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FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce?
6d ago00:08:42Tap to summarizeMost companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing to help them guide their teams. That will become more and more problematic as challenges continue to mount—like the two issues that have emerged recently: companies shifting the models they’re using, and employees stepping out of their areas of expertise because AI can give them information they would normally turn to internal subject matter experts for. Links from this episode: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ hits limits as workplaces look for cheaper artificial intelligence Workers are crossing job boundaries with AI, OpenAI research shows Managers say they don’t feel ready to lead an AI-fluent workforce The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: When companies change something they’ve been extolling for the last six months, managers are expected to support that change. When employees step outside their lane, managers are supposed to manage that. But can managers do these things when they haven’t been prepared? That’s the case with some of the fallout from the introduction of artificial intelligence in organizations. The details are coming up in this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release. Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 524 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz, and you’ve got just me again this week. I have three artificial intelligence stories to share with you. Organizational communicators are going to have to live at the intersection of all three of these issues, whether we’re ready or not, so let’s tackle them as parts of a bigger whole. I’ll dive into these stories right after this. Let’s start with the whiplash. For the past year or so, companies have been in what some have come to call the “token-maxing era”: Throw AI at everything, reward employees for burning through as many tokens as possible, and worry about the ROI later. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was quoted as saying that if your half-million-dollar engineer isn’t burning $250,000 in tokens, something’s amiss. Meta reportedly ran an internal competition rewarding token usage. That was the mood last spring. Summer’s mood is different. The Associated Press—and, by the way, this same reporting ran in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere—describes companies now hitting a wall. Costs went up, productivity didn’t keep pace, and the bill is coming due. We covered this in episode 517 back in early June, but just as a reminder: Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget in four months, according to its CTO, and has since rolled out spending tiers starting at $1,500 a month per employee. Some companies aren’t just tightening budgets; they’re switching platforms entirely. One AI startup called Lindy moved 100% of its traffic off Claude and onto DeepSeek, the cheaper Chinese alternative. Its CEO told CNBC that the cost curve “crashed to the ground.” Multiply that kind of switch across every company currently having the same conversation, and you’ve got a specific communication problem: How do you explain to a workforce that, after spending months enthusiastically evangelizing one tool, you’re now moving employees to a different one—possibly overnight—for reasons that are mostly financial and don’t actually involve the employees who have been building things on the original tool? That’s problem number one. Problem number two is going to make problem number one look simple, because it’s not just about which tool people use. It’s about what people are allowed to do with it. Axios got an exclusive look at new OpenAI research drawn from more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from business users. The finding is that workers are routinely doing other people’s jobs. Roughly 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks typically associated with a different profession. After stripping out generic activities such as drafting emails, customer service employees, designers, and HR professionals are the biggest boundary crossers. Something like three-quarters of their profession-specific prompts touch work that belongs to somebody else’s job title. People are using ChatGPT to draft marketing materials, troubleshoot software, run financial calculations, and interpret regulations—jobs that used to require reaching out to a specialist for help. OpenAI’s chief economist told Axios that the boundaries between jobs are already becoming more flexible because of this. Now, if you’re in communications, you can probably already hear the governance questions stacking up. Who’s accountable when a well-meaning employee uses AI to draft something that touches legal, financial, or regulatory territory in which they have no training? What happens to your carefully built subject-matter-expert review process when everyone feels like a generalist? And when something goes wrong because of bad advice, off-brand sentiment, or a compliance miss, who owns that failure? Is it the employee, the tool, or the manager for not seeing it coming? That brings us to the third piece, and honestly, it’s the one that worries me most. HR Dive reported on new research from Indeed and YouGov. The headline number is that 43% of managers say they feel poorly equipped—or not equipped at all—to lead a workforce that’s fluent in AI. More than half of workers say they’re not getting the AI training they need. Employer expectations for what workers should be doing with AI are running two or three times ahead of what workers actually feel comfortable doing. Indeed pointed out that companies have spent two years building AI-ready workforces. The next challenge—and arguably the harder one—is building AI-ready leaders. Now, put these three stories together and you get a pretty clear picture. Companies are going to keep switching models and vendors as the economics shift. Employees are going to keep wandering across job boundaries because the tools make that easy and, honestly, tempting. The people standing in the middle of both trends—the frontline managers who must explain the switch, catch the boundary problems, and answer the “Wait, am I even allowed to do this?” questions in real time—are the group companies have prepared the least. That is a communication problem, and it’s ours to fix. If managers don’t understand why the company moved off the model they spent six months championing, they can’t credibly explain it to their teams. They’ll either go silent, which breeds suspicion, or they’ll improvise, which is worse. If managers don’t have clear guardrails explaining what kinds of AI-assisted work outside someone’s lane are acceptable and what kinds require a specialist’s involvement, they’ll either rubber-stamp everything or block everything. Neither option serves the business. And if leadership training lags this far behind workforce adoption, managers become the bottleneck at exactly the moment the company needs them to be the translators and interpreters. Here are three things I’d be pushing for internally right now: First, build the change narrative for platform and model switches before you need it. Develop a plain...
Transcribe →FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island
2w ago00:45:39Tap to summarizeNeville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates. xx Links from this episode: How Marketers Should Rethink Thought Leadership Treat Thought Leadership as a Lasting Asset, Not a One-Off Campaign A 5-Step Framework for Genuine Thought Leadership Why thought leadership is no longer optional for tech companies The ROI of Thought Leadership CEO thought leadership can drive $367M in value Why Thought Leadership Is Failing — and How to Solve It Reclaiming Brand Sovereignty In The AI Era The paid brand mention problem in GEO Can Hedging Make You a Better Communicator? Effectively communicating uncertainty: The persuasive impact of different types of hedges The Role of Different Markers of Linguistic Powerlessness in Persuasion Hedges, Tag Questions, Message Processing, and Persuasion Links from Dan York’s Tech Report Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool Attie: AI for the Atmosphere Instagram will charge for AI access Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI Roadmap to 7.1 Investigation into TikTok’s compliance with duties to protect children from encountering harmful content under section 12 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment. Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it? And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing. That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release. Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own. You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record. He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support. It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery. Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients. Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host. But today, you get just me. At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes. Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs. There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody. It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.” Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it. Tim Sutton left a comment saying: “Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.” Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs. Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts. The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually. Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying: “They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.” Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new ...
Transcribe →Circle of Fellows #131: The Evolving Media Landscape and What It Means for Media Relations
2w ago01:00:29Tap to summarizeLocal 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 features four IABC Fellows with deep backgrounds in journalism and media relations. Moderated by Shel Holtz, SCMP, the panel discussed what’s changed in the newsroom, what hasn’t, and what it means for the way communicators do their jobs. The panel dug 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. 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. Raw Transcript <span data-descript-pasteboard="eyJ2ZXJzaW9uIjoxLCJkYXRhIjpbeyJzb3VyY2VUcmFjayI6eyJpZCI6ImFjMWE2Nzk0LWIxODYtNGI3Mi1hNTZlLTg5ZTkxNTQ2ZDkzOSJ9LCJzb3VyY2VUcmFja0F1ZGlvUHJvcGVydGllcyI6eyJnYWluIjoxLCJwYW4iOjAsImlzTXV0ZWQiOmZhbHNlLCJlZmZlY3RzIjpbXSwic3VwcHJlc3NSb29tdG9uZSI6ZmFsc2V9LCJ2b2ljZXMiOltdLCJtZWRpYVJlZnNDb3B5RGF0YSI6W3sibWVkaWFSZWYiOnsiaWQiOiJjNzg0NTNlMi1kMmU1LTRmNTMtYTUyMi02...
Transcribe →FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting?
4w ago00:21:39Tap to summarizePodcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative’s core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms. Links from this episode: Podcasting 2.0 — Making Podcasts Better for Everyone What Is Podcasting 2.0? And Why Should I Care? Podcasting 2.0 What Is Podcasting 2.0? What You Need to Know About Podcasting 2.0 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 522. I’m Neville Hobson Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, we’ve been doing this show for more than 21 years. When we started, there were maybe 400 podcasts. There was no Apple Podcasts to help people find and subscribe to shows, and every podcaster was what today they seem to be calling an indie podcaster. What’s not an indie podcaster? That would be Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify collecting money. He’s not an indie, he’s mainstream media. So I try to follow the podcast industry. I subscribe to some newsletters. I read some people who talk about it. But somehow I only recently encountered Podcasting 2.0. This thing has been around since 2020. Despite the name, it’s not a new audio format. It’s not a new app or a replacement for RSS. It’s an open source movement launched by, guess who? Adam Curry, the podcasting pioneer, along with a developer named Dave Jones. God, there’s a lot of Dave Joneses out there. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. Now, that word open matters. Traditional podcasting works because creators like us publish an RSS feed that many different apps can read. Nobody has to upload a separate master copy to each player. But over time, discovery and listening have become concentrated in large corporate directories and platforms like Apple, increasingly Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, but there are others. These companies set their own rules for their own services. Spotify’s rules explicitly say that it can remove content and suspend or terminate accounts. You can call that moderation, deplatforming, censorship. There’s no denying the underlying power these services have. Spotify can remove a podcast from its service. If the creator independently controls the RSS feed and hosting, Spotify can’t erase the podcast from the entire internet. The danger comes when creators and audiences become so dependent on one proprietary platform that removal there is effectively removal from public view. Podcasting 2.0 was designed to reduce that gatekeeper risk. Its answer isn’t that every app has to carry every show, it’s that no single app or company should be able to make a show disappear everywhere. Now, the initiative has several major pieces. The Podcast Index is an open directory that apps can use instead of depending on one company’s catalog. I checked, and FIR is listed, as are our other active shows on the FIR Podcast Network. The podcast namespace adds new backward-compatible tags to RSS feeds. Those tags can provide creator-controlled transcripts, richer chapters, information about hosts and guests, live stream notifications, alternate audio and video versions, licensing information, and a podroll of shows creators recommend. Remember blog rolls? This is podrolls. There’s also PodPing which alerts apps quickly when a feed changes, and there’s a really much-discussed thing called Value for Value. It’s a model that lets listeners support creators directly, often through tiny Bitcoin payments called sats, S-A-T-S, and attach messages known as boosts or boostagrams. And, yeah, I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show with Curry and Jones, and they were shouting out everybody who gave them a boost the Bitcoin element gets disproportionate attention, but it’s optional. Podcasting 2.0 is much broader than cryptocurrency. And by the way, there’s a vertical market application of Podcasting 2.0 called Godcaster. That’s a defined community of religious podcasters who have embraced Podcasting 2.0. The question is whether this model could work for, say, corporate ecosystems, universities, trade groups, nonprofits, and the like. And that explains why communicators should care or at least know about all this, because this really is a conversation about channel ownership, interoperability, accessibility, and resilience. Accurate transcripts improve access and make our content easier to search and reuse. Chapters and person tags make expertise more discoverable. Podrolls let organizations recommend trusted voices without surrendering discovery to Spotify or YouTube and their algorithms. And open distribution reduces the risk of building an audience on rented space. Now, there are caveats. Support remains uneven. I didn’t even learn about it until a couple weeks ago. Hosts like Libsyn, which hosts FIR, and podcasting apps implement different subsets of the standards. Open infrastructure doesn’t eliminate legal obligations. It doesn’t change hosting company policies. There are other choke points. And decentralization doesn’t automatically make the content accurate, ethical, or responsible. But the core idea is important, and that’s that podcasting began as an open medium, not a collection of corporate content silos. Podcasting 2.0 is an effort to modernize that open model without giving up what made podcasting distinctive in the first place. For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond audio. Distribute widely, but retain control of the source, the identity, and the relationship with the audience Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s quite a story, Shel, I think. Like you, I hadn’t really heard of this other than the fact I did come across Podcasting 2.0 website when Adam Curry launched it back in, what was it, 2021, 20- 2020. But since then, no, haven’t heard anything about this at all really other than some kind of, aside comments here and there on on a couple of tech podcasts. And I’m thinking what you’ve outlined or makes complete sense to me. So why hasn’t this been thought about before even? I think it has in part. I’ve read people talking about this online, particularly on making content more easily consumable as they see it and there we’re talking about an idea that’s not new. Apple’s been offering this for a while, which is chapters, splitting up your content into chapters. But that’s only Apple. It doesn’t transport, and therein lies one of the issues with this, I think. How could you put it? There are some concerns I can see. I’ll come onto the pros in a minute. But I think is this not fragmentation of something that’s going to require quite a bit of a learning curve to figure out what to do with this? I’m also thinking that, is this going to open another standards race? Open standards only work if enough people adopt them, otherwise there is becoming another well-intentioned technical layer that only enthusiasts use. We’ve seen that. But, A broader, top-level question is, are we looking at the next stage in podcasting’s evolution, or are these features primarily serving podcast creators rather than podcast listeners? In other words, who’s getting the greatest benefit? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think it, it does… The fragmentation issue I think creates complexity. Features, bolting on new features more metadata doesn’t compensate for weak storytell...
Transcribe →AI, trust and the answer economy – Pete Blackshaw on the future of brand credibility
4w ago01:00:57Tap to summarizeYour brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you. That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé. As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve. In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future. For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes. In this conversation, we discuss: Why Pete believes AI is becoming an auditor of organisational credibility rather than simply another information retrieval tool. What he means by the idea that “your brand is as strong as its answers.” Why evidence increasingly matters more than messaging in an AI-driven world. The concept of a “book of truth” and why organisations need to make trusted information easier for AI systems to understand. How and why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI models can develop different perspectives on the same brand. Whether communicators need to understand AI “worldviews” as well as human audiences. Why corporate communications could become one of the most strategically important functions in the age of AI. How organisations should prepare for AI-generated reputation challenges and new governance responsibilities. What AI agents could mean for marketing, purchasing decisions and brand influence. Pete’s advice for communication professionals on becoming “answer ready.” About Pete Blackshaw Pete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands. A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives. Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, *The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future*, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology. Resources Pete Blackshaw on LinkedIn BrandRank.ai The book: The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future Pete’s The Answer Economy newsletter Search previous FIR interviews with Pete Blackshaw (2005, 2007 and 2009) on the FIR archive site. Transcript A transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length. Shel Holtz (00:04) Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson (00:09) And I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz (00:11) And we are thrilled to have Pete Blackshaw back with us. Pete, this is your fourth appearance, I believe, on FIR. And it’s been a while. I think is what? It was 2009, I think, was the last time. But it’s great to have you back. I’ve been following you ever since then. Certainly read your content on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. So very happy. Pete Blackshaw (00:21) It has been a while. Yeah. Shel Holtz (00:38) Anxious to have this conversation and the reason we reached out to bring you back on FIR interviews is because of some research that you have been doing for a couple of years that has resulted in quite a LinkedIn post and a new book coming out in September. tell us about all this and yourself. Pete Blackshaw (00:57) Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a native Californian who’s here in kind of adopted Cincinnati as my is my home. I have kind of had a mix of is my s you know, two time startup founder, first one I sold to Nielsen, which was in that space that you and I were talking about, you know, viral complaints and early social media. And and I’ve always been, you know, if there’s any through line across my career, I’d say it’s The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint Neville Hobson (02:18) Ha ha. Pete Blackshaw (02:22) after Switzerland was recruited by P and G and Kroger and some of the Cincinnati companies to launch a startup accelerator and did a little bit of work in venture capital. But I’ve loved being back in the startup world and yeah, looking forward to the conversation. Neville Hobson (02:39) Terrific. So we should to kind of warm us up. I’ve got a question to start with that is a very, very simple one, actually, Pete. when I was looking into the the book that you’re publishing and looking at the content, what you’re covering and all that stuff, I saw I saw some huge kind of resonance with what we talk about in FIR. And there’s a lot of overlap, which I which I found really, really exciting because that that’ll fuel some of what we’re gonna talk about today, I think. But Pete Blackshaw (02:45) Yeah. Neville Hobson (03:09) First questi...
Transcribe →FIR #521: AI Layoffs Are Here. Wait. Strike That. Reverse It.
Jul 600:21:27Tap to summarizeEveryone from CEOs to politicians has been talking about the likelihood of AI-related job loss, and several companies have already let people go in anticipation that AI can do their work. Ford Motor Company is the latest to rehire those workers when AI proved inadequate for the job. Elsewhere, many of the managers who have let people go regret their decisions, and some companies are revising their hiring plans. To remedy the chaos, Neville and Shel discuss the importance of strategy and knowledge management systems, among other things. Links from this episode: ‘Talent refresh’ | Ford rehires human staff after AI quality-check tools fail to deliver Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks Return of the ‘greybeards’: AI backfired – so Ford had to rehire humans Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short Ford rehires ‘greybeards’ after AI tech fails to deliver The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 521 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. Here’s a story that should make every one of us pause before we get too comfortable handing things over to AI. Ford, the automaker, has just rehired somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty veteran engineers. Note the word rehired. The company had let them go in recent years as it leaned into AI-driven quality checks. Ford calls them greybeard engineers. That’s not a throwaway nickname. It’s the whole point of the story. These are the people with decades of experience across multiple product cycles, and Ford let a lot of them go only to discover it needed them back because the AI wasn’t working the way Ford expected. We’ll look into what happened right after this Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly on a call with reporters. Here’s what he said: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” Think about that for a moment. Ford didn’t skip a step. They fed the AI everything that was written down, every design requirement, every documented specification. It still wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t just one system. Ford had installed around nine hundred AI-assisted cameras on the production line specifically to catch quality issues. Nine hundred cameras, and still they couldn’t replace the trained eye of an experienced technician who knows what a problem looks like before it becomes a visible defect. Ford’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, added more context. He said the company had been leaning more and more on automated quality systems, and the results were disappointing. Teams across software, hardware, manufacturing, and supply chain had also been working in isolation from each other, which meant defects were being caught late and fixed under pressure rather than prevented early. Galhotra described this as a find and fix mentality that Ford is now trying to move away from towards genuinely preventing problems before they start. The returning engineers sit right at the center of that shift. They now run mandatory weekly quality and design reviews, hunting for failure points before a single part reaches the factory floor And here’s the part I think matters most for us. A lot of the people who held that hard-won judgment had already walked out the door to suppliers, to retirement before anyone at Ford thought to capture what was in their heads. Poon admitted as much. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through many product cycles,” he said. So Ford had to buy that expertise back three years into this process at real cost. Was it worth it? By Ford’s own numbers, yes. The company has just topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey for mainstream brands for the first time since twenty-ten. That’s sixteen years. CEO Jim Farley says the rehired engineers are already contributing what he called literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, largely through reduced warranty and recall costs. Ford’s even projecting around a billion dollars in cost reduction this year on the back of this quality push. Now, here’s a tension worth sitting with. This is the same Jim Farley who said publicly on other occasions that AI is gonna replace rough-roughly half of all white-collar jobs. And yet here’s his own vice president standing in front of journalists explaining that Ford’s entire quality turnaround depended on bringing back the very human expertise the company thought it could do without. To be clear, this isn’t really a story about AI failing and humans winning. Ford isn’t walking away from AI. Those returning engineers aren’t just doing inspections. They’re training junior staff, and they’re reprogramming the AI tools themselves, feeding them the judgment that design requirements alone couldn’t capture. It’s a hybrid fix, not a retreat. But for anyone in our line of work, comms, knowledge management, anyone thinking about where AI fits into institutional expertise, there’s a sharp lesson underneath all of this. Documentation isn’t the same as judgment, and once the people carrying that judgment are gone, you don’t get it back for free or quickly or easily. I think there’s a bigger question here, too, about how organizations are handling this handover between human expertise and automation, and whether Ford’s experience is a one-off or a warning sign for a lot more companies than just car manufacturers. Shel Shel Holtz Yeah, I think it is a warning sign. But I, I don’t think it’s a trend necessarily, the idea that AI AI layoffs are being reversed everywhere. Yeah I’d just be careful about overstating that. There’s really only a handful of well-documented company examples of this. I think it’s easier to say that the way many organizations overestimated how quickly AI could substitute for the experienced judgment of their staff, I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it. Increasing number are recalibrating toward AI human collaboration rather than there are examples though. IBM has reversed course. They didn’t rehire the same people, but they’ve really reversed course on this whole replacement idea. An AI system deployed to take over HR work handled about 94% of incoming requests, but the 6% it couldn’t resolve including situations in- involving ethical judgment, really revealed the limits of all of this into the hands of a large language model. And then the company announced that it planned to triple its US entry-level hiring this year. That’s a pretty significant reversal. Klarna’s the one that … that’s the poster child for all of this. They were one of the first to announce that they were going to replace their customer service with AI. A year later their CEO publicly reversed course, admitting that customer experience had gone down the tank, quality had fallen the company had over-prioritized cost savings which most companies seem to be doing. They’re looking at cost savings and not other ways AI could really improve things or even help the organization grow and that human customer service remained essential. So they went back to hiring customer service representatives, and they expanded their human support. They la- even reassigned engineers and marketers into customer support roles while they were busy rebuilding the support organization that they had decimated. CEO, I think it was he who was quoted saying, “Cost, unfortunately, seems to have been too predominant evaluation factor.” that said I think it is worth noting that according to one research organization, I hadn’t heard of them before, but OrgView, 39% of busin...
Transcribe →ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable?
Jun 2900:19:50Tap to summarizeMost 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.
Transcribe →FIR #520: AI’s PR Meltdown
Jun 2901:36:24Tap to summarizeIn 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 fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: 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 ...
Transcribe →Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary
Jun 2800:29:50Tap to summarizeMost 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 th...
Transcribe →FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You?
Jun 2300:17:56Tap to summarizeWe 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 fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript 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? <p data-start=...
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