For Immediate Release Podcast #39: Client, measure thyself

Today’s panel features IBM Social Consulting Senior Business Consultant Neville Hobson (a familiar voice to listeners of the Hobson & Holtz Report), @Steveology CMO Steve Farnsworth, and SeeDepth and PerkettPR founder and CEO Christine Perkett. Topics discussed include…

* Breaking news: Microsoft is buying LinkedIn

* The New York Times’ possible response to ad-blocking, which could be to block anybody who uses it (along with some other approaches and a discussion about the core issues)

* Why PR agencies shouldn’t grade their own homework and leave measurement of their efforts to their clients

* Instagram has passed Twitter as a social media advertising channel; after Snapchat passed Twitter for daily active users, is Twitter’s future in doubt?

* PR is one of the 10 most stressful jobs. Might that be a good thing?

* Spain’s Podemos leftist party printed its program to look like an IKEA catalog. It got attention.

* Edelman says CEOs need to get engaged. The panel explores the communicator’s role.

* There’s a new definition of “dark social.” Should we be crafting content for these channels as well as “light social?”

* Dan York reports on a cool new update to Anchor.FM.

Connect with our panelists on Twitter at @steveology, @jangles, and @MissusP.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Delicious.

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

About today’s panel:

Steve Farnsworth has over 15 years as a senior digital marketing executive, and is currently the Chief Marketing Officer for the @Steveology Group, a content marketing for demand generation agency serving high tech B2B organizations. He works with mid-sized and large companies, and funded start-ups to develop and implement multimedia content marketing programs that increase inbound leads and grows brand reputation. Steve is a Forbes top 50 social media influencer. He is a digital marketing educator and has moderated panels, spoken at, or managed industry events at Google, Intel, PayPal, Yahoo!, Cisco, Adobe, Electronic Arts, HP, SAP, Wells Fargo, TEDx, Applied Materials, Symantec, NetApp, and Stanford on brand, social, digital, and content marketing.

 Neville Hobson co-hosted this show for 10 years and 8 months, up just a few months ago. Neville is based in Bracknell, outside of London in England where he works as a senior business consultant for IBM Social Consulting. Neville has spent much of his career analyzing trends, behaviors and practices in digital communication. As an independent consultant before joining IBM, he focused on social business, the collaborative economy, wearable technologies, and the professionalism of PR. He also held a position with WCG as head of social media for Europe, and was VP of Corporate Communication for Scala Business Solutions in Amsterdam.

Christine Perkett founded PerkettPR in 1998 and SeeDepth, a PR analytics platform, in 2013. She has been named one of the ‘Top 25 Authorities Moving PR Forward’ in a recent industry study, and is routinely recognized as one of the most social media-savvy CEOs – currently ranked as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter (by Hubspot), a “Top Influential Woman in Tech on Twitter” (by Google’s Don Dodge, alongside such greats as Marissa Mayer, WSJ’s Kara Swisher, Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, and others), and featured two consecutive years in BusinessWeek’s Social Media Special Report (keeping company of notable CEOs from Zappos, Virgin, Digg, HDNet, Mint and more). Christine was also awarded “Best Communications,