Local newsrooms keep shrinking, journalism schools keep closing their doors, and the reporters who remain are stretched thinner than ever. For organizational communicators, that shift changes the math on media relations. It’s no longer enough to know how to write a pitch. You need to understand who’s left to receive it, what standards still govern their work, and how to build the kind of relationship that gets your story told well instead of not at all.

Circle of Fellows #131 will feature four IABC Fellows with deep backgrounds in journalism and media relations. Moderated by Shel Holtz, SCMP, the panel will discuss what’s changed in the newsroom, what hasn’t, and what it means for the way communicators do their jobs.

The panel will dig into what that means day to day for communicators, including:

• Thinking local and strategic. Where does your story actually need to go, and which relationships and networks get it there?
• Knowing journalistic standards and principles (JSPs). Understanding what reporters can and can’t do — and where the real limits are — makes for smarter pitches and fewer frustrated calls.
• Respecting deadlines and information needs. How communicators and journalists can work together, rather than at cross purposes, to produce the stories both sides actually want.
• Getting to know the people in your “journalism ‘hood.” In a shrunken media landscape, personal relationships with the reporters who remain matter more than ever.

Join us for this hour-long conversation, live on Thursday, July 23, at noon ET. You’ll be able to ask questions and share your own experiences with the panel in real time. Can’t make it live? The video replay and audio podcast will be available afterward.

About the panel:

Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design.

Edward “Ned” Lundquist is a retired U.S. Navy captain with 43 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. His company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to government and commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington, director of U.S. District 3, and chair of the International Accreditation Council. He was named an IABC Fellow in 2016. Captain Lundquist received the Surface Navy Association’s Special Recognition Award in January of this year, for his service on SNA’s executive committee and chair of the SNA communications committee. He writes for numerous naval, maritime, and defense publications and chairs and presents at communications, naval, and maritime security conferences around the world.

Martha Muzychka, ABC, MC, speaks, writes, listens, and helps others do the same to make change happen. Martha is a strategic, creative problem solver seeking challenging communications environments where we can make a difference. She helps her clients navigate competing priorities and embrace communication challenges. Martha offers strategic planning, facilitation, consultation services, writing and editing, qualitative research, and policy analysis. Her work has been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally with multiple awards.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and is passionate about the strategic use of storytelling to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills on the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada.

The post Coming Up on Circle of Fellows: The Evolving Media Landscape and the Value of Ethical Journalism appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Circle of Fellows departed from the discussion of communication issues, as we do once each year, to introduce IABC’s newest Fellows. Five new communicators join the Fellows community in 2026, spanning the globe from Canada (from which three of our Fellows hail) to South Africa and Australia.

Part 1

Part 2

Meet the Fellows

Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design.

Founder and Principal of Fluency Leadership, Catherine Ducharme, IABC Fellow, PCC, CLC,is a career communicator, certified coach, and facilitator with more than 35 years of experience in communication and leadership. She has held senior roles across public relations, corporate, internal, and marketing communication in industries, including high-tech and health sciences, grounding her work in deep, real-world expertise. Building on that foundation, Catherine now focuses on developing communication and marketing professionals to be exceptional leaders.

Cyrus Mavalwala, IABC Fellow, ABC, MC, is a sought-after communication strategist who leads a team of trusted advisors that senior executives rely on to capture, own, and sustain mindshare with the people that matter most. After senior roles at global PR agencies, Cyrus founded Advantis Communications in 2002. Advantis’ proprietary frameworks operationalize AI, elevate social media, and deploy video as core drivers of thought leadership and influence, strengthening visibility and relevance.

André Oberholzer, SCMP, FCSCE, is group head for corporate affairs at Sappi Limited, a global pulp and paper company with operations across South Africa, North America, and Europe. He is a member of the Group Management Committee. He chairs the company Brand Council, ensuring close alignment between corporate, service, and product branding. He also serves on the Sappi SA Social Impact committee and the Group Sustainability and Risk Councils.

Sia Papageorgiou, IABC Fellow, FRSA, FCSCE, SCMP, is one of the world’s most awarded communication strategists, with more than 60 accolades for excellence in strategic communication and leadership. Over three decades, she has worked across journalism, public relations, corporate communication, and strategic advisory roles in government, business, and the not-for-profit sector. She is the co-founder of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE), a global professional development and insights organization trusted by leading organizations worldwide.

The post Circle of Fellows #129 and #130: Meet The 2026 Class of IABC Fellows appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most agency owners will tell you accountability is something they value, but fewer will realize they’re often the biggest obstacle to it. In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency.

Chip tells of his own recent experience where he missed putting out a newsletter after an emergency root canal. Even with Jen repeatedly pinging him, the decision of whether to get something done rested with him. Most employees won’t push back hard because they know who signs the paychecks. The exceptions are rare, and you can’t build your accountability system around them.

Gini’s structural fix has been making “less founder dependence” an explicit OKR, tracked at every leadership meeting. When the goal shows up red on a dashboard, the visibility creates its own pressure. Chip thinks it’s less about any specific single system. AI has helped him stop some procrastination, but it’s also added new projects he’d never have attempted before. His takeaway is that you need to figure out what works for your specific wiring, and not rely on someone else’s approach.

For external accountability, peers, coaches, and organizations like YPO or Vistage can help, particularly for big-picture questions you wouldn’t bring to your team. But formal advisory boards are another story. Both Chip and Gini are skeptical, since even paid corporate directors with legal obligations frequently fail at the oversight function. For owner-led agencies, the complexity almost never justifies the benefit. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

Links from this episode:

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

Links from Dan York’s Report

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

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

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 episode number 520 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz: A lane for that, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz: Russell Brand thought it was hysterical.

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz: No boycotts, huh?

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

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

Neville Hobson: ‘Tis.

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

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

Shel Holtz: Yeah, outcomes-based.

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

Shel Holtz: About the —

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

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

Neville Hobson: What to do, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of “On the Same Page,” Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn’t, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences.

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo

Hey Shel.

Shel Holtz

Steve, how you doing?

Steve Crescenzo

Doing good, doing good. We’re doing this on a record I’m doing this on a Saturday, which is fun. well, I mean it’s it’s what else am I gonna do? It’s too early to drink, so what yeah, this is this is good time spent. but I’m really glad I’m excited about our topic. More importantly this this week. we decided to talk about values, corporate values. And I think there’s there’s two camps of people when it comes to values. There’s people that really believe they can drive the culture and affect how people feel at work and how they work and how they treat each other and

Shel Holtz

Yeah, is it?

Steve Crescenzo

All that good stuff. you know, and there are companies where that happens. I I’m not gonna say there’s none. Second camp is people who just think they’re completely worthless and they just are posters on a wall and nobody pays attention to them, nobody can name what they are. And I’m in the third camp. I think they do some damage at some a lot of companies for two reasons. Number one, they’re they’re too generic. You look at it, I could pull up any and it’s it’s integrity, respect, excellence, agility. Teamwork, putting people for you it’s all the same crap. So it’s so generic that everyone just agrees with them, and of course who’s not gonna agree with that? the second thing though is that if you don’t live your values, if it’s I I go into so many corporate communications departments at companies where one of the values is innovation, and their intranet looks like it’s from nineteen ninety five. they’re not innovative. they’re in a you know, so agility, no no. Transparency, absolutely not. Not so you gotta poster on a wall with this list of stupid words, and everybody sees what’s in front of them and says, That’s not us. That’s not us. So I think they actually might do more harm than good.

Shel Holtz

Well l let me read you some corporate values. these are from one company, these are their values integrity, respect, excellence, and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

For the swords I said. Who’s it?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. You see anything wrong with those, other than the fact that they’re generic?

Steve Crescenzo

I I think that’s great. I’m glad they operate that way. That’s great. you making

Shel Holtz

Yeah, well that’s Enron. Yeah, it is. Liv they were literally Enron’s values. excellence and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

teamwork. That’s classic. Yeah, that’s that’s my experience too. I I’m I’m with that I’m with I’m with that example.

Shel Holtz

Well, we will talk about that. We will talk about your other issues too, because I think they’re spot on. But I do believe that when it’s done well and done right, they can really rock an organization.

Steve Crescenzo

Not gonna disagree with that, but let’s talk about it.

Shel Holtz

So before we jump into the values discussion, I did want to share one comment we got over on LinkedIn where I shared the last episode where we talked about employee voice. This is from Vincent Bruneau, who is commenting pretty regularly on our show and also on my other podcast for immediate release. and he’s always got he’s he’s he’s got great stuff. I I I want to know more about him. but he says in terms of employee voice, the most effective employee listening strategies don’t start with asking more questions. They start with demonstrating that previous feedback led to meaningful change. When people can see the connection between their input and organizational decisions, participation becomes much easier to sustain. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. That’s why that’s the point you made, is that we don’t have a survey fatigue. We have a nothing happens when we take a survey fatigue.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, the way I heard it at a conference was it’s it’s not survey fatigue, it’s bullshit fatigue. yak because if we if we survey you and then don’t tell you what the survey results were or how things are changing as a result of that, that’s bullshit.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, you know, Cindy does probably, you know, she’s she’s our measurement arm of Crescent Communications. She does, you know, fifty surveys a year. And her first question is, Why are you asking that question if you don’t if you if you it’s ac if you don’t have the power to change something? And they do it. They load the survey up with a j a wish list of things and they can’t change any of it. And they still ask and nothing happens and then they do it again the next year.

Shel Holtz

And nobody wants to take that survey. Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s jump into values. And I think a good place to start is what are corporate values supposed to be? And the way I see it, the way I’ve always heard that values are supposed to be presented to employees, is these are the underlying beliefs that drive decisions and behavior in the company. These are the things that we believe. And how do you get to that? I I I think, you know, first of all.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz

It has to be shared between the leaders and the employees. Nothing is going to turn employees off more than leadership coming to them and saying, hey, everybody, these are our values. And employees look at it and say, well, first of all, I don’t see those values reflected in decisions or behaviors. And second of all, they’re not my values. I worked for an organization once and I left them in 1993. They have changed owners a couple of times. I don’t think anybody is there. Who was there when I was there? So I’m going to go ahead and name them. It was Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. where yeah, they came up with the values and and I wasn’t involved. I was director of communications, but this was like the executive committee. And they came to me and said, we’ve decided these are the corporate values, go communicate these. And I looked at them and I I said, do we have employee buy-in on these? And they almost literally said, Employee buy-in, hey, this is my way or the highway. If they don’t like these, they can go work somewhere else.

Steve Crescenzo

I remember that. Yeah. my God. Shell, so we’ve done this kind of work with five or six companies over the years, mission, vision, and values. And you know, our we they they hired us to help them write these statements in these words. And our thing was we always said, we’re not gonna do it unless we can talk to employees first. We’re gonna do focus groups. So this company sent us to London, Paris, Singapore. We did focus groups globally to get to the mission, vision values, what people really believed, what was in their core, what brought them to work every day. You know, we did. Cindy led the focus groups and she’s good at that, and we got such great stuff. Then it came time to present it to the C suite. This was a big company. And here’s why everything ends up sucking so bad. It’s all written by committee. Like we we gave them three great examples pulled from their own employees that were unique. You couldn’t pull them out and give them to any other company. They were, they were good. And by the time we walked out of that half day session, they had been watered down. Because yeah, you had eight eight guys in there, eight guys and two women, and they all had their own ideas and they all just wanted to be safe. Well, safe. Yeah, they all always default to safety. Like, let’s just be safe. That’s why you get integrity. Who’s gonna argue with integrity? Transparency, who’s gonna argue with that? Well, by the time I d I don’t even know what they ended up with, but I know that they watered it way down from what we gave them. And our communications people loved it. Our clients loved us. We worked with them again and again and again. But when you’re up against that C suite in that that lemming like thing like to not take a chance to just be safe and you know and they wanna be kinda corporate and we gotta be serious and that’s where it all falls apart. It’s writing by committee. You wanna have values. I mean it just it’s really hard.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and another place this falls apart is what you mentioned at the outset, which is that the behaviors don’t match the values. I’ll tell you, I was doing a focus group with employees of a technology company. It was in their Los Angeles office. They’re headquartered up here in Silicon Valley, but this was in their LA office. And their values were printed on the back of the security badge that they all wore on lanyards around their necks. And I said, What do you think about those? And they laughed. I literally laughed out loud. And I said, Okay, tell me about that. And one of them turned his badge around and he read off the values. He says, You see all of these? There was a guy who was just promoted to executive vice president and he violated every single one of these. He he he got the car and the stock options and the huge bonus potential. And he violated every one of these, but he blew his numbers away. So

Steve Crescenzo

Ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Every employee in this company knows that we can do what these things say or we can do what gets us ahead based on what we see actually happen in the organization. And that’s where values become a source of incredible cynicism and derision.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, yeah, I I I can I I can tell three or four different clients that we’ve had. One of the one of the values was transparency. no, I’m sorry, one of the values was innovation. I have a transparency story too. was innovation and ri risk taking. You know, that was the that was in the values, that was in the then we did focus groups with employees and they’re like, You’re they’re out of their mind. If you make a mistake around here, you’re punished. Like I and you’re not gonna you’re you’re not allowed to fail forward. You’re not allowed to try things. I mean, you’re you supposedly are. But you’re gonna spend time and money doing something, you’re gonna go after what you know is gonna work. You’re where they’re not being innovative. So it’s it’s preached up here at the top, and it’s not happening down there. The other one is transparency, right? Everyone’s got that one lately. I was working for a big oil company, and transparency was one of the values, and I was doing focus groups, and everyone kept saying it I we just don’t feel leadership is transparent. We don’t think they’re transparent. Transparent, we don’t think it kept coming up. The number one theme out of like fifteen focus groups. So I go to give my report to the communicator and he loves it. Then we got to take it to the next level to a bit one of the leaders, not yet the big guy. And he looks and he goes, stops me like six slides in and says, You’ve already mentioned lack of transparency three times, and that’s not the case. I said, Well, that that’s what I heard. I mean, I I did fifteen talking, I talked to 110 people or whatever. And he goes, No, that’s not the case though. They’re they just don’t understand what we’re telling We we are very transparent. I’m like, all right, I can see exactly how much good this audit’s gonna do. And it’s just it’s it’s so it just doesn’t happen up there often enough to make a difference down here where people are doing the work.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and you know, when you’re sharing things transparently, and I this is a bit of a digression. It also needs to be relevant. I did work with a media company whose name everybody listening or watching this podcast would recognize in a heartbeat. And I was interviewing their CEO, who’s very famous, and he said, we actually don’t need employee communications. He says, you know, the cachet of working here. Is is all we really need because people go out at night and say, I’ll tell you when we stop recording. But I went out and did the focus groups and I heard the same thing i i in every focus group. and what they were saying was they keep talking to us about our international expansion. And I am a producer on a US-based show.

Steve Crescenzo

Well now I I don’t know who it is.

Shel Holtz

International expansion doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to be involved in that. There are other things I want them to be transparent about. I don’t ever hear about that. And then what they said was every year we’re told what our financial goals are. And from January to October, everything is great. Everything is rosy. we get these all company updates where they tell us how wonderful everything is. Then in October, we’re far behind budget and we have to

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

Take measures to to to fix things. And I asked this of the CEO when I had my follow-up call with him. And he said, Well, if we told employees what was going on earlier in the year, in 10 minutes it would be on the related blogs and all of this stuff would be out in public and it would affect our share price. And I said, Okay, so your employees don’t trust you. And you don’t trust your employees, but you don’t need employee communications. Yeah, it was that was a I I went in there thinking that was going to be a fun gig and it it it ended up being really, really challenging. But anyway, another problem with values is a lot of leaders make them aspirational. You know, so employees in the focus group say they’re not transparent. And leadership says, No, that’s what we’re working toward. That’s not values, right? That’s a maybe a strategic plan.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, no, no, no. That’s that could be a vision. That could be yeah, something else, but it’s not values are how what we do every day right now. What are our values?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are the what are the beliefs that underscore everything that we do, every decision, the way we behave, the way we treat each other? You mentioned innovation. Innovation is one of the values at my company, but it’s real. Nobody doubts this. We do very complex, yeah, we yeah, we do very complex things that other, you know, some of our competitors turn down these projects, saying that can’t be done.

Steve Crescenzo

no, that’s what yeah.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we we did one it was a hotel in San Francisco that we built and the footprint was ridiculous. There was no place for staging. you had a building right abutting where the back was and two abutting where the side was like a vacant lot between two high rises and the building on the street behind it, right there. no place to put a crane. I mean, all kinds of issues and we innovated ways. To do I’ll tell you one great innovation story if I can digress a little on this. We we built the California Academy of Sciences, and there were two things in that building that were challenging. And one of them was that we needed fire suppression systems in a not a vacuum-sealed room, but you know, an airtight room. And this ended up being a challenge. And somebody said, Well, you know, who lives in that kind of environment is people on submarines. So we went to a submarine manufacturer to find out how they did it. the other one was in this simulated rainforest. Yeah, the other one was the rainforest it in this dome had this sort of curving walkway that you could it it started at the top and winds its way down. And you see, there’s no stairs that do this. What does it? And somebody looked at the design and said, you know what it looks like?

Steve Crescenzo

That’s that’s that’s cool. That’s a great story. That yeah, I’m

Shel Holtz

It looks like a roller coaster. So we worked with a roller coaster company on this walk. So this is things other people go, we you can’t do that. And that’s innovation. And you know I that’s relevant to the people in the organization. And yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, you know so we we were lucky enough to do work with Sandia Labs. and you remember any old days Dan Dan Baum? He wrote he wrote like a funny corporate column in the in the in the Sandia Lab News. And he was like a Mike Roykko level comic columnist. But anyway, I digress. He’s retired. But we went on there innovation’s one of their values, and of course Sandia Labs. They’re they’re making weapons and and they’re

Shel Holtz

I did some work with Seth. They’re great. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

They have to be innovative, right? So innovation’s all over the place and it’s a value and it’s it’s really driven into the DNA. But then what w if you had to guess in the United States, what’s the most innovative healthcare organization in the in the United States?

Shel Holtz

Mayo clinic would would come to the top of my mind. Mayo clinic. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

If you think Mail Client? Yeah, exactly. That’s one of our clients. And there’s a one he’s retired now, I think, but think he retired just last year. Hoy Cinemore was one of the best corporate editors in in my in in that I’ve ever stated him. He was a brilliant writer, brilliant editor. And he go and he and he measured everything. Every article he would measure the you know, everything. How long they stayed in the page, metro opens, clicks, w everything. He goes, Steve, if I ever want to guarantee that nobody reads a story that I write. somebody else writes, I’ll put the word innovation in the headline. It’s just so beaten to death. It’s beaten to death. And Mail Clinics as innovative as anybody gets, but they don’t talk about it all the time. They they just tell stories. They they would tell that story. And they might say the word innovation in there, but they don’t constantly talk about how innovative we are because

Shel Holtz

No, no, no. You can’t beat people over the head with this stuff. in our internal comms department, we have a test. What value or values does this article reinforce? Doesn’t mean we put the value in the headline or even in the story. But it has to align with at least one of in some way. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

I love it. Shut up. And I have seen companies in the in the employee on the internet, back when back in print even, that have a little icon for each value and they would just stick the icon next to it. So it wasn’t in the headline, it wasn’t like that, but it it was a way to kind of reinforce that, you know, these things matter. This is th this is this is what we’re saying and this is how we’re working and that’s how they blend together.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that I like about where I work is that I know because I’ve been in the room a few times, that the executive leadership tests decisions against the values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s awesome. So that’s a g that’s great. I mean, if that more people did that, they wouldn’t be so either useless or harmful. When I was doing the focus when Sydney was doing the focus troops for that large company globally, one of the things she would ask was now we’re gonna talk about now I want to talk about values. We talk about mission, vision, values, but you know, corporate values is a very strange concept, she would say, because there’s fifty thousand people in this company. How can they possibly all have the same values? Now think about your personal values. Which what are your values, Shell? I know yours. You’re you’re kind, you’re a deadhead, you take care of people, you mentor people, you’re generous. Those are your values. Always have been, always will. not everybody has those values. I would argue that certain politicians today certainly do not have those values. So a value should I why what do I a value is valuable when it forces choices. You know what I mean? Like it’s gotta force choices.

Shel Holtz

Exactly.

Steve Crescenzo

If you’re if one of your values is transparency, there are going to be some leaders that don’t agree with that and they may want to go work somewhere else. If one of your values is speed and agility, and you’ve got a worker who is precise and he came from a Swiss watch company and he’s not the kind of worker that likes to go move fast and break things, as all the tech bros say. Like they should values should force people to make decisions. Like, is this the kind of company I want to work with?

Shel Holtz

Well, it should force leadership. It should force leadership to make decisions too. And there’s there’s a great example one you know, one of the archetypal crisis communication examples, case studies, is the Tylenol tampering. It was right there in Chicago where you live. and yeah, you know, it’s taught in every business school. we look at that through rose colored glasses. I was talking to somebody who was there at Johnson and Johnson

Steve Crescenzo

Right. Well yeah, that’s the main thing. god, yeah. on there, yeah.

Shel Holtz

At the time that happened. And yeah, it was was saying, you know, everybody says this was this immediate thing that the board decided, that the executive team decided. It actually took three days and it took a lot of harping from I can’t remember his name, but he ran PR back then in the company. But what he kept telling them was, you know, because they they only wanted to pull the product in Chicago. You pull it nationwide, that’s a real hit to earnings. that’s going to affect the shareholders, and that’s bad.

Steve Crescenzo

really?

Shel Holtz

and his point, well, he had two points. One was if there’s an incident outside of Chicago, it’ll kill us if we leave the product on the shelves. But the other thing is, if you look at our credo, they called it a credo, but it was their values, it was their beliefs, was that our patients come first, our employees come second, the communities in which we operate come third, and shareholders come last. And if we pull

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

product only in Chicago and leave it up when there’s a risk in the rest of the country, that’s not what we say our values are. We’re putting the shareholders first. So they ended up agreeing. They pulled the product nationwide. They took a huge hit to their bottom line, but they innovated the safety seal. They reintroduced the product with a safety seal. No other pain reliever had this. Not only did they get their own customers back, but they got a bunch of customers who had been buying competitor

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, good.

Shel Holtz

Products because the competitors didn’t have safety seals. Shareholders made out like bandits. Take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the bottom line will take care of itself, you know. but you have to live your values. And I think this is why crisis tabletop exercises at least twice a year are so important because it builds the muscle memory when you’re in the midst of a crisis and have to make decisions really fast. You have to test them against your values. Right? I mean value should cost something.

Steve Crescenzo

without a doubt. Values should cost something. Like I I don’t know what Target’s values are. but I’m sure I’m I’m sure they’re I’m sure somewhere in there I’m sure they violated them when they didn’t speak up what was happening in Min Minneapolis. I’m quite sure that they value they they violated seven or six six or seven of their values. you know what you know who actually get another copy that gets it right, Shell is right in your neighborhood and you might not like because they, you know, they’re utility and nobody really likes the utilities. And they they yeah, PG and E. We’re doing a lot of work with them right now. through with Brad Whitworth over there and and the rest of the team. And we went out there and we gave a speech to 600 of their managers. And Patty Poppy is the CEO, and she led off. And then I fought we follow Cindy and I followed her, and she was just fantastic. I I I’ve been blown away by some really special CEOs in my life. mostly I’m disgusted by them, to be honest. but this one she blew me away. She was so transparent.

Shel Holtz

P G and E.

Steve Crescenzo

And real and authentic. And the 600 managers, you could just tell the that the culture in that room was vibrant and it was there. And you know, they they have values, and their values are their values are very actually very unique. They’re what was it? I forgot curiosity. There there were good values. but they also have you you talked a little bit about values being aspirational. So they have their values, which are cool, curious. all sorts of i I’ll remember later. but then they have what they call their stands. That’s this is what we’re gonna we’re gonna where we’re gonna take a stand, what we’re gonna make a stand on. And their stands are everyone and everything is always safe. If everyone you work for utility, well Shell, you’re in construction. Everything is safety, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah. S yeah, second most dangerous occupation in the country is is construction. Oil and gas.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I don’t with the first. well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone and everything is always safe. Aspirational, right? Catastrophic wildfires shall stop. It’s almost like biblical. Is it it is enjoyable to work with and for PG and E. Clean and resilient energy for all. Our work shall create prosperity for our customers and investors. You know what? I would look at that if you didn’t know I didn’t know the backstory there and who she is and what she does. I’d be like, that’s they’re full, that’s just words, words. But they’re not with her. They’re not. They they she

Shel Holtz

Yeah. But they’re also not values. They’re they’re not trying to convince people this is what we this these underscore our behavior and activity today. They’re they’re aspirational and they’re separating those from their values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Exactly. And that’s that’s why I love it. And then but then the the values come into play and then the the strategic initiatives are tied to those two things and it’s all very mapped out and and smart and it makes makes a difference. I mean the the employees feel c connected. And you know what’s funny is when Patty Poppy came on board there, you know, they were losing money, they were they were in dire straits, they had gone through some I think lawsuits or whatever, I don’t even know. but she goes, If you came here for me just to turn the books around, I’m not your girl. I’m not your I’m not your person. I’m here to change the culture of this company. And she did. And that’s why I feel bad saying all values suck, because when they’re right, like Southwest Airlines used to get it right. I’m not sure if they still do. When they used to get it right, I remember having dinner with Ginger Hard, she just passed away recently. Did you hear that?

Shel Holtz

I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear that.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I saw it on LinkedIn. She was a wonderful woman. She headed up all of employee communications for Southwest Airlines. And I had dinner with her once. And I said, What is it about you guys with this weirdo Kool-Aid drinking culture? Why are your people so nice on the flights? Why do people seem to love working here? And she gave it, went back to Herb Kellerher, of the CEO, the founder. And they said, because Herb always said, every other company says the customer’s always right. We’ve always said our employees are right, and then we trust them to take care of the customer.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, she was.

Steve Crescenzo

And that was a value and employees got that. And I mean y it can make a difference if it’s community if it makes something to begin with that came from employees and it’s communicated properly, it can make a world of difference.

Shel Holtz

I I I heard a story. I I don’t know if this is apocryphal or if it really happened, but there was a marketing team brought into Southwest. They did the dog and pony show for their their marketing slogan, and you know, they had the the big reveal and Herb Callaher and the board is there, and Callaher’s kind of looking at it, and he’s grimacing and and he says, You guys don’t get it. Here’s here’s our slogan: smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.

Steve Crescenzo

Now that’s real. That’s cold. I love that.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Hey Steve, I got one more thing I wanna talk about with values, but before we do, I wanna let everyone know that this episode of On the Same Page is sponsored by the strategy studio. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Steve Crescenzo

Just a couple of seconds, not an ad necessarily, but we started the str Crescenso Communications. My wife Cindy, myself, and Zach started the strategy studio. Our son, Zach. Start we started it about a year and a half ago. And it is a private community paid, but a drop in the bucket compared to going to even one conference or one one webinar, even. we got about 140 people in there now, and we share ideas in there. We do weekly live sessions. So we we just did one, we just interviewed Mary Lou Panzano. On her new book out, Cementing Change. She’s a board member of the studio. So we talked to her for an hour. We do live interviews. We do a lot of trainings on things like AI and content creation and measurement and strategy and planning and weekly live sessions. You know, they’re 20 minutes, they’re 25 minutes, micro trainings, so you can do it over lunch. And then we have we have the water cooler thread in there where people just go out there and say, It just happened last week. Someone goes, Hey, I’m thinking about proposing these changes to my employee newsletter. My boss is gonna be a little skeptical. Any advice? 20 people get out there and say, Yeah, do this, do this. And they’re just like sharing stuff all the time. So would love to have anybody listening join the studio. And here it is. Constrategy studio dot com.

Shel Holtz

Higher, higher, higher up. There it is, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Check it out. Check out our check out our website, crescendo dot com, and if you wanna you can get there from there too. So yes, we’re so proud to sponsor this because you’re my mentor. Not everybody gets a chance to talk to their mentor twice a month. That’s really cool. So thank you for having me again.

Shel Holtz

Out. Yeah. my pleasure, and you’re my mentor too. you mentioned you mentioned AI. So now I have two things to talk about before we wrap this up. Yeah. Well, this is this will be pretty quick, but AI is really the values test right now. You know, I mean there are companies that are laying people off and claiming it’s AI. How do you message that? are you disclosing what is machine generated? These are all, you know, values decisions in disguise, aren’t they?

Steve Crescenzo

Haha Well I knew and I should have got you off out of God damn it. Absolutely. Yeah, I d absolutely. I think companies are really gonna struggle with it. I really do. And here’s another ethical AI thing that has to do with values. You have all employees are equal, right? All associates are equal, all partner, whatever you wanna call your employees. Well we’re seeing with a lot of our clients is the only AI they’re allowed to use at work is Copilot, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah, because they were already Microsoft Office three sixty five customers. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they can only use copilot, but there’s two versions of copilot. There’s a standard version that comes with it and everybody gets that kinda. But then they have Microsoft copilot enterprise, which costs money. And that’s where you get the stored memory, that’s when you can train it, that’s where AI gets powerful.

Shel Holtz

It’s it it it it maintains all the inputs from your queries. It doesn’t share that, yeah. So

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. So it’s a whole d it’s two two different tools. and we have communication teams that we’re working right now where two of them have the enterprise version and five of them don’t. it’s gonna create a a have and have not world here because they gotta pay for each individual ticket. So it’s like Willie Wonka’s golden ticket. So how can you tell values, get back to values, how can you tell your employees they’re all valued equally and everyone’s great and we respect diversity, blah blah blah. And then you’re giving two people a professional advantage.

Shel Holtz

Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

And you can’t afford to give the I mean, that’s gonna be a big deal. Come on, why mark my words?

Shel Holtz

absolutely. The only way you can get away with that is if you say we’re piloting it right now and we have a a group of pilot testers. Yeah, there’s another one that tests the values here, and that’s where you say the only thing you’re allowed to use is co-pilot, and then you hear that the CEO is using Claude and the the the president is using Chat GPT. Yeah, so that that’s another one. The the the other thing I wanted to mention though is the importance of values in recruiting, because people who are looking for a job, especially coming out of college, but pretty much anybody looking for a job.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, yeah, right.

Shel Holtz

is looking for a company whose values align with theirs. We’ve we’ve had people join us coming from some of our competitors. Why are they coming? culture. And what drives culture? Values.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, you’re right. I think it is a dis a d a dis distinctive thing. I think it can set a company apart. I mean, especially nowadays, people are just more into their own values. It’s like we’re not that’s fifties or sixties where we just went to a company, you worked fifty years, you got your watch, and you went home. People are jumping and around and moving around and taking different and they they can go to I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, but they put values values matter to them. They don’t want to work for a company they don’t believe in.

Shel Holtz

No, they really don’t. So for everybody out there working on their values, let us know how you’re approaching this.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, we’d love to hear. If you have values that are actually working and that means something, please let us know. I I’m always looking for a great case study to teach in the strategy studio. So I’d love to hear from anybody.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, send an email to FIR comments at gmail.com. You’ll see that we’ll post this when it goes live online on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on on threads, and on Blue Sky, whichever one you’re on. Leave a comment there. Let us know how you’re approaching values or what kind of challenges or struggles you’re facing or what kind of success you’ve had. we want to hear it all. So share it. By the way, you can send us an audio comment. That would be awesome if we could play an audio comment or even a video comment would be great too.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, those are fun. That would be even more fun.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks on the next episode of On the Same Page. See you later, Steve.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Take care, Shel.

The post Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

Links from this episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found it interesting in a number of areas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That makes the challenge even more complicated for communicators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz:
Yeah, I do.

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

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

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

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

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

Neville Hobson:
That was my thought as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then again, perhaps that’s not the point.

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

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

Shel Holtz:
Yeah.

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

You’d think the losers would feel most targeted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was completely new to me.

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz:
Yes, we do.

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

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

You’re using AI to handle more of the work that your team used to do. That’s exactly why the human side of the business has become a competitive advantage.

In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that as AI slop floods everyone’s inbox and feeds, the bar for genuine human interaction has dropped so low that clearing it will make you stand out. Demonstrating real experience and expertise in conversation — not just in content — is where agencies will win.

That starts with having actual conversations. Chip argues that meetings have become more valuable, not less, because you can’t fake a real-time interaction the way you can a written deliverable. And Gini adds that it extends to one-on-one meetings with your team, which can be used to get the specific decisions needed from you.

Written content is increasingly hard to trust, and Chip admits even he can’t reliably tell his own writing from AI output. Video helps close that gap for now. So does the handwritten note, which Chip still sends to podcast guests when he can track down an address. He jokes that the illegibility is proof of authenticity.

In person beats everything. Chip pushes agency owners to budget for it deliberately, with clients, prospects, and remote team members alike. Gini mentions the Augusta Rule as one way to offset some of those costs, though both are quick to say talk to your accountant before you try to benefit from it. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 310: In the age of AI, people skills matter more than ever appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

Links from this episode:

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

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

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 episode number five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it really is.

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

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

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

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

 

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

Most agency owners think their clients have it easy. But the gap between how you believe your agency operates and how clients and prospects actually experience it is often wider than you’d expect, and it’s usually the small, everyday frictions that do the most damage.

In this episode, Chip and Gini ask if you were on the receiving end of your own agency’s processes, would you be happy? The answer, for a lot of agencies, is probably not. Their point isn’t that agencies should cave to every demand, but if you market yourself as a partner, act like one.

The friction can start before someone even becomes a client. Contact forms loaded with qualifying questions scare people away. And back-and-forth emails to find a meeting time have no excuse in 2026. Use a scheduling tool, have a link ready, and make it especially easy for prospects. Once someone is ready to talk, the goal is to respond fast and remove every obstacle.

When it comes to the handoff from prospect to client, agencies should have a standard proposal template so they can turn paperwork around in 24 hours, not days. Make invoicing and payments as easy on the client as you would want it to be if you were in their shoes. And when it comes to project management tools, if the client already has one they’re using, just use it. The tool matters less than having one. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 309: Is your agency easy to work with? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Are employees suffering from survey fatigue?

The question is asked often, frequently because someone high up in the organization doesn’t want to hear what employees think. But if employees see change as a result of someone taking their feedback to heart, you can survey them all day long. If you’re sending emails, publishing articles, and posting videos, but not asking employees for their perspectives, you’re not communicating.

You’re just messaging.

In this episode of On The Same Page, Steve and Shel discuss how to ensure employees’ voices are heard in meaningful ways to drive engagement and business success — and to avoid crises, since employees’ voices can serve as the organization’s smoke alarm.

Links from this episode:

• Return to Office 2025: The Corporate Mandate Wave Reshaping American Workplaces
• How CEO Satya Nadella Reset Culture at Microsoft
• Strategy Studio

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo: Hey Shel, how are you?

Shel Holtz: I’m great, Steve. How’s everything with you?

Steve: Awesome. Friday, sunny. Got the boat this weekend. We’re heading out on the boat, so everything is good. We’re about an hour away from happy hour.

Shel: Anything to keep your mind off what’s going on with the Cubs, huh?

Steve: All right, enough is enough. Dodgers fan. Nothing’s worse than Dodgers fans with all your money. anyway, but you know, before we start, I know we’re gonna talk about the employee voice today and the importance of giving employees a voice. And before we start, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this, I’ve read what you’ve written about this, and I know in your communication model, which I really respect, you’ve got it as one of the four drivers of employee engagement, along with strategic narrative, engaging managers, which we talked about on our first podcast, employee voice and integrity. And I don’t argue with any of that. I agree with ninety five percent of everything you’ve ever written about this or said about this. Employee voice matters, I get that. Employees should be you know, communication should be a conversation, not a broadcast. Employees should be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem. You know, all of that I get. No argument for me. But do you think maybe employees are getting tired of being asked about shit? And here’s why I ask. I mean, think about it. Surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay interviews, focus groups, listening tours, town halls. The average employee’s been asked for their opinion so many times they’re ready to send the company an invoice. I mean, these employees have completed enough surveys to qualify for a minor in organizational psychology. And after all that voicing and talking, employees will still say in every company we work for, nobody listens. Which makes me wonder if we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe companies don’t have a problem with employee voice. Maybe they have a leadership listening problem. I think most companies, I think, have plenty of ways for employees to speak up. It’s not whether they have a microphone; it’s that nobody on the other end is paying attention. So employees end up feeling like, you know, they’re yelling into a well. Which is why most face to face town halls when there’s Q&A time, nobody says anything. So the question is: Is it about giving employees a voice, or is it more about coaching leaders to listen? And that’s what I’d like to talk about.

Shel: Yeah, I would frame that just a little differently. I agree with you a hundred percent. The way I usually talk about this is saying that you know, we constantly hear about survey fatigue. Employees have survey fatigue. And my answer to that is there’s no such thing as survey fatigue. What there is is bullshit fatigue. And that’s being asked for your opinion and then finding that nothing is being done with it once you share it. I once had a senior VP of HR, I reported to him. This was on the client side many years ago. And I wanted to do an environmental survey, find out what employees thought about the environment in which they worked. And he said no. And I said, But Rick, you wrote a book about employee surveys. Why don’t you want to do one? He says, Well, if you read my book, you’ll find that the only time you should do a survey is when the leadership has an appetite to make changes based on what they hear. And the leadership here has no appetite to make changes based on what employees say. So there’s no point in doing a survey. And I think that other companies should take that to heart.

Steve: Ha ha. Bingo. You’re exactly right. Once again, I can’t disagree with you, Shel. I think the reason there is survey fatigue I think there is survey fatigue, but it’s not because they hate filling out surveys, it’s because nothing ever happens. Why waste your time?

Shel: Right. I think employees will fill out surveys all day long if every time they do they hear about what’s changing as a result of that.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Shel: Sure

Steve: So before we dive back into that, and I can’t wait for that conversation, I got a nice comment from a Carrie Knight on Substack, believe it or not. She put it on my Substack, which I didn’t even post this podcast on my Substack, but I’m going start doing that. It’s about episode two when we talked about this mythical knights of the round table, get-a-seat-at-the-table. And she said, Currently midway through listening to On the Same Page, second episode: There is no table. And she quotes us and says, There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. She said, Brilliant. I’ve been on the side of earning a seat at the table, but this conversation is shifting my perspective from what I thought that meant to what I actually believe in real time. Then she quotes us again and says, We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And how do you get those? You earn it. And she says, Carrie says, I don’t disagree with this at all. Perhaps it’s this concept of a table that’s broken. Leaders show up at every level of a business, which I love that line. Leaders show up at every level of a business. That’s brilliant, Carrie. In my honest opinion, leading from within is the biggest flex over having a seat or job title that demands leadership. And then she quotes us again and says, You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel. She said such an insightful episode that expands into the disconnect between leaders and employees’ cons and channel choices. And she closes it with another one of our quotes Leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. Fabulous episode. Thanks, Steve Crescenzo and Shel Holtz. Keep coming. And we sure will, Carrie. Thanks for the comment. love to hear feedback from our listeners.

Shel: Absolutely, Carrie. Thanks for listening. We had a number of comments come in through LinkedIn as well.  one of them from Vincent Bruneau saying the seat at the table conversation has always been a proxy for the real question are you actually shaping decisions or just being informed of them afterwards? Consequential is the better word, and it’s available to more than one person at a time. referencing that notion that only one communicator in a company can have that seat at the table,  regardless of how many. Communicators work there. Louise Thompson said, Hmm, not sure I’m with you guys. Moaning about it? Agree, that needs to stop. We know what we need to do and how, but as someone who has been in the room and out of it, there is no doubt that being an active participant around that table, and yes, it does exist, is going to lead to better outcomes for the organization. And yeah.

Steve: Right. I think that I don’t think we should read any comments that disagree with us.

Shel: That’s not a good idea, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s true. We’re gonna listen. Communication is a two-way activity. And yeah, I understand what Louise is saying, but again, you know, there are organizations with hundreds of communicators, there are organizations with dozens, there are organizations like mine with a handful. But if there is a communicator at that table, it’s only one.

Steve: That’s what most companies do. That’s what today’s all about. Employee voice. Our employee We are gonna listen.

Shel: So for every communicator to say, I want that seat at the table, that doesn’t fly. But any communicator can start to wield influence and have consequence. So I think that was our point. Janet Hitchen said, Halle-flippin’-lujah. That was her comment. Love that. Kathleen, yeah, Kathleen Bell said, Ha, so 1990, totally agree. And then Jared Brough, you know Jared, in New Orleans.

Steve: Love in Jared Brodkin.

Shel: Yeah, he said, I remember that discussion. My response is if you wait for an invitation it never comes. You get your seat by walking in the room and taking it.

Steve: I think he sa I think I actually had drinks with him in Orleans and he said, No, you don’t you know you know you kick down the doors, I think is what he said to me, which I was I always remember that.

Shel: Yeah. But you have to have built that influence and have developed that consequence or they’re just gonna throw you out of the room or have you escorted out of the room and away from the table.

Steve: Exactly. Or you’ll be or you’ll be a token. You’ll they’ll they’ll give you a seat, but you won’t have any influ I mean having a seat doesn’t give you influence. Influence being respected as a counselor gives you influence. You could have a seat at the table. I have a seat at my dinner table and I it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t no nobody listens to me. You can have a seat, but it doesn’t mean they’re gonna listen to you.

Shel: Well, you have mostly cats in the house, so they don’t listen to anybody.

Steve: Right, that’s true. That’s true.

Shel: So today we’re talking about the employee voice,  which is, as you mentioned at the outset, one of the four enablers of engagement. you know, there are people out there who dismiss employee engagement in general, but I’ve I’ve made it one of the four inner circles of of my framework for internal communication. I do yeah if if you just do the Gallup survey and try to get to that final number, then it’s nonsense. But

Steve: Yeah, I

Shel: If you’re looking at the elements that contribute to engagement and take action b on each of those based on the results of the survey, then it can have a real positive impact.

Steve: I think that’s I’m not a I’m not a big engagement guy because of the way it’s practiced with the Gallup stuff and the best friend at work stuff and all that nonsense. Employee engagement’s a very real thing, but it’s sh always shifting, right? If you could be fully engaged on Tuesday, you get a new boss on Wednesday and you’re disengaged. I mean it just shifts. It’s almost a it’s like nailing jelly to a wall, but go ahead.

Shel: There’s an organization out of the UK called Engage for Success. It’s a chartered organization by the government or the Crown or whoever does the chartering in the UK. And they say that the employee voice is the smoke alarm in the organization. I kinda like that characterization. that works real well for me. But yeah, bottom line is the communication is a is a two-way thing. if y communication is the act of sharing.

Steve: That’s cool.

Shel: Knowledge and information. So it’s a two-way street. And a lot of organizational communication is not. It’s one way. We’re sending information to employees. We’re not listening to them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s messaging. That’s not communication. It has to be two way to fulfill that definition of communication. So finding the mechanisms to give employees that voice, I think, is important.

Steve: Yeah, I do agree with that, but I don’t think it’s a channel thing. I don’t think it’s a mechanism thing. I think it’s an ego thing more than anything else. I really I think these leaders get into a position of leadership and they think that they’re more plugged in, they think that they’re more knowledgeable, they think that they’re smarter probably, they think that there’s a reason there’s a leader, they’re supposed to lead, they weren’t put in this place to let the employees lead. So you could have town halls and suggestion boxes electronically and slack and w you know, whatever. You can have all the employee voice channels in the world. If leadership has too much ego to listen to it, I mean you think they’d be smart enough to realize that guess what? The people closest to the work might have a good idea on how to improve things. The people closest to the clients, the customers, the products, the people that are creating all those things, you think they might have good advice about the company? Well, of course they do. But I think most leaders are either afraid to listen to employees because they think they’re just gonna bitch, or B, don’t respect their ideas. So I don’t think it’s a matter of setting up the channels as much. I mean, you have to do that, I agree, show. But I think you also have to work closely with leadership to say, you gotta listen to people. You gotta listen to your employees. These people are way closer to the work than you. You may be up here in the stratosphere driving strategy and dealing with Wall Street and numbers and EBITDA and all the other crap that they do, which they’re very good at. But these people are down here doing the work. And A, they might be able to help the company. And B, if you want them to be engaged and have a good culture, then it has to be a two-way street. And I think unfortunately, a lot of especially the older leaders don’t let don’t have don’t don’t let that happen. I think a lot of younger leaders coming up today that grew up with social media, digital natives, so to speak, I think they’re I think things are gonna get better in this area. I think people are gonna start paying attention more to employees. I hope. I mean that’s my not my hope. But I agree. Set up the channels, but work the other end of it as well. Work the leadership end of it because a lot of those people just don’t listen.

Shel: Yeah, I think getting them attuned to paying attention to what employees are saying is one thing, but I think where communicators have a role to play here is in presenting what employees are saying in a way that is digestible and understandable for the leader. So they’re not getting hit by messaging of different types from all sides and not understanding what they’re supposed to do with it. I think if we can give them here’s the daily summary or the weekly summary of what we have heard. And put it in categories and make it something that they can actually get through and make decisions based on or factor into discussions that they’re going to have.  that makes it easier for them to do exactly what you’re talking about. But if we’re not there coordinating this as an activity, then it’s just overload for them.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. I no, I agree. You know, I in some of my workshops I show a model that says, you know, it’s up to leadership with the help of communications to communicate the what and the why down to employees. And you do it very clearly. Here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s the initiative, here’s what it is, here’s why it’s very important to both us and the company, and then communicate the how up. And you do that through helping managers get the how and you c opening up these channels. Most companies just aren’t willing to do it. They’re more than willing to do the what and the why down and then forget about the how. And that’s the problem. But if you can tap into that how at that work level, at that employee level, I mean you’re unleashing a dragon there. I mean, you are unleashing a lot of power. But let me ask you a question, Shel. And you kind of alluded to this with your HR story to start the podcast. What’s worse? Not asking employees their opinion at all, or asking them and not doing anything about it?

Shel: I think asking and not doing anything about it is going to create tremendous cynicism and dissatisfaction. I think if employees understand that the culture is one where leadership makes the decision and you just do your job, I don’t like it. I wouldn’t want to work in that organization. And there may be people who decide that they’re not going to work in that organization, but at least they understand what the deal is.

Steve: Yeah.

Shel: But to have that say do gap, right? We are interested in your opinion and we’re going to ignore it. I mean, there’s a great example of this. I’m trying to remember the company that did this. I think it might have been Amazon Web Services. it may have been JP Morgan Chase, but they had an employee feedback mechanism. And when they told employees that they had to come back from COVID after telling everybody it was okay to work remote, they shut off. The mechanism that allowed employees to share their opinion. When they said 99% of employees agree that coming back to the office is a good thing, they got a massive petition signed by a huge number of employees saying that’s nonsense. That’s just not true. So there are organizations that say we want to hear from you, and then when they hear from employees, they shut off the channel, they ignore what they’re hearing. It’s not good.

Steve: Yeah, no, no, no. No, I agree. I agree. And no th that l that leads me to another thing I was I was thinking about when I was thinking about this topic. You know, there’s an old theory out there that out of a hundred percent employees, you have you have the ten percent of the Kool-Aid drinkers, right? They’re the ones that wear the company windbreaker and the company hat and they love everything about the company.  they love where they’re working, everything’s great. Then you have the ten percent of, you know, the lunatic fringe I call that are very, very discontent. They’re just unhappy.

Shel: Cheerleaders.

Steve: You they’re just unhappy in mind, no matter what you do. They’re unhappy in life. They’re alcoholics, they go home and kick the dog at night. They’re just not happy people. And the eighty percent is the people we need to communicate to. I do you think that there’s a factor that le with leaders that they’re worried that when they open it up for conversation in a town hall, a Slack, online channel, they’re only gonna hear from the ten percent because the other eighty percent are, you know, they’re fine, they’re just going along doing their job, they’re fine. The ten percent

Shel: No matter what.

Steve: I love where they’re working, so they’re pr they’re probably not gonna go out there and say how much I love where they work. They’re just happy. So you’re gonna hear from the cry babies, the people that are unhappy, and it’s gonna give make the whole place look naked. Do you think that’s a thing or?

Shel: I think that’s a cultural thing. I think there are organizations where the 80% feel just fine about sharing their ideas or their opinions because they’re taken seriously. There’s a history in the organization of listening to those things. I think it’s the organizations that don’t give that shrift to those 80%, where they just shrug and say, What’s the point?

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Shel: You know, and the ten percent at the bottom, yeah, they’re the ones who are gonnare gonna whine and that’s why these leaders don’t want to engage with employees at all.

Steve: Yep, I agree. I agree, unfortunately. And let me a let me ask

Shel: But I mean if you yeah, if if you look at organizations that have made a point of soliciting the employee voice, you get a sense of what you can get out of that. I mean, you know, look at look at Microsoft. When Steve Ballmer left, Satya Nadella was anointed the CEO. he inherited this culture of siloed departments waging internal political battles. Microsoft was falling behind on some pretty important Categories, mobile, gaming, social. And the turnaround was built on employee voice. He solicited honest feedback through surveys and meetings. He made an open show of being ready to listen. He bypassed hierarchy so low-level employees could be heard. He invited junior staff to meetings, brainstorming meetings that previously only senior people went to. And the mechanisms that they implemented, they were they were concrete, they were they were comms adjacent. they created employee hackathons to generate employee input on the culture change. Yeah, you remember that? even the leadership framework of model coach care was developed over two years using employee feedback surveys. And the outcome was improved sentiment scores, better, better customer feedback. And of course the market cap story everybody knows.  it wasn’t a soft initiative running alongside their strategy. I mean, it was the strategy at Microsoft, yeah.

Steve: I heard about those, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was as strategic right. Well, you know, let me let me let it brings me to another topic, not another topic, another angle on this thing. Do you do employees really want a voice? And here’s why I ask.  just in the last couple of years, Cindy and I worked for a large, very large healthcare institution, and they were going through hell. They were going through hell. They were losing money after COVID, they were ha gonna have to downsize, they were gonna have to cut funds, they were gonna have to cut funding to certain programs that people loved, people were being shifted into different positions. I mean it was like a you know the big Chop consultants got involved the at the at the big level it’s the business consultants and it was ugly. But they had a fantastic CEO and when he brought us in we got it we h we had him start doing town halls, right? And they were not regular town halls. We said we outlawed PowerPoint. We worked with him and his executive team there was four of them that sat up there as a panel for the town hall And we said it’s gonna be 30 minutes of you guys having a conversation,  talking about what’s happening, what’s what’s being decided, what’s you know, all the good stuff, and then 30 minutes of Q&A, guaranteed. And the town halls were fantastic. And the people that were there and the chat, which I don’t know if they would have the nerve to stand up live and do this. That’s why I love virtual town halls. I don’t even want to do live town halls anymore because virtual, they get to that chat and you can vote questions up and down, and so. We would run that chat and we would feed the leaders the questions and it was a fantastic system. We did two a month for four months. And even then, with all the change that was happening, with all the turmoil, with all the angst, with all the fear, we still got like thirty-five to forty percent of people to show up to these town halls. And it was it wasn’t mandatory, obviously, but anybody could come. All you had to do was log in. Now Granted, it’s healthcare, so a lot of people are working. But even the recordings weren’t weren’t that great. I mean, what do you do when you’re doing everything right and you’re opening up the channels and they did everything right? They begged for the employee voice. They took their they hard dealt with hard questions. They  you know, all they did everything right. And they still had a minority of the people showing up to participate. I mean, what’s that all about?

Shel: Well, yeah, I mean I don’t know. my answer would be to ask, to go out to employees and say, hey, you know, we’re giving you this opportunity. Why aren’t you taking advantage of it? And you know, find out. Are they too busy?  are they intimidated? do they not care? there is data that shows that employees increasingly don’t want to be involved in, say, extracurricular stuff at work. I mean, there have always been employees who don’t care, right? They just want to come in. Do their work, get paid and go home. They’re not going to get involved in volunteering for a task force or a committee.  they’re not going to do volunteer activities after work. They’re not going to go out with people for a beer after work. they just they just wanna do their job for eight hours, pull their lever for eight hours and then and then go home. which is fine. You have to respect those people and what they want out of work. But a lot of people, you know, work is their purpose.

Steve: Yeah.

Shel: Work is what gets them up in the morning. And that’s frankly the majority, from everything I’ve seen. I have seen data that says the number of people who don’t want to do things that are extracurricular is growing. And I don’t know what is behind that. But it I’ll find that. I have that report somewhere saved. But yeah, you have to ask. And again, that’s giving employees a voice, right? Asking them why.

Steve: Really, I’d love I’d love to see I’d love to see that.

Shel: Don’t you want to take advantage of these opportunities to share your voice? One thing that we do where I work, when there’s going to be a town hall, is about a month before the town hall, because they’re quarterly,  we’ll open up an anonymous comment line. Yeah, it’s it we use a tool, it’s on the web called Free Suggestion Box. It’s absolutely anonymous. It’s a third party thing. So Employees know that it’s anonymous and we’ll get questions through that from people. Maybe they know that they can’t be there at that meeting, but they still want their question asked and they can watch the video later or read the transcript. maybe they’re just not wanting to share their name with the question that they’re asking. But I mean, even having a card on the seat, if people are coming into an actual room that says, write your question down, no need to put your name on it, we’ll collect these.

Steve: Yeah, we’d I’ve done that. I’ve done that.

Shel: Right. I mean that takes a lot of the intimidation out of asking a question of the senior leaders. I mean, a smaller company, most employees know the leaders. in a bigger company, I mean, you know, if Jamie Dimon is your is your CEO and he’s doing a town hall standing up and asking him a tough question, I th that can intimidate a lot of frontline workers, you know.

Steve: Yeah it sure could. It sure could. You know, one of the other things is I think a lot of I think a lot of leaders confuse voice with venting. they think that employees are only going to complain. If we if we open up the channels, they’re gonna complain because employees complain about a lot of stuff. how do I’ve always struggled with this. How do we coach leaders into understanding that voice isn’t e i Well, it’s a venting. I mean some people might vent. Sure, there’s always gonna be people who vent. But voice is more about constructive conversations. And I think if leaders could understand that, that yes, there’s gonna be some venting, don’t let it kill ya. I mean that case study I was talking about, you should have heard some of the questions that came in through the chat. It was pure out venting. Leadership of this company has never demanded accountability from leadership, and that’s why we have a bad culture. I that kind of stuff came in and we fed it to the leaders and they answered it. So there was venting. But I would say 85% of the comments were A, I really appreciate you taking the time to communicate to us this way. And B, here’s what we need to do about this and that and the other thing. Here’s my suggestion. I mean, it was mostly positive. And I think the leaders in that organization, I don’t know if they expected that, but I know they got we got resistance about allowing people to just ask questions like that. So I think leaders are always afraid.

Shel: Yeah. I think it’s a I think it’s a matter of tying this to a strategy. rather than, you know, we’re just gonna have this free for all where people can s say whatever they want through these channels that we’ve set up. But yeah, I think there’s a number of ways to approach this. First of all, there are initiatives. You know, we are going to be developing this program, we’re gonna be developing this process. We would like your input to make sure we’re doing something that is going to meet your needs. satisfy your expectations. Please participate in this. There is feedback on things that have been said and done. I mean this is as simple as having a comment section on your intranet for every article that gets posted, things like that. then there’s just the ongoing stuff. I mean there are companies that have had these, companies like Volkswagen for example and Boeing, where you know they said these are channels where you can tell us what’s going on,  so that we can be aware. And then employees at Volkswagen said, Well, you know, this debt on the diesel emissions is not right. This is going to cause problems. Boeing, people said, you know, the safety culture here is really deteriorating. There are problems down here. We need to address these. I think it was Boeing.  I’m not sure, but one of them actually had a process for finding a way. To get rid of these employees. You know, monitor the ones who are raising these concerns. And you know, if we see them coming in two minutes late, we have cause to to terminate them. Yeah. So I mean, you know,  but companies that want to take this seriously can have these mechanisms, and like Engage for Success says, this becomes a smoke alarm for something that could cause you real grief down the line. I mean, look at what happened to Boeing, look at what happened to Volkswagen when

Steve: And look and look at Boeing now. Yeah.

Shel: The arrogance at the senior level saying this is what we’re doing and yeah. Yeah. I mean, a Boeing, it was all about profit. It was the people who came in and said, you know, we have to cut costs so that we can return greater amounts of money to shareholders. At Volkswagen, it was, well, our emission numbers have to look good, so we’re gonna we’re gonna game those numbers. this if they had listened to what the issues were, they might have taken action and prevented

Steve: Right, ego goes back to that.

Shel: The consequences of those things. And I and I think this is what we counsel them on. Yeah, there are going to be people who whine. Why don’t we have a larger share in our 401k plan coming from the company match? thing things like that. But I think counseling them to say, look, there are some real issues that might surface that you’re not aware of, or a decision that you made is backfiring. And you need to know that. as the communicator who is going to help you process this two way communication, we’ll we’ll filter all that and give you summaries. Yeah, we if twenty employees are saying the same thing, we’re not gonna make you read twenty comments. We’re gonna give you a summary of what they’re what they’re saying. Make this all something that you can manage. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, we’ll help. And you know what, Shely? You just you stole my idea like you often do because you’re smarter than me. that’s the key, what you just said. Structured voice, structured feedback. You don’t have to open it up and say, Here, if you want to complain that your coworker has body odor, this is the place to do it. If you want to complain that you have to work on Fridays or you gotta come back and then No, you structure the input, you structure the feedback around certain initiatives and that’s A great way, we’ve done that at companies where they didn’t have any feedback, you weren’t allowed to comment on articles on the intranet. The way to kind of break the ice a little bit with leaders who are either you know s suspect or they’re just suspicious about the whole idea of listening to employees, you structure it by tying it to initiatives. Here’s what we’re doing, it’s incredibly important that we do this right, and we’d love to hear your feedback on on this on this particular initiative or this particular project or this particular something. And if you tie it to actual things in the workforce and not just open it up to say, hey, it’s the wild west, say whatever you want about anybody you want and whatever, it’s in you know, I don’t know where you stand on this, but I don’t like anonymous comments on intranets. I love having your anonymous suggestion box. That’s perfect. And you can filter out the nut cases and the nut jobs and everything else and take the real ones. But when you allow anonymous comments on the intranet, not sure how you stand, I think it opens up it’s a bad it’s a bad I think it sets a bad precedent.

Shel: Yeah, I agree with a caveat. my general view is you should have the strength of your conviction when you say something. And if you’re not going to stand behind it and be identified, don’t say it. in organizations where there where the culture has been one where people are not comfortable sharing and you’re trying to change that culture, I think having an anonymous intranet input.

Steve: Right.

Shel: Functionality can be a temporary benefit to the organization. People say, look, they listened to that comment. maybe next time I’ll put my name on it. So yeah, I think as a transition thing, it might be helpful. Yeah, but generally, no, I agree with you. I don’t I don’t like it. I think people should stand behind their you know, the interesting thing is that Zoom, if you’re doing your webinars or your feedback sessions on Zoom, there is the ability to share a

Steve: Yeah, could be, could be.

Shel: A question anonymously if you if you’ve got the q and i’m pretty sure it’s the default i may be wrong about that but i notice a lot of employees are anonymous and i don’t think they mean to be it’s just the way it’s set up but let me share two stories with you real quick you know the first one this was when i was consulting i had a client it was a big company in the consumer package goods space

Steve: Is it really? I didn’t know that.

Shel: And they brought me in because employees weren’t paying any attention to the intranet. Their analytics sucked. And I took a look at their intranet before I came out and met with them. And you know, by God, the intranet was great. I mean, this was a great intranet. The articles were short and concise and relevant and useful and aligned with strategy and values. They did a lot of short videos that were very consumable. I was really impressed. So why weren’t employees paying attention to this? I really wanted to know. And we started off by interviewing the executives and they said, the intranet is great. We really want employees paying attention to it. This is the official source of truth in the organization. And then we did focus groups. And the focus groups from the middle managers and the focus groups from the frontline employees told us the same thing. The frontline employees say, I can’t be looking at the intranet. My boss is gonna see me doing that and give me a hard time. And the middle managers say if my employees are looking at a video on the intranet, they don’t have enough work to do. So that’s where the problem was. And you know, if you didn’t go out and surface that employee voice, the leaders would have never known that middle managers were undermining their approach to getting the word out to employees. Yeah. But where I work,  we have an annual survey. This is nothing that my department

Steve: Yeah, I heard that. Happens all the time. Happens all the time.

Shel: Is responsible for. We do the communication on it, but this comes out of HR. And it’s a leadership survey. And you will get the survey specifically, will identify the leader you’re being asked to evaluate. It’s the person who runs your project or your department or your team. We’re not talking about the senior leadership unless you report to somebody in senior leadership. And every leader gets the results of that survey and has a meeting with an HR business partner to develop a plan. To make things better based on the results of the survey. And I did an article for the intranet with one of those people who was the subject of the survey. And he said, were one of the lowest rated projects last year. My light went off. We were one of the Lowest rated projects last year. did the survey. I got the results. I made some changes. This year were the top-rated project. So employees notice this when they give feedback and things change. You know, they do notice that. And I think that leads that leads to engagement, that leads to commitment, that leads to all good things from employees in the organization.

Steve: Yeah, without a doubt. I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t think it happens very often where leaders actually listen. My close would be: I think you need three things. And I think very few companies have all three things. One, you have to have the channels and the mechanisms to listen. you have to have those set up. Two, you have to have leaders who actually give a damn, who will actually listen to constructive feedback. And three, you have to have employees who feel enough trust in leadership that they feel trusted enough to speak up and they feel engaged enough to speak up. So if you have engaged, responsible, professional employees, leadership who can check the ego at the door and actually listen to those employees, and the communications people have set up easy to manage channels, it would be nirvana. But getting all three of those things lined up is very, very hard.

Shel: And that’s where our counsel comes in. I think we need to explain to leaders and we share examples, right? And if you can share examples from the same industry that you’re in, so much the better of what happens when leaders listen to employees, what happens when they don’t. And you know, take baby steps. try something that is not that consequential initially.

Steve: Exactly. Yep, yep. Yep, try to hook it to an initiative. Yeah. Yeah, I’m a big fan of taking baby steps. They need the baby steps. They’re not gonna run into this thing. So start small, let it build, let it but realize that, my God, the sky’s not falling because we let people talk and offer opinions and ideas and surface problems. The sky didn’t fall. And once they realize that then it can kind of build and build and then you get to the kind of culture where people feel empowered to use a really bad buzzword. They feel confident that they can be heard and they will speak up.

Shel: And then we get two way communication.

Steve: Which is the end goal.

Shel: Yeah, praise be. See you next time, Steve.

Steve: All right, Shel, I’m off to happy hour.

The post Episode 3: If It’s Not Two-Way, It’s Not Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.