Subscribe to receive every episode of every show on the FIR Podcast Network
Listen to episodes
60 recent
September 6, 2026Episode 721 min
OTSP #7: No Story? No Strategy.
A strategic narrative is a critical asset for any organization. It is the overarching story that explains where an organization came from, what it stands for, where it is going, and why that direction matters. Grounded in the organization’s purpose, values, vision, and strategy, it provides a common foundation for communication and helps employees and other stakeholders understand how they fit into the larger story and why they would want to be part of it. In this episode, Mark and Shel dig into strategic narratives, why they are so important, and why so many organizations seem to dismiss their importance. Links from this episode The Strategic Narrative (from Shel’s blog) Strategic Narrative (from Engage for Success) How To Build A Strategic Narrative That Inspires And Aligns Raw Transcript Shel Holtz: Mark, how are you doing? Mark Dollins: I’m good, Shel. How are you? Happy Sunday on the West Coast to you. Shel Holtz: Thanks, and happy Sunday on the East Coast to you. Mark Dollins: Thank you very much. We’re loving it. We’re getting close to Labor Day. Shel Holtz: It’s getting there—a day off for us. I find strategic narratives to be a fascinating topic. They’re well established in theory. You can’t pick up a book on communications, internal or external, and not find strategic narratives in there. Engage for Success, the UK employee engagement movement, lists a strategic narrative as one of the four enablers of employee engagement. And yet, in 21 years of consulting on internal communications, I was never asked to be involved in developing or evolving one, and one was never given to me as part of the package when I was preparing to work with a client. I think the theory is more prevalent than the actual practice. Is that what you’ve found? Mark Dollins: I think that’s true. In fact, when I’m working with clients, I always ask them, “What is your story?” I could go online and say what I think their story is based on what they’ve put on digitally managed channels, but when I ask them to tell me their story, often there isn’t a lot there. Pardon the pun, but it’s the North Star. It is the single most important element for any communication because it’s all about purpose and mission. If you can’t make that really clear, it’s hard to tell a story about it. Shel Holtz: I remember when I was working on the strategic narrative where I work, I had to explain that we weren’t inventing something. We weren’t going to introduce concepts that we’d have to get employees to buy into. We were creating a package containing all of these statements and philosophies: our core values, purpose, mission, vision and strategic plan, all baked into a narrative. Where did we come from? Where are we today? Where are we going? Wouldn’t you like to join us on this journey? Mark Dollins: Exactly. I did a little research and found that the word “narrative” comes from the Latin narrare , meaning “to relate,” and gnarus , meaning “knowing.” It’s all about attaching meaning to the facts we’re presenting. That’s really important for any kind of North Star narrative because everything comes from that. Shel Holtz: I thought we would talk about the strategic narrative as an element of communication and the role the internal communicator plays in it. I was surprised in my research to find that sometimes these are delivered fully baked to the internal communicator, who is told to convey the narrative rather than play a part in developing it. Mark Dollins: Bummer—as if we have nothing to add to it. We’d have to be involved. There’s no question, because we work with internal stakeholders. If the external message doesn’t live up to, inspire or align with the internal experience, we’re wasting a lot of time and energy. Shel Holtz: Right. It’s particularly important because the narrative gives you the “why” behind everything. You should be able to connect the stories you tell to the narrative. More importantly, as you’re developing those stories, the narrative should be their foundation. They should all be consistent. What you want to avoid is having your salespeople tell one story while your investor relations team tells another and your CEO delivers a keynote telling a third. These should all be the same story. Mark Dollins: They absolutely should. You’re raising an important point about the connection between a narrative and a story. Let me give you my framing of it. I believe the narrative is a never-ending story. It is your North Star. It takes place over time and doesn’t have an ending. It presents the very big picture. It is usually purpose- and vision-driven, and it’s inspirational. It gets to the heart. It gives people a reason not only to understand the “why,” but to ask, “What’s in this for me? Why should I care?” As I said, it really has no end. That’s a narrative in my framing. A story is a proof point connected to the narrative. It addresses a specific problem, issue or opportunity. You use the traditional elements of storytelling. That may include a hero or a catalyst and an antagonist. You’ve got a conflict, a turning point, a resolution and, importantly, a lesson to be learned. It often highlights the hero’s role, and you can decide whether that’s the company, internal communications, HR or whoever the story is about. At the end of the day, there’s a hierarchy. It starts at the top with the narrative. Then it gets to what I’m going to call the capital-S Story—the presentation, event or other thing you’re going to communicate. Within that are the proof points: stories with those traditional elements. I often advise clients to think about this connectivity, but it has to start at the top with the narrative. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. I’ll give you a great example. I work, as you know, for a commercial general contractor, and one of our value propositions is that we’re a client advocate. You won’t find a big commercial contractor that doesn’t say that: “We’re on board with the client. We’re there to help them realize their vision. We’re not going to keep secrets. We’re going to be upfront and fill them in on everything that’s happening. We’re committed to transparency.” Claiming to be a client advocate is not a unique marketing approach. But if you look at our strategic narrative, you learn from our history that two of our founders were general contractors—and also developers. In other words, the client perspective was represented in the organization’s leadership, rather than being someone you worked with only externally. When we talk about being a client advocate, we can say it’s in our DNA because two of our founders were clients. We were founded with this philosophy. We’re different. If that finds its way into the interviews the business development team conducts after being shortlisted for a project, it makes a difference. That’s why having the narrative is important, but so is making sure people pay attention to it. Mark Dollins: I love that. Exactly—it’s got to be real. The other thing about narratives, and I think you’ll agree, Shel, is that they change over time. It doesn’t mean they change fundamentally. The mission and purpose remain the same. But as organizations go through change, they have to evolve the narrative that goes with them. I’ll give you a quick example. Pittsburgh International Airport launched a $1.8 billion new terminal last November. The narrative the leadership team developed positioned it as more than an airport. They looked at positioning themselves as a leader in aviation and a driver of economic growth for the region. Those words are really important because they stood the test of time. The airport announced it was going to build the new terminal. Then it entered what I’ll call the narrative’s second chapter: We’ve done all the groundwork, but now we have to start building it and preparing our people. They developed the Smart Plan Forward, a five-year journey with a clear destination: creating a smarter airport. They said they were going to enable, empower and equip their people to innovate and collaborate in the name of change, and that was why they were taking a customer-first approach in everything they did. It took the original narrative—“We’re building this airport, leading the aviation industry and creating economic growth for the region”—and said, “Now we’re going to do this part of it,” while staying true to the original narrative. The new terminal had a very powerful and successful opening last November. It was fun to watch the airport develop, launch and then update the narrative as part of an overall change in its positioning within the aviation industry. Shel Holtz: It’s interesting that you bring up change as a catalyst for evolving a narrative. My research indicated that most strategic narratives are actually developed during a time of change, as part of a change communication effort. If we’re going to explain the change, we need to tell the story of where we came from, where we are today and why we’re making this change now. So let’s establish that narrative. For organizations going through some sort of change—which is everybody—I think it’s a good reason to start. Mark Dollins: Everybody is going through change. You’re right. The big issue most organizations miss in the narrative—and I didn’t give the whole narrative in this example—is the burning platform. Why the hell are we going through this change? What’s at stake? There’s a way to engage people in the work they’re doing and the mission, but especially around change, there has to be a reason. What happens to us as a team, institution or organization if we don’t make this change or pivot? What’s at risk? On the other side, what’s the opportunity? How do we position ourselves in a much better, more competitive way? These are clear things that have to be part of the narrative, and they’re often missing. People love telling stories, but the stories are so independent. They’re proof points of a hierarchical narrative that explains the bigger picture. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Something else is that the narrative needs to be packaged, and maybe repackaged, in multiple ways so it’s useful to different people. I think a lot of these are developed with executives in mind, so that when a CEO, CFO or executive vice president communicates with stakeholders, everybody is on the same page and tells the story from the same foundation. But managers need to be able to tell those stories in ways that work for them. If it’s just a polished speech, it isn’t going to work. Mark Dollins: You’re raising a good point about litmus-testing it—not just with managers, but with the front line, because those employees are going to be your toughest sell. It will pass the sniff test or it won’t. They’ll say, “That’s just BS. It doesn’t match my experience. I don’t believe it. I don’t trust it.” We’ve worked with clients who did exactly that. They pressure-tested the narrative by asking, “Do you see yourselves in this, and do you believe what we’re saying?” When you go to frontline employees and they say, “That’s it. That makes me want to come to work and reminds me why I go through all the stuff I have to deal with in my job. I’m all in,” you know you’ve got it right. It does happen when you hit the right tone, words and framing, and frontline employees can say, “I see myself.” You’ve got a winner, as long as you use it in the right ways. But you’re right: It has to pass the sniff test not just for senior executives, but for everybody. Shel Holtz: It has to pass the sniff test, for sure, but it also has to be adaptable so everybody can use it. Right now, for example, we have employee advocacy programs. We’re asking employees to go out and tout the company to their communities. If they’re telling a different story from the one the talent acquisition team is telling, people can detect that. Mark Dollins: Right. There’s an opportunity for internal communicators not just to develop the narrative, but to help the organization use it. Usually, when I’m working with clients, step two is getting people in a room and talking about what the narrative is, why we use it and how they can use it in their ongoing communications. Let’s work through some examples. Let’s look at a presentation you’re making or an email you’re writing. There’s language we want you to use that is consistent with the narrative and helps you position the issue of the day, the priority of the quarter or the strategy of the year within it. Otherwise, the narrative is left as words on a page: “How nice. I get it. I’m like everybody else.” But you’re not telling people how to engage with and use it. It’s a critical opportunity for employee communicators to say, “Hold on. It’s not just about developing and releasing the story. It’s about making sure people know how to use it.” Shel Holtz: Exactly, whether you’re a senior executive or a frontline individual contributor. That’s an important point: How does an individual contributor use this, beyond making sure they’re not out of step when posting on a social network? I think one answer is that they’re going to understand where they fit in the big picture and in the context of where everybody else fits. A good strategic narrative should let you see where you are in the story. If you can see yourself, you can probably also see the vendors you work with, the suppliers, customers and other stakeholders. It should make it easier to relate to their experiences with the organization, too. Mark Dollins: When I was at DuPont, we were in the process of doing this megamerger with Dow—a $130 billion deal. The plan was to bring together two major companies in the industry, divide the assets and then launch three brand-new companies. It took two years, so we had to develop a really clear master narrative about what we called DowDuPont: Why are we bringing these two together? Very quickly, to your point, Shel, we had to launch narratives for each of the new spinoff companies so employees could see themselves in what was then DowDuPont, but more importantly, in one or more of the spin companies. People in corporate groups, especially, didn’t know which company they would be spun off to because everybody was working for everybody while the companies were being brought together. The real point is that you have to be able to see yourself in the narrative. That was one of the questions we asked as an ongoing metric: “Do you see yourself in one of the future companies?” It was a way of assessing engagement during a period of change and transition with a lot of unknowns: “I don’t know which of the three companies I’ll be assigned to, and I have to keep working, but I’m excited about all three—or at least one or two of them—because the vision for why we’re doing this, where it can go and the opportunities for employees are pretty darn exciting.” It was a critical element and something we measured. It contributed to an important ongoing metric for assessing how engaged our employees were and how communication was helping us. Shel Holtz: Right. The fact that a strategic narrative encompasses both internal and external stakeholders means that, as an internal communicator, you may think there isn’t one when somebody in marketing has actually created one. It may not be publicly available. It may just be something they’re using. Mark Dollins: Or somebody has created one without you—or without the company—which happens. That’s what a narrative is. Somebody takes the facts and applies their own interpretation to them. If no one in your company is doing it, trust me, someone else is. It may not be to your liking. Shel Holtz: Before you set about creating one, ask around to see whether one already exists. I happen to believe it should be right there on the intranet, or whatever platform you’re using to make things accessible to employees. They should have access to it. I think it should be addressed in new-hire orientation so everybody knows what it is, where to find it and when to reference it. Mark Dollins: This might sound obvious, but communicators also need to be trained to use that narrative. It’s shocking how often communicators don’t know their organization has one or don’t know how to use it because nobody has ever talked to them about it. That’s another opportunity for internal communication professionals: What does our own function know about how to use this narrative continuously in ways that advance the organization’s cause? There are lots of opportunities beyond the narrative itself for communicators to help their colleagues and the organization use the story. Shel Holtz: It’s also important to make sure you’re treating this as something strategic, not tactical. Some of what I’ve seen positioned as strategic narratives is really just guidance for message consistency—and that’s not this, right? Mark Dollins: No, you’re absolutely right. This is foundational. I look at it as the base of any communication strategy you’re building: What is your story, and how does everything you do after that connect to it? Without it, you have an unstable base from which to communicate. Nobody wants that. Shel Holtz: We’d love to hear about listeners’ experiences with strategic narratives. If you have one, we’d love to see what you’ve got. I was fascinated when, before getting into the nitty-gritty of our strategic narrative, I spent some time talking with the person on Workday’s communications team who was responsible for developing its strategic narrative. The CEO unveiled it at the company’s big show—its version of Salesforce’s Dreamforce. This was the European edition. I think he said there were 8,000 or 10,000 people in the audience when the CEO said, “This is our strategic narrative.” There was some real investment by the organization. Mark Dollins: How did it go over? I’m fascinated by that because I always think launching it to everybody is a critical decision. What happened beforehand? Was there alignment with senior leadership? I’m always interested in knowing what took place before a big event with a cast of thousands at which you’re unveiling your story—and, importantly, what happened immediately afterward. I’d love to hear more. Shel Holtz: I don’t recall what happened immediately afterward, but senior leadership was involved in developing the narrative, so he worked closely with them. He also reached out to rank-and-file employees to make sure it worked. It’s almost like a vision or mission statement. If you create it in a vacuum, in the rarefied air of senior leadership, and then tell everybody else, “This is our mission,” only to have employees look at it and say, “No, it’s not,” that’s a problem. Mark Dollins: Right: “What company is that? It’s not mine.” It sounds like he did a good job of pressure-testing it. I’d love to know more about how it was rolled out beyond that. The hardest work is done beforehand. It’s about getting alignment and making sure you’ve got something that feels right to the organization. Then the question becomes: How do you sustain this effort and make sure people know how to use it? Think about recruiting. How do you deliver that message to potential employees? How do you onboard them and make sure it’s part of the process? What happens afterward? How is the narrative used in town halls with your CEO or senior executive team? How do you keep it alive and sustain it? Otherwise, like values, it becomes words on a page. Until it’s applied—and applied regularly—the meaning begins to fade. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. It’s a matter of introducing it well so everybody understands what it’s for and how to use it, and then maintaining it through an ongoing communication cadence. Mark Dollins: Right. It’s not just an event. Events are fine for introducing it, but the hard work really comes afterward. Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Thanks, Mark. I look forward to talking with you next time. Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. Always a pleasure. The post OTSP #7: No Story? No Strategy. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
September 3, 2026Episode 52823 min
FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom
Fandoms are not synonymous with audiences or communities. The difference: Fans’ identities are tied up with the team, artist, product, or other object of their passion. It’s not surprising that marketers are chasing fandoms, in hopes of turning their brands into something people are genuinely excited about. But not everything is a potential flashpoint for a fan base. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore what distinguishes fans from members of other audiences or communities, how brands might leverage them, the wisdom of trying to spin up a fan base, and why fandoms might rebel against attempts to use them for marketing purposes. Links from this episode: WTF are fandoms, and why are marketers chasing them? Consumers as Brand Fans: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda Using the TCCM Framework Social media and fandom How community is redefining Media & Creative in 2025 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email 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 528. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. There is a new word making the rounds in marketing circles these days, and that word is “fandom.” Obviously, fandom isn’t anything new. Beatles fans constitute a fandom. Star Trek fans are a big fandom. Sports teams have had fandoms for as long as sports have been around. What’s new is the idea that fandom should be a marketing strategy. Marketers are paying attention because a fandom represents something considerably more valuable than an audience. An audience is passively watching you. That notion led Jay Rosen to write a 2006 post titled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” describing the shift away from a one-way mass-media model to a networked model in which people who once passively consumed information can now publish, respond, organize, remix, and distribute it themselves. That’s not always necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is. A community gathers around a shared interest, but a fandom goes even further. Fans incorporate that interest into their identities. They create things, develop rituals and inside jokes, recruit other people, recommend things to one another, and sometimes defend the object of their fandom with remarkable enthusiasm. One definition I particularly like comes from an article in Digiday: Fandom is where attention turns into identity. You can probably understand why marketers find that appealing. Advertising can buy attention. It’s much harder to buy identity. It’s harder to buy belonging, advocacy, or voluntary engagement. There is some evidence that fandom deserves to be treated as something distinctive. A systematic review published last year examined 38 marketing studies involving brand fans and concluded that fandom has moved from the margins of consumer culture into the mainstream. Brand fans really do behave differently from people who merely buy a product regularly. There is another reason fandom has suddenly become attractive: The media environment has fragmented spectacularly. People aren’t gathered around the same handful of television networks, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations anymore. They’re scattered among TikTok creators, YouTube channels, Reddit communities, Discord servers, gaming platforms, streaming services, group chats, podcasts, and sports communities. We could keep listing niches all day long. Instead of asking, “How do we reach women ages 25 to 44?” marketers can potentially find a group of people who are already intensely interested in something relevant to the organization. That changes the communication challenge. You don’t approach a fandom as an audience waiting to receive your message. You’re entering somebody else’s existing culture. That culture already has leaders, vocabulary, expectations, and history. It has ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t. Increasingly, creators are among the people who have earned credibility within those cultures. The strategic question isn’t, “Which influencer can deliver the biggest reach?” It becomes, “Who actually has standing with these people, and do we have a legitimate reason to be here?” That last question is one I think organizations should spend much more time considering, because fandom is in danger of becoming a bandwagon. Whenever marketers discover something people genuinely care about, there’s a temptation to turn it into a technique. Community, authenticity, purpose, and engagement have all become marketing techniques. Once every agency presentation starts promising to “activate fandom,” that’s probably the time your Spidey sense should start tingling. You can’t manufacture a fandom just by announcing that you have one. Nor is every organization capable of inspiring fandom. Nobody necessarily wants to build part of their identity around an electric utility, payroll software, an insurance company, or the manufacturer of the toner cartridge in the office printer. How many true HP fans are there, really? That doesn’t mean those organizations can’t have excellent customer communities. They can create useful resources, cultivate advocates, involve customers in product development, and provide terrific experiences. There are plenty of organizations that do these things well. But calling every highly engaged customer a fan doesn’t make fandom a meaningful strategic concept. It just gives customer engagement a trendy new name. There is another danger: Brands may identify an existing fandom and assume its passion is available for rent when it probably isn’t. Fans can tell when a company has wandered into their community because somebody in marketing spotted a cultural trend. Borrowing the language, memes, or symbols of a fandom without understanding them can make a brand look less relevant, not more. The more intensely people identify with the community, the more protective they may be of it. After the animated television series Rick and Morty made McDonald’s discontinued Szechuan sauce into a fan obsession, McDonald’s embraced the phenomenon and announced a one-day return. But stores received extremely limited supplies. Fans lined up for hours, and some traveled considerable distances, only to find that no sauce was available. The resulting anger produced protests and the hashtag #GiveUsTheSauce , and McDonald’s ultimately had to apologize. The mistake wasn’t offensive cultural appropriation. It was a company correctly spotting a fandom but badly misunderstanding its intensity—and failing to deliver the experience it had encouraged. I like one test suggested by the material I was reading: If the brand disappeared from the activation, would fans still say that what happened made their community better? That’s a pretty demanding standard. Your contribution might be access, useful information, an experience people couldn’t otherwise have, a genuine role for fans in developing something, or help that enables creators to do better work. Merely inserting your logo probably doesn’t qualify. It also means fandom isn’t likely to be an especially good short-term campaign strategy. These relationships require cultural fluency and sustained participation. If the budget disappears after the quarter ends or management expects an immediate conversion metric, conventional marketing may be the more sensible choice. There are plenty of examples of companies getting this right. LEGO supports its AFOLs—Adult Fans of LEGO—and an existing culture rather than pretending it invented that culture. Harley-Davidson didn’t merely accumulate loyal customers. It helped riders organize around a shared identity by creating the Harley Owners Group, or H.O.G. It provides chapters, rallies, riding challenges, a magazine, events, and other opportunities for motorcycle owners to interact with one another. Even the pumpkin spice latte gave Starbucks an opportunity to turn a seasonal beverage into a fall ritual. The company created a private Leaf Rakers Society Facebook group for enthusiasts, which grew to more than 26,000 members. Starbucks didn’t invent the pumpkin spice latte ritual or the anticipation surrounding it, but it certainly learned how to play along. What should communicators do with all of this? First, don’t begin by asking, “How can we build a fandom?” Start by listening. Find out whether communities already exist around your organization, its products, the problems it solves, or interests adjacent to it. Second, distinguish an audience from a community and a community from a fandom. Don’t inflate ordinary engagement numbers into evidence that people have incorporated your brand into their identities. Third, if you enter an existing fandom, learn its culture before trying to influence it. Identify the people who have earned trust there, including creators, and involve them rather than treating them as distribution channels. Fourth, look for ways to enable participation rather than merely generate impressions. Give people opportunities to contribute, create, influence, and connect with one another. Finally, measure whether the relationship persists when the campaign stops. Are people coming back? Are they creating things voluntarily? Are they recommending you? Are they talking to one another rather than just talking to you? Ultimately, fandom isn’t something a communication department creates. It’s something people decide they belong to. If organizations remember that distinction, fandom could be a genuinely useful way to think about relationships. If they don’t, it may become the next marketing buzzword we spend a couple of years enthusiastically putting into PowerPoint decks before moving on to the next one. Neville Hobson: You addressed this a bit, but what’s the difference between a community and a fandom? When does one become the other? Shel Holtz: The key differentiator is that the members of a fandom incorporate the object of their interest into their identities. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me—and probably half the listeners to this show—that I’m a Deadhead. I love the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead merchandising makes a ton of money, and I buy some of that stuff. I recently received a scale model of the Wall of Sound, the massive audio system the band toured with in 1974. It’s 3D-printed and even has a little Wi-Fi speaker built into it. It was a birthday present, and I just love looking at it. It’s part of that fandom. I’ve read an entire book about the Wall of Sound. I’ve probably read 20 books about the Dead. I was listening to a 1985 concert on my drive to the office this morning. I am a fan. That is part of my identity. The Grateful Dead isn’t just a band I like and whose music I sometimes listen to. I may be part of a community of people who like Elvis Costello, for example, but that doesn’t make me part of an Elvis Costello fandom. I don’t incorporate that particular artist into my identity. That’s the real differentiator. Neville Hobson: That’s a good explanation. Identity is the key, based on what I’ve been reading as well. Are marketers suddenly so interested in fandom because traditional ways of reaching audiences are becoming less effective? Shel Holtz: That’s my take. Marketers are desperate because some traditional means of reaching and engaging people have vanished, some have transformed, and most have fragmented. They’re looking for magic bullets. You read one or two articles about how an organization leveraged a fandom, and suddenly the response is, “We’ll turn our customers into a fandom, too.” But I just can’t see someone becoming a fan of their electric utility. You’re a customer. You may even be an enthusiastic customer for some reason, but I’m never going to incorporate the PG&E brand—Pacific Gas and Electric—into my identity. Ever. Neville Hobson: Here’s a slightly rhetorical question prompted by your comments about Deadhead fandom: Can a brand genuinely become part of a fandom, or does the relationship become transactional the moment the brand begins mapping and monetizing it? Shel Holtz: I think both things can be true. A brand can become part of a fandom if it approaches the opportunity in the right way. First, there has to be a genuine connection to that fandom. I’m trying to think of something that would connect naturally to the Grateful Dead fandom. It might be a guitar brand or one of the nonprofits affiliated with the band, such as Rock the Vote. If you listen to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, the band’s podcast, it has done a deal with Dogfish Head Brewery on the East Coast. The brewery makes Grateful Dead-branded beer. They have thought it through and developed the connection and relationship so they can reach the fandom through the podcast. That may lead people to flock to the beer and talk about it. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll become fans of the beer. They may become consumers of it, perhaps even regular consumers, but the company is leveraging an existing fandom. I think there are also opportunities for brands to build fandoms. Some happen naturally. Consider a car brand. There are Mustang fans. They love their Mustangs. They attend Mustang rallies and car shows. That reminds me of the brouhaha we discussed many years ago, when Ford sent a cease-and-desist letter to a fan who ran a discussion board. It wasn’t about the Mustang, though, was it? It involved a pickup truck. Neville Hobson: I think it was the pickup—the Ranger. Shel Holtz: The Ford Ranger, that’s right. The Ranger Station was the name of the site. Ford sent the cease-and-desist letter, and the site’s owner posted a note saying, “I have to shut this down. I received a cease-and-desist letter from Ford.” The fandom erupted. This was an organization that had a fandom but didn’t recognize its power. Ford could have been leveraging it to expand the customer base. There are opportunities to identify existing fandoms that may revolve around your products, services, or company. More often, though, it will be something adjacent to your business that you can tap into. You need to understand the culture. You need to know who drives it and understand its rituals and jargon. You can’t parachute in and announce, “Here we are. We’re going to tap into this fandom. Aren’t you excited that we’re here?” People will simply say, “No, we’re not. Go away.” It’s definitely worth considering, but it isn’t a magic bullet. For most organizations, I think it’s ridiculous to assume they can develop a fandom around what they do. Neville Hobson: I agree. We’re touching the edges of a discussion about a shift from authenticity—which is unquestionably overused in marketing—toward reciprocity. Does a brand have to earn the right to participate in a fandom? If so, what does it have to give back? There’s an interesting communication principle underneath that question: Don’t begin by asking what value the community can create for the organization. Ask what value the organization can create for the community. What do you say to that? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. That’s how you build credibility and relevance within a fandom, unless it’s a built-in fandom involving something like the Ford Ranger or Ford Mustang. If you have identified an existing fandom that isn’t centered on one of your products but has a genuine connection or relevance to your business, it may be worth investing the time, effort, and money required to ingratiate yourself with that community. How do you do that? You might make access to the object of the fandom a little easier or give fans access to the right merchandise. Ask what you can do to make their fandom more meaningful or more fun. Then you may be accepted, and fans may consider doing something for you—which is obviously one reason you became involved in the first place. You have to be strategic rather than simply jumping in and saying, “We connected the dots. Look at our connection to this fandom. Don’t you want to help us sell our product?” I fear that’s what will happen with a lot of marketers who read about this and think, “There’s a solution for me. I’m going to jump all over fandoms.” Neville Hobson: I struggle a bit to see the precise gap between community and fandom. When does one become the other? I understand the examples you’ve given: the Grateful Dead fandom and The Ranger Station, for instance. Shel Holtz: And the Adult Fans of LEGO. Neville Hobson: That one, too. But do these groups actually refer to themselves as fandoms? What do their members call themselves? Shel Holtz: Well, they call themselves Adult Fans of LEGO. The “F” stands for “fans,” so they do. Would members of Harley riders’ groups—the H.O.G.s—call themselves a fandom? Probably not. They would probably call themselves H.O.G.s, but they’re definitely a fandom. I remember working for a company in the early 1990s whose vice president of compensation and benefits was a Harley owner. He rode with his club every weekend and wore a Harley jacket to the office—and this was a pharmaceutical company in the ’90s. He was a fan. There’s no question about it. He wasn’t merely a member of a Harley community. Being a Harley rider was part of his identity. Neville Hobson: This is rich territory for marketers to get wrong. Forgive me for beginning with the cynical perspective, because I can also see the opportunities available to organizations that do it well. But are we trying to manufacture something that doesn’t need to be there? I don’t particularly like the word “fandom,” although I’m not part of a fandom myself. I belong to many communities, but I’m now wondering about the difference for me personally. Do I see any of those groups as part of my identity? Not really. I probably haven’t encountered one that produces that “wow” for me. Is fandom a manufactured opportunity for marketers, or is it genuinely something worth investing in? Shel Holtz: Again, I think both things can be true. We’re going to see a lot of marketers try to manufacture fandom because it’s a buzzword making the rounds. But some organizations will have a lightbulb moment and realize, “We have a fandom. We’re just not leveraging it.” Imagine if Harley-Davidson had never organized local chapters or created clothing people could wear to express their fandom. What if the company had said, “We sell motorcycles. If our customers want to form clubs and ride around, that’s fine—but they had better not make clothing with our logo because that’s a copyright violation”? Harley-Davidson probably wouldn’t have the identity it has today if it hadn’t recognized that it had a fan base it could support and leverage. The same is true of Adult Fans of LEGO. The company produces kits that clearly aren’t intended for little kids snapping together a few bricks. Some contain thousands of pieces and cost hundreds of dollars. Those are definitely products for adult fans. As long as you listen to fans and nurture the relationship, there can be value in it. Fans have a relationship with the object of their passion. Organizations need to examine that relationship and ask: Are we strengthening it? Are we reinforcing it? Or are we merely trying to exploit it? Neville Hobson: Exactly. Shel Holtz: That’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 31, 202621 min
ALP 314: Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI
Some advisers are telling agency owners they don’t need to know AI all that well themselves. They suggest owners go deep on AI for a month or three, then pass the day-to-day to the team and move on with life. In this episode, Chip and Gini explain why that’s backwards, and how owners who step back from AI are making a mistake. Chip’s argument is that AI doesn’t fit the usual delegation model because it’s moving too fast and touching too much of the business to hand off after just a few months of study. Gini agrees, noting that advice which made sense six months ago is often stale today. Both connect this to credibility with the team: Chip compares the situation to a non-technical manager overseeing developers, who then gets disrespected because they don’t speak the language. Gini says her own coaching works because she’s in the tools constantly enough to give specific workable advice. They also describe pushing AI into something closer to a personal operating system than a work tool, from Chip wanting an assistant that catches him contradicting his own past positions, to Gini’s agent that calls her out when she takes on work she said she’d delegate, telling her flatly it’s not the best use of her time. The episode closes with the advice that staying curious personally is what keeps owners sharp enough to lead a team through a tool that keeps rewriting its own rules. [ read the transcript ] The post ALP 314: Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 28, 202657 min
Circle of Fellows #132: AI and the Communication Leadership Moment
Episode 132 of IABC’s Circle of Fellows examines what the newly released Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 report from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management means for the profession. The report surveyed 536 communication professionals across six global regions and found a profession that has embraced AI in practice but not yet claimed AI governance in leadership: 95.9% of organizations now permit AI, yet only 8.6% have communication professionals leading the formal governance structure. One in four organizations discloses AI use to no one at all. Joining moderator Shel Holtz are Bonnie Caver and Adrian Cropley OAM, both Global Alliance board directors and the research partners behind the survey, as well as Mike Klein. (Theomary Karamanis was scheduled to be a panelist but laryngitis prevented her from participating.) Together, they dig into what the data means for the profession, what it will take to move from adoption to accountability, and what it takes to be a leader in the AI era. Links from this episode: The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management Reimagining Tomorrow 2026: The Report About the panel Bonnie Caver , SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession. Adrian Cropley is the founder and director of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, a global training and development organization. For over thirty years, Adrian has worked with clients worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, on major change communication initiatives, internal communication reviews and strategies, professional development programs, and executive leadership and coaching. He is a non-executive director on several boards and advises some of the top CEOs and executives globally. Adrian is a past global chair of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), where he implemented the IABC Career Road Map, kick-started a global ISO certification for the profession, and developed the IABC Academy. Adrian pioneered the Melcrum Internal Communication Black Belt program in Asia Pacific and is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and thought leader. He has been a keynote speaker and workshop leader on strategic and change communication at international conferences in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. He has received numerous awards, including IABC Gold Quill Awards for communication excellence, and his Agency received Boutique Agency of the Year 6 years running. Adrian is the Chair of the Industry Advisory Committee for the RMIT School of Media and Communication and a Fellow of the IABC and RSA. In 2017, he was awarded the Medal of Order of Australia for his contribution to the field of communication. Mike Klein is the Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine, Founder of #WeLeadComms , and a communication consultant specializing in internal and social communication based in Reykjavik, Iceland. A former US political consultant, Mike shifted direction toward internal communication while pursuing his MBA at London Business School. Since then, Mike has been one of the leading voices for empowering communication professionals, and advocating a focus on internal influence and social connection as drivers of communication, integration and performance. His 2011 book, From Lincoln to LinkedIn remains relevant as organizations recognize that personal credibility and connection are critical to communication success in a world where content volumes are increasing and instability flourishes. Raised in Chicago, Mike has lived and worked in seven different countries, and is also a Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and the Institute of Internal Communication. Raw transcript And we are live. Hi everybody, and welcome to Circle of Fellows. Uh, I am Shel Holtz. I am an IABC fellow. I am here with, uh, three of my IABC fellow colleagues, and we are going to talk about, uh, the leadership moment in artificial intelligence for the communication community. This is the first of two episodes where we will focus on this topic. This is based on the results of a survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance. Uh, both Bonnie and Adrian are heavily involved with the Global Alliance, and I’ll let them tell you how, uh, as we go around the horn and do introductions. Uh, before we get into that, though, I do wanna let everyone know that we hope that you will participate in this conversation by sharing your questions, your observations, your thoughts in the YouTube chat. I can see them right here in this sidebar panel, and we’ll share them on the screen, and we can bring you into the conversation that way. Uh, so let’s do introductions. We’ll go around, uh, clockwise in the order I see you. Uh, and that means we’re starting with you, Adrian. Thanks for that, Shel. It’s always good to be on the Circle of Fellows. Um, I’m Adrian Cropley. I am the co-founder of the Center for Strategic Communication based in Melbourne, Australia, past IABC chair, and now, uh, director on the board of the Global Alliance, and fortunately, um, a partner in the research. Bonnie has- Bonnie and I have done this now for the last couple of years with the, the Global Alliance, so it’s great to be on here sharing a little bit around that, uh, what it’s telling us about that leadership moment. Terrific. Glad to have you with us, Adrian. Bonnie, you’re up. Hi, I’m Bonnie Caver, and I am in Austin, Texas, and I run a company called Reputation Lighthouse, and that’s my day job. Um, of course, I’ve been involved with IABC a long time, and am the past chair of the Global Communication Certification Council and sat on the board of the Global Alliance where, for the last, uh, three years, I’ve been focused on responsible AI and the way our global profession looks at responsible AI. So anytime we have an opportunity to talk about that, uh, it’s very helpful to me as we’re moving forward to Abuja and the World PR Forum, and we’ll be updating the responsible AI guidelines for our profession. Excellent. Looking forward to seeing the outcome of that initiative. And Mike? Hello there. I’m Mike Klein, and I am an IABC fellow. I am also editor-in-chief of Strategic Magazine, which publishes daily content for communication leaders worldwide. And also, I have my own consultancy focused on internal communication and organizational strategy. And my AI bent is less about responsible use of AI and more about strategic use of AI and our strategic positioning within the AI ecosystem, um, with an, with a particular focus on the second-order effects of AI use in organization worldwide Great. And some of you watching this may have seen the promotional materials that went out announcing that this was going to be happening and saw that Thea-Mari Karamalis was also going to be on the panel. Uh, we miss her. Uh, we were looking forward to seeing her here as well, but she let us know the day before yesterday that she has come down with laryngitis. So I, I suppose she could still be here, she just couldn’t say anything. Uh, so she’s opted to take it easy, and we hope that she recovers well and look forward to having her on a future, uh, installment of Circle of Fellows. So let’s jump into this. We have talked about artificial intelligence on Circle of Fellows a couple of times. It’s hard to avoid the topic. If you spend any time on LinkedIn at all, I swear half of the posts there have something to do with AI. I have started following somebody who is talking just about AI in the construction industry on, uh, on LinkedIn. Uh, she posts some really good stuff. She’s not selling anything other than her own consulting services, so, uh, she’s talking about what different companies are doing, and it’s, it’s, it’s really fascinating out there. Um, I personally subscribe to, I think, 12, uh, different AI newsletters, uh, that come by email. And I use AI to summarize all of those because I can’t possibly read 12 daily email newsletters. Uh, but we wanna sort of look at this from more of a, a 40,000 foot, uh, perspective as opposed to the nitty-gritty applications of AI in communication. What does this mean for communication leadership within organizations, uh, and within the communication profession? So, uh, the survey that was conducted by the Global Alliance, uh, I believe, if I remember correctly, I don’t have it in, up in front of me, but I think it was 600 responses or so. Um, so it was a, a, a pretty good representation, a global representation of, of how this is being used. The report, uh, does slice and dice the data so you can see how it all shakes out regionally, for example. But there were some interesting results. Let me just share a couple of, uh, the data points, uh, here. Um, 95.9% of organizations now permit their employees to use AI. That’s up from 91% last year, so incremental growth. Most organizations are letting everybody use it, but only 8.6 of organizations have communication professionals leading formal AI governance. And one in four organizations, uh, specifically 25.4%, um, discloses AI use to no one. There is no disclosure at all. Uh, disclosure is one of my favorite topics because I don’t think it’s an either/or question. But, uh, that’s Interesting data that’s out there. I’ve seen other data from other surveys. We just did one where I work, uh, so I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got that perspective floating around in my head since I joined this call on the heels of a call with my company’s AI committee. So what does that data tell us? Let’s, let’s look at this from, from a governance perspective. What’s missing, uh, when only 8%, 8.6% of us are, are, are leading governance? Uh I, I mean, I presume that somebody’s leading governance in, in these organizations. So what do companies lose when, when communication isn’t engaged? It’s, you know, it’s a really interesting one. I, I might jump in and, and talk about this one first, ’cause when we looked at the, the survey, it, it, it was kind of a worrying statistic because this, this year’s survey, it’s now the second year that this particular survey has been running. So Bonnie and I have, have kind of led that with the Global Alliance. It means now we’ve got that comparative data. Governance really hasn’t shifted in the, the last two years. We can ask a question around what involvement should communication professionals have in governance, should we be leading it, is probably the, the key question there. But if we’re not leading it, are we, are we part of that? Um, so for instance, one of the, the statistics in the, the survey was 57.3% of us are involved in shaping responsible AI guidelines. Um, but only 13.9 are actually leading in that work as well. So it- it’s part of that government s- governance frame, but it’s quite low in the numbers. Now, I guess there’s, there really is that debate around where we should be positioned as communication professionals and there’s, there’s lots of people that say we really shouldn’t be leading it, it should be dedicated AI, um, executives, um, that have a department that looks at, at AI, and I’m, I’m all for that. I think that’s great. But at the absolute minimum, we have a big role in being part of that conversation, and certainly leading it in areas that support communication within the organization. Um, and I might come back to this later, but the, the latest changes within Claude, for instance, is a reaction to… And, and, and what those changes are is, is digital watermarks saying how much of, uh, AI is, is being used, and it automatically discloses for, for us. We’ll talk about disclosure a little bit later, but it’s worrying that decisions are being made without the understanding of the context of communication and, and our input because it’s not black and white, we used AI or we didn’t, it’s to what degree and how much is the human in the loop. And, and, and, and I’m sure Bonnie will talk a lot more about, um, about the, uh, uh, responsible AI and, and the importance of, of that role. But I think we’re in, we’re in a, a place where we actually need to be starting to be part of that conversation, if not leading in that con- that, that area of governance, ’cause it’s a really good role to be given AI is used in content development right across organizations. I was just gonna add in here that, that really and truly where this governance is coming and where it, it impacts us is in that connection to reputation. And because of the way that we are working as organizations, how we’re governing, uh, it, it increases our risk, uh, exposure. Every time we are hiding something is, or it appears that we’re hiding something because we’re not transparent, we’re not dis- dis- disclosing, uh, when people have questions about how we’re using AI, when there’s any sort of doubt, uh, around, of course, we’ve got all of the AI slop. When we don’t have governance, um, it goes to the patterns that are looked at, um, for our organization and how w- it’s, it’s impacting our reputation. And if you look across the board, um, you know, I, I’ve been in the reputation business for a long time. My, my company is, is, uh, 20-plus years old, and we’ve been talking about reputation for a long time. But it’s interesting to me how many comms departments and how many jobs now say reputation is important, how many, um, organizations are talking about it, how many agencies are talking about it. It’s like reputation is the new buzzword, and part of it is because of this lack of AI governance and the ethical challenges and how we’re not communicating that, and we’re not communicating appropriately, uh, and transparently to our stakeholders, and it’s causing, um, reputational risk Mike, any thoughts? I think the, I think the challenge of, of looking at, uh, uh, I think the challenge of looking at AI, you know, uh, this from a reputational lens is that reputation is hugely important. A huge chunk of a company’s value is based, you know, particularly most of a, a company’s intangible value is based on its reputation. But reputation is a fundamentally defensive discipline, and governance is a fundamentally defensive discipline. And the opportunity that communication leaders have isn’t just simply about leading the defense, it’s also about guiding the offense. It’s about finding the opportunities and seeing beyond the, the, the, the current set of risks. Um, AI isn’t just simply making it easier for people to produce on s- you know, produce content without supervision. AI is also transforming the way people work in organizations, and what organizations fundamentally do and how they do that. And as important as AI rep- you know, as AI governance is, it’s also very intense. It’s very time-consuming, and we could very easily find ourselves sidetracked from even these even bigger opportunities on, you know, on the other side of the organization. Mike, I’d like to just talk about that. I th- I love that you say that reputation is defensive, because I’ve just written a whole book about the fact that it’s not. And everything here is about how- Okay. We’re gonna have some flak Here’s some opportunity r- right, to move it from being defensive to how you do things right and take advantage of the opportunities to differentiate yourself and to differentiate yourself from a reputational perspective, how you create reputational currency. And this is an incredible opportunity to do that. While we’re looking at the risk, um, certainly I 100% agree with you. Let’s switch it and let’s look at where the opportunities are for our leadership and, and really reputation should be embedded in those things that we do, um, in, uh, as a daily basis. And so how do we begin to look at it from that perspective and take advantage? I totally agree with you. Um, it’s time to look at the positive and how we lead on a positive level versus being in this total defense mode. And I think there’s, there’s- It’s interesting- If we look at the role of communication professionals o- over years, we, we love a good defense. We love to get involved when the crisis has happened. We love to get involved when, when issues need to be managed within the organization. So do we automatically put ourselves in the defensive role? Is it time now to start looking at being the proactive role and, and, and the attack role, as, as you said, Mike, which I, I totally agree with, is we need to look at our time. So are we saying that things like governance reputation is time-consuming, and it will become even more time-consuming the more we fall off these cliffs because there is not governance and there’s not order in place when it comes to AI, or it’s being defined for us around how we use AI within the organization. So I think there’s… I think it’s actually about turning it into, as Bonnie was saying, the positive of here is the opportunity now for us to step up. Because if we stay in content creation mode and tool mode and, and learning those tools without stepping into a much more leadership role, then I think we’re missing a huge opportunity. One of the things that Bonnie mentioned that I wanted to come back to was the idea that reputation should be embedded in what people are doing and what organizations are doing. I agree that it should be embedded rather than being, you know, a parallel measurement. One of the big problems that we have in the realm of communication, it’s not just around reputation, it’s also particularly strong around employee engagement, putting my own book on as it happens. And we often look at measurement of reputation and measurement of- employee engagement as parallel metrics to organizational performance. And Bonnie is dead right about saying these are embedded, these are part of the picture. Um, we need to think about reputation, but reputation isn’t an end of, an end in itself. When, when I think about governance, uh, I, I come at it from two levels. Uh, one is the role that, uh, communications and particularly internal communications should play, uh, in any governance, whether it’s AI or anything else in the organization, and that is how are employees gonna react to this? Uh, this is, I think, why we wanna be proactive and, and be in the room and have a, a voice in shaping all of this because we know, uh, intrinsically, uh, how employee audiences are going to react to, to certain things, whether they’re gonna be cynical or upset or, uh, skeptical or if they’re gonna like it. Uh, because if this is built in a vacuum and we’re not involved, uh, they’re gonna send it to us and say, “Communicate this,” and, and we’re gonna look at it and go, “This isn’t gonna fly. Uh, this isn’t gonna work.” I mean, I, I’ll give you a great example out, out of my company is, uh, we, in the communication of the survey results, said, uh, one of the things we’re gonna do is revisit the governance policy. And the guy who’s leading this effort for the company said, “We don’t have to do that. I just checked with our general counsel, and he says it’s still good.” And I said, “Well, you know, this is two years old, and agents weren’t even i-in, uh, in the conversation two years ago.” Uh, I had been reading about companies that are worried about having thousands and thousands of agents that have not been cataloged or inventoried. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Employees create them and leave, and they’re still out there looping and burning tokens. Uh, this has to be addressed with governance. Uh, so at one level, we need to have a say, uh, o-o-on any governance, but at the other level, we need to be able to say, “Hey, what about agents? Shouldn’t that be in here?” And for that, the communicator needs to be pretty well informed on all of this. And I don’t believe that all, uh, I, I wouldn’t even hazard that most are completely up to speed, uh, on the issues that would affect AI governance. Uh, so, uh, you know, should they be leading that effort? Probably not. They should just be looking at the impact it’ll have when it’s introduced into the organization. I, I think one of the really important points that you’re talking about is the difference between AI as tool Uh, even when we talk about Claude or ChatGPT or let’s implement, uh, Copilot, you know, we’re looking at it as a tool. But when we start to talk about it, uh, we start to talk about agents, we’re talking about it beginning to be part of our infrastructure, and we ha- we are already behind because we didn’t put in the governance for tools. Now we’re going to look at it, um, as it, it’s embedded into our infrastructure, it’s embedded into our workflows, it’s, uh, you know, part of the way we do business. We’re moving away from it being a trusted, you know, just a, an, um, a, you know, I’m using these tools, this is my, uh, you know, we used to talk about our stack. Well, now we have an AI stack. We’re moving completely away from that, where AI will be embedded in our organization at such a level, um, that we won’t know where it’s looking at data. We might not know when we’re using third-party tools where it is. So if we’ve started out without the right infrastructure, we’ve started out without the right governance, now when it w- when it moves from being an operating system, from being guardrails to an operating system, how far behind are we going to be? The challenge is the, where it’s going in our organizations is moving so much faster than our governance, uh, that we’re gonna have a day of reckoning, exactly as you said, Shel, when somebody creates an agent and, and it’s just out there running, um, and we don’t even know about it. You don’t even know it’s there. The, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make a little parable between- You know what? You know what this- … history and, uh, and where we’re at now. And I know when I started in, in internal communications 25, 30 odd years ago, um, and you’ll remember this Michelle, is there was no understanding of what internal comms was, what was involved, how to manage channels, what was good communication. So we were stepping into organizations where we actually had to say, “We need to take stock of this, put some frameworks around it, put some governance, put some structure.” And then as we’ve evolved, we’ve been able to let go of that because people were trained within the framework of, of how they work. And we’re seeing in the report the confidence levels of, of communication professionals around issues like ethics and understanding ethics. Now we’ve got the knowledge of it, but how are we applying that? ‘Cause that’s only one component of responsible AI. But I think in, in any evolution we’ve got, uh, we’ve got an area where we, we have this, this chaos. Sometimes we have to put some very tight guardrails and governance around it, bring everybody into the understanding then of how to use and what’s good practice and, and those things. It’s an educational process, and then we’re able to let it go. The conversations we seem to be having, certainly from a center point of view with, uh, with our clients at, at the moment, is that they’re, they’re dealing with that exact issue of people generating content within their organizations, sending it to them and going, um, “Can you send this out?” Um, exactly what you were saying before. And it’s because there is no understanding of what good communication is in the AI space. We’ve got this great opportunity not just to govern it, but also to educate people of what that looks like when we’re using AI Sorry, Mike, I think you were going to say something to that Well, I just think the, the b- yeah, I had a, I had a couple of things. I mean, I think the educational role of, of the communication person around things like AI ethics and responsible AI is important, but at the same time, we need to be cautious about the extent to which this is seen as a primary role of ours. Because, you know, there are very few of us in organizations. You know, our, our resources are stretched, our remit is stretched. You know, we’re often in, as you say, defensive mode rather than proactive mode. And certainly AI governance is a largely defensive or proactively defensive approach. But this conversation also reminds me of the intranet conversation that we’re having 5, 10, you know, certainly conversation we were having 25 years ago, where there’s lots of stale content out there, and there’s this idea that comms people should be the ones who colle- who do all the tagging and collect all the metadata and screen all of this stuff out. There aren’t enough of us to chase rogue agents. Um, there aren’t enough of us to chase, um, you know, stuff that was created that’s no longer relevant, that’s consuming resources. You know, maybe we can work with AI so that AI can find its own, you know, its own rogue, um… But, you know, there’s only so much we can do without marginalizing ourselves in that process See, interesting. And, and I, and I absolutely get it. It’s, it’s, to me it’s a little bit around the how much role do you play in, um, facilitating the governance role. I think what we need is a really important in defining the governance role from our point of view. Um, but I don’t think we should be the arms and legs of saying we’re going to be the, the organization police around it. What we do need to be is the facilitator of the knowledge around proper use and responsible use of AI, given that the majority of the work that we’re doing in organizations now is about content, and it is about getting that stuff out there. Disclosure, without kind of flipping us onto another topic, has been the hot topic right now, and there’s tons of conversations being happening around what we disclose, how we disclose and, and so on. And that seems to be the hot button now. And we should, in a way, been ahead of that curve in helping our organizations understand what does this mean for the content that we’re producing and putting out there in terms of disclosure. Yeah, and we’ll talk about disclosure in just a second. I know we need to move on to that. But I, I did want to raise one other issue. I, I really liked what you said, Adrian, about the difference between, uh, influencing what the governance is and actually facilitating it. I think that’s an important distinction. Uh, and yeah, I think it’s important that we be engaged in the definition of the, the governance, uh, because ultimately this is gonna have an impact on communication, and I can, I can think of a couple of levels where this is happening. Uh, one is, uh, work slop, where people are using a, uh, an iffy prompt. They’re getting what looks like a polished document. It sure reads well. Uh, and they’re attaching that to an email or, or copying and pasting it into an email and sending it, and they go, “Wow, I just saved two hours. I didn’t have to do the research and the writing on this.” But that saved time on the part of the person who created that has really just been offloaded onto the person who received it, because they have to read this now and go, “Okay, this, this sure reads well, but I’m not getting any substance out of this. Uh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.” Uh, it’s, it’s not a good document for people to work with, so that affects communication. And then I was just hearing, in fact, I’m on a popular panel coming up next week, uh, with Jenny Field Uh, that is talking about the fact that there are people who are getting internal comms content, uh, for review and approval, and they’re rewriting it using AI because they think with AI they’re now all internal comms experts. Uh, and the communicators are getting this stuff back and they’re going, “This isn’t what I wrote. This isn’t getting, uh, the intent across.” Uh, and yet they think that this is now perfect because they ran it through Claude or ChatGPT. So, uh, one other interesting bit of data that I’m aware of, and that is that people are less frequently getting in touch with their organization’s subject matter experts because they can just go to ChatGPT and get the answer from the engineering team or the marketing team or the sales team. Uh, I don’t need to actually talk to one of our SMEs, I can just ask Claude. Uh, so we’re communicating less with the people in the organization. The second, the second-order effects of all of this are absolutely brutal. It’s not just simply that the, that the receiver of the message is getting a diluted and perhaps worse message. You know, when multiple people are getting that memo, when multiple people are having meetings to discuss that watered-down memo, then the cascading effects of all of this aren’t just simply, you know, content. These are actual second wor- second-order impacts happening in the organization. And when you talked about the offloading of expertise conversations onto Claude, that is wreaking havoc on the organizational social networks of every organization in the world. It’s wreaking havoc on, um, new employee onboarding. It’s wreaking havoc on, you know, really the ability to do coherent internal communication more broadly. And organizations are not willing to do the, the basic organizational network analysis right now to figure out what their current networks look like, so that when the networks get degraded by this use, you know, they’re not gonna be able to take the right corrective action before things deteriorate further. Now let’s move on to, uh, disclosure. Uh, again, looking at the data from the Global Alliance survey, 60.3% see AI as a reputational opportunity, 56.1% see it as increased reputational risk. And I’m not a mathematician, but to me that means there are people who answered yes to both of those questions. Uh, and one in four organizations disclose to absolutely nobody. I, I mentioned that at the outset. Uh, what, what’s being risked? Uh, w- what are the– what, what’s the fallout from this kind of an approach to AI and disclosure? So w- and if I look at this from a general observation, I, I, I’ve been talking to quite a number of communication departments, particularly in internal comms. Um, and A lot of what’s coming back is they’re just not sure about how to disclose. And, and I know that sounds like a really basic issue, but it, it’s do I just say sweepingly AI was used in the, in the development of this content? And does that then impact the reputation because people believe it’s not you, it’s not your intellect. Um, and what we’re really starting to get our head around as, as, as a world le- uh, working in AI is that at what parts is AI playing the role? And I think this is the big thing around disclosure now is the fear of disclosure if it’s gonna have a, a, a negative impact, um, versus what is it we should be disclosing on. Because you go from a spectrum where you go, “Look-” AI really is, is doing to the world what calculators did to the world in mathematics years ago. Um, should we be disclosing every time we use AI to get an idea or a, a prompt or, or should we be having levels of disclosure? And I think that’s where we’re coming into effect where we need to understand what the landscape of disclosure… So for instance, image, if it’s completely, completely, uh, uh, created in, in AI, we should have a disclosure saying, “This image has been created, um, use, with the use of AI.” But when it comes to content and intellect, it is how much of your intellect versus what AI has done. So if it’s just been used to spell-check and edit, then do we just pop that in, in terms of this is what it’s being used for? And I think there’s a drifting towards that what is it being used for. So I think what we’ve had is, and then why the statistics low, is we’ve had this paralysis in understanding the actual landscape of disclosure. I think something really interesting there is, is to, to add in this conversation to transparency. And all of us know that, that, um, people have a different idea of what transparency is. Um, you know, you want your leaders to tell you absolutely everything they are doing, and we’re going to go through a merger and you’re going to lose your job, or you’re going to get promoted or whatever. We want to know everything in this day and age, and reality is it’s, it’s a need to know transparency. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think when we go to disclosure, it gets at that level as well. We have to think about how does this impact the stakeholders, and when is the right time to tell them, and what does that look like, what that level of disclosure. But we also have to look at it as to how as organizations we’re being judged, and AI has now become part of that judgment process. It’s now how, you know, I’m judging you how you’re using AI. I’m judging you based on the products that are coming out. If I’m looking at a consultancy that I’m going to pay millions of dollars, and they have thrown out some AI slop that doesn’t, wasn’t properly researched, that’s hurting their reputation, so now I’m judging them on how they used AI. I’m judging you on organizations, whether you’re governing AI. I’m judging you on how you’re communicating your use of AI. And then I’m also trying to make some decisions as to whether I’m going to, uh, do business with you because I don’t know how you’re going to use my data and whether, uh, I can trust you. And we can even look at governments and it, govern- publics are now re- wanting to know how are, is my government using AI? And when it gets so embedded in our organizations and we don’t even know how AI is being used, we don’t even know what it’s doing, that becomes an issue. So that’s where I see this disclosure and transparency. Um, we’re really looking at it as being visible corporate behavior, and just as you would talk about anything else in your organization, uh, you need to be talking about your use of AI. And I just want to add to that one too, just to bring in the point that Shel made before. When you’re working in the world of agents now, particularly as we’re looking at autonomous agents where AI is in the loop of checking AI, and then we’re putting stuff out there, disclos- disclosure becomes even more important when there really isn’t the human in the loop apart from kind of the, the, the, the deciding the, the, the process in the first place. So it, it, it is becomes a really tricky landscape, and organizations won’t want to put it out there for the fear of diminished reputation. And, and so the rewards versus benefit is a big conversation here and, and this is why I think there needs to be a lot more guidance to help support organizations’ use of AI. It’s, it’s having conversations with your stakeholders. Mm, absolutely. T- cert- there’s a certain brutality level around all of this. I mean, I’m a small business owner, been working in Europe for the last 20 years, and the recent AI regulations from the EU, which, you know, essentially, you know… And, and it’s not the regulations themselves, which, you know, really focus on public awareness and public, um, information about certain specific topics. But the proactive overcompliance, like what we saw with Claude and their digital watermarks, is absolutely crucifying small business here. You know, I have a, you know, I have my own newslet- you know, I, I, I have my own news magazine, basically, Strategic. You know, there’s two of us working on it, um, you know, on a day-to-day basis. I use AI to generate headline images for the articles that we use. I use Ideogram. It’s excellent. I pay 20 bucks a month for it. If I had to say AI content all over that, you know, that would diminish the credibility of what I’m doing. Which, you know, is, you know, i- it’s an unacceptably high cost just because we need to align ourselves with corporate standards for, um, for disclosure. I mean, you g- you gotta wonder about the whole disclosure thing to begin with. If you’ve got a human who’s accountable for a piece of information that goes out, then why do you need to have disclosure regulations, so long as there’s an identifiable human who’s got some finger on that? I mean, if you’ve got AI feeding directly into information systems, then it’s a different ballgame. But it’s like, why should I have to label my, my headline images as AI generated? You know, I can’t afford to pay a graphic artist or Getty Image for, for every, um, for every article I post, and it would make my, the work that I do impossible if I had to do so. It’s a really good example, Mike, of it’s being done for us because we haven’t given the context to the people that are making these regulations. So are, are we actually talking with, you know, the EU to say, “Right, here, here is the, the, the regulation,” or, “Here is our take on what the regulation should be from a communication perspective.” Because you can’t blanket AI versus non-AI use because it is context. And if we look at, you know, IBC’s, um, global standard, context is one of the key principles here that we bring to the table of value to our, our organizations, but the wider world. So we might be getting our heads around it within organizations, but when we see government starting to regulate things, they go in quite heavily handed. And you’re quite right, it has that negative impact on, on the businesses because you’re now made or mandatory doing it. Same with Claude going, “Right, so we’re solving the problem because everybody’s telling us we need to disclose, so we’re now gonna put the digital watermark in place.” Um- Now thankfully there isn’t the, the, the trackers to just, to see whether that, that watermark is working ’cause they haven’t produced that yet. But the reality is we will see the companies going, “Oh, we now need to comply with a greater regulation that’s been put in or imposed by people that don’t actually understand the landscape of use of AI for content.” Uh, well, and that’s my take on it. Yeah. I think- There’s a, there’s a bigger issue with the Claude watermark, and that is that it will, uh, be a positive if it was processed through AI, not necessarily written. You could have written that whole thing bespoke and run it through AI as a grammar spellcheck, and it’s going to incorporate that watermark and will show as a positive when somebody runs the eventual, uh, check on it, uh, that, that Claude, uh, that Anthropic says they’re going to release. But I, I think, you know, disclosure ultimately has to be a question of individual judgment, and our role, um, in the governance part of this is giving people the context they need in order to make a good judgment. Uh, I know what I need to disclose. Uh, it’s, it’s a bit like that, uh, that US Supreme Court decision on pornography that is like, “I, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” Um- … it’s, you know, it’s, it’s kinda like that. I mean, I, I can absolutely see the need to disclose that an image was created with, with AI if I think people would feel deceived if they knew that. On the other hand, I just published an article on our intranet where there was n- there were no photos, uh, there was nothing to photograph. Uh, so I had AI create some conceptual commercial graphics. If I had gone out to an artist, you know, um, 20 years ago for this, I wouldn’t have said, “This art was created by commercial artist Don Weller.” Um, it just would’ve been there with the article. Uh, and I don’t see that I need to disclose that I used AI to create this commercial- you know, uh, graphic, uh, either. Uh, I don’t need to disclose, for example, that I used AI, uh, one of the note-taking tools to record an interview, shared the transcript with one of the large language models and said, “Please strip out anything that isn’t about this topic and then organize this in a nat- natural flow, and then use that to actually write the article based on that interview.” It was a tool that I used in the process, and I don’t feel compelled to disclose that. For me, the rule is if anybody would feel deceived if they knew I used AI, then I need to disclose that. But I have the context to make that decision. I’m not sure everyone in the organization does. I think that’s the, the, the big issue is, is really about organizations understanding around this one, and I think this is a really good role for us, not only to, to give the guidelines, but then help people understand how they might apply that because people are actually confused. Um, I run a number of writing courses for, for government here in, in Australia, and they’re not communication professionals. They’re people that just want to learn a, a skill, and they are completely confused around, uh, things like disclosure and when I can use it. But they’re also very confused on how to use the tool to get good content out of the, the writing that they’re, they’re doing. So it is really about the role you take and then what it is that we need to, to, to look at. And, and, and I’m a big advocate that we didn’t disclose when we started using calculators. And I’m, I’m, I’m of the generation when you went to a- an exam when you were younger, you were not allowed to take calculators in because that was cheating. Now it’s, it’s just a given. Um, and I think we’re, we’re there on some of the things where it’s absolutely a no-brainer. It’s just a tool to help you. And if it’s spell-checking or reformatting or putting it into another style, fantastic. But if it is a significant part of the process I think we need to say where we’ve been able to, to use that in our ability to deliver a better outcome, certainly for our clients. And we’re, we’re now looking at statements certainly within the, the center that’s saying, “So what’s our general policy on use of, of AI?” Uh, and their statement’s around the intellect, the input is from the, the, the professionals that understand this and the expertise. AI is helping us as a tool to help format or re- um, re-look at or do research or whatever those moments are, just so you’re… It’s just, it’s there, it’s transparent, and it’s assumed that’s what you would be doing. Yeah. And by the way, I, I get really frustrated when I hear people say that AI should never be used for writing at all. Uh, because I d- I don’t know if any of you have ever read a memo written by an engineer. Uh, but, uh, if, if AI can make their stuff readable, um, God bless it. Uh, I, I, I will take that. But this again gets to- And it’s if- … the need for having that kind of training where they know don’t just throw in a prompt and have it produce something. You have to give it the good information that you want it to polish into a readable document. But if, if AI does that, then we’re all gonna benefit from it. And as we begin to build, um, our infrastructures within our organization and we’re uploading, uh, our brand guidelines and we’re uploading our narrative and our messages and all of these things, people are gonna come in, uh, and, and use that information. So we’re not necessarily the people that are writing. We’re being the narrative. Uh, we’re, we’re creating the narrative. We’re creating the brand. We’re talking about the stories. We’re showcasing the, the proof points. All of those things that we’ve done forever, but we might not be doing the end product. We may just be setting up our Claude workflows. We may be setting up our agents so that the VP of sales can go do their own presentation, can go do their own sales sheet, but they’re not gonna break my rules. They’re doing it anyway today, right? Um, and then you see it a month later and you go, “Oh my gosh, that wording’s not right. That’s not what we talked about. Um, that’s not our brand.” Now you can put all that in place and in, within your work, work teams, uh, whether you’re in ChatGPT or you’re in, um, Claude or whatever tools you’re using, and then they can’t break the rules, and they have to use the storylines and the things that you say. And that is going to be the way our role’s changing because we might not be writing the end products. Um, we may be a little more on that strategy perspective, and other people are gonna take that and build their own content out of it. Yeah, and, and, and that was, I think, a very interesting development that basically perhaps our long-term role was really as part of the, you know, the guidance and programming team rather than the delivery team. Um- Mm-hmm … you know, making sure that there is internal consistency around narratives, internal consistency around brand guidelines. You know, you know, some of the tools that we’re seeing with, um, you know, AI monitoring, AI, um, media monitoring, those tools can do some of the things that can monitor the internal consistency and the internal prevalence of your messaging. Mm-hmm. So I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s an interesting take on where the profession’s headed. Um, but one thing that just struck me about the whole conversation about disclosure is that if everything is AI, nothing is AI. You know, if ev- you know, ultimately every single piece of that text, whether it’s an email that you’re sending from Gmail that suggests the right word at the end of the sentence to a 360-page book written based on 20 interviews that are fed into Claude, um, everything’s gonna be AI. And so, you know, a lot of this blanket disclosure stuff is gonna go out of the window within, you know, within two, three months because everything will be AI. One interesting, uh, observation that I keep hearing is how new this is. We’ve never encountered anything like this before. Uh, and one of the reasons for that is this is a tool that everybody uses differently based on their role, uh, based on their industry, uh, based on their department. Uh, this is not like Workday where everybody gets trained the same way. Uh, that’s actually kind of useless to train everybody exactly the same way. And, uh, for, for a tool that people are going to be using on their own and have an impact on, on the organization, we have been here before. Uh, and the specific tool that I’m thinking of is desktop publishing. Um, because with desktop publishing before that, uh– And, and we’re going way back, uh, with desktop publishing. The, the first one I used was called Ventura Publisher. I think this was around 1985, so absolutely predated, you know, the internet and, and, and the web and, and, uh, certainly social media and things like that. But before desktop publishing, everybody came to communication and say, “I need people to know about this.” Then out- outcomes Ventura Publisher and then of course PageMaker, uh, and every department was producing their own newsletter and sending them to the mail room for distribution to ev- And everybody was getting 30 newsletters in their inboxes. Uh, and yeah, I remember getting a call from leadership saying, “Make this stop.” Uh, you know, the company I was with at the time. This is– Nobody can consume this much content. There’s no gatekeeping going on, and communicators had to figure this out from a governance standpoint, from a technology standpoint. Uh, so we have been here before, haven’t we? We- we’ve been, we’ve been here actually many times. Um, uh, and those significant milestones, the, the one I, I really love and I, I absolutely relate to where you’re at, and in fact, I used to get my copies in a routing envelope. It all came in printed copies, and you had to sign off that you’ve actually read it. Um, so you had a ton of emails or ton of, ton of printed emails to read, um, through the organization. The one that, that I, I use as an example all the time is, is our journey into social media because the … I, I see some of the similarities in behavior. With, with social media, there, there, there was the few that jumped in, the early adopters. We’re, we’re seeing that certainly from a, a comms point of view, people jumping in there early. Um, I like to feel all of us on this call are, are people that are doing that. Um, but there were the people that resist getting into it, and I think social media, because we’d gone through that, that change, and it changed the landscape and we didn’t We kind of resisted that they were channels of communication. It was a fad. All of those, those types of things. But the reality is it became embedded as in part of what we do. We don’t even think about it now. It’s all part of the mix that we do. However, it, it got away from us when it came to, to any behaviors that we would use in social media. So we kind of went, “It’s a platform. Anybody can say anything, and we’ll put it out there.” And then governments started putting in some, some regulations and changes. And here in Australia, and I know the US are looking at this now, uh, about age limits to, to who can, you know- use certain social media platforms because we’ve now learnt the impacts of that. So I think when we, we look at some of those times in histories where we’ve gone through the change, it is, it’s the change journey. We should actually be stepping in, embracing it, and looking at how we can positively use it, understand when it becomes part of the norm, but learn some of those lessons from the past of the bad behaviors, and do we make sure that we’re being proactive to make sure we are educating people on the proper use of this stuff? I think that’s really one of our roles, um, and our opportunities, is to really help organizations, um, operationalize responsible behavior. Uh, that is something that we really miss the opportunity with social media, and we miss that training opportunity to say, “This is where you can gain trust. This is where you can lose trust. This is where you put in the reputational risks.” We lost all of that opportunity. We lost the opportunity for our narratives. Um, it became an influencer environment, which now is, is, is, you know, AI is now our influencers in many cases. We’re moving away from human influencers in many cases. So there’s a lot of opportunities, I think, for us to g- to guide that, um, responsibility of, of what behavior in AI, and then call it out, uh, this misinformation, this disinformation, um, you know, stand up for the things that are happening out there that aren’t, um, you know, aren’t helping organizations and also aren’t helping humans. But you kind of- It’s interesting that you- Oh, sorry, go on, Mike You know, it’s, it’s interesting that you talk about this being a follow-on from social media. I think there’s something f- that’s potentially fundamentally different between AI and social media. And social media was about the decentralization and disintermediation of knowledge sharing to large groups of people, whether inside the organization through social intranets or publicly through Facebook, Twitter, what have you. AI, particularly if organizations focus on having, you know, some degree of an internal AI platform, whether it’s, you know, and this could be where Copilot actually adds value, providing access to a- Uh, various models, but actually centralizing the data on a platform. AI may give us the chance to help recentralize the narratives, recentralize the, the processes, the principles, the practices, the guidelines for responsible use that were completely lost in the social media era. I think you’re right on the internal side, but on the external side, uh, we don’t have control of that. So how do we, uh, how do we look at it from, uh, both perspectives? I love the fact that we can now take back some of that control, um, on the internal side. But the external side is like the Wild West, and it’d be nice to see how we can, uh, take a little bit of control back for that, and I think we’re gonna have to stand for that from an internal perspective. We’re going to have to s- stand for our narratives, and we’re going to have to argue when, uh, our brand is attacked, uh, when people are, uh, you know, when there are AI influencers that are misrepresenting our organization. We’re gonna have to step out and, and, and change that narrative, and that’s where it will be the Wild West is externally When we look at th- those bigger impacts too, to, Bonnie, just build- building on that is the, the state of trust. And we, I think we have to overlay this with, you know, the Edelman Trust Barometer this year talked about, uh, you know, the new role of organizations being the trust broker. Um, because we’ve got this erosion over time in the landscape of communication in society as a whole. And so we’re dealing with this, this whole people disconnecting because they’ll only connect with the things that they engage with. So people will engage with like-minded people, and our algorithm- algorithms s- kind of help put that on steroids, that you’ll only engage with those people. So that polarization is now there, but how do we start rebuilding it? And I think, you know, AI, AI gives us that opportunity to really start looking at how organizations can now change that landscape of, of, uh, trust and engagement back into the organization from both the internal and the exper- external viewpoint. But it does play into that bigger narrative, and it’s one of the things that the, the, the global alliance that we’ve been looking at that we’ve got responsible AI is really, you know, and the work certainly you’ve been doing, Bonnie, with, with, um, with responsible AI and saying, this has to be a living document and what continually evolves as we evolve as a, a society. And now we’re looking at it from a, a, a total perspective of responsible communication because there’s all this stuff that’s happened in the past that we really now need to go, how do we retake some of that control of what we should and shouldn’t be responsible for as a communication professional? Um, and that’s, that’s the stuff we’re now starting to look at as we head towards the World PR Conference in, um, in, in Abuja, in, in Nigeria in November. And I think to your point, uh, that do, say, are is so important. Uh, what we do, uh, versus what we say versus what we are at the heart of our organization, that will be, that disconnect of that alignment will be so exposed, um, in today’s environment. The more AI becomes embedded in, in the way we live, the more w- will those lines of disconnect will be exposed. And, and, and not only will they be exposed, people will take advantage of that. Um, AI will take advantage of that. So it’s really important in organizations that we’re looking at how we do that alignment between what we say and what we do and what we are at the heart of our company, and that is our role. Well, I, I actually had a couple of questions left, but we’re down to less than three minutes, uh, so I’m not gonna ask those questions. But fortunately, we are, uh, pushing this over to next month, part two of this. I think we can just probably pick up where we left off. Um, that will take place, that will be episode 133 of Circle of Fellows on Thursday, September 24th, same bat time, same bat channel. Uh, be, uh, 6:00 PM Eastern, uh, that’s 3:00 PM for me, and Adrian, it’s tomorrow morning for you, uh, coming to us from the future. Uh, Adrian, you’ll be back for the panel next month. Yep. Uh, you and I will be joined next month by Mary Hills, uh, Cyrus Mavawala, who is one of our new fellows, uh, named this year, um, and Robin McCasland. Uh, so that should be a good panel. Um, in the meantime, uh, this will be available as both the YouTube video replay and the audio podcast. For those who are listening, uh, or watching this on YouTube, go to, uh, subscribe to this, and it’ll just show up in your podcast app, uh, every month just, just like magic. Uh, thanks everybody. I think this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your, your time. The post Circle of Fellows #132: AI and the Communication Leadership Moment appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 25, 2026Episode 623 min
OTSP #6: One Size Fits Nobody — A Better Way to Communicate Employee News
Communicating news to employees used to be a straightforward proposition: Publish the company newspaper or magazine, and give everyone the same information at the same time. Today, communicators can target news by audience, location, channel, source, and relevance. But the greater challenge is deciding what qualifies as news and what you hope employees will think, feel, or do after receiving it. In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins discuss why employee news cannot be one-size-fits-all — or a one-and-done — and explore the importance of timing, sequencing, trusted voices, employee influence networks, and planning for what happens after the announcement. Raw transcript: Shel Holtz: So, Mark, I don’t know about you, but when I got into this business, communicating news to employees was what employee communication was all about. Was that true for you? Mark Dollins: Yes, exactly right. Often, it was one size fits all: Hit that button, and now everybody knows. It was really simple. Shel Holtz: My first job was with an energy company, ARCO, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was acquired by British Petroleum after I left. An interesting story: One of the people I knew who was still there—Dave Orman, who ran the department—said someone at BP who had been with another company it acquired asked whether he knew how to pronounce his company’s name. I think it was Amoco. Dave said, “No, how do you pronounce it?” He replied, “BP. The Amoco is silent.” Mark Dollins: Clever. I like it. Shel Holtz: Just to give you a heads-up about what it was going to be like. We had a newspaper. Sometimes it was eight pages; sometimes it was 16. Every Friday, it was delivered to all 55,000 employees in the company. Everybody got the news, and everybody got the same news. Today, there are organizations doing internal communication that don’t actually have a news vehicle. They don’t communicate the news. They’ve shifted entirely to a proactive, strategic approach to communication. Mark Dollins: We may have been separated at birth, because my first corporate job was also with an energy company. Our communication to employees was a monthly magazine—anywhere from 32 to 38 pages. To your point, everybody got exactly the same news and information at the same time. There really wasn’t a sense of urgency. Communicating news meant communicating what we decided was news employees needed to know, when we decided they needed to know it. Things have changed considerably with the advent of social media and immediate communication. Of course, there also used to be a wall between internal and external communication. You could get away with some things. That’s not possible anymore. That wall is invisible. Shel Holtz: I remember when I was at ARCO, Dave brought Roger D’Aprix in to speak to us. I believe he was with Xerox at the time. Roger was pushing this whole notion of proactive communication: You communicate to prepare employees for what’s coming, ensure they are aligned, and make sure they know what they need to know to understand and support whatever is about to happen. Everybody on the ARCO staff, with the exception of the graphic designers, had a daily newspaper background. We were all newspaper reporters. That was what they wanted—people who could report the news. There was pushback against what Roger said: “You mean we’re not going to report when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminus station blows up and kills three employees?” You do need to report that, but you also need to be proactive. Today, though, let’s talk about news. Mark Dollins: Indeed. How we communicate news today is critical. While one size doesn’t fit all in communicating news, I believe it is important to apply a strategic filter when deciding how to report it. Shel Holtz: Do you want to report absolutely everything that goes on? Even in public journalism, you don’t report everything that happens. There are editorial decisions. What is news? Mark Dollins: That’s the most basic question: What is news? What makes people interested? What is going to produce an “Aha!” rather than a “Ho-hum, I’m not interested”? Shel Holtz: Of course, news in an organizational or internal communication context is not necessarily defined the same way it would be at the Los Angeles Times or The Wall Street Journal. Mark Dollins: Remember all the filters you were supposed to apply in journalism school—proximity, timeliness, relevance, and so forth? Some are applicable here, and some less so. For global companies, proximity may not be geographic. The connection may be that my company’s name is involved. That gives it some relevance. Shel Holtz: But what’s relevant to an employee in Paris working in sales is not necessarily relevant to an employee in Peoria working in a manufacturing facility. When we started—with your monthly magazine and my weekly newspaper—the technology limited what we could do to tailor the news to different audiences. Today, that is drop-dead easy. Mark Dollins: Exactly. We can repackage and repurpose it for the channel we choose. Shel Holtz: You can deliver news to the people who will be interested in it or whose jobs will be affected by it, without bothering somebody who is going to look at it and say, “Why are they sending this to me? This has nothing to do with me.” Mark Dollins: When you’re faced with a “news item” for your organization, what filters do you run it through? How do you decide whether and how to treat it strategically? Shel Holtz: We have established employee profiles. I had wanted to create profiles forever, but we didn’t have the resources or time to do it right. Then I attended a conference where Andrea Greenhous was speaking. I think you were at the same conference—the PRSA Internal Communications Conference in Atlanta. Andrea talked about three profiles she uses: hard to convince, hard to reach, and everyone else. I expanded on that. I think we have five profiles based on those three. That’s one filter we use: Is this someone we really need to convince, or someone who merely needs to be aware? Another filter is what the news reinforces. We tell stories that reinforce our core values. We have six core values, which I think I could actually name if I were pressed. We have a strategic plan with four planks, and we have a purpose statement that expresses our higher calling. Through our storytelling and news reporting, we try to reinforce those things. We tell stories demonstrating that we are true to our values and that we are making decisions consistent with the planks of the strategic plan. Mark Dollins: And consistent with your earlier point, your purpose. That’s where many organizations miss the boat. Even when they have legitimate good news—“We’re launching a new product” or “We’re acquiring this company”—they explain the mechanics of how it will work but miss the opportunity to say, “This is how it supports our purpose, our whole reason for being.” If it connects to a specific strategy, explain that: “We’ve said we’re going to expand into these adjacencies as a strategic priority for the next three or four years. Look at how this action accomplishes that.” Sometimes, when you dig just below the news, you wonder why anybody would care, because no connection has been made to the organization’s purpose, mission, or strategy. As internal communicators, we have to think about the application and relevance to stakeholders. Shel Holtz: Obviously, there will be news stories without a clear connection to one of those things, but they’re so big that you must communicate them anyway. Before we started recording, we were talking about announcing a new CEO. That may happen because your succession plan has kicked in and the existing CEO is retiring. It could also happen because the CEO dropped dead of a heart attack or was removed by the board under questionable circumstances. Mark Dollins: This ties to what we discussed on our last podcast about change and change management. The way we treat news cannot be one and done. We have to consider the impacts: What’s the aftermath? A new CEO could signal an entirely new direction for the executive leadership team and other high-priority areas of the company. If you’re going to announce the news, you need to think about whether something else should follow immediately or fairly quickly. “How do we communicate the news?” is the easy question, in my opinion. You decide whether it is news and then determine how to get it to the appropriate internal stakeholders. But if we’re not asking, “And then what?” we’re going to miss a significant opportunity, especially with bigger news items such as a new CEO, a major acquisition, or something signaling a seismic change in the direction of the company or industry. It isn’t simply, “How do we communicate the news?” It’s, “How do we communicate the news, and what happens afterward?” Shel Holtz: Exactly. This is one of the challenges with hiring newspaper reporters to become internal communicators. In public journalism, you communicate something because it happened and is relevant to people who live in the area. That doesn’t fly in internal communication. You have to consider what you want from employees after they become aware of the news. Ed Robertson at FedEx developed a model with a horrible name: the Pyramid of Communication Quality. Mark Dollins: Rolls off the tongue. Shel Holtz: It sounds like something from a 1940s textbook, but it’s based loosely on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He said most executives—and the communicators they hire—think they can start at the top of the pyramid: “What do you want me to do as a result of reading this?” But you have to move through several steps first. The communication must satisfy logistical requirements. A good example of a logistical failure would be: “Yes, we sent you the news. The news was about a change in benefits providers, and we got it to you a week after the benefits-enrollment deadline.” Mark Dollins: Gee, thanks. Shel Holtz: After satisfying the logistical requirements, the communication has to capture your attention. What captures the attention of someone who goes down into a mine will differ from what captures the attention of someone sitting in a boardroom. Once it has your attention, you ask, “What does this have to do with me? Why should I pay attention? Do things improve for me as a result?” Only after satisfying those requirements can you get to, “What do you want me to think, believe, or do?” Mark Dollins: Your example of communicating benefits changes after they’ve already been implemented also raises the issue of timing and sequencing. Sometimes there are advantages to carefully sequencing how you communicate news. I recently had a conversation with a dear friend about a major symphony orchestra in this country that decided earlier this year not to renew its conductor’s contract. The board of directors and CEO certainly have the right and responsibility to make that decision. But it appears the news wasn’t communicated to internal stakeholders—namely, the orchestra’s musicians—with much thought. The musicians learned their conductor would not be returning at the same time the press release went out to everybody else. The problem was that the musicians liked this person. They got behind him and mounted a campaign to save his job. When I saw them recently, they were wearing red carnations. I asked what that was about, and my friend explained the situation. They are all members of the musicians’ union, so they can organize and communicate in a coordinated way. It also appears insufficient thought was given to what the outgoing conductor could say or do. He took advantage of that and communicated some things on his own. When internal communicators are brought to the table, we may receive the press release, but we need to ask about the implications for internal stakeholders. What are the rules of engagement for the outgoing conductor regarding what and how he can communicate? When is the announcement going out? Who is being notified, and when? What can we offer to help make the process go more smoothly for everyone, including the musicians who clearly care about this person? Communicating the news is a simple concept. But if we don’t consider the aftermath and its impact, we may create our own problems. Shel Holtz: They didn’t do the incoming conductor any favors either, did they? Mark Dollins: Good luck finding someone who wants to walk into that situation. That’s going to be a challenge. Shel Holtz: This gets to the argument I keep hearing that there is no longer a distinction between internal and external communication because the lines have blurred. The argument goes: You send out the press release, it gets published, and everybody reads the same thing. Why do we need to communicate separately? The musicians’ response speaks directly to that. This is exactly why you do need to communicate separately. Roger D’Aprix refers to employees as “informed insiders,” and that’s why you need to treat them differently. Mark Dollins: We’ve seen the rise of employee activism. Employees get behind an issue or topic—rightly so in many cases—and suddenly they aren’t merely complaining to their bosses. You may have a shareholder proposal authored by employee activists. Thinking about the aftermath of news and how we communicate it isn’t merely a nice thing to do. It’s a central and important responsibility. Shel Holtz: Or you could have 20,000 employees walk out. That’s another possibility. Mark Dollins: There’s that. There is also talk of a strike in the situation I mentioned. Shel Holtz: Really? There was certainly the case of Wayfair, which was selling furniture to ICE detention facilities. That led employees to revolt. Then there was Google, where 20,000 employees walked out in a coordinated labor action. Google fired the communicator who helped organize all of that. She now has a book about the experience. Mark Dollins: I’m guessing she’s making more money from that than she did in her former job. Shel Holtz: That may be true, but I’m not sure firing her had the positive impact Google thought it would. Mark Dollins: We should also think about whether there are champions we need to engage or pre-engage to help communicate the news. That’s a change-management concept. It isn’t just about the press release or the announcement in the internal house organ. If this is big or significant news, let’s give it appropriate attention and equip the right people to help deliver the message in ways a digital or printed document can’t. That includes providing context, conveying emotion, and engaging people. It’s a far more effective way of showing that we care about how the organization responds to and engages with the news than simply saying, “Here it is. Talk to you later.” Shel Holtz: I know organizations that have mapped their influence networks and tap into the appropriate network for each type of communication. Mark Dollins: Smart. And don’t forget the derailers. We need to know both ends of the spectrum: Who is going to help us, and who is likely to become the voice of the opposition? Perhaps we can bring those opponents around to a different way of thinking. Shel Holtz: Another drawback of the transition from newspaper reporter to internal communicator is the tendency to think every article—and all the news we share—must be a work of journalism. That was all there was for us before. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. We have multiple channels and multiple ways to distribute information. Mark Dollins: Those channels are designed to handle information differently. Some can accommodate a boatload of material. Others give you only a limited number of characters, with the option to dive deeper elsewhere. That’s the beauty of much of the digital communication we do. It isn’t one size fits all in terms of either the end user or the channels we use to reach them. Shel Holtz: Some of it can be visual. I can tell a story with a photo and a caption and not need anything else, if the story can be contained there. The other question is: Who is telling the story? I recently saw data—it may have been from Gallagher or Poppulo—indicating that people decide which news they’ll pay attention to based on who sent it. Was it the CEO? Was it their manager? Was it the internal communication team? When you advise clients, is the source of the news a consideration? Mark Dollins: Of course. Whose voice matters? If you’re going to use the CEO’s voice, it ought to be a pretty important piece of news. Otherwise, you misuse the CEO’s voice, and over time nobody pays attention because it has been overleveraged. In other cases, a subject-matter expert with credibility—or even a third party—may be a great way to get people to pay attention. Employees may think, “I haven’t heard from this person in a while,” “This is a pretty senior person,” or “This person has a great deal of expertise in this area, so I’m going to pay more attention.” Again, it’s situational. It requires us to think—that’s what we’re paid to do. We must consider whose voice matters and how stakeholders will react. That’s still not one size fits all. One voice may work well in one part of the organization or for a particular type of message. In other circumstances, a second or even third voice can add credibility and acceptance. For relatively minor news, one voice may be plenty. But for something bigger, perhaps you have analysts discuss the power of combining your company with another company. Now you’re adding credibility based on the voices you choose to help share the news and the story surrounding it. Shel Holtz: I know organizations that overcompensate for this, too. Back in my consulting days, I had a client that never wrote a news article. It didn’t have a vehicle for communicating news. Everything came from an executive, and the communication team ghostwrote all of it. I asked, “Really? You don’t have a voice of the company you can use to share basic, ground-level news?” No. Everything came from an executive. Mark Dollins: That’s unfortunate. We talk about brand personality and all the components that make a company a brand and a brand a company. Those are opportunities to leverage the company’s voice without necessarily attaching a human being to it. Again, it’s situational. We have to be thoughtful about it. Shel Holtz: I want to return to targeting for a minute. Not only can we get relevant news into the hands of the people for whom it matters, but we can also get hyperlocal with it. I’m a big fan of Jeff Jarvis. I read his book about what the news industry needs to do to become relevant and profitable, and I think he’s spot-on. He says that if you want the news to be relevant to me, don’t tell me only what’s happening in my city. Tell me what’s happening on my block. I want to know whether there is a road closure that will keep me from getting to work. I live about two miles from the Concord Pavilion, a large performing-arts venue. Our main thoroughfare, Ygnacio Valley Road, is frequently backed up because of concerts. Tell me that this road, which is two-and-a-half blocks from my house, will be backed up from 1 p.m. until midnight. Mark Dollins: Exactly. I may need a loaf of bread and some milk, and I don’t want to spend an hour and a half getting them. Do your part as a good community neighbor and tell me the news that affects me. Shel Holtz: We have the ability to extract that information. AI can help us automate the process to some extent and get local information to the people who need it. We could talk about news all day, but we’ve been at this for a while, so let’s wrap it up. Any last thoughts, Mark? Mark Dollins: Being strategic in how we communicate news is a critical component of any employee communicator’s role. It isn’t one size fits all. We should use the tools available to make news hyperlocal, present it in the right voice, think about sequencing, and—most importantly—consider the aftermath. Those are the critical elements we need to address. Shel Holtz: Perhaps another time we can talk about measuring the impact of the news we communicate. Mark Dollins: Yes. You know my favorite topic is outcomes versus outputs. Shel Holtz: We’re only guessing that we’re having an impact if we don’t measure whether we achieved the result we wanted. Talk to you in a couple of weeks, Mark. Mark Dollins: Amen, brother. Sounds great, Shel. Have a good one. The post OTSP #6: One Size Fits Nobody — A Better Way to Communicate Employee News appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 24, 2026Episode 5271 hr 34 min
FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI
At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision. Also in this long-form episode for August 2026: An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre’s untimely death. Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven’t returned the feeling. Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequential could be a requirement to strip from its social media platforms the devices that addicted young people, many of which have become standards for social media. Will social media as we know it change in the wake of the verdict? Some companies are compensating employees who join the ranks of influencers and creators sharing content about the companies’ products and services. It sounds like a good idea, until you look at the labor, HR, and legal issues that arise. In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working? Links from this episode: ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts I Just Ran My Thesis, Written in 2014, Through an AI Detector Hayden Panettiere’s Old Neutrogena Story Resurfaces After Her Death Neutrogena Faces New Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death Hayden Panettiere Dead: Clip of Star Discussing Neutrogena Dropping Her Over PPD Resurfaces Neutrogena Under Fire Again for Dropping Hayden Panettiere After She Revealed Postpartum Depression Struggle Neutrogena Faces Backlash After Hayden Panettiere’s Death. How Should the Brand Respond? Hayden Panettiere Said Neutrogena Dropped Her Over Postpartum Depression. Now Fans Are Boycotting Neutrogena Faces Backlash Over Hayden Panettiere’s Postpartum Depression Claims Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling. Reddit Fades From ChatGPT Citations No More Doom Scrolling or Instagram Stories? A Meta Trial Loss Could End the Social Media We Know Meta Trial Could Spell the ‘End of Social Media as We Know It’ LinkedIn Adds an Option to Report ‘AI Slop’ I Just Had a Deeply Alarming 45-Minute Sync With Our Talent Acquisition Team Gap Inc. Opens Creator Program to Employees Gap Inc. Expands Cross-Brand Creator and Social Advocacy Program to Employees Employee Creators Are a New Brand Strategy Inside David’s Bridal’s New Commission-Based Ambassador Program for Creators and Employees David’s Bridal Ramps Up Its Creator Strategy Why Starbucks Is Betting on Employees as Creators Why Brands Are Inviting Their Employees to Be Creators Why Major Retailers Are Turning Employees Into Content Creators: Billo Should Brands Build Creator Programs From Their Own Employees? 32 Experts on the Risks and Payoffs Links from Dan York’s Tech Report: Publisher Traffic Falls 33% Globally as AI Overviews Reshape Search In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click Time Has Started Serving Ads to AI Agents Perplexity Blocks Time’s Ads Being Served to AI Agents LinkedIn Adds a Button to Report AI-Generated ‘Slop’ LinkedIn Says Its ‘AI Slop’ Button Is Working The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email 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 the For Immediate Release podcast, long form episode 527 for August 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, you’re back in your office. It’s good to see you back there again. It must mean that the heat wave has broken there in the UK. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has. I’m enjoying a temperature of low twenties in here with the air conditioning on. It’s very nice. And beats what we’ve had with thirty plus upwards. Not good. But it’s been an interesting few weeks and on a number of levels. One of the highlights, in fact a big highlight, was the fact that when Laura and I and our grandkids and my daughter were visiting California at the beginning of August in Novato in Marin County, we met for lunch. We came into the city and you and I and the whole crew got together and we had a phenomenal time at that lunch, didn’t we? Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did at the Waterbar, right on the waterfront on Embarcadero Neville Hobson: Nice place. Shel Holtz: Overlooking the Bay Bridge. And it was fun to be able to have you sit in there, this wonderful building, and to say we built this because the company I work for Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Did build the structure that the Waterbar is in and the steakhouse next to it, that whole complex. So that was fun, even though that was before my time that we built that. But it was great to see you and Laura. It had been since 2019. Neville Hobson: A while. Shel Holtz: And it was just delightful to meet your daughter after having heard about her for so many years. And to meet your wonderful granddaughters. They’re terrific. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well, you made a big impression on them because they talked about you a lot afterwards. But it was it was good. I mean, it as we’ve both said, you know, in real life face to face can’t beat it. But this is the next best thing on video. So it was great catching up and enjoying a delightful lunch over a few hours. The wine was super that we had. It was Californian wine if I’m not wrong, Shel. Shel Holtz: Stag’s leap, if I remember correctly. Neville Hobson: Okay, no Spanish Rioja there. So that’s good. And we did enjoy our week overall, even though some of the circumstances weren’t quite as we had originally planned it. But it was good to, from my point of view, certainly, where a change is as good as a rest. So a change of scene coming over there I found extremely beneficial to recovering from some of the health problems that I’ve been having prior to that. So enjoyed it a lot, Shel, and we gotta do it again soon, I hope. Shel Holtz: Yeah, Michelle and I were talking about the fact that we need to get back over to the UK. So it won’t be won’t be next year. We already have our vacation next year plotted out, but maybe twenty-eight we’ll cross the pond and come see you. We’ve not been to Somerset, so need to make Neville Hobson: Okay, we’ll make a pencil note. Yeah. Shel Holtz: That journey. Neville Hobson: Yeah, this is this is quite something to experience for some assets. There’s a lot. Yeah, I look forward to that if we can if we can swing it, it’d be great. Shel Holtz: But we’re not gonna talk about personal stuff for the entire show. We will Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: Be talking about stories in the news that have a connection to organizational communication and technology. And we hope that one of them at least sparks a comment from you listeners. And there are a number of ways that you can comment on. This show, the first is to just leave a comment in the comment field in the show notes at the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork. Com. You can also leave that comment on the post where we share updates on episodes that we have published, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky. We share on all of them. And you can leave a comment there. We check those for your comments. You can send an email to FIR comments at gmail. Com and attach up to a two-minute audio file. If you would like us to play it, we would be happy to. You can even record that. No fuss, no mus, right there on the FIR website. We use a service called SpeakPipe. It has a tab on the right-hand side of the page that says send voicemail. Click and record, and I’ll get that. And there’s also the FIR community on Facebook where you can not only leave a comment but engage with other listeners. And yeah, lots of ways that you can share your comments and become part of the show and drive the content. We have some comments in this episode to share with you. Also, your reviews are very Neville Hobson: Super. Shel Holtz: Much appreciated wherever you have the opportunity to rate and review podcasts. That’s a great way for others to Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm. Shel Holtz: Discover FIR. Neville Hobson: Let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long form episode five twenty three for July published on the twenty seventh of july, You shall reported on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining brand sovereignty in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. In FIR 524, on the 3rd of August, you addressed the topic of whether managers are ready to lead an AI fluent workforce or not. Too many indicators suggest they’re not. The subject of workslop. Was our topic in FIR five twenty five on the twelfth of August, with mounting evidence that it can create long term problems for companies. We discuss the latest research and share our thoughts on what businesses can do about it. And we have one comment. Shel Holtz: Yeah, from Mike Klein, who said, Of course, organizations have been clocking externalities as productivity gains since the time they started clocking anything at all. Neville Hobson: Okay. In FIR five twenty six, we added our thoughts to the growing debate about Anthropic’s new watermark feature that’s rolling out on Claude. That episode was published just last week, actually. We discussed one firm’s new AI writing policy and its four guiding principles for employees, which make far more sense to us than trying to detect a watermark. And we have some comments on this one. Shel Holtz: Yeah, Suzy Urjavik Parker wrote that this will never apply to me as a professional communicator because my writing is mine and mine alone. I don’t outsource any of it to a technology destined to destroy the environment, our water resources, and the creative process of humanity. Here’s to everyone saying no to this nonsense. And Ike Piggott, in a reply to Susie, said, let me search online and see if someone has written the thing I want so I can copy it. Is plagiarism. Yet for the AI evangelists, let me ask for a smoothie blend of hundreds of plagiarized documents is somehow fine. Feels like idiocracy is nigh. And Patrick Coyle in an independent comment said, No, we should definitely be asking, Did you use AI to write this? So a lot of people continue to object to this at a fundamental level. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I you’re right. I noticed that myself even. So the debate will continue, in my view, the wrong topic to be debating. It’s not it’s not doesn’t carry the same importance or weight as the one people should be talking about, which is the content that is produced, guidance on how to do it well and do it right. So, you know, this debate will continue for quite a while, I’d say. So yeah, now you’re up to date on FIR episodes. Shel Holtz: Great. Now let me bring you up to date on Circle of Fellows episodes. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. I usually moderate these and when I’m not available, Brad Whitworth does that. We have published episode number one hundred and thirty one. This is a monthly program, so you can imagine how many of how long this has been going on to get 131 of them out there. This was on the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations, the fact that so many journalists are starting their own media companies with Substacks and YouTube channels and the like. And what does this do to pitching and the notion of reaching out to reporters in order to get coverage because the audiences that these media companies have is much smaller than the mainstream media. So it was a great conversation with Diana Degan, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka. And Jennifer Waugh. The next episode is the first of a two-parter, and it is coming this Thursday. And it will feature Adrian Cropley, Bonnie Caver, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and the leadership moment for the communications profession. So should be a good, robust discussion. And I as I say, we’re doing that in two parts. There will be four. Different fellows picking up part two of this in September. So now you’re all caught up on previous episodes, on Neville’s travels, on Circle of Fellows, and we’ll dive into our six stories right after this. Neville Hobson: So our first story is an interesting one, I find. Three people died, around 200 homes were destroyed, and millions of dollars were at stake. And an expert witness hired by 3M to help defend the company and the resulting litigation turned to ChatGPT to help write his expert report. That alone might raise questions, but it isn’t really the extraordinary part of the story. According to reporting by 404 Media, The expert, Josh Autenrieth, told ChatGPT that he had been retained by 3M and asked it to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M. More remarkably, he instructed it to show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion. In other words, this wasn’t here is the evidence, help me analyze it and determine what happened. It was much closer to here is the conclusion. Help me build the argument that supports it. And we know this because his ChatGPT conversations became part of the legal discovery process. The prompts reveal something else rather astonishing. Autenrieth reportedly has about 20 years’ experience in gas detection. Yet at one point he uploaded a photograph of a gas detector to ChatGPT and asked, What am I looking at? According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that detector was central to the entire case. There are obvious questions here about professional standards, disclosure, and the appropriate use of generative AI in expert testimony. But I think that’s a bigger question for organizations. AI can make it extraordinarily easy to construct a persuasive argument for something you’ve already decided to believe. Give it enough documents, tell it the conclusion you want, and ask it to assemble the strongest case. That’s not necessarily analysis, it can be automated confirmation bias. And if organizations increasingly use AI to support decisions, strategies, investigations, and recommendations, how do we distinguish between using AI to help us discover what the evidence says and using it to manufacture a convincing justification for what we already want the answer to be? And one more thought if your AI conversations might eventually be discoverable, perhaps we should start thinking about prompts, not simply as instructions to a machine. But as records of our reasoning. There’s an awful lot to unpack here, Shel, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: There certainly is. And at its core, this is a governance story. I don’t know if Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: This expert witness was an independent contractor or if he worked for somebody. But at some level you need to have that governance that gives you the rules about how to use this and what you are going to retain. I mean this is why legal needs to play a part in that whole governance conversations because they understand the rules of discovery from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they understand what kind of challenges can arise when in a lawsuit the other party has access to all of those prompts, all of those conversations that you’ve had with a large language model. So you need to have governance around this to begin with. The other issue that leaps to mind is that output could be three pages of highly polished slop that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because it answered the question he set out to have it answer, he’s perfectly happy with it. I wonder if he challenged it at all. Did he put it through a any kind of a red team? I’ve I spent days creating a communications red team skill in ChatGPT. And I can run anything through this. I can run a detailed communication strategy through it. I can run a three-paragraph email we’re sending out on behalf of the CEO through this. And it puts it through all of these various levels in order to challenge what I’m saying here. What’s a fact and what’s an assumption? How are different audiences within the organization likely to react to this and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, first of all. Front loading the outcome that you’re looking for is dangerous enough. Leaving that paper trail there for a belligerent legal team to find is another level of bad. But then just assuming that the output is perfect and relying on that without putting it through some kind of challenge, I think is dangerous. I think this was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. Neville Hobson: Yeah. The thing I find extraordinary, frankly, is did anybody at the client check any of this? Was there a human client in the loop? I wonder. There’s something else too to mention that the Futurism also reported on this as well as 404 Media. They’re they reported that over three hundred and fifty pages Of ChatGPT activity were turned over in the discovery process. And I’m thinking to myself, what this suggests to me, apart from the obvious things, is that this was someone who didn’t quite understand how ChatGPT works in terms of what it retains, how it retains it. And the other side did. So when they did the discovery, they knew what to look for and how to ask for it. So it still comes back to Probably the legal team at three N. Did they not rehearse this? Did they not know what this expert witness was going to be asking or going to be presenting? I from reading the four media report, this all came out during the presentation of by the expert witness in the lawsuit. So it came unknown to anyone. I mean, goodness me, that’s no way to run a defense in a lawsuit of this magnitude, it seems to me. So, I’m surprised it’s not got more coverage than it has, actually, but it is extraordinary that this actually happened, it seems to me. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m not surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention because it’s, my God, another law story where somebody used ChatGPT and it bit in the ass. You know, we hear those pretty frequently. The difference here though is that it’s expert witness testimony, and Neville Hobson: Right. Shel Holtz: How discovery played a part, that I think should get people to pay attention to this. And you know, why would 3M not dig into it deeper? I can imagine, I’m just making this up. I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine, you know, you’ve worked with an expert witness for decades. They’re great. They have helped you win multiple cases. And now this person has discovered ChatGPT. You don’t know this as the legal team. You’ve been working with this guy for years. He’s been Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: Fine. So you just accept the outputs that he produces based on that experience and the trust that has built up. The only difference being now he’s made life easier for himself by employing a large language model. And there the trouble begins. So I think we’re gonna need to start needing to ask for disclosure from people that we have worked with a lot. Hey, you know, we’ve been working together since before there was generative artificial intelligence. Are you using it? How are you using it? Let’s go over this to make sure that we’re covered. I think you’re gonna need to ask that of pretty much every supplier these days. Neville Hobson: I totally agree with that, Shel. I think it hasn’t happened. Obviously they didn’t ask any of those questions. So you’ve got a kind of fault, if you will, at the client for not asking those kinds of questions. Maybe a maybe it’s a comfort thing that think everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry about this. But you’ve raised the point quite well, I think, that the time has arrived now where you need to audit everything. You need to be clear in your mind. So you’ve got to go through the what if. You’ve got to, you know, what’s the what could happen if that will guide you in terms of what you need to do with the people you do business with or who you hire to help you do something such as an expert witness in a lawsuit, where the consequences are not minor at all, the outcome of this if it goes against you. And use an all an expert witness who. Is great because you’ve worked with him before, but is completely current with the right way of doing all this is an ethical issue here too. So that’s something I think you need to add to-do list to make sure that you are clear with the people you’ve hired to work with you that they are on board with the right way to do this. That may well come into play in terms of your own policies about third parties working for you as contractors or some other manner, that how they use AI needs to be declared. And you also then the obvious, you need to put in place the checks and balances that the human in the loop activity we’ve talked about a lot on this show. Shel Holtz: Yeah, it’s a vendor AI audit is a new requirement. That’s inventory all the vendors we work with and check on their AI practices. I mean, what if you work with a freelance writer to supplement your own staff’s ability to crank out copy? You’ve been working with them for years. They’ve only recently started using AI. They need to disclose to you how they’re doing that so that you know what you need to be looking for when you’re reviewing their content. Neville Hobson: Yeah. Boy, this opens up a Shel Holtz: What it comes down to. Neville Hobson: This opens up a an eyebrow raising area, it seems to me, because I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that hardly anyone’s doing that. Shel Holtz: I would be surprised if I surveyed twenty c communicators, if I found one whose organization was auditing all of their suppliers and vendors for AI practices, that would that would surprise me. I don’t think this is one Neville Hobson: Boy, boy. Shel Holtz: That has seen the light of day yet in terms of general awareness. Neville Hobson: No, my I agree. Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, Neutrogena is in a genuine crisis right now. The kind of almost impossible to game out in a tabletop exercise because it didn’t start with anything the company did, you know, yesterday or this week. It started with something that has been on the record for some time, discoverable with a two minute search. It’s been up there for more than a decade. You may have known Hayden Panettieree from a TV series called Heroes. I didn’t. I guess I’m cultural culturally illiterate or maybe I’m just old. But I saw my daughter had Neville Hobson: You’re not a you’re not a you’re not a you’re not you’re not a Gen Z shell, that’s the point. Shel Holtz: That’s a problem. I’ve you know, I think I’m glad I’m not. I hope I just didn’t offend all the Gen Z Gen Zers in our audience. But my daughter had posted an RIP to Hayden on Instagram. So as I was reading about all of this with Neutrogena, I had to reach out to my daughter and say, Okay, tell me who this person was. One thing she was, though, was the face of Neutrogena, the spokesperson for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015. Not long after she gave birth to her daughter, she went on live with Kelly and Michael and talked openly about her postpartum depression. Panettieree said that what that’s what got her dropped by Neutrogena. They said that they viewed her disclosure of her postpartum depression as a violation of their morals clause in their contract. She told the story again this past May while promoting her memoir, generating some mild but manageable backlash at the time. Then she died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found unresponsive at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina. There were no signs of trauma, no signs of foul play. The cause of death, last I checked, was still pending, although there are indications of some kind of overdose. The internet, though, went straight back to that interview. And within days, the phrase Neutrogena boycott was trending, and the stock of its parent company, Kenvue, that used to be a Johnson unit, took a real, but not necessarily a substantial, hit. But for four days, Neutrogena didn’t say anything. And this is interesting because they responded within hours to an unrelated advertising flap involving Tate McCrae. And no, I don’t know who he is either. Shameful. I know. But the point is that this wasn’t a company that doesn’t know how to move fast. It just chose not to on this one topic where speed and empathy probably mattered most. And by the way, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are front and center in the news right now with the trial of Lindsay Clancy making headline news. She’s the former news nurse who killed her three children, then tried to kill herself, paralyzing herself in the process. She sought help for a rapidly worsening postpartum mental health crisis, and the system failed to identify and treat the psychosis that ultimately overwhelmed her. And of course, society here in the US is kind of polarized over this case. But with that going on, Neutrogena should have been able to see how its firing. Of the celebrity back in 2015 might have sparked renewed attention. Anyway, this past Thursday, Neutrogena finally posted a statement on Instagram. They were deeply saddened. They were proud to have partnered with her. And the line getting the most attention, we understand that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time. And then they promised a significant investment to a postpartum support health partner. Details to come. And notably, they turned off comments on the post itself. So, what do crisis professionals make of all of this? Molly McPherson of NBC News said that it isn’t a press release problem, it’s an action problem. The company faced one of these unknowns in crisis management, but still could have planned to be empathetic. It cost Neutrogena four days of the narrative being written entirely by other people. Two LinkedIn reactions from communicators get exactly what’s wrong with the response. Jerry Corbett, former chair and CEO of PRSA and now CEO of Red Flag, and a past guest on FIR, wrote for Strategic Magazine the day before Neutrogena broke its silence that a corporate crisis does not always begin with a new event. Sometimes an old decision returns under circumstances that give it new meaning. His point. Was that the silence itself became the story. And Erica Cardina, a PR manager, went further on LinkedIn. Her critique, the moment to acknowledge this was in May when she was still there to receive that acknowledgement. We were proud to partner with her. Ring’s pretty hollow given why the partnership reportedly ended, and we understand why we made her feel unsupported is corporate cushion cushioning. Her suggested fix, just say we failed to support her because that’s what it was. Then there’s the comments being switched off. And as Erica put it, you can’t publish a statement about accountability and immediately shut up shut the door on the conversation. By August, she argued it read less like accountability and more like a brand trying to contain damage. And people can tell the difference. Communicator Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: Lacey Haynes commenting on Jerry Corbett’s post raised a related gap. The donation pledge is easy money unless it’s a really substantial amount and backed by real executive commitment. And what would actually reassure people is a stated policy on how Neutrogena will support its spokespeople going forward, not just a one time gesture because of something we did in the past. So, what’s the lesson for us? Real quickly, three things. One, your discoverable history is your risk profile. Assume anything a public figure has said about your brand anywhere at any time is going to resurface at the worst possible moment and plan for it before that moment arrives. Two, silence is never neutral, and neither is turning off comments on the statement meant to address it. Both say we’re managing this and not we’re listening. And three, soft language reads as evasion. If your statement needs a phrase like we understand we made someone feel X. Ask whether the plain version we failed her is the one you’re actually avoiding and why you’re avoiding it. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very sad tale, itself. But these revelations about Neutrogena and going back just over a decade to what they did to literally get rid of her, how they reacted at that time, and then now all this has come out and the lack of response. So they are in trouble in the court of public opinion without any doubt. Cynics would argue does it’s it all blow over. Does it really matter? Well, yes, it does matter. You’re if you’re a public listed company in particular, it could affect your stock price, which you notice their parent company has taken the hit. But it will have a negative effect on people’s perception of you and your brands. When they’re out in the pharmacy or wherever buying products and they’ll r recall this perhaps if they’re fans, they definitely will have a negative reaction to you. So I just found it Extraordinary. Some of the things you said, Shel, such as publish what they did and then turn off all the comments. There’s one of the reports I read, I think it’s in the independent newspaper, talked about posts on Reddit that have attracted thousands of r responses and likes and so forth and upvotes, all that. That’s there for all to see for time immemorial, I would say. And they’re not part of the conversation. So I’m not gonna try and second guess what they might have done in crisis communication planning, except to say it doesn’t look they had a plan ready for this eventuality. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we say this pretty much every time we do a crisis communication story about a company that blew it. We ask was a communicator in the room when any of these decisions were made? Did they just choose to not listen? But to those who would say that this will all just blow over, and we hear this a lot is you know, all crises are transient in nature. Well, remember this is now part of your permanent record too. So in five years, when Neutrogena gets into some sort of a dust up with another spokesperson or an influencer or a creator that they’re paying, people are gonna remember this. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna do a quick search and they’re gonna find it and it’s gonna re-emerge and just add fuel to the fire. You see, they did this before to this woman, and they bought everybody off by making a contribution to a nonprofit that deals with postpartum issues. And then they went along their merry way and now they’ve abused another person that they had on their on their payroll because they didn’t change their policy to how they treat their spokespeople when they went through this before. So it’s Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well Shel Holtz: Just waiting to happen again. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I just performed a completely unscientific experiment. I just opened up Google and typed in Neutrogena. We’ve got sponsored results is the first item that appears in the in the in the in Chrome from Neutrogena. Explore our range, as it says, and link to something provided skincare results. Then the very next thing is Neutrogena responds backlash after Hayden Panettiere dies. And then there’s links galore to media stories about this. And that’s just entering the word Neutrogena. And beyond that, you know, it’s got it’s got a link the way Google’s now doing all this. More news, you click on that, and you get pages of this stuff. Then further down, if you scroll, you’ll then start seeing links to some of their products. But If you land on the page and the first thing you see is the is what happened with this woman and how they dealt with it, you’re likely to kind of explore that a bit, I suspect. Not a good look for them at all. Shel Holtz: No, it’s not. It’s a classic crisis communication. Is it existential for Neutrogena? Probably not. But I can see that the particularly among this actress’s fan base, there are probably people who are simply going to switch to a competitor’s product a and be done with Neutrogena. At this point. So you’re gonna you’re gonna lose some faith with some of your existing fans, you’re gonna lose trust. And you’ve pretty much established an approach that you’ve taken to this sort of thing that I think is underwhelming and unsatisfactory for a lot of people who are looking for more from an organization like this. Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So, the obvious question I’d ask you is if you were advising Neutrogena, what would you advise him to do now? Shel Holtz: Well, now it’s all reactive and it’s I mean this is after Neville Hobson: It is Shel Holtz: The proverbial horses left the pu proverbial barn. But at this point I would I would come right out and say the our previous statement was inadequate. We take full responsibility For our actions. We should not have there clearly somebody suffering postpartum depression is not a violation of a morals clause. That was inappropriate. Here is what we are doing by way of our policies with spokespeople going forward to make sure that we treat our spokespeople fairly i in the future. And this is what we are doing in order to support. People who are suffering through postpartum issues and challenges, because we wanna play a part in this in order to try to make up for our transgressions thus far. Neville Hobson: So neutrogen, if you’re listening, there’s some good advice there for you. Shel Holtz: Yeah, they w they’re not listening. Neville Hobson: Well, I mentioned Reddit in that story, and that’s the heart of our next story, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. So, 20 years ago, when companies were first trying to figure out social media, we used to give them some fairly simple advice. Don’t walk into somebody else’s community and immediately start talking about yourself. Listen first, learn the culture, understand why people are there. And if you eventually join the conversation, contribute something useful. That holds true today, as it did 20 odd years ago, but apparently we’re having to learn all that again, it seems to me. Because marketers have suddenly fallen in love with Reddit, according to the Journal. And there’s a p very particular reason why. According to the Journal’s report, Reddit has gone from being something of an afterthought in many companies’ digital strategies to one of the places marketers desperately want their brands to appear. We’ve talked about this a number of times on FIR o over the past year, the rise of Reddit as a literally a number one place to see discussions about you and your brand. It’s interesting what the Journal says, and the reason for it is not simply because consumers use Reddit, but because AI does. Reddit conversations turn up extensively in the material that AI systems use to answer questions. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which running shoes to buy, which software to use, or whether a particular company is trustworthy, what people have been saying on Reddit could help shape the answer. Naturally enough, marketers have spotted that opportunity. Unfortunately for them, Redditors have spotted it too. When jewelry company Brilliant Earth have advertised for a Reddit strategy manager whose job included shaping conversations. That would cascade across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision making, moderators of the jewelry subreddit immediately raise the alarm. One described Reddit as possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback. And that gets to the fascinating contradiction here. The more valuable authentic human conversation becomes to AI, the greater the commercial incentive to manipulate that conversation. And the more brands try to manipulate it, the less authentic and therefore potentially less valuable it becomes. Some marketers have already approached are already approaching Reddit exactly as you might fear. So those old behaviors have never ever gone away. The journal found agencies operating brands dozens of Reddit mentions every month, using accounts that appear to be legitimate community members, and even promising services involving negative comments. But some companies have discovered another approach. Don’t market. Audio equipment manufacturer, Sonos, built goodwill by having an identifiable company representative help people with technical problems and translate corporate announcements into ordinary language. There in itself, by the way, is a lesson for communicators. How about trying to communicate in the first place in ordinary language? So investment solutions and services firm Fidelity created communities around useful financial discussion and information. And Reddit itself says brands should arrive with three things: utility, humility, and respect. Which sounds remarkably like the advice we were giving companies at the beginning of social media over 20 years ago. There’s an AI story here, certainly. There’s a marketing story. There’s also a communication story about authenticity, community, and trust. But as AI makes genuine human conversation increasingly valuable as a source of information, are we about to see an escalating contest between the people creating those conversations and the organizations trying to influence what those conversations tell the machines? And if marketers succeed too well, do they ultimately destroy the very thing they’re trying to exploit? Welcome back to social media circa two thousand six. Shel Holtz: Yeah, which is exactly the same as social media twenty years ago in terms of what organizations should be doing. Of course, what organizations should be doing and what they do frequently are misaligned. But i every couple of years we report on a story that leads me to invoke Christopher Barger and the time that he spent at General Motors running their social media team. Because if anybody understood how to do this well, it was Christopher. And this was long enough ago that social media was basically the blogosphere. This predates all the social networks. But what Chris did was he had members of his team assigned to the various car blogs that wielded a certain amount of influence. I remember Jalopnik was one of these. There were there were several of them. But the instructions they had were very clear. He says, You’re not parachuting in from GM. I’m here to help. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong with what you just said about one of our vehicles. Their role was first to listen, second, to participate in conversations where they had expertise that had nothing to do with General Motors, just be a member of the community and participate and build the connection with the other people in the community. And when GM comes up, At that point, you’re already known. You’re trusted. You’re not the spokesperson from GM. You’re Bob, right? And now you can comment, and people are going to listen to you because you are on equal footing with other members of that community. That’s the way to do this. Dell was another great example. They had that, you remember that, that listening center. I don’t know if anybody still has these, but those. High-tech futuristic mission control like social media listening centers would use an algorithm to surface discussions that were taken to the appropriate department in the organization for action. And then the person who was in that community would be able to solicit more information, then come back and say, okay, we’ve listened to you. There was one particular case where there was a lot of discussion about why this particular Dell laptop cost so much more than a different model when the only difference was that it had been loaded with bloatware. And you know, they took it to the team that was the product management team for that for that particular product and they looked at the argument and they said, you know what, they’ve got a point. And so they dropped the price and they were able to go into the community and say, Well, thank you for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening. You’re absolutely right. And we’re taking action, we’re lowering the price. How do you imagine the community reacted to that? I mean, 100% positively. So there is a way to engage in these communities. Should your organization be on Reddit? I don’t know, is your Community on Reddit? Are your fans on Reddit? Are your customers on Reddit or other stakeholders or thought leaders and influencers? Is there a good strategic reason to be there with your brand or your organization? Maybe. Should you be there just for the GEO? I don’t think so. And in fact, this was just in the news. From July 18th through August 7th of this year, Reddit accounted for an average of 3. 83% of ChatGPT search citations. By August 14th, that had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0. 52% through this past Monday. That’s an 86. 4% drop. So according to the Axios piece where I read this, they’re suggesting that you shouldn’t pin all your GEO hopes. On one mythical unicorn. Now, who called it a mythical unicorn? Our friend Steve Rubel, who is an executive vice president for Media Insights and Measurement at Burson these days. That mythical unicorn, he says, doesn’t exist. It’s a long game, and brands need to be engaged on many different channels. Some will go up, some will go down based on citations. But doing yourself reputational damage by misbehaving in a social network. Just because you think that’s where your citations in AI results are gonna come from, man, that’s just dumb. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean I would say, you know, if you’re not already on Reddit or another place that’s relevant to where conversations are happening about your brand that’s relevant to you, it’s gonna present you with a with a huge hill to climb to establish a credible presence now. I’ve already seen some examples, I’m not gonna mention any names, of companies who are doing this, going about this utterly the wrong way. Going, doing literally what you said not to do earlier. You know, hey, I’m here from X, company, not X, but Company X or whatever. Let me know what’s bothering you and try and help, that kind of thing. Whereas it would be better if you are Bob from X. Who’s got a who’s got a passion and a strong interest in whatever the topic might be, that’s relevant to that community, joins that community and doesn’t do anything for three months except listen to what people are saying. Might like something or upvote something, and he’s already filled out a comprehensive profile describing himself, where the focus is on him and his passion, not Him and who he works for. And it’s kind of like a by the way, I also I work for so and so. But these are this is just me here. Either way, that was what I would recommend to anybody. And with the with the caveat, it’s gonna be hard work to establish a presence now if you haven’t already done one. And if it’s kind of not perceived to be the kind of behavior you would expect from your company, your work is even harder in that case. But Flip it over and say it’s never too late, indeed, better too late than never. So I would say you know, it this is worth listening to what these examples show and look back at two thousand six to see what people are doing, and join the conversation the right way. Shel Holtz: Yeah, the other example that we can take from back in the Jurassic era of social media would be Frank Eliason in the Comcast Cares account on Twitter, where they were actively searching Neville Hobson: Yep, another good example. Shel Holtz: For people complaining about Comcast, and then not going in to tell them they’re wrong, but going in to tell them, let me see if I can help you with that. You some people were a little creeped out, you know. You’re monitoring me. But most people Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Were delighted that somebody was being proactive, not waiting for. Me to pick up the phone and deal with the labyrinth of customer support and instead reaching out when you’ve identified that i’m having a problem with a solution yeah i think most people are very grateful for that so Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So there’s lessons to be learned here from just twenty years ago, but even that, this isn’t like was invented twenty years ago. This has been since the days of forums, that this was good behavior to exhibit on those old forums that were control freakery writ large, those forums. But if you were there you as Bob from Company X Hey, you know, it’s chatting with people about the things they’re interested in, you would have stood good stead in building relationships. So the medium may ch the mediums may have changed and social attitudes certainly have changed. But the these fundamentals of listening, getting to understand people’s issues, making an effort to come across as genuinely interested in helping them. Stan we’ll stand you in good stead no matter what. Shel Holtz: Well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, I’ve been reading all about the LinkedIn option now. A little pull-down menu from the three dots that you can signal that you think that something is AI slop. I haven’t used it. The only thing I use there on a regular basis is not interested, as LinkedIn seems to be populated more and more bipartisan political posts that have absolutely no connection to business whatsoever. I don’t mind a political post on either side of the aisle as long as there’s a connection to business because that’s what LinkedIn is for. But if it’s just a blatant partisan attack, I don’t yeah, and I do this with people who are posting positions I agree with. I am on LinkedIn for the business connections, for the business thought leadership, for the business reporting. And if it’s if there’s no connection at all, I’m not interested. And I find that I’m able to adjust my feed. The more I click that, the less of that type of thing I see. And LinkedIn goes back to being what I joined it for in the first place. But I have not yet clicked the one that allows you to identify this as AI slop. Have you done that yet? Neville Hobson: No, I’ve not encountered I’ve not actually encountered anything that made me search for something to report it at all. I tend to ignore all of this stuff, Sean, to be frank. I rarely proactively do anything only. If I get a pop-up saying, Do you like this? Sometimes I might. Particularly no, there’s one thing I do is report stuff. Please block this. I’ve seen this too often. And I asked me a reason why. Often it’s just not of interest to me or I see it too often. I always get fine, we’ve taken it off, won’t appear on your feed anymore. Great. I should do that more often now that I think about it. But you know, it’s fine. And I see as Dan mentioned, i in one of the I think it’s TechCrunch he refers to, reporting that this seems to be working. Now I’ve not looked into any more detail about how do they know it’s working, but I mean, hey, great. If it is, it’s good. But I think it’s so arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, a button, this is AI slop. I mean that is so generic. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I saw dashes, it must be AI slop. Neville Hobson: Amazing. Shel Holtz: All right. On Tuesday this past week, Meta went to trial in Oakland, facing a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. This is being led by the attorneys general from my state. This is Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, also Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. These are the lead plaintiffs. They’re claiming that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook kids, and that Meta knew it and hid it. Meta itself told the told the court the penalty calculation could run as high as $1. 4 trillion if they are found liable for everything that they’re being accused of. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. I’m sure that’ll go extremely well. So is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. The dollar figure is mind-boggling. I mean, I mean, imagine if Meta had actually wind up paying Over a trillion dollars. I mean, what would that do to the organization’s future, its finances? But there’s a lot more at stake here than the existential threat to Meta. This isn’t a personal injury case, it’s a consumer protection case, which means the states aren’t just asking for money, they’re asking the judge to order Meta to actually rip features out of the product. We’re talking about infinite scroll, video autoplay, disappearing stories, beauty filters, algorithmic feeds for minors. And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. A Los Angeles jury already found Meta and Google negligent in a similar case back in March. They awarded six million dollars in damages. And California’s attorney general said flatly that Meta is just first in line. YouTube and Snap are already facing their own lawsuits. So, what do people who study this think will actually change? Well, Kate Winnick, a principal analyst at Forrester, called this potentially the end of social media as we knew as we know it, and drew the comparison a lot of people are drawing to the big tobacco settlements of the 90s. Her prediction isn’t that social media will disappear, it’s that the product gets harder for young people to access and the cultural conversation around it shifts the way it did with cigarettes. She also expects competitors like Snap to make preemptive changes rather than wait to be sued themselves. Analysts covering the advertising side of this are already sounding a warning. A Storyboard 18 analysis this week made the point that engagement has always been the currency of social advertising. More time in app means more advertising inventory, more data, more monetizable moments. If courts start forcing platforms to strip out The very features that maximize engagement, that inventory shrinks, particularly for younger audiences. DesignRush put it even more bluntly for marketers. Platform risk is becoming brand risk, and agencies need to start factoring regulatory exposure into media planning the same way they’d factor in a supply chain risk. So practically, what should you be doing right now? Social is a centerpiece of your strategy. Well, stress test your channel mix before you’re forced to. Don’t wait for a verdict to ask what happens to your plan if Instagram Stories or infinite scrolls simply isn’t there anymore. Start modeling these things now. You also should be shifting your measurements of success. The engagement as currency model, time spent, scroll depth, session length, is exactly what’s on trial. Start building your reporting around qualified reach, completed views, and actual brand lift, not raw time on platform. So your metrics don’t collapse the moment the underlying mechanics change. Also, if your brand targets younger audiences at all, start scenario planning for tighter age verification and access restrictions now, rather than reacting when a court order lands. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s exactly what the states are asking for. And fourth, and here’s the one that I think is particularly comms specific, not just marketing specific. Get ahead of your own internal conversation about platform dependency. If your organization’s quietly let one platform become the backbone of both your marketing and your external communications, the trial is your prompt to ask leadership: what’s our plan B? Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: And are we building it now, or are we just waiting for the verdict to force our hand? Obviously, we don’t know how this trial ends. It just started. It’s expected to go on, I think, six weeks, is what I heard. But the lawyers, the analysts, and Meta’s own court filings all agree on one thing. Whichever way it goes, it’s a signal event for the whole industry, not just for Meta. Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. I agree. It’s got a lot of attention over here too. And I think that’s partly or primarily it’s because it’s Meta. And it’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole parade of apps behind it that everyone uses in one way or another. So the speculation my god, is this the end of Instagram? I see people talking about that. But I add a dose of cynicism to some of this shelf, to be honest. In that we’ve been here before with threats of lawsuits, that’s the end of this or whatever it might be. I can’t imagine that Meta is going to go down the tubes with a one trillion dollar financial penalty. I just couldn’t see it happening. Look at look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica back in twenty eighteen. I mean, that was a scandal beyond the pale. Nothing really happened to them. I mean it was business as usual and they repeated some of the bad things that they did. Not long ago, even. So it needs something a lot more existential threat like than a trillion dollar fine. Petty cash. It’s not even you know, it’s only twenty five percent of the US national debt under Trump, so it’s not a big deal Shel Holtz: Ha. Neville Hobson: Really, you know. So it’s it’s nevertheless it is serious without doubt. And one good thing of it is it’s drawing attention to some of the things that you know Meta are now talking about we’re gonna do something about. Here in Europe and specifically in the UK, there’s a lot of talk. It’s constant, although it’s died down in intensity in recent weeks, about the damage to young people, particularly preteens who are active on these platforms. And I saw a news story the other day that OpenAI is rolling out a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT for teens, for users under 18, that they say has stronger built-in safety protections. I mean, I don’t know what message they’re trying to get out here, but why haven’t you done this before then? With stronger built-in safety protections? Why isn’t that in place for everyone doing this? So I think from a comms point of view, Meta and everyone else who are suddenly scrambling to make announcements what they can do. Be wary of talking about that we’re doing this dedicated thing to address you know concerns about safety protections all that kind of stuff because that’s what you’ve been resisting for decades. And Sally don’t now try and play the good guy. You’re not the good guy. This lawsuit demonstrates that quite clearly. And I think it’s interesting to observe what happens. That could this spread out into something mega, I mean truly mega. In parallel I see other interesting things going on. I saw a story just the other day saying that in the midst of all this, it’s rumored that MySpace is about to make a comeback. Now Shel Holtz: I saw that. Neville Hobson: If they yeah, if they are looking to do something like they did back in the day, that might appeal now, actually. I’ve still got a MySpace account by the way. I haven’t visited it in a long time. But So this is kind of in the midst of one of the reasons I think why it’s getting attention, in the midst of society level concerns that we’re seeing manifesting itself in some of the opinions pressure groups have here in the UK, certainly, often run by women who you can’t truly genuinely argue against what they’re saying. Although some of them are argue against it. That there’s no proof, where’s the evidence? And you know, it doesn’t match our data, all that kind of stuff. And I think it will need a groundswell, I think, of public opinion to be behind some of the criticisms. Again, cynicism kicks in here because we’ve seen this before and nothing really happened. So I’m not sure whether this will make any difference, again, depending on what happens. And as you say, this is only just kicked off. So I did see because one of the TV station the news channels here, Sky News, covered the opening of the trial outside the courthouse in where is it in LA or somewhere in California, is it? It might have been new yeah, San Francisco. Okay. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think I think it’s up here. I th I think it’s in Oakland. Yeah. Neville Hobson: So and it showed there’s a picture of the courthouse. It had all these rosettes, red, white, and blue, hanging off the balconies. And it gave the razzmatazz show that’s very American. You wouldn’t see that happening over here. But all these women talking about and strong opinions, and they were credible in some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t, you know, misery being on display here. These were people who had strong opinions. They can see an opportunity to highlight their case and I think they’ll get attention if they do it the right way. So add that to the mix. I Other than that, we don’t really know much more because it’s only just starting. So but it will be definitely an interesting story to keep an eye on. Shel Holtz: Yeah, even if the court fines one hundred percent for the plaintiffs in this case and one hundred percent against Meta, they’ll appeal. And the appeal will take a couple of years and then that can be appealed. And you know, how many times can you appeal? This will be years before there’s a resolution. But I Neville Hobson: Yeah. Shel Holtz: Can see you know, when all of this plays out, that the change to social media could be substantial. And it’s the analogy to tobacco that I think makes me feel that way because it took forever to change attitudes about tobacco. But it is not socially acceptable now. After Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: Piecemeal laws, I mean it was first you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants and people were up in arms about that. And but you take that for granted now. You’ve you get rid of the advertising that’s aimed at kids, Joe Camel, for example. You get rid of the cartoons, the cool camel smoking an unfiltered cigarette. And you’ve really shifted societal attitudes about tobacco. And I could see the same thing happening over the long term with the same type of approach taken. So if it starts with not letting kids take advantage of the features in the social networks that they like, you know, just removing those, making it harder for them to access some of this stuff or just removing it from the platform altogether, then those platforms become less desirable, the kids aren’t there. Who’s left? You know, us. Yeah, how appealing are we to marketers as a target? And everything sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, I over the long term I can see this having an implication. Do I think in Neville Hobson: Yeah, I Shel Holtz: Six weeks there’s going to be a finding and suddenly social media as we know it is gone? No, I think that’s absurd. But I do agree with you. Meta’s not the good guy in this case. I think in the previous cases that have been tried, and there was the one in California earlier, there was also a bigger one. I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Where it was literally hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay, that the Discovery found emails that supported the case, that they knew that this is what they were doing. They did it deliberately and they didn’t care that they were addicting kids to these platforms. And I assume that same evidence is going to be introduced in the current trial. So yeah I’d be surprised Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: If this one suddenly and miraculously goes Meta’s way. So I think this could be the start of some significant changes Neville Hobson: No. Yeah. Shel Holtz: To the way social media is offered to people and the kind of influence this that it’ll have. And by the way, could be excellent timing for MySpace’s return to come and say, hey, you know, we’re back. We’re the social media that always took safety seriously. Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly. Shel Holtz: And if what you have been hearing about Facebook troubles you. Rejoin us and come visit MySpace Island in Second Life too, you know. So Neville Hobson: It’s funny, I was watching about a month or so back now, a video I’ve got. You’ve seen this, I know. Thank you for smoking, Shel Holtz: Mm-hmm. Neville Hobson: About the lobbying industry of tobacco, booze, and I’ve forgotten the other one, firearms. It got me thinking, and mentioned it popped into my mind again as we were discussing this, that I seen recently here in the UK editorial articles or maybe placed media. I haven’t paid too close attention to it. About the upcoming likelihood that the only product, the only tobacco product that doesn’t carry any health warnings on them at all is cigars. And that’s about to change. And Shel Holtz: Hmm. Neville Hobson: These ugly announcements about cigar smoking will kill you. Stop smoking now, all that in black letters on a white background that obscure the packaging. The interesting argument I’m seeing though is that the it’s to arguing about this is such a shame because some of the designs on cigar packaging is iconic from a century ago. And we’re gonna lose all this, and this is bad. I’m thinking I see a lobby event happening here. And I wonder what they’re gonna crank up in Meta’s defense, specifically relating to social media, how they’re gonna address this. But be sure this is gonna crank up. Shel Holtz: When I when I was a kid, we all kept our little memorabilia in cigar boxes and they’re gorgeous. The designs are spectacular. And Neville Hobson: Beautiful. Shel Holtz: I don’t know where I got them from because my dad did not smoke cigars. He was a cigarette man. Lucky Strikes, I remember that very, very well. But yeah, we all had cigar boxes Neville Hobson: Boy, boy. Shel Holtz: And that’s where we kept our little collectibles. Neville Hobson: Yeah, as you do. Shel Holtz: Yeah. Neville Hobson: Well, that was that’s an interesting story though, Shel, nevertheless. I think it’s only just starting, as you point out. The trial is just getting underway and revelations are going to emerge and see how it develops. So I’ve got an interesting one here that the title of it, well, what can I say? I mean, the as I wrote about it on LinkedIn, it’s an AI story that stopped me in my tracks. That’s the only way to describe it. When I came across it just a few days ago. And I and I want to put an important caveat around it before I introduce the topic. So It originated in a post on X. I haven’t been able to independently verify that every detail happened exactly as described. It may be entirely literal, it may be embellished or maybe partly be intended as a cautionary tale. But the organizational behavior it describes is absolutely worth talking about. The author of the tweet says he joined a meeting with his company’s talent acquisition team to discuss their new AI-driven. Resume screening system. And apparently it was working brilliantly. The team reported that the software had reduced time to hire by 60% in a month. Think about that as a management KPI for a moment. 60%. If you’re sitting in the executive suite looking at a dashboard, that’s a sort of number that gets people’s attention. The technology investment is working. Productivity is up. Hiring is faster. Great result. Except the author asked another question. What exactly had they told the AI to optimize for? The answer was digital natives with high runway potential and a useful energy. So he asked them to look at the demographics of the candidates the system had rejected. According to his account, it had rejected 100% of applicants who had graduated from university before 2010. Suddenly that spectacular 60% productivity improvement looks rather different. But there’s a line later in the story that I think is even more revealing. When the potential discrimination problem was pointed out, because that’s really what you’re talking about, age discrimination. The HR manager apparently argued that the AI made the decision, not her. So the company was insulated from liability. We’ve delegated the decision, therefore we’ve delegated the responsibility. And that to me is one of the most dangerous misconceptions organizations can have about AI. And if this example is typical, this is not uncommon. I bet you that is the case. It’s really dreadful. You can delegate a task to an AI system. We’ve talked about this on the show before, Shel. You can automate a process, you can allow an algorithm to make recommendations or even decisions, but you cannot automate away accountability. There’s another aspect of this that I think should concern communicators in particular. Look at the language supposedly used to instruct the AI system. Digital natives, high runway potential, useful energy. Those are exactly the kinds of expressions that can float around organizations sounding like harmless jargon or management shorthand. Put them into an AI system, making consequential decisions about real people, though, and suddenly language isn’t just describing organizational culture. It’s operationalizing it. The machine is turning the euphemism into a decision rule. And there’s something else here that connects to a much wider problem we’re starting to see with AI adoption. When an AI system produces an unexpectedly good result, our instinct is to celebrate it. Perhaps our instinct should sometimes be to investigate it. If productivity jumps 60%, what happened? What trade offs produced that number? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? Because automation doesn’t necessarily eliminate discrimination, bad judgment, or flawed organizational assumptions, it makes them scalable. And here’s a final comment from the tweet author. I’m currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4, 000 resumes, those ones that the system had rejected. So here’s the question I’d put on the table, Shel. If an AI system delivers a spectacular improvement in a business KPI, Whose job is it to ask what the system had to do to achieve it? Shel Holtz: I think that needs to be baked into the governance, doesn’t it? We’re right back to that Neville Hobson: Yeah, it does. Shel Holtz: Governance model and the policies. I mean, we’ve talked about this recently. I mean, my productivity could absolutely skyrocket because I delegated a report, let’s say, to AI. I gave it a thin prompt. It gave me this highly polished five page report. I give it a quick once over and I send it along. And I’m now able to take the time that I would have spent researching and writing that report, doing other high value things for the organization, and the organization can now tout that we’ve had this productivity gain. Meanwhile, the department that I sent that report to is looking at this and going, wait a minute, this reads real well, but there’s no substance here. I need to validate whether there are things that are accurate here. So what happened, I merely shifted. The work to the department that received my output rather than me creating a useful, rel well-researched, well-written document. So, yeah, the first thing I want to question is how are they measuring productivity? The second question is, what are these people doing with their time? Now that they have saved that time by using AI? Is it just more you know, mundane rote work doing, you know, more AI agent management. Or they actually, I mean, you know, we talk about where I work, and I’m on the AI committee. We just wrapped up an AI survey of our entire employee population. And what we have found is that out in the field on the actual construction projects, the people who are saving time with AI are one, spending more time with the client, engaging with the owners, building that relationship, building the trust, and they’re spending more time out on the project, walking the project, doing safety walks, doing project walks, talking to the subcontractors. This is high value stuff that an AI can’t do. So we were really happy to see that in our survey results. We can say okay that what they’re spending that saved time doing is high value strategic stuff that matters to the organization. So yeah, I think, you know, what are you measuring and how are you measuring it need needs to be part of this conversation. Neville Hobson: Okay, yeah, I d I don’t disagree with that at all. I think though what concerns me about this is the fact that you had an employee involved in the recruitment process who with a straight face argued that AI made the decision, not me, so hey, you know, what can I do? And the author of the tweet Did the right thing, I think, which is investigate the re rejects to see, you know, what clues can he as to why they we were rejected. Yet he knows the answer because the prompt they were given was, you know, those high runway potential digital natives useful energy. And so that’s what it worked on. And I think the what I find strange, if this is a true story, and I have no reason to doubt it’s not, even though this. Only this tweet that you have to go on. No one asked and again I can’t say more than that because I don’t know what the structure is of this organization. Where the kind of curiosity was that would have produced things like what happened if it’s productivity this productivity jump, this is extraordinary. What trade-offs produced that? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? They didn’t have anything to guide them on that by the looks of it. So this comes back precisely to the point you made. This is a governance issue. There’s things they should have in place that clearly are not. If this guy hadn’t accidentally encountered this, I mean, I shudder to think if he hadn’t had that conversation with that talent acquisition person in his team. This would have remained undiscovered and they would have blissfully gone about, wow, this is fantastic, this productivity gain. And yet there’s something fundamentally flawed, it seems, that you give this kind of prompt, you get the behavior we understand that it did to reject all these other applicants and produce the outcome that it gave. No one questioned anything, it seemed to me. So there you got a problem at the high level in the organization. And this is a pattern we see in many of the stories we’re reporting, Shel, over the past few months, where you look at the story that developed that led us to talk about it, and you think there’s something missing here at a at a management level in the organization that shouldn’t be missing. And we’ve had the obvious one about the human in the loop, but this goes deeper than that. This is fundamental and this is worrying. Shel Holtz: It is. And I mean we could we could spend a whole show talking about talent acquisition and AI being used to screen resumes and the like, which is problematic i in its own right. I mean, what do most organizations using the AI to find. It’s the candidates who have the appropriate degree from the right university, that they’ve got the right keywords in their CV, they have the appropriate technical skills. None of these things are predictors of success in the organization, in life. I’m reading a book right now, by the way, highly, highly recommend this book. It’s having a profound impact on my thinking. It’s called Robot Proof by Vivian Ming. She’s a fascinating character. But this book is extraordinary in the approach that it takes to ensuring that humanity remains relevant and thrives when AI is there handling all of these routine tasks that humans are no longer required to perform. So she points out through her work in recruiting and in education, the predictors of success are things like social intelligence, perspective taking, communication and collaboration, the ability to solve novel problems, comfort with uncertainty, and deeply human capacities that increase in value as AI gets smarter. These are things that are predictors of success and wealth and happiness and the ability to be creative and innovative on behalf of an organization. And we’re not looking for those things. So I mean, these are all conversations that I think we need to be having out there is, you know, I mean, just an AI that is faster at looking for the wrong things that recruiters have been looking for decades and decades. That’s not the approach we need to be taking. We need to be rethinking all of this stuff based on the data that’s available to us. And that’s what Vivian Ming has and shares in this book is the data that she has processed through machine learning tools since long before there was a ChatGPT. Highly recommend this book. And by the way, the book also has the best footnotes I have ever read. Neville Hobson: There’s also much think of you know the HR person saying that the AI made the decision, not me, of something that Shel Holtz: You made a decision to use the AI, right? Neville Hobson: Well back in April, February and April, in fact, Sylvia Cambi and I ran a couple of workshops for IBC on ethics in AI. And we gave some case study examples, and one of them is very relevant to this conversation, this is the example of Workday that is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiffs who were suing Workday allege that AI systems used in talent acquisition resulted in discriminatory outcomes. It’s the concern isn’t simply bias in one decision, it’s systemic exclusion embedded in the design of it. How ranking, filtering, and screening models operate at scale. So what happened, just as one little example, is that someone who was studying all this that came up with the details discovered that there are examples where someone applied for a job and within literally a minute they got a reject email. And there are examples where the reject emails are sent at 2 a. M. In their time zone. That lawsuit is still going on. It’s raised questions about oversight, fairness, transparency, and even vendor liability. So it’s certainly relevant to this story if you’ve got someone arguing that the AI made the decision. But it’s discriminatory and arguably from what we know, the human was behind it, yet the AI made that decision. That’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears. So this is quite serious, and the Workday one I think is even more serious, the way it’s it seems to be playing out. But nevertheless, these indicate again, as I mentioned earlier, that we’ve got examples in organizations where things aren’t working right, things aren’t being done well, and you kind of wonder what else is going to emerge that we didn’t know about until someone discovered it. So these are things from a leadership point of view. That we need to pay attention to be proactive in setting in place the ground rules for this. So it’s not about guidelines or any of that kind of thing. It is about the fundamentals of AI leadership. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re probably not getting the best candidates in the door at the same time, which ultimately that’s what we want. And the way these things are working right now, they’re creating problems and probably leaving us with less than the optimum new hires. Well, retail has a new marketing playbook, and brands are turning their own employees into influencers. Gap. Is the clearest example. In January, it opened its year-old creator program. It had previously been reserved for outside influencers with at least a thousand followers. They’ve opened it up to its own corporate distribution and store staff. Employees can now earn commission and free product for posting about Old Navy Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Those are the Gap brands. Gap says the original program had already reached 154 million people across nearly 30, 000 posts. David’s Bridal did something similar. They launched David’s Style Squad, these are store associates, earning the same 5 to 15% commission as outside creators, with top performers up to 20%. A progress update from Modern Retail in April said the program had grown past 250 active ambassadors with roughly 500 applications. Starbucks has gone even further still, building the Green Apron Creators program from scratch and piloting a custom TikTok tool to share ad revenue with baristas. And Staples got here almost by accident. A store associate who went viral talking about their printing services became such an asset that the company leaned into it rather than shutting it down. And you may remember that we talked several years ago about a guy who worked for a paint company who was doing, I think it was either Instagram or TikTok videos, and they fired him for doing that, even though he was a hardcore brand ambassador who was getting people to buy the product. And he ended up getting hired by a competitor, Go figure. But why are brands suddenly taking this position of inviting their employees to become creators. Why now? And the answer is trust. Audiences are tuning out anything that smells like an ad. And the most credible person a brand has is someone who already works there. We’ve told you this for years and years that your employees are your most credible spokespeople and that it comes out in the Edelman Trust Barometer too. Employees almost also come cheaper. Than an outside creator roster. And the content has a built-in supply chain. A barista or a store so you can film something in 10 minutes with product that’s already just sitting there on the shelf. But the people covering this are flagging real problems. Digiday’s reporting this month points out that you can’t just flip a switch. There’s no consistent model for whether content happens on the clock or off the clock. Or what happens when a store manager needs someone running the register instead of chasing down that viral shot? One marketing exec told Digiday, most employee content is unusable, and finding the ones who are actually good at it is like panning for diamonds. There’s precedent for how badly this can go too. Amazon’s FC ambassadors, which was launched in 2018, to put warehouse workers on social media during a labor conditions controversy. Drew accusations of astroturfing and questions about whether some accounts were even real employees. Then there’s the legal exposure. Employment attorney Mark Conkl said that the moment a company starts directing what employees post or ties compensation to participation, it’s no longer enthusiasm, it’s work. And every employment law that applies to work applies to that too. That includes the FLSA. Filming, editing, and monitoring comments at nine at night can be compensable time, voluntary label or not. It includes overtime math, if stipends or engagement bonuses aren’t folded into the regular rate correctly. It includes discrimination risk if creators get picked because they look good on camera rather than by documented objective criteria. And it includes labor law, a creator policy That reads as don’t say anything negative can legally chill employees’ protected right to discuss wages and working conditions. Neville Hobson: Mm. Shel Holtz: So here’s my advice, and it splits two ways depending on which hat you’re wearing. If marketing is building one of these programs, your job is to get legal HR and marketing in the same room before it launches, not after the first viral post. Sort out compensation, selection criteria, and IP ownership up front. If you’re the one being asked to sell this internally, be honest with employees about what they’re actually signing up for. Real hours, real tax and wage implications, and a real trade-off between building the brand’s audience and building their own. And if marketing pitches you a program without any of that groundwork done, that’s the time to push back loudly, before it launches, not after that first lawsuit. Neville Hobson: Yeah, quite interesting, isn’t it, Shel? We’ve talked about this before, some time ago. And that example of the paint company is interesting. I think attitudes, strategies and so forth have will have changed quite a bit since then. I think the paint company was Sherwin-Williams, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. It could be. Shel Holtz: Think so. Although that may have been the one he ended up going to. I could look it up. I don’t remember. Neville Hobson: Could be. Yeah, could be. I it reading the story in one of the links you shared in Retail Dive that talks about Gap and David’s Bridal, it’s actually quite interesting. This is now, this is not a kind of a an aside, like a little aside project. This is a this is a significant aspect to their to their brand management and general marketing, where employees are part of the process that rewards them for their actions. It makes sense. I don’t have any critiques on this at all, even. I can understand some concerns certainly surrounding people saying we do authentic storytelling. You know you can say that, but you need to convince people that is the case, authentic storytelling. I think there’s a difference between people with passion who happen to be employees of your company. Talking about your brands out in the marketplace, as opposed to people with passion or employees, you’re now gonna pay to do this. So that’s kind of losing something in the picture, it seems to me. So there’s a fine line to walk, I think, in how you communicate authentic storytelling. Because is it authentic because you’re paying them? Because When they’re doing this before and now they’re being rewarded. So I’m not saying that’s not a not a good thing. You need to be clear in how this is perceived. Shel Holtz: Yeah, sure. This is not an employee advocacy program. To be clear, Neville Hobson: No. Shel Holtz: This is not an opportunity for employees to share content and to put their own spin on it in their networks. Employee advocacy programs have been around a long time. They can be very effective. We have one. We use one of the tools that’s available out there to manage it. But nobody gets paid for these. I mean, some of them, you know, y you have leaderboards and you may have campaigns with prizes for who’s on top of the leaderboard each week during the campaign. That’s not the same thing. The creator programs Neville Hobson: No, it’s not. Shel Holtz: That we’re talking about grew out of the whole influencer movement where these people get paid to promote the product. And basically what they’re doing is saying, hey, we’re gonna give our employees the same opportunity we’re giving the creator community out there. And it just doesn’t shake out that way because of employment law and because of everything else that I mentioned. And by the way, that was Tony Piloseno. He was an Ohio college student and a Sherwin-Williams employee, so good memory. He built a huge TikTok following posting paint mixing videos using Sherwin-Williams products. And in 2020 they fired him, citing misuse of company materials and creating content on company time. And he was hired by Florida Paints, which embraced his social media creativity and gave him a role producing content for the brand. So that was that story. Neville Hobson: Show and Williams loss, without question. They missed the point entirely. But to be fair, that was back then and that was probably a common view. You’re wasting time on our dime and we’re gonna fire you. But you know, I was reading the retail dive piece that I mentioned on Gap as well. And interestingly, the VP of marketing, his comments about why they’re doing this. Our employees know our brands, our products and customers better than anyone. Absolutely. By expanding the program to eligible employees across our offices, we’re giving them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing our brands to life through authentic storytelling. That doesn’t gel with me at all, that description, I have to say. It’s it’s forced this is a marketing activity basically. So y the word authentic doesn’t work well there, I think. Anyway, they have had some success without doubt. They talk about the program has now reached nearly hundred and fifty-four million consumers across thirty thousand posts, according to the press release that the GAP issued. I mean, that’s no small beer, without doubt. So it’s a good result. So I guess the answer is to for me, I’d want to take a look at this in six months’ time to see what it’s looking like. Shel Holtz: Yeah, but in the meantime, I think the advice stands. There are labor, legal, and HR implications in doing this. And if you just let marketing launch it without having looked into that and addressed it and invited HR legal and y any labor relations specialists Neville Hobson: Presume they did all that. Shel Holtz: Into the room, I don’t know. Could have just been marketing. God knows we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. Where marketing just releases Neville Hobson: It’s true, yeah. Shel Holtz: Something to the wild, right? Like snatch up these bargains faster than a gator can snatch up a child, you know? Neville Hobson: Extreme example. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Well, I think it I think it’s interseeing. Shel Holtz: Yep. That’s stuck in my mind. Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s good seeing all this, I have to say. And as long as they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna bite back at them, as it were, all to the good, but need to see more evidence of success and that word authentic being used properly. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’d be very interested if any listeners work for organizations or have clients that are have embarked on this kind of a program. I’d love to know what kind of safeguards were applied to that, what kind of conversations were held with HR and Legal and how it’s going. So let us know. So our next monthly episode of FIR, our long-form monthly episode for September, will drop on September twenty-eighth. Monday, September twenty-eighth, which means Neville, you and I will record it on Saturday, September twenty-sixth. We will be here with our Neville Hobson: Yep. Shel Holtz: Short form midweek episodes beginning not this Monday, but next Monday. In between those monthly episodes. So we hope that you will all watch for those announcements and or just subscribe to the podcast and they’ll show up in your podcast player. And until we see you on our next episode, that will be a 30 for immediate release. The post FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 17, 2026Episode 52622 min
FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence?
Anthropic’s watermark scheme is the focus of so much discussion that you could be excused for thinking there was nothing else to talk about. For many, it’s the solution to identifying all those evil-doers who offload their writing to large language models. But we are wasting far too much time trying to determine whether (and to what degree) AI was involved in creating content. Much more important is determining whether the content was crafted with respect for the reader, and whether the creator can stand by every word. That’s the idea behind the new AI writing policy from the software company Clay, which makes far more sense than trying to detect a watermark. Links from this episode: Clay AI Writing Policy: 4 Guiding Principles How Claude marks AI-generated content Anthropic’s watermark survives copy-paste, but not the real dev workflow Can Anthropic’s invisible watermarks curb ‘AI slop’? Researchers remain sceptical Anthropic’s text watermarks signal new front in AI detection Claude’s new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now How to Build a Responsible AI Writing Policy How Claude’s text watermarking works Claude is now watermarking every response — here’s what that means if you use AI for writing I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. 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: Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 526. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. In the last episode of FIR, we talked about workslop and the implications workslop brings to the workplace. We’re going to continue down that path today. I’m sure you’ve all seen the headlines about Anthropic putting an invisible watermark on anything Claude writes. I want to separate what that actually does from what people have been claiming. First, you won’t see this watermark. It’s not a “written by Claude” tag. It’s machine-readable. It survives copy and paste, and it may even survive some editing. The reason Anthropic came up with this is to comply with the transparency rules under the EU AI Act, and it applies everywhere Claude runs: the app, the API, Claude Code, Cowork, cloud providers — you name it. You can’t paste text into a public detector and expose someone yet. Anthropic says detection tools are coming, but it hasn’t released any of them. Here’s roughly how it works: Every time Claude generates text, it’s choosing between several equally good next words — say, “gray” or “overcast.” Normally, that choice is random. With watermarking, though, a secret cryptographic key nudges that randomness in a consistent way. No single word looks suspicious, but across a couple hundred word choices in an article, the pattern becomes statistically detectable if you have the cryptographic key. That’s completely different from tools like Pangram, which look for writing patterns that seem AI-like — you know, em dashes, overuse of words like “delve” or “tapestry” or “underscore,” constantly grouping things in threes. These are all things real writers do, by the way. The rule of three is nothing unique to AI, nor are em dashes. That’s why I don’t put much stock in these tools. Anthropic’s detector doesn’t guess. It tests whether the text matches the pattern its own cryptographic key would produce. Now, it’s particularly important to understand that a detected watermark means the content was processed by Claude. It doesn’t mean Claude wrote it. You could write something yourself, have Claude clean up the grammar, and it would still carry that watermark. Axios flagged exactly this risk for communications teams that polish a human-written press release with Claude. It also works in reverse, by the way. Heavily edit, paraphrase, translate, or blend the text with other writing, and that watermark can disappear. Short passages may not carry enough signal to be detected at all. So this isn’t a foolproof “Did a human use AI?” detector. Picture a reporter running a company statement through a detector and calling it AI-generated when your team actually wrote it and just had Claude do the final polish. The watermark tells you about processing. It can’t tell you who did the thinking. And that brings me to Clay, the software company, which just rolled out an AI writing policy. I think this is actually more important than a watermarking system. The policy had its origins in Clay’s engineering department, but it has since gone company-wide. It’s not a ban. Brainstorming with AI, drafting, proofreading — all that’s fine. Instead, the policy has four principles. First, stand behind every idea and every sentence. Second, writing is thinking. Third, spend more time creating a document than you expect someone to spend reading it. And fourth, longer isn’t better. And AI, by the way, notoriously pads its content. I like this policy a lot. I like it a lot more than “Don’t use AI to write.” Because sometimes AI writing is exactly the right call. Plenty of people are great at their jobs and bad at writing. Engineers are a great example. I’ve used engineers as an example of this before. If AI helps these people organize their explanation and turn an incomprehensible email into something readable, that’s good for everyone. The problem is AI can make bad thinking look like good writing. This is what we were talking about last week with workslop. You give the model a thin prompt, it hands back three polished pages, and now you’ve just shifted the work of figuring out what you meant onto everyone else who has to read it. The prose looks finished, so the creator of that content feels like they’ve finished, but the thinking never actually happened. That was how we defined workslop last week when we talked about it. So companies don’t need an AI policy that’s focused on AI. They need one that’s focused on accountability, quality, and respect for the reader. Cover the basics, for sure. List the approved tools. Talk about confidential information and how it gets used. Talk about fact-checking and human review and brand voice and blah, blah, blah. But add that Clay test: Can you defend every sentence? Does it represent what you actually think? Did you verify the facts? Did you cut the padding? And did AI make the communication better, or did you just shift your effort onto your audience? For communicators, that last question is the one to focus on. The watermark debate is going to tempt organizations to obsess over detection: Was AI used? Can we prove it? Should we disclose it? Yeah, sometimes, I guess, that’s a fair question. But the better ones are: Is the thinking ours? Is it accurate? Does it serve the reader? And is a human willing to stand behind every word? If we can get those things right, I’m not too worried about whether Claude helped fix a few sentences along the way, watermark or no watermark. Neville Hobson: Hmm. We have talked about this before — this kind of weird obsession so many people seem to have with trying to figure out whether someone used AI to write a piece so they can exclaim with great glee, “Yeah, this guy wrote this. It’s 96 percent AI. He didn’t write it at all. It’s a scam, it’s fake,” blah, blah, blah. Shel Holtz: Yeah. Neville Hobson: We’re already seeing it happen with this. Someone wrote the other day about this, “Finally, a way to get rid of AI slop.” What? I mean, isn’t — Shel Holtz: No. Neville Hobson: It isn’t going to do that. This obsession isn’t going to stop, I don’t think. And, in fact, maybe the best thing out of the Clay principles is taking the focus away from that and moving it to the writing, to authorship, to accountability, as you point out. The caution, I would say, is don’t obsess about this. Don’t set concrete rules that are so inflexible that you’re going to end up with writing that isn’t flexible at all. The point, I guess, is to concentrate on the actual writing. Think about what it is that you’re writing. So let’s move away from “Did you use AI to write this?” to something like, “What was your contribution to this?” That, to me, is a healthier discussion to have. There are still going to be lots of people who do the “gotcha” talk. I saw one today on LinkedIn: “I would never hire someone who uses AI to copywrite. That kind of approach isn’t for my team,” and stuff like that. I think asking what your contribution was encourages accountability, whereas “Did you use AI to write this?” is all about concealment and policing — discovering that someone did and assuming or implying that they’ve cheated somehow. That said, I think the point that you need to stand behind every idea and sentence is absolutely spot on. And that’s not new. We should have been doing that all along. That’s probably the right way to approach it. For example, don’t ask Claude to write something: “Here’s a topic. Write a 1,200-word piece arguing that communicators need to take responsibility for AI governance.” Claude produces it, you might edit two or three sentences, and you’re done. You publish it under your name. That is substantially AI-generated writing, and the watermark is relevant. But for what, though? So someone could say, “Gotcha”? You don’t know what that was for. You don’t know what’s wrong with that. Has someone deceived you? I suppose, by implication, if it’s under their name, they have deceived you in that they wrote it. They didn’t; the AI wrote it. But what’s the difference between that and, as a comparison, Grammarly or something like that, which suggests paragraph changes and you accept every single one of its recommendations? You end up with something that’s then 70 to 80 percent Grammarly, as opposed to you. Better, though, to avoid ethical issues and accusations and all that stuff, is that you do the writing. Don’t dump the stuff on the AI. You do the writing and introduce your own thinking to this. Have the AI — Claude or whatever it might be — check it. Ask it to proofread it. Ask it, “Is there any other angle I could have incorporated in this?” or “Do you think this is the right approach?” I do that a lot with the stuff that I write. And I must admit, probably two out of three times, I’ll accept some of the recommendations the chatbot comes back with. Sorry, the AI assistant comes back with. I don’t call it chatbot. Shel Holtz: Ha ha ha. Neville Hobson: And there I just slipped up. I did. So I think we’ll have to weather the gotchas all the time, and so be it. But if you are confident in doing the writing, using your AI assistant as the guide for you — as, in a sense, the editor that sits by your side, the critiquer that tells you what it thinks and where you could improve this or don’t say that — follow guidelines such as Clay has done, and you should be okay. Shel Holtz: Yeah. The piece on Clay’s writing policy makes the point, as I mentioned, that writing is thinking. Writing is the way we process our thoughts and test our thoughts. And this is a point that I think a lot of people have made. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times. I think it was over the weekend. I think it was an op-ed that was exhorting people to please, for God’s sake, write your own stuff because we don’t want to lose the ability to think. The problem is, I think most of these proclamations come from writers. You and I are writers, and the communities that we interact with on LinkedIn in particular are probably also writers. We’re connected to people who are engaged in communications, and hence you get the opposition to using AI to write. But again, what about an accountant? What about an engineer? There are so many jobs out there where being a really good writer was never a requirement when these folks were earning their degrees or their certificates. And now, because they’re in the business world, they have to communicate effectively. So how do you go about the thinking process? No, you don’t want to delegate it to AI. You don’t want to say, “Write an email about X” or “Write a blog post about X.” You want to think it through. But does that mean you think it through by writing? Well, not if you’re not a writer, necessarily. You may think it through by creating an outline, by doing a brain dump. It could even be — this is something Chris Penn talks about a lot — just recording your thoughts as audio and then uploading that file and saying, “These are my thoughts. Now turn this into a coherent email to this audience designed to produce this result.” Then you go back and you review it and edit it so that you can defend every sentence, every word. Again, I think this is all about respect for the reader. And if the way you demonstrate respect for the reader, knowing that you’re a terrible writer, is using AI, that’s appropriate. If you just knock out this email, people are going to go, “What is he talking about? I don’t know what he’s trying to get at here.” Respect for the reader is using the AI to make that message clearer, more cogent, more understandable, and more actionable. So, again, I really like those four pillars. And I think there undoubtedly will be ways to defeat the Claude watermark. People will come up with them. Anything that is designed to catch people is something somebody else is going to come up with a way to circumvent. In the meantime, though, as you say, this is not a surefire way to catch somebody. It’s going to identify that Claude processed this, not that Claude wrote it. So I think people need to calm down and start thinking about this tool in a way that provides the high-quality content that you’re trying to deliver to people — not just something polished that makes them have to figure out what you intended because it’s polished but no thinking went into it. The thinking still has to go into it, whether Claude’s going to do the lion’s share of the writing or not. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting distinction is between AI-generated and AI-assisted writing. Although I add my own caveat to that, which is: Who cares? I mean, truly, do I want to get into a discussion about that? No, I do not. So I know the difference. I’m not evangelizing that everyone should understand and follow the difference, although it’s helpful to. For example, using Claude, you give Claude a short prompt — it’s not Cowork, by the way; this is just the chat — and it produces an article. You tell it, “I want to write about X, and the topic is this, and I want to achieve this. These are the points I want to make.” Maybe not even as much as that. And Claude produces, you know, a 600-word draft, and you lightly edit it. Lightly meaning maybe you change not the syntax so much, but certain expressive words that you might use. If that’s your bag, sure. Although you would have given — Shel Holtz: Or adding the Oxford comma. Neville Hobson: — your AI assistant the guidance about your preference on the Oxford comma. Shel Holtz: Presumably, yeah. Neville Hobson: It would know. So you do that. On the other hand, if you’ve already developed the argument, you’ve already got a clear picture in your mind, you’ve researched it, you’ve used Claude to challenge or improve your thinking, and you make the editorial decisions yourself, that’s another matter entirely. That, I believe, is AI-assisted writing. So, as we mentioned earlier in the discussion, the better question isn’t, “Did you use AI?” but, “What was your intellectual contribution?” So, writing is thinking. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Although, again, I don’t want to get hung up on having definitions all over the place about this. The danger is real of turning this into another policing technology, which many people are already starting to do. I did see in Anthropic’s FAQ about watermarking where they say, in answer to the question, “How do I check if a piece of text was written by Claude?”, “We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.” So that’s coming. That’ll give those gotcha people a lot more ammo to say “gotcha” a lot more, I bet. It just takes attention away from what really matters with all of this. But, you know, like a lot of things that are new, we have to go through all this. So my recommendation is: Don’t give it too much attention. Be sure in your own mind that what you’re doing is, in your definition, the right way of going about it. You feel confident that it is. You have guidelines to follow, such as Clay’s, for instance, so you are able to say, “Yep, these four things — I do these things in all my approaches to this.” In which case, you can wave two fingers at the gotchas. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I can’t emphasize this enough: The detection is not going to be focused on whether Claude wrote this. It’s whether it processed it. So you could have written it and then sent it through Claude for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and the watermark will show up, even though you wrote it. So the gotcha is, I think, a little disingenuous in a lot of cases. I mean, it could be that somebody used it to write, for sure, but it’s not a sure thing. It’s not a lock that if the detector says, “Yes, Claude processed this,” then, “Aha! You wrote this with AI.” Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean that at all. Neville Hobson: But even if he did, so what? If someone says that, do I care? Not at all. Shel Holtz: Well, and again, I come back to the engineer or the accountant who wants to be understood and is not a writer. I think that’s where this tool shines and where we have opportunities for better clarity and better understanding in the workplace. Do I expect my professional writers to write? Yeah, absolutely. Do I expect my accountants to write? My lawyers? Not necessarily. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s one other thing about this, too. I did read Anthropic’s technical paper describing what this is and how it works. I’m going to have to actually ask Claude to simplify this — give it to me in simple terms so I can understand it well. Shel Holtz: Ask Claude. No, better yet, ask ChatGPT to do it. Neville Hobson: Because it talks about, for instance, let’s say you asked Claude to write a piece. You briefed Claude, it did that, you edited it, passed it back to Claude, it made some recommendations, which you implemented, including removing a chunk. You passed it back to Claude again. You went to and fro a bit, and you might then have — let’s say it’s an article for an academic journal, for instance — passed it to a colleague, saying, “Can you review this and give me your opinion?” They did, and you made some further changes as a result. The end result of all of that is so muddy that Claude would have — or rather, the watermarking wouldn’t be clear as to who wrote which bits and so forth. You could pinpoint where the words came from, but you couldn’t pinpoint who the author was. In which case, the gotcha folks are not going to be happy with that. But, you know, just get on with it, for God’s sake, and stop all this stuff. Shel Holtz: Yeah. And you don’t know which words it selected to accommodate this watermarking. If your edit changes them, then the watermark vanishes. So again, no guarantees here at all. This is compliance with the EU AI law. That’s all it is. By the way, I think you can expect to see the other frontier models follow suit, also to be in compliance with the EU AI law. So the fact that only Anthropic is doing this so far — Neville Hobson: Undoubtedly. Shel Holtz: — doesn’t mean that you won’t see it in ChatGPT and Gemini and even maybe Grok. We’ll see. Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, they talk about retrofitting this to earlier versions of Claude, and that makes total sense to me. You are right. I believe it would make no sense if Claude was the only one doing this. So we’ll expect news from the others. But in the meantime, my suggestion to everyone is: Don’t worry about this. Be true to yourself. Read Clay’s guidelines — what are they called? I can’t remember. It’s kind of a policy, writing policy. Shel Holtz: Yeah, policy. Writing policy. AI writing policy, yeah. Neville Hobson: Okay. And there’ll be others adding to this and saying, “Here’s my version,” and so forth. So you can pick what’s best. But just focus on your writing. One of the points that comes out of this is absolutely right: You do the writing. Don’t just say, “Give me a 1,200-word article on whatever topic.” That’s the best approach, and that has been the case since before this topic emerged. Shel Holtz: And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 17, 202618 min
ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders
Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it. The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon , who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform. Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most. [ read the transcript ] The post ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 13, 2026Episode 52522 min
FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop
We have been hearing about work slop for a while now, and evidence is mounting that it can create long-term problems for companies. Yet we are hearing very little (if anything) about what businesses are doing about it. There’s new research, which Neville and Shel discuss in this episode, along with some thoughts about actions companies can take. Links from this episode: Why People Create AI “Workslop”—and How to Stop It Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026 Harvard Business Review warns AI ‘workslop’ is rotting companies from the inside Botsitting, botshitting, and the hidden human labor of AI at work 27 Seconds to Breach: The AI “Workslop” Tax Hitting 2026 Bottom Lines How to Eradicate AI ‘Workslop’ From Your Office 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 Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 525 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson And I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz And Neville, it is great to have you back on the show. You’re well enough to record again. Neville Hobson Yeah, it’s certainly been an interesting few weeks, including the kind of disconnection that I did from just about literally everything with this heat exhaustion that I suffered, which was quite profound and far more serious than I thought, according to the doctor. And then the R&R, as I described it—the rest and recuperation—slotted in nicely with our existing family plans here to spend some time in Novato, Marin County, in California, which we did last week. And as some listeners will know, you and I and the family, in fact, all met together, had lunch in a delightful restaurant in San Francisco last Thursday, and took some pictures, which is what people saw. So I’m back in the UK now. It was a worthwhile visit, and, well, here we are doing FIR again. It feels like déjà vu all over again. That’s great. Shel Holtz It is back to normal. I should tell people that if you’re curious about the wonderful restaurant we ate at in San Francisco, it’s called Waterbar, and my company, Webcor, built the building that it’s in. So it was fun to have you there and to say, “We built this.” Neville Hobson Yeah, it was. I agree. The hospitality was really good in that restaurant. Very nice service, friendly people, excellent food, of course. It’s focused on fish, so if you’re a fish connoisseur, this is the place to go in San Francisco, I would say. Yeah, really nice. Shel Holtz Yeah, and right on the water. You get a view of the Bay Bridge and a good part of San Francisco Bay. So, yeah, it was great to see you in person. It’s been since 2019. Neville Hobson Yeah, a long time. Shel Holtz And here we are looking at each other over Riverside, but that’s not the same. Neville Hobson No, the next best thing, but not the same. Shel Holtz Yeah, being together in real life really matters. But today’s topic is one that we were planning to discuss just before you took ill, so we’re going to return to it. Neville Hobson Yeah. Shel Holtz We’re going to return to it. Neville Hobson We are. And this is based on an article that caught my eye a few weeks ago in the Harvard Business Review. It was actually published back in January, but having returned to it, I think it’s even more relevant than it was then. The title of the article is “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’—and How to Stop It.” Timely topic, I’d say. The authors use the term “workslop” to describe low-effort, AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface but ends up shifting the real work onto whoever receives it. We’ve probably all seen examples: reports full of generic language, presentations that say a great deal without saying very much, emails that are technically fine but leave you wondering what the sender actually thinks. Since that article appeared, the wider idea of AI slop has become much more prominent. We’re hearing the term applied to the flood of cheap, AI-generated material appearing on social networks, in publishing, marketing, and elsewhere. There’s even research suggesting that people increasingly use “AI slop” as a judgment about authenticity. Something doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-generated to be dismissed as slop; it just has to feel like it. Perhaps the most useful new evidence comes from research by the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to the practice of human resources management. Published in June, SHRM’s Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026, based on more than 5,000 U.S. workers, found that 41% use AI at work, and 44% of those users describe at least some of their output as AI slop. Early-career employees feel the greatest pressure to adopt AI. SHRM also found greater engagement and commitment where organizations take an open approach to AI integration. What interested me most about the HBR article was its argument about why workslop happens inside organizations. The authors suggest that it isn’t fundamentally an AI problem at all. It’s a leadership problem. Many organizations are telling employees simply to use AI without defining what success looks like, without giving people sufficient guidance or confidence, and without creating an environment where it’s safe to experiment, ask questions, or admit uncertainty. In that environment, people can end up optimizing for appearing to use AI rather than actually using it well. Putting it simply, the article says it’s the result of unclear AI mandates and overwhelmed teams. Leaders are issuing vague directives for employees to start using extremely powerful tools, while many of those employees are overburdened, psychologically depleted, and operating in environments where it doesn’t feel safe to admit uncertainty or ask for help. Evidence published since the HBR article seems to reinforce rather than undermine that argument. We’re seeing more research showing significant numbers of employees encountering poor-quality, AI-generated work while, at the same time, employees are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they’re using AI. There’s another dimension to this that I think is particularly interesting: productivity. Imagine that something that previously took me two hours to produce now takes me 20 minutes with AI. That’s a significant productivity gain for me. But suppose I send it to Shel—to you—and you then spend an hour trying to understand what I mean, checking my claims, and correcting some mistakes that I hadn’t spotted. Have we actually improved productivity, or have I simply transferred the cost of my work to Shel? That’s essentially what workslop does. And some recent research into AI-assisted work describes this as a kind of tragedy of the commons. Individuals can appear more productive while imposing additional costs on everybody else. If an organization measures AI adoption, output volume, or individual efficiency rather than the performance of the whole system, workslop might actually look like successful AI transformation. That struck a chord because it echoes something we’ve discussed on FIR more than once. Whenever we hear stories about AI failing in organizations, the technology itself often isn’t the real issue. AI has a remarkable ability to expose weaknesses that were already there: unclear leadership, poor communication, lack of trust, unrealistic expectations, and organizations measuring activity rather than outcomes. And there’s an important question of individual responsibility here, too. Poor leadership may create the conditions for workslop, but that doesn’t absolve the person who sends it. If I knowingly send something I haven’t properly considered or checked simply because an AI produced it, that’s also a failure of professional judgment. So perhaps workslop isn’t really the diagnosis at all. Perhaps it’s a symptom. Is AI creating a new workplace problem, or is it simply shining a very bright light on old management problems? What happens when leaders measure AI adoption instead of better decisions, better collaboration, and better business outcomes? And as AI makes producing apparently polished work almost effortless, does human judgment actually become more important rather than less? The Harvard Business Review article may now be seven months old, but the questions it raises are becoming more urgent, not less. Shel? Shel Holtz Without question. And there— Neville Hobson Mm. Shel Holtz —there is newer research. I found work done by the Work AI Institute. They did a 2026 research project called The Work AI Index. And in addition to workslop, they have a new term in there called “botshitting.” I kid you not. Neville Hobson Ha ha ha. Shel Holtz Botshitting describes employees knowingly shipping AI output they believe is wrong. And 12% of employees who were surveyed for this research admit to doing this. Interestingly, when they are basically caught, they blame AI. They say, “The AI did this.” Forty percent of workers blame the AI rather than themselves. There was also a study in January 2026 from Workday. Some 3,200 leaders found that 37% of AI productivity gains are immediately lost to rework because the workslop isn’t adequate, with employees spending an average of six hours a week correcting or rewriting flawed AI content. Built In reported workslop now affects roughly 40% of employees and costs about $186 per worker per month. And there was a more recent study—BetterUp sourced this figure—that found that 66% of workers are spending six-plus hours every week fixing AI errors. So this is serious stuff. And by the— Neville Hobson Mm. Shel Holtz —way, nearly every recent report on workslop ties this to layoffs associated with AI. Workers and outlets are connecting 2026 tech job cuts to premature AI-driven headcount reduction. And the workers who are left behind are absorbing that workslop rework burden. So we cut people to use AI; now the survivors are— Neville Hobson Mm. Shel Holtz —cleaning up after it. That’s an important framing to look at. And one last thing I’ll mention from some research—this was just from June of this year. They found that the errors in workslop go beyond the work that somebody else needs to do to correct it. It moves downstream through teams and into the organization’s collective knowledge base. And that knowledge base just deteriorates. So it’s not just individual wasted hours, but this slow erosion of what the organization actually knows to be true. This is a very serious problem, and I don’t see a lot being said about measures that organizations are taking to address it. I think some measures need to be taken pretty soon, or this is going to get out of control. Neville Hobson Yeah. The Harvard Business Review article does have some suggestions about what organizations can do to address it, which I’ll mention in a minute. But they also include some examples. I found these rather interesting. Not a whole lot—three only—but nevertheless, they talk about the toxic effect workslop can have on workplace dynamics, breeding mistrust and leading team members to think less of the sender’s intelligence and trustworthiness, among other traits. They talk about their ongoing research, where they’ve heard a number of examples of workslop seeding ill will, eroding trust, and generally having a corrosive effect on workplace morale. There’s one where I thought, I can imagine this. One example they give is an employee at a technology company who told the Harvard Business Review that he’d noticed the tone in his performance review was unlike his manager, and that the document recycled content from his self-evaluation. The experience made him feel unvalued and underappreciated, and he gave up all hope that he would ever be promoted. So, reading between the lines, what happened? Whoever did that grabbed some of the employee’s self-evaluation and had an AI produce the review. I bet that’s what happened there. We don’t know the details behind that, but that’s a really good example of what you could see happening in an environment where there is a lack of clarity, all those things the Harvard Business Review points out, and the pressure to deliver in some form or another. So, for instance, doing an employee evaluation would come into that area where the manager has cut corners and used AI to do it. And I could imagine that is happening a lot. And in relation to the examples that the Harvard Business Review piece includes, they say something quite interesting. Many of the responses focused on the productivity costs—the time people wasted dealing with each instance of workslop that crossed their desks. But they note that what should really worry leaders is the impact workslop can have on human relationships. And I think that’s a point to hammer home. It’s a kind of soft thing. You don’t necessarily see it, but it’s there. And some of these examples make that very clear indeed. So that’s a manifestation of the management failure behind all of this, Shel, don’t you think? Shel Holtz I do. And I think it’s because we’ve been rushing headlong into this rather than pausing to strategize it. And I think we’ve talked about that deterioration of human relationships once before. The situation is that people are not picking up the phone or sending an email off to the local subject-matter expert because Claude has the answer. ChatGPT has the answer. So you’re getting less of that interaction within the organization. This is causing people to assume some of the work that is outside their area of expertise, outside their lane, if you will, instead of reaching out to the people in the organization who actually have that expertise so they can do the work that previously was part of their job. Another interesting thing you noted was that somebody felt this was leading to a lack of promotion opportunity. Neville Hobson Mm. Shel Holtz I’m reading a book right now, an excellent book. We were talking about it before we started recording. It’s called Robot-Proof. And one of the things she talks about is this economic phenomenon of deprofessionalization, where AI takes on a certain amount of the work, and therefore you, as the professional, don’t need to know or do as much as you did before. And it lowers your overall value. It pushes the wage down for people who are doing that. The author, Vivienne Ming, uses an analogy of Jiffy Lube, which in the U.S. is a place where people take their cars to have their oil changed. And she says, “What if colonoscopies worked that way?” You don’t need a doctor to do a lot of this work because a lot of the work in a colonoscopy is pretty routine and AI can do that. Now you need just the Jiffy Lube guy there to take the hose and do— Neville Hobson Yeah. Shel Holtz —the insertion, looking at the camera to make sure it’s right. But that’s more of a technical skill than a deep medical skill that is taught in medical school and then honed over years of experience and practice. And this is the road I think we’re headed down if we don’t take some steps to fix it. The people who were brought into an organization based on education and years of experience and subject-matter expertise, and perhaps even thought leadership, no longer need all that stuff. They just need to do the base-level effort that is required by a human following the instructions of the AI. So I think organizations need to look at this very seriously: how this work gets done, what is required of the outputs, and having guardrails in place to make sure that people aren’t skirting around it. Because let’s face it, if the cost of producing this stuff continues to drop, there’s an incentive on the part of the organization to go ahead and use this because the cost is lower. It’s hard to see the impact of that on sales and reputation in the short term. In the long term, I think it absolutely will have that impact. Neville Hobson Yeah, I’d say you’re right. I mean, one thing that I’ve been talking about all year in everything I’ve written or said about artificial intelligence in organizations is that it’s about the people, not the technology. If we’re implementing AI or doing a rollout or planning it, or telling people, “Use AI,” as a leader, you have the responsibility to make that as crystal clear as possible and focus on the people. So one of the things I did like about the Harvard piece was the concluding remarks they make, starting with this: “The greatest irony of all is, to make AI work at work, we need to get better at being human.” Absolutely spot on. Leaders need to make space for the unpolished, slower but more rewarding work of human collaboration. Without organizational changes that enable agency and trust rather than AI mandates for overburdened teams, we’ll all drown in the sludge of workslop. A very well-put concluding statement, I think. But the serious element of that is something that, in my opinion, I’m amazed that leaders don’t seem to get at all. They talk about efficiencies. They talk about cost savings. They talk about all these things, and yet there’s nothing about: How do we help employees become more productive themselves and develop themselves, too? How do we help them, in a sense, augment their skills using AI? Now, that’s not to say—and I’m not suggesting for a second—that AI leaders generally just don’t think about that at all. I believe they do, but it’s way down the priority list in terms of how they communicate this. They need to get that to the top of the priority list. But more than just talk about it, they need to put these things in place. And there are many things they can do. There’s, in a sense, rebuilding trust with people. We’ve talked about examples in recent episodes of layoffs that are very clear to see. People are talking about them all the time, and that is happening. We talked about a really great one a few episodes back about what Ford Motor Company is doing with the graybeards. Lovely name. We’ll pass on the age— Shel Holtz Mm-hmm. Neville Hobson —thing on that. But it’s about the organizational collective memory people have of how things are done and what worked in the past, among people who were laid off and are gone. So they rehired a whole bunch, and they’ve benefited hugely, as the articles we cited go into in some detail, including, I believe, if I recall, Shel, they were the number-one automaker for a particular reason that they attribute directly to rehiring all these graybeards. So that is a great way of doing it. But it’s just one example. There are undoubtedly more fundamental things organizationally that people can do to rebuild this connection between the organization and the people who make up that organization—the employees, mostly. So there’s a lot of work to be done. And yet none of this is rocket science to leaders at all, I don’t believe. Just because we’ve got this newfangled technology on the scene, you’re telling people to start using it without giving them the proper guidance. So these, to me, are Leadership 101 things. And if no one’s doing this, then communicators, let’s step up to the plate and help. That’s what I think we should be doing. Shel Holtz Yeah, absolutely. And I have been reading more and more research that talks about what happens when you delegate your thinking to AI. Rather than doing the research yourself and the writing yourself, which helps you think through the issue, it actually has an impact on your ability to think and to learn. So there are a lot of reasons I think that we need to take this seriously. I think the first thing communicators need to do inside their organizations is raise the alarm. Because I think this may be an issue where everybody’s heard “slop” and everybody’s heard “workslop,” but I don’t know that everybody in the organization—especially the decision-makers—is up to speed on what the research is saying about all of this and the deleterious impact it can have on our organizations and the outputs that we produce. So, yeah, I think sharing this data—and we will have links to the research in the show notes—and making the people who make the decisions aware of what this could mean to the future reputation and earnings of the organization is the place to start. Neville Hobson Yeah, I agree. So, simply, there are good tips in this discussion. The links to the articles—please read them. They’re really, really useful. You’ll find a lot of insights in all the ones that we’ll have in the show notes. So there you’ve got your route map, I would say. Shel Holtz And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release. The post FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
August 10, 202623 min
ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency
Most agency owners probably haven’t thought much about shadow AI (the name for when employees use their personal ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini accounts to do work). In fact, owners may be doing it as well. In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through what the risks are and how to respond without overreacting. The instinct to crack down is understandable but wrong. Employees are going to use their own tools regardless, often because personal accounts are better trained or more accessible than whatever the company has set up. The goal should be education, not elimination. Most employees don’t know that personal accounts default to feeding data into training sets, or that a single toggle can turn that off. That one fix alone is worth a conversation with your team. Vibe coding and a plain-language AI policy get discussed, in addition to educating your team. Gini’s team runs weekly micro-learning sessions to help people use AI as a thinking partner, not just a drafting tool. Both Chip and Gini advise that owners and employees who aren’t using AI meaningfully within the next year or two are putting their careers and businesses at risk. [ read the transcript ] The post ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network .
Is this your show?
Claim this listing to keep it up to date, reach guests who want to pitch you, and manage bookings with Guestify.
