For Immediate Release

The volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has, according to the Financial Times, led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel discuss whether this makes sense or if it's just another case of people using AI poorly.Continue Reading → The post FIR #530: Has AI Created a Demand for Human Ghostwriters? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

A Press-Gazette investigation found that dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media don't actually exist, and PR agencies are unwittingly sharing them with the press. This poses a credibility issue for the agencies and the media. It requires a layer of verification unlike anything we've faced before. Also in this episode, crisis communication has long been housed in the PR or communications department. Should it be a governance responsibility of the C-suite? That's the case made in a new report from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. In his Tech Report, Dan York covers an initiative to close the AI language gap, including video moves by YouTube and Bluesky, smart glasses, and enhancements to Threads' podcast toolkit.Continue Reading → The post FIR #529: Fake Quotes from Fake Experts Find Their Way Into Top-Tier Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Fandoms are not synonymous with audiences or communities. The difference: Fans' identities are tied up with the team, artist, product, or other object of their passion. It's not surprising that marketers are chasing fandoms, in hopes of turning their brands into something people are genuinely excited about. But not everything is a potential flashpoint for a fan base. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore what distinguishes fans from members of other audiences or communities, how brands might leverage them, the wisdom of trying to spin up a fan base, and why fandoms might rebel against attempts to use them for marketing purposes.Continue Reading → The post FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed "youthful energy." What's worse, the talent acquisition manager didn't see any liability issues, since AI made the decision. Also in this long-form episode for August 2026: An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre's untimely death. Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven't returned the feeling. Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequenti

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.Continue Reading → The post FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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.Continue Reading → The post FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing... Continue Reading → The post FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York's Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining "brand sovereignty" in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan's report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky's Attie AI feature, Instagram's plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv's new community feature, WordPress's plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates.Continue Reading → The post FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Podcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative's core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms.Continue Reading → The post FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you. That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé. As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It's no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve. In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more impor

Everyone from CEOs to politicians has been talking about the likelihood of AI-related job loss, and several companies have already let people go in anticipation that AI can do their work. Ford Motor Company is the latest to rehire those workers when AI proved inadequate for the job. Elsewhere, many of the managers who have let people go regret their decisions, and some companies are revising their hiring plans. To remedy the chaos, Neville and Shel discuss the importance of strategy and knowledge management systems, among other things.Continue Reading → The post FIR #521: AI Layoffs Are Here. Wait. Strike That. Reverse It. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In the long-form FIR episode for June, Neville and Shel consider the causes and implications of surging anti-AI sentiment in the US (which is also growing in other developed countries), as well as the increasing use of "shadow AI" in organizations. Other reports include studies documenting the continued erosion of trust in mainstream news media, the growth of personal branding among communication professionals, a shocking self-inflicted reputation crisis for a UK business, and evidence that employees aren't reading your internal communications (unless maybe they are). Dan York shares information on Collections in the Mastodon 4.6 release and the W Social situation in his Tech Report.Continue Reading → The post FIR #520: AI’s PR Meltdown appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

We have known about media bias effect for decades: the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. While the research was focused on political issues, the underlying cause applies equally to misinformation about brands, companies, and business issues. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel find that the PR industry has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon, which requires strategies to address it.Continue Reading → The post FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

he history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another -- failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry's intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing.Continue Reading → The post FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

First, they were told to use AI. Experiment! Add it to your workflows! Go wild! Then the bills started piling up, and companies realized the cost was not tenable. Now the walk-backs are happening. Usage caps! Caution! Slow down! Among the issues communicators need to address is employees questioning leadership's judgment. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville explore approaches communicators can take to help employees understand the pivot while maintaining the perception of leader competence.Continue Reading → The post FIR #517: How to Communicate AI Whiplash to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The Economist has gone public with an experiment: it has created a shadow website featuring an AI-friendly version of its front-of-paywall content. The idea is to improve the odds of this content surfacing in AI answers and responses to AI queries. It's based on a new standard, llms.txt, which has been described as the robot.txt of AI. What does this mean for communicators? Neville and Shel break it down in this short midweek episode.Continue Reading → The post FIR #516: Your New Shadow Website appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Employees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we're seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees' behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. Also in this episode: AI copyright lawsuits are coming for communicators Google's search overhaul could signal a post-citation era Placing your thought newsmakers, thought leaders, and subject matter experts on podcasts is becoming a standard media relations practice "I worked all weekend" is no longer an argument for the fees you charge Short-form video clippers are creating go-to

There's a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky's daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines. Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what's collapsing isn't text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand

Neville and Shel dig into a provocative Harvard Business Review article that argues most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale that agentic AI now enables. The bottleneck, the authors contend, isn't the technology; it's the operating model. Neville and Shel connect the piece to conversations FIR has been having for the past year: AI as orchestration rather than automation, professionals shifting from supervisors of tasks to directors of systems, and 2026 increasingly framed as “the year of the agent.” At the center of the Harvard piece is the idea of a “brand code” — a machine-readable knowledge system that lets specialized AI agents continuously create, adapt, test, and optimize marketing in real time. Communications urgently needs its own equivalent: a “narrative code” containing executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, and escalation rules. Whoever builds it first, he warns, will inherit the agentic stack, and if marketing gets there first, co

While there's no evidence that business leaders are outsourcing the most important decisions to AI, there are reports that many executives are relying on AI to make many -- in fact, most -- of their decisions. The implications for communications could be huge.Continue Reading → The post FIR #512: The AI Shift in Executive Decision-Making appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.