FIR Podcast Network

Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz got together for the monthly “Hobson & Holtz Report” to talk about…

* The change management implications of Artificial Intelligence

* The content management tactics being employed by critics of organizations

* The rise of drone journalism

* A study that found social sentiment analysis doesn’t line up with what your customers really think

* What to expect from Facebook’s new head of communications, former UK Deputy Minister Nick Clegg

* The wariness consumers have of social media chatbots

Dan York’s Tech Report covers what’s new in Gutenberg, Twitter Moments, the Pinterest API, and the unintended consequences of regulating the Internet.

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

You can find the stories from which FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

About Neville Hobson

Neville Hobson was co-host of The Hobson & Holtz Report for over 10 years. For over 15 years, Neville has been a voice of experience and influence when it comes to speaking about digital technologies, disruptive change in workplaces and marketplaces, relevant trends to pay close attention to, and what it all means for your business. His experiences embrace deep understanding and subject-matter expertise in contemporary business issues that include social, digital and cognitive technologies, connecting that with a career in traditional public relations, marketing communication, employee compensation and benefits communication, and investor relations. Based in the Thames Valley some 30 miles west of London, Neville works either from his home office or from a client’s location; or from wherever he has a good network connection.

Links from this episode

* AI will impact 100% of jobs, professions, and industries, says IBM’s Ginni Rometty

* Third Point Stirs Up Its Fight for Campbell Soup Board Seats with Video

* Anonymous Microsoft and Amazon employees speak out on Medium

* Drone journalism’s battle for airspace

* Brands Shouldn’t Believe Everything They Read About Themselves Online

* Nick Clegg Appointed Facebook Head of Global Affairs and Communications

* Facebook hires Nick Clegg as head of global affairs

* Why Facebook Hired Nick Clegg

* Nick Clegg’s Facebook Post

* Users Wary Of Bots, But Businesses Utilize Them In Customer Communications

* Social Media Bots Draw Public’s Attention and Concern

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

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In this week’s episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich discuss the difference between working in and working on your agency.

It is very easy to get sucked in to the day-to-day client service and management of the business. In so doing, you can lose strategic focus, fail to invest heavily enough in business development, and miss out on opportunities to innovate.

Chip and Gini discuss the importance of making the time to work on your agency and offer ideas and strategies for improving your business outcomes.

Whether you’re looking to maintain a lifestyle business or trying to grow like gangbusters, you must make the time to think like a business owner, not just a client service professional.

[read transcript]

How do you know if you’re using the best structural model for communication? Can hybrid models co-exist successfully? Four IABC Fellows explored the latest thinking on department structures, including how to work with agencies and freelancers (on goal-setting, budgeting, etc.). The panel will also look at whether departments should be consolidated or employ an agency model (with staff embedded in parts of the organization), as well as whether all communications departments should be grouped together, and where they should report.

The panel, moderated by IABC Fellow Brad Whitworth, featured Mary Ann McCauley, George McGrath, Barbara Puffer, and Jennifer Wah.

About the panel

Mary Ann McCauley is committed to ensuring people communicate more effectively about their organizations’ products and services. With a specialty practice in crisis management, Mary Ann addresses sensitive issues with timeliness, dignity, and minimal backlash. “Managing communication during a crisis requires common sense folded into a structured process,” she says.

George McGrath is founder and managing principal of McGrath Business Communications, which helps clients build winning corporate reputations, promote their products and services, and advance their views on key issues. George brings more than 25 years in PR and public affairs to his firm. Over the course of his career, he has held senior management positions at leading strategic communications and integrated marketing agencies including Hill and Knowlton, Carl Byoir & Associates, and Brouillard Communications.

Barbara Puffer‘s communications management career spans 45 years, including work in banking, insurance, and telecommunications organizations.  She has consulted as Puffer Public Relations Strategies for 20 years and previously was Corporate Communications Manager at Barnes Group for 13 years.  While consulting, she was also associate professor of communication studies at UMUC for 13 years.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. The company operates as a strategic alliance of hand-picked professionals; all renowned for work in their areas of specialization. This approach means the right team is assembled for each project; no more, no less.   With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare to financial services to academia, and is passionate about the opportunity for stories to inspire actions and reactions within organizations.In 2013, Jennifer was named Associate Faculty of Royal Roads University, and in this capacity, continues to teach, coach and mentor others with an interest in business communication.

Brad Whitworth, the moderator of the panel, is a communication manager at Hitachi Vantara.  A communication coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Brad was most recently an executive communication manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Before that, he was senior communication manager at Cisco Systems. Before Cisco, Brad led communication programs at HP, PeopleSoft, and AAA. He earned undergraduate degrees in both journalism and speech at the University of Missouri and an MBA at Santa Clara University. A former broadcaster, Brad has made more than 300 presentations to executives, communicators, and university classes around the world. Brad has a long history with IABC, including serving as chairman of the international board and president of two local chapters. He is one of the authors of The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication.

This week we look at several resources that can be used to help examine your content marketing strategy. First up, this piece by an executive with Athena Health talks about how the company took the time to look at how their site visitors were reacting to their posted content and adjusted accordingly. It also discusses the importance of storytelling as a component of content marketing. There are great tips here on how to improve your content portfolio.

Last month, GlaxoSmithKline introduced a brand incubator that is used for internal audits of all aspects of its marketing and messaging. While your company may not have the resources to do this on a full-time basis, reading this post on MarketingWeek could help inform your own thinking about how you can accomplish rebranding and using content specifically for this task.

Paul shares his thoughts about how small teams can be useful for this effort, particularly since they aren’t direct stakeholders.  This could be a way to innovate and fail fast. He also refers to a presentation that he has put together about content audits. You can download this slide deck from one of Paul’s presentations here. 

He suggests that you think across what he calls the content cube, as shown here. Each cell of the cube classifies the type, delivery vehicle and stage in marketing funnel for a particular content asset. Finally, we offer another content auditing worksheet from Hilary Marsh here.

IAP2 is a federation of regional IAP2 organizations such as IAP2 USA and IAP2 Canada. Kylie Cochrane is the Chair of the overarching federation. Recently, while at the IAP2 North America Conference in Victoria, she talked with Joseph Thornley about IAP2, its changing structure, major issues in the P2 practice and a look into the future.

Gini, Martin and Joe talk about privacy and the continuing interest of government legislators about what the social networks and search engines are doing – and not doing – to protect it. Privacy is not just about the personally identifiable data. It’s as much about the metadata that flows from it.

We also talk about how realistic it is to expect agencies and organizations to respond to individual people during a crisis. The case is Joe’s over-two-day return to the dark ages when he and 250,000 other Hydro customers lost their power following a tornado in Ottawa. Is it good enough for organizations to simply publish general information – or should they attempt to respond to individuals and communicate information that would be useful to specific groups, such as neighbourhoods?

In the debut episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, co-hosts Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich discuss some of the things that new and prospective agency owners should be thinking about. From naming to legal and accounting issues, there are important decisions that need to be made in the early days.

[read the transcript]

In this episode, Mitchell Levy (@HappyAbout), TEDx speaker and the AHA Guy at AHAthat (http://AHAthat.com), and co-host Lisa McDonald (@FearlessLisaM), an author, motivational speaker, TV and radio host, and blogger (http://livingfearlesslywithlisa.com), exchange great insights with Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett), a best-selling author, global business celebrity, speaker, and chairman of C-Suite Network.

Jeffrey Hayzlett provides us with amazing insights about legacy, which is in line with the topic for this month. Jeffrey believes that what you do now determines the legacy that you leave behind. He points out that you should not worry or think about your legacy because it is more important to live your life the way that it should be lived today. Furthermore, in life, you can’t do it all, but you can do what you can.

Here are a couple of AHA messages from the episode. See more in the “AHA Moments from Thought Leader Life” eBooks available in the social media-enabled eBook platform, AHAthat: http://AHAthat.com.

* A #Legacy is a collective result of what you do, whom you’ve been associated with, and how it represented you. What’s your legacy? #TLL http://aha.pub/JeffreyHayzlett

* If you want to #LeaveAMark in today’s world, you need to know what kind of human being you are. #Legacy #TLL http://aha.pub/LisaMcDonald

* The most important thing in life is to show up and be there. #NoExcuses #TLL http://aha.pub/MitchellLevy

* Don’t live your life for label’s sake, because it’s disingenuous. Be who you truly are. #NoPretentions #Legacy #TLL http://aha.pub/LisaMcDonald

* In this life, people come and go. It’s up to you to decide what kind of #Legacy you will leave behind. Start building your legacy now! #LeaveAMark#TLL http://aha.pub/JeffreyHayzlett

To learn more about Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, subscribe to the channel: http://youtube.com/user/thoughtleaderlife.

Craig Carroll, Executive Director of the OCR Network, joins Chip to discuss corporate reputation and the measurement and evaluation of corporate communications.

They explore current trends in corporate reputation, the rise of the CCO, and challenges in PR evaluation and media measurement.

[read the transcript]

There’s no conversation with a subject matter expert this week, just host Shel Holtz nattering on about…

* Whether a brand voice should remain consistent across multiple social channels

* The BBC’s new communication metric: long-term memory

* How evolving business response to disasters is changing how communities deal with them

* Making managers a discrete audience as a core part of the Employee Experience

* The long, slow demise of Google+

* A human-like Artificial Intelligence that could appear in your room to answer your questions — assuming you bought the right AR headset

* Amazon’s recruitment AI that was biased against female candidates

* Delta’s Twitter poll that will determine its in-flight holiday movie

* The “personal podcast” Pocket will play for you

* Twitter’s decision to end Moment creation on its mobile apps

* The blockchain that will verify journalism (which Forbes is joining)

Dan York’s Tech Report covers the successful DNSSEC key rollover, the shutdown of Google+, Spotify opening its podcast beta to everyone, new video hardware from Facebook and Google, Snapchat’s original daily scripted shows, and Facebook’s 3D photos.

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

You can find the stories from which FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from this week’s episode:

* Should Your Brand Voice Stay the Same Across Social Channels?

* How the BBC ties memory to branded content effectiveness

* As Michael Approaches, Companies Are Changing the Way We Weather Natural Disasters

* Design an Employee Experience That Attracts Star Talent

* Leadership development series entertains staff on just $15 (for theme music)

* Google+ to shut down after security bug

* Magic Leap’s Mica is a human-like AI in augmented reality

* Amazon Reportedly Killed an AI Recruitment System Because It Couldn’t Stop the Tool from Discriminating Against Women

* Die Hard or Elf? Delta lets passengers Twitter-vote for movies

* Pocket Plans to Turn Your Never-Ending News Reading List Into a Podcast

* Twitter sunsets the ability to create Moments on mobile

* Meredith is developing 10 original shows for Instagram’s IGTV

* Forbes Enters Blockchain Game, Partners With Civil

Links from Dan York’s Report:

* Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs,