Join hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz for a discussion with Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, co-authors of the new book, "Empowered." The book, a follow-up to Benoff and Charlene Li's bestseller, "Groundswell," explores how companies use technology to solve customer problems. It focuses of HEROes, highly empowered and resourceful employees whose experiments and innovations on customers' behalf result in extraordinary customer service. That surprising level of customer service, the co-authors argue, is the new way to market, generating repeat business and attracting new customers.During the hour-long show, you'll be able to call in with your own questions or comments, or participate in the chat room.The show is scheduled for 1 p.m. (Eastern time) on Saturday, October 9.

FIR Live #19: Empowered employees, empowered customers

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Chris Abraham and Frank Eliason join Shel Holtz for this week’s episode, commenting on these stories…

* United Airlines’ crisis drags on and on, aided by user-generated content, competitors piling on, and Saturday Night Live. Even Pepsi can’t escape the United kerfuffle.
* Mastodon continues to grow and continues to earn scoffs from the been-there-done-that crowd. There are things about it that could, maybe, give it legs.
* Twitter’s struggles haven’t abated, but what would it mean to PR if it went out of business?
* Burger King tried some subversive advertising last week that hacked both Google Home and Wikipedia. Some thought it was brilliant. Others not so much.
* Burson-Marstellar is taking an ombudsman approach to social media. It could be a trend for other agencies to follow or it could be a marketing ploy.
* In his Technology Report, Dan York adds his thought to the United and Mastodon discussions.

Connect with today’s guest co-hosts at @chrisabraham and @frankeliason.
Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.
Here’s where to join the FIR Gaggle , which was mentioned on today’s show.
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
FIR was recorded using Zencastr.
About today’s guest co-hosts:
Chris Abraham, digital strategist and technologist, is a leading expert in digital: search engine optimization (SEO), online relationship management (ORM), Internet privacy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet crisis response. He operates his consultancy at Gerris Corp. A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and adviser to the industries’ leading firms. He specializes in Web 2.0 technologies, including content syndication, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.
Frank Eliason, a partner at Brain+Trust Partners, is a renowned customer experience leader who introduces disruptive and transformative strategies to revolutionize businesses. Working for Comcast, he was recognized by BusinessWeek as “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S., possibly in the world.” At Citi he was recognized as one of the most innovative people in banking, not once, but twice by Bank Technology News. He drives the right behaviors at all levels by bringing focus to the customer and their story. Besides working for Comcast, Citi and Vanguard Investments, he has advised many Fortune 500 companies. Prior to joining the team at Brain+Trust, he led U.S. digital for Zeno Group, a Daniel J. Edelman company. He is the author of “@YourService” (Wiley, 2012).

For Immediate Release #83: The Problem with Magical Thinking

Lionel Menchaca and Ike Pigott join Shel Holtz for this week’s episode, commenting on these stories…

* Pepsi was the subject of ridicule when the brand released a tone-deaf TV commercial accused of appropriating and minimizing the protest movements of Black Lives Matter and others. We talked about the commercial itself and the bigger issue how companies should approach their efforts to drive social change.
* Facebook has released a free version of Workplace, its enterprise collaboration tool.
* There has been more movement in the battle against fake news, including moves by Facebook and Google as well as a new initiative from the world of journalism that involves a coalition of players that includes a couple PR agencies.
* Is PR gradually becoming just an extension of marketing? That’s the conclusion of USC Annenberg’s 2017 Global Communications Report.
* PR publications are promoting the idea that practitioners should pitch reporters via cold calls, which is an absolutely terrible idea.
* Dan York reports on the sudden rise of Mastodon, which is being hailed by many as a Twitter killer.

Connect with today’s guest co-hosts at @lionelgeek and @ikepigott.
Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.
Here’s where to join the FIR Gaggle , which was mentioned on today’s show.
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
FIR was recorded using Zencastr.
About today’s guest co-hosts:
Lionel Menchaca serves as director of Corporate & Strategy for W2O Group. In this role, he helps clients of all sizes to develop content and engagement strategies so they can connect directly with customers. He’s worked extensively on social media training for organizations and on helping organizations build and launch employee advocacy programs. He also works with teams of developers to build tools companies need to manage an increasingly complex flow of content. Before W2O, Lionel worked at Dell for 18 years and was the founder and chief blogger of Direct2Dell, Dell’s main corporate blog. Over the last 7 years, Lionel authored hundreds of posts on behalf of Dell. He helped expand it into several continues to extend Dell’s global presence. Before the blog, Lionel was one of the main architects behind Dell’s blog monitoring process begun in April 2006. He was Dell’s first full time employee paid to handle social media efforts.
After more than 16 years in television news, Emmy-winner Ike Pigott left to feed his passion for crisis communication. While building his consultancy, he started working with the American Red Cross – first as a local communicator in Alabama, and finally as the Director of Communications and Government Relations for a five-state region. It was during his time at the Red Cross that he pioneered the use of social media, developed the first disaster-response blogs, as well as the non-profit’s Twitter account all the way back in 2007. For the last seven years, Ike has worked as a communication strategist and spokesman for Alabama Power, an electric utility that serves more than 1.4-million customers. He helped shape the Social Media Guidelines for Alabama Power’s parent, Southern Company, and serves on the system-wide Social Media Advisory Council. In addition to media relations duties and serving as editor of the corporate NewsCenter site, Ike works across the company to help individuals and departments get the most out of social media tools. Ike has been a featured speaker at dozens of communication conferences in the United States and Europe,

For Immediate Release #82: The Ridicule Pepsi Generation

Francine Hardaway and Kami Huyse join Shel Holtz for this week’s episode, digging into these stories…

* More and more brands are producing web video series. The latest to join the trend: Chipotle, Marriott Rewards, and Dove. Is there potential here for PR and corporate communications?
* There has been no shortage of corporate crises to explore, including leggings on United Airlines, invasive seeds from Honey Nut Cheerios, and a fired employee from Cracker Barrell. Do any of these matter in the long run?
* Advertisers are fleeing from YouTube due to fear of an ad appearing with an offensive video, causing anguish among content creators whose revenues are tanking. Google is trying to right the ship, but one company has already reduced the number of sites on which it advertises from 400,000 to 5,000 with no noticeable change to the performance metrics.
* Millennials are driving B2B companies to become “socially investible.”
* There’s data in GIFs.
* Dan York reports on Facebook’s mobile apps adopting a Snapchat-like Stories feature.

Connect with today’s guest co-hosts at @hardaway and @kamichat.
Links to the source material for this episode are on Contentle.
Join the FIR Gaggle for a chance to get a free copy of J. Kelly Hoey’s book, “Build Your Dream Network.”
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
FIR was recorded using Zencastr.
About today’s guest co-hosts:
Francine Hardaway, Ph.D., is the co-founder of Stealthmode Partners, an accelerator for early stage entrepreneurs. A three-time entrepreneur herself, she has been a PR professional since 1980. Her last PR company, Hardaway Marketing Services, was acquired by Intel in 1996, and after a year inside Intel, she emerged to advise, coach, and fund startups in the internet space in partnership with Ed Nusbaum. Dr. Hardaway has written for Huffington Post, Fast Company and Medium, and is a contributing writer to the Phoenix Business Journal, where she has won two journalism awards for best column. She has also taught “Business and Future of Journalism” and “Digital Media Entrepreneurship” classes as ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism.
Kami Huyse is the founder of Zoetica Media. She writes an award-winning blog, Zoetica Talks, on the topic of public relations and social media strategy. Kami is a national leader in the use of social media for public relations. She speaks at social media events and conferences all over the country and her work in social media has earned her the SNCR’s 2008 Reputation Management award and IABC’s 2009 Gold Quill of Excellence Award. Kami was a 2010 fellow of the Society for New Communications Research where she pursued a study on how cause marketing in social communities can benefit companies. She is also the co-founder and organizer of the Social Media Breakfast Houston and serves on the board of CiviliNation.

For Immediate Release #81: The Socially Investible Company

Shel Holtz is globe-trotting this week, so Paul Gillin and David Strom of FIR B2B take the reins. Our guests are Todd Van Hoosear, a well-known social media figure in Boston and elsewhere, and Barbara Selvin, associate professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, where she created and teaches a course on the changing news industry.

* Within minutes of delaying a vote on the replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, President Trump placed calls to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa to spin the decision. These are the same publications the President recently branded as “enemies of the people.” What are we to make of his decision to reach out to them rather than Breitbart or Fox News, whom he has praised as being more reliable?
* Subscriptions surge for the ‘dishonest media’ after Trump’s attacks – Newspapers and magazines such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic and sites such as ProPublica and the ACLU are seeing print and online subscriptions surge in the wake of Trump’s victory. Could this be the silver lining in the “fake news” crisis?
* We could use one, because Nick Bolton writes in Vanity Fair that fake news is about to get even scarier than you ever dreamed. “Advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways.” This is a chilling piece. Maybe blockchain will help?
* A photo of an all-male White House panel discussing women’s health issues sparks anger, highlighting the power of imagery and the importance of thinking about your images might be interpreted before you post them.
* IBM, remote-work pioneer, is calling thousands of employees back to the office. In a dramatic change of course, the company that championed telecommuting is telling its U.S. marketing employees that they must now work from one of six locations in Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Boston, San Francisco or New York or seek employment elsewhere. Has the tide turned on the virtual office concept?
* How do you label audio promotions? Google wants to create promotions that aren’t ads for its voice-controlled assistant, but it got grief for an audio Plug for Disney that Google said wasn’t an ad.
* One thing’s for sure: native advertising is a thing. eMarketer says spending on native digital display ads will make up more than half of all digital display ad spending in the US this year. Are these ads diluting th the quality of editorial content that goes around them?
* Dan York’s report covers the launch of a Producer API for Twitter and <a href="https://blog.twitter.

FIR #80: New life for news outlets, fake news 2.0 and how the ‘like’ button ruined the internet

Shel Holtz was away on travel and so FIR correspondent Dan York stepped in as a guest host. Chip Griffin and Jen Phillips joined Dan for this week’s episode, which covered these stories…

* The Association of National Advertisers calls for independent ad data audits at Amazon, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter – but will any of the companies actually care? And are communicators looking at the wrong metrics, anyway?
* Global advertisers are pulling spending from Google / YouTube due to PR/reputation concerns about having their ads shown on videos they consider offensive – how does Google adjust? Who determines what is “offensive”?
* On that topic, Google’s latest algorithm changes are targeting offensive results and low-quality sites — should communicators pay attention? (Chip has a rather strong opinion here!)
* Articles about Snapchat are divided about whether it is a leader or it is failing, while competitors are copying Snapchat’s features — will it survive? (Chip had another very strong opinion here.)
* A Poynter article says that in Donald Trump’s America there is significant competition for investigative journalists – what role does investigative journalism play in media success and failure?
* European newsrooms are forming a united front against fake news — will it matter?
* And, of course, we had to discuss the recent court case in Maine that was decided based upon the lack of an Oxford comma…

This was also the first-ever “Made in New Hampshire” episode of FIR, with all three participants being in NH.
Connect with our guests on Twitter at @chipgriffin and @jenzings.
Links to the source material for this episode will are available on Contentle.
Join the FIR Gaggle for a chance to get a free copy of J. Kelly Hoey’s book, “Build Your Dream Network.”
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
About today’s guest co-hosts:
Chip Griffin, host of Chats with Chip and the Media Bullseye Roundtable, brings more than two decades of experience in the public relations arena, including service in public and private sector organizations. Chip is an entrepreneur, communicator, and writer. He currently serve as North American CEO of CARMA, a global media intelligence company with a presence in 43 countries worldwide. In his free time, Chip is an active American University alumni volunteer, as well as a baseball umpire and basketball referee. Chip lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two sons.

 Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips is the principal at 4L Strategies, consulting and providing content development for a variety of industries. She has worked in communications and public affairs for 20 years. Her background includes work in electoral politics, government, lobbying, and public affairs PR work. Jen lives in New Hampshire.
 
 Dan York has contributed a weekly “tech report” into the For Immediate Release podcast since 2005. A passionate advocate for the open Internet, Dan serves as Senior Manager, Content and Web Strategy, for the Internet Society, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet. Since the mid-1980’s Dan has been working with online communication technologies and helping businesses and organizations understand how to use and participate in those new media. Dan frequently presents at conferences,

FIR Live #19: Empowered employees, empowered customers

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