you know, swathes of people looking for a home to go to? No, I don’t think so. I think most have found a place.

There is no longer a single place that’s a giant public square. There are multiple, and they’re all small. So are we going to see a kind of movement of thousands, maybe millions, of teeny niche communities? You could actually argue: what a nightmare for communicators. So that’s where your audience goes. But that’s what it looks like to me a bit, Shel, frankly. What I hear some people talk about, what I read — my own behavior, even — I’ve navigated myself to small communities. So I’m still a member of a number of LinkedIn groups, although, to be honest, most of them have really diminished in quality of content. A lot of people pimping their wares, full of consultants doing that kind of stuff. No value there at all. It’s almost like Facebook in that sense, where every other post you get interrupted by ads and stuff like that. So that’s going on too, by the way.

So is it fatigue? I think it could well be generational. I mean, I’m not looking right now at any research that supports that opinion, but it seems to me that, you know, if you’ve got migrations to video channels that are typically the home of younger-oriented people — younger-oriented communicators, I’d say — that’s where it is. I take a look at TikTok now and again. I’ve been on TikTok forever and I don’t contribute. I watch. It’s not my cup of tea, the kind of stuff there. The new successor to Vine, called eVine — I’ve got an account. I haven’t yet posted anything, because I couldn’t figure out what I want to say there. But I’ve looked, and there’s lots of interesting stuff. So I’ll keep that kind of perspective. On those, I’m a consumer as opposed to a creator and a sharer. On others, I create, and most of that’s text-based content. I don’t believe that’s always because I’m a boomer — far from it. That’s my preference. But I frequent these other places as well. Is that typical? I have no idea. I don’t think it might be. But who knows?

But I think this is definitely a conversation to have in terms of what it means for communicators more than anything. So, you know, audience building is going to become harder for communicators. That’s how I see it. Owned channels are becoming far more important. Trust matters more. We know that from all the conversations we’ve been having and what we can observe ourselves. Community matters more than reach. I believe that. Personality matters more than scale — I don’t see evidence of that, but maybe that is true. Consistency matters more than virality. I think that’s going to become increasingly more important, and that’s connected with trust.

So the old social media promise was scale, right? The emerging model may be relevance and trust. Are we seeing an emerging model? I’m not sure, but that’s where the direction of travel looks like it’s going, it seems to me.

Shel: Well, it starts with, I think, brands needing to adopt the philosophy that you just articulated with your subscription to eVine — not posting anything because you haven’t figured out what to post there. I think a lot of people in social media create content, they reformat it appropriately for each channel, and throw the same piece of content into all those platforms. That won’t work anymore. I think you need to look at each platform, look at the people who are there, and figure out what you want to share that’s relevant, that will resonate, that will produce some kind of movement of the needle. And for those where you can’t answer that question, maybe it’s time to abandon those networks as a brand. As an individual, go where your people are. We’re not talking about what network you like personally. For people who love being on Bluesky, I’m not suggesting that you stop. Go wild. Have a great time on Bluesky. But is it a place to share the content that you’re sharing from your organization? Is there a way that you can craft content that’s going to work there? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s time to reevaluate that based on these trends.

Neville: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think things like human voice, the individual voice, the demonstration of judgment — making judgments about something, your own lived experience and the intentional participation you exhibit by being on a certain platform — I think are increasing. Not scaled. I mean, this is small beer compared to the scaling that used to be the important thing. But they’re all connected with what we’ve been talking about: trust, authenticity, oversight, the evolving role of communicators in AI-shaped environments, to quote a phrase. I mean, it’s all in there too. Whatever — we think communicators need to be paying close attention to this in a macro sense, and indeed maybe the micro sense without getting into the weeds or anything — just be aware. So I pay attention to a lot of this stuff. I may not read every Reuters Institute report or Nieman report — not all. I’ll read the executive summaries. It’s a bit like, you know, the TikTok clips — I’ll look at the clips to get interesting stuff out of it and reflect. Do I think this is something that people I’m connected with will be interested in knowing? And that drives a lot of what I write about on the blog, for instance, which is AI-heavy these days. I think this is important to pay attention to. Perhaps public social networking is in decline. Maybe it is. But the social behaviors in small groups are definitely not. And that’s the thing to keep in mind — those two contrasts.

Shel: Yeah, and that requires a whole different approach than we’ve been taking — to this blasting this content out. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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

Most agency owners know AI can write a first draft or clean up copy. Far fewer have figured out how to use it as the strategic sounding board they’ve always needed.

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as a thought partner, not just a content machine.

Gini’s example is a client who asked her to map what a PESO model maturity ladder would look like for an organization. She described the situation and constraints to Chat GPT, and keep pushing the conversation forward. Six weeks of iterative back-and-forth surfaced ideas she wouldn’t have reached on her own, including finding the gaps when the AI was willing to poke holes in her thinking.

Chip points out that for owner-led agencies, that 8pm Friday idea you don’t want to dump on your team now has somewhere to go. The tool doesn’t care what time it is, and it has no stake in whether your idea succeeds or embarrasses you. Both hosts advise to direct the AI to ask you questions rather than just answer them. It takes some coaching to get a tool that genuinely engages rather than validates everything you propose, but once you’re there, you start getting real value.

One warning they have is that these tools are not always consistent. The same AI that helped you build a strategy three weeks ago might question it today with equally compelling reasoning. Stay in the driver’s seat, and treat AI-generated recommendations as input, not conclusions. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page, the new employee communication podcast from communication veterans Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo. In this first episode, Shel and Steve tell their origin story, recount how this podcast came to be, what listeners can expect, and riff on how to tap into managers to help support communication to their team members.

We hope you’ll participate in the show by sharing your comments, questions, experiences, and anecdotes by sending an email to [email protected] (include an audio clip; we’ll play it), or commenting on this page or on the announcement posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or BlueSky. As you can see below, you can also watch the YouTube video version of the show.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: If your managers are improvising messages, you don’t have a communication strategy, you have a rumor pipeline.

Steve Crescenzo: Manager communications — one of the most misunderstood and ignored parts of employee communications, but one we need to pay attention to. But before we get there, welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page.

Shel Holtz: Now, factoring managers into communication is the kind of challenge, Steve, you and I are going to be talking about here on this brand spanking new internal comms podcast.

Steve Crescenzo: I prefer to say employee comms podcast show, but we’ll be sure to be talking about that as we go. Yeah, we’ve obviously launched this podcast for communicators primarily, but we’re also hoping some managers listen in, some executives, some leaders, some CEOs — they could all benefit from what we’re going to be talking about, right?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. This is for anybody who’s engaged in communication inside the organization, whether it’s the formal communication that is the work of we employee communicators, or just people who know that they have to do it, whether that’s senior executives or department managers or whomever. But we’ll cover one dimension of employee comms, internal comms, whatever you want to call it — EC/IC — in each episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, exactly right. And yeah, you know, if you work in an organization, you have to communicate. You may not do it for a living, but you have to communicate. So why don’t we tell the gang where — you and I have known each other for 30 years, 32 years, something like that. And we’ve talked about this before, and we always say we’re going to do it. We never do it. You’re already doing podcasts, and I’m lazy. I’m like, this is extra work. I never give myself extra work. But this is the right time to do it. Why do you think I finally caved and you finally said, you know, we need to carve out time for this. Why now?

Shel Holtz: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some are based on what’s going on in the world right now, and some are based on the fact that I’m working on a book that covers all this. And it has the same title as this podcast. The topics we’re going to cover come from the framework from this book. The book is a framework for internal comms — employee… I call it employee communications in the book, by the way. And I do that for a very specific reason. I got some pushback on that from one of the internal communications experts, thought leaders out there, whom I asked to review it. And he said, call it internal comms, don’t call it employee comms because there are other audiences that are internal besides employees. And I said, yeah, but this book is just for communicating with employees because they are, as Roger D’Aprix called them, informed insiders. Those other people, the contractors that come in and are embedded in the organization — yeah, they’re there, they’re getting a lot of that internal messaging, but they’re accountable to the values and the purpose of the company that they work for, the one that pays them.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, they have their own mission and values and everything. Yeah, I’m glad you stuck to your guns on that, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I do think internal communicators need to factor in those audiences, those stakeholders, but not for the purposes of the book that I wrote. That’s really aimed at employees. The framework came when I was an independent consultant. I haven’t been one of those for — it’ll be nine years in October. It really is. The older you get, the faster that time goes by. But when I was doing independent consulting, I found myself sort of reinventing this on every engagement, particularly on internal communication audits. And I said, this is ridiculous. If I just had the framework fleshed out, I could just pull it out and I could do the audit report much more quickly. So I sat down and I came up with it, and I worked with a few other people to get their thoughts. And finally I had it in front of me and I said, it looks like there’s about 28 elements of this. I ought to flesh these out. So I did a blog post for each of them. And about halfway through, somebody said, you are going to turn this into a book, aren’t you? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought about that. But now that I have, yeah, I will. So that took — yeah, all of this has taken 15, 16 years since I first sat down and hammered out the framework. And I mean, I had some great help. Brian O’Mara-Croft actually did the visuals to take my terrible graphic and turn it into something that looked nice.

Steve Crescenzo: Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. Well, I’m very lucky in that I’m one of the rare people who’ve read the book and really, really love the book. And when you said you wanted to start a podcast to further explore the topics in that book, I was all over it. Now, there’s so much to cover, but we’ve got the rest of our lives, Shel, right? Well, I’m not going anywhere. You got at least five years left, right?

Shel Holtz: My dog has at least five years left and I don’t want to leave her alone.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, when he goes, you go, probably. But we’re gonna try to stick to, what, about 20 minutes? I mean, that’s hard for me and you. I think that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be our biggest challenge. I’ll tell you that right now. I got a lot to say, and I want a lot to learn from you, and I got a lot of opinions, so it’ll be tough to stick to 20 minutes, but we can.

Shel Holtz: It will. We’ll try. My view on the length of podcasts — and anybody who’s listened to FIR already knows this — is that they should be as long as it takes to say what you wanted to say, as long as it remains interesting for the people who are listening. If people are going, my God, they’re just droning on and on, I’m going to go listen to something else, then…

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I always get the question in my writing workshops about how long can an online article be? And I said, as short as humanly possible without leaving anything important out. That’s it. Not an extra word after that.

Shel Holtz: I think that’s a great answer. So we’re going to shoot for 20 minutes. If we go over, we’ll go over. If during the editing process I think I can make it shorter without leaving out anything that needed to be said, I’ll edit mercilessly. But the point here is to be entertaining and informative at the same time. And that’s why I wanted to do this with you, Steve — besides your experience with employee communications, all the various companies you’ve worked with, everything you’ve learned. I figure you and I are gonna host an entertaining show.

Steve Crescenzo: Have some fun. We’ll have fun. These things aren’t worth it. We’re not getting paid, Shel. I don’t know if you realize that, but we’re not getting paid. Well, you gotta have fun. We’re love. So we’re gonna do one every other week, right?

Shel Holtz: No, this is a labor of love. And speaking of that, we’re going to bring your wife into this every now and then.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we’re gonna — that sounds kind of weird. All right, let’s just take… but yeah. We’re gonna bring Cindy in once in a while. We’re not gonna have a lot of guests though, right? Do we agree to that?

Shel Holtz: Now, the goal here is not to do another interview podcast. This is two people who have been doing internal comms for their entire careers and sharing what we have learned and what we know around each of these topics that we will introduce. And these topics — we’re not going to do a topic just once. We’ll come back to them as there are new things to talk about. But when we get to measurement, that’s Cindy’s area of expertise. She works with you at Crescenzo Communications.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, she runs our audits. She’s a measurement queen — dashboards, measuring behavior, not outcomes, outputs. I mean, she lives and breathes that stuff. So yeah, you know, there’s open marriages where they introduce somebody else into the marriage. And this is an open podcast. Once in a while, we’ll bring Cindy in.

Shel Holtz: And once in a while, we’ll bring in another communicator, presumably somebody who is doing this in an organization, but not to interview them — just to have the conversation with them because they have expertise or experience around the topic that we’re discussing.

Steve Crescenzo: So, you know, people know you and people know me, but they may not know us and how long we’ve known each other. So I remember the first time I met you. It was in New Orleans, and I had just almost pretty much just started at Ragan Communications. I was a nobody, you were already well known. And it was the days of CompuServe. And I went out to CompuServe and I met you and Pete Shinbach and Charles Pizzo and Craig Jolly. And you guys were doing like a barnstorming tour all over the place. And Charles Pizzo invited me down to New Orleans, which is where he lives, to be the lunch speaker. So you guys are going to handle all the heavy hitting, all the big topics, and I’m going to come in and be the lunch speaker — my first speech ever, except for college. I threw up right before I got on the stage and it went great. I said, you know what? I don’t know how else to do this but to be myself. And I’m a little unfiltered. I’m a little irreverent. I’m a little — whatever you want to call it — unprofessional, maybe. But I got up there and I did what I did. I just do what I do. And it was a huge hit. And it basically launched my career. And then we went on to have one of the most epic weekends of all time at Jazz Fest.

Shel Holtz: I remember this well enough to know that you were physically sick at the idea of getting up and speaking in front of people. Not to mention an epic dinner at Emeril’s.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh, that 12 courses in his wine cellar at Emeril’s. God, I’ll never forget that meal. And then since then, we’ve been on vacation together. You and I did a barnstorming tour with our wives up and down the East Coast, from Boston all the way down to D.C.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did. We stopped and saw a concert in Hartford, Connecticut on the way. We had many good meals. And yeah, you spoke the first day, I spoke the second day. And the wives hung out with whichever of us was not presenting. We went out and did stuff. And then we were all together for our drives between locations. We didn’t fly from place to place. We rented a car and we drove. But we vacationed.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s right, you’re Dead. Dead. Yeah, no, we drove. We drove. You know, the reason we’ve never done that again, because every time I was speaking, Michele would try to get Cindy to spend money shopping, and we couldn’t afford it at the time. I was barely making any money.

Shel Holtz: I remember that well. I think you had more money when we spent a week together in Hawaii.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we were doing a little better then. It helps that it was free for us because of your kindness. You know, we promised we would talk about managers as communicators.

Shel Holtz: Yes, we did.

Steve Crescenzo: So, what I’d like to tell you is what’s happening in Crescenzo Communications. And this is a really good thing. I want to say this is a good thing. We are getting at least eight to 10 requests every year now to directly address managers on how to be more effective communicators, how to carry the water, how to explain complicated business initiatives to your teams. People — I used to say, you know, we speak to the communicators about how to galvanize managers, and how to — don’t give them a big toolkit, don’t give them some big obnoxious thing they’re never gonna pay attention to, but you can help them communicate. I would always go to the communicator. Lately now, the communicators are bringing us in and saying, we just want to talk to our managers directly. And that’s happening more and more. I think people are finally kind of starting to get it a little bit, that — yeah, channels are important, yes, messaging is important, our vehicles are important, what we do as corporate communicators is important, but where the rubber hits the road is down there at the work level, and the frontline supervisors and the managers.

Shel Holtz: I used to resist this like crazy. I understand that managers are important in the communication mix. If you look at research, you ask employees, what is your preferred source of information on these 10 things? And five of them will be my manager. And the reason for that is that those five things are going… my phone is ringing.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh, okay.

Shel Holtz: It’s my cable company trying to upsell me. Okay, let me go back to that.

Steve Crescenzo: Okay.

Shel Holtz: If you look at surveys that ask employees what is their preferred source of information, you give them a list of 10 things, five of them will be my immediate supervisor. And the reason for that is those five things are going to have an impact on the way they do their work, on what their outputs are supposed to be, what’s expected of them in that department, on that team. And the manager is the one they expect to know — what are we supposed to do different here? You’re not going to ask your manager to explain a new benefit or the strategic plan; those things you expect to hear from the benefits department or the executive team. But if it has to do with what you are expected to do differently — this change that we’re making is going to drive some kind of change in your team — the manager is the one who’s going to talk about that at the ground level. My issue has always been that managers are never held accountable for communication. And every one of them does it differently. I mean, let’s face it, most managers were not promoted into their position because of their great management style. They were promoted because of what they were doing as an individual contributor, and they kept getting promoted and promoted, and to get promoted again and to get more money, now they have to be a manager because that’s the hierarchy of the organization. So because they did this great work as an individual contributor, they now have people reporting to them. Most companies will put them through some kind of training. My company does. It’s called management essentials. There is a communication module. But again, they’re not held accountable. And you ask them to communicate, and some of them will forward the email to their employees, some of them will mention it at a meeting, some of them won’t do anything, some of them will do a great job, some of them will do a terrible job. But manager communication, to me, was always like that children’s party game of telephone, where you whisper something into the ear of the first kid, then they whisper it into the ear of the next. By the time it gets to the last kid, the message has been corrupted so much it doesn’t sound anything like what was whispered into the ear of the first kid.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’m the living embodiment of that. When I came out of college — and I had like 85 jobs in college and leading up to college — I’ve only had two jobs since college: Ragan Communications and Crescenzo Communications. But I started at Ragan as an editor and I was good at what I did, I guess. Next thing I knew, I had six people reporting to me, and I couldn’t stand it. I was a terrible manager. I wasn’t relaying information. I would just do the work myself. I hated all the people that worked for me after a while because I just — I wasn’t a good manager. I’d skip them. I didn’t do them sometimes. Here’s a great example. One of the guys that we worked with had such bad body odor. And everybody came to me and said, you gotta tell him he can’t ride his bike to work, he’s gonna stink up the office. And I was like, I’m not telling him that. They said, it’s your job, you’re his manager. I’m like, no, I’m not doing it. You want to tell him? I was just terrible. But that’s exactly… You remember this guy, what was his name? Grunig, Grunig…

Shel Holtz: I bet you hated doing performance evaluations. Jim Grunig.

Steve Crescenzo: Grunig, that was his name. Grunig. Jim Grunig. He wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review about how companies shouldn’t even have communications departments. They should just pour all their money into helping managers communicate. Forget about a newsletter, forget about this, forget about that, town halls — forget all about it. Pour everything into the managers. And I was asked to debate him once in Toronto. And I’ll never forget, I went up to him before the debate and I said, hey, let’s do a real debate. I said, because I really disagree with you. Don’t be one of these conference debates where we basically just agree with each other the whole time and we’re nice to each other. I vehemently disagree with you. So let’s have it out. And we had a slugfest up there. And I just disagreed with him. I think that — truth be told, now with a little more wisdom — I was young then, we probably had to meet in the middle somewhere. Communicators should put more emphasis on managers and help them communicate. Help them localize the corporate news for their teams, make it relevant to their teams, start conversations, gather questions from employees. We should be helping managers do all that. In the meantime, we also need enterprise-wide communications and all the good stuff that we’re good at.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I’m really glad that communication teams are recognizing the importance of this to the degree that they’re asking you to come out and talk to managers. And I’m glad you’re getting that work. But it’s like anything else that we’re doing right now — it’s a one-shot thing. And in a year, managers will have moved on. The pressures of the job, the expectations for their teams, the numbers they need to produce. And the simple fact is, if you’re looking at your performance review, and 90% of what you are scored on is all about productivity, and 3% is communication, you’re going to blow off the communication. So what we need to do is find ways to make sure that we have an ongoing dialogue with managers where they understand what it is that they need to communicate without putting extra pressure on them. For example, where I work, we do a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. And the first thing is four bullets, right? We want you to remind your employees of this. We want you to tell your employees this. If it’s a big deal, we’ll also put out something we call Manager Briefing, which is an FAQ on the topic so that they can answer specific questions. We’re not trying to get them to become communicators, but we are trying to promote consistency of…

Steve Crescenzo: But it’s still short, it’s tight, right?

Shel Holtz: …the primary message, while leaving them the room to say, here’s what this means to us here in this team, this department, this location.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’ve never, in all my years of building the companies and helping managers communicate all over the world, I’ve never seen a manager’s toolkit, for lack of a better word, work if it’s extensive — if there’s “watch this video, do this, do that.” Every time we do focus groups with managers, and Cindy does a hundred a year, maybe 50 a year for our audience, they all start off by saying, I don’t have any time to communicate. I don’t have time to communicate. After Cindy digs in a little bit, as you do in a focus group, she gets to the bottom — they say, well, you know what? They do have time to communicate. They communicate every day to their teams. They’re talking to their teams every day. They just don’t know what to communicate. They don’t know what’s for their ears only, what they should pass on. That’s why one of the things we do whenever we do a newsletter for managers, we always do Know, Do, and Share. Put them in categories. Here’s stuff we need you to know — this is just for the managers’ ears. Here’s stuff we need you to do as a manager. And here’s what we want you to share with your employees. It makes it very easy for them to share that information. And lately what we’ve been doing is including conversation starters where they can actually talk — that way they can facilitate that two-way up and down communication. And you know what, managers appreciate it. They appreciate the help. They don’t want to be bad communicators. You know, I was just out at PG&E, in your neck of the woods, Shel — San Francisco. And I was addressing 600 people leaders at PG&E. And I got there and I said, how many people here have miscommunicated? How many people here have screwed up a communication to their teams? Every hand went up. I said, how many people did it out of malice? How many people did it because you wanted to sow confusion? You wanted to irritate? You wanted to bring productivity to a halt? You’re just a bad, lousy, rotten person. Every hand went down, of course. I said, no, we just — we have bad habits. We write too long. Our emails aren’t clear. We don’t like to get negative feedback. I mean, we got bad habits, and communications can help managers get rid of some of those habits.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think they appreciate learning how to do something that is going to advance their own careers, which, by the way, is something that we can also impress upon them — is if you do a good job of communication, you’re going to get better outcomes from your teams. You’re going to get more promotions and more money and more prestige within the organization. But we’re not trying to turn them into communicators. We’re not trying to make them do what we do.

Steve Crescenzo: No, no, they have a job! They have a job!

Shel Holtz: They do, but we are trying to make them better managers. And in my framework, under employee engagement, one of the four topics listed there is engaging managers. And if you want to be an engaging manager and boost the engagement of your employees, being a better manager who communicates well is a big part of that.

Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I like that. That’s for our first podcast — that’s a keeper right there. We are not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication. No, I didn’t say that right. I agree — we are not… I like that. Close enough, Shel, come on, for God’s sake, edit that out. No, no, I like that. You said it. It was really good. We’re not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication tactics.

Shel Holtz: Exactly. Close enough. I can pull it out of the transcript later. Exactly what I said. Yeah. So, and by the way, I’m sure that when you implemented those newsletters for managers, you had a mechanism for measuring how effective they were.

Steve Crescenzo: I didn’t implement them, Shel. I started them. We don’t implement over here. Yes, we launched, and we started. We didn’t facilitate them. We didn’t implement them. We didn’t utilize them. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. And you know what? One of the companies we did that for was the Mayo Clinic. I know we have to get to the end here, but we did it at the Mayo Clinic. And now Cindy and I just finished a project where we interviewed 50 Mayo Clinic nurses, leaders, nurse leaders.

Shel Holtz: Got it. The client did it. But you provided the client with the means of measuring how effective they were.

Steve Crescenzo: We built a whole 41-course curriculum for them. And we heard in our interviews that they love the manager newsletter — it’s called Supervisor Update — because it has that Know, Share, Do. They love them. People said it without knowing that we were the ones that created it, that we gave them the format. They just talked about, yeah, this was really effective. I like doing this. I like getting that newsletter because it’s quick. Tells me what I need to pass on to my team. So yeah, the measurement’s there. If we can help them communicate without taking up a lot of their time, that’s the silver bullet.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Yeah, for my Talking Points newsletter, the measure is real easy. I get a list of 50 random employees who are frontline workers. I send them a survey. It’s four questions. Did your manager in the last week or two talk to you about this? How about this? What about that? All four of those points. And we can find out if these messages are getting passed along.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh wait, so you bypass the managers, you go right to the people, and you can figure out if the managers are using your bullet points? That is smart. That’s something — every time I talk to you, that’s smart.

Shel Holtz: Yes. Yeah. And I’m able to detect trends — which kinds of talking points they are inclined to share, and which ones, I guess, bore them and they don’t share.

Steve Crescenzo: Now if there’s one manager who’s particularly not doing anything, do you snitch on them? Do you rat them out?

Shel Holtz: We don’t know who’s answering. It’s an anonymous survey. But what it tells us is that we need to find a different channel to communicate these messages because managers aren’t passing them along. While at the same time working with managers to get them to understand the importance of sharing this information.

Steve Crescenzo: Well, I hope this isn’t going to be the last time we talk about manager communications.

Shel Holtz: I can’t imagine that it is. We are going to talk about other things, though, like the elements of culture where employees can have an impact. The other enablers of employee engagement, like organizational integrity, closing the say-do gap between what leaders say and what they actually do. Strategic narratives, elevating the employee voice.

Steve Crescenzo: Love it. There’s so much on my mind, and luckily it all does fit into your framework. You know, the employee experience, how they can influence the customer experience, how can you turn them into ambassadors? And obviously we’re going to talk a little bit about AI, Shel — I mean, you’re Shel Holtz. But I’m hoping to learn from you about AI.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about technology. I can’t imagine that we could do this whole podcast without talking tech. But we’ll get down to some of the fundamentals too, like delivering the news to employees. I’ve talked to some communicators who are so into the strategy, they don’t think they need to share news anymore, but the news is how we create a shared reality in the organization.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I love that. We got to have the two C’s — crisis and change communications — both of which are often butchered. Well, it’s just going to be fun, Shel. I can’t wait. Can’t forget those. Are we doing it every other week, right?

Shel Holtz: Every other week. I can’t swear what day it’ll be. I’m not going to promise the first and the 15th or every other Thursday, but twice a month. And you’ll be able to get this wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe. And it’ll also be on YouTube on the FIR Podcast Network. That’s also where this one will live — on the FIR Podcast Network at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. That’s where Neville Hobson and I have been doing For Immediate Release for 21 years.

Steve Crescenzo: I know.

Shel Holtz: So you have to look forward to, Steve, will be doing this when I am in my nineties.

Steve Crescenzo: Well, I want to end with one more anecdote about you and your podcast and your ability and your forethinking. Is that a word? Forethinking? Your thinking forward, your forward thinking. My wedding to Cindy was 20 years ago. And you’d pretty much almost just started the podcast. And you showed up, came into my house, like the day before the wedding, with your suitcase — your podcast suitcase. Remember that? And you had all this equipment.

Shel Holtz: It is now. I do.

Steve Crescenzo: Run it all over the dining room table, and you did your podcast from my house. Probably that was the first year you were doing it, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it would have been. I had a travel mixer and a travel mic. I don’t use a mixer anymore. I don’t need that stuff anymore because of what’s available online. But yeah, I absolutely remember that.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I remember all that. I remember — what kind of nerd brings podcast stuff to a wedding? But you’re dedicated, man. You are dedicated.

Shel Holtz: Well, we did them on a regular cadence and had to get it done. So, yeah. And I think I came to your place because the Wi-Fi in the hotel wasn’t cutting it.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s awesome. That’s great. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. You couldn’t do it in a Starbucks, you told me. I remember that very clearly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, a little too much ambient noise in a Starbucks. But anyway, we’re recording this first episode for two reasons. One, you have to do a first episode that tells people what it’s all about. But two, you can’t get listed in the podcast directories until you actually have an episode in the RSS feed. So this will be an episode that will get us listed in the directories so that you’ll be able to find us there, everybody.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. Is that why we did this? I don’t even know. Okay. Now, can people comment on the podcast — like ask us questions?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. We will let people know when there’s a new episode up. We’ll share some information about it through the social channels, primarily LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. And we’ll also have the post on the FIR Podcast Network. You can comment there. You can comment where we leave the announcements on the social feeds. We’ll check them all, and we will use those as launching points for additional conversations.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, my friend. Well, I want to thank you for asking me to do this. I’m looking forward to it every other week. Plan on learning a lot, plan on laughing a lot, and I will see you in a couple of weeks.

Shel Holtz: I’ll see you then. It’s going to be a blast.

The post Managers As A Communication Channel appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Neville and Shel dig into a provocative Harvard Business Review article that argues most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale that agentic AI now enables. The bottleneck, the authors contend, isn’t the technology; it’s the operating model. Neville and Shel connect the piece to conversations FIR has been having for the past year: AI as orchestration rather than automation, professionals shifting from supervisors of tasks to directors of systems, and 2026 increasingly framed as “the year of the agent.”

At the center of the Harvard piece is the idea of a “brand code” — a machine-readable knowledge system that lets specialized AI agents continuously create, adapt, test, and optimize marketing in real time. Communications urgently needs its own equivalent: a “narrative code” containing executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, and escalation rules. Whoever builds it first, he warns, will inherit the agentic stack, and if marketing gets there first, comms will be stuck with a system never designed for crisis, controversy, or stakeholder complexity. The episode also includes some concrete examples and early thoughts on Hermes, Wispr Flow, and where human judgment still has to win.

Links from this episode:

• Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age
• The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications
• Google Summary: The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications
• If you work in PR and you’re unsure how AI agents will help you, this should help.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25.

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

Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 513 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville: I’m Neville Hobson. Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard countless conversations about how AI is changing marketing and communication. Most of those discussions tend to focus on tools — faster content creation, better personalization, workflow automation, synthetic media, analytics — all the things AI can supposedly do more quickly and at greater scale than humans. A new article in Harvard Business Review published last week takes the discussion somewhere much bigger.

Its argument is not simply that AI will improve marketing productivity. Its argument is that AI may fundamentally redesign how marketing organizations themselves operate. The article is called “Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age,” and the authors argue that most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale AI now enables. The reasoning is interesting; we’ll look into this in a minute.

AI has already accelerated software engineering and product development dramatically. Products, updates, campaigns, and features are being developed and shipped much faster than before. But marketing organizations, they argue, are still largely built around sequential workflows, siloed teams, approval chains, meetings, handoffs, and coordination-heavy processes. So even when AI speeds up individual tasks, the organization itself still moves slowly.

In other words, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily the technology, it’s the operating model. What struck me reading this article is that in many ways it feels like the continuation of conversations we’ve already been having on FIR over the past year. About a year ago, Shel demonstrated some of the early agentic AI capabilities we were beginning to see emerge — systems that could move beyond simple chatbot interactions and actually take actions across workflows, tools, and platforms.

At the time, it felt experimental, slightly futuristic, and maybe just a glimpse of where things might be heading. Since then, we’ve repeatedly returned to related themes on the podcast: AI as orchestration rather than just automation, and managers becoming directors of systems rather than supervisors of tasks, to name but two. Recently, the wider communications industry has been framing 2026 as the year of the agent, a fundamental shift from generative AI, which creates content based on prompts, to agentic AI, which acts autonomously to achieve long-term goals. The rise of such autonomous agents requires a focus on agentic orchestration, with professionals acting as AI engineers who guide, manage, and audit these digital employees. As we discussed on this podcast last year, communication departments will adopt a hybrid structure where humans focus on high-level strategy and creativity while AI agents handle high-volume procedural communication tasks at machine speed.

We’re already seeing a marked impact on marketing and public relations. The Harvard piece explains how companies such as HubSpot and AWS have begun putting this model into practice. They say organizations are achieving measurable gains, with marketing materials adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs reduced by 80%, and click-through rates increased up to 17 times. Research from BCG has demonstrated these benefits at scale.

Organizations embedding agentic AI into marketing workflows, the research has found, can achieve up to a threefold increase in ROI, campaign speed, and content volume. That’s why this Harvard article feels so interesting to me. It doesn’t contradict any earlier conversations; it complements them. It takes many of the ideas we’ve been discussing conceptually and places them inside a concrete organizational model. The authors propose something they call an agentic marketing organization — essentially a system where humans and AI agents work together continuously across multiple layers of activity.

At the center of this idea is what they describe as a brand code: a machine-readable knowledge system containing brand strategy, customer insights, messaging frameworks, business rules, governance structures, and operational guidance that both people and AI systems can understand and act upon. Once that foundation exists, specialized AI agents can continuously create, adapt, test, distribute, optimize, and report on marketing activity in real time. It’s a vision of marketing that starts to look less like a department and more like an operating system.

But what really caught my attention wasn’t the technology itself so much; it was the shift in the role of the marketer. Because beneath all the platform architecture and workflow diagrams is a much deeper question: if AI increasingly handles execution, what becomes the real value of marketers and communicators?

The article argues that value shifts away from production and toward judgment — setting intent, evaluating outputs, interpreting signals, shaping governance, and guiding how the system evolves. And that raises some fascinating questions for communicators. But first, Shel, your demo of those early agentic capabilities was about a year ago now. As I mentioned earlier, it felt experimental and slightly futuristic then. So what’s changed since then?

Shel: It feels like ancient history now. If I were to look at that, I’d probably shake my head and say, “my God, that’s pretty primitive.” The way it worked was, it took a screenshot of every site it visited and then acted on the screenshot. So it was a very slow and tedious process. The video that I shared, I edited out all of the waiting time for it to go through all of this, because it showed you everything. And those days are long gone.

That was clearly a demo. I don’t remember which of the AI models offered that — I think it was Anthropic — but it was just tedious and not all that functional. It did what it was supposed to do in the end, which was to create a spreadsheet with the information I’d asked for. It was some open-source spreadsheet that it used.

I ran a similar exercise just last week using Claude Cowork. And this was for a piece somebody in our sustainability department wrote. It was about two projects that had achieved world-first certifications for zero waste, which is kind of a big deal in the construction industry. It’s one of the biggest contributors to landfills and the like, the industry is.

So I’m looking to place this article. And what I did was, I told Claude Cowork that I wanted four subagents working: one to look at construction and AEC publications — that’s architecture, engineering, and construction; AEC is the category for the industry. Another one was going to look at sustainability publications. And there was one other, but I also had it look for podcasts where the authors of this report might be invited for an interview.

I said, what I want you to do is find the publications and podcasts based on their previous content that are most likely to be interested in something like this, and then create a spreadsheet with the name of the outlet. And of course, divide it into these categories — right? AEC, podcasts, sustainability-focused publications, and the like. Mainstream media was the other category. But I also wanted the URL, I wanted the name of the appropriate person to pitch the article to. And then, based on what that person has written — that particular reporter or editor — I wanted a pitch that was personalized to that person.

And I came back in about half an hour, and there was a spreadsheet ready to go. And I had started acting on it. I don’t copy and paste the pitches; I go and take a look at that reporter’s writing and review the pitch and then make some tweaks to it. But my God, can you imagine how much time that would have taken for me to go out and do this on my own by way of research? That would have been hours and hours.

And instead the agents went out and did it, and then Cowork assembled all that information into a spreadsheet. I was doing other stuff while it was doing that. I wasn’t sitting and watching, because there frankly wasn’t that much to watch. I mean, you could watch the agent tell you, “now I’m going to go look at this.” But, you know, that’s kind of boring. Let it do its thing.

Neville: Yeah. So a question I have related to this, I suppose, is to put it into one practical area, which is: people might think of this in the context of the interaction you have with prompts and the old-fashioned way of doing things that is still prevalent. So how did you — the agents went off and did their thing, and then you came across what they produced and so forth, and it saved tons of time — how did you gain confidence, let’s say, that it was accurate, that there were no hallucinations, no errors? Or is that not the issue anymore with this kind of development?

Shel: I believe that hallucinations would still be an issue. It’s still a model at some level doing this work. I mean, it’s Claude with Claude Cowork. I did install Hermes over the weekend. We’ll talk about that in a bit, but it’s an agent platform, an agent framework, and you create the agents to do things.

For example, I created one over the weekend that I set up to be a weekly job, and it’s going to go out and look at construction industry news to find things based on our areas of expertise where I work, where we have subject matter experts and thought leaders, to find the top three articles that are ripe for newsjacking. If you remember David Meerman Scott’s newsjacking — things where we can get some stuff out there quickly.

Neville: Yeah.

Shel: And take advantage of the fact that this is something that people are looking at and gain some traction over it. So every Monday at eight, it’s going to run this job, and by 8:30, 8:45, it’s going to give me the results. And all of this is through Telegram, or WhatsApp, or whatever app you choose to use to interact with the bot. It still starts with a prompt. The difference is that you’re not prompting a question in order to get an answer; you are telling it what task to perform.

And in the case of the one that I set up on Hermes, it’s now a weekly task. And the interesting thing about Hermes is that it learns as it goes. It continually self-improves based on the more it knows about you and the kinds of tasks that you’re asking it to perform. So I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes. But so far, I just have the one agent running there. But it’s still a prompt at the end of the day.

And in fact, I used — I think it was Gemini — to help me craft the prompt to get the best results I could. I said, here’s the list of requirements, turn it into the best prompt that Hermes will understand and act on most effectively. And it did that. It did a great job. And I’m very satisfied with the results so far. I ran one test of it, so I liked it.

Neville: Yeah. So Claude Cowork is kind of at the heart of this. I’m experimenting myself with Claude Cowork — with Claude generally, Cowork sort of. Nothing like you’re doing with this, I hasten to add. But one of the things that I’m very impressed with about Claude is the way in which you tell it the things about you, who you are and what you’re doing, all this stuff — your preferences in how it conducts what you’re asking it to do — in a way that, unlike ChatGPT for instance, where you have to, in a sense, include in a prompt stuff you’ve already told it for something previously, but you’ve got to do that again. It doesn’t kind of remember that in the same way. Claude is different, though.

So your setup — I mean, I guess what I’m asking basically is, when you set this up, did it require that level of preparation that is probably desirable to do that? Or was there anything special that you had to do that was outside of what you would normally do with Claude Cowork?

Shel: Well, for the byline piece that I was looking to pitch, that I set the subagents out to do their thing in Cowork, I did in the prompt explain what my goal was and what the organization was. I had it look at our company website to get a good sense of who we are and what our areas of specialization are. I gave it some additional information.

But then something I do with all of these now — not every prompt, if I’m just in Claude or ChatGPT, but especially with the agents, with deep research projects and things like that — I’ll say, “ask me questions before you go out and do this.” And it usually asks some very salient questions. It’s very good at deducing what it doesn’t know. And the answers factor into the results you get, which is really interesting to me — that it can, if you ask it to, understand where there are gaps in the prompt that it could use this information in order to deliver really excellent and pertinent results.

Neville: Got it. So thinking about our listeners listening to this, to how you’ve explained all of this — is it kind of credible and within the reach of anyone literally wanting to do this? Or do you need to have some kind of mental preparedness or knowledge technically to do this? Could anyone just dive in and start something? Right.

Shel: Well, I don’t know about diving in. With Hermes, for example, I watched a couple of YouTube videos. I watched one that actually walked me step by step through the installation process and then had a whole section on use cases. I’ve watched more. There’s one on 99 use cases for Hermes that I watched, which was pretty good. So it helps you get in that mindset. But in terms of, can anybody do this?

In the world of communications, anybody better be able to do this, because you’re not going to be sent out to look for these sites and assemble a spreadsheet anymore. You need to be able to orchestrate these agents. And that means knowing how to prompt it to get the results that you want. And that’s different, again, from prompting ChatGPT for an answer to a question, right? You are giving it a task, and it could be a recurring task that somebody on your team does.

Now, in communications, I still don’t see this replacing a communicator, because every communicator is going to have the human-only or human-required elements of the job. I cannot see one of these conducting, say, an employee focus group. There’s so much that we do. I mean, you know, in public relations, the word “relations” always stands out to me, and maintaining those relations is not something a bot can do.

But in terms of what that Harvard Business Review article was talking about, you can swap marketing for communications. I think it’s more true in comms. Comms workflows are more coordination-heavy than marketing. We have legal, we have HR, we have the C-suite. We have to make sure everything’s consistent with the brand and maybe get some brand representation approvals. They’re the owners of the channels that we have to deal with.

If marketing needs a brand code — and this was a concept I really liked in that article — communications needs a narrative code. You know, a machine-readable positioning, machine-readable executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, rules for escalating things that emerge that need to be taken up a step in the hierarchy or maybe up to the C-suite or the CEO. I don’t know anybody who’s built a narrative code.

Whoever builds this first in your organization, by the way, is going to end up owning the agentic stack. If marketing builds it first, we in communications are going to inherit a system that wasn’t designed for crisis communication, wasn’t designed for controversy or reputation damage or stakeholder complexity — it was built for marketing. And that’s the one we’re going to end up having to work with. You probably remember, Neville, in the early days of social media, Richard Edelman was out there sounding the drum that PR needed to own social media before marketing and advertising got their hands on it, because they would turn it into something inauthentic, right? It’s the same thing here.

Neville: Yeah. Yeah.

Shel: I think we in comms are going to have to build out the narrative code and let marketing take advantage of the agentic stack that we’ve built. But we need to be in the room when those decisions are being made.

Neville: So another challenge for communicators, and I can see that. I think the overall structure of the Harvard piece, as I mentioned in the introduction, is on the organization as a whole. And I think there are examples where that’s in work — I quoted a couple, and then there’s the BCG research, which I found quite interesting. But that’s… restructuring is a way away yet on an organizational level, I would say, for most companies. But the individual actions, such as experimentation you’re doing, are definitely right in front of us, literally right now.

And it prompted a thought in my mind, looking at this overall picture, about some assumptions in the Harvard piece that I think are worth looking at for a minute, where the article assumes that strategic judgment remains human, not AI focused, but execution becomes agentic. So I think, okay, then — though history suggests automation rarely stops neatly where people would like it to and where they would expect it to.

So perhaps a question that’s relevant to address in this context is: if AI systems — agentic is part of that — increasingly assist with strategy too, which is what they’ll be doing, where exactly does human value migrate to? That’s a broad question, but for communicators specifically, how would we address that one?

Shel: I think, first of all, if you’re going to look to the agentic system to assist with the development of the strategy, I would sit down and map out a game plan for that. I wouldn’t just say, “hey, you know the company I work for, come up with a strategy for us.” I would say, first of all, what is this strategy…

Neville: Ha ha ha.

Shel: …going to be designed to achieve? What do we know about the direction the company’s going and decisions that have been made? I would certainly use it to go out and say, research the marketplace and research our competitors and identify, to the extent that you can, what their strategies are. I would develop the strategy myself, but I would give it to the AI to stress-test.

And by the way, some of this is agentic and some of it is just querying a chatbot. I mean, let’s just take crisis communication as an example. No CEO is going to go into a boardroom with an answer from an AI system telling a leader something they don’t want to hear. That is amplified by the agentic stack. If we go in as the crisis counselor and say, “look, I know you’re not going to like this. Here’s my judgment. And I’ve got this information that came from the weekly analysis of sentiment in the marketplace,” so I think it can bolster your argument. It can’t replace your argument. You’re going to walk into that boardroom as a human and make a case.

Same thing, maybe, with focus groups. When passive signals in social media, for example, and message boards get gamed, sitting in a room with 10 employees becomes the truth that the dashboards that are out there — the agents that are out there looking at sentiment — get checked against. So when a dashboard says that morale is great and the focus group says it isn’t, I’m going to pay attention to the focus group. I’m going to pay attention to those 12 people in the room before I listen to an agent that says, “well, we’ve been analyzing all the sentiment in Slack and email, and everything is just dandy.”

So I think it’s the same with strategy. I think I would never abdicate strategy…

Neville: Mm.

Shel: …but I could certainly develop it faster and be more confident in its viability by using agents and chatbots.

Neville: Yeah, I agree. And it makes me think of, I guess I would say, what’s coming, which is already here in ways that lead to even greater — well, integration, I suppose, is the right way. I’m thinking what you said at the beginning of this segment we’re talking about now, which is, you don’t hand the whole thing over to the AI and say, “hey, go and develop a strategy.” You would do…

Shel: And you know there are people who are, right?

Neville: Yeah, they will. They will. But it seems to me that this is really, in a sense, the fulfillment of an expectation — a promise — from artificial intelligence tools like this, that you would have a conversation with it in the same way you would with a human being who might be an external consultant or a colleague who’s a subject matter expert or whoever it might be, that you would explore with that individual: we’re developing a strategy for next year, let’s look at how we’re going to do this.

You set the framework for how you might start that conversation with your AI assistant. And as you said, this is not specifically agentic; it’s the whole spectrum of what the tools are. And you set it on course to go and research this. And that’s probably what an agentic tool will do. And that to me is the excitement of where this is going — that you can get to that stage, which then I think would address some of the skepticism and indeed alarm bells by some in organizations when they see unfettered technology going all over the place or being asked to do stuff. This, though, makes it credible and gives it some legs of credibility.

Which leads me, I guess, to possibly the final question here. We’re seeing this, as you’ve explained, this is light years ahead of the demo you gave a year ago, which gave a signal, a strong sense of what’s possible, where this could go. We’ve seen that fulfilled. It is eminently possible. And you don’t need to be a rocket scientist, as you might have expected you would have to be a year ago. This is doable. And the more people experiment with it in simple ways, like you’ve outlined as a real-world example, they will want to do that in that case.

So the question then, therefore, is: okay, fine, a year on from last year, you’ve explained something you’re doing that delivers value quite readily every Monday morning, let’s say. So what’s next, do you see, in terms of developing technology and the developing value people will get from it that would accelerate probably its uptake? How do you see it?

Shel: I think that the next thing we’re going to see is an evaluation of every role and where an agent will fit. This is something we went through a couple of years ago. Ethan Mollick was talking about it in his book, Co-Intelligence, before we were even talking about agents — talking about inviting AI to the table and figuring out where you could work it into your workflows. But it was still the chatbot. It was still the, “I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to deliver some kind of answer.”

I think we need to do that again and look at agents. What tasks are we performing, and which ones can we hand off to agents? And I think there are probably roles where this is going to be even easier to do, where you’re going to see more opportunities than in communications. I mean, you know, engineering, for example, I think is wide open for this sort of thing.

So I think that’s what’s next — as we do hand off certain (and I’m going to call them) mundane tasks, because this is not the high-level strategy and the human-touch stuff that is so important in so many jobs. But as we hand these off, and it now takes an hour instead of a week, what does that do to the rest of our workflows? What does that do to our organizational structure?

One of the things that I was reading over the weekend was the expectation that middle managers are going to be a thing of the past, because what do they do? They handle the flow of information up and down between the people who report to them and the people that they report to. They handle a lot of mundane tasks that might now be handed off to an agent. Agents, according to — I don’t remember who this was who was saying this. It was somebody noteworthy. It might’ve been Dario Amodei at Anthropic, but I honestly don’t remember for sure — but middle managers can be replaced by agents by and large.

So what does that do to organizational structure? Certainly flattens it. But now, in terms of those executives who have a lot of people reporting to them, what part of that reporting structure can be handed off to an agent? So I think this is sort of a cascading situation where everything we do leads to a reconsideration of something, that leads to, well, what else can we do with the agents, which leads to further reconfiguration?

I think that’s what we’re looking at. And I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, because, as you alluded to, the technology may be moving fast, but organizations tend not to, particularly when it comes to issues of structure and governance.

Neville: I think this is so exciting, to be frank — the idea of the changes we can see coming that will be painful for many. But is it more structural change? It’s a constant in our lives, is it not, with all of this? Something we should embrace emotionally and logically, that we can control this. And I don’t mean control the tech — we can’t do that. But we can control the risk and the benefits of something like this by not reacting to something that’s coming, by, in a sense, embracing it and experimenting with this and learning it. And as you said, if we don’t do this, the marketing guys will. And so we can’t have that. I think…

Shel: And then we’re stuck with theirs.

Neville: I think it’s something to really pay attention to. So this has been a useful, interesting discussion, Shel, getting your thoughts on this in particular. So yeah, I think we’ll come back to this conversation unquestionably at some point in the future.

Shel: No doubt, as we see developments. In fact, as I say, I just started working with Hermes over the weekend, and it was an eye-opener, and I expect, as I work with it more, I’ll have more thoughts about it and my thinking will evolve. I should point out that I did install this on a personal virtual server, not on a company computer. I’m not taking that kind of risk. And it’s my personal account.

One other thing I thought I’d mention — you talked about the idea of having a conversation with the AI, and I think that’s becoming more of a focus. And I’ll give you two quick examples. One I already mentioned is with Hermes: you don’t go to a terminal and engage with it or go to its website. You do this through WhatsApp or Slack or, in my case, I’m using Telegram — just like I’d be having a conversation with a person in that same app.

But on, I think it was Thursday, I did a half-day webinar that was offered by the Marketing AI Institute, Paul Roetzer’s organization, and it was on AI for writing. And it was very interesting. Chris Penn was among the speakers; he did a great job, as always. But one of the folks there talked about, you know, have the conversation with AI for real — do it with your voice, not with your keyboard. And she talked about a tool, which I haven’t used it yet — I have installed it across my personal computer, my laptop, and my phone — called Wispr Flow. It’s an AI tool. Have you…? It’s pretty cool. I mean, in any tool you’re using, you just click it and talk. And it doesn’t go directly into the chat box; it interprets it…

Neville: Yeah, I’ve been using it. Yeah. Yeah.

Shel: …and then puts the best prompt based on what you just said into the box. And that’s what you use to prompt the model. And I’m looking forward to giving that a try. And it’s called Wispr Flow, by the way, because if you’re in the office in an open-space format and you don’t want to disturb the people next to you, it understands what you’re saying when you whisper to it.

Neville: Yeah, it is interesting. I’ve got a hurdle to jump with it, though, which is getting accustomed to speaking what I want things to be done and how, rather than typing them. You know… yeah, and I haven’t got across that hurdle yet. That’s limiting my use of it. So I’m reverting to the, well, I’m more comfortable typing, I can type fast and all that kind of stuff. But, reality, this is faster than that. And it is…

Shel: Yeah, same.

Neville: I recognize the benefits of it. I can see this. Not everyone will be used to this. This is not dissimilar to the argument we could have about voice notes. I know people who love voice notes; I don’t. And I know more people who don’t like it. It could be a generational thing, I think to myself. But it’s part of the communication landscape. So you need to get accustomed to these developments.

Shel: Yeah. And I hear about voice notes being preferred by some reporters who are being pitched, because it’s evidence that it wasn’t AI slop that’s pitching them.

Neville: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

Shel: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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