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Companies are urging employees to adopt AI—but a software rollout, training session, or announcement doesn’t necessarily prepare people for changes to their work. When expectations keep shifting, and the destination remains uncertain, how can organizations build trust and help employees move forward?

In episode 9 of On the Same Page, Shel and Mark explore AI adoption as a change management challenge and the role internal communicators should play. They discuss listening to employees, challenging leadership assumptions, and building a flexible approach to change—along with the gap between recognizing the need for change management skills and developing them.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hey, Mark, how’s your experience with AI these days?

Mark Dollins: It’s never-ending. I keep getting both excited and frustrated with it, but it’s all about learning, right?

Shel Holtz: It is. It’s about learning for a lot of employees as well. Many companies are still struggling to introduce AI and drive adoption in their organizations.

I was reading about the Financial Times’ AI transformation program in 2024. They started by listening. They surveyed employees and received 725 responses. What they found was that the biggest obstacle was a lack of time, and that helped shape their approach.

A lack of time isn’t resistance. When we’re asking people to adopt AI and integrate it into their workflows, we’re asking them to make a change. We tend to look for resistance, but not every challenge is resistance. How have you been thinking about change management and AI adoption, given your passion for change management and internal communications?

Mark Dollins: Ironically, one thing communicators have increasingly been doing over the last several years is using AI to become more productive. It’s already saving us time.

But I think professionals in this space increasingly understand that AI isn’t simply a technology rollout. It’s one of the biggest waves of change we need to step into, get in front of, and help manage.

Shel Holtz: I guess the question starts with our role in managing this change. Are we taking the lead? Are we trying to get that coveted seat at the table so we can influence it? Are we waiting for the training and IT departments to say, “Here’s the program. Communicate this and drive the change”? What should we be doing?

Mark Dollins: It’s a little of everything. In the research we’ve done—and we’ll talk more about this in another podcast—Jon Stemmle and I conduct an annual survey about communicators’ attitudes toward and uses of AI. We talk to a couple of hundred communicators around the world to understand what’s changing, what we’re working with, and what we’re struggling with.

We’re finding that communicators are getting a bigger seat at the table. We’re having more influence in setting governance and policies, which is good. We’re using AI more, but we aren’t using it for more strategic purposes.

The biggest thing we haven’t fully signed up for is treating AI as a change management initiative that we should help lead. We tend to view it as a technology rollout or a policy rollout connected to AI. But artificial intelligence is itself a massive change. We’re talking about seismic adjustments in how organizations work. That’s a space employee communicators should be stepping into, and some are beginning to do that.

Shel Holtz: I absolutely agree. The question is whether we’re being asked to help design the change or simply sell decisions that have already been made.

We should use the expertise we bring that others in the organization may not have to the same degree: identifying impacts on employees, testing leaders’ assumptions before a rollout, and listening.

But responsibility requires authority. We can’t resolve workload, staffing, or incentive problems through messaging. What decisions must we be able to influence if we’re going to be held accountable, to any degree, for AI adoption?

Mark Dollins: Even better, let’s not wait to be asked. Let’s step up and say, “We believe we can help this organization better manage this wave of change. Let’s figure out how.”

Some numbers provide context for what I call moving upstream. In 2024, about 45% of communicators reported being involved in shaping AI usage in their organizations. That rose to 70% last year and 76% this year. That’s a good sign. We’re saying we’re shaping it, although I’m not exactly sure how that’s happening in every organization.

Communicators aren’t just using new tools. We’re helping organizations explain, govern, and normalize new ways of working. That’s where change management comes in.

We asked communicators whether they view change management as a competency they should have. That figure rose from 73% in 2024 to 81% last year and is at 79% this year. That tells us this isn’t being treated as a fad. It’s more of a structural expectation.

We’re also seeing growing interest in training or certification to become more proficient at managing change through communications. Around 72–73% of this year’s respondents said AI requires significant change management communications. About 80% believe change management—which is different from change communications—is a competency they should acquire. And about 76% believe communicators should be involved in influencing AI use in their organizations.

There’s clear evidence that, as a global community of employee communicators, we know what we should be doing. The real question is whether we’re doing what needs to be done.

Shel Holtz: At some level, everything we communicate is change communication. We’re putting something out because we want something from people. We want them to do something new or different, stop doing something, do more of something, or think or believe something. All of that is change.

But when it’s a software rollout, the scope may be more contained. We’re adopting Workday as our HR and payroll software, and everyone needs to start using it. I don’t know how much of that requires the full Prosci process or whatever change management protocols you follow.

AI is different. What does the change look like at the end? One thing I learned when I began studying change communication—and I had a great mentor in Tudor Williams—was that you should be able to close your eyes and envision the outcome. I don’t think anybody can do that with AI yet. That presents an interesting challenge for a change program.

Mark Dollins: AI can be a tool for some change management and communication tactics, but we still need to understand the disciplines themselves.

The question we should ask is whether we really understand change management and how change communications works with it. Over the years, I’ve asked communicators that question, and I often hear, “Yes, I understand change communications. I put out organizational structure announcements, leadership changes, and executive updates.”

Then I ask, “What else went with that?” Often, there’s silence.

That doesn’t happen every time. Our community is getting better at this. But my experience is that many communicators don’t get into the specifics of the change management discipline.

What do I mean by that? Understanding organizational readiness for change, for example. Is the organization ready to make this change? Who are the executive sponsors? Who are the champions who will help lead it? Do we understand the detractors and barriers? Do we have governance and processes for addressing barriers when the people involved can’t reach a resolution?

Those are parts of change management that organizational communicators often aren’t taught when they learn how to communicate change.

Whether the topic is digital transformation, cultural transformation, or AI adoption, it’s deeper than simply a technology change. These aren’t one-and-done activities. They require sustained, focused, strategic communications and an understanding of stakeholders’ individual needs. Not everybody experiences change in the same way, and that understanding should inform our communication.

There’s far more to change management communications when it’s structured and aligned with the discipline of change management. Without that alignment, you can find yourself in a situation I’ve experienced: “Hey, Mark, we have a big change we want you to communicate.” I ask, “What’s the change management plan?” and get blank stares. Then someone says, “Why don’t you develop that?”

That’s why, more than 10 or 15 years ago, I took the time to become certified as a change management professional. I chose Prosci, one of several options. It changed how I viewed the relationship between change communications and change management. The training took about four days and was tremendously helpful.

I’m agnostic about which certification people choose. What matters is understanding the concepts we’ve discussed. That understanding helps us drive successful change through communications.

How’s that for getting on my soapbox?

Shel Holtz: That’s fine. I loved it. What we’ve seen in many organizations is almost the opposite of what you’re describing.

Initially, companies asked communicators to tell employees to experiment with AI, without much clarity about the purpose. Then we told people to use AI a lot. We got into this whole “token maxing” thing, where people were using so much that they blew through a company’s annual budget in a month, and organizations had to dial it back.

It’s hard to get people to buy into a change when you’re continually clawing back the messages you sent earlier. What are we asking employees to trust? What happens to the time they save? Will there be new expectations? Will roles change or disappear? Who gets development opportunities?

We shouldn’t simply accept the message we’re asked to deliver. Part of change communication is pressing leaders to explain what’s been decided, what’s still uncertain, and how employees will be involved.

Blanket assurances that AI won’t cost any jobs, or that it will completely transform the way we work, can make the job harder if we don’t have a plan, a vision, or an understanding of the outcomes.

Mark Dollins: Completely agreed. There’s a difference between being a tactical communicator who says, “We’re rolling out AI. Use it in these three ways,” and asking, before the message goes out, “And then what? Where is this going? What’s the longer-term vision for AI in this organization?”

I’ve had conversations with CEOs who have told me, “In less than a year, every role in our organization will have an AI component.” That’s fascinating, but how are you communicating it, and in what context? If every role has an AI component, what happens next? Will roles be redefined? Should employees expect that?

A responsible communicator, working with the CEO, CHRO, and other leaders, should say, “We can’t communicate only one phase of this. We need to think more broadly.”

It’s okay if some questions haven’t been answered. But let’s not promise that no jobs will ever go away because of AI. We can acknowledge that it’s possible while also explaining the opportunity for employees to learn technologies that expand their capabilities, wherever they are and wherever they go.

Ideally, employees can help us redefine their roles within the organization. That doesn’t always happen, but it’s an outcome worth working toward.

We need to be open about what we know and what we don’t: “We don’t know exactly where this technology will take us. Here’s where we are now, and here’s what we want you to explore so we can learn, improve, and help define the next chapter.”

Shel Holtz: I read about a company that brought together 100 employees, I think in Nashville. They identified challenges they faced in their jobs, grouped people with similar challenges, and had them vibe-code AI solutions. Rather than look for existing tools to buy—or rent, as is often the case—they built solutions to their own problems.

It was apparently successful. But I wondered whether it was a separate, one-off activity or part of a comprehensive strategy. Did employees know it was coming? Had they helped identify it as an approach they wanted to take?

I think it’s great that the company did it. I don’t know whether it was part of a broader change strategy. But I worry about one-off activities that aren’t integrated into a process where employees can see progress toward an articulated goal.

Mark Dollins: You’re describing exactly why change management creates value. It prompts those questions and discussions before communications go out.

Ideally, in that situation, people would have discussed the direction and addressed the questions: “This is one step in a multistep process of defining our future through AI.”

That’s where understanding change management comes into play. I’ll be candid: I don’t use every element of my training every time I help communicate a change. I put it in context. We may not need to go deeply into stakeholder assessment because much of that work has already been done. Or I may recognize that we don’t have executive sponsorship and that we need to address that weakness before moving forward.

It’s about understanding all the components of successful change management.

People sometimes hate hearing this, but communication should follow the change management plan. It shouldn’t have to define the whole plan. We should be able to say, “Here’s our plan for managing change. Now let’s determine how communications can best support it.”

We can become better change management practitioners. With the right credentials and experience, we may even lead the change effort. But especially when we’re getting started, we’ll probably need a partner who knows more about the discipline and who sees us as a partner as well.

Communication is the thread running across every element of change management. Without it, we’re done.

Shel Holtz: Try making a change without communication and see how that goes.

Mark Dollins: Without thoughtful communication. People communicate all the time, but without a strategic approach, their efforts can fail miserably.

Shel Holtz: It’s important to get involved early enough. We’ve said that not every employee difficulty with AI is resistance, but there may well be resistance. You won’t discover what it is unless you ask.

You can make assumptions, but I worry about relying on them. Our employee populations reflect the public to a large degree, and we know the range of public concerns about AI: the environmental impact of data centers, privacy and data security, even fears that it’s going to kill us all.

You can’t address resistance without understanding it. If a sizable group of employees is likely to resist the way management plans to introduce AI, you need to be able to say, “We should rethink this approach.” That won’t happen if we’re brought in too late.

Mark Dollins: Our survey also measured communicators’ skepticism about AI. Skepticism rose in 2026 after falling in 2025. Something happened between last year and this year that made us less trusting.

About 45% of respondents said they remained worried about accuracy and privacy. If communicators have those concerns, we can be certain that many of our colleagues do as well.

Resistance can have many sources, but as you said, you have to ask.

Shel Holtz: You have to ask, and you may need to acknowledge that these issues exist across society, not just within our company. Explain how we’re addressing them, how we plan to use AI, and what we consider ethical adoption.

I also think the plan needs to be a living, breathing thing. In many change programs, you know the outcome. With the Dow–DuPont merger, for example, you knew the endgame. We don’t know the endgame with AI.

We don’t know exactly how workflows will change. Many companies haven’t even gotten that far. Many haven’t prepared their data so AI can retrieve information appropriately as part of a knowledge management system.

This is a different animal. We need a sustainable, ongoing, flexible plan that can pivot as we get new information or frontier model companies release new capabilities. Many factors may require us to change direction. We need to do that strategically and consistently while maintaining employees’ trust that we know what we’re doing.

Mark Dollins: Not to mention emerging regulation. The EU is ahead of the United States in this area. Accountability and regulatory frameworks will be another influence on how we use AI.

When we talk about both struggling with AI and seeing its possibilities, we also have to recognize all the other influences taking shape.

There’s one other research finding I wanted to mention. We looked at whether employee communicators—people with employee or internal communications in their titles or roles—were becoming certified in change management.

We reviewed more than 500 public LinkedIn profiles and found a substantial disparity. Remember, 79% of our survey respondents said change management was a competency they needed. But in the LinkedIn profile sample, about 8% indicated that they were certified in change management.

There was also a difference by seniority. We saw figures around 10–15% for VPs or heads of internal communications, compared with 2–4% for individual contributors with employee or internal communications in their titles.

That suggests more senior communicators are recognizing the value of change management certification, while fewer people further down the talent pipeline are pursuing it. That concerns me.

I’ll go back to your earlier question, Shel: What do we do that isn’t related to change? That’s particularly true of internal communications, but I’d make the argument for external communications too. A new product, service, or person involves change.

Understanding what enables acceptance and the associated behavior feels like a natural part of our work. Why wouldn’t we want to understand that discipline if we’re going to be held accountable for communicating change and, in theory, the resulting behavior?

It was an interesting finding from those LinkedIn profiles.

Shel Holtz: It’s fascinating. You know I’m vice chair of the Global Communication Certification Council, and I’m trying to encourage communicators to become certified in communications. But, good heavens, you can have more than one set of letters after your name. They all provide value.

I appreciate the time, Mark.

Mark Dollins: Always fun, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Listeners, we’d love to hear about your AI adoption, change communication, and change management journeys. Let us know.

There were comments on our last episode, but I haven’t had a chance to pull them together. The next time we meet, we’ll discuss comments from that episode and this one before moving into our next topic.

Mark Dollins: Great. We’d love that.

Shel Holtz: See you then.

Mark Dollins: All right. Take care.

The post OTSP #9: The Uneven Introduction of AI to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 530 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. AI was supposed to put ghostwriters out of business. Instead, according to the Financial Times, something rather different is happening. LinkedIn is awash with generic AI-generated posts, and the flood of polished but forgettable content is creating new demand for human ghostwriters who can help executives sound human again. There’s a nice irony in that, but it also raises a question I keep coming back to: If I use AI to help write a blog post, a LinkedIn update, or an article published under my name, is AI effectively my ghostwriter?

Shel, you and I have touched on this territory before, most recently in FIR 526 in August, when we discussed Anthropic’s text watermarking. We argued that detecting whether AI was involved in writing something tells you remarkably little about who actually did the thinking. A more useful test is whether the author understands the argument, stands behind it, and can defend every sentence.

I developed that argument afterward in a blog post titled “So AI Helped Write It. Who Cares?” My point wasn’t that authorship doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s an important distinction between asking AI to do your thinking for you and using it to help express thinking that is yours.

Now, a Bloomberg Businessweek article adds another twist. It argues that, for many people at work, using AI to write is simply becoming normal. Writing isn’t necessarily their craft. It’s a means of communicating an idea, answering a customer, updating colleagues, or getting something done.

The article introduces another tension. Some businesses actively expect employees to use AI for writing because it saves time. But it also describes the opposite problem at one company, where AI-generated documents became polished, lengthy, and difficult to read. The CEO concluded that AI was making writing quicker for the sender but slower for the recipient—a point we touched on in our last discussion—and asked employees for rougher versions containing their actual thinking instead. There’s a novel idea.

That brings us back to ghostwriting. We accepted long ago that a CEO might put their name to words written by a communication professional, provided those words express what the CEO thinks. So, is AI-assisted writing fundamentally different?

For me, this raises several questions. If the ideas, argument, and judgment are yours, does it matter whether you, a ghostwriter, or an AI produced the sentences? Where is the boundary between assistance and substitution—editing your thoughts versus generating thoughts for you? In an environment where producing polished prose is becoming almost effortless, will distinctive thinking become more valuable than distinctive writing?

And would you feel differently upon discovering that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter?

Shel Holtz: Yes, it does matter. You have to consider the audience’s expectations. Those matter as much as the intentions of the person who drafted the speech, article, or whatever it might be.

Think about the difference between an operational update, a CEO’s personal account of a career failure, and a condolence message to an employee. Those messages could be accurate, carefully reviewed, and approved. On the other hand, readers could reasonably expect a particular level of personal involvement from the person whose name appears on them. I think that makes a difference.

But I’d like to step back for a minute and explore ghostwriting itself. I’ve known a couple of people who made their livings, or part of their livings, as ghostwriters. You knew the late Shel Israel, a very good friend of mine.

Neville Hobson: Sure.

Shel Holtz: He was a ghostwriter. He wrote books for people who didn’t know how to write, but he didn’t spend most of his time writing. His clients hired him because they liked his writing and his approach to getting to know them and their styles, so what he wrote sounded like them.

How did he do that? Through a lot of interviews—hours and hours, dozens of hours, on the phone and in person. He challenged the generalities he heard from clients and drew out experiences they might not have thought mattered. As an experienced ghostwriter, he understood which experiences would lend color to the manuscript and what readers would care about.

The Financial Times story opens up a more interesting possibility than simply saying humans write better. Perhaps the valuable service of ghostwriting was never just sitting there typing sentences. One person featured in the article said in a public response that AI remains integral to his business, but people still handle the conversations and relationships.

Another person I know ghostwrites for an online service. Someone signs up and says, “I want to write a memoir. It’s only going to go to 10 people in my family, but I want somebody to write it.” The service matches that person with a writer. There’s a prescribed number of meetings, but they talk for hours. The writer takes notes and produces a first draft.

If I take all those notes and everything I’ve learned about the subject, understand their writing or speaking style, and incorporate that into what I ask AI to produce or help me produce, am I still doing the lion’s share of the work as a ghostwriter? I think I am, especially if the person tasked with doing this isn’t a writer in the first place.

We’ve talked before about people in organizations who might be assigned this work but can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Writing wasn’t what they studied, and it isn’t their area of expertise. If AI can help them use the material they’ve gathered by doing the work of a ghostwriter, I have less of a problem with it.

Neville Hobson: I have a similar view. The FT article includes a good quote from Bernie Hogan, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. The journalist asked whether LinkedIn ghostwriters could help cut through AI slop.

The part that caught my attention was his point that the message behind a post can still be sincere, even if you didn’t write it. He compares it to buying a greeting card: Someone else wrote the words, but the sentiment can still reflect what you mean. I agree with that.

His further point is where the rubber meets the road. Because we can’t tell when a LinkedIn post is ghostwritten, is it authentic in readers’ eyes, even if it broadly reflects what the person posting it believes?

That sums up the situation we’re in. I don’t think there will ever be agreement on the broad question of whether it’s wrong for someone else—or an AI—to write something you publish under your name. We’ve discussed the details many times: Is it your thinking? Did you contribute to it? Or did you give AI some material, ask it to write something, and post the result without further involvement?

It isn’t a simple question. I keep coming back to this: Would you feel differently if you discovered that someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human ghostwriter rather than ChatGPT? If so, why? I’d particularly like critics of AI-assisted writing to answer that.

Shel Holtz: It would be interesting. I like the greeting-card analogy. The greeting was written by a copywriter at Hallmark, American Greetings, or somewhere else, but you don’t just grab the first card off the rack. People spend 15 or 20 minutes looking.

Neville Hobson: You might.

Shel Holtz: You might, but I’ve never seen anybody in the greeting-card aisle just grab a card and go. They pull one off the shelf, open it, read it, put it back, and try another. They’re looking for the one that expresses the sentiment they have. Then, when they get home, they write a little more. I would consider that the human in the loop.

Human ghostwriting deserves the same scrutiny as AI ghostwriting. Someone assigned to write a LinkedIn post can manufacture the persona of the person they’re writing for. They can avoid the hard work, fabricate a profound message, or give someone credit for expertise they don’t have.

An AI-assisted post grounded in a leader’s actual experience, with that experience shared as part of the process, could represent the person more faithfully than a human ghostwriter does. So, are we defending authentic communication, or are we defending an outsourcing arrangement we’re already familiar with?

Neville Hobson: I think we’re defending authentic communication, but the definition of “authentic” seems to be a movable feast.

I don’t believe we’ll resolve this argument in the near future. Where I land—and I think we discussed this in episode 526—is that you, as the human, need to be confident in your thinking and in how the text expresses it. If you are, you can comfortably continue what you’re doing.

Apply that to a human ghostwriting a LinkedIn post for a CEO, senior manager, or someone else. The post will appear on that person’s profile under their name. That’s common practice; I know many people who do it.

The question isn’t simply whether the manager or CEO is happy with it and praises you. Are you satisfied with it? Does it meet your standard for authenticity?

You might outline your ideas, share them with your AI assistant, explain the assignment, and ask it to suggest the best way to tell the story. You might then ask for a proposed draft. It comes back, and you think, “This is a reasonable start. I can work with this.”

You might edit it extensively and create something fresh, then pass it back to your AI assistant. It might suggest three changes. You could decide the second suggestion is useful and incorporate that. That process resembles what you might do with a human ghostwriter.

So, my question is: What’s the difference? Does it matter? I’ve been accused of being terribly naïve for asking that, but I don’t believe it matters if you’ve satisfied those questions about authenticity, honesty, and confidence in what you’ve created with AI’s help.

Others will disagree strongly. I still see absolutist comments on LinkedIn from people saying you can always tell when something was written by AI. I used to ask how they could tell, but I’ve stopped because the responses often suggest they don’t really know. I don’t believe you can reliably tell.

I particularly enjoy examples where somebody submits a passage by Charles Dickens to an AI detector and it comes back as 98% AI-written. Or somebody tests an article they wrote for a magazine in 1995, and the detector says the same thing. What can you do with that?

Let me ask you, Shel: Would you feel differently if you discovered someone’s LinkedIn post was written by a human rather than an AI?

Shel Holtz: Generally, no, assuming they used the AI well.

I’ll disagree with you on one thing, but only to an extent. You can sometimes recognize AI writing when it was given a weak prompt and defaults to a familiar approach. But that’s different from giving it detailed information about the person whose byline will appear, helping it understand their writing style and thinking, sharing other things they’ve written, and providing guidance on what the piece should say. You might even interview the person and share the transcript.

We’ve had this conversation since the early days of blogs, when people debated whether communicators could acceptably ghostwrite for CEOs. I remember where we came down on it. If the CEO calls and says, “Write a thought-leadership post for me on this topic,” then hangs up and leaves you to invent it from scratch, that isn’t acceptable.

If you go into the CEO’s office, interview them, and turn your notes into a post, that’s different. Bill Marriott used to record his thoughts and give the recording to his communicators. They didn’t transcribe it word for word because spoken remarks needed editing to work in writing. But the substance was his.

Did he sit there and type it? Was every word one he had chosen? No, but it was his post. In that case, ghostwriting is perfectly acceptable.

Today, AI can assist with that process. If we maintain the practices that make ghostwriting effective, authentic, and ethical, I have no problem with it. It doesn’t matter to me whether a human or AI helped produce the wording, as long as it reads well and reflects what the person would have said. That person also needs to approve it. We haven’t mentioned that yet.

Neville Hobson: I agree. The process you described, using Shel Israel as an example—interviewing the subject, spending hours preparing, and understanding their thinking—would still apply.

I particularly like the idea of using voice-recording tools that connect to Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant. You could ask the CEO to do a brain dump on the topic, as unstructured as they feel comfortable making it. The recording uploads, you get a transcript, and AI can help interpret or organize it and suggest where you might take the story.

That can save a tremendous amount of time compared with doing everything the traditional way. There’s a benefit to AI assistance, and I hope professional communicators make the most of those tools.

Of course, some people will skim the output or post it as it is. We’re talking about people who bring their professional skills and judgment to the work. Based on the criteria you outlined, I wouldn’t feel differently about a post written with AI assistance. If those steps had been followed, I’d be comfortable with it.

Yet I can think of half a dozen people who would strongly disagree. This seems to be a never-ending discussion.

Shel Holtz: It is. One other thing we haven’t discussed is disclosure.

I don’t think most ghostwriting requires disclosure. I don’t think Shel Israel’s name appeared on the books he ghostwrote. My friend Bill, who writes memoirs through the online service, doesn’t have his name on them either. Those memoirs have a small distribution: “This is my memoir for my children and grandchildren.”

But you may remember an instance when a company wanted a PR agency to tweet on the CEO’s behalf while he was at a conference. The agency initially refused, saying, “We’re not you. We’re not going to pretend to be you.” They eventually agreed that roughly every fifth tweet would remind readers that the agency was tweeting on the CEO’s behalf.

You have to think about where people might feel deceived and where the writing arrangement simply doesn’t matter.

Neville Hobson: I agree. That’s our latest 50 cents’ worth of opinion on this topic. We’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re a ghostwriter listening to this, we’d especially love to hear what you think. It’s an ongoing conversation.

Shel Holtz: And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #530: Has AI Created a Demand for Human Ghostwriters? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

AI has evolved enough now that one-shotting entire deliverables is tempting, and many people online claim to be doing just that. In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss why that’s a bad idea, and how you can train your AI tool to give you less slop-like content.

Chip is fed up with receiving one too many pieces of material with no human thought applied to them, not in preparation, not in editing, not even in the decision to hit send. His take on the broader one-shotting trend is that when the result is actually good, it’s rarely a true one-shot. The person usually spent months feeding their AI tool context first, the same way a good off-the-cuff article draws on years of accumulated expertise.

Gini suggests treating AI like a capable intern. You wouldn’t send an intern’s first draft straight to a client, so don’t do that with AI either. She describes going back and forth with her tools so much that Claude once asked her to batch her edits instead of making them one at a time. Chip pushes back on the intern comparison, arguing that with enough context and consistent feedback, AI has moved closer to a capable mid-level colleague. That feedback loop is also the focus of Gini’s internal training program, Slack sessions where the team is currently learning to push back, reject, and refine AI output instead of just accepting it.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that because it needs your guidance, AI isn’t worth using. Being the human in the loop doesn’t make you the savior of your business. Owners who rely solely on humans without using AI are making as grave of a mistake as people who think they can replace themselves entirely with AI. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 316: Agency owners need to manage AI like employees 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 and the Institute of Directors.

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.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, October 26.

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

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 529 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

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

Shel Holtz: Neville, it is wonderful to be back together with you again.

Neville Hobson: It’s been a bit of a strange few weeks because of some health issues I’m working through. They’ve affected my availability to record our midweek shows. I was particularly keen to make sure we could record the topics we’re discussing today. Hopefully, by the time our next monthly episode comes around, I’ll be close to normal again.

Shel Holtz: My fingers are certainly crossed. To accommodate all of this, we’re recording a shortened version of our monthly episode: two topics plus Dan York’s report. We’ll also have a quick recap of the two episodes since our last monthly show.

Neville Hobson: Episode 527 was a particularly interesting long-form show with six topics. Our lead story was about a senior manager who discovered that AI was rejecting job applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason was that applicants had graduated from college before 2010, even though the instruction was to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager saw no liability issue because AI had made the decision. If I recall correctly, she said, “We’re okay. We have no liability because the AI made the decision.” If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious.

We also discussed an expert witness who used ChatGPT to prepare a report for a legal case. The prompts he used—not just the AI’s output—were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence. You have to check these things.

Then, in episode 528, we talked about fandom. We explored the differences among fans, audiences, and communities. A fan’s identity can become tied to a team, artist, product, or other object of passion. It’s no surprise that marketers want their brands to inspire that kind of excitement, but not everything has the potential to develop a fan base. We received a couple of comments about that episode.

Shel Holtz: Brian Kilgore in Toronto wrote, “Good show. In my life, I’ve worn Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy clothes, an MG T-shirt, and a sweatshirt I designed using ASCII code as the hook for CNCP telecommunications. One cap that I’ve lost says ‘Nikon Most Excellent.’” Brian has been a fan of quite a few things.

We also received an audio comment from our tech reporter, Dan York.

Dan York: Hey, Shel and Neville. I had a comment on episode 528. I found myself cringing when I heard marketers talking about how to grow a fandom. You have fans, and marketers should find where those fans are and engage with them. They shouldn’t be trying to build a fandom.

You were right that fandom can be part of someone’s identity. My neighbors across the street are big Mazda Miata owners. They each have one, and they go on rallies and tours with other owners. It’s a community and a group, but being Miata owners is also part of who they are. To its credit, the local Mazda dealership supports that community.

There’s a lot of fandom on Reddit, too. I own a Hyundai Santa Cruz, a little vehicle that’s rather like an SUV with a truck bed on the back. Its subreddit has people sharing photos, asking questions, and talking about what they’re doing with their vehicles. Some are passionate about these little trucks. I’ve seen that with other vehicles as well.

Marketers and communicators, please don’t talk about trying to create a fandom. Find the fans where they are.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I couldn’t agree more. If there’s a fan base around something you make or represent, by all means, see how you can support it and become more visible to it. Trying to build a fan base around something that doesn’t naturally inspire one can feel artificial.

I hadn’t thought to look for those communities on Reddit. I have a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and as soon as we’re done recording, I’m going to look for a Mach-E subreddit. I have to believe there is one. I appreciate the comment.

I also want to mention Circle of Fellows. Episode 133, part two of our conversation on AI and the leadership moment for the communication profession, should be available by the time you hear this. Adrian Cropley returned, and we were joined by Mary Hills, Cyrus Mavalwala, and Robin McCasland.

Our next episode is Thursday, October 29, at 6 p.m. Eastern. That hour accommodates Zora Artis, who will be joining us for a discussion of connection and leadership. Three other Fellows will join us as well. You’ll find details on the FIR Podcast Network website.

Neville Hobson: Let’s talk about crisis communication—or, more precisely, governance. When we talk about crisis communication, many of us picture what happens once a crisis is underway: the holding statement, the spokesperson, media response, frantic internal calls, whether the CEO should go public, and how quickly the organization says something. But a new handbook from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ Crisis Communications Network, published with the UK’s Institute of Directors, argues that this way of thinking starts far too late.

The handbook, Crisis Communication for Boards: A Handbook for Good Governance, argues that crisis communication belongs within governance, risk management, and organizational resilience. By the time a crisis breaks, many factors that determine how well an organization responds have already been decided.

Has the board understood the risks? Has it treated reputation as a strategic risk? Are escalation routes in place? Can uncomfortable information move quickly from the front line to senior management and the board? Have stakeholder relationships been built before they’re urgently needed? Has anyone rehearsed making decisions quickly under scrutiny with incomplete or conflicting information?

The handbook’s point is that crisis management begins long before a crisis hits, and boards should own it as part of their responsibility for organizational resilience. Communication runs through crisis management because it shapes how events are understood, how decisions are interpreted, and whether trust is maintained or lost.

One line early in the handbook captures the argument: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.” That shifts the communicator’s role. If communications is brought in only after management has made its decisions, when the organization is already under pressure, the communicator starts at a disadvantage. Senior communicators should be involved earlier to help boards understand how decisions may be perceived, where stakeholder concerns are emerging, which assumptions may be wrong, and where the organization’s behavior may be creating reputational risk.

That means treating communications as an intelligence function as well as a messaging function. The handbook emphasizes horizon scanning, stakeholder relationships, and the flow of information throughout the organization. Emerging risks increasingly cross legal, regulatory, HR, operations, technology, and communications boundaries. Communicators can help boards understand what’s happening and what it may mean for trust, legitimacy, and reputation.

The handbook is blunt about the consequences of getting this wrong. Poor or delayed communication can itself become a reputational risk. Minor incidents can escalate, information can become trapped in silos, and boards can lose touch with what employees, customers, and other stakeholders are saying. Once trust is damaged, recovery can take years.

It also addresses AI, cyber risk, misinformation, and the speed at which reputational issues spread. With AI, it asks familiar governance questions: Who decided? Who verified? What accountability was in place? Technology can change the nature and speed of a crisis, but it doesn’t remove the board’s responsibility for decisions.

The handbook goes further, arguing that strategic communication belongs inside the governance structure, with access to the board and potentially representation at board level. A board that waits until a crisis to engage communications has already lost some of the ground on which trust is built.

So, Shel, have we been using the term “crisis communication” too narrowly? Is it about what you say once a crisis happens, or about how the organization is governed before it happens?

Shel Holtz: I think the answer is yes. Communication has to happen during a crisis, but it can’t be the work of a department brought in to clean up afterward. It has to be woven into the organization’s approach to crisis governance. That isn’t solely a communications function.

The question of having a “seat at the table”—a term you know I hate—matters if an organization doesn’t take crisis preparedness seriously. Some leaders think, “We’re fine. We don’t have crises. If one happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” If you can’t get access to leadership to make the case for crisis governance, then that lack of access is a problem.

This is timely for me because I’m helping develop a crisis management plan. We’re calling it that rather than a crisis communication plan. I’m not suggesting you can necessarily manage every aspect of a crisis, but the plan needs a name. We’re developing it by committee, and in this case, that’s a strength. Crisis governance requires active participation from several parts of the organization. Communications can’t wave a document when a crisis hits and announce, “Here’s the plan, everybody.” People need to have helped develop it, understood it, and practiced it.

Our committee includes a senior operations leader, our general counsel, our vice president of best practices, and the head of safety. They all have a say in how we approach crisis governance. Horizon scanning falls largely to me in communications, although leadership listens when something comes to us through our monitoring service or another channel.

The plan also identifies who should convene on the crisis team based on the nature of the event. You need different expertise for an operational crisis than for a digital security crisis. Those teams need practice to develop the muscle memory to respond well.

As our friend Philippe Borremans would say, we’re in an era of polycrisis. You may face several dimensions of one crisis at once, or two unrelated crises that begin to intersect. Adversaries can see what’s happening and take advantage of it. I found an example in our industry that started as a safety issue, became a legal issue, then a financial one, and ultimately put the company out of business. The ability to pivot quickly has to be built into both governance and training.

That’s why tabletop exercises matter. Give the team a realistic scenario, put people through their paces, and introduce complications that force them to adapt. Ideally, you would do that four times a year. I don’t know how you build muscle memory if it’s merely an annual exercise people feel obliged to complete.

None of this sits solely within a communications department’s purview. Communications informs the communication dimensions, but leadership and the other functions have to prepare together. It cannot begin with a call to communications saying, “We’ve got a crisis. Help.”

Neville Hobson: Another point that stood out to me is that communicators should challenge decisions, not merely explain them. The handbook presents senior communicators as sources of stakeholder intelligence and constructive challenge. They can help boards anticipate how decisions will be interpreted, spot emerging reputational risks, and counter groupthink. That goes well beyond creating messages.

If the communicator enters the room only after a decision has been made, have we misunderstood the role? Sometimes the most valuable contribution is to say, “You may not want to do this in the first place.”

Shel Holtz: That connects to identifying issues before they become crises. I can’t remember the exact wording, but I recall a thought from the IABC Excellence Study: A crisis is what an organization faces when it fails at issues identification and management. If you see an issue coming and act, you may keep it from becoming a full-blown crisis.

One definition I use for a crisis is that it can become existential. If it spins out of control, it can affect your ability to do business. The organizations that say, “We’ve never had one; things are going great,” may be particularly unprepared when a crisis arrives.

Our plan includes holding statements—not just one, but several for different circumstances—that can be revised and issued quickly. Delay can look evasive. Victims, adversaries, and others may speak first, and that first account can become the version people remember. Then you have to overcome an impression that has already taken hold.

Even if all you can say is, “We’ve just learned of this and are looking into it,” you can tell people when to expect an update. If you don’t have more information at that point, say you’re continuing to investigate and give them another update time. Give people a reason to turn to you for reliable information.

Neville Hobson: The handbook is worth reading rather than skimming. We’ll link to the PDF on the CIPR website in the show notes. It includes case studies and a toolkit that may be useful in your planning. And I’ll repeat that line: “You cannot communicate your way out of a crisis that you behaved your way into.”

Shel Holtz: Self-inflicted crises are among the hardest to handle. In some crises, the organization is a victim too, even if others are harmed along the way.

One last thought: Many crisis plans fail to include employees among the stakeholders they need to communicate with. Employees can be your strongest advocates and supporters during a crisis. If you equip them with accurate information, they may be able to answer questions from clients, vendors, partners, consultants, and others they work with.

Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and FIR listeners around the world. It’s Dan York on a glorious autumn day in northwest Vermont. I’m drinking warm apple cider and will soon head to an orchard for apple cider doughnuts.

I want to talk about three things happening online. First is an effort announced this past week to close the language gap in AI systems. On September 21, the Gates Foundation announced a five-year commitment with about 60 organizations to make AI services available in more languages.

More than 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, but most online content is in perhaps seven to 10 languages. AI training data and interfaces are concentrated in even fewer. As part of its Goalkeepers report, the Gates Foundation looked at what’s needed for more people to benefit from AI, and language is a major piece of that.

My employer, the Internet Society, signed on, as did the Coalition on Digital Impact, or CODI, whose board I sit on. CODI is a nonprofit focused on helping people navigate the internet in their own languages. There’s nothing concrete to report yet, but I think this is an exciting development. I’ll share more in the months ahead, including ways people might get involved. Everyone who chooses to use AI should be able to do so in their own language.

My second topic is video. Bluesky now allows uploads of videos up to 10 minutes long. We’ll see whether that encourages more people to make videos there.

YouTube also held its Made on YouTube event on September 23 and announced a range of updates. They include ways to customize the feed on your home page, an Ask YouTube tool for recommendations, more editing tools for Shorts, and features for creating vertical microdramas. YouTube is also adding live-streaming capabilities that appear aimed at competing with Twitch, including new ways for hosts to interact. It says live automatic dubbing into multiple languages is coming by 2027. There’s a lot for creators and communicators who work with video to explore.

I’ve also been following smart glasses. I’m intrigued by their possibilities but concerned about privacy. Cameras built into glasses can be used to record people inappropriately, including women who have not consented. At the same time, I’ve seen how helpful the technology could be for people with disabilities. Someone who is blind, for example, might use smart glasses to navigate a store and learn what’s on the shelves.

That promise comes with difficult questions. You may not know whether the person wearing Ray-Ban smart glasses nearby is livestreaming. Meta has announced more glasses, including a future VR model that sounds closer to goggles than ordinary eyewear. Snap has also announced new augmented-reality Spectacles, with a price around $2,200. Meta has introduced an audio-only option, which may address some concerns about cameras. I’m interested in what these devices can do, but I remain concerned about the privacy implications.

Finally, Threads has announced podcast tools intended to help creators share shows, bring listeners back, and start conversations. They include profile banners, episode link cards, transcript and guest cards, new-episode reminders, and podcast insights. I have a Threads account but don’t use it much anymore. Still, if you’re a podcaster who uses Threads, these tools may be worth a look.

I’ll send it back to you. I need to buy some apple cider doughnuts. Bye for now.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, Dan. I’ve also been following the smart-glasses announcements. Meta’s glasses were around for a while before they developed a stigma, but that stigma has become real. You may remember Google Glass and people being called “Glassholes” for wearing it in public. Something similar seems to be happening with camera-equipped Meta glasses.

A version without cameras strikes me as a smart move. I can see the value of glasses that display turn-by-turn directions or information about what I’m looking at. When I travel internationally and encounter a sign in another language, I pull out my phone and use Google Lens to translate it. Having that translation appear in my glasses would be wonderful. There are many useful things AI glasses could do without intruding on other people.

As for recording, people already use devices such as Plaud and Fieldy. If you ask permission or let people know you’re recording, I don’t see a major issue. I hope AI glasses develop further, though I’m not inclined to buy a pair from Meta.

I’ve also been reading about Meta’s new VR glasses. Initially, I was enthusiastic. I use a Meta Quest 3 mainly to work out with an app called Supernatural. There’s a wonderful story behind Supernatural that we should discuss on the podcast one day. I wanted to know whether my Quest library would work with the new glasses, and apparently it will. I also wondered whether glasses would stay on while I’m jumping around during a workout, and the answer seems to be yes. But then I saw the $1,200 price. People complained that the Quest 3 was expensive at $500. I won’t be rushing out to buy the new device. I’ll see what people say after it’s been out for a while; my Quest 3 works just fine.

Great report, Dan. Thank you.

Dr. Eleni Nicola is described as an art therapist from Cyprus. She has been quoted more than 30 times in recent months: in Forbes on resetting your home office, Vice on what color to paint your walls to calm an anxious dog, Glamour on crying therapy, and Parade on the right way to retire. Different outlets have called her a clinical psychologist, an art therapist, or a creative wellness expert.

The problem is that she doesn’t appear to exist. Press Gazette reported that an image detector rated her profile photo 10 out of 10 for being artificial and her quotes as 100% AI-generated. Her LinkedIn profile was created late last year despite claims of a long career. She isn’t listed by the Art Therapy Credentials Board, which lists thousands of art therapists.

Every one of her online profiles links to the same paint-by-numbers kit retailer, DeVincify, where she is presented as an “expert in residence.” This has become a business model. A quote in Forbes brings a link from a high-authority news site. That can improve search rankings, and rankings can drive sales. SEO operators are building fake personas as part of link-building campaigns. When Press Gazette asked DeVincify to verify her, the company’s statement about taking the matter seriously was itself identified as AI-generated. At the time of publication, her profile was still active.

This is far bigger than one case. Press Gazette has identified more than a thousand articles across outlets including Mail Online, Metro, The Sun, The Mirror, HuffPost UK, Yahoo, and The Independent that relied partly or entirely on fake experts. More than 600 were traced to a single company. One fictitious psychologist was quoted hundreds of times before anyone established that she wasn’t real.

The fakes aren’t limited to sources. Tech sites have pulled articles attributed to finance writers whom Press Gazette couldn’t verify. One claimed a Deloitte career that Deloitte has no record of; another used a headshot that appears to belong to a computer repair technician in the United States.

Dan Simon, who runs the journalist-sourcing platform Qwoted, says the platform handles more than 15 violations a day and blocks about 50 prospective clients from registering each day. As he put it, “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire.” The combinations include real agencies with fake experts, real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts.

David Higgerson at Reach, publisher of The Mirror, said agencies Reach regularly works with had supplied fake experts without realizing it. They had sourced the quotes in good faith. That makes PR both a victim and a vector. If an agency fails to verify the experts it puts forward, it can launder fakes into the news.

These are things we need to catch before publication. A LinkedIn profile is no longer enough to establish that someone is real. Reach has whitelisted hundreds of PR firms, built an AI tool called The Detective to assess whether spokespeople are genuine, and added another layer of verification for people quoted on health or money. Qwoted is introducing video verification. One platform requires responses to be recorded live on camera. Another stopped offering open access because verifying everyone would otherwise have threatened its business.

Simple checks still help. Ask for a five-minute call. Ask the person to respond to a specific photo request. If they claim a professional credential, check the relevant registry. One supposed expert stopped responding when asked for a photo. Another was exposed when an agency checked a WhatsApp profile picture and found that it belonged to a man doing SEO for a recipe blog.

Neville, what else can an honest communicator do to avoid perpetuating quotes from fake experts?

Neville Hobson: I was surprised by how readily fake experts were accepted by major media outlets. I remember a case involving The Telegraph a few months ago. I can’t recall the details, but it published something false, then removed it and apologized. Why wasn’t it checked first?

We make the same argument about people using AI-generated content without checking it, but source verification is even more fundamental. I don’t know precisely how every newsroom chooses and verifies the people it quotes. Clearly, though, something is seriously amiss if this is happening on an industrial scale.

We may need stronger ways to prove digital identity, comparable in some respects to the checks involved in applying for a passport or, in my case as a school governor, undergoing a criminal-records check. Informal methods aren’t working, and manual checks are difficult to scale. The people creating fakes can scale their efforts. We may have to give up some of the casualness with which we’ve approached verification.

Shel Holtz: One detail that struck me was that this involved a paint-by-numbers company. If a company selling paint kits is doing this, who else is? We tend to picture shady crypto operators or other familiar bad actors. But anyone trying to sell something and gain an SEO advantage might be tempted.

A journalist’s credibility is at risk when a quoted expert turns out not to exist. News organizations need a process for vetting sources, and they should tell readers what that process is. PR people need one too. If you use a fake expert’s quote to support a press release or offer that person to a reporter, why would that reporter trust you again after discovering the deception?

This reminds me of a story we discussed years ago about a purported bank robbery in Texas. A local publication reported it, a larger outlet picked it up, wire services followed, and it spread through news sites, television, and radio. The original story was fake. Each outlet assumed the previous one had checked it.

Now the assumption is, “This person has ‘Dr.’ before their name and a LinkedIn profile, so they must be legitimate.” That is woefully inadequate. We need processes to catch these fabrications before we send them into the world.

Neville Hobson: That’s the issue. It doesn’t make much sense for every media outlet to build a different verification process. That won’t scale. There may be a role for independent services whose job is to verify that people are who they claim to be.

Imagine a PR firm with a strong reputation for providing knowledgeable spokespeople. If just one turns out to be fake, doubts could arise about everyone the firm has supplied. Firms need a way to bolster their own credibility and give journalists and clients confidence in the people they put forward. AI will only make this problem worse. It’s unfortunate, but we’ve reached a point where verification is essential.

Shel Holtz: I like the idea of vendors offering verification as a service. It’s also an example of new work arising as AI changes existing jobs. In the meantime, a five-minute video call or a specific photo request can help establish that an individual is real. Those checks may not scale across thousands of sources, but they are steps people can take while better systems are developed.

Ultimately, we need scalable solutions. This affects reputation and trust, particularly if people act on advice that was fabricated simply to sell a paint-by-numbers kit.

Neville Hobson: Amazing.

Shel Holtz: That’s our report for today. We would love to hear your comments. Audio comments are especially welcome—you heard one today. Send us an MP3 of up to three minutes, or record a message directly on the FIR website by clicking the “Send Voicemail” tab on the right side of the page.

You can also comment where we post episode announcements, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, or leave a comment in the show notes at FIRPodcastNetwork.com. We’ll find it, and you can be part of the conversation.

Ratings and reviews mean a great deal to us, too. Wherever you get your podcasts, we’d be grateful if you would rate and review the show.

We plan to record our next monthly episode on Saturday, October 24.

Neville Hobson: That’s right, and we’ll publish it on Monday.

Shel Holtz: Monday, October 26. As for shorter midweek episodes, we’ll see how Neville is feeling. If you subscribe to the show, new episodes will appear in your feed as soon as they’re available, without your having to wait for an announcement. And that’s a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #529: Fake Quotes from Fake Experts Find Their Way Into Top-Tier Media appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Last month, a panel of IABC Fellows shared their observations on the results of a recent AI-focused survey conducted by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management (Global Alliance). This month, a fresh panel (with Adrian Cropley returning) will pick up the conversation where the August panel left off, exploring various aspects of the role communication professionals will play as AI continues to evolve, along with the challenges and opportunities it presents to organizations of all kinds.

Joining Adrian and moderator Shel Holtz are Mary Hills, Robin McCasland, and Cyrus Mavalwala.

Catch Part 1 of the discussion.

About the Panel

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.

Mary Hills, ABC, IABC Fellow, Six Sigma, FCSCE serves as MBA Faculty in Benedictine University’s Goodwin College of Business, teaching brand and marketing management. Her work in marketing, finance and organizational structure and management naturally brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her students.

Mary’s professional career includes work at large, publicly traded corporations in the financial sector and at closely held, middle-market companies.  Her work includes time at Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Whiteco Advertising, NiSource, Northern Trust, Unilever, and Zebra Technologies. As a member of strategic management teams, her work includes research, risk analysis, and strategic planning for product launches, market expansion, and change and crisis management

Mary’s AI work began in 2012 supporting a start-up’s AI product development at Purdue Technology Center and Research Park of NWI. Most recently, she completed AI Usage and Guidelines in Marketing Research for MBA students in her brand and marketing class.

Robin McCasland, IABC Fellow, SCMP, is Senior Director of Corporate Communications for Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). She leads her department’s CommTech initiative, using AI and emerging technologies to deliver productivity gains and build differentiated communication capabilities that shape business decisions and outcomes. Robin also leads the internal communications team and the employee listening program, demonstrating to senior leaders how employee and executive communication add value to the business’s bottom line. Previously, Robin excelled in leadership roles in communication for Texas Instruments, Dell, Tenet Healthcare, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

Robin is a past IABC chairman and has served in numerous association leadership roles for more than 30 years. She was honored in 2023 and 2021 by Ragan Communications/PR Daily as one of the Top Women Leaders in Communication. She’s also received IABC Southern Region and IABC Dallas Communicator of the Year honors. Robin is a frequent presenter at communication and HR conferences. She is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and a Leadership Texas alumnus. Robin resides in Dallas.

Cyrus Mavalwala, ABC, MC, IABC Fellow, is a sought-after communication strategist who leads a team of trusted advisors that executives rely on to capture, own, and sustain mindshare with the people that matter most.

After senior roles at global PR agencies, Cyrus founded Advantis Communications in 2002. Advantis’ proprietary frameworks operationalize AI, elevate social media, and integrate video to advance thought leadership and earn relevance, influence, and trust. These frameworks have been cited in news media, industry, and academia. Cyrus helps communication teams apply AI responsibly to improve workflows, increase effectiveness, and amplify impact.

Through Act Like an Agency™, Cyrus leads ALA faculty to elevate communication teams from tacticians to trusted advisors. An operating system for the modern communication function, Act Like an Agency enables in-house teams to operate with the confidence, discipline, and influence of strategic business partners.

A co-creator of the Digital Strategy and Communications Management Certificate at the University of Toronto, Cyrus brings his strategic perspective and practical frameworks to classrooms, boardrooms, and stages across North America.

Cyrus brings deep governance experience through his service with IABC at the local, regional, and international levels. He has judged industry awards and received more than 30 honors for communication excellence across local, national, and international programs.

The post Circle of Fellows #133: AI and the Communication Leadership Moment, Part 2 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Employee engagement is often treated as a goal — or worse, as a standalone annual survey score that needs to be nudged upward to placate the CEO. But engagement is not an end in itself. It is a condition that makes employees more likely to flag problems, share knowledge, question bad instructions, help colleagues, and contribute discretionary effort. Measuring it can be valuable, but only if an organization asks the right questions, receives honest answers, and acts on what it learns.

In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins examine what employee engagement really means, the limitations of standardized surveys, and why disengagement is a leading indicator while turnover is a lagging one. They also explore the role communicators can play — without assuming responsibility for factors they cannot control — and why equipping managers to listen, provide feedback, and translate organizational messages for their teams may be one of Communication’s most effective contributions.

Links from this episode:

Raw Transcript:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

But you and I have a very different orientation to engagement in the world of employee communication, and I thought we could talk about that. I’m going to start with something fundamental that a lot of people struggle with: defining it. There’s a big-picture version of engagement, but for employee communicators, what we need to consider can be very specific to an organization or even to a person within that organization. What is your 30,000-foot view?

Shel Holtz:

I’ve also heard that engagement means bringing discretionary effort to the job—going above and beyond. Of all the definitions I’ve heard, one I like is the analogy to a car. If the transmission is engaged, the car is moving. If the transmission is disengaged, it’s idling. How do you want your organization to be moving? You want it going forward, not standing still.

Before we jump into this discussion in more detail, I want to invite everybody watching or listening to share your comments with us. You can do that in the show notes, where there’s a field for comments, or wherever we post updates announcing a new episode. We would love to discuss your comments in an upcoming episode.

Mark Dollins:

Moving on to the broader topic of engagement, I think about some of the studies that have been done. Gallup, obviously, spends a lot of time focusing on the details of employee engagement. This year, it released a report saying that about 20% of the global workforce was engaged at work last year. In 2022, its comparison point, the figure was 23%. So it’s starting to fall again toward almost COVID-level territory. Gallup is quite confident in its reporting and says the margin of error is less than 0.1%.

The report makes some interesting points about the value of paying attention to engagement. It says engaged people are 69% less likely to burn out at work, half as likely to be job hunting and 69% more likely to be “thriving” in life, even beyond work. Gallup takes a very holistic approach.

As you noted earlier, Shel, it measures many factors in determining what it means to be engaged: whether employees know what’s expected of them, whether they have the right materials and equipment, whether they are allowed to do what they do best and whether they receive recognition. The list goes on and on. As you think about this big-picture world of capital-E Engagement, what are you finding with your clients and in your own organization?

Shel Holtz:

More importantly, we can identify opportunities to improve and come back to employees to say, “These are the things we’re going to change as a result.” We can also narrow the results down. There may be a very low score in one part of the organization and a much better score elsewhere. That enables us to take action locally and work with the leaders of those groups to make improvements that will lift the rest of the organization.

Mark Dollins:

In my experience working with many organizations, an organizational-health or pulse survey typically has a finite set of perhaps eight to 10 questions that someone—usually the chief people officer—has decided matter most and represent what the organization cares about for engagement.

Here’s where it gets interesting for employee communicators. We want to help, be accountable and deliver results that help employees feel engaged. But then we sign up for things without understanding what we’re responsible for or whether we can influence them. Many questions, for example, are about what a manager does. I can’t control all time and space for every manager. But if we spend time determining which questions reflect outcomes we can influence, that’s where we should focus.

Sometimes we’re behind the eight ball because we don’t have a say in the questions being asked. Some questions are worded so broadly that you could drive a truck through them. Take a question about understanding the company mission. People may interpret that in different ways. Some will think it means the enterprise mission; some, their functional leader’s mission; and others, their team leader’s vision of where the team is going. You end up with a mixture of feedback you can’t meaningfully act on.

There are three lessons here. First, understand what the questions are. Second, choose what you’re able to influence. Third, make sure the questions are worded in a way that can produce actionable information.

Shel Holtz:

It’s not just Communication that uses the survey. It’s a significant input for Human Resources and for leadership in how they lead the organization. Part of the process is parceling out the data to the people who can act on it, even if Communication can’t.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

There is an engagement-survey industry, and I think that industry has diminished the perceived value of engagement for many people. A lot of people “study for the test.” It’s engagement-survey time, leadership wants a high engagement score and the boss tells employees how to answer so they won’t get in trouble for contributing to a lower score. That’s not helpful. We need sincere answers. We need people to tell the truth when they respond.

Look at Gallup’s Q12 survey, for example. One question that drives me crazy is, “Do you have a best friend at work?” It’s not one of my favorite engagement questions. I understand the rationale and why it’s there, but I don’t think that really drives engagement. Some people want to come to work, do their jobs and go home. They don’t want to go out for a beer after work or do the axe-throwing team-building activity. That doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. Other things drive engagement besides wanting to party with your colleagues.

Mark Dollins:

Digging deeper with those “why” questions can help communicators understand the thinking. If the questions come from the CHRO or someone else in HR, ask, “Help me understand why we’re asking this. Why do you think it’s so important?” Push a little. Healthy discernment—and sometimes healthy debate—will give us better information for making informed communication decisions.

Shel Holtz:

Think about what disengaged people don’t do. They don’t flag a problem early. They don’t help a colleague, share what they know, question a bad instruction or stay late when it matters. These are effectiveness behaviors that don’t show up on a decision-rights audit.

Some people who are critical of engagement as a metric say what we really need is competence. But a competent, disengaged employee is the one updating a résumé. Mike Klein, who has written about his objections to engagement as a metric, says people vote with their feet. He’s absolutely right—but disengagement is the leading indicator. Turnover is the lagging indicator.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark, you’ve written two books about communication and engagement. What do you see as Communication’s leading role in driving, supporting or sustaining engagement?

Mark Dollins:

We spend a lot of time on general employee communication, but if we don’t focus on and equip and empower leaders—all the way out to the front line—we’re doing our organizations a disservice. That is where the big levers get pulled: in day-to-day interactions.

You’ve heard the expression that employees don’t leave companies; they leave managers. It comes down to that relationship: whether employees feel informed, equipped and empowered, and whether the mission is clear. All of those things are funneled through leaders to the front line. We have to invest time there. I have a couple of chapters in my books about this because I feel so passionately about it. Organizations that do this well typically have lower attrition and higher engagement.

Shel Holtz:

Engage for Success has four enablers of engagement, and I like that framework better than any other I’ve seen. One of those enablers is engaging managers. It’s absolutely critical to have managers who engage with their people.

My problem with many managers is that they were promoted into the role based on their performance as individual contributors. They hit the top of their pay range, and the way to promote them and give them a higher paycheck is to make them managers. Then they don’t receive the training, resources or help they need to learn how to manage. They are just suddenly in charge of a team.

Mark Dollins:

If we’re thinking ahead about where employee communicators can make an impact on engagement, we should consider how we can help managers not just with content, but also with skills. That’s not limited to delivering a message. How do you learn to listen? How do you learn to provide feedback? Those are critical skills for leaders, as well as individual contributors.

As you said, people are often promoted without those skills, which creates a compound problem: They don’t know how to do these things themselves, and now they’re in charge of other people. Supporting them is a worthwhile place to invest time and energy.

Have you worked in organizations on programs that support managers’ team and small-group interpersonal communication skills?

Shel Holtz:

IBM used to have that culture. Business schools would visit IBM to see how its managers managed. The company has lost some of that over the last couple of decades, but my current organization is very serious about it.

We do several things in Communication to support managers. One is a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. It always starts with three or four things we believe are important enough for managers to share with their teams. The message should come from the manager because we want managers to add the local angle—to translate or interpret what the information means for their teams and the work they’re doing.

The newsletter also includes a couple of articles. One might cover a recent survey or study about management. We also have a managers’ blog where we invite managers to share something small they did that helped. It isn’t a major business-school lesson, just a practical tip others can try.

One manager, for example, invited someone at each monthly team meeting to cook something from their ethnic background and share it with the group. That led to conversations about those backgrounds, helped people get to know one another, was fun and built the team. I love it when people write about those kinds of ideas.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Engagement is not the end game. It’s a condition we need to achieve, and we need it in concert with other things, such as capability. The best approach is to view engagement as a strategic component of leading an organization rather than saying, “It’s time for the annual engagement exercise. Let’s see if we can move our score up 0.3%.”

Mark Dollins:

At the end of the day, the holy grail for me in employee communication and engagement is behavior change. If something isn’t working, how do we as communicators help change the behavior? That has always been the holy grail in the work I’ve done.

This has been a really engaging conversation, Shel. Thank you for that.

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

The post OTSP #8: Employee Engagement Matters. It Is Not the Goal. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

If you’re screening candidates on experience or technical skills, you may be making a mistake. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that curiosity and problem-solving are the two traits that separate great hires from mediocre ones, and neither one can be taught from scratch.

Most agency skills, from writing a press release to running Google Ads to using AI tools, can be picked up on the job. Curiosity and problem-solving are different: people either arrive with some baseline capacity for them, or they don’t. Gini makes it about AI, where ever-evolving tools and audience behavior reward the people who keep asking questions instead of coasting on routine.

The two discuss how to actually screen for these traits in a couple hours of interviewing. Gini leaves 15 to 20 minutes at the end for the candidate’s questions and reads a lot into what they ask, or whether they ask anything at all. Chip changes up the order entirely, opening by asking the candidate what questions they have for him before he’s asked anything himself, and he’ll throw a candidate’s own question right back at them to see how they handle being put on the spot. Both dismiss scenario-based questions and interview theater like “what animal would you be” as close to useless. Gini also flags a habit she’s trying to break on her own team, being “Gini-GPT,” where people default to asking her for the fast answer instead of working through problems themselves. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 315: The top two traits for new agency hires appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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

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.

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:

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 [email protected].

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

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

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

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is Episode 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.

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.