For Immediate Release

When brands deliberately provoke outrage, is the backlash a crisis or a planned part of the marketing strategy? Reformation’s campaign featuring Olivia Jade Giannulli, whose family was embroiled in the college admissions scandal, raises questions about using controversy to sell products. The campaign’s charitable donation from each sale adds another layer to the discussion, but does generating attention justify the risk to a brand’s reputation? In this episode, Neville and Shel explore the differences between calculated provocation, taking a principled stand, and accidentally causing offense.

Drawing on campaigns from Reformation, Nike, American Eagle, and others, we debate how to measure success beyond mentions and whether communicators should have the authority to stop a campaign when the reputational risks outweigh the likely benefits. Attention may be easy to count; the cost to trust is something else altogether.

Links from this episode:

Marketing Brew Article

The Reformation / Olivia Jade campaign

Rage bait and outrage as brand strategy

Research on whether bad publicity pays

Scandal-to-comeback arcs

Lean in vs. apologize

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30.

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 534. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. When a brand deliberately builds a campaign around a scandal, is that courageous? Or is it just rage bait masquerading as marketing with a charity twist?

Marketing Brew’s Jennimai Nguyen tackled that question last month in a piece that’s been popping up in my feeds more than once. Let’s talk about it, because the case at the center of it is almost perfectly engineered to divide a room of communicators.

Back in 2019, influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was at the center of Operation Varsity Blues, the college admissions scandal. Her parents, Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud after she was admitted to the University of Southern California through a fake rowing recruitment. She dropped out, went quiet, and eventually came back as an influencer.

Fast-forward to this fall. Reformation, the fashion brand that went public over the summer, made her the face of its “Good Sport” campaign. The hero product is a crewneck sweatshirt that just says “College.” The Instagram caption—and I’m paraphrasing only slightly—says she’s back on campus in a crew that suits her better than the other kind.

Net proceeds from sales of this product go to YES Scholars, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged students get to college. People commenting on the campaign split pretty much the way you’d expect: half the audience calling it iconic and the other half calling it insensitive.

The Marketing Brew piece doesn’t just describe the controversy. Nguyen gets Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, to lay out a framework for thinking about when leveraging a scandal works and when it doesn’t. It boils down to three things.

First, the old line that any publicity is good publicity. Rucker’s answer is—and I’m quoting him here—“definitively no.” Brands that court controversy can lose sales, lose audiences, and sometimes spend money cleaning up after the campaign.

Second, intentional controversy is really a bet about math. Rucker’s example is Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign in 2018. We discussed that more than once at the time here on FIR. Nike wasn’t surprised by the backlash. They were expecting it, but they were betting that the audience that shared their values was bigger than the audience that didn’t. That is a strategy. He notes that it’s an easier bet for smaller brands because there’s less of an existing audience to alienate.

Reformation, though, just IPO’d and wants to appeal to a broad swath of millennials and Gen Z. That makes the bet riskier.

Third—and this is the part I find most interesting for anybody who deals with crises—you can tell whether the controversy was intentional by watching what the brand does next. Rucker points to two tells. One is the charitable donation attached to the product. Reformation did it with YES Scholars. American Eagle did it last year with the Sydney Sweeney jeans and Crisis Text Line.

The other tell is the absence of an apology. Rucker’s line is that these brands aren’t going to apologize because they’re not sorry. They’re targeting a specific audience, and the people who were offended were never part of that target.

Contrast that with Converse, which pulled its Karina campaign and issued a flat-out apology within days when people pointed out that the imagery evoked the Ku Klux Klan and lynching symbolism. That’s what unintentional controversy looks like. Rucker’s advice there is the opposite: apologize immediately, take it down, and explain to consumers what happened. I would add, beyond what Rucker said, explain what you’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The framework is: intentional or not, and does the response match?

Reformation’s silence isn’t a failure of crisis communications. It was their strategy from the get-go. Yet Rucker’s own closing thought is that, if he were starting a brand, he wouldn’t go this route because there are plenty of ways to stand out that don’t involve controversy.

Neville, I’m curious where you land on this. Is Reformation being clever, or is this a brand that just told its most offended customers it doesn’t need them?

Neville Hobson: It’s interesting. I don’t believe that Olivia Jade story was familiar to a lot of people here. I remember seeing news reports at the time. Isn’t that the issue that Felicity Huffman was involved with, and William H. Macy?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Same one.

Neville Hobson: Now it rings big bells, I must admit.

My immediate thought, listening to what you were saying and reading some of the reports on all of these, is that controversy generates attention. We know that. But attention isn’t the same as trust, reputation, or commercial success. Communicators have a responsibility to challenge the strategy, not simply manage the fallout.

I’m wondering whether, in these examples—notably American Eagle and Reformation—we’re confusing the ability to generate attention with the ability to build a brand. If everyone’s talking about the controversy but nobody is talking about the product, have they really succeeded? That’s the first thing that comes to mind.

How would you measure the success? I guess this is really the crystallization of my thought here: How would you measure the success of a deliberately controversial campaign?

Shel Holtz: I think it depends on what their goal for the campaign was. If it was building awareness of the brand, that’s pretty easy. You can measure sentiment: How many people supported this? How many didn’t? Into which camps did they fall?

If you’re targeting millennials and Gen Z, and they’re more likely to think this was cool, especially given that the proceeds are going to a charity, then you can call it a success. If the goal was selling a ton of these shirts, that’s pretty easy, too. But the question is, when you release a new product or look at the other items in your product line, have you seen a lift there as well?

I don’t think a communicator would have told Nike not to do the Colin Kaepernick ad. I think they said, “Look, you’re going to get backlash, but it’s from customers we’re not particularly interested in. We’re interested in the larger audience that’s going to support this and buy these shoes.”

That’s what ended up happening. Nike suffered some backlash. I remember seeing shoes being burned in barbecues and things like that. But at the end of the day, Nike’s reputation is fine. Their profits are fine. They didn’t suffer at all. By and large, I think they’re seen as standing up for an important principle when they took the position they did.

Neville Hobson: I’ve been reading recently that their financial situation is actually not particularly good. Nevertheless, I think this is not a good place to be doing this kind of activity. That’s my broad opinion.

There’s a fundamental difference between deliberately challenging conventions, which some of these people do, and simply offending people. I don’t buy the argument that all these people we’ve offended don’t matter because they’re not our audience. That’s an unsustainable argument in my book.

Even if the marketing team believes controversy will generate attention, which is clearly what they do in all these cases, did anyone actually ask whether the reputational hit is worth it?

My question to you is: When does a provocative campaign like any of these cross the line from clever marketing into very poor professional judgment?

Shel Holtz: There was a Newsweek piece on this. The expert they quoted said that provocation becomes a crisis at the moment consumers stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company. That’s when prolonged negativity undermines trust and erases the attention benefit. As long as they’re just talking about the ad, I think your reputation and the degree of trust you may have earned are probably fine.

We can equate this to the very current political situation here in the U.S. I know we don’t like to take sides on the show because we don’t want to offend anybody in our audience. We want people on all sides of the political spectrum to listen because what we’re talking about is how to communicate effectively, and we don’t get into politics.

Nevertheless, Vivek Ramaswamy lost his race to be governor by double digits, and he was only down by two points before he released a very controversial ad. This was the ad that featured his opponent’s estranged mother. She hadn’t seen her in 30 or 35 years. She had been removed from her mother’s care as a child because her stepfather had raped her.

He was advised not to run this ad, but he felt it was beneficial to his campaign, so he did anyway. What I’ve been hearing is that it cost him 10 points in the race.

To the point of this person quoted in Newsweek, the conversation shifted from the ad itself to the guy who decided to run it, and what kind of character is involved in somebody who would make that decision. I think that’s a useful distinction. When they stop debating the ad and start criticizing the company, that’s when you’ve got trouble.

There was one other person quoted in that Newsweek article who draws the line between calculated provocation and a brand blunder. What you got with Reformation was calculated. What you got with Ramaswamy was a blunder. The former anticipates criticism as part of the plan. The latter happens when a brand fails to recognize cultural or historical associations.

I think Reformation falls into the category of, “We were going to anticipate the criticism, and people are still talking about the ad, not the company.” Ramaswamy, meanwhile, went down to a resounding defeat in a red state because of a blunder where he didn’t anticipate the blowback.

Neville Hobson: What troubles me about all this—and I hear what you say, Shel—is that I wouldn’t do stuff like this if I were running communication for one of these big brands.

Some brands, as is obvious from this, knowingly accept alienating one audience to strengthen their relationship with another. I think that’s appalling business practice, personally.

What troubles me is the possibility that we’re normalizing controversy as just another marketing technique, with reputation management reduced to cleaning up afterward. If a brand deliberately sets out to provoke people, it can’t then pretend to be surprised by the reaction.

I wonder where communicators sit with this. Shouldn’t they have the authority to challenge or even stop a campaign when, in their professional judgment, the reputational risk outweighs the likely benefits?

Shel Holtz: I think that’s the counsel communicators need to provide.

There was an older study—it’s 15 years old—from Stanford and Wharton that found negative publicity actually boosted sales, but only for relatively unknown products or brands, because it stimulated awareness of them. It hurt more established brands.

Reformation’s not unknown. This data would suggest that it probably wasn’t a good strategy for them, but so far it doesn’t look like it’s hurting them much.

Neville Hobson: It just seems not to be the way you should behave, in my humble opinion.

My final thought on it is that controversy may buy attention. We’ve got evidence that it obviously does in these examples. But that doesn’t necessarily earn trust at all. If anything, it will damage it, in my view.

Communicators need to understand the difference, and they should understand it better than anyone else. It seems to me to be another marketing technique that is not a good thing at all.

Shel Holtz: I’m inclined to agree. A campaign like this probably wouldn’t even pop into my mind if I were assigned the task of promoting this particular shirt.

Reformation never responded to a request for an interview, and they haven’t confirmed that the controversy was part of their strategy. That was Rucker’s belief.

There are so many different approaches you can take to marketing a product and a brand that I wouldn’t go down this road for fear of the damage it could do to trust.

But I come back to the Colin Kaepernick example from Nike. I think that was more than just courting controversy or using rage bait, which was somebody’s word of the year this year. What happened there went beyond using controversy and scandal to sell products. Nike was taking a stand. They were putting a stake in the ground and saying, “This is what we believe in.”

This was at a time when brands were doing that. We’ve talked before on the show about brands stepping back from taking positions on public issues, despite the Edelman Trust Barometer saying that people want brands to address societal issues and take stands. I think the political climate has led them to dial that way back, but that’s what Nike was doing at the time.

I don’t think they were rage baiting or trying to gin up controversy. They were trying to say, “This is what we stand for. We stand with Colin.” They knew from the research they’d done about their brand, demographics, and market that the vast majority would stand with them, which is pretty much what happened.

It’s a calculation. If it were an issue central to the organization, its culture, its marketplace, and the like, I might say, “We could do an ad that puts out our position on this issue and lets everyone know where we stand.” Do the research and know that 80% of your market isn’t on the other side of it.

But just rage baiting, just ginning up controversy? I wouldn’t recommend that. I find it fascinating that it’s becoming more or less a standard marketing practice.

There’s a piece in Campaign that quotes Rosie Brown, head of strategy at a marketing company with a great name: Kill Boring Dead. She says controversy is now planned. Brands treat backlash as a campaign event with KPIs rather than a crisis. Her distinction is that backlash on a campaign is survivable; backlash on your identity isn’t.

That’s another way to look at this. If you’re willing to take backlash on your brand, that’s fine. But if your identity is tainted, that can be very serious in terms of the damage it causes.

Neville Hobson: I think it’s a great shame that we’ve got someone who says stuff like that. But if that’s the landscape we’re in, then it’s part of what you see with social networks, where they all went down the toilet—notably Twitter, or X—and they think it’s fine.

I suppose you could argue that not all controversy is equal. Deliberate provocation, which is what nearly all the examples we discussed today involve; taking a principled stand, which I’d agree perhaps applies to what you said about Nike; and accidental offense are all different situations.

But what seems to be gaining acceptance in some quarters, particularly in the marketing arena, is that deliberate provocation is okay as long as you’re able to assess the benefit of the attention you’ll get, much of which may well be hostile to you, and the potential for damage to your brand.

I personally can’t imagine anyone being able to demonstrate, with a clear ethical conscience, that this is good business practice.

Shel Holtz: Just one more data point I pulled up: Novig, the brand that used the Sydney Sweeney controversy with its ad, saw brand mentions surge 900% after that ad aired. The company’s founder, Jacob Fortinsky, told Front Office Sports that the controversy “forces us into the national discourse.”

Again, was that their goal? If that was their goal, they succeeded. Why that would be their goal, I don’t know. Maybe they looked long term and said people would remember their name long after the controversy had receded into the background.

But I agree with you. It’s a sad thing to see controversy and rage baiting being used to sell stuff. I think we’re going to see more of it, not less.

Neville Hobson: I’m sure you’re right. We might as well just say the end justifies the means, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: That’s very sad.

Shel Holtz: It is. And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #534: Is A Scandal-Based Marketing Campaign Worth the Risk? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In this long-form October 2026 episode of For Immediate Release, Neville and Shel report on FGS Global’s research, “Winning the Debate on AI.” More than 7,000 people across seven countries rate AI as the least trusted technology in widespread use, yet 37% became more positive after hearing about its benefits. Shel looks at Microsoft’s move of communications into its corporate, external, and legal affairs group, and its plan to put employees out front telling the company’s story. Neville examines OpenAI’s Locked Chats and the gap between the name and what the feature delivers. Shel reports on Fresh’s finding that 28% of employees meet company news through an AI summary first, and on how to write content that survives it. Neville asks what a Northern Ireland council’s return to a printed newsletter says about channels and measurement. Shel closes with the Wharton 2026 AI Adoption Report, in which managers and the employees they manage describe two very different workplaces.

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on the critical PHP vulnerabilities fixed in the October 21 security release. The two remote code execution flaws affect any server hosting a PHP application, which is why WordPress and other platforms urged immediate updates. Dan covers why the release was coordinated, the role AI plays in the story, and the xkcd comic that captures how much of the internet depends on a few critical components. He then turns to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2026 report, “Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet,” and to the French government’s pressure on Meta, TikTok, and other platforms as protests spread this weekend. He closes with two fediverse stories: the Social Web Foundation’s Fediverse Multimedia Grants, funded by a $200,000 Interledger Foundation grant, and what’s coming in Mastodon 5.0, including a redesigned composer and navigation.

We’d love to hear from you: comment on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or WhatsApp, email [email protected] with or without an audio file attached (or use the voicemail button on the FIR website to record a comment directly from the web).

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, November 30.

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 the For Immediate Release podcast, long-form Episode 533 for October 2026. I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset, England.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: This month we have our usual six great stories to share with you, plus, as usual, Dan York’s Tech Report. But first, let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments.

In the long-form Episode 529 for September, published on the 28th of September, our lead story reported on a Press Gazette investigation that found dozens of experts quoted in the mainstream media who 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, we said, requiring a layer of verification unlike anything we faced before. Other stories include a crisis communication handbook for boards from the CIPR and the UK Institute of Directors. And we’ve got a handful of comments here, don’t we, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we have a couple. Philippe Borremans, our friend, said, “Thanks for covering the CIPR and Institute of Directors handbook. It was a great collaboration with colleagues, and I think the final result is really worth a look.”

And Jane Wilson said, “Love the line, ‘You can’t communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into.’ I use a similar line: you can’t communicate out of a crisis while the fire is still burning. There needs to be operational behavior, resolution, or a plan to resolve. For comms to do our jobs. And I agree wholeheartedly, it’s a governance issue.”

And Neville, you had a reply to Jane. You wrote, “Deepwater Horizon is such a powerful illustration of this point. No amount of carefully crafted messaging could change the reality that oil kept pouring into the Gulf, and Hayward’s remark just compounded an already disastrous situation. It’s a reminder that what leaders say matters enormously, but what the organization actually does matters even more. Which brings us right back to governance and accountability, long before anyone starts drafting a holding statement.”

Neville Hobson: Good comments Jane made, I thought. So in FIR 530, on the fifth of October, we discussed a Financial Times report claiming that the volume of AI slop appearing as thought leadership on LinkedIn has led to a surge in interest in human ghostwriters. And this is the one that attracted quite a few comments, right, Shel?

Shel Holtz: This attracted 14 comments. This one really seemed to strike a nerve with people. It’s too much to read all of the comments as they were written, but we do have a summary.

Chris Norton kicked things off. He was hosting a GEO/AEO event the week after he shared his post, and has been talking with SEOs and copywriters. One of them ran a 300-person SEO and copywriting agency and just closed it because the market vanished. Chris still believes people want taste and human authenticity in 2026. We’ll accept some automation, he says, but we’d still rather talk to a human at the co-op checkout than pack our own bags. And Neville, you replied that the scarce commodity may no longer be words at all, but judgment, taste, and genuine perspective, and that those become more valuable as AI makes competent content effortless.

Dennis Howlett uses Claude to draft his FOIAs and his posts. He trained it on the Diginomica library for style, then edits everything, often rewriting. He runs it through Grammarly, then passes it back to Claude for a legal check. It makes him more efficient.

Jeff DeCanya says it definitely matters. Working with a human ghostwriter isn’t the same as feeding a prompt to an algorithm. Neville, you called that the strongest argument on the other side, since the human process involves challenge, interpretation, and a real relationship with the subject.

Mac Worsham offered a useful test for any byline: could the named author explain the prompt and why each point is there? If so, the drafting tool matters less than critics fear. If not, a human ghostwriter wouldn’t fix it either. He also commented on a different post. Neville, you posted and I posted, and he commented on both of our posts sharing the episode. He said the line about not being able to communicate your way out of a crisis you behaved your way into is maybe the most powerful sentence in the profession right now. That’s actually from the previous episode; I don’t know why he left it on this one, but well. It treats crisis communication as governance and moves the question upstream, to the gap between what an organization says and what it does. He sees the fake expert story, that previous story, as the same lesson from the other side. Back to this episode.

Sherilyn Starkey wondered whether calligraphers had the same debate when Gutenberg unveiled movable type, asking whether it had really done the thinking. Authenticity, she says, has always had a technology problem.

Megan Thomas says ghostwriting for leaders who give zero input always feels wrong to her, and she sees no difference between that and using AI with no input or care. She’s fine with AI used responsibly and with appropriate human attention, and she loves that authentic comms are back in demand, “ums,” “ahs,” and typos included.

Rita Zonia says AI helps enormously with the mechanics of writing, but tends to stay skin-deep on its own. She finds it amusing that a lot of organizations thought they could decimate comms teams and let AI pick up the work, only to discover the tool is only as good as its operator. So great comms people are making a comeback. Experienced writers and ghostwriters know how to get beneath what someone says, ask the extra questions, and spot the little odd comment that’s actually the story. Finding what’s worth saying, and saying it authentically and succinctly, is still a very human skill.

Sharon O’Day has seen tools that generate a podcast from your news articles or presentations, with vendors pitching materials in your CEO’s voice. Philosophically, she says, that’s no different from ghostwriting text, and yet it gives her what the kids call “the ick.” Catherine Atkinson, replying to Sharon, said she’s doing that kind of writing now, with many years of experience in writing voice from journalism and screenwriting. What she’s seeing is a rush to fix big problems.

And Joe, who has a name that’s interesting to pronounce. It’s S-Z-N-K-O-W-S-K-I. So, “Znowski,” I’m going to guess. I apologize, Joe. Joe has been ghostwriting since 2008 and says the desire for authenticity is boomeranging back to where it was before ChatGPT. That puts ghostwriters in a great spot, but only if they’re willing to do the hard work and fun work of interviewing, research, and collaboration.

And Melissa Edwards found it all encouraging for communicators. A lot of comments from that episode.

Neville Hobson: Terrific. That’s really terrific, getting that qualitative insight into people’s different views.

Okay, so “Factual Accuracy Isn’t a Comms Strategy” was the theme of our discussion in FIR 531 on the 12th of October. We considered research suggesting that using familiar language can help accurate information compete with misinformation. But we asked, where’s the line between persuasion and manipulation?

In FIR 532 on the 19th of October, we asked, does a seat at the executive leadership table give communicators genuine influence, or does influence come from being the trusted advisor a CEO turns to? We revisited this perennial debate about communicators having a seat at the top table, with some different perspectives. And now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: One more episode to bring you up to date on, and that is Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel conversation, usually moderated by yours truly, sometimes by Brad Whitworth. It is a panel of four IABC Fellows from the International Association of Business Communicators. This was part two of our discussion about artificial intelligence and communication leaders’ moment. Adrian Cropley was back for this episode, along with Mary Hills, Robin McCasland, and Cyrus Mavalwalla.

The next episode of Circle of Fellows is titled “Lead, Communicate, and Connect.” We’ll be talking about the communicator’s role in creating workplaces where people feel seen and appreciation becomes part of how we lead, communicate, and connect. Zora Artis, John Clemens, Catherine DuCharme, and Jennifer Waugh will join me for this conversation. It is scheduled for 6 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, October 29th.

And one last note: we had a lot of comments on a couple of our episodes over the past month. We love those comments. We love having other perspectives brought into the show, and we would be very grateful for your comment. There are lots of ways to do that. Every comment we got over the last month came through LinkedIn, from people who left their comments on the posts where we share the announcement of a new episode’s availability. So that seems to be the easiest and most popular way to comment, and we encourage you to do that. We also share on Facebook, on Threads, and on WhatsApp, and I check those too for comments, so you can comment there.

You can send us email at [email protected]. You can attach an audio file to that. We would love to play your voice speaking your comment out loud. You can do that through your own recording mechanism and attach it to that email. You can also use the tool we have on our website: go to the site and click the button that says “Send voicemail” and record your comment. Or leave your comment in the show notes. And you can comment on absolutely anything you want, including any of the six topics that we are going to be discussing today. And Neville, those are going to start right now with you.

Neville Hobson: That’s true. So I’ve been reading an interesting new research report from FGS Global, a strategic communication consultancy, called “Winning the Debate on AI.” It explores public attitudes towards artificial intelligence based on a survey of more than 7,000 people across seven countries, including the UK and the US, alongside interviews with political, regulatory, and business leaders.

What caught my attention was a striking contradiction. AI is being adopted at remarkable speed, yet public sentiment towards it remains surprisingly negative. For example, 71% of people surveyed said they’d used AI in the previous six months, yet when asked how positively they viewed different technologies, AI came at the bottom of the list, even below social media.

But here’s where it gets interesting. When people were presented with AI’s potential benefits, 37% said their views became more positive. FGS sees this as evidence that public opinion remains open to persuasion and that organizations have an opportunity to shape the debate. That sounds like good news for communicators, but it raises a question I’ve been thinking about: is AI’s reputation problem really something we can solve through better communication? Or does the technology industry need to change some of its behavior before people have good reason to trust it?

There are a few things I think are worth exploring here. Are people skeptical about AI because they don’t understand its benefits, or because they have legitimate concerns about how it’s being developed and deployed? Where’s the line between helping people understand AI and trying to persuade them to accept something they might reasonably distrust? And what should communicators be doing? Promoting AI’s benefits, or helping their organization build the transparency, accountability, and safeguards that earn public confidence?

One other finding struck me. When researchers asked about AI’s benefits, everyday convenience resonated much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth. Perhaps that’s telling us something quite simple. People don’t necessarily want to hear about how AI will transform the global economy. They want to know how it will improve their lives and what safeguards are in place when things go wrong.

Which brings me back to the title of the report, “Winning the Debate on AI.” I don’t think the real challenge is winning the debate at all. I think it’s earning the trust that makes persuasion unnecessary. How do you see it, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more on that. There is a tremendous amount of persuasion that needs to be happening. I think that the industry needs an association. I have not seen the equivalent in artificial intelligence, among the frontier labs for example, of the pharmaceutical association or the oil and gas association. I used to interact regularly with the Toy Manufacturers Association when I worked at Mattel. They represented the industry. They had the investment, of course; they got all of the money from the organizations that belonged to the association, which were all of the big companies. They conducted the research. They identified the issues. They worked with PR agencies or had their own in-house communicators, or both. They framed the approach that was going to be taken and fed that back out to the member organizations, who were all in lockstep then about how they were going to wield this influence and build this trust, rather than each one doing its own thing.

Right now you have Dario Amodei coming out and saying, “Yeah, 10% chance this could kill us all.” Well, you have Google taking a completely different approach, and OpenAI saying other things. In fact, OpenAI saying conflicting things. And God knows what’s coming out of xAI. It’s a hodgepodge. There’s no coordinated messaging, there’s no common understanding or common agreement among these companies about what the issues and challenges are. The information that’s in this report would be invaluable if there was a coordinated effort in the industry.

Knowing that people are interested in “what’s in it for me,” well, that’s not rocket science. That shouldn’t be a shock to people. But “what’s in it for me” covers a lot of ground, everything from “it can make my life easier when I want to book dinner and a movie as a date night” to “this could cure my lung cancer or prevent me from getting it.” So, talking about this in realistic terms. But right now what you have is this combination of so many different issues associated with AI coming at people from so many different directions. You have the concerns about the future of civilization. You have the concerns about what this means to work. You have the concerns about the data centers, everything from “my electric bills are going up” to “it’s creating health hazards.” You have the concerns about its impact on the economy and what happens if the AI bubble bursts, and there are a lot of people who are reading and hearing about that.

There are so many different issues coming at people from so many different directions, and there isn’t a coordinated effort to address them. It’s being dealt with almost entirely defensively. “Here comes another one, let’s react.” And you don’t build trust that way. No matter how hard they try, there really needs to be a different approach to building and gaining that trust. And by the way, you do that through action. You do need communication so that people know that you’ve taken these actions, but communication alone is not going to address this. These organizations need to behave in a way that builds trust.

And you’re seeing the beginnings of it with the data centers. No more nondisclosure agreements with the cities and counties where they’re getting the agreements to build them. They’re now going in and having town halls first, to hear the concerns of the local residents and come back with proposals to address them. You’re now seeing money pumped back into the community, so people’s kids are going to new schools and health clinics are opening because of the revenues coming from these data centers. They’re taking steps to address the concerns that people have about noise and water use, with closed-loop systems and the like. But all of this is in reaction to the ton of hate that was coming at them when it was learned what was going on behind closed doors, with no concern for all of these things. So they need to be proactive about these things, and they need to build and earn that trust. And they need communications to let people know that this is what they’re doing.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, agreed. That’s well summarized, I think. It is a major, major issue, the misinformation that’s out there. Much of it is not deliberate; it’s well meaning. But you go on any social network and you’ll find any regular Joe with an opinion, and he will share it. I’ve lost count of how many people leaving such posts on LinkedIn where I’ve asked a question, “What’s your source?”, because they don’t cite a source for anything, and I don’t get answers to those questions. So you don’t pay any attention to those kinds of comments. But most people do.

I think of a handful of people I know who are skeptics, very much so, about all this. They react constantly: “Look at what I just read,” and another one saying the world’s going to end tomorrow. They look alarmed about what they’re doing with ChatGPT, so they stop doing it even. I think it leads to misunderstanding, because not only do you not have enough information to clearly explain what’s going on, it’s conflicting, because some say different things.

But I think the significant thing about earning trust is utter clarity in explaining what’s in it for you, and in our own organizations, what’s in it for all of us. It reminds me a bit of podcasting. Not in the early days, but things I’ve noticed over the years, particularly over the last couple of years, where I see people posting “here are the benefits of podcasting,” and they justify what they’re trying to talk about by saying the global take-up is X, and this guy Joe Rogan’s got three million listeners, look at what he’s getting out of it. That doesn’t relate at all to the real world for most people.

So talking about how AI is going to help us all be economically beneficial in five years’ time just goes over the heads of most people. If you say it’ll enable you to get the best deals on your holiday, or it’ll help you understand something you’ve been trying to do… A good example as well, one that should interest most people, is the role AI played in the PHP issue that arose these past few days, where AI discovered the fault that had lain hidden in the code. No one knew, or people in the tech community certainly did nothing about it, for 22 years. Which, as an aside, raises the question: what the hell was the tech industry doing? They didn’t fix this. The answer I read from someone was that they believed the chances of anyone taking advantage of this were close to zero. Well, guess what?

And I think that comes back to the owners of the AI tools, who should be doing more. OpenAI and Anthropic, in my opinion, instead of getting the headlines about “this latest cool thing we can do,” and we’ve got a story coming up about ChatGPT shortly, should talk more about what it means to the average Joe and the average company, and focus on something that they know people are concerned about. They do enough surveys themselves.

So I think communicators, and again, let’s bring this back to reality for people: what do you need to do in your organization to help people understand all this? In the absence of any kind of handy toolkit or playbook you can get that makes sense to you, you have to understand this, promote the benefits, and help the organization build transparency and accountability. These are messages we’ve been talking about for quite a while on the podcast. And I think the point I made earlier holds: everyday convenience resonates much more strongly than sweeping promises about economic growth that people can’t relate to.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are other things that I think communicators can help these organizations do, things that we have seen in other industries, like the computer industry. So let’s take, for example, OpenAI announcing that they have solved one of the twelve Millennium math problems. And this came as a complete surprise to the mathematics community. Now, these are people who have gotten PhDs, they have devoted their whole lives to mathematics, and many of them pick one of these challenges and spend their careers working on it. And suddenly here’s OpenAI announcing, “We solved it. It took two weeks.” And they did this without the involvement of the mathematics community.

Now, if they had used their PR capabilities appropriately, they would have said, “Here’s what we’re working on.” And a good PR person would have said, “You should do this in concert with representatives from the mathematics profession, in the open, so that they are engaged with this.” They can, first of all, be involved in making sure that the process is a valid one. Even if it solves the problem, maybe it went about it a bad way, or there’s not sufficient documentation to prove that this actually is the solution. And then you figure out how mathematicians can use this, rather than end up where we are today, which is with mathematicians furious about this and also terrified that there’s going to be no need for them within the next couple of years. And everybody who’s heard this story, they’re not going, “The poor mathematicians.” They’re going, “My profession is next.” And that’s how you erode trust.

If they had partnered with mathematicians and come out and said, “Here is how AI and humans work together, where each provides what they’re best at, to solving these problems and identifying new ones,” then everybody’s optimistic. That’s how it’s going to go for my profession too. And they had no clue about this, probably because they never consulted their communicators.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are tons of things we could continue discussing on this, but that’s a foundational overview, let’s say, on what you need to do. You’ve got to build trust. So I’m sure we’ll be returning to this topic soon.

Shel Holtz: No doubt. But for now, let’s turn away from AI altogether and talk about how Microsoft is rethinking the way it communicates. On September 24th, internal memos from Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, reported by GeekWire, moved the communication function out of marketing. It now sits in Brad Smith’s corporate, external, and legal affairs group. Okay, that makes sense to me. Brent Colburn is leading it on an interim basis. Frank Shaw, who has run Microsoft’s communications for, well, nearly 20 years, is leaving at the end of the year and moving into an advisory role in the meantime.

The bigger piece here, though, is the strategy. Microsoft wants employees and executives out front, telling the company’s stories in their own voices, quote, “under a shared strategy and set of principles,” end quote. The press has called this “building in public.” Forbes, which is where I spotted this, frames it as a trade-off: more voices, less control.

Now, so far nobody has published those principles. The way I see it, this is essentially a strategic narrative. I developed one of these where I work for pretty much the same purpose, so that our people, leaders, people out in client interviews, the marketing department developing proposals, all speak in their own voice and tell their own stories, but guided by a set of principles. But we haven’t heard anything about that yet for Microsoft, nor have we heard anything about the approval process or what training might be required before employees can post. Where are they going to post? How can they post? Can they do a podcast? Can they do TikToks? We haven’t even seen a timetable. So it’s hard to assess how this might work or might not work.

Before we get to the pros and cons of this approach, I do want to make the point that this is hardly new. Some of you may remember Robert Scoble. In the early days of blogging, he was a Microsoft employee. He was writing as the Scobleizer. It was an early blog. In fact, in 2005, The Economist wrote about it, and I’m quoting here: “He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public relations types have been failing abjectly for years. He has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience.” That was the Scobleizer in 2005.

By 2006, roughly 3,000 Microsoft employees were blogging on the company’s developer network. Neville, you and I interviewed Robert in March of 2005. You can still hear that interview over on our archive site, and we covered his departure from Microsoft in 2006. One report said he was the third best-known employee at Microsoft, behind Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the time.

So, what’s different this time around? A couple of things. First, this is a stated enterprise strategy that came from the CEO. Second is the home for it. It’s not sitting under marketing; it’s under the legal and policy side of the house. When we debated reporting lines on Episode 532, I joked that comms should report to legal, and that’s what Microsoft did, though I doubt they’d say it that way. Third, there are the platforms. Channel 9 and Microsoft blogs were owned; Microsoft controlled the stage. Today those voices live on X and LinkedIn, platforms Microsoft can’t control. And all of this is in the middle of an AI race where every competitor’s engineers are doing the same thing, and under real regulatory scrutiny.

What are people saying about this? Named practitioner reaction is pretty thin so far. Mostly it’s just media coverage. GeekWire noted that Shaw’s shift surprised some people inside the company. The sharpest analysis I found was from ContentGrip, which says the communications job becomes one of designing a system of credible voices rather than being the voice.

And real quickly, just some pros and cons. On the plus side is credibility. An engineer explaining her own work is more believable than a press release. It’s faster. It reaches more of the right people through fragmented channels that no media list covers. It gives you a listening post; Scoble used his blog as a free focus group. And in an age of AI-generated everything, verifiably human voices are going to carry some weight.

On the minus side, there’s, well, a lot. There’s inconsistent messaging. There’s legal and regulatory exposure, especially for a public company facing antitrust attention. There are disclosure risks and leaks. There’s uneven participation: some employees are going to shine at this, and others are going to feel pressured into doing it. There’s a loss of control, which is part of the whole point, but it’s also the whole problem. And with the issues, we’re just scratching the surface. It’s not like things don’t happen like this all the time with organizational support or indifference. Where I work, we have people posting videos from construction sites to LinkedIn all the time. Are we upset by it? Hell no. We cross-post most of it to our official accounts. We love it.

So if you’re doing this at your organization, the Microsoft story points to three things. Publish clear principles people can actually remember. Train and coach the people you’re asking to speak, because enthusiasm isn’t a skill. And build an escalation path and monitoring so someone can help fast when a post goes sideways.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, there’s a lot here, Shel, I must say. A key point in my mind, when I hear this kind of story, is that the Scobleizer, and indeed IBM, did something similar to this, which is where we met Philippe Borremans, when he was at IBM involved in the blogging initiative.

Shel Holtz: That’s right.

Neville Hobson: Right. The landscape is utterly, utterly different to what it was then. There are more people, apart from anything else, and there’s more access to opinions and to anything other people say online. Back 20 years ago, you were still on dial-up for a large part. DSL might be your fastest choice. Mobile networks weren’t anything to speak of at all. So it was limited what people could do. But also the awareness and the desire weren’t fully formed yet. That’s emerged over the last two decades. Now everyone’s online, we’ve got AI on the scene, and attitudes are shifting away from the command-and-control behavior exhibited by companies 20 years ago, Microsoft being one of them: official spokespeople only, no one’s allowed to say anything publicly. That was the mantra in the ’90s, certainly. Now it’s different, so encourage it.

It’s no small thing, though, for large enterprises to suddenly shift tactics and do this. But the trend, I’ll call it that, is clearly there to do this, and Microsoft may well be a great ongoing live case study on how this works. I can think of, for instance, when I was working at IBM a decade ago, involved in mobile app development, I was using tools that would help employees share content on social networks with pre-created messaging. That was so fake, in my humble opinion. Now you want it to be natural, and with it comes the inherent risk that they’re going to say something that, by mistake, is not really what you would like people to be talking about. It’s not about “you can only talk about certain things.” I think you’ve got to say, talk about what you want related to work. But you mentioned something really significant, which is you’ve got to have guidance and training from the very, very outset.

And undoubtedly there are other things you could do to lessen what some people might see as pressure to do this. There’s no pressure. You don’t have to do this. You need to make that message very clear. Equally, if you don’t do it, there’s no penalty, but peer pressure will help improve that, I would imagine, if you do it right. We don’t have time to go into a lot of detail on this, but I think finding champions within the organization who can lead the charge, who stimulate people to do all this, would be great.

But I think you’ve still got another issue, which I don’t know how you would solve, which is that much of what employees in a big company like Microsoft post is going to be just so much noise amongst all the other noise that’s out there. You’re competing for people’s attention. So I doubt you can expect to achieve mass conversion to people paying attention to what you say online in that kind of environment. So maybe you need to concentrate on small communities that you have a relationship with. But the idea, I think, is really good. And I think IBM is probably the best model, because at the time there wasn’t really anyone else doing it the way they did it. They published guidance, examples, manuals that were publicly accessible by anyone, and that helped drive awareness of what others could do. That was really quite something. It’d be interesting if Microsoft does something like that with this. But I think it’s a good step.

I read the Forbes article. I didn’t think they were quite right with their title, by the way, which was “Rethinking Communication as Employees Take on a Storytelling Role.” That looked to me like there’s a keyword they put in the headline so it shows up. This is way, way beyond just storytelling. This is something where you are an extension of the organization in how you communicate externally and, indeed, even internally. So it’s a huge task, I think, and I wish them well. I think it’d be great to see how they get on with this.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think this is a step beyond advocacy, because in employee advocacy programs you’re asking people to amplify a message that you have already distributed. And in this case, you’re telling people, go out there and tell your own stories and engage in your own conversations with people. There is nothing new about this. Not only did Microsoft do it before IBM, we had General Motors with a social media team engaging in the car blogs, and not about GM stuff, just becoming part of the community. Dell had a program that I think was on par with IBM’s. I remember speaking at one of their certification programs for the people who were going to become bloggers on behalf of Dell. There were a couple of hundred people in this program, and I think there were 11 of us speaking there. Christopher Barger was there. Richard Binhammer was at Dell at the time.

Neville Hobson: I did similar with Dell in the UK. The same thing. It was a global thing they were trying to do.

Shel Holtz: Right. But they trained people heavily. They trained people very deeply in all of this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There are so many examples we could spend the rest of the show just talking about what others did. It’s not new, you’re absolutely right. But it needs revisiting again, because I think people have forgotten this.

Shel Holtz: Well, this is why I raised the story. Here we go again, with somebody saying employees are authentic, their voices are authentic, it’s going to have more credibility than sending out a press release or putting something on our media site. I think that’s great. Why hasn’t it become the standard? It’s because too many organizations don’t take the time and trouble to do the training and to provide the resources to make it easy. They don’t think through what this means to employees who may feel pressured to participate. They don’t teach you where the regulatory risks are. Don’t mention another employee’s health problem in the United States. For God’s sake, that’s a HIPAA violation. So there are all kinds of risks here. You can mitigate them with the appropriate program before you just tell people, go out and blog, or go out and post on LinkedIn and X and whatever.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s good. So I mentioned earlier that we had a story about ChatGPT to mention. Here it comes. OpenAI has just introduced an interesting new feature for ChatGPT called Locked Chats. It lets you hide individual conversations from your normal chat history and protect access to them with a four-digit PIN. It’s being rolled out across ChatGPT’s consumer and business plans, including Enterprise. At first glance this seems like a useful addition.

But here’s where it gets interesting. OpenAI is quite explicit that locking a conversation doesn’t encrypt it separately, doesn’t change how long the company retains it, and doesn’t override an organization’s compliance policies. In Enterprise and Edu workspaces, the content can still be available through authorized compliance systems. So a locked chat isn’t necessarily a confidential chat in the way some users might imagine.

Consider what an employee might reasonably assume when they see a feature called Locked Chats. They might think the conversations are now completely private, even from their employer, or that sensitive corporate information becomes secure simply because the conversation requires a PIN. Neither assumption is necessarily correct. OpenAI’s own documentation makes some important distinctions. Locking isn’t encryption; the feature doesn’t create an end-to-end encrypted vault. Data retention doesn’t change; locked conversations remain subject to the same retention and model improvement settings. Organizational oversight remains; locked chats in Enterprise and Edu workspaces are still included in message logs available through OpenAI’s compliance platform. And forgetting the PIN has major consequences: resetting it permanently deletes the locked conversations and the protected content that you might have shared with ChatGPT.

And this raises some questions for communicators. For example, are employees becoming increasingly comfortable discussing sensitive workplace matters with AI assistants, perhaps without fully understanding who can access that information? How clearly are organizations explaining the distinction between privacy, confidentiality, and security when they introduce AI tools? And is there a danger that features like this create a false sense of security, encouraging people to share information they perhaps shouldn’t be putting into an AI system in the first place?

I think there’s a broader issue here about AI literacy, though. We often talk about teaching people how to use AI effectively, but perhaps we aren’t paying enough attention to helping them understand the implications of using it. And there’s another thought. As ChatGPT and similar systems have become more integrated into everyday work, employees may increasingly regard their AI conversations as personal spaces, even when they’re using company-provided tools. That could create some interesting tensions between individual expectations of privacy and an organization’s legitimate responsibilities for governance, security, and compliance. So is a feature like Locked Chats simply a welcome improvement to the user experience, or does it highlight a bigger challenge for organizations trying to establish sensible boundaries around AI at work?

Shel Holtz: Well, I’m going to use it, because any extra degree of security is a good thing. But this is clearly a branding issue as far as I’m concerned. The word “locked” suggests more protection than it obviously provides, based on everything OpenAI has told us about it. I think that’s a pretty good example of how product naming shapes the expectations of the user, and of the gap between a help center disclosure and what people assume. Calling it “locked” is going to set an expectation for people who don’t pay attention to the fine print, and it’s going to be misleading. As a communicator, I probably would have advised a different name for it. I don’t know; I haven’t given any thought to what I would call it. That could be a listener exercise. Send us your ideas for what you would have called it.

But yeah, I think it’s a poor branding choice. I think it sets a bad expectation. It is still up to the organization, when we’re talking about the use of something like this in the enterprise, to make sure employees understand what it is, what it can do, and what it can’t do. If we are involved in a lawsuit, in discovery, those chats are still going to be accessible. The fact that you locked it doesn’t mean it’s not going to end up in the court records and in the hands of the adversary in the lawsuit. So this becomes governance in the organization. It becomes part of the training, the ongoing training. This is why we talk about the fact that AI training in the organization is not a one-and-done thing. This technology continues to evolve and change dramatically, and it will be incumbent upon communicators, the trainers, and the IT department to work together to make sure that employees understand: this is the utility that you can get out of this feature, and this is what it will not do for you.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think also, I read in one article commenting on this that you can have guidelines written and published on a website accessible to all employees. No guarantee they’re going to read it. Well, yeah, that’s true, but you still have to do it. You should communicate it and make it available and help people understand all this. But you need to do more to help people understand the consequences. That’s the point that strikes me. Not how to use ChatGPT, but the consequences of this. So that, I think, is one way of addressing expectations of privacy that balances that out with organizations’ responsibility. These are communication issues.

I think, like you, I’m going to give it a go when I see it in my copy of ChatGPT. It is rolling out, as I mentioned; I haven’t got it yet. Would I use it? I’m a bit different to everyone else employed in an organization, because my use of these tools has now changed in terms of workplace needs, so there’s not an awful lot that I would be alarmed about if it was accessible. That said, I don’t want it to be just open to anyone to look at if they don’t have a need to. So there’s that issue. But it comes down to, this is related to what we’ve been talking about earlier, too: building trust. And you think the employer needs to do more than they might think they need to do with the addition of a feature to this tool. Undoubtedly Claude, maybe Gemini, will come up with something like this as well.

Shel Holtz: Of course. I was just going to say, Anthropic and Gemini will look at the criticism that’s coming out of what OpenAI did and come out with versions that address some of those, and they’ll be able to market that “ours doesn’t do this” or “ours is better because of that.”

Neville Hobson: That’s right. So lots to consider on this from a communicator’s point of view and from a user’s point of view. Just be aware of the limitations.

[Dan York’s Tech Report]

Shel Holtz: Thanks for that report, Dan. It arrived just moments before we started recording, so we have not had a chance to listen to it. I know that it’s a little late because of your travels. I read your post that it took you about 30 hours to get home from the conference you were attending, and I’m very grateful that you still found time to record your report. I’m looking forward to hearing about it. I’m definitely interested in your take on that PHP vulnerability that we discussed briefly earlier, and interested in hearing about the features of Mastodon 5.0, since I still host the mastocom.org Mastodon instance. So I appreciate that.

Internal communicators, this one’s for you. You craft a message. You know the kinds of messages you craft: benefits change, reorganization, safety policy. You consider the structure, the tone, what leadership wants to say, and how employees will react to it. And then your employees never read it, because instead they paste it into an AI tool and read what comes back.

That’s not hypothetical. Fresh, an intranet company, surveyed a thousand professionals in the UK and the US, both communicators and employees. 88% of employees say they use AI to summarize workplace communications. 28% now encounter company news through AI first, before the intranet, before the leadership email, before word of mouth. Only 12% read internal communications in full. 95% of employees trust AI to capture the key points accurately. Yet 92% of internal communicators say those summaries distort emotional tone and intent. Both of these things can be true, because the employees can’t see what got left out. That’s the nature of a summary. And just a third of organizations have any formal monitoring or policy for how their content gets reinterpreted.

So, how accurate are these summaries? Well, there’s research, although not about internal comms. There was a study in Royal Society Open Science that looked at almost 5,000 AI summaries of scientific abstracts and articles. The summaries were far more likely than the originals to overgeneralize, and the newer the model, the worse it got. Llama 3.3 was 39 times as likely to produce generalized conclusions. ChatGPT-4o was nine times as likely. In one example, “a diabetes drug was better than placebo” in the original became “effective and safe treatment” in the summary. The qualifiers just disappeared. The researchers told the bots to stay faithful to the source and not introduce inaccuracies, but they still produced about twice as many generalized conclusions. So “just tell the AI to be careful” isn’t a fix.

Now, scientific abstracts aren’t an all-hands memo, but the failure is the same one we worry about: the conditions, the exceptions, and the caveats get dropped in the summaries. “We’re moving to the new system, with exceptions for field staff pending approval” might turn into “We’re moving to the new system.” A piece in Digital Journal points out that summarizing means choosing what to leave out, and a short answer is a starting point, not a substitute for the source.

So what do we do? First, write content that survives the summary. David Bowman of Fresh, the UK organization that did that study, put it this way: “To be heard in 2026, organizations must design content to survive the summary.” In practice, that means lead with the point. Put what’s happening, who it affects, what they need to do, and by when in the very first few lines. I know you want to write in that feature style, with an example before you get into the news, to make it human. It doesn’t survive the summary. Write your own one-sentence bottom line. If you don’t supply the summary, the machine is going to do that. Keep qualifiers attached to the claim. Don’t bury “this only applies to this cohort of employees” in paragraph six. Label what’s decided and what isn’t. Cut, shorten. The way Bowman said it, subtraction is now a strategic necessity. Fewer messages means the important one is less likely to get mangled. And test it. Run your own announcement through whatever AI tool your employees use and see what comes back. You may not like it.

Second, consider channels that don’t invite the paste-and-summarize habit. This might include live town halls, manager-led team conversations, and face-to-face with people who aren’t at a desk all day. Conversation carries the context and the tone that a summary strips out, and you can see in the room whether it landed. I’ll be honest, though, this isn’t a wall. Meetings get transcribed, and video can be summarized. The point isn’t to hide from AI. It’s to put the important stuff where a human explains it to another human.

And then there’s governance. Only a third of organizations have any policy. Find out how your employees actually consume your content. Tell leaders that sending isn’t the same as being understood, and that the summary is now a channel they don’t control. The audience isn’t skimming anymore. They’re delegating the reading. Our job is to make the message hold up when the reading is done by the machine.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s an interesting scenario you’ve described, I think, Shel. One of the articles you shared, in IT Brief, I found quite interesting. A couple of quotes struck me. The report presents the issue less as a technical shift than as a behavioral one. That makes total sense to me. This is largely behavior, it seems to me. But the conclusion makes sense to me too. It underlines how quickly AI tools are moving from optional assistance to frontline filters for corporate information. 28% of employees now are seeing company news through AI before any original source. I don’t see that changing at all.

And I think the reality is that this is how people like to share information. It gives them a sense of control, I suppose. It could be that they might reinterpret what the official news from a company is, maybe with a hint of skepticism about what they really mean. And you’ll even find some who’ll say, “This really means this.” And that kind of content will spread outside the organization. So it’s a complicated landscape, it seems to me, and I think there are no easy answers.

Shel Holtz: No, I think it is important, though, for internal communicators to find a way to poll your population and find out the degree to which this is happening in your organization. Because I firmly believe that if you find out that some significant percentage of your employees are engaging with organizational content this way, and I’m not talking about best practices or things that are in the archives. I’m talking about the news that’s being presented, the information that leaders are sharing in their emails, the things that you’re sharing through your intranet that you think are important for all employees to understand. The new policy, right? The fact that there is a laptop swap program coming up and all employees need to go and fill in this information about their current company equipment. This is important, that employees get this. And if you find that a preponderance of employees in your organization are using the summaries, you need to restrategize your whole approach to communication. It may end up relying more on face-to-face.

And I’m actually thinking about this as subject matter for a new book: that we are going to come to rely on managers like we have never relied on managers before to become the conveyors of this information directly to the members of their teams. We’ve been talking about this in internal communications for decades, but it is now a required part of the strategy, if in fact your ability to get the message across is being eroded by the summaries that employees are creating. It’s also going to change the approach you take to writing and where you put this stuff for people to get. So I think you need to ask your employees where they’re at with this, and keep doing that so that you’re ready. Even if they’re not doing it now, when they start doing it, which I think is probably inevitable.

Neville, I do this with all the newsletters that I get on AI through Gmail. I have a skill set up in Claude. I subscribe to probably 20 AI-related emails. There is absolutely no way that I’m going to be able to read all of those every day. But my Gmail summary skill does a great job of telling me, “Here are the things that they’re all covering. The Neuron covered this, and TLDR covered that, and Casey Newton’s newsletter covered this other thing.” I can skim that in about two or three minutes, and it’s great. But am I getting the context? Am I getting the nuance? Am I missing something? Is it skewing some of that information as it creates a summary? Yeah, I read this knowing full well that that’s possible. But it’s better than not being able to read them at all. And I’m sure that there are employees who are tremendously busy on their jobs who feel the same way about reading the information that comes to them from the company.

Neville Hobson: Yep, makes total sense, I agree.

Okay, so here’s an interesting story, nothing to do with AI, utterly nothing, from Northern Ireland, that caught my eye. A local council is abandoning its digital newsletter for residents and going back to a printed magazine delivered through letterboxes. Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council says readership of its digital newsletter has collapsed. One edition in 2024 attracted around 1,650 views, but a more recent edition managed fewer than 120. So the council is spending £30,000, which I would say is probably about $38,000, on a trial printed magazine, which will go to 60,000 households.

Now, I rather like the idea of print making a comeback. We’ve talked a number of times before about how traditional communication channels still have a place in an increasingly digital world. But what really interests me is why the digital newsletter failed so spectacularly. Was it the format? Was the content not sufficiently interesting or relevant to residents? Did people even know the newsletter existed? Was it promoted effectively? Or perhaps the council simply didn’t understand how its residents wanted to receive information.

And there’s this. The council has an online registration form for its digital magazine. It asks residents for their name, address, postcode, and email address, together with consent to receive emails about accessing the publication. That raises another possibility: was a digital edition sufficiently easy to discover and access? We can’t tell from the registration form alone how residents actually received or found the newsletter, and the articles I’ve read don’t really talk any more about this. But it’s another reminder that the experience surrounding a publication can matter as much as the publication itself.

We don’t know the answers, as I mentioned, and the reports I’ve seen don’t really explore them. There’s more, such as the question of measurement. The council knows its digital newsletter attracted very few views. But how will it know whether the printed magazine is any more successful? Delivering 60,000 copies doesn’t mean 60,000 households will read it.

So there are a few questions worth exploring. For example, are organizations sometimes too quick to blame a communication channel when the real problem might be their content, their audience understanding, or the distribution strategy? Could returning to print actually be a sensible decision, particularly when communicating with an entire community rather than a self-selecting digital audience? And how should we measure success? Is it enough that people receive or read a publication? Or should we be looking for evidence that they understand something, take action, or engage more with the organization?

And I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Digital isn’t automatically better simply because it’s digital, and print isn’t automatically outdated. What matters is reaching the right people with something that’s relevant to them, in a format they’re willing to engage with. So here’s a closing thought: a channel can deliver your message, but it can’t make people interested in it.

Shel Holtz: I have so many thoughts about this, I’m not even sure where to start. In terms of the declining readership of the digital publication, did they ask people why they weren’t reading it? Did they survey their residents? They might have been able to make changes.

Neville Hobson: We don’t know any of that.

Shel Holtz: No, I understand we don’t, and it would be very helpful to know. If they asked, and people said, “We don’t care what information you provided or in what digital format, we’re not going to read this because we just don’t care,” that’s one thing. But if they came back and said, “You’re talking too much about this when I’m actually interested in that,” then you can make changes and probably increase your open rates. Did they do any other research, into the reasons that people may not be opening it? We don’t know. Was it going to their spam folder, for example? Was it reaching them at all? Did it have the appropriate kind of subject line that was going to entice people to open it? Did they do A/B testing on their subject lines? There are so many questions about why the digital version didn’t succeed.

Will a print version succeed? Well, maybe. The councillors kept over and over again pointing to older residents, which is a reminder to segment your audiences. The debate about digital versus print is sometimes hiding the real question, which is, who are we trying to reach? Now, you and I are in our seventies, and we are digitally savvy. Our work lives involved all of this stuff.

Neville Hobson: Digitally native.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we are. We’ve been working online since what, the 1980s?

Neville Hobson: The ’80s.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. So I don’t buy this “older people only read print.” I think that may have been true 30 years ago. But this is what these councillors seem to believe. And as long as that’s their belief, it does allow us to remember that segment, and who we are trying to reach, and who’s more likely to pay attention to what kind of content. But the question that I really have is, why in the world wouldn’t you do both? Accommodate the people who would rather get print and the people who would rather have digital, and let the people who are reading digital opt out of print so you can save a little money, for goodness’ sake.

I graduated from college in 1976. I get a four-color magazine from my university four times a year that goes immediately into the recycling bin. It looks like it is well written, it looks like it is beautifully designed, and I simply don’t care. I just don’t have the time or interest. I have no connection anymore to my university beyond some of the people I went to school with there. I have no time to read the Atlantic Monthly that I pay money for. I’m not going to take the time to read this, so it goes straight into the bin. Wouldn’t they like to know that, and stop sending it to me and reduce the cost of their print run?

So yeah, I think there are ways to manage this stuff. You know I’m a fan of print. You know what I think the advantages of print are, especially for the people who are going to take a minute to at least flip through it and go, “My goodness, I didn’t expect to find this article here.” That hardly ever happens online, because you get what you’re looking for, and print allows that serendipitous discovery of really interesting or important content. I wish I could send a print magazine to the homes of my employees. You know why? Not only would they flip through it, and you know what employees look for first when they’re flipping through a magazine: pictures of people that they know. But their families would get to see it and suddenly feel like they’re a little bit more a part of the company their husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers are working for. I think there’s tremendous value in the tactile nature of print.

But does that mean it’s necessarily going to work in this instance, without the research to figure out what people want to read about, what people need to know about, how to ensure they’re going to pay attention to it? This all sounds to me like a research failure, and I would really need to know more about what research they did. They’re also going to need to do research to figure out if the print publication is working. They’re going to need to ask.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. It’s a shame that there isn’t more information. I didn’t dig any further than that. In fact, the links to the two publications in Northern Ireland that had the story are in the show notes for this episode, so you can read more detail there. But not the answers to what did they do, why did they do this, why didn’t they do that, did they do research, et cetera. I’d also be keen to know of any listener in Northern Ireland who has any insight into this story. If you’d like to share your insight with us, we’d really like to know that.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And I’ll leave this report with one thought: what a great opportunity for human-led design. Because the one thing about print is that you can’t escape its notice. Even if it comes in the mail, you go through it quickly and you see it. And how good is the cover design, right? That becomes vital to people stopping and going, “Maybe I’ll flip through this.” It’s so easy to skip a subject line in a list of today’s email in your inbox. It’s harder to skip that print publication when you’re holding it in your hand and the cover is in your face. It had better be a good cover, or it’s going into the recycling bin.

Neville Hobson: Your comment about your university magazine I found quite interesting. If you’ve been getting this thing for years, and each time you stick it in the recycling bin, don’t they email subscribers occasionally saying, “We’d like your views about the magazine, do you like it?” Or I guess not.

Shel Holtz: No, no. I occasionally get one from the journalism department, and I’ll pay attention to that, first of all because it will report on people that I know, and second because I am very interested in what they are teaching journalists these days in university, especially since many of them are going to come into corporate communications. But the one from the university that talks about all the other departments that I don’t care about? Nope, don’t care.

Well, some listeners may think that I have saved the most interesting item for last. The 2026 AI Adoption Report from Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective was published on October 13. It’s the fourth annual edition. It is long, and it is full of data on ROI and agents, so I’m going to try to stick to just what matters to us as organizational communicators.

They asked about 1,400 full-time employees at U.S. private-sector companies with more than a thousand employees. Those were the people who were surveyed in July. About a thousand were managers and above. This is the first year they also surveyed 409 entry- and mid-level employees, which is great, because that’s where it gets interesting. In the report’s own words, there is no group in this study where managers and the employees they manage describe the same working environment. I want to say that again: there is no group in this study where managers and employees were aligned.

So, the numbers. 79% of managers and above say leadership has provided a clear long-term AI vision. Among entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 64%. 84% of managers say managers are empowered to lead AI change. Employees say 65%. And the biggest gap of all is training. 78% of managers say employees get adequate AI training. Only 56% of entry- and mid-level employees agree. There’s also a general alignment measure: 39% of managers describe an organization that clears four or five alignment factors for employees; for employees, it’s only 26%.

Now, the report doesn’t have a section dedicated to communication, and probably should, but a gap where leaders believe they’ve explained the vision and provided training, and employees say they haven’t, is pretty clearly a communication problem. We have seen this pattern before. It’s the “we told them” syndrome.

The sentiment numbers say the same. 84% of managers say their view of AI has improved over the past year. For entry- and mid-level employees, it’s 68%. For a positive impact on society, managers are at 76%, employees at 55%. And 46% of entry- and mid-level employees worry their own skills are declining from AI use. Now, that fascinates me. They fear that their own skills are declining because AI is doing the work. The report is careful to say, and this is a quote, “far from a backlash against technology,” but it’s not the same experience as the one that leaders are having.

So let’s move on to the business results. Companies using AI in a way the researchers call “transformational” are far more likely to report strongly positive ROI: 67%, versus 19% for companies whose AI use isn’t described as transformational. Departments with strongly positive ROI were also more likely to have changed their management structure because of AI, 64% versus 47%, and they didn’t report more layoffs or hiring freezes. A few other correlations. Among organizations with a newly designated chief AI officer, 58% report strongly positive ROI, versus 8% with no such role. Those standardized on a single approved platform, 50% versus 9% for those still experimenting. Again, those are correlations and not causations.

One more finding, on agents. Two-thirds of departments say they use AI agents, but only 17% let an AI agent finish a task without a person approving each step. Brian Smith of GBK says most companies are, quote, “paying for autonomy and then reviewing every action.”

So what do we do with this? Well, and this is getting to be a litany: don’t assume your message has landed. Measure the gaps. Ask employees the same questions leaders get asked. Is the vision clear? Is the training adequate? Do you know what you’re allowed to do? If you find the same gap Wharton found, you have a case.

Second, claim a role in AI training communication. Department leadership gets named for user training by 51% of respondents, the C-suite by 30%. Communication isn’t on the list. Communicators who can make the training findable, practical, and understandable will win. They’ll matter.

Third, equip managers. There’s that message about managers again. They’re the channel employees actually trust, and the data suggests they’re more optimistic than the people they manage. Give them the real questions employees are asking, not just talking points.

Fourth, be honest about jobs. 37% of managers say AI has led to staff reductions, and they expect fewer entry-level hires. Employees notice when you’re silent about that.

And last, govern what you’re communicating. If your company is adopting agents and platforms, the communication plan for who’s accountable and what the rules are belongs right there with the technology plan.

There’s a lot there, Neville. What jumped out at you?

Neville Hobson: There is a lot, Shel. I haven’t read the report; it’s big. But I did pay attention to the key takeaways on the page they posted on the website describing the report. A couple of things from that jumped out at me, related to something you mentioned about the chief AI officer. If you look at the acronym, CAIO, I think it’s fabulous, absolutely fabulous.

Shel Holtz: Ha! Ciao.

Neville Hobson: So it’s interesting that someone with dedicated AI ownership, says Wharton… Well, they may say more about that in the report. I’d like to know what they mean by “dedicated AI ownership.” Is the person’s prime role this, nothing else on their plate they’ve got to pay attention to, or what? That would be helpful to know. But 58% of organizations with someone in that role report positive ROI. Again, it’s only 8% for a company that doesn’t have anyone with a dedicated role. Well, there’s good evidence of what you should be doing in an organization, if you’re able to. It may well be that you need to have someone with that role as part of something else he or she is doing as well, because you may not have the resources to have someone just dedicated to that. That would be better than not having anyone, I would say.

The bit about agents, where they’re putting steps in place to check everything at each stage, sounds counterproductive, but it could well be that those doing that are going to say, “I told you so, these agents are dangerous,” if you look at what’s been written in the tech press over the last couple of weeks. I remember when we talked about this specific topic in one of our short episodes earlier in the year, about the growth of agents and how they’re going to take over various things in organizations. Largely that’s happening. But we’re now seeing a strong pushback based on some of the scare stories. For instance, I read one in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was, about AI agents gaining access to people’s bank accounts without permission. And you’re thinking, this plays into the reporting about AI taking control and “we’re all going to die.” It’s that kind of talk. So I think that makes it inevitable that you’re going to have big handbrakes on some of these things without oversight. But again, determining what’s best there is the CAIO’s job, I would say.

From what I read about this, and hearing what you’ve explained, what Wharton calls “adaptive organizations,” there are some really good examples here of what adaptive organizations do differently from those who are not thinking about these developments. So I think there’s plenty here. I’m not sure I’ll have time to read the full report, but I see there’s an executive summary. I’ll download that and see what it says. But it’s interesting, Shel, that this survey has credibility, I think, and this kind of study is worth paying attention to, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: I dropped the whole report into Claude and asked it to extract and summarize the elements that would be relevant for communicators, and that’s how I crafted the report I just delivered. I’m glad you focused on the chief AI officer. I was really fascinated by this particular data point, for a number of reasons. We talk all the time about companies creating the “chief blank officer” role for trendy things. I think we just recently mentioned that there were companies that had chief metaverse officers there for 15 minutes. But in this case, I think it makes sense. There are a lot of companies that are hiring a senior AI person, probably sitting in the IT department. But are they speaking strategically to the organization about the non-IT parts of this?

We have reported on data that said there are CEOs who have decided that AI is so important that they are becoming the leader of the AI effort. But they’re speaking to employees and to other stakeholder audiences about so many other topics that the AI stuff may get lost in there. If you send the message to your employees, and frankly to outside audiences who are interested as well, that this is such an important thing in our organization that we have elevated it to a board-level officer position, with all of the regulatory responsibility that goes along with a true officer position, then people pay attention. That person has credibility when they speak, and employees are going to listen, as opposed to hearing some of it from the CEO and some of it from HR and some of it from legal and some of it from IT, and “what do I make of all of this?” It’s easy for me to see why employees in an organization with a chief AI officer feel better about what’s happening and understand it more than in organizations that haven’t named one.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. Although I have to say, the acronym stuck in my mind. I can see that: “Hey, ciao, ciao, ciao.”

Shel Holtz: Yeah, ciao. Well, you could always go with the U.S. government’s insistence now that we call it superintelligence, and that would make it a chief SI officer.

Neville Hobson: Oh my God.

Shel Holtz: It’s a whole other topic.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Let’s not talk about the midterms. Okay, that’s a big topic. So I think that’s a great report, Shel. I’m going to take a look at that executive summary to understand what they’re saying here. So thanks for sharing it.

Shel Holtz: My pleasure. And that will draw to a close this episode of For Immediate Release, Episode 533, our long-form episode for October 2026. Our next long-form episode is scheduled to drop on Monday, November 30th. Neville, you and I will record that on Saturday, November 28th, right after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., anyway.

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: So I look forward to talking to you then. But of course, we will be recording some shorter midweek episodes between now and then. I hope you will all subscribe. If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, we’ve already let you know where to leave comments. Your ratings and reviews are of tremendous value to us, and we are immensely grateful for the time and effort that you take to do that as well. So until our next short midweek episode, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #533: The Two Distinct Realities of AI Adoption appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most communicators long for that coveted seat at the table. What do those who have attained it have to say about it? What does it take to achieve it? And does it deliver the kind of influence top-level communicators want? Neville and Shel explore the data and share their own thoughts in this short midweek episode.

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 532 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Today’s topic is one we’ve discussed on FIR many times over the years, and one the communication profession has debated for as long as I can remember: the communicator’s seat at the top table.

For decades, senior communicators have argued that communication deserves a place alongside finance, operations, legal, HR, and the other functions involved in shaping an organization’s direction. We’ve talked about becoming strategic advisors rather than simply the people who communicate decisions made elsewhere.

But here’s something I’ve been thinking about: Maybe the question isn’t whether communicators deserve a seat at the table anymore. Maybe it’s what they contribute once they’re there—and what makes the CEO and other executives want them to stay.

That question came to mind when I read a recent Axios article with the apt title “How Communicators in the C-Suite Are Staying at the Table,” by Simon Hernandez-Arthur. It draws on conversations with senior communication leaders and identifies four principles that seem to distinguish those who have become trusted strategic advisors.

First, operate like a peer, not a provider. Don’t wait for instructions about what needs communicating. Participate in the decisions that determine what needs to be communicated in the first place.

Second, think beyond the traditional boundaries of communication. Understand the business, its risks, the regulatory environment, and stakeholder expectations.

Third, don’t confuse AI’s speed and analytical capabilities with the judgment that comes from experience. AI can help us see what’s happening, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what to do about it.

Fourth, invest in the next generation of communication leaders. If experience and judgment are becoming more valuable, we need to ensure younger practitioners have opportunities to develop them.

What struck me is how closely these principles connect with a book I reviewed last December, Chief Communication Officers at Work, by my good friend Tabita Andersson. Tabita interviewed 23 CCOs from major organizations across different industries, exploring what their roles involve. What emerged was a picture of communication leadership much broader than managing messages, media relationships, or corporate reputation.

These people help organizations interpret their environment, anticipate problems, challenge decisions, and navigate complex relationships. They bring the outside world into the organization and help leaders understand the consequences of what they do, not just what they say.

In my review, I drew three conclusions: The CCO’s value lies in anticipation rather than amplification; clarity is a leadership behavior; and the role is expanding while becoming—perhaps surprisingly in the age of AI—more human.

That’s the connection with the Axios article. For a long time, we’ve talked about earning a seat at the table. Perhaps the real measure of success is whether the communicator contributes something that would otherwise be missing from executive decision-making.

There’s also the question of how representative these examples are. We’re hearing from highly accomplished leaders in major organizations. Is this how the profession operates more broadly, or are we describing an ideal many practitioners struggle to achieve?

Have we finally moved beyond the old argument about earning a seat at the table, or are we giving the same argument a new name? What do you think, Shel?

Shel Holtz: We’re giving the old argument a new name. No question. This is one of my favorite topics. I love talking about the seat at the table because every communicator wants it, but in any organization, there’s only the potential for one communicator to have it.

Neville Hobson: I would question that. I’m not sure every communicator wants it.

Shel Holtz: You have a valid point. Some communicators want to remain individual contributors and write articles. Some want to manage departments. But we all talk about the seat at the table as the ultimate goal for communications. Go to a conference, and you’ll hear in half the sessions that doing this or that will earn you that coveted seat.

I had some issues with the Axios piece. It was almost entirely anecdotal and cited little, if any, data. Some of its sources have commercial interests: agencies and an AI-monitoring vendor.

If you look at the data, Korn Ferry’s 2025 survey examined 78 Fortune 500 companies. It found that 47% had chief communication officers reporting to the CEO, up from 40% in 2023. Fifty-one percent sat on the executive committee. Among industrial organizations, including companies like mine, that drops to 36%.

This year, Page’s Navigator Benchmark looked at 179 CCOs in 33 countries. It found that 65.9% said their scope had expanded, but 45.9% said resources hadn’t kept pace. Budgets fell for 31.1%, up from 24.8% last year. Page’s Candace Steele Flippin said the data show that access—reporting to the CEO—isn’t enough.

What I mostly want to discuss is what Jim Lukaszewski says about this. Jim has spent years on the speaking circuit, written many books, and counseled CEOs, particularly on crises. He calls the table a myth.

In a podcast from about 10 years ago, he said real decisions often happen after the group meeting, when the boss pulls one or two people aside. Jim’s advice is to “be the table.” Don’t wait to be seated. Build the skills and habits that earn the boss’s attention. Then you can bring that influence into any room, whether or not you’re the CCO sitting at that particular table.

He also says one-on-one beats committee. Meaningful decisions often emerge from an advisor’s work with a leader, and the more people involved in the discussion, the lower the odds of a productive result.

Leaders choose their advisors for expertise, insight, loyalty, and specialized knowledge. Advisors who offer only one functional skill, such as communications, tend to be consulted mainly about that function.

If you want to be a senior advisor who influences decisions, with or without an executive committee seat, you need to expand your knowledge of how your business works and how business works generally.

Finally, you need to start from the boss’s perspective. In his 2008 book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You?, Jim treats most business problems as management problems first. A communicator who thinks only like a department head rather than a business manager won’t be in the room.

Do you need a seat at the table to influence decisions? I don’t know.

I remember reading an article by Dean in Communication World, back when IABC published a printed member magazine. This must have been in the 1980s or ’90s, before I met him. He described the communicator as a hired gun: somebody brought into town after things had gone wrong to clean up the mess.

Instead, you want to be there when the decision is being made, saying, “This is a bad decision. You can’t communicate it well. You should reconsider or revise it.”

I don’t disagree with that. But if you want to be an executive committee member with an officer title and everything that goes with it—which is a whole different rabbit hole—you need broader knowledge and the ability to engage in discussions beyond the communication angle.

Neville Hobson: I see that point in many articles, including Axios, and it comes across strongly in Tabita’s book.

It raises a question for me: Does being at the table mean having influence? No. Those are different things. A fancy title with “officer” in it, an executive reporting line, or regular invitations to leadership meetings don’t necessarily confer influence.

There’s a difference between being present when decisions are announced and being able to shape them before they’re made. How do we distinguish an influential CCO from someone with executive access who is still treated primarily as a service provider?

Shel Holtz: That gets back to Jim’s point about wielding influence in whatever room you’re in, whichever meeting you’re attending, and whichever leader you’re speaking with.

It doesn’t come simply from being in a room with a group of people. As Jim says, the more people in the room, the more your influence can be diluted by all those voices.

If the CEO makes the final decision after the meeting, who gets the call for that last piece of advice or to explore implications the executive committee hasn’t considered?

I want to be that person—the person they pick up the phone and call. That matters more to me than attending a weekly meeting where everyone’s opportunity to influence the discussion is limited.

Neville Hobson: That’s interesting because a friend of mine is CCO at a large British public company. He has told me that meetings with the executive team are among his most significant opportunities to move conversations in the direction he wants them to go. He has influence in that setting. They listen to him.

Being present when decisions are announced and shaping them beforehand are different things. If the executive team still treats you primarily as a service provider, that suggests they don’t see you as someone with influence.

Shel Holtz: I don’t disagree with that at all.

Neville Hobson: If you’re a CCO in that position, you have a problem. You may not be fulfilling the role as you should. You need the things you mentioned: knowledge of the business and the broader perspective described in the book you quoted.

I can’t imagine someone going into those meetings without that background knowledge—being completely up to speed on the organization, its place in the landscape, and what’s happening elsewhere.

Others, particularly the CEO, may have that perspective too. That brings us back to the Axios point: What can you add to the discussion that would be missing if you weren’t there?

You need specific examples to assess that. But I’m not convinced that a private word in the CEO’s ear after a meeting is necessarily more significant than being in the meeting and talking to everyone.

Shel Holtz: My point is that the decision often gets made after the executive committee meeting. The CEO is the person at the top who has to live with it, based on the input received.

If they haven’t made up their mind and call for your perspective afterward, that’s great. But I’m equally happy to be called before the meeting. That has happened: “I’m going into a board meeting tomorrow or next week, and I’d like your perspective.”

It’s about people seeking your counsel. But you’re right that we need a perspective broader than communication.

The Medill CCO Monitor surveyed 125 senior communication leaders in February this year. Respondents ranked business and financial acumen, executive presence, and C-suite counsel ahead of communication craft among the skills they most needed to develop after advancing.

Develop those skills, and you’re less likely to be seen only as a service provider.

One respondent’s advice was to learn to tell senior leaders what they don’t want to hear, calmly and clearly. That means challenging decisions. If you can challenge a decision from a broader business perspective as well as a communication perspective, your counsel will be more valuable, and you’ll be more likely to be invited into those conversations.

Neville Hobson: That makes sense. Some of the interviews in Tabita’s book suggest senior communicators increasingly operate across strategy, culture, governance, reputation, and other areas. That seems like a natural evolution at that level. Communication is your background, but the role embraces other parts of the organization you need to understand and discuss.

One implication is that CCOs may need to challenge decisions that are commercially attractive but potentially harmful to trust.

That’s another reason the group setting matters: You may need to challenge other executives, not only the CEO. But what happens when you do that and your advice is ignored?

Shel Holtz: They end up being reported on this show in stories about how things went awry.

Neville Hobson: We’ll get some names next time we discuss this!

How far does the CCO’s responsibility extend? Should the modern CCO be the organization’s conscience?

Shel Holtz: According to the Global Alliance’s Melbourne Mandate from more than a decade ago, yes. Being the corporate conscience was central to that model.

The CEO–communicator partnership requires the courage to disagree when necessary. Corey duBrowa of Burson makes the point that communication leaders can fall short when they wait to be briefed instead of getting into the room where decisions are made.

We can keep talking about a seat at the table, but that CEO–communicator partnership matters much more to me.

And what does it mean to be a corporate officer? You may report to the CEO, sit on the executive committee, and be identified in the company’s Form 10-K, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Do you need an officer title? We now have chief AI officers, chief storytelling officers, and all sorts of other titles. In many organizations, those aren’t necessarily corporate officer positions. They’re titles bestowed on people. There are so many of them.

Neville Hobson: We talked about that a year or so ago—the proliferation of officer titles.

Shel Holtz: I remember.

Neville Hobson: There’s a counterargument worth considering. Is it realistic to expect a CCO to serve as an independent challenger when they’re employed by, report to, and depend on the CEO? Shouldn’t that responsibility belong to the entire executive team rather than being assigned disproportionately to the CCO?

Shel Holtz: That’s an interesting question. It depends on what people perceive the CEO’s expectations to be, because that’s where their fortunes lie.

It’s interesting that OpenAI hasn’t had a chief communications officer for nine months. Hannah Wong left in January, and the discussion about filling the role has included whether it should report to CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, or the chief marketing officer.

Chief marketing officers are much more prevalent than chief communication officers. I can see organizations asking whether they need both on the executive committee or whether one should report to the other.

Personally, I think it’s all communication: marketing, public relations, corporate communications, internal communications, investor relations, government relations, and community relations. It all has to align with the strategic narrative, presumably developed by the communication function.

People will probably still be arguing about this long after you and I are gone. But some organizations don’t have CCOs because they say, “We have a CMO. The top communicator can report to them.”

Neville Hobson: This is a big topic, and we won’t go down that rabbit hole today. But we’ve discussed why the CCO, or whoever the senior communicator is, shouldn’t report to marketing: The communicator’s role embraces everything the company does, while marketing has a more specific remit.

Marketing has relatively little to do with investor relations or employee communication. I don’t think that makes the marketer the right person to oversee all communication. If anyone is going to have that responsibility, it seems to me it should be the communicator. Others would disagree.

It’s one of those circular debates that won’t be resolved soon. There’s even talk of senior communicators reporting to HR.

Shel Holtz: No, they should report to legal.

Neville Hobson: I’ve seen people suggest that too.

Returning to what communicators contribute once they’re at the table, one thing they do is make difficult decisions understandable. You don’t have to be a CCO to do that, although it helps to be fairly senior.

We’ve seen how that can fail at prominent companies. Tesla comes to mind, where Elon Musk seems to be the person expected to handle communication.

But could a communicator’s greatest contribution be explaining why a proposed decision is unwise before it becomes an organizational problem? That returns us to whether fellow executives believe the CCO has a perspective worth listening to.

It’s complex—perhaps unnecessarily so—but that’s the reality.

From what I recall, that kind of concern didn’t dominate the 23 interviews in Tabita’s book. The CCOs talked much more strategically about their roles, rather than focusing on who listens to whom. It’s a fascinating book.

This certainly isn’t a concluding discussion.

Shel Holtz: Good heavens, no.

Neville Hobson: It’s another chapter, and we’ll no doubt return to it.

Shel Holtz: I’d like to, as more data emerges and we hear more about it.

I’ll conclude by saying that it depends on the culture of your organization and its leadership. As the saying goes, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is another situation where that holds true.

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

The post FIR #532: Do You Really Want That “Seat at the Table”? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

When misinformation strikes, PR professionals swing into action, directing people to accurate information. But will people follow your links? One study found that people are far more likely to see what you have to say if the invitation sounds much like the language used to invite them to the original misinformation. Neville and Shel discuss the idea in this short midweek FIR episode.

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:

Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone. Welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 531. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you find a misinformation campaign online targeting your company, your products, your industry, or whatever. You immediately embark on an effort to combat it using all the strategies, tactics, and tools we’ve been trained to use. Is that a good idea?

Researchers in Australia ran a dozen paired tests on Facebook. In each pair, they ran two ads carrying exactly the same accurate, consensus-based information. One was written the way PR people usually write this stuff: neutral, careful, and measured. The other was written in the style of the communities spreading the misinformation. It was warmer, more direct, and more personal.

The styled ads won every time. All 12 pairs favored the styled version, and 11 of the 12 results were statistically significant. On a message about school education, the styled ad had a click-through rate of 6%. The neutral version—the one using traditional PR techniques—had a rate of 1.1%. That’s about five times as many clicks to get people to exactly the same facts.

Now, “style” can sound like a euphemism for spin. Here’s what the researchers actually did: They built personas of people who engage with misinformation and matched their tone, directness, and emotional framing. One example in the article said, “You want to keep your little one safe. Wondering what vaccinations will mean for your baby?” That isn’t a lie or a scare tactic. It’s how a person talks.

Even styles that weren’t a precise match for the audience beat the neutral version in most of the tests. I’m reading between the lines here—this is my interpretation, not a claim by the study’s authors—but it suggests that part of the problem isn’t just that we’re failing to speak the audience’s language. It’s that our language is so bland it barely registers.

You may be thinking this contradicts what we’ve heard about prebunking, and you’d have a point. Other research I read, including work from Harvard’s Kennedy School that I encountered in Communications Psychology and a review of 32 studies in the Journal of Science Communication, mostly points the other way: Don’t imitate the manipulation; teach people to recognize it.

The Harvard study is a good example. A 19-second Instagram Story ad shown to more than 375,000 users in the UK taught people to spot manipulation techniques. Afterward, 59.55% of those who saw the ad correctly identified the technique, compared with 38.21% in the control group.

So, which is it? I’d say both. Here’s the line I would draw: Copy the warmth, familiarity, and directness, but don’t copy the fear, scapegoating, or fake urgency. The paper suggesting that we imitate the style of misinformation purveyors draws the same line in its ethics section: no impersonation, no amplifying fear, and no stigmatizing language.

The review of 32 studies found no gold-standard intervention. Effects were small to medium and depended heavily on the specific myth. Think of these as tools in the same box rather than competing theories.

I have one caveat: The misinformation study measured clicks, not changed minds. A click is a first step, but it isn’t proof of persuasion. That first step matters, though. If nobody clicks, nobody reads. Nobody gets the accurate information, and you have no hope of changing anybody’s mind.

There’s plenty of adjacent work. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health runs a creator program, and the World Health Organization has a network called FIDES. Both focus on getting trusted voices into the channels where people already are. Public health agencies have been working on this for a while.

But I looked for a business doing what the study describes, and I couldn’t find one: a company countering a rumor, hoax, or false claim about itself or its products by deliberately adopting the style of the people spreading it. I couldn’t find a single example, despite the research showing stronger engagement.

I’d argue that’s an invitation to experiment. Here’s what I would do. First, listen. Pay attention to how people talk about your company or industry when they’re worried, skeptical, wrong, or deliberately spreading misinformation. Don’t focus on your talking points. Focus on their words.

Then test it. Run a simple A/B test with the same evidence in two versions: your standard statement and one written in your audience’s voice. That’s what the researchers did.

Finally, measure beyond the click. Look at comments, shares, sentiment, and whether the rumor’s reach actually shrinks. Start with something low-stakes, such as an FAQ, an employee-facing rumor, or a customer-service reply. Somebody should be trying this. Why not us?

Neville, communicators spend years learning to sound credible and measured. This research suggests that being measured might be part of why our corrections get ignored. How willing do you think companies would be to test a warmer, more direct voice? Would legal and leadership kill the idea before it had a chance?

Neville Hobson: That’s a good question. I think the brave ones would do it. But listening to you, and having read the piece in The Conversation, another question comes to mind: Are we sometimes so concerned with making our information accurate and authoritative that we forget to make it relevant and worth engaging with?

I’m circling around that thought because some of the conclusions drawn from this study seem questionable to me. If someone is going to use techniques associated with misinformation campaigns, something is missing.

To clarify the distinction, misinformation is incorrect information shared without an intention to deceive. Disinformation is a deliberate attempt to mislead people or influence them to do something they otherwise might not do. Either way, techniques are used to attract attention.

Are we seeing people bring in too much of those approaches? Some elements may be useful, but I’m thinking of an article I read—and I believe blogged about—on AI in warfare, particularly the war in Ukraine. I think it was published on Deutsche Welle’s English-language website. It discussed misinformation and then disinformation that others mirrored, perhaps unintentionally.

I wonder whether people may bring in the whole package, knowingly or unknowingly, and conclude that it’s acceptable to exploit vulnerabilities or manufacture emotional responses that people identify with.

Did I answer your question? I probably did, but here’s one for you: If we borrow the persuasive techniques of misinformation, how do we ensure we aren’t also borrowing the manipulative behaviors that make it effective?

I haven’t looked for guidance on this, and agencies may already have it: “This is what misinformation looks like. Don’t do that. Here’s an example of what you should do.” If that doesn’t exist, there’s an opportunity to develop it because the ethical dimension matters.

There’s also a danger that we celebrate winning the battle for attention without knowing whether we’ve made any progress in helping people understand the message or building trust. Those fundamental questions should be at the forefront.

That connects to your question about why organizations should address this properly. If they don’t, they’re missing opportunities and failing to help the broader community understand what’s right and what’s wrong.

Shel Holtz: I come at this from the perspective of wanting to get people to accurate information. Remember, the A/B test concerned what got people to click. Once they clicked, the information was the same in both versions. The warmer, friendlier language attracted more clicks than the typical bland PR language.

The researchers in Australia included that ethics section addressing stigmatizing language and other concerns. But here’s what I kept thinking as I read it: In marketing, and to some extent in public relations and certainly in internal communications, we’ve embraced audience personas for years.

We get to understand different groups within a larger audience based on their characteristics. We often boil those down into a fictional person who embodies them: “Mary is a 33-year-old single mother and administrative assistant.” Here’s what she’s likely to believe, what she pays attention to, where her skepticism lies, and so forth.

That helps us craft messages for different groups within the audience to get the best possible results. Why aren’t we doing that when confronting misinformation?

We wouldn’t need to use every persona. We’d focus on the groups attracted to the misinformation or being targeted by it. Instead, we tend to default to a crisis communication or issues management approach: “Here’s what they’re saying, and here’s the truth.” That isn’t attracting the clicks.

Again, the study didn’t determine whether people changed their minds after clicking through, and I wish it had. I would have loved to know. But when you have about five times as many people clicking through with a more persona-based approach, it seems to me that’s something we would want to try.

Neville Hobson: I agree. But what’s the real lesson? It certainly isn’t that communicators should behave like misinformation purveyors. It’s that factual accuracy alone isn’t a communication strategy.

It often surprises me how we miss the essential element: understanding the people we’re trying to reach, speaking in language that resonates, and getting their attention without compromising our integrity.

We also need to remember that getting someone to click isn’t the same as getting them to understand, believe, or trust. That’s a different part of the process. As you said, the click is a first step.

I’ve seen things on LinkedIn and Facebook that others called out as disinformation rather than misinformation. One example came from a well-known brand. I’d like to think they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they were called out quite strongly on Facebook.

It’s a minefield. It’s no surprise that people make mistakes, but the consequences can be greater than in the early days, when less of this was happening.

We’re in a time when things happen that we couldn’t have imagined even a couple of years ago. Bad actors, including governments and other groups, manipulate brand messaging to confuse people or get them to click something that downloads malicious software. We’re seeing more of that.

To my knowledge, there isn’t a playbook for this. If you want to emulate how the bad actors attract attention, how will you do it without adopting what they do?

Shel Holtz: I think Philippe Borremans, whom we interviewed several months ago, is right: You can’t rely on a crisis manual that gives you a sequence of steps guaranteed to address the crisis. You need the scaffolding to manage a crisis in whatever form it takes.

You need holding statements ready to be adjusted and published quickly because you have to respond quickly. You need prebunking in place, anticipating what bad actors might say about you and making the facts available beforehand. If you can get independent, third-party media sources to establish some of those points so you can refer to them later, even better.

But how do you get people to look at that information once misinformation or disinformation has been published? That’s where this study comes in.

We need to listen to how the people we’re trying to reach talk. They may not respond when we sound like PR people. They’re more likely to respond when we speak in a way that resonates, demonstrate that we care about their concerns, and share something they find relevant.

That’s why listening matters. It isn’t just about identifying misinformation. It’s also about understanding how it’s being presented in a way that gets so many people to click and pay attention.

We need to engage with that rather than simply push back. We have to listen and participate in the conversation using language that fits the people already having it. That isn’t what I see in many organizational or institutional responses to misinformation.

Neville Hobson: Your point about prepared crisis messages is important. You should have those. But these situations are often so fluid that you also need to be capable of responding on the fly. You may have no prepared message for what somebody just did, and you need to address it in an original way.

That requires the communicator to have the knowledge and confidence to do it. I was going to call it training, but perhaps preparation is a better word.

Shel Holtz: I would say training too.

Neville Hobson: Preparation leads to the point I wanted to make: This isn’t necessarily a new technique for countering misinformation. It’s a reminder that good communication has always begun with understanding the audience.

That thought keeps coming back to me. I read an article about a supposedly new approach, and I think, “We’ve always been trying to understand the audience.”

It’s a complex picture. You need to recognize that you may confront this almost daily, especially if you’re a prominent brand, individual, institution, or government. Even if you aren’t, some people will take a dig at you simply because they don’t like you. Some brands are experiencing that.

You have to prepare. That’s where “what if” scenarios come in. Spend time working through them because I think this is only beginning.

Shel Holtz: It’s going to get worse. And you’re right: This is nothing new. The new consideration is to apply what you’ve been doing all along—understanding your audience and speaking to people in ways that resonate—to your responses to misinformation. That’s something we haven’t been doing enough.

Neville Hobson: Absolutely.

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

The post FIR #531: Should You Mimic Your Detractors? 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.

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.

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.

At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision.

Also in this long-form episode for August 2026:

In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working?

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

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 the For Immediate Release podcast, long form episode 527 for August 2026. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, you’re back in your office. It’s good to see you back there again. It must mean that the heat wave has broken there in the UK.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it has. I’m enjoying a temperature of low twenties in here with the air conditioning on. It’s very nice. And beats what we’ve had with thirty plus upwards. Not good. But it’s been an interesting few weeks and on a number of levels. One of the highlights, in fact a big highlight, was the fact that when Laura and I and our grandkids and my daughter were visiting California at the beginning of August in Novato in Marin County, we met for lunch. We came into the city and you and I and the whole crew got together and we had a phenomenal time at that lunch, didn’t we?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did at the Waterbar, right on the waterfront on Embarcadero

Neville Hobson: Nice place.

Shel Holtz: Overlooking the Bay Bridge. And it was fun to be able to have you sit in there, this wonderful building, and to say we built this because the company I work for

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Did build the structure that the Waterbar is in and the steakhouse next to it, that whole complex. So that was fun, even though that was before my time that we built that. But it was great to see you and Laura. It had been since 2019.

Neville Hobson: A while.

Shel Holtz: And it was just delightful to meet your daughter after having heard about her for so many years. And to meet your wonderful granddaughters. They’re terrific.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well, you made a big impression on them because they talked about you a lot afterwards. But it was it was good. I mean, it as we’ve both said, you know, in real life face to face can’t beat it. But this is the next best thing on video. So it was great catching up and enjoying a delightful lunch over a few hours. The wine was super that we had. It was Californian wine if I’m not wrong, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Stag’s leap, if I remember correctly.

Neville Hobson: Okay, no Spanish Rioja there. So that’s good. And we did enjoy our week overall, even though some of the circumstances weren’t quite as we had originally planned it. But it was good to, from my point of view, certainly, where a change is as good as a rest. So a change of scene coming over there I found extremely beneficial to recovering from some of the health problems that I’ve been having prior to that. So enjoyed it a lot, Shel, and we gotta do it again soon, I hope.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Michelle and I were talking about the fact that we need to get back over to the UK. So it won’t be won’t be next year. We already have our vacation next year plotted out, but maybe twenty-eight we’ll cross the pond and come see you. We’ve not been to Somerset, so need to make

Neville Hobson: Okay, we’ll make a pencil note. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: That journey.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, this is this is quite something to experience for some assets. There’s a lot. Yeah, I look forward to that if we can if we can swing it, it’d be great.

Shel Holtz: But we’re not gonna talk about personal stuff for the entire show. We will

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Be talking about stories in the news that have a connection to organizational communication and technology. And we hope that one of them at least sparks a comment from you listeners. And there are a number of ways that you can comment on. This show, the first is to just leave a comment in the comment field in the show notes at the FIR website, firpodcastnetwork. Com. You can also leave that comment on the post where we share updates on episodes that we have published, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky. We share on all of them. And you can leave a comment there. We check those for your comments. You can send an email to FIR comments at gmail. Com and attach up to a two-minute audio file. If you would like us to play it, we would be happy to. You can even record that. No fuss, no mus, right there on the FIR website. We use a service called SpeakPipe. It has a tab on the right-hand side of the page that says send voicemail. Click and record, and I’ll get that. And there’s also the FIR community on Facebook where you can not only leave a comment but engage with other listeners. And yeah, lots of ways that you can share your comments and become part of the show and drive the content. We have some comments in this episode to share with you. Also, your reviews are very

Neville Hobson: Super.

Shel Holtz: Much appreciated wherever you have the opportunity to rate and review podcasts. That’s a great way for others to

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: Discover FIR.

Neville Hobson: Let’s begin with a recap of the episodes we’ve published over the past month and some listener comments. In the long form episode five twenty three for July published on the twenty seventh of july, You shall reported on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining brand sovereignty in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. In FIR 524, on the 3rd of August, you addressed the topic of whether managers are ready to lead an AI fluent workforce or not. Too many indicators suggest they’re not. The subject of workslop. Was our topic in FIR five twenty five on the twelfth of August, with mounting evidence that it can create long term problems for companies. We discuss the latest research and share our thoughts on what businesses can do about it. And we have one comment.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, from Mike Klein, who said, Of course, organizations have been clocking externalities as productivity gains since the time they started clocking anything at all.

Neville Hobson: Okay. In FIR five twenty six, we added our thoughts to the growing debate about Anthropic’s new watermark feature that’s rolling out on Claude. That episode was published just last week, actually. We discussed one firm’s new AI writing policy and its four guiding principles for employees, which make far more sense to us than trying to detect a watermark. And we have some comments on this one.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, Suzy Urjavik Parker wrote that this will never apply to me as a professional communicator because my writing is mine and mine alone. I don’t outsource any of it to a technology destined to destroy the environment, our water resources, and the creative process of humanity. Here’s to everyone saying no to this nonsense. And Ike Piggott, in a reply to Susie, said, let me search online and see if someone has written the thing I want so I can copy it. Is plagiarism. Yet for the AI evangelists, let me ask for a smoothie blend of hundreds of plagiarized documents is somehow fine. Feels like idiocracy is nigh. And Patrick Coyle in an independent comment said, No, we should definitely be asking, Did you use AI to write this? So a lot of people continue to object to this at a fundamental level.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I you’re right. I noticed that myself even. So the debate will continue, in my view, the wrong topic to be debating. It’s not it’s not doesn’t carry the same importance or weight as the one people should be talking about, which is the content that is produced, guidance on how to do it well and do it right. So, you know, this debate will continue for quite a while, I’d say. So yeah, now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Great. Now let me bring you up to date on Circle of Fellows episodes. This is the monthly panel discussion featuring fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators. I usually moderate these and when I’m not available, Brad Whitworth does that. We have published episode number one hundred and thirty one. This is a monthly program, so you can imagine how many of how long this has been going on to get 131 of them out there. This was on the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations, the fact that so many journalists are starting their own media companies with Substacks and YouTube channels and the like. And what does this do to pitching and the notion of reaching out to reporters in order to get coverage because the audiences that these media companies have is much smaller than the mainstream media. So it was a great conversation with Diana Degan, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka. And Jennifer Waugh. The next episode is the first of a two-parter, and it is coming this Thursday. And it will feature Adrian Cropley, Bonnie Caver, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. We’re going to be talking about artificial intelligence and the leadership moment for the communications profession. So should be a good, robust discussion. And I as I say, we’re doing that in two parts. There will be four. Different fellows picking up part two of this in September. So now you’re all caught up on previous episodes, on Neville’s travels, on Circle of Fellows, and we’ll dive into our six stories right after this.

Neville Hobson: So our first story is an interesting one, I find. Three people died, around 200 homes were destroyed, and millions of dollars were at stake. And an expert witness hired by 3M to help defend the company and the resulting litigation turned to ChatGPT to help write his expert report. That alone might raise questions, but it isn’t really the extraordinary part of the story. According to reporting by 404 Media, The expert, Josh Autenrieth, told ChatGPT that he had been retained by 3M and asked it to help him create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M. More remarkably, he instructed it to show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion. In other words, this wasn’t here is the evidence, help me analyze it and determine what happened. It was much closer to here is the conclusion. Help me build the argument that supports it. And we know this because his ChatGPT conversations became part of the legal discovery process. The prompts reveal something else rather astonishing. Autenrieth reportedly has about 20 years’ experience in gas detection. Yet at one point he uploaded a photograph of a gas detector to ChatGPT and asked, What am I looking at? According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, that detector was central to the entire case. There are obvious questions here about professional standards, disclosure, and the appropriate use of generative AI in expert testimony. But I think that’s a bigger question for organizations. AI can make it extraordinarily easy to construct a persuasive argument for something you’ve already decided to believe. Give it enough documents, tell it the conclusion you want, and ask it to assemble the strongest case. That’s not necessarily analysis, it can be automated confirmation bias. And if organizations increasingly use AI to support decisions, strategies, investigations, and recommendations, how do we distinguish between using AI to help us discover what the evidence says and using it to manufacture a convincing justification for what we already want the answer to be? And one more thought if your AI conversations might eventually be discoverable, perhaps we should start thinking about prompts, not simply as instructions to a machine. But as records of our reasoning. There’s an awful lot to unpack here, Shel, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: There certainly is. And at its core, this is a governance story. I don’t know if

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: This expert witness was an independent contractor or if he worked for somebody. But at some level you need to have that governance that gives you the rules about how to use this and what you are going to retain. I mean this is why legal needs to play a part in that whole governance conversations because they understand the rules of discovery from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they understand what kind of challenges can arise when in a lawsuit the other party has access to all of those prompts, all of those conversations that you’ve had with a large language model. So you need to have governance around this to begin with. The other issue that leaps to mind is that output could be three pages of highly polished slop that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because it answered the question he set out to have it answer, he’s perfectly happy with it. I wonder if he challenged it at all. Did he put it through a any kind of a red team? I’ve I spent days creating a communications red team skill in ChatGPT. And I can run anything through this. I can run a detailed communication strategy through it. I can run a three-paragraph email we’re sending out on behalf of the CEO through this. And it puts it through all of these various levels in order to challenge what I’m saying here. What’s a fact and what’s an assumption? How are different audiences within the organization likely to react to this and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, first of all. Front loading the outcome that you’re looking for is dangerous enough. Leaving that paper trail there for a belligerent legal team to find is another level of bad. But then just assuming that the output is perfect and relying on that without putting it through some kind of challenge, I think is dangerous. I think this was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. The thing I find extraordinary, frankly, is did anybody at the client check any of this? Was there a human client in the loop? I wonder. There’s something else too to mention that the Futurism also reported on this as well as 404 Media. They’re they reported that over three hundred and fifty pages Of ChatGPT activity were turned over in the discovery process. And I’m thinking to myself, what this suggests to me, apart from the obvious things, is that this was someone who didn’t quite understand how ChatGPT works in terms of what it retains, how it retains it. And the other side did. So when they did the discovery, they knew what to look for and how to ask for it. So it still comes back to Probably the legal team at three N. Did they not rehearse this? Did they not know what this expert witness was going to be asking or going to be presenting? I from reading the four media report, this all came out during the presentation of by the expert witness in the lawsuit. So it came unknown to anyone. I mean, goodness me, that’s no way to run a defense in a lawsuit of this magnitude, it seems to me. So, I’m surprised it’s not got more coverage than it has, actually, but it is extraordinary that this actually happened, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’m not surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention because it’s, my God, another law story where somebody used ChatGPT and it bit in the ass. You know, we hear those pretty frequently. The difference here though is that it’s expert witness testimony, and

Neville Hobson: Right.

Shel Holtz: How discovery played a part, that I think should get people to pay attention to this. And you know, why would 3M not dig into it deeper? I can imagine, I’m just making this up. I don’t know if this is true, but I can imagine, you know, you’ve worked with an expert witness for decades. They’re great. They have helped you win multiple cases. And now this person has discovered ChatGPT. You don’t know this as the legal team. You’ve been working with this guy for years. He’s been

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Fine. So you just accept the outputs that he produces based on that experience and the trust that has built up. The only difference being now he’s made life easier for himself by employing a large language model. And there the trouble begins. So I think we’re gonna need to start needing to ask for disclosure from people that we have worked with a lot. Hey, you know, we’ve been working together since before there was generative artificial intelligence. Are you using it? How are you using it? Let’s go over this to make sure that we’re covered. I think you’re gonna need to ask that of pretty much every supplier these days.

Neville Hobson: I totally agree with that, Shel. I think it hasn’t happened. Obviously they didn’t ask any of those questions. So you’ve got a kind of fault, if you will, at the client for not asking those kinds of questions. Maybe a maybe it’s a comfort thing that think everything’s fine and we don’t need to worry about this. But you’ve raised the point quite well, I think, that the time has arrived now where you need to audit everything. You need to be clear in your mind. So you’ve got to go through the what if. You’ve got to, you know, what’s the what could happen if that will guide you in terms of what you need to do with the people you do business with or who you hire to help you do something such as an expert witness in a lawsuit, where the consequences are not minor at all, the outcome of this if it goes against you. And use an all an expert witness who. Is great because you’ve worked with him before, but is completely current with the right way of doing all this is an ethical issue here too. So that’s something I think you need to add to-do list to make sure that you are clear with the people you’ve hired to work with you that they are on board with the right way to do this. That may well come into play in terms of your own policies about third parties working for you as contractors or some other manner, that how they use AI needs to be declared. And you also then the obvious, you need to put in place the checks and balances that the human in the loop activity we’ve talked about a lot on this show.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it’s a vendor AI audit is a new requirement. That’s inventory all the vendors we work with and check on their AI practices. I mean, what if you work with a freelance writer to supplement your own staff’s ability to crank out copy? You’ve been working with them for years. They’ve only recently started using AI. They need to disclose to you how they’re doing that so that you know what you need to be looking for when you’re reviewing their content.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Boy, this opens up a

Shel Holtz: What it comes down to.

Neville Hobson: This opens up a an eyebrow raising area, it seems to me, because I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that hardly anyone’s doing that.

Shel Holtz: I would be surprised if I surveyed twenty c communicators, if I found one whose organization was auditing all of their suppliers and vendors for AI practices, that would that would surprise me. I don’t think this is one

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: That has seen the light of day yet in terms of general awareness.

Neville Hobson: No, my I agree.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Well, Neutrogena is in a genuine crisis right now. The kind of almost impossible to game out in a tabletop exercise because it didn’t start with anything the company did, you know, yesterday or this week. It started with something that has been on the record for some time, discoverable with a two minute search. It’s been up there for more than a decade. You may have known Hayden Panettieree from a TV series called Heroes. I didn’t. I guess I’m cultural culturally illiterate or maybe I’m just old. But I saw my daughter had

Neville Hobson: You’re not a you’re not a you’re not a you’re not you’re not a Gen Z shell, that’s the point.

Shel Holtz: That’s a problem. I’ve you know, I think I’m glad I’m not. I hope I just didn’t offend all the Gen Z Gen Zers in our audience. But my daughter had posted an RIP to Hayden on Instagram. So as I was reading about all of this with Neutrogena, I had to reach out to my daughter and say, Okay, tell me who this person was. One thing she was, though, was the face of Neutrogena, the spokesperson for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015. Not long after she gave birth to her daughter, she went on live with Kelly and Michael and talked openly about her postpartum depression. Panettieree said that what that’s what got her dropped by Neutrogena. They said that they viewed her disclosure of her postpartum depression as a violation of their morals clause in their contract. She told the story again this past May while promoting her memoir, generating some mild but manageable backlash at the time. Then she died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found unresponsive at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina. There were no signs of trauma, no signs of foul play. The cause of death, last I checked, was still pending, although there are indications of some kind of overdose. The internet, though, went straight back to that interview. And within days, the phrase Neutrogena boycott was trending, and the stock of its parent company, Kenvue, that used to be a Johnson unit, took a real, but not necessarily a substantial, hit. But for four days, Neutrogena didn’t say anything. And this is interesting because they responded within hours to an unrelated advertising flap involving Tate McCrae. And no, I don’t know who he is either. Shameful. I know. But the point is that this wasn’t a company that doesn’t know how to move fast. It just chose not to on this one topic where speed and empathy probably mattered most. And by the way, postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are front and center in the news right now with the trial of Lindsay Clancy making headline news. She’s the former news nurse who killed her three children, then tried to kill herself, paralyzing herself in the process. She sought help for a rapidly worsening postpartum mental health crisis, and the system failed to identify and treat the psychosis that ultimately overwhelmed her. And of course, society here in the US is kind of polarized over this case. But with that going on, Neutrogena should have been able to see how its firing. Of the celebrity back in 2015 might have sparked renewed attention. Anyway, this past Thursday, Neutrogena finally posted a statement on Instagram. They were deeply saddened. They were proud to have partnered with her. And the line getting the most attention, we understand that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time. And then they promised a significant investment to a postpartum support health partner. Details to come. And notably, they turned off comments on the post itself. So, what do crisis professionals make of all of this? Molly McPherson of NBC News said that it isn’t a press release problem, it’s an action problem. The company faced one of these unknowns in crisis management, but still could have planned to be empathetic. It cost Neutrogena four days of the narrative being written entirely by other people. Two LinkedIn reactions from communicators get exactly what’s wrong with the response. Jerry Corbett, former chair and CEO of PRSA and now CEO of Red Flag, and a past guest on FIR, wrote for Strategic Magazine the day before Neutrogena broke its silence that a corporate crisis does not always begin with a new event. Sometimes an old decision returns under circumstances that give it new meaning. His point. Was that the silence itself became the story. And Erica Cardina, a PR manager, went further on LinkedIn. Her critique, the moment to acknowledge this was in May when she was still there to receive that acknowledgement. We were proud to partner with her. Ring’s pretty hollow given why the partnership reportedly ended, and we understand why we made her feel unsupported is corporate cushion cushioning. Her suggested fix, just say we failed to support her because that’s what it was. Then there’s the comments being switched off. And as Erica put it, you can’t publish a statement about accountability and immediately shut up shut the door on the conversation. By August, she argued it read less like accountability and more like a brand trying to contain damage. And people can tell the difference. Communicator

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: Lacey Haynes commenting on Jerry Corbett’s post raised a related gap. The donation pledge is easy money unless it’s a really substantial amount and backed by real executive commitment. And what would actually reassure people is a stated policy on how Neutrogena will support its spokespeople going forward, not just a one time gesture because of something we did in the past. So, what’s the lesson for us? Real quickly, three things. One, your discoverable history is your risk profile. Assume anything a public figure has said about your brand anywhere at any time is going to resurface at the worst possible moment and plan for it before that moment arrives. Two, silence is never neutral, and neither is turning off comments on the statement meant to address it. Both say we’re managing this and not we’re listening. And three, soft language reads as evasion. If your statement needs a phrase like we understand we made someone feel X. Ask whether the plain version we failed her is the one you’re actually avoiding and why you’re avoiding it.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a very sad tale, itself. But these revelations about Neutrogena and going back just over a decade to what they did to literally get rid of her, how they reacted at that time, and then now all this has come out and the lack of response. So they are in trouble in the court of public opinion without any doubt. Cynics would argue does it’s it all blow over. Does it really matter? Well, yes, it does matter. You’re if you’re a public listed company in particular, it could affect your stock price, which you notice their parent company has taken the hit. But it will have a negative effect on people’s perception of you and your brands. When they’re out in the pharmacy or wherever buying products and they’ll r recall this perhaps if they’re fans, they definitely will have a negative reaction to you. So I just found it Extraordinary. Some of the things you said, Shel, such as publish what they did and then turn off all the comments. There’s one of the reports I read, I think it’s in the independent newspaper, talked about posts on Reddit that have attracted thousands of r responses and likes and so forth and upvotes, all that. That’s there for all to see for time immemorial, I would say. And they’re not part of the conversation. So I’m not gonna try and second guess what they might have done in crisis communication planning, except to say it doesn’t look they had a plan ready for this eventuality.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we say this pretty much every time we do a crisis communication story about a company that blew it. We ask was a communicator in the room when any of these decisions were made? Did they just choose to not listen? But to those who would say that this will all just blow over, and we hear this a lot is you know, all crises are transient in nature. Well, remember this is now part of your permanent record too. So in five years, when Neutrogena gets into some sort of a dust up with another spokesperson or an influencer or a creator that they’re paying, people are gonna remember this. And if they don’t remember, they’re gonna do a quick search and they’re gonna find it and it’s gonna re-emerge and just add fuel to the fire. You see, they did this before to this woman, and they bought everybody off by making a contribution to a nonprofit that deals with postpartum issues. And then they went along their merry way and now they’ve abused another person that they had on their on their payroll because they didn’t change their policy to how they treat their spokespeople when they went through this before. So it’s

Neville Hobson: Yeah. Well

Shel Holtz: Just waiting to happen again.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I just performed a completely unscientific experiment. I just opened up Google and typed in Neutrogena. We’ve got sponsored results is the first item that appears in the in the in the in Chrome from Neutrogena. Explore our range, as it says, and link to something provided skincare results. Then the very next thing is Neutrogena responds backlash after Hayden Panettiere dies. And then there’s links galore to media stories about this. And that’s just entering the word Neutrogena. And beyond that, you know, it’s got it’s got a link the way Google’s now doing all this. More news, you click on that, and you get pages of this stuff. Then further down, if you scroll, you’ll then start seeing links to some of their products. But If you land on the page and the first thing you see is the is what happened with this woman and how they dealt with it, you’re likely to kind of explore that a bit, I suspect. Not a good look for them at all.

Shel Holtz: No, it’s not. It’s a classic crisis communication. Is it existential for Neutrogena? Probably not. But I can see that the particularly among this actress’s fan base, there are probably people who are simply going to switch to a competitor’s product a and be done with Neutrogena. At this point. So you’re gonna you’re gonna lose some faith with some of your existing fans, you’re gonna lose trust. And you’ve pretty much established an approach that you’ve taken to this sort of thing that I think is underwhelming and unsatisfactory for a lot of people who are looking for more from an organization like this.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So, the obvious question I’d ask you is if you were advising Neutrogena, what would you advise him to do now?

Shel Holtz: Well, now it’s all reactive and it’s I mean this is after

Neville Hobson: It is

Shel Holtz: The proverbial horses left the pu proverbial barn. But at this point I would I would come right out and say the our previous statement was inadequate. We take full responsibility For our actions. We should not have there clearly somebody suffering postpartum depression is not a violation of a morals clause. That was inappropriate. Here is what we are doing by way of our policies with spokespeople going forward to make sure that we treat our spokespeople fairly i in the future. And this is what we are doing in order to support. People who are suffering through postpartum issues and challenges, because we wanna play a part in this in order to try to make up for our transgressions thus far.

Neville Hobson: So neutrogen, if you’re listening, there’s some good advice there for you.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they w they’re not listening.

Neville Hobson: Well, I mentioned Reddit in that story, and that’s the heart of our next story, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. So, 20 years ago, when companies were first trying to figure out social media, we used to give them some fairly simple advice. Don’t walk into somebody else’s community and immediately start talking about yourself. Listen first, learn the culture, understand why people are there. And if you eventually join the conversation, contribute something useful. That holds true today, as it did 20 odd years ago, but apparently we’re having to learn all that again, it seems to me. Because marketers have suddenly fallen in love with Reddit, according to the Journal. And there’s a p very particular reason why. According to the Journal’s report, Reddit has gone from being something of an afterthought in many companies’ digital strategies to one of the places marketers desperately want their brands to appear. We’ve talked about this a number of times on FIR o over the past year, the rise of Reddit as a literally a number one place to see discussions about you and your brand. It’s interesting what the Journal says, and the reason for it is not simply because consumers use Reddit, but because AI does. Reddit conversations turn up extensively in the material that AI systems use to answer questions. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Claude which running shoes to buy, which software to use, or whether a particular company is trustworthy, what people have been saying on Reddit could help shape the answer. Naturally enough, marketers have spotted that opportunity. Unfortunately for them, Redditors have spotted it too. When jewelry company Brilliant Earth have advertised for a Reddit strategy manager whose job included shaping conversations. That would cascade across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision making, moderators of the jewelry subreddit immediately raise the alarm. One described Reddit as possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback. And that gets to the fascinating contradiction here. The more valuable authentic human conversation becomes to AI, the greater the commercial incentive to manipulate that conversation. And the more brands try to manipulate it, the less authentic and therefore potentially less valuable it becomes. Some marketers have already approached are already approaching Reddit exactly as you might fear. So those old behaviors have never ever gone away. The journal found agencies operating brands dozens of Reddit mentions every month, using accounts that appear to be legitimate community members, and even promising services involving negative comments. But some companies have discovered another approach. Don’t market. Audio equipment manufacturer, Sonos, built goodwill by having an identifiable company representative help people with technical problems and translate corporate announcements into ordinary language. There in itself, by the way, is a lesson for communicators. How about trying to communicate in the first place in ordinary language? So investment solutions and services firm Fidelity created communities around useful financial discussion and information. And Reddit itself says brands should arrive with three things: utility, humility, and respect. Which sounds remarkably like the advice we were giving companies at the beginning of social media over 20 years ago. There’s an AI story here, certainly. There’s a marketing story. There’s also a communication story about authenticity, community, and trust. But as AI makes genuine human conversation increasingly valuable as a source of information, are we about to see an escalating contest between the people creating those conversations and the organizations trying to influence what those conversations tell the machines? And if marketers succeed too well, do they ultimately destroy the very thing they’re trying to exploit? Welcome back to social media circa two thousand six.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, which is exactly the same as social media twenty years ago in terms of what organizations should be doing. Of course, what organizations should be doing and what they do frequently are misaligned. But i every couple of years we report on a story that leads me to invoke Christopher Barger and the time that he spent at General Motors running their social media team. Because if anybody understood how to do this well, it was Christopher. And this was long enough ago that social media was basically the blogosphere. This predates all the social networks. But what Chris did was he had members of his team assigned to the various car blogs that wielded a certain amount of influence. I remember Jalopnik was one of these. There were there were several of them. But the instructions they had were very clear. He says, You’re not parachuting in from GM. I’m here to help. I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong with what you just said about one of our vehicles. Their role was first to listen, second, to participate in conversations where they had expertise that had nothing to do with General Motors, just be a member of the community and participate and build the connection with the other people in the community. And when GM comes up, At that point, you’re already known. You’re trusted. You’re not the spokesperson from GM. You’re Bob, right? And now you can comment, and people are going to listen to you because you are on equal footing with other members of that community. That’s the way to do this. Dell was another great example. They had that, you remember that, that listening center. I don’t know if anybody still has these, but those. High-tech futuristic mission control like social media listening centers would use an algorithm to surface discussions that were taken to the appropriate department in the organization for action. And then the person who was in that community would be able to solicit more information, then come back and say, okay, we’ve listened to you. There was one particular case where there was a lot of discussion about why this particular Dell laptop cost so much more than a different model when the only difference was that it had been loaded with bloatware. And you know, they took it to the team that was the product management team for that for that particular product and they looked at the argument and they said, you know what, they’ve got a point. And so they dropped the price and they were able to go into the community and say, Well, thank you for this conversation. It’s been really enlightening. You’re absolutely right. And we’re taking action, we’re lowering the price. How do you imagine the community reacted to that? I mean, 100% positively. So there is a way to engage in these communities. Should your organization be on Reddit? I don’t know, is your Community on Reddit? Are your fans on Reddit? Are your customers on Reddit or other stakeholders or thought leaders and influencers? Is there a good strategic reason to be there with your brand or your organization? Maybe. Should you be there just for the GEO? I don’t think so. And in fact, this was just in the news. From July 18th through August 7th of this year, Reddit accounted for an average of 3. 83% of ChatGPT search citations. By August 14th, that had fallen below 1%, averaging just 0. 52% through this past Monday. That’s an 86. 4% drop. So according to the Axios piece where I read this, they’re suggesting that you shouldn’t pin all your GEO hopes. On one mythical unicorn. Now, who called it a mythical unicorn? Our friend Steve Rubel, who is an executive vice president for Media Insights and Measurement at Burson these days. That mythical unicorn, he says, doesn’t exist. It’s a long game, and brands need to be engaged on many different channels. Some will go up, some will go down based on citations. But doing yourself reputational damage by misbehaving in a social network. Just because you think that’s where your citations in AI results are gonna come from, man, that’s just dumb.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean I would say, you know, if you’re not already on Reddit or another place that’s relevant to where conversations are happening about your brand that’s relevant to you, it’s gonna present you with a with a huge hill to climb to establish a credible presence now. I’ve already seen some examples, I’m not gonna mention any names, of companies who are doing this, going about this utterly the wrong way. Going, doing literally what you said not to do earlier. You know, hey, I’m here from X, company, not X, but Company X or whatever. Let me know what’s bothering you and try and help, that kind of thing. Whereas it would be better if you are Bob from X. Who’s got a who’s got a passion and a strong interest in whatever the topic might be, that’s relevant to that community, joins that community and doesn’t do anything for three months except listen to what people are saying. Might like something or upvote something, and he’s already filled out a comprehensive profile describing himself, where the focus is on him and his passion, not Him and who he works for. And it’s kind of like a by the way, I also I work for so and so. But these are this is just me here. Either way, that was what I would recommend to anybody. And with the with the caveat, it’s gonna be hard work to establish a presence now if you haven’t already done one. And if it’s kind of not perceived to be the kind of behavior you would expect from your company, your work is even harder in that case. But Flip it over and say it’s never too late, indeed, better too late than never. So I would say you know, it this is worth listening to what these examples show and look back at two thousand six to see what people are doing, and join the conversation the right way.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, the other example that we can take from back in the Jurassic era of social media would be Frank Eliason in the Comcast Cares account on Twitter, where they were actively searching

Neville Hobson: Yep, another good example.

Shel Holtz: For people complaining about Comcast, and then not going in to tell them they’re wrong, but going in to tell them, let me see if I can help you with that. You some people were a little creeped out, you know. You’re monitoring me. But most people

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Were delighted that somebody was being proactive, not waiting for. Me to pick up the phone and deal with the labyrinth of customer support and instead reaching out when you’ve identified that i’m having a problem with a solution yeah i think most people are very grateful for that so

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. So there’s lessons to be learned here from just twenty years ago, but even that, this isn’t like was invented twenty years ago. This has been since the days of forums, that this was good behavior to exhibit on those old forums that were control freakery writ large, those forums. But if you were there you as Bob from Company X Hey, you know, it’s chatting with people about the things they’re interested in, you would have stood good stead in building relationships. So the medium may ch the mediums may have changed and social attitudes certainly have changed. But the these fundamentals of listening, getting to understand people’s issues, making an effort to come across as genuinely interested in helping them. Stan we’ll stand you in good stead no matter what.

Shel Holtz: Well, thanks, Dan. Yeah, I’ve been reading all about the LinkedIn option now. A little pull-down menu from the three dots that you can signal that you think that something is AI slop. I haven’t used it. The only thing I use there on a regular basis is not interested, as LinkedIn seems to be populated more and more bipartisan political posts that have absolutely no connection to business whatsoever. I don’t mind a political post on either side of the aisle as long as there’s a connection to business because that’s what LinkedIn is for. But if it’s just a blatant partisan attack, I don’t yeah, and I do this with people who are posting positions I agree with. I am on LinkedIn for the business connections, for the business thought leadership, for the business reporting. And if it’s if there’s no connection at all, I’m not interested. And I find that I’m able to adjust my feed. The more I click that, the less of that type of thing I see. And LinkedIn goes back to being what I joined it for in the first place. But I have not yet clicked the one that allows you to identify this as AI slop. Have you done that yet?

Neville Hobson: No, I’ve not encountered I’ve not actually encountered anything that made me search for something to report it at all. I tend to ignore all of this stuff, Sean, to be frank. I rarely proactively do anything only. If I get a pop-up saying, Do you like this? Sometimes I might. Particularly no, there’s one thing I do is report stuff. Please block this. I’ve seen this too often. And I asked me a reason why. Often it’s just not of interest to me or I see it too often. I always get fine, we’ve taken it off, won’t appear on your feed anymore. Great. I should do that more often now that I think about it. But you know, it’s fine. And I see as Dan mentioned, i in one of the I think it’s TechCrunch he refers to, reporting that this seems to be working. Now I’ve not looked into any more detail about how do they know it’s working, but I mean, hey, great. If it is, it’s good. But I think it’s so arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, a button, this is AI slop. I mean that is so generic.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I saw dashes, it must be AI slop.

Neville Hobson: Amazing.

Shel Holtz: All right. On Tuesday this past week, Meta went to trial in Oakland, facing a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. This is being led by the attorneys general from my state. This is Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, also Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. These are the lead plaintiffs. They’re claiming that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to hook kids, and that Meta knew it and hid it. Meta itself told the told the court the penalty calculation could run as high as $1. 4 trillion if they are found liable for everything that they’re being accused of. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. I’m sure that’ll go extremely well. So is Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. The dollar figure is mind-boggling. I mean, I mean, imagine if Meta had actually wind up paying Over a trillion dollars. I mean, what would that do to the organization’s future, its finances? But there’s a lot more at stake here than the existential threat to Meta. This isn’t a personal injury case, it’s a consumer protection case, which means the states aren’t just asking for money, they’re asking the judge to order Meta to actually rip features out of the product. We’re talking about infinite scroll, video autoplay, disappearing stories, beauty filters, algorithmic feeds for minors. And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. A Los Angeles jury already found Meta and Google negligent in a similar case back in March. They awarded six million dollars in damages. And California’s attorney general said flatly that Meta is just first in line. YouTube and Snap are already facing their own lawsuits. So, what do people who study this think will actually change? Well, Kate Winnick, a principal analyst at Forrester, called this potentially the end of social media as we knew as we know it, and drew the comparison a lot of people are drawing to the big tobacco settlements of the 90s. Her prediction isn’t that social media will disappear, it’s that the product gets harder for young people to access and the cultural conversation around it shifts the way it did with cigarettes. She also expects competitors like Snap to make preemptive changes rather than wait to be sued themselves. Analysts covering the advertising side of this are already sounding a warning. A Storyboard 18 analysis this week made the point that engagement has always been the currency of social advertising. More time in app means more advertising inventory, more data, more monetizable moments. If courts start forcing platforms to strip out The very features that maximize engagement, that inventory shrinks, particularly for younger audiences. DesignRush put it even more bluntly for marketers. Platform risk is becoming brand risk, and agencies need to start factoring regulatory exposure into media planning the same way they’d factor in a supply chain risk. So practically, what should you be doing right now? Social is a centerpiece of your strategy. Well, stress test your channel mix before you’re forced to. Don’t wait for a verdict to ask what happens to your plan if Instagram Stories or infinite scrolls simply isn’t there anymore. Start modeling these things now. You also should be shifting your measurements of success. The engagement as currency model, time spent, scroll depth, session length, is exactly what’s on trial. Start building your reporting around qualified reach, completed views, and actual brand lift, not raw time on platform. So your metrics don’t collapse the moment the underlying mechanics change. Also, if your brand targets younger audiences at all, start scenario planning for tighter age verification and access restrictions now, rather than reacting when a court order lands. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s exactly what the states are asking for. And fourth, and here’s the one that I think is particularly comms specific, not just marketing specific. Get ahead of your own internal conversation about platform dependency. If your organization’s quietly let one platform become the backbone of both your marketing and your external communications, the trial is your prompt to ask leadership: what’s our plan B?

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: And are we building it now, or are we just waiting for the verdict to force our hand? Obviously, we don’t know how this trial ends. It just started. It’s expected to go on, I think, six weeks, is what I heard. But the lawyers, the analysts, and Meta’s own court filings all agree on one thing. Whichever way it goes, it’s a signal event for the whole industry, not just for Meta.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. That makes sense. I agree. It’s got a lot of attention over here too. And I think that’s partly or primarily it’s because it’s Meta. And it’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole parade of apps behind it that everyone uses in one way or another. So the speculation my god, is this the end of Instagram? I see people talking about that. But I add a dose of cynicism to some of this shelf, to be honest. In that we’ve been here before with threats of lawsuits, that’s the end of this or whatever it might be. I can’t imagine that Meta is going to go down the tubes with a one trillion dollar financial penalty. I just couldn’t see it happening. Look at look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica back in twenty eighteen. I mean, that was a scandal beyond the pale. Nothing really happened to them. I mean it was business as usual and they repeated some of the bad things that they did. Not long ago, even. So it needs something a lot more existential threat like than a trillion dollar fine. Petty cash. It’s not even you know, it’s only twenty five percent of the US national debt under Trump, so it’s not a big deal

Shel Holtz: Ha.

Neville Hobson: Really, you know. So it’s it’s nevertheless it is serious without doubt. And one good thing of it is it’s drawing attention to some of the things that you know Meta are now talking about we’re gonna do something about. Here in Europe and specifically in the UK, there’s a lot of talk. It’s constant, although it’s died down in intensity in recent weeks, about the damage to young people, particularly preteens who are active on these platforms. And I saw a news story the other day that OpenAI is rolling out a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT for teens, for users under 18, that they say has stronger built-in safety protections. I mean, I don’t know what message they’re trying to get out here, but why haven’t you done this before then? With stronger built-in safety protections? Why isn’t that in place for everyone doing this? So I think from a comms point of view, Meta and everyone else who are suddenly scrambling to make announcements what they can do. Be wary of talking about that we’re doing this dedicated thing to address you know concerns about safety protections all that kind of stuff because that’s what you’ve been resisting for decades. And Sally don’t now try and play the good guy. You’re not the good guy. This lawsuit demonstrates that quite clearly. And I think it’s interesting to observe what happens. That could this spread out into something mega, I mean truly mega. In parallel I see other interesting things going on. I saw a story just the other day saying that in the midst of all this, it’s rumored that MySpace is about to make a comeback. Now

Shel Holtz: I saw that.

Neville Hobson: If they yeah, if they are looking to do something like they did back in the day, that might appeal now, actually. I’ve still got a MySpace account by the way. I haven’t visited it in a long time. But So this is kind of in the midst of one of the reasons I think why it’s getting attention, in the midst of society level concerns that we’re seeing manifesting itself in some of the opinions pressure groups have here in the UK, certainly, often run by women who you can’t truly genuinely argue against what they’re saying. Although some of them are argue against it. That there’s no proof, where’s the evidence? And you know, it doesn’t match our data, all that kind of stuff. And I think it will need a groundswell, I think, of public opinion to be behind some of the criticisms. Again, cynicism kicks in here because we’ve seen this before and nothing really happened. So I’m not sure whether this will make any difference, again, depending on what happens. And as you say, this is only just kicked off. So I did see because one of the TV station the news channels here, Sky News, covered the opening of the trial outside the courthouse in where is it in LA or somewhere in California, is it? It might have been new yeah, San Francisco. Okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think I think it’s up here. I th I think it’s in Oakland. Yeah.

Neville Hobson: So and it showed there’s a picture of the courthouse. It had all these rosettes, red, white, and blue, hanging off the balconies. And it gave the razzmatazz show that’s very American. You wouldn’t see that happening over here. But all these women talking about and strong opinions, and they were credible in some of the things they were saying. It wasn’t, you know, misery being on display here. These were people who had strong opinions. They can see an opportunity to highlight their case and I think they’ll get attention if they do it the right way. So add that to the mix. I Other than that, we don’t really know much more because it’s only just starting. So but it will be definitely an interesting story to keep an eye on.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, even if the court fines one hundred percent for the plaintiffs in this case and one hundred percent against Meta, they’ll appeal. And the appeal will take a couple of years and then that can be appealed. And you know, how many times can you appeal? This will be years before there’s a resolution. But I

Neville Hobson: Yeah.

Shel Holtz: Can see you know, when all of this plays out, that the change to social media could be substantial. And it’s the analogy to tobacco that I think makes me feel that way because it took forever to change attitudes about tobacco. But it is not socially acceptable now. After

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: Piecemeal laws, I mean it was first you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants and people were up in arms about that. And but you take that for granted now. You’ve you get rid of the advertising that’s aimed at kids, Joe Camel, for example. You get rid of the cartoons, the cool camel smoking an unfiltered cigarette. And you’ve really shifted societal attitudes about tobacco. And I could see the same thing happening over the long term with the same type of approach taken. So if it starts with not letting kids take advantage of the features in the social networks that they like, you know, just removing those, making it harder for them to access some of this stuff or just removing it from the platform altogether, then those platforms become less desirable, the kids aren’t there. Who’s left? You know, us. Yeah, how appealing are we to marketers as a target? And everything sort of snowballs from there. So yeah, I over the long term I can see this having an implication. Do I think in

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I

Shel Holtz: Six weeks there’s going to be a finding and suddenly social media as we know it is gone? No, I think that’s absurd. But I do agree with you. Meta’s not the good guy in this case. I think in the previous cases that have been tried, and there was the one in California earlier, there was also a bigger one. I think it was in Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Where it was literally hundreds of millions of dollars that they had to pay, that the Discovery found emails that supported the case, that they knew that this is what they were doing. They did it deliberately and they didn’t care that they were addicting kids to these platforms. And I assume that same evidence is going to be introduced in the current trial. So yeah I’d be surprised

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: If this one suddenly and miraculously goes Meta’s way. So I think this could be the start of some significant changes

Neville Hobson: No. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: To the way social media is offered to people and the kind of influence this that it’ll have. And by the way, could be excellent timing for MySpace’s return to come and say, hey, you know, we’re back. We’re the social media that always took safety seriously.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz: And if what you have been hearing about Facebook troubles you. Rejoin us and come visit MySpace Island in Second Life too, you know. So

Neville Hobson: It’s funny, I was watching about a month or so back now, a video I’ve got. You’ve seen this, I know. Thank you for smoking,

Shel Holtz: Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson: About the lobbying industry of tobacco, booze, and I’ve forgotten the other one, firearms. It got me thinking, and mentioned it popped into my mind again as we were discussing this, that I seen recently here in the UK editorial articles or maybe placed media. I haven’t paid too close attention to it. About the upcoming likelihood that the only product, the only tobacco product that doesn’t carry any health warnings on them at all is cigars. And that’s about to change. And

Shel Holtz: Hmm.

Neville Hobson: These ugly announcements about cigar smoking will kill you. Stop smoking now, all that in black letters on a white background that obscure the packaging. The interesting argument I’m seeing though is that the it’s to arguing about this is such a shame because some of the designs on cigar packaging is iconic from a century ago. And we’re gonna lose all this, and this is bad. I’m thinking I see a lobby event happening here. And I wonder what they’re gonna crank up in Meta’s defense, specifically relating to social media, how they’re gonna address this. But be sure this is gonna crank up.

Shel Holtz: When I when I was a kid, we all kept our little memorabilia in cigar boxes and they’re gorgeous. The designs are spectacular. And

Neville Hobson: Beautiful.

Shel Holtz: I don’t know where I got them from because my dad did not smoke cigars. He was a cigarette man. Lucky Strikes, I remember that very, very well. But yeah, we all had cigar boxes

Neville Hobson: Boy, boy.

Shel Holtz: And that’s where we kept our little collectibles.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, as you do.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: Well, that was that’s an interesting story though, Shel, nevertheless. I think it’s only just starting, as you point out. The trial is just getting underway and revelations are going to emerge and see how it develops. So I’ve got an interesting one here that the title of it, well, what can I say? I mean, the as I wrote about it on LinkedIn, it’s an AI story that stopped me in my tracks. That’s the only way to describe it. When I came across it just a few days ago. And I and I want to put an important caveat around it before I introduce the topic. So It originated in a post on X. I haven’t been able to independently verify that every detail happened exactly as described. It may be entirely literal, it may be embellished or maybe partly be intended as a cautionary tale. But the organizational behavior it describes is absolutely worth talking about. The author of the tweet says he joined a meeting with his company’s talent acquisition team to discuss their new AI-driven. Resume screening system. And apparently it was working brilliantly. The team reported that the software had reduced time to hire by 60% in a month. Think about that as a management KPI for a moment. 60%. If you’re sitting in the executive suite looking at a dashboard, that’s a sort of number that gets people’s attention. The technology investment is working. Productivity is up. Hiring is faster. Great result. Except the author asked another question. What exactly had they told the AI to optimize for? The answer was digital natives with high runway potential and a useful energy. So he asked them to look at the demographics of the candidates the system had rejected. According to his account, it had rejected 100% of applicants who had graduated from university before 2010. Suddenly that spectacular 60% productivity improvement looks rather different. But there’s a line later in the story that I think is even more revealing. When the potential discrimination problem was pointed out, because that’s really what you’re talking about, age discrimination. The HR manager apparently argued that the AI made the decision, not her. So the company was insulated from liability. We’ve delegated the decision, therefore we’ve delegated the responsibility. And that to me is one of the most dangerous misconceptions organizations can have about AI. And if this example is typical, this is not uncommon. I bet you that is the case. It’s really dreadful. You can delegate a task to an AI system. We’ve talked about this on the show before, Shel. You can automate a process, you can allow an algorithm to make recommendations or even decisions, but you cannot automate away accountability. There’s another aspect of this that I think should concern communicators in particular. Look at the language supposedly used to instruct the AI system. Digital natives, high runway potential, useful energy. Those are exactly the kinds of expressions that can float around organizations sounding like harmless jargon or management shorthand. Put them into an AI system, making consequential decisions about real people, though, and suddenly language isn’t just describing organizational culture. It’s operationalizing it. The machine is turning the euphemism into a decision rule. And there’s something else here that connects to a much wider problem we’re starting to see with AI adoption. When an AI system produces an unexpectedly good result, our instinct is to celebrate it. Perhaps our instinct should sometimes be to investigate it. If productivity jumps 60%, what happened? What trade offs produced that number? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? Because automation doesn’t necessarily eliminate discrimination, bad judgment, or flawed organizational assumptions, it makes them scalable. And here’s a final comment from the tweet author. I’m currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4, 000 resumes, those ones that the system had rejected. So here’s the question I’d put on the table, Shel. If an AI system delivers a spectacular improvement in a business KPI, Whose job is it to ask what the system had to do to achieve it?

Shel Holtz: I think that needs to be baked into the governance, doesn’t it? We’re right back to that

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it does.

Shel Holtz: Governance model and the policies. I mean, we’ve talked about this recently. I mean, my productivity could absolutely skyrocket because I delegated a report, let’s say, to AI. I gave it a thin prompt. It gave me this highly polished five page report. I give it a quick once over and I send it along. And I’m now able to take the time that I would have spent researching and writing that report, doing other high value things for the organization, and the organization can now tout that we’ve had this productivity gain. Meanwhile, the department that I sent that report to is looking at this and going, wait a minute, this reads real well, but there’s no substance here. I need to validate whether there are things that are accurate here. So what happened, I merely shifted. The work to the department that received my output rather than me creating a useful, rel well-researched, well-written document. So, yeah, the first thing I want to question is how are they measuring productivity? The second question is, what are these people doing with their time? Now that they have saved that time by using AI? Is it just more you know, mundane rote work doing, you know, more AI agent management. Or they actually, I mean, you know, we talk about where I work, and I’m on the AI committee. We just wrapped up an AI survey of our entire employee population. And what we have found is that out in the field on the actual construction projects, the people who are saving time with AI are one, spending more time with the client, engaging with the owners, building that relationship, building the trust, and they’re spending more time out on the project, walking the project, doing safety walks, doing project walks, talking to the subcontractors. This is high value stuff that an AI can’t do. So we were really happy to see that in our survey results. We can say okay that what they’re spending that saved time doing is high value strategic stuff that matters to the organization. So yeah, I think, you know, what are you measuring and how are you measuring it need needs to be part of this conversation.

Neville Hobson: Okay, yeah, I d I don’t disagree with that at all. I think though what concerns me about this is the fact that you had an employee involved in the recruitment process who with a straight face argued that AI made the decision, not me, so hey, you know, what can I do? And the author of the tweet Did the right thing, I think, which is investigate the re rejects to see, you know, what clues can he as to why they we were rejected. Yet he knows the answer because the prompt they were given was, you know, those high runway potential digital natives useful energy. And so that’s what it worked on. And I think the what I find strange, if this is a true story, and I have no reason to doubt it’s not, even though this. Only this tweet that you have to go on. No one asked and again I can’t say more than that because I don’t know what the structure is of this organization. Where the kind of curiosity was that would have produced things like what happened if it’s productivity this productivity jump, this is extraordinary. What trade-offs produced that? Who benefited? Who didn’t? What did the system learn to optimize away? They didn’t have anything to guide them on that by the looks of it. So this comes back precisely to the point you made. This is a governance issue. There’s things they should have in place that clearly are not. If this guy hadn’t accidentally encountered this, I mean, I shudder to think if he hadn’t had that conversation with that talent acquisition person in his team. This would have remained undiscovered and they would have blissfully gone about, wow, this is fantastic, this productivity gain. And yet there’s something fundamentally flawed, it seems, that you give this kind of prompt, you get the behavior we understand that it did to reject all these other applicants and produce the outcome that it gave. No one questioned anything, it seemed to me. So there you got a problem at the high level in the organization. And this is a pattern we see in many of the stories we’re reporting, Shel, over the past few months, where you look at the story that developed that led us to talk about it, and you think there’s something missing here at a at a management level in the organization that shouldn’t be missing. And we’ve had the obvious one about the human in the loop, but this goes deeper than that. This is fundamental and this is worrying.

Shel Holtz: It is. And I mean we could we could spend a whole show talking about talent acquisition and AI being used to screen resumes and the like, which is problematic i in its own right. I mean, what do most organizations using the AI to find. It’s the candidates who have the appropriate degree from the right university, that they’ve got the right keywords in their CV, they have the appropriate technical skills. None of these things are predictors of success in the organization, in life. I’m reading a book right now, by the way, highly, highly recommend this book. It’s having a profound impact on my thinking. It’s called Robot Proof by Vivian Ming. She’s a fascinating character. But this book is extraordinary in the approach that it takes to ensuring that humanity remains relevant and thrives when AI is there handling all of these routine tasks that humans are no longer required to perform. So she points out through her work in recruiting and in education, the predictors of success are things like social intelligence, perspective taking, communication and collaboration, the ability to solve novel problems, comfort with uncertainty, and deeply human capacities that increase in value as AI gets smarter. These are things that are predictors of success and wealth and happiness and the ability to be creative and innovative on behalf of an organization. And we’re not looking for those things. So I mean, these are all conversations that I think we need to be having out there is, you know, I mean, just an AI that is faster at looking for the wrong things that recruiters have been looking for decades and decades. That’s not the approach we need to be taking. We need to be rethinking all of this stuff based on the data that’s available to us. And that’s what Vivian Ming has and shares in this book is the data that she has processed through machine learning tools since long before there was a ChatGPT. Highly recommend this book. And by the way, the book also has the best footnotes I have ever read.

Neville Hobson: There’s also much think of you know the HR person saying that the AI made the decision, not me, of something that

Shel Holtz: You made a decision to use the AI, right?

Neville Hobson: Well back in April, February and April, in fact, Sylvia Cambi and I ran a couple of workshops for IBC on ethics in AI. And we gave some case study examples, and one of them is very relevant to this conversation, this is the example of Workday that is involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiffs who were suing Workday allege that AI systems used in talent acquisition resulted in discriminatory outcomes. It’s the concern isn’t simply bias in one decision, it’s systemic exclusion embedded in the design of it. How ranking, filtering, and screening models operate at scale. So what happened, just as one little example, is that someone who was studying all this that came up with the details discovered that there are examples where someone applied for a job and within literally a minute they got a reject email. And there are examples where the reject emails are sent at 2 a. M. In their time zone. That lawsuit is still going on. It’s raised questions about oversight, fairness, transparency, and even vendor liability. So it’s certainly relevant to this story if you’ve got someone arguing that the AI made the decision. But it’s discriminatory and arguably from what we know, the human was behind it, yet the AI made that decision. That’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears. So this is quite serious, and the Workday one I think is even more serious, the way it’s it seems to be playing out. But nevertheless, these indicate again, as I mentioned earlier, that we’ve got examples in organizations where things aren’t working right, things aren’t being done well, and you kind of wonder what else is going to emerge that we didn’t know about until someone discovered it. So these are things from a leadership point of view. That we need to pay attention to be proactive in setting in place the ground rules for this. So it’s not about guidelines or any of that kind of thing. It is about the fundamentals of AI leadership.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and you know, at the end of the day, we’re probably not getting the best candidates in the door at the same time, which ultimately that’s what we want. And the way these things are working right now, they’re creating problems and probably leaving us with less than the optimum new hires. Well, retail has a new marketing playbook, and brands are turning their own employees into influencers. Gap. Is the clearest example. In January, it opened its year-old creator program. It had previously been reserved for outside influencers with at least a thousand followers. They’ve opened it up to its own corporate distribution and store staff. Employees can now earn commission and free product for posting about Old Navy Gap, Athleta and Banana Republic. Those are the Gap brands. Gap says the original program had already reached 154 million people across nearly 30, 000 posts. David’s Bridal did something similar. They launched David’s Style Squad, these are store associates, earning the same 5 to 15% commission as outside creators, with top performers up to 20%. A progress update from Modern Retail in April said the program had grown past 250 active ambassadors with roughly 500 applications. Starbucks has gone even further still, building the Green Apron Creators program from scratch and piloting a custom TikTok tool to share ad revenue with baristas. And Staples got here almost by accident. A store associate who went viral talking about their printing services became such an asset that the company leaned into it rather than shutting it down. And you may remember that we talked several years ago about a guy who worked for a paint company who was doing, I think it was either Instagram or TikTok videos, and they fired him for doing that, even though he was a hardcore brand ambassador who was getting people to buy the product. And he ended up getting hired by a competitor, Go figure. But why are brands suddenly taking this position of inviting their employees to become creators. Why now? And the answer is trust. Audiences are tuning out anything that smells like an ad. And the most credible person a brand has is someone who already works there. We’ve told you this for years and years that your employees are your most credible spokespeople and that it comes out in the Edelman Trust Barometer too. Employees almost also come cheaper. Than an outside creator roster. And the content has a built-in supply chain. A barista or a store so you can film something in 10 minutes with product that’s already just sitting there on the shelf. But the people covering this are flagging real problems. Digiday’s reporting this month points out that you can’t just flip a switch. There’s no consistent model for whether content happens on the clock or off the clock. Or what happens when a store manager needs someone running the register instead of chasing down that viral shot? One marketing exec told Digiday, most employee content is unusable, and finding the ones who are actually good at it is like panning for diamonds. There’s precedent for how badly this can go too. Amazon’s FC ambassadors, which was launched in 2018, to put warehouse workers on social media during a labor conditions controversy. Drew accusations of astroturfing and questions about whether some accounts were even real employees. Then there’s the legal exposure. Employment attorney Mark Conkl said that the moment a company starts directing what employees post or ties compensation to participation, it’s no longer enthusiasm, it’s work. And every employment law that applies to work applies to that too. That includes the FLSA. Filming, editing, and monitoring comments at nine at night can be compensable time, voluntary label or not. It includes overtime math, if stipends or engagement bonuses aren’t folded into the regular rate correctly. It includes discrimination risk if creators get picked because they look good on camera rather than by documented objective criteria. And it includes labor law, a creator policy That reads as don’t say anything negative can legally chill employees’ protected right to discuss wages and working conditions.

Neville Hobson: Mm.

Shel Holtz: So here’s my advice, and it splits two ways depending on which hat you’re wearing. If marketing is building one of these programs, your job is to get legal HR and marketing in the same room before it launches, not after the first viral post. Sort out compensation, selection criteria, and IP ownership up front. If you’re the one being asked to sell this internally, be honest with employees about what they’re actually signing up for. Real hours, real tax and wage implications, and a real trade-off between building the brand’s audience and building their own. And if marketing pitches you a program without any of that groundwork done, that’s the time to push back loudly, before it launches, not after that first lawsuit.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, quite interesting, isn’t it, Shel? We’ve talked about this before, some time ago. And that example of the paint company is interesting. I think attitudes, strategies and so forth have will have changed quite a bit since then. I think the paint company was Sherwin-Williams, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. It could be.

Shel Holtz: Think so. Although that may have been the one he ended up going to. I could look it up. I don’t remember.

Neville Hobson: Could be. Yeah, could be. I it reading the story in one of the links you shared in Retail Dive that talks about Gap and David’s Bridal, it’s actually quite interesting. This is now, this is not a kind of a an aside, like a little aside project. This is a this is a significant aspect to their to their brand management and general marketing, where employees are part of the process that rewards them for their actions. It makes sense. I don’t have any critiques on this at all, even. I can understand some concerns certainly surrounding people saying we do authentic storytelling. You know you can say that, but you need to convince people that is the case, authentic storytelling. I think there’s a difference between people with passion who happen to be employees of your company. Talking about your brands out in the marketplace, as opposed to people with passion or employees, you’re now gonna pay to do this. So that’s kind of losing something in the picture, it seems to me. So there’s a fine line to walk, I think, in how you communicate authentic storytelling. Because is it authentic because you’re paying them? Because When they’re doing this before and now they’re being rewarded. So I’m not saying that’s not a not a good thing. You need to be clear in how this is perceived.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, sure. This is not an employee advocacy program. To be clear,

Neville Hobson: No.

Shel Holtz: This is not an opportunity for employees to share content and to put their own spin on it in their networks. Employee advocacy programs have been around a long time. They can be very effective. We have one. We use one of the tools that’s available out there to manage it. But nobody gets paid for these. I mean, some of them, you know, y you have leaderboards and you may have campaigns with prizes for who’s on top of the leaderboard each week during the campaign. That’s not the same thing. The creator programs

Neville Hobson: No, it’s not.

Shel Holtz: That we’re talking about grew out of the whole influencer movement where these people get paid to promote the product. And basically what they’re doing is saying, hey, we’re gonna give our employees the same opportunity we’re giving the creator community out there. And it just doesn’t shake out that way because of employment law and because of everything else that I mentioned. And by the way, that was Tony Piloseno. He was an Ohio college student and a Sherwin-Williams employee, so good memory. He built a huge TikTok following posting paint mixing videos using Sherwin-Williams products. And in 2020 they fired him, citing misuse of company materials and creating content on company time. And he was hired by Florida Paints, which embraced his social media creativity and gave him a role producing content for the brand. So that was that story.

Neville Hobson: Show and Williams loss, without question. They missed the point entirely. But to be fair, that was back then and that was probably a common view. You’re wasting time on our dime and we’re gonna fire you. But you know, I was reading the retail dive piece that I mentioned on Gap as well. And interestingly, the VP of marketing, his comments about why they’re doing this. Our employees know our brands, our products and customers better than anyone. Absolutely. By expanding the program to eligible employees across our offices, we’re giving them a way to become influencers, earning commission and product while sharing what they love and bringing our brands to life through authentic storytelling. That doesn’t gel with me at all, that description, I have to say. It’s it’s forced this is a marketing activity basically. So y the word authentic doesn’t work well there, I think. Anyway, they have had some success without doubt. They talk about the program has now reached nearly hundred and fifty-four million consumers across thirty thousand posts, according to the press release that the GAP issued. I mean, that’s no small beer, without doubt. So it’s a good result. So I guess the answer is to for me, I’d want to take a look at this in six months’ time to see what it’s looking like.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, but in the meantime, I think the advice stands. There are labor, legal, and HR implications in doing this. And if you just let marketing launch it without having looked into that and addressed it and invited HR legal and y any labor relations specialists

Neville Hobson: Presume they did all that.

Shel Holtz: Into the room, I don’t know. Could have just been marketing. God knows we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. Where marketing just releases

Neville Hobson: It’s true, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Something to the wild, right? Like snatch up these bargains faster than a gator can snatch up a child, you know?

Neville Hobson: Extreme example. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Well, I think it I think it’s interseeing.

Shel Holtz: Yep. That’s stuck in my mind.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. It’s good seeing all this, I have to say. And as long as they’re doing it in a way that isn’t gonna bite back at them, as it were, all to the good, but need to see more evidence of success and that word authentic being used properly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I’d be very interested if any listeners work for organizations or have clients that are have embarked on this kind of a program. I’d love to know what kind of safeguards were applied to that, what kind of conversations were held with HR and Legal and how it’s going. So let us know. So our next monthly episode of FIR, our long-form monthly episode for September, will drop on September twenty-eighth. Monday, September twenty-eighth, which means Neville, you and I will record it on Saturday, September twenty-sixth. We will be here with our

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: Short form midweek episodes beginning not this Monday, but next Monday. In between those monthly episodes. So we hope that you will all watch for those announcements and or just subscribe to the podcast and they’ll show up in your podcast player. And until we see you on our next episode, that will be a 30 for immediate release.

The post FIR #527: Delegating Hiring Decisions to AI appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Anthropic’s watermark scheme is the focus of so much discussion that you could be excused for thinking there was nothing else to talk about. For many, it’s the solution to identifying all those evil-doers who offload their writing to large language models. But we are wasting far too much time trying to determine whether (and to what degree) AI was involved in creating content. Much more important is determining whether the content was crafted with respect for the reader, and whether the creator can stand by every word. That’s the idea behind the new AI writing policy from the software company Clay, which makes far more sense than trying to detect a watermark.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [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 526. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. In the last episode of FIR, we talked about workslop and the implications workslop brings to the workplace. We’re going to continue down that path today.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the headlines about Anthropic putting an invisible watermark on anything Claude writes. I want to separate what that actually does from what people have been claiming.

First, you won’t see this watermark. It’s not a “written by Claude” tag. It’s machine-readable. It survives copy and paste, and it may even survive some editing. The reason Anthropic came up with this is to comply with the transparency rules under the EU AI Act, and it applies everywhere Claude runs: the app, the API, Claude Code, Cowork, cloud providers — you name it.

You can’t paste text into a public detector and expose someone yet. Anthropic says detection tools are coming, but it hasn’t released any of them.

Here’s roughly how it works: Every time Claude generates text, it’s choosing between several equally good next words — say, “gray” or “overcast.” Normally, that choice is random. With watermarking, though, a secret cryptographic key nudges that randomness in a consistent way.

No single word looks suspicious, but across a couple hundred word choices in an article, the pattern becomes statistically detectable if you have the cryptographic key.

That’s completely different from tools like Pangram, which look for writing patterns that seem AI-like — you know, em dashes, overuse of words like “delve” or “tapestry” or “underscore,” constantly grouping things in threes. These are all things real writers do, by the way. The rule of three is nothing unique to AI, nor are em dashes. That’s why I don’t put much stock in these tools.

Anthropic’s detector doesn’t guess. It tests whether the text matches the pattern its own cryptographic key would produce.

Now, it’s particularly important to understand that a detected watermark means the content was processed by Claude. It doesn’t mean Claude wrote it. You could write something yourself, have Claude clean up the grammar, and it would still carry that watermark. Axios flagged exactly this risk for communications teams that polish a human-written press release with Claude.

It also works in reverse, by the way. Heavily edit, paraphrase, translate, or blend the text with other writing, and that watermark can disappear. Short passages may not carry enough signal to be detected at all.

So this isn’t a foolproof “Did a human use AI?” detector. Picture a reporter running a company statement through a detector and calling it AI-generated when your team actually wrote it and just had Claude do the final polish.

The watermark tells you about processing. It can’t tell you who did the thinking.

And that brings me to Clay, the software company, which just rolled out an AI writing policy. I think this is actually more important than a watermarking system.

The policy had its origins in Clay’s engineering department, but it has since gone company-wide. It’s not a ban. Brainstorming with AI, drafting, proofreading — all that’s fine.

Instead, the policy has four principles.

First, stand behind every idea and every sentence.

Second, writing is thinking.

Third, spend more time creating a document than you expect someone to spend reading it.

And fourth, longer isn’t better. And AI, by the way, notoriously pads its content.

I like this policy a lot. I like it a lot more than “Don’t use AI to write.”

Because sometimes AI writing is exactly the right call. Plenty of people are great at their jobs and bad at writing. Engineers are a great example. I’ve used engineers as an example of this before. If AI helps these people organize their explanation and turn an incomprehensible email into something readable, that’s good for everyone.

The problem is AI can make bad thinking look like good writing. This is what we were talking about last week with workslop. You give the model a thin prompt, it hands back three polished pages, and now you’ve just shifted the work of figuring out what you meant onto everyone else who has to read it. The prose looks finished, so the creator of that content feels like they’ve finished, but the thinking never actually happened.

That was how we defined workslop last week when we talked about it.

So companies don’t need an AI policy that’s focused on AI. They need one that’s focused on accountability, quality, and respect for the reader.

Cover the basics, for sure. List the approved tools. Talk about confidential information and how it gets used. Talk about fact-checking and human review and brand voice and blah, blah, blah.

But add that Clay test: Can you defend every sentence? Does it represent what you actually think? Did you verify the facts? Did you cut the padding? And did AI make the communication better, or did you just shift your effort onto your audience?

For communicators, that last question is the one to focus on. The watermark debate is going to tempt organizations to obsess over detection: Was AI used? Can we prove it? Should we disclose it?

Yeah, sometimes, I guess, that’s a fair question. But the better ones are: Is the thinking ours? Is it accurate? Does it serve the reader? And is a human willing to stand behind every word?

If we can get those things right, I’m not too worried about whether Claude helped fix a few sentences along the way, watermark or no watermark.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. We have talked about this before — this kind of weird obsession so many people seem to have with trying to figure out whether someone used AI to write a piece so they can exclaim with great glee, “Yeah, this guy wrote this. It’s 96 percent AI. He didn’t write it at all. It’s a scam, it’s fake,” blah, blah, blah.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: We’re already seeing it happen with this. Someone wrote the other day about this, “Finally, a way to get rid of AI slop.”

What? I mean, isn’t —

Shel Holtz: No.

Neville Hobson: It isn’t going to do that. This obsession isn’t going to stop, I don’t think.

And, in fact, maybe the best thing out of the Clay principles is taking the focus away from that and moving it to the writing, to authorship, to accountability, as you point out.

The caution, I would say, is don’t obsess about this. Don’t set concrete rules that are so inflexible that you’re going to end up with writing that isn’t flexible at all.

The point, I guess, is to concentrate on the actual writing. Think about what it is that you’re writing.

So let’s move away from “Did you use AI to write this?” to something like, “What was your contribution to this?”

That, to me, is a healthier discussion to have.

There are still going to be lots of people who do the “gotcha” talk. I saw one today on LinkedIn: “I would never hire someone who uses AI to copywrite. That kind of approach isn’t for my team,” and stuff like that.

I think asking what your contribution was encourages accountability, whereas “Did you use AI to write this?” is all about concealment and policing — discovering that someone did and assuming or implying that they’ve cheated somehow.

That said, I think the point that you need to stand behind every idea and sentence is absolutely spot on. And that’s not new. We should have been doing that all along.

That’s probably the right way to approach it.

For example, don’t ask Claude to write something: “Here’s a topic. Write a 1,200-word piece arguing that communicators need to take responsibility for AI governance.”

Claude produces it, you might edit two or three sentences, and you’re done. You publish it under your name. That is substantially AI-generated writing, and the watermark is relevant.

But for what, though? So someone could say, “Gotcha”?

You don’t know what that was for. You don’t know what’s wrong with that. Has someone deceived you? I suppose, by implication, if it’s under their name, they have deceived you in that they wrote it. They didn’t; the AI wrote it.

But what’s the difference between that and, as a comparison, Grammarly or something like that, which suggests paragraph changes and you accept every single one of its recommendations? You end up with something that’s then 70 to 80 percent Grammarly, as opposed to you.

Better, though, to avoid ethical issues and accusations and all that stuff, is that you do the writing. Don’t dump the stuff on the AI. You do the writing and introduce your own thinking to this.

Have the AI — Claude or whatever it might be — check it. Ask it to proofread it. Ask it, “Is there any other angle I could have incorporated in this?” or “Do you think this is the right approach?”

I do that a lot with the stuff that I write. And I must admit, probably two out of three times, I’ll accept some of the recommendations the chatbot comes back with.

Sorry, the AI assistant comes back with. I don’t call it chatbot.

Shel Holtz: Ha ha ha.

Neville Hobson: And there I just slipped up. I did.

So I think we’ll have to weather the gotchas all the time, and so be it. But if you are confident in doing the writing, using your AI assistant as the guide for you — as, in a sense, the editor that sits by your side, the critiquer that tells you what it thinks and where you could improve this or don’t say that — follow guidelines such as Clay has done, and you should be okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The piece on Clay’s writing policy makes the point, as I mentioned, that writing is thinking. Writing is the way we process our thoughts and test our thoughts.

And this is a point that I think a lot of people have made. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times. I think it was over the weekend. I think it was an op-ed that was exhorting people to please, for God’s sake, write your own stuff because we don’t want to lose the ability to think.

The problem is, I think most of these proclamations come from writers. You and I are writers, and the communities that we interact with on LinkedIn in particular are probably also writers. We’re connected to people who are engaged in communications, and hence you get the opposition to using AI to write.

But again, what about an accountant? What about an engineer?

There are so many jobs out there where being a really good writer was never a requirement when these folks were earning their degrees or their certificates. And now, because they’re in the business world, they have to communicate effectively.

So how do you go about the thinking process?

No, you don’t want to delegate it to AI. You don’t want to say, “Write an email about X” or “Write a blog post about X.” You want to think it through.

But does that mean you think it through by writing? Well, not if you’re not a writer, necessarily.

You may think it through by creating an outline, by doing a brain dump. It could even be — this is something Chris Penn talks about a lot — just recording your thoughts as audio and then uploading that file and saying, “These are my thoughts. Now turn this into a coherent email to this audience designed to produce this result.”

Then you go back and you review it and edit it so that you can defend every sentence, every word.

Again, I think this is all about respect for the reader. And if the way you demonstrate respect for the reader, knowing that you’re a terrible writer, is using AI, that’s appropriate.

If you just knock out this email, people are going to go, “What is he talking about? I don’t know what he’s trying to get at here.”

Respect for the reader is using the AI to make that message clearer, more cogent, more understandable, and more actionable.

So, again, I really like those four pillars.

And I think there undoubtedly will be ways to defeat the Claude watermark. People will come up with them. Anything that is designed to catch people is something somebody else is going to come up with a way to circumvent.

In the meantime, though, as you say, this is not a surefire way to catch somebody. It’s going to identify that Claude processed this, not that Claude wrote it.

So I think people need to calm down and start thinking about this tool in a way that provides the high-quality content that you’re trying to deliver to people — not just something polished that makes them have to figure out what you intended because it’s polished but no thinking went into it.

The thinking still has to go into it, whether Claude’s going to do the lion’s share of the writing or not.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting distinction is between AI-generated and AI-assisted writing. Although I add my own caveat to that, which is: Who cares?

I mean, truly, do I want to get into a discussion about that? No, I do not.

So I know the difference. I’m not evangelizing that everyone should understand and follow the difference, although it’s helpful to.

For example, using Claude, you give Claude a short prompt — it’s not Cowork, by the way; this is just the chat — and it produces an article.

You tell it, “I want to write about X, and the topic is this, and I want to achieve this. These are the points I want to make.” Maybe not even as much as that. And Claude produces, you know, a 600-word draft, and you lightly edit it.

Lightly meaning maybe you change not the syntax so much, but certain expressive words that you might use. If that’s your bag, sure. Although you would have given —

Shel Holtz: Or adding the Oxford comma.

Neville Hobson: — your AI assistant the guidance about your preference on the Oxford comma.

Shel Holtz: Presumably, yeah.

Neville Hobson: It would know.

So you do that. On the other hand, if you’ve already developed the argument, you’ve already got a clear picture in your mind, you’ve researched it, you’ve used Claude to challenge or improve your thinking, and you make the editorial decisions yourself, that’s another matter entirely.

That, I believe, is AI-assisted writing.

So, as we mentioned earlier in the discussion, the better question isn’t, “Did you use AI?” but, “What was your intellectual contribution?”

So, writing is thinking. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Although, again, I don’t want to get hung up on having definitions all over the place about this.

The danger is real of turning this into another policing technology, which many people are already starting to do.

I did see in Anthropic’s FAQ about watermarking where they say, in answer to the question, “How do I check if a piece of text was written by Claude?”, “We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.”

So that’s coming.

That’ll give those gotcha people a lot more ammo to say “gotcha” a lot more, I bet. It just takes attention away from what really matters with all of this.

But, you know, like a lot of things that are new, we have to go through all this.

So my recommendation is: Don’t give it too much attention. Be sure in your own mind that what you’re doing is, in your definition, the right way of going about it. You feel confident that it is. You have guidelines to follow, such as Clay’s, for instance, so you are able to say, “Yep, these four things — I do these things in all my approaches to this.”

In which case, you can wave two fingers at the gotchas.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I can’t emphasize this enough: The detection is not going to be focused on whether Claude wrote this. It’s whether it processed it.

So you could have written it and then sent it through Claude for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and the watermark will show up, even though you wrote it.

So the gotcha is, I think, a little disingenuous in a lot of cases.

I mean, it could be that somebody used it to write, for sure, but it’s not a sure thing. It’s not a lock that if the detector says, “Yes, Claude processed this,” then, “Aha! You wrote this with AI.”

Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Neville Hobson: But even if he did, so what? If someone says that, do I care? Not at all.

Shel Holtz: Well, and again, I come back to the engineer or the accountant who wants to be understood and is not a writer.

I think that’s where this tool shines and where we have opportunities for better clarity and better understanding in the workplace.

Do I expect my professional writers to write? Yeah, absolutely.

Do I expect my accountants to write? My lawyers? Not necessarily.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s one other thing about this, too.

I did read Anthropic’s technical paper describing what this is and how it works. I’m going to have to actually ask Claude to simplify this — give it to me in simple terms so I can understand it well.

Shel Holtz: Ask Claude. No, better yet, ask ChatGPT to do it.

Neville Hobson: Because it talks about, for instance, let’s say you asked Claude to write a piece. You briefed Claude, it did that, you edited it, passed it back to Claude, it made some recommendations, which you implemented, including removing a chunk. You passed it back to Claude again.

You went to and fro a bit, and you might then have — let’s say it’s an article for an academic journal, for instance — passed it to a colleague, saying, “Can you review this and give me your opinion?”

They did, and you made some further changes as a result.

The end result of all of that is so muddy that Claude would have — or rather, the watermarking wouldn’t be clear as to who wrote which bits and so forth.

You could pinpoint where the words came from, but you couldn’t pinpoint who the author was.

In which case, the gotcha folks are not going to be happy with that. But, you know, just get on with it, for God’s sake, and stop all this stuff.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And you don’t know which words it selected to accommodate this watermarking. If your edit changes them, then the watermark vanishes.

So again, no guarantees here at all.

This is compliance with the EU AI law. That’s all it is.

By the way, I think you can expect to see the other frontier models follow suit, also to be in compliance with the EU AI law.

So the fact that only Anthropic is doing this so far —

Neville Hobson: Undoubtedly.

Shel Holtz: — doesn’t mean that you won’t see it in ChatGPT and Gemini and even maybe Grok. We’ll see.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, they talk about retrofitting this to earlier versions of Claude, and that makes total sense to me.

You are right. I believe it would make no sense if Claude was the only one doing this. So we’ll expect news from the others.

But in the meantime, my suggestion to everyone is: Don’t worry about this. Be true to yourself.

Read Clay’s guidelines — what are they called? I can’t remember. It’s kind of a policy, writing policy.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, policy. Writing policy. AI writing policy, yeah.

Neville Hobson: Okay.

And there’ll be others adding to this and saying, “Here’s my version,” and so forth. So you can pick what’s best.

But just focus on your writing.

One of the points that comes out of this is absolutely right: You do the writing. Don’t just say, “Give me a 1,200-word article on whatever topic.”

That’s the best approach, and that has been the case since before this topic emerged.

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

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

We have been hearing about work slop for a while now, and evidence is mounting that it can create long-term problems for companies. Yet we are hearing very little (if anything) about what businesses are doing about it. There’s new research, which Neville and Shel discuss in this episode, along with some thoughts about actions companies can take.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [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 number 525 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And Neville, it is great to have you back on the show. You’re well enough to record again.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it’s certainly been an interesting few weeks, including the kind of disconnection that I did from just about literally everything with this heat exhaustion that I suffered, which was quite profound and far more serious than I thought, according to the doctor.

And then the R&R, as I described it—the rest and recuperation—slotted in nicely with our existing family plans here to spend some time in Novato, Marin County, in California, which we did last week. And as some listeners will know, you and I and the family, in fact, all met together, had lunch in a delightful restaurant in San Francisco last Thursday, and took some pictures, which is what people saw.

So I’m back in the UK now. It was a worthwhile visit, and, well, here we are doing FIR again. It feels like déjà vu all over again. That’s great.

Shel Holtz

It is back to normal. I should tell people that if you’re curious about the wonderful restaurant we ate at in San Francisco, it’s called Waterbar, and my company, Webcor, built the building that it’s in. So it was fun to have you there and to say, “We built this.”

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it was. I agree. The hospitality was really good in that restaurant. Very nice service, friendly people, excellent food, of course. It’s focused on fish, so if you’re a fish connoisseur, this is the place to go in San Francisco, I would say. Yeah, really nice.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and right on the water. You get a view of the Bay Bridge and a good part of San Francisco Bay. So, yeah, it was great to see you in person. It’s been since 2019.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, a long time.

Shel Holtz

And here we are looking at each other over Riverside, but that’s not the same.

Neville Hobson

No, the next best thing, but not the same.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, being together in real life really matters. But today’s topic is one that we were planning to discuss just before you took ill, so we’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

We’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

We are. And this is based on an article that caught my eye a few weeks ago in the Harvard Business Review. It was actually published back in January, but having returned to it, I think it’s even more relevant than it was then.

The title of the article is “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’—and How to Stop It.” Timely topic, I’d say. The authors use the term “workslop” to describe low-effort, AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface but ends up shifting the real work onto whoever receives it.

We’ve probably all seen examples: reports full of generic language, presentations that say a great deal without saying very much, emails that are technically fine but leave you wondering what the sender actually thinks.

Since that article appeared, the wider idea of AI slop has become much more prominent. We’re hearing the term applied to the flood of cheap, AI-generated material appearing on social networks, in publishing, marketing, and elsewhere. There’s even research suggesting that people increasingly use “AI slop” as a judgment about authenticity. Something doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-generated to be dismissed as slop; it just has to feel like it.

Perhaps the most useful new evidence comes from research by the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to the practice of human resources management. Published in June, SHRM’s Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026, based on more than 5,000 U.S. workers, found that 41% use AI at work, and 44% of those users describe at least some of their output as AI slop. Early-career employees feel the greatest pressure to adopt AI. SHRM also found greater engagement and commitment where organizations take an open approach to AI integration.

What interested me most about the HBR article was its argument about why workslop happens inside organizations. The authors suggest that it isn’t fundamentally an AI problem at all. It’s a leadership problem.

Many organizations are telling employees simply to use AI without defining what success looks like, without giving people sufficient guidance or confidence, and without creating an environment where it’s safe to experiment, ask questions, or admit uncertainty.

In that environment, people can end up optimizing for appearing to use AI rather than actually using it well. Putting it simply, the article says it’s the result of unclear AI mandates and overwhelmed teams. Leaders are issuing vague directives for employees to start using extremely powerful tools, while many of those employees are overburdened, psychologically depleted, and operating in environments where it doesn’t feel safe to admit uncertainty or ask for help.

Evidence published since the HBR article seems to reinforce rather than undermine that argument. We’re seeing more research showing significant numbers of employees encountering poor-quality, AI-generated work while, at the same time, employees are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they’re using AI.

There’s another dimension to this that I think is particularly interesting: productivity.

Imagine that something that previously took me two hours to produce now takes me 20 minutes with AI. That’s a significant productivity gain for me. But suppose I send it to Shel—to you—and you then spend an hour trying to understand what I mean, checking my claims, and correcting some mistakes that I hadn’t spotted. Have we actually improved productivity, or have I simply transferred the cost of my work to Shel?

That’s essentially what workslop does. And some recent research into AI-assisted work describes this as a kind of tragedy of the commons. Individuals can appear more productive while imposing additional costs on everybody else.

If an organization measures AI adoption, output volume, or individual efficiency rather than the performance of the whole system, workslop might actually look like successful AI transformation.

That struck a chord because it echoes something we’ve discussed on FIR more than once. Whenever we hear stories about AI failing in organizations, the technology itself often isn’t the real issue. AI has a remarkable ability to expose weaknesses that were already there: unclear leadership, poor communication, lack of trust, unrealistic expectations, and organizations measuring activity rather than outcomes.

And there’s an important question of individual responsibility here, too. Poor leadership may create the conditions for workslop, but that doesn’t absolve the person who sends it. If I knowingly send something I haven’t properly considered or checked simply because an AI produced it, that’s also a failure of professional judgment.

So perhaps workslop isn’t really the diagnosis at all. Perhaps it’s a symptom.

Is AI creating a new workplace problem, or is it simply shining a very bright light on old management problems? What happens when leaders measure AI adoption instead of better decisions, better collaboration, and better business outcomes? And as AI makes producing apparently polished work almost effortless, does human judgment actually become more important rather than less?

The Harvard Business Review article may now be seven months old, but the questions it raises are becoming more urgent, not less. Shel?

Shel Holtz

Without question. And there—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—there is newer research. I found work done by the Work AI Institute. They did a 2026 research project called The Work AI Index. And in addition to workslop, they have a new term in there called “botshitting.” I kid you not.

Neville Hobson

Ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Botshitting describes employees knowingly shipping AI output they believe is wrong. And 12% of employees who were surveyed for this research admit to doing this. Interestingly, when they are basically caught, they blame AI. They say, “The AI did this.” Forty percent of workers blame the AI rather than themselves.

There was also a study in January 2026 from Workday. Some 3,200 leaders found that 37% of AI productivity gains are immediately lost to rework because the workslop isn’t adequate, with employees spending an average of six hours a week correcting or rewriting flawed AI content.

Built In reported workslop now affects roughly 40% of employees and costs about $186 per worker per month. And there was a more recent study—BetterUp sourced this figure—that found that 66% of workers are spending six-plus hours every week fixing AI errors. So this is serious stuff.

And by the—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—way, nearly every recent report on workslop ties this to layoffs associated with AI. Workers and outlets are connecting 2026 tech job cuts to premature AI-driven headcount reduction. And the workers who are left behind are absorbing that workslop rework burden. So we cut people to use AI; now the survivors are—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—cleaning up after it. That’s an important framing to look at.

And one last thing I’ll mention from some research—this was just from June of this year. They found that the errors in workslop go beyond the work that somebody else needs to do to correct it. It moves downstream through teams and into the organization’s collective knowledge base. And that knowledge base just deteriorates.

So it’s not just individual wasted hours, but this slow erosion of what the organization actually knows to be true. This is a very serious problem, and I don’t see a lot being said about measures that organizations are taking to address it. I think some measures need to be taken pretty soon, or this is going to get out of control.

Neville Hobson

Yeah. The Harvard Business Review article does have some suggestions about what organizations can do to address it, which I’ll mention in a minute. But they also include some examples. I found these rather interesting. Not a whole lot—three only—but nevertheless, they talk about the toxic effect workslop can have on workplace dynamics, breeding mistrust and leading team members to think less of the sender’s intelligence and trustworthiness, among other traits.

They talk about their ongoing research, where they’ve heard a number of examples of workslop seeding ill will, eroding trust, and generally having a corrosive effect on workplace morale.

There’s one where I thought, I can imagine this. One example they give is an employee at a technology company who told the Harvard Business Review that he’d noticed the tone in his performance review was unlike his manager, and that the document recycled content from his self-evaluation. The experience made him feel unvalued and underappreciated, and he gave up all hope that he would ever be promoted.

So, reading between the lines, what happened? Whoever did that grabbed some of the employee’s self-evaluation and had an AI produce the review. I bet that’s what happened there.

We don’t know the details behind that, but that’s a really good example of what you could see happening in an environment where there is a lack of clarity, all those things the Harvard Business Review points out, and the pressure to deliver in some form or another.

So, for instance, doing an employee evaluation would come into that area where the manager has cut corners and used AI to do it. And I could imagine that is happening a lot.

And in relation to the examples that the Harvard Business Review piece includes, they say something quite interesting. Many of the responses focused on the productivity costs—the time people wasted dealing with each instance of workslop that crossed their desks. But they note that what should really worry leaders is the impact workslop can have on human relationships.

And I think that’s a point to hammer home. It’s a kind of soft thing. You don’t necessarily see it, but it’s there. And some of these examples make that very clear indeed. So that’s a manifestation of the management failure behind all of this, Shel, don’t you think?

Shel Holtz

I do. And I think it’s because we’ve been rushing headlong into this rather than pausing to strategize it.

And I think we’ve talked about that deterioration of human relationships once before. The situation is that people are not picking up the phone or sending an email off to the local subject-matter expert because Claude has the answer. ChatGPT has the answer. So you’re getting less of that interaction within the organization.

This is causing people to assume some of the work that is outside their area of expertise, outside their lane, if you will, instead of reaching out to the people in the organization who actually have that expertise so they can do the work that previously was part of their job.

Another interesting thing you noted was that somebody felt this was leading to a lack of promotion opportunity.

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

I’m reading a book right now, an excellent book. We were talking about it before we started recording. It’s called Robot-Proof. And one of the things she talks about is this economic phenomenon of deprofessionalization, where AI takes on a certain amount of the work, and therefore you, as the professional, don’t need to know or do as much as you did before.

And it lowers your overall value. It pushes the wage down for people who are doing that. The author, Vivienne Ming, uses an analogy of Jiffy Lube, which in the U.S. is a place where people take their cars to have their oil changed.

And she says, “What if colonoscopies worked that way?” You don’t need a doctor to do a lot of this work because a lot of the work in a colonoscopy is pretty routine and AI can do that. Now you need just the Jiffy Lube guy there to take the hose and do—

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

—the insertion, looking at the camera to make sure it’s right. But that’s more of a technical skill than a deep medical skill that is taught in medical school and then honed over years of experience and practice.

And this is the road I think we’re headed down if we don’t take some steps to fix it. The people who were brought into an organization based on education and years of experience and subject-matter expertise, and perhaps even thought leadership, no longer need all that stuff. They just need to do the base-level effort that is required by a human following the instructions of the AI.

So I think organizations need to look at this very seriously: how this work gets done, what is required of the outputs, and having guardrails in place to make sure that people aren’t skirting around it.

Because let’s face it, if the cost of producing this stuff continues to drop, there’s an incentive on the part of the organization to go ahead and use this because the cost is lower. It’s hard to see the impact of that on sales and reputation in the short term. In the long term, I think it absolutely will have that impact.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I’d say you’re right. I mean, one thing that I’ve been talking about all year in everything I’ve written or said about artificial intelligence in organizations is that it’s about the people, not the technology.

If we’re implementing AI or doing a rollout or planning it, or telling people, “Use AI,” as a leader, you have the responsibility to make that as crystal clear as possible and focus on the people.

So one of the things I did like about the Harvard piece was the concluding remarks they make, starting with this: “The greatest irony of all is, to make AI work at work, we need to get better at being human.”

Absolutely spot on.

Leaders need to make space for the unpolished, slower but more rewarding work of human collaboration. Without organizational changes that enable agency and trust rather than AI mandates for overburdened teams, we’ll all drown in the sludge of workslop.

A very well-put concluding statement, I think. But the serious element of that is something that, in my opinion, I’m amazed that leaders don’t seem to get at all.

They talk about efficiencies. They talk about cost savings. They talk about all these things, and yet there’s nothing about: How do we help employees become more productive themselves and develop themselves, too? How do we help them, in a sense, augment their skills using AI?

Now, that’s not to say—and I’m not suggesting for a second—that AI leaders generally just don’t think about that at all. I believe they do, but it’s way down the priority list in terms of how they communicate this. They need to get that to the top of the priority list.

But more than just talk about it, they need to put these things in place. And there are many things they can do. There’s, in a sense, rebuilding trust with people.

We’ve talked about examples in recent episodes of layoffs that are very clear to see. People are talking about them all the time, and that is happening. We talked about a really great one a few episodes back about what Ford Motor Company is doing with the graybeards. Lovely name. We’ll pass on the age—

Shel Holtz

Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson

—thing on that. But it’s about the organizational collective memory people have of how things are done and what worked in the past, among people who were laid off and are gone.

So they rehired a whole bunch, and they’ve benefited hugely, as the articles we cited go into in some detail, including, I believe, if I recall, Shel, they were the number-one automaker for a particular reason that they attribute directly to rehiring all these graybeards.

So that is a great way of doing it. But it’s just one example. There are undoubtedly more fundamental things organizationally that people can do to rebuild this connection between the organization and the people who make up that organization—the employees, mostly.

So there’s a lot of work to be done. And yet none of this is rocket science to leaders at all, I don’t believe. Just because we’ve got this newfangled technology on the scene, you’re telling people to start using it without giving them the proper guidance.

So these, to me, are Leadership 101 things. And if no one’s doing this, then communicators, let’s step up to the plate and help. That’s what I think we should be doing.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, absolutely. And I have been reading more and more research that talks about what happens when you delegate your thinking to AI.

Rather than doing the research yourself and the writing yourself, which helps you think through the issue, it actually has an impact on your ability to think and to learn. So there are a lot of reasons I think that we need to take this seriously.

I think the first thing communicators need to do inside their organizations is raise the alarm. Because I think this may be an issue where everybody’s heard “slop” and everybody’s heard “workslop,” but I don’t know that everybody in the organization—especially the decision-makers—is up to speed on what the research is saying about all of this and the deleterious impact it can have on our organizations and the outputs that we produce.

So, yeah, I think sharing this data—and we will have links to the research in the show notes—and making the people who make the decisions aware of what this could mean to the future reputation and earnings of the organization is the place to start.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I agree.

So, simply, there are good tips in this discussion. The links to the articles—please read them. They’re really, really useful. You’ll find a lot of insights in all the ones that we’ll have in the show notes. So there you’ve got your route map, I would say.

Shel Holtz

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

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