#518June 29 · 1 hr 36 min
In the long-form FIR episode for June, Neville and Shel consider the causes and implications of surging anti-AI sentiment in the US (which is also growing in other developed countries), as well as the increasing use of “shadow AI” in organizations. Other reports include studies documenting the continued erosion of trust in mainstream news media, the growth of personal branding among communication professionals, a shocking self-inflicted reputation crisis for a UK business, and evidence that employees aren’t reading your internal communications (unless maybe they are). Dan York shares information on Collections in the Mastodon 4.6 release and the W Social situation in his Tech Report.
Links from this episode:
‘Shadow AI becomes a massive enterprise liability’: New study claims most of us are now using unauthorized AI tools at work
FIR #510: Should Companies Embrace Shadow AI?
FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company?
The Rise of Shadow AI is a Double-Edged Sword for Corporate Innovation
Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers
AI’s Public Relations Emergency
AI Data Centers and the Public Relations Challenge for Business Owners
Wowcher apologises after email appears to reference crocodile attack on toddler
Digital News Report 2026
From Invisible To Influential: The Personal Branding Shift In Corporate Communications
Wowcher apologises for email referencing toddler crocodile attack
Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
Wowcher apologises over email that referenced crocodile attack on boy
LinkedIn post (Queen of CRM): “I’ve had 16 messages about this email…”
LinkedIn post (Flo Powell): Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
The Attention Recession: Why Your Employees Aren’t Reading What You Send
State of Workplace Communication 2026: Why 44% of Employees Tune Out
Links from Dan York’s Report
Designing Collections
Mastodon 4.6
The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals
W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty
W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data
The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.
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 fircomments@gmail.com.
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 520 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: And it’s good to be back with you for our long-form episode. We really enjoy doing our short midweek episodes, but these are an opportunity to dig into some meaty topics. And we have six for you this week. Obviously, we’re going to be talking about some artificial intelligence, but not exclusively. So we have some other communication-focused topics to share with you, and some comments from listeners from the last month’s worth of episodes. And to get to those, Neville, how about a recap of what we’ve talked about in the last month?
Neville Hobson: In the long-form episode 515 for May, on the 25th of May, we led with the rise of AI agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. We also talked about AI copyright lawsuits, Google’s search overhaul, what’s becoming standard media relations practice on podcasts, the question of whether the time is coming for value to be at the forefront of client billing, and the rise of short-form video clippers. A lot of content in that bumper issue. Hefty but good, as we like to say. And then The Economist is building two versions of its web presence: one for human readers, one structured for AI agents. In FIR 516 on the first of June, we discussed what this means for communicators and raised an important counterpoint. Websites aren’t going away. We said the answer is to do both, not abandon one for the other. And we have at least one comment on this one, don’t we, Shel?
Shel Holtz: We have several comments on this one, starting with Sylvia Cambié, who says: “A really interesting episode. Your point about the need to be deliberate when we write copy for websites and think about what an agent would extract is fascinating. Here’s a task that communicators can do well. Great to see new tasks like this emerging for comms. It is funny to hear that AI likes Q&As. When I was a journalist, this was considered a real no-no, a sign of lazy journalism. How times change.” By the way, The Economist has published a great article by Harvard Kennedy School fellow Shui Fang about the world entering the age of machine audiences and agents. And Neville, you replied that her point about Q&As is spot on, and you hadn’t thought about it from a journalism angle before. It’s a good example of how context changes everything. What signals laziness in one setting becomes good or best practice in another. And yes, communicators are well placed to take this on. Structuring content with clarity and precision is what good communicators do. The agent readability requirement just makes the skill more explicit and more consequential. Then we have a comment from Sally Getch, rhymes with “sketch.” She says: “I started this comment on the website, but realized I needed to revise it. My first thought is, WTF is wrong with The Economist’s regular website that it’s unintelligible to AI agents? In my experience, AI does a pretty good job of reading and understanding websites, and it seems to be able to find and do things that the search engines we have all spent decades trying to appeal to could not, like transcribing PDFs and audio files. We use them for those purposes ourselves. Likewise, images with good alt text improve the understanding of both bots and humans. It felt like a flashback to the days of ‘we need to make a separate mobile website.’ I don’t think you need a separate site, but you might need a better one. I asked Stefan about this” — that’s her husband and a software developer — “and he said that the reason for the markdown is because it’s fewer tokens for the agent to consume and therefore costs less. There are some new and therefore not widely tested WordPress plugins that can convert your pages to Markdown and index them to LLMS.txt. If you edit a page or a post, they generate a new .md file. Another thought I had was that one thing that might interfere with agents ingesting content on media sites is ads. They sure do that for humans.” And then Vincent Bruneau left a short comment saying: “Parallel content architectures for human readers and AI agents is the clearest signal yet that the two audiences have genuinely diverged. And if The Economist is doing it, the question for every communications team is not whether to think about this, but how far behind they really are.”
Neville Hobson: Good comments. I think Sally’s in particular had me thinking. And I think all I’d say to Sally’s really good, insightful opinion there is, I recommend you read The Economist article explaining in considerable detail why they’re doing this. I think we link to that. The trouble is it’s behind a paywall, but there are ways around that kind of thing. Anyway, thanks to those commenters. So then in episode 517 on the ninth of June, we looked at what communicators should do when leadership makes a loud public bet that doesn’t pay off. Yes, it’s AI we’re talking about. And what happens when the bills start piling up and companies realize the cost isn’t tenable? Can communications repair the resulting damage from such a management failure that wasn’t a technology one? Partially, we said, but only if leaders are willing to be honest about what happened and why. And there are comments.
Shel Holtz: One comment, and this is also from Vincent Bruneau, who has also left a comment on 518, and I just want to tell Vincent, thank you for being such an interactive participant in our episodes. It’s great to see you here. Vincent writes: “The gap between the loud public bet and the quiet walk-back is where employee trust goes to die, and communications can only repair it if leadership is willing to be honest about what actually happened. Partially is the right answer, and probably more than most organizations will achieve.”
Neville Hobson: Terrific. So next: PR misread social media in 2007, and the internet in 1995, and desktop publishing before that. The disciplines that grew from these were largely built by people outside the profession. Are we about to do it again with AI? In episode 518 on the 15th of June, we explored why PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate, we would argue — and we did — and what they should be doing, noting that time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with. That’s a very concise summary of that episode, but we talked about a lot in that episode. And we have comments, right?
Shel Holtz: Again from Vincent Bruneau. He says: “‘Time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with’ is the line that exposes most current AI strategy in PR. Efficiency without redirection just produces idle capacity, not transformation. The return to relational, face-to-face work as the actual opportunity is the most hopeful and least obvious takeaway.”
Neville Hobson: Now, we have known about the media bias effect for decades — the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. In FIR 519 on the 22nd of June, we looked at what this hostile misinformation effect means for organizational communicators, discussing what strategies might look like, including pre-bunking and the value of calm, rapid response. If you look up pre-bunking, by the way, you’ll get an answer on Google. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.
Shel Holtz: Yeah, and by the way, I was on a panel at the PRSA Public Affairs and Government Section Summit in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. We had the panel on Friday, just yesterday. Good God, I was in Kentucky yesterday. And pre-bunking came up there as a way to address misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. It’s really just the notion that you can anticipate what people are going to attack you on. And if you already have the content that addresses that, it becomes very easy to point to it. And you don’t look reactive when you’re pointing to content that’s already there. You’re not inventing new stuff to address it. So that’s, I think, an important practice for communicators to consider given the state of the media environment these days. Circle of Fellows is going to be posted very, very soon. We did record it. It was two episodes on the same day. Brad Whitworth hosted the first one, I hosted the second one. And the reason for this was that this is the episode where we introduce our new fellows, and there are five of them, and they are across time zones. And the only way we could make this work for people who are in Australia and all over the world was to break this into two. So those will be posted soon, and you’ll have the opportunity to meet our five new fellows. The next episode of Circle of Fellows — episode 131, and we do this once a month, so 131 of these is, I think, noteworthy — that will be on Thursday, July 23rd, at noon Eastern time. The topic is the evolving media landscape and the value of ethical journalism. I’ll be moderating that one with Diana Degan, who is one of our 2026 class of fellows, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Waugh. So if you would like to participate in that in real time, mark that on your calendars. That covers our pre-topic discussion. We’ll start the conversation around our six topics right after this.
Neville Hobson: Shadow AI is a topic we’ve returned to more than once on For Immediate Release, and with good reason, because the story keeps developing and the numbers keep getting harder to ignore. Shadow AI is the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools, applications, or models by employees without the formal approval, monitoring, or oversight of an organization’s IT or security teams. It typically happens when workers use public, consumer-grade tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or third-party browser extensions instead of tools approved by the employer — Copilot, for instance, a common one — to speed up tasks, brainstorm, or analyze data. Cast your mind back to July 2024, when in FIR 419 we asked whether shadow AI was an evil lurking in the heart of your company. At the time, a Cyberhaven report had found that 27.4% of the content employees were feeding into AI tools was sensitive: customer data, source code, confidential HR records. It was a striking figure, and it pointed to a tension that was already building between what employees wanted to do and what their employers were prepared to sanction. By February 2025, in FIR 449, we were reporting that employee use of shadow AI was surging — half of all employees, some studies were suggesting. The appetite was clearly there. The question was whether organizations were keeping pace, and by most accounts they weren’t. Then in April this year, in FIR 510, we put a sharper question on the table: should companies simply embrace shadow AI? Not fight it, not just manage it, but lean into it? Because by that point it was becoming clear that the crackdowns weren’t working, and the productivity gains employees were quietly achieving were real. Now we have new data. And it moves the needle again. A June 2026 survey carried out by Wakefield Research for PagerDuty — a digital operations platform that automates incident management, alerting, and on-call scheduling for IT and DevOps teams — reported that two-thirds of US workers, that’s two in every three, are now using AI tools at work that their company hasn’t approved, in spite of knowing the rules. More than half received informal warnings to stop. Nearly half faced formal consequences — official warnings, disciplinary action — and they carried on regardless. Perhaps the most telling finding is this: 88% of those workers have shared work-related information with public AI systems. We’re not talking about using a tool to draft a meeting agenda. People are uploading emails, sharing meeting notes, entering customer information, and in nearly a third of cases, inputting sensitive business documents, financial data included. There’s also a striking confidence gap emerging. Nearly three-quarters of workers and 77% of senior leaders believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. Whether or not that’s true, it tells you something important about the dynamic inside organizations right now. This isn’t a case of employees feeling lost and reaching for unauthorized tools out of confusion. They’re reaching for them out of conviction. And this is worth noting: one reason employees may feel less obligated to follow AI rules is the perception that company policies are inconsistently applied. According to PagerDuty’s report, while 86% believe their company has formal AI policies in place, more than four-fifths — 81% — believe those rules are applied differently to leadership than to the rest of the workforce. So here’s the question I want to ask. If two-thirds of your workforce is already doing this, if warnings, policies, and even disciplinary action haven’t slowed it down, is the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use effectively over? Is the current wave of anti-AI sentiment sweeping the US playing a role here? Shel, we’ll be talking about that in a bit. If the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use is over, what does responsible AI governance actually look like now?
Shel Holtz: AI governance is just in complete disarray, I believe, right now. I’m sure there are some companies that have their AI governance in good shape, but I think overall — and the research seems to bear this out — it’s chaos out there. I think you probably have a variety of different situations from organization to organization. You have governance that people look at and say, “This is ridiculous.” You have governance that employees are not aware of, or that has not been well communicated. I think there’s a variety of reasons that we’re seeing this — governance that even leaders are not adhering to, and you alluded to this, and that’s very visible. You hear stories of employees being told, “You have to use Copilot because we’re an Office 365 shop and we get Copilot with it, and it’s been extended to all of your Office 365 tools, your Outlook email, your Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and Excel — all of these things are now AI-enabled, so use Copilot.” And then you hear that the executive vice president for operations is happily using Claude all the time, while you also have somebody in HR who’s using ChatGPT, and employees roll their eyes and say, “Well, if they’re going to do it, I’m going to do it. I’m just not going to tell anyone.” They’re using their own accounts or billing it through their expense system for twenty bucks a month, and nobody’s even noticing, because who’s paying attention to a twenty-dollar-a-month charge? It’s terrible. And I think there’s a lot that has to happen, and it should happen, and it must happen, in order for organizations to get their arms around this. The first is more communication from leaders about their expectations. We just had a town hall where our CEO told employees explicitly, “We want you to use this.” He talked about caution about exposing client information or anything else that’s proprietary. He talked about the fact that our Copilot account allows us to keep all of this data in the company. It doesn’t get exposed to the models for training purposes and the like. And that’s one of the reasons we want employees to use that. And that was the caution he gave: if you’re using the others, you’ve got to be really, really careful about that. But I also think that employees need to have a voice in this. If they’re going to embrace it, they need to feel like they own it. And again, I’ll talk about where I work. And I’d love to take credit for this, but this was not my doing — there is an AI committee. And this is not IT people and leaders and the like. We have project engineers and project managers, frontline people on this, including one or two who were skeptical at the outset. And it’s a very enthusiastic group, and we’re planning a company-wide activity because we want employees to have that voice in this. We want them to feel like they’re part of what the direction is with AI — what tools we adopt, what policies we adopt. It’s like anything else in the organization. I mean, think about value statements, for example. If employees feel like they had a say in determining what the company’s values are, they’re going to embrace them. If it’s leadership coming out saying, “Here are our values, live these,” and employees go, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t see that in practice in the organization, and they don’t align with my values,” then you’ve got trouble. It’s the same thing here. So if this is foisted on employees who are already figuring out other ways to do this that are better for them, you end up with all kinds of problems. One, for example, is you’ll find that there are employees who have solved big problems in their jobs and made themselves more efficient and more productive, or have been able to grow something beyond where it was using AI, and they don’t share it, because they don’t want to admit that they used some tool that isn’t authorized in the organization. So you have fifty other employees doing the same job the old way and not benefiting from what this first employee learned. That’s terrible. We need to get our arms around this. And I think communicators have a huge role to play here, because let’s face it, this is not about policy. This is not about technology. This is entirely about communication.
Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think the policy hypocrisy point, if I can call it that, needs pushing on directly. According to the survey, if 81% of workers believe AI rules are applied differently to leadership than to everyone else, that’s not a compliance problem. It’s a legitimacy problem, surely. No AI governance framework can work if employees don’t believe it applies equally to the people setting the rules. So that makes total sense to me — it won’t work. Do you think, if this is widespread — and there’s the worry, it seems to me, if it’s widespread — do you think any organization can recover trust on this without visible, demonstrable accountability at the top? Where does the buck stop in that case?
Shel Holtz: Absolutely there needs to be visible accountability at the top. But if there is, yes, you can recover trust. You lose trust a lot faster than you can rebuild it. So rebuilding it is going to take time, it’s going to take a plan, but it absolutely can be rebuilt. And again, I think this is where communicators come in, to say, “Okay, let’s develop a plan and a strategy around this.” Does your company have a committee that engages the front line in the discussion that is leading to this? If not, consider that. Does your company communicate the policies well? Does it share success stories with employees? There needs to be a strategy for this. You can’t just throw it out there like, you know, a new HRIS — we’ve adopted Workday, you let everybody know once, and they start recording their time there and requesting their PTO there, and everybody figures it out, and it’s no big deal. This is not that. We need to have a long-term strategy that we can adapt as things change, because as you know, in the AI world things change a lot, quickly. I don’t know if you read that Sam Altman has announced that there are going to be massive changes to the ChatGPT interface. He said the chatbot is over — this is an agentic thing now — and what you’re going to see on ChatGPT will reflect that. So people who think of AI as a place where you go type a query into a box — I’m sure there’s going to still be a way to ask a question and get an answer, but that’s not the focus anymore. What does that do to employees who are going to a tool and seeing these changes? We need to be able to pivot pretty quickly. But we need a plan that will accommodate that kind of change, but also move us forward in getting the benefit from AI and also rebuilding that trust. And by the way, one of the things I think employees would love to hear — and I don’t remember where I read this, it was just in one of the newsletters I got, it may have been Shelly Palmer — is that we’re not talking enough about using AI to grow the organization. We talk about being more efficient and saving money and saving time, which is all great. But AI can actually help your organization grow. And we’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about how to do that. We’re not talking about the role employees could play. And if employees knew that that’s what they were contributing to, I think there might be a bit more enthusiasm around it.
Neville Hobson: Let’s take a look at this confidence gap a bit. This is where nearly three-quarters of workers believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. This strikes me as genuinely new territory. Shadow IT was about convenience, right? This feels more like a values clash — employees who believe they are the more capable party, acting accordingly. Is this the moment, do you think, where the traditional model of IT as gatekeeper finally breaks down for good?
Shel Holtz: Yes and no. I think those employees are right to a great extent. They know how to use this tool for their job better than IT ever could, because this is not Excel, right? It certainly isn’t something like an enterprise resource planning system or a customer relationship management system, where IT is clearly going to be an effective gatekeeper. This is where every employee is going to use it differently based on their job, based on their role, their department, their function — and they know best. And I think where IT still needs to be the gatekeeper is on things like cost. If employees are out there creating agents that are just continually looping 24 hours a day, you’re going to burn through a lot of tokens, and the company’s going to have a pretty considerable impact on their bottom line. So there’s absolutely a role for IT to play, but it’s on the technical side, not the application side. How it’s used — I don’t think IT can help you much there at all. They’re not experts at prompt building. They’re not experts at skill or agent building. That’s really not their job. They’re looking at the nuts and bolts of it. So I think there’s still a role there, as a gatekeeper on that side of it. I think policies about how much you use agents and how often you run them and how many tokens you burn through, and education around that — that’s probably an IT thing. And communicators should be working with their IT teams to convey that information. But in terms of how I’m going to use this — man, IT can’t tell me how to use this as a communicator, and I don’t think they have any interest in doing that either.
Neville Hobson: That’s good. Although I would argue that there’s probably a learning experience ahead for IT in that regard, because IT has had a history, I suppose, of dabbling in stuff that is not their domain at all. They see everything as an IT project. So some behavior change is due, I think.
Shel Holtz: Heck, yeah. I remember in the early days of email, there was a company I was doing consulting for that had a CIO who had to approve every email that went to all employees. And I didn’t work there very long, because I looked the CIO right in the eye and I said, “Really? Does your printer approve everything that goes out in print?” Because that’s essentially what it was, right? But no, I think there are more IT departments these days that recognize, especially with AI, that their role is not to tell engineers how to use this or accountants how to use this. Certainly our IT department is very supportive of having employees figure out what the use cases are. They’re not even dabbling in that. Well, let’s stick with this topic of AI, because AI has lost the public. We’re not talking about some public skepticism. This is a flat-out rejection by the vast majority of the American public. And Neville, when we talk about this, we’ll also talk about the UK and Europe. But how vast is vast? There’s a new Pew survey out this month that found that just 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society. Sit with that for a minute. 16%. Forty percent expect the impact on society to be negative, and about a third think it will personally harm them. Right? Got that? A third think that AI is going to be harmful to them. The people most hostile to AI are the young. Among Gen Z adults, nearly half think AI will be bad for society. And yet that same group uses it more than anyone else — two-thirds of them. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology makes the point that this is the real emergency, because the attitudes people form in their late teens and early 20s are the ones that stick for life. Advertisers have always known this. And right now, an entire generation is forming an anti-AI view at exactly the age where those views get locked in. And this isn’t just polling either. It’s gone public and physical. We’ve had graduates booing AI at commencement ceremonies across the country this spring, at one point literally drowning out former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as he tried to tell them to go shape the technology’s future. And then there are the data centers, which is where all this abstract unease turns into a concrete fight. Seven out of ten Americans now oppose having an AI data center built in their area. And that reminds me — I saw in The New York Times just this morning an article that said this community actually wants an AI data center. Like that’s a newsworthy thing now. Community opposition has blocked or delayed something like $64 billion in projects. This is showing up as a talking point in the 2026 midterm elections. And in a handful of disturbing cases, it has tipped over into threats and even violence, with workers on the construction sites of these data centers being assaulted by members of the community. And the resistance isn’t just coming from outsiders. It includes the very employees we’re trying to get to adopt AI inside our organizations — which goes back to our preliminary conversation, Neville. Think about it. If only 16% of the public thinks AI is a net positive, it’s likely that that many, maybe even more, among your employees feel that way. Pew shows usage and approval moving in opposite directions. Half of adults now use these tools, up from a third just two years ago, and a lot of them are using it because their boss told them to use it, while at the same time they distrust it and maybe even despise it. And that’s the gap we have to manage internally. We can talk about the PR challenge AI companies are facing, but let’s talk first about what communicators actually can do about this internally. You have to acknowledge the fear instead of dismissing it. The job-loss anxiety is rational, and pretending otherwise just torches your credibility. We need to separate adoption from advocacy. People can use the tools well without having to love them. We’ve seen this with other tools. I remember — I can’t remember what the tool was that I was using for charts and graphs, this goes way, way back into like the 1990s — but I wanted to use Harvard Graphics, and I was told, “No, our IT department doesn’t support Harvard Graphics.” So we really have to help people understand: look, this is the tool we’re using in the job. You don’t have to love it, you just have to use it. We have to give employees a voice in the rollout rather than just a mandate, because forced use with no input is exactly what breeds resentment. As I mentioned before, I’m on the AI committee where I work, with other frontline employees and non-IT managers and people who are being asked to use it. And we need to lean on trusted peers to carry the message, not executive proclamations, because executive enthusiasm is part of what employees are skeptical about in the first place. As for the AI companies themselves, they’re in damage control right now. They’ve lost the chance to set the agenda. The most striking sign of that is this latest techlash. Tech still polled better than politicians. Today AI polls below every major political candidate, which means the political cost of cracking down on it has basically evaporated. They had a window to set expectations early, honestly, with community buy-in. They missed it. And now they’re negotiating from a deficit. And from where I sit, that’s an argument for startups to embrace PR and communications, because I don’t think any of them really did. If they did, they would have had a PR person telling them that going out there and saying, “This is going to cause massive job loss,” is a really stupid approach to building support for what you’re doing. And yet that’s what they did.
Neville Hobson: It certainly is a muddy picture, it seems to me. I was looking at the Pew report whilst you were talking, and this is a hefty piece of research, I have to say, but a lot of striking contradictions appear to me in trying to understand why this is happening. I mentioned when we were chatting earlier that I don’t see news headlines in the mainstream media in the UK about groundswells of anti-AI sentiment in this country. Not to say there isn’t any, but it’s certainly not driving the news agenda in any way that I could tell. But I found it most interesting — just to break out some snippets from Pew’s research — they say the share of Americans who say they use ChatGPT, which they say is the dominant one of all the chatbots, the one preferred by most people, that usage by Americans has more than doubled since 2023, which is when it became part of public consciousness. Interesting, I think. They report using ChatGPT far more than other chatbots. They say the second most-used platform is Gemini, followed by Copilot and Meta AI. I was surprised at that, because I’ve started using Claude, and that’s way, way down their list, according to Pew. They also talk about — I found this interesting in the context of something else that I mentioned — that Americans are more likely to say, according to Pew, that chatbots help rather than hurt their productivity, knowledge, and creativity. That would explain why more people are using it. But what about the folks who — what about all this anti-AI sentiment that’s emerging? Are they not using this? Are they part of the other percentage that doesn’t? An interesting side explainer, I suppose, to understanding the wider picture about smartwatches, smart home devices, and other things like smart speakers, where you can also use AI. The thing is, though — and clearly I’m not the demographic here, Shel, so this comment is anecdotal —
Shel Holtz: They are using it. Yeah, I’m sure they are.
Neville Hobson: You end up using AI and not realizing you’re using AI. So I’ve taken to using Google’s little widget that they run, the AI mode. 99% of everything I search uses that, unless I’m asking just for a phone number, which is not the kind of thing I normally ask, actually — I don’t phone anyone these days. I often ask questions like, “How many miles is it from A to B?” I often ask that kind of question. And if I use Google’s AI mode, it will ask me, like, “What do you want — kilometers or miles? Direct line, as the bird flies, or roundabout?” I don’t want those questions, right?
Shel Holtz: Yeah. “Freeways, no freeways,” yeah.
Neville Hobson: Exactly. So that’s interesting, all that stuff. A majority of Americans — 60%, so that is a majority — say they read AI summaries at the top of search results. I would imagine that that is growing. Another 10% aren’t sure if they do that or not. Interesting. So Americans predict AI’s impact on society and on them will be more negative than positive. So notwithstanding the majority of people using it, which has doubled since 2023 on ChatGPT, most say the impact on society and them will be more negative than positive. So is that what’s driving the anti-AI sentiment? Younger adults are more wary of the potential impact on society and on them than older groups, yet the younger groups are the ones using it most. So there’s, to me, a paradox there. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say AI is advancing too quickly. So you can now see that you can actually grab some metrics that are the “yes, but” to the “I use it, I’m getting benefit.” Yes, but — so maybe this is about balance. So another metric: most think AI will make their personal information less secure. And there’s that kind of niggle in the back of your mind. Then there’s some political stuff they go into in some detail here. But it got me thinking: maybe you can have this. “This is beneficial, I get what I want out of it, but I hate it.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But nevertheless, either way, this is not a good landscape to be gazing at in the context of where AI companies are developing their products. As I mentioned, I’ll be using Claude a lot in my migration experiment. I use Claude and ChatGPT interchangeably. I’ve got too much invested in ChatGPT just to give it up. And in fact, some of the stuff I ask ChatGPT to do, particularly if it’s summarizing something, I quite like what it provides — sometimes better than Claude. Sometimes I do both: give me this, and I give the same prompt to the other one. Projects and those kinds of things in Claude I’m not using as much as I thought I would. So the point, though, is that maybe there is, Shel — you can embrace two different perspectives at the same time. “I get benefit from this, it helps me do what I’m doing. I don’t trust it. I hate what it’s doing to society, and so I’m anti-AI, but I find it useful.” Is that what’s happening?
Shel Holtz: I think so. I think there are a lot of employees who recognize that if they want to be employed in five years, they’re going to have to know how to use this. And they’ve —
Neville Hobson: Yeah, but this is not just about employees. This is people generally in society.
Shel Holtz: Sure. Yeah. I think there are people who are getting benefit from it, better than they can from other tools, and they recognize that, and they still distrust it. They still don’t want the data center in their backyard. I know people who don’t use it at all. And one of the reasons among some of those people is that they think the whole thing is based on theft. I even saw this as a post on LinkedIn — some discussion of AI, and one person left a one-line response saying, “All AI is theft.” I was very tempted to leave a comment saying, “You’re talking about generative AI, there are other kinds of AI.” But the notion that it’s all based on scooping up everything that’s on the internet that people created, and they weren’t asked and they weren’t compensated — you know, Bernie Sanders, I think, has a proposal that there be a sovereign wealth fund where some of the profits from AI go into that fund and are used to benefit people, because it’s their content, it’s their intellectual property that is fueling all of this generative AI.
Neville Hobson: But it seems to me, though, that those kinds of big-picture statements don’t have any impact on people. I hear that argument a lot. “AI is theft, it scrapes content” — which it does, hence all the talk, particularly here in Europe broadly and here in the UK in particular, on permissions and the new regulations that they’re bringing in that are related to copyright and intellectual property ownership. Good luck with all of it, I say, because these are geographically based laws, and we’re not talking about geographically based protections. So I don’t know how on earth they’re going to solve that. I’m not sure that they can. In which case we’ve got something, have we not, that is almost an impossibility: that if this continues like this — and to your point you mentioned earlier, and I have seen reporting of that here too, of very strong anti-behaviors, including violence — that we see an increase in that. Data centers here don’t seem to be a prominent topic of debate; i.e., it’s not like dozens of them are sprouting up all over the place. It’s not like I read recently in the US, there’s this town somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe — might have been Texas — where the town’s council that runs the town, it’s about 2,000 people in this little town, agreed to the investment program of a company who wants to build a data center there. And to do that, they’re going to need to build, including the infrastructure for energy generation, that would serve a city the size of Chicago. So the whole nature of the whole living environment is utterly changed if they go ahead with this. So —
Shel Holtz: Are you suggesting that more than 2,000 people live in Chicago?
Neville Hobson: Just a few more. So I get the logic of that, but it seems to me that there doesn’t seem to be any strong desire at government levels, whether national or local, to seriously address people’s concerns here. And there you have the paradox, because, “Yes, I love what I can do with this AI tool, it’s wonderful, but I hate it. I don’t want it building a data center in my town, but I want the benefits of using this AI.” Is it what we call in the UK NIMBYism? You’ve heard of the acronym?
Shel Holtz: Yeah, “not in my backyard.” Certainly.
Neville Hobson: Right, but I don’t mean to belittle people who do. It’s not all just that. There is some of that, clearly. But these are genuine concerns people have.
Shel Holtz: Well, I mean, in this instance, where you don’t want it in your backyard, it’s because it’s going to drain your water. There are places where data centers have been built where you turn on the tap and it trickles, because all the water’s going into the data center, and electricity rates are rising because of the consumption of the data centers. I think the companies that are building and running and operating these really need to make the investment in energy infrastructure so that they are actually contributing something rather than taking it away. By the way, I looked it up: KPMG did research. In the UK, 42% of adults are willing to trust AI, so the majority does not. 57% are willing to accept or approve AI use, meaning nearly half remain hesitant. 78% are concerned about negative outcomes from AI, and 72% are unsure whether online content can be trusted because it may be AI-generated. 80% believe AI regulation is required, and 91% want laws to combat AI-generated misinformation, and only 29% trust the UK government to use AI for its tasks. So that’s —
Neville Hobson: Well, addressing the issues — that’s the 91% who want that happening — that’s in train, as it were. But I get a little cynical about some of these surveys, particularly where you’ve got such huge numbers that you then say, “Therefore the majority of people don’t support this or do support this,” or whatever. I want to know how many of the “don’t knows” or didn’t respond or whatever. But either way, it’s a hot-potato topic, more so in the US than here, that’s a fact, because you’ve got situations happening that aren’t happening here yet, particularly related to data centers. There’s not dozens of them springing up everywhere. Hey, we’ve got a nuclear power station being built further north of here, but that’s not quite the same thing, right? So I don’t believe there’s a way to solve this cleanly that will keep everyone happy. Like most things in politics, you can’t please everyone. But this in the US certainly, according to all this research, is a growing issue.
Shel Holtz: I think the frontier labs — OpenAI and Anthropic and Google — certainly need to put their heads together on a strategy to turn this around. This can’t be something that they just shove into the background. The frontier labs are going to have to get together and really figure this out. I know they’re trying, because I’ve seen the $400,000 salaries for storytellers, which is a cute, very precious way of saying they need good PR. And we need better communication, and stronger strategic planning in our organizations. This is a perfect storm that has to happen, and I don’t know how it will, but I’m sure we’ll be talking about this in the future.
Neville Hobson: Yep, I’m sure too. So let’s move along and talk about the decline of trust in news. Trust is one of those words that gets used so often in discussions about media and communication that it can start to feel abstract. But every year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford puts a very concrete number on it. And every year for the past several years, that number has been going in the wrong direction. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is now in its fifteenth year. It covers 48 markets and draws on responses from around 97,000 people worldwide, which makes it one of the most comprehensive ongoing studies of news consumption habits anywhere in the world. We’ve referred to its findings many times over the years on For Immediate Release, and it remains, in my view, the essential annual benchmark for anyone working in or around journalism, communication, or media. The 2026 edition was published just recently, and I want to focus on one finding in particular — not because it’s the only important one, and we may well return to other threads from this report in future episodes, but because it captures something important about the environment in which all of us as communicators are now operating. Global public trust in news has hit a new low, says Reuters. Just 37% of people worldwide say they trust most news most of the time. That’s down three points from last year. Falls were recorded in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed. In the United States, the figure has dropped to 25%. Among right-leaning Americans, it’s 15% — the lowest figure recorded for any demographic in any country in the entire 15-year history of the survey. In the UK, where I’m based, the picture is also stark. Trust has fallen five points this year, to 30%. But here’s the figure that really stopped me: that’s 20 points lower than it was ten years ago. Twenty points in a decade. That’s not a dip. That’s a structural collapse in the relationship between news organizations and their audiences. And it’s not as though people have stopped caring about news or stopped believing in what journalism should be. The same report finds that 48% of people globally still say they prefer news with no particular point of view — an endorsement of impartiality as an ideal that has barely shifted in years. People still believe in what journalism could and should be. They just stopped believing that’s what they’re getting. So when trust has fallen this far, this consistently, across this many markets, is there a realistic path back? Or have we crossed a threshold where declining trust in news is simply the permanent condition of the information environment we now inhabit? Shel?
Shel Holtz: I think it’s not something that’s going to be solved easily, if ever. The fact that right-leaning Americans distrust news more than centrist or left is consistent with the data that we talked about on the last weekly episode, when we talked about — I mean, the episode was about misinformation, or actually disinformation, and media bias. But the media bias effect that we talked about in that episode, that has been around as a measured phenomenon since the 1980s and has been reaffirmed with research ever since then, is at play here, because it finds that right-leaning Americans are more inclined to believe that media reports are biased against them than centrist and left-leaning. Now, centrist and left-leaning also believe that media reports are biased against them, just not to the same degree. So this is that. This is people getting into their bubbles, feeling that media bias effect, and not trusting the media. I think you see a lot of reporters, journalists, leaving the outlets they work for and starting their own media companies, starting Substacks, because they as individuals find that they are trusted; it’s the outlet that they work for that isn’t. So we’re seeing a shift in where journalism comes from. And when you talk about this shift toward social media being the source of news for people, a lot of that is journalists who have started media operations that present their content through social media. The other thing that I find interesting is that 70% of adults in the US say they have a lot or some trust in information from local news organizations. That’s way higher than those who say they trust the national organizations. Republicans trust local news more than national — 64% trust it more. So it seems to me that — I mean, we could speculate about what news media organizations, the New York Timeses of the world, the Washington Posts of the world, the CNNs and NBCs of the world, what they can do about it, but that’s really outside our area of expertise, isn’t it? What do communicators do about this if they’re trying to get news coverage in outlets that people don’t trust? I think the first thing to do is start looking at those local news organizations. And you know that there’s been a serious decline in local news because of the internet and because of social media. I think business needs to invest in local news. I don’t know that you want to go as far as what Alabama Power did — we’ve reported about that on FIR. They actually created a local news outlet that they maintain is independent and unbiased, but it definitely skews toward the topics that are relevant to them. But I think we need to find a way for the business world to help bring local news back. And I think there are other ways that this can happen. I’ll tell you, I set up a Claude Skill, because there is no local news where I live in Concord, California. There’s something in the next community over, it’s called the Clayton Pioneer. It is absolutely awful. You don’t find out what the city council did, or the zoning commission, or the school board. It’s all puff. So what I did was I set up a skill, and it goes out and it checks the minutes of the last city council meeting and the zoning commission and the planning board and all of these agencies in the city, and it builds a newspaper. It’s just for me at this point. And every day I get — it’s like five pages, in a PDF. It also talks about where streets are going to be closed and stuff people actually need to know. I keep tweaking it, but when I get it where I want it, I’m going to buy a domain and I’m going to have this skill publish it as HTML to the web, so that there is an outlet. And I’m going to get out there on Nextdoor and other platforms and let people know it’s there. It’s not a place where opinion is shared. This isn’t puff. You want to know what the school board decided? You want to know what the zoning commission approved? This is where you’re going to find that, in addition to today’s weather and street closures and the police blotter and things like that. But this is where I think businesses need to start building relationships with reporters — in the local news media, because that’s what’s trusted. The other is that they need to do the owned stuff and start doing that external-focused journalism. Not press releases, but journalism.
Neville Hobson: Yeah. There doesn’t seem to be a huge groundswell of interest in doing any of those things, though, I would say. But I found it interesting that this whole trust paradox is not resolved at all. So audiences say they endorse impartiality as an ideal. And that makes complete sense to me, particularly your point, which I agree with. You’re talking about journalists starting Substack newsletters and all that kind of business. I see it not just that — I see it more as, who do we trust? We don’t trust an algorithm to create news, do we? We trust a journalist writing the news. And that plays very clearly to your point about people connecting with a journalist much more than the medium they’re writing for. So hence many people have moved on from the employment in the newspaper to running their own newsletter, some people making money at it, doing quite well. I think the Reuters report also mentions something: 48% globally say they prefer news without a point of view. I agree, I’m in that group, I have to tell you. I don’t want editorialized news. I do not want to read news that’s dressed up as news, and it’s not, it’s an opinion piece. You see that a lot, particularly online. Here in the UK, we’ve got a move in regional newspapers up and down the country, many of which are owned by large monolithic organizations, that publish AI-generated content as their news stories. And we’ve talked about this before. A lot of it is the sports reports, for instance, but just generally local news. And I’d be amazed if they have a sustainable business model. Or could it be that people don’t actually care, because it’s gone beyond — “I can’t do anything about this, I don’t see any change, therefore I don’t care anymore,” so they’re looking at other places to get the news from? And therein is a paradox of your idea of doing what you proposed — creating news content. That, to me, is a smart way of doing it. Your example of the Alabama Power Company, I think, wouldn’t meet the impartiality test, no matter how good they say their content is. And I think there is the problem, then, with businesses trying to do deals or trying to cozy up to journalists: you need to have genuine impartiality. So there’s probably few business models in that mix there, I would say. But in the small town where I live, there’s only 9,000 people here, so it’s actually quite a large town by UK standards. Local media is pretty good online. There are a number of reporters I like, particularly the ones who talk about things like you mentioned — planning applications, roadworks and diversions, all that stuff. It’s good, it’s up to date, and they’re using Facebook mostly, and there are lots of groups that you can join to follow this. But that’s all individual actions and a couple of local newspapers. There’s nothing scalable in that at all. So I don’t know where this actually happens, Shel. I don’t see — people haven’t given up on what journalism should be. They probably don’t even think about the word “journalism” in all of this. They just want impartiality in their news reporting. They’ve given up on it. Is that fixable, do you think? Is there a fixable gap here?
Shel Holtz: I’m sure there is, but I don’t know what it is for the news media. I just have to think about what communicators do to get their news out in this environment. That’s what concerns me. And I think a number of things we need to do. One — it’s interesting that Cision and the companies that do the press release distribution and the contact with the reporters, they all know the reporters that work for the mainstream news outlets. Do they have the Substacks from professional journalists, or the Ghosts, or whatever service they’re using? I don’t think so. I think somebody might be able to make some money by offering a service that does what Cision does, but with those independent journalistic enterprises. But I think as communicators, we need to find the journalists who are doing that and have big followings, and start to build relationships with them, just like we have been with those who work for the newspapers and the TV news. We need to find the podcasts. Increasingly we find — and we’ve talked about this on FIR — that the interviews on podcasts make news. You want to get the word out, get on a podcast that is influential in your industry or whatever your area of subject matter expertise is that you’re dealing with. But we need to move where the trust is. And getting your news out through outlets that people don’t trust, I think, is not a viable solution. But it’s what we’re accustomed to, and it’s what agencies get paid to do. And it’s a shift that I think will be very, very slow, but we have to start.
Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and everyone of our listeners all around the world. It’s Dan, coming at you on a gorgeous sunny day, the first Saturday without rain in Shelburne, Vermont, for quite a while. So we’re enjoying it. But right now I want to talk about Mastodon, and specifically about collections and helping people get started with finding accounts to follow. This has always been a challenge, right? When you start up with a new service, you go in there, and who do you follow? What’s your feed doing? Now, Mastodon has had for a while a thing with some recommended accounts that you could follow, but those were ones that Mastodon, the central entity, put together, and they were looking for a way to do something broader. In the meantime, of course, Bluesky came out with what they called starter packs, where anybody could create a starter pack full of people of a certain topic, whatever else, and you could then discover one of these starter packs, and you could follow everybody. You’d be able to get on there and see that, and boom, your feed suddenly is full of a lot of different activity and things that were there. So people in the Fediverse were looking at what Bluesky did to make it easy, and there were several different experiments people have tried. There are actually some people calling something starter packs. There are some other people trying other different ways to go and do it. But there wasn’t something quite from the central Mastodon company until this latest 4.6 release, where it has created these collections. Now, it’s actually interesting. It’s kind of the beginning of the journey, because with this release, what they did was they made it easy to create collections. You can create them, you can have a link to share, but there’s not as much about finding them, and the rationale makes sense. They said, you know, before we can really get a lot of search and discovery working, we need to have collections. So this release, 4.6, was all about getting the mechanism to create collections out there, and then in subsequent releases, they will work on making them more searchable and discoverable, so that they could replace, for instance, the recommended accounts that Mastodon has when you first join. Now, there are a couple of interesting aspects. One criticism of Bluesky’s starter packs was that your Bluesky account could be added to one without permission. So if I wanted to create a starter pack of people I don’t like, for instance — I don’t know why you would do that, but I could. I could add accounts to something, and if you didn’t feel comfortable being part of that, maybe you don’t want to be there. There wasn’t a great mechanism when Bluesky first came out with that. So collections brings that in in a big way. When you go and add people to an account, first of all, they have to have turned on — or not turned off — a switch in the settings which allows them to be used in search and discovery. So that’s one way: if you just don’t want to be in anybody’s collections, you can turn that off, and then people will have no ability to add you to any of these kinds of collections. Now, the other aspect is, when you are added to a collection, you get a notice that you have been added, so that you can choose to remove yourself from a collection if you want to. And at any point in time, if you find that you don’t want to be part of that collection, you can go and remove yourself. So it’s a much more consent-based thing. And also, in this initial phase, they are not putting a “follow all” button. So there’s no way to just go and click on “follow all” and do it. You just have to go down through the collection and click, click, click, click — follow the people that you want to. Other note: it’s right now restricted to only 25 accounts, not the 150 that were in Bluesky starter packs. And again, partly it’s to learn and to see what was there. They found one of the criticisms of some of the Bluesky starter packs was that they became stale, with too many dead accounts. So this is partly a forcing factor to go and see what’s there, and they want to learn, and that may change over time, and we’ll have to go and take a look at what happens. But it’s very interesting. I’ve created a couple of collections. One added factor here is that Mastodon is a collection of thousands, tens of thousands, of servers, each one of which has to be running the 4.6 software for the accounts to be on it. So I could add Neville, because he was on a system that was upgraded. I couldn’t add Kjell, because the system he’s on is not upgraded. So there’s a factor here that will take some time for this to be able to work with. But it’s an interesting way to go about how do you do this form of discovery and how to work with it. So it’s called collections. If you go to my account on mastodon.social, Dan York, you’ll actually see on my profile page now there’s a link to where these collections are, and you can see them. I have kept mine public. There’s also, of course, a feature to make them unlisted so that people couldn’t find them. But it’s something interesting, something new to try, and we’ll see how this helps with the further adoption of the Fediverse and Mastodon. Speaking of Fediverse and Mastodon and other stuff, I want to just tell you that there’s a woman out there named Elena Rossini — she’s from Italy, but living in Paris — who’s been writing some amazing articles right now about the service called W Social. It was launched to great fanfare at the Davos meeting, where all sorts of folks are, and what’s happened in the past several weeks or so is that the accounts from Bluesky of the European Commission, its president, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank, and other different people have moved from Bluesky over to these W Social servers. There’s a lot more than I can talk about in the scope of this report, but to say that it’s a very curious thing, because the people announced this, then they seem to have seized on using Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that piece of that. They’ve launched their service. They’ve then moved their code to be closed-source, and they’re just doing a bunch of different kinds of sketchy things. They’re promoting it as a social network that will require age authentication, age verification, age assurance — I’m not sure even which term they’re using — but you have to prove your identity or provide a government ID to show your age, and they’re working with another entity called W Identity to create this. There’s a lot of splash, a lot of fanfare, but it’s turning out they haven’t actually been talking to people in the “atmosphere,” as it’s called, the set of people working with the AT Protocol. So I would encourage people to read the articles from Elena Rossini, and to think about what is really going on here, and is this actually something that will provide a true, decentralized, open service for the Europeans, or is this somebody else trying to create a centralized service that happens to be Europe-based? Not clear yet. Lot of unanswered questions in all of this. I’m going to leave it there, send it back to you guys. Back to you, Shel and Neville. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.
Neville Hobson: Thanks for the report, Dan. We’ve not had a chance to listen to it, but I’m very interested to hear what you have to say with regard to W Social, because that is something I’ve been paying attention to. I signed up for it way back, some months ago now, when they first announced they were coming. I’m still on the wait list. But I’ve seen a number of reports literally raising cautionary notes about this, along the lines of what you’ve included from Elena Rossini, for instance. A really good website, by the way, I would say. So I haven’t read her report yet, but I’m keen to listen to what you have to say about this. So I’ll be doing that once we’ve published the recording.
Shel Holtz: Me too, Dan. I got home at, what, about one o’clock this morning, and I barely made it to the scheduled start of this recording. So I’ll be listening to you a little bit later. Always look forward to it, though. There is a shift going on. I suspect a lot of our listeners are living through this, whether they’ve put a label on it or not. And I read about this most recently — it’s something I’ve been aware of, but I just read this piece by Geetikka Bangia, who heads PR and corporate comms for Stryker in India. The oldest rule in our profession has flipped. Think back 20 years. The best PR people were the ones you never heard about, unless it was through a professional association, right? The Gold Quill Awards or the Silver Anvil Awards, that type of thing. They were invisible, but they were essential. We built the brands for everyone else — the CEO, the company, the product. That’s what we wanted to shine a light on, and we stayed in the shadows. That was the job of PR. In fact, if PR made the news, it meant something went wrong. Well, according to Geetikka, that rule is now dead. Today the most effective communicators are the ones publishing thought leadership on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences outside of the industry, putting their insights out in public. Her line — and I love this, because it’s pretty blunt — is, if you’re still operating like it’s 2005, “brilliant but invisible,” you’re playing a game that no longer exists. Your personal brand, she says, isn’t vanity, the way the industry used to see it. Today, it’s survival. So what changed? Social media, and LinkedIn in particular, democratized visibility. Suddenly junior people were building audiences, mid-level communicators were publishing, and employers noticed. Trust is in play here. Edelman’s data keeps showing that peers now outrank CEOs in credibility, which means your own authentic, consistent voice can actually enhance your employer’s brand — or, if you get it wrong, you can certainly damage the brand. When Bangia looks at the people who do this well, there’s a clear pattern. They add value beyond their job description. They share insights. They don’t promote themselves. They build trust. They’re not looking to build follower counts. Her example is Parag Agrawal, who built a reputation as a genuine tech thought leader with educational posts long before he became the CEO of Twitter. So his personal brand signaled expertise, not ambition. But again — and this is where it gets interesting — she’s very honest about the dark side. The line between personal opinion and professional representation is thinner than we think. And in PR, where we manage reputation for a living, our own missteps get magnified. You know the Weber Shandwick stat that nearly half a company’s reputation is attributed to its CEO? She extends that logic right down to the individual communicator. If you’re credible, your employer benefits. If you’re controversial, they pay the price. She says she’s watched comms professionals torch their employer’s reputation with a poorly timed political post — personal brand is damaged, employer brand becomes collateral damage. So we need to figure out how to navigate this. And she offers what she calls a Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much, not too little. She has four rules. Be visible but purposeful — don’t post to post. Stay opinionated but professional — you can hold strong views without being divisive. Build your brand, not your ego — be known for something valuable, like crisis management or storytelling, not just chasing virality. And this is the one I’d underline: know when to stay silent. Know when to shut up. Not every trending topic needs your take. PR people, of all people, should understand message discipline. Her bottom line is, the question isn’t whether to build your personal brand anymore, it’s how — with intention, integrity, and the understanding that in our field, your reputation isn’t just yours, it’s intertwined with everyone you represent. And the thing I want us to think about is the organizational flip side of all this, because if every employee is now a brand voice, then our job isn’t just building our own visibility, it’s helping the whole organization navigate theirs.
Neville Hobson: Yeah. I remember the days — I’m sure you do, Shel — when anything anyone wanted to say about the company externally was not allowed at all. It had to go through official spokespeople. And in fact, it was a disciplinary offense if you uttered something that was quoted in the newspaper, for instance, without permission. Imagine that today still. Imagine if that was still the case today. But the landscape is utterly different to what it was in the 90s, never mind the 2000s. What Geetikka talks about is the visibility thing first, that struck me. Because back in those days, none of these platforms, none of these tools, none of these channels existed. So there was limited means by which you could talk publicly about something and attract attention to you as the person saying these things. Things changed when blogs hit the scene back in the early 2000s, where suddenly anyone could be a publisher. And we relished those times, didn’t we? We wanted everyone to be doing this. We got our wish, so we had good stuff and bad stuff. But I can’t imagine this changing. If anything, it’s going to become more microscopic, in the sense of, you are under a microscope all the time. And hence her advice, Geetikka’s counsel in this really good post, is that you need to be cognizant, very, very aware, of literally everything you do and say online. And the thing that never ceases to amaze me, Shel, is the people in responsible positions, with authoritative opinions and presences, who don’t do that. It amazes me — where someone who’s a CEO of a company, or a senior politician of some type, says something, gets all over the tabloids in particular, and that’s it, your reputation’s toast. And before you know it, after a few months, that person’s gone, probably. But there is damage. And in fact, Philip Bourne has talked about this quite a bit too, the damage resulting from loose lips, if you like. So it is something to pay attention to. And I like the way she says that personal branding isn’t about becoming an influencer — heaven forbid — it’s about being known for something valuable. I utterly agree with that. And I think, if some of the people I know who were journalists or reporters on a national newspaper of some type, or were senior people in organizations who are now gone independent themselves, who retain the credibility they’ve earned from their previous experiences and roles —
Shel Holtz: A lane for that, right?
Neville Hobson: Right, exactly right. That’s carried forward to what they’re currently doing, because they are still trusted by people. So their reputation hasn’t changed, because they haven’t changed the consistency of how they walk the talk of their brand, if you will, as a means to talk about their client or their employer. So it makes common sense to me, much of this. Yet I am constantly surprised when I see examples of common nonsense being spouted, where, you know, “What were they thinking?” I say to myself every time I see it. So “know when to stay silent” is a very good one. And there are far too many people with verbal diarrhea, it seems to me, who have an opinion on everything and they will spout it. And I see that myself, particularly on LinkedIn, as literally, “Look at me, look at me, I’ve got these things to say, and it’s great, and I know all these topics.” That’s what I’m seeing. So that’s our landscape, Shel.
Shel Holtz: Well, yeah. And there are figures circulating out there that something like 70% of employers now consider a personal brand more important than a resume. And even LinkedIn has researched that people with active personal brands see nearly 50% more inbound opportunities than those without. So this is something that you want to do. And the other thing is that, as other employees in the organization and other parts of it are doing this, this is something to coordinate. We’ve got a guy who does an occasional post, maybe monthly. He’s out on one of our most important projects, and he does these great posts about milestones they’ve reached and what it took to do it. We end up sharing it through our advocacy platform. Now, what if other employees were doing that? The advocacy platform is one thing — it gives employees our content to share in their communities. But I’d love to see some of our subject matter experts, the people who really understand concrete, become — their personal brand in social media is now concrete, that sort of thing. And then we can coordinate that, and we can leverage all that as PR opportunities, and then we can share that in the advocacy tool for other employees to amplify. If people are doing this, communicators need to get their arms around it, not just manage their own personal brand.
Neville Hobson: They get known for it. They get known for it. Yeah, lots to learn from this, I’d say, Shel. Okay, so sound advice, very nice article. Now let’s talk about a reputation crisis — a PR crisis, but a reputation one. And this is something quite extraordinary that I want to share here. Sometimes a single incident cuts through the noise and forces a conversation that the industry probably would have been having for a while. Recently, a week or so back, that incident involved a UK discount voucher website called Wowcher, a three-year-old boy, and a crocodile enclosure in a zoo. Let me give you the background, because if you’re not based in the UK, you may not have followed this disturbing story, although I have seen it talked about in media around the world, actually.
Shel Holtz: I read this on CNN and The New York Times, so this has made the rounds.
Neville Hobson: Right, yeah. So on Thursday, the 18th of June, so not long ago, a toddler three years old was pushed by a stranger into an enclosure containing Nile and saltwater crocodiles at a zoo in Huntingdonshire in England. The child suffered serious injuries and was taken to hospital in Cambridge, where he remains in a critical but stable condition. It’s a deeply distressing story. A family’s worst nightmare played out in public, and a news event that dominated the UK media cycle for days. It gets worse, Shel. It really gets worse. Two days later, on the Saturday, just two days on, Wowcher sent a marketing email to its customer distribution list — so we’re probably looking at tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people on that list. The subject line of the email read: “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid!” Exclamation mark. Well, as you can imagine, the reaction was immediate, universal, and unsparing. Marketing professionals, commentators, and members of the public condemned it without reservation. There was no debate about —
Shel Holtz: Russell Brand thought it was hysterical.
Neville Hobson: We don’t talk about Russell Brand, sorry. There was no debate about whether it was misjudged. There was no defense offered from any quarter. Just about all mainstream media in the UK, including the dozens of regional press outlets, covered the story. It featured in the news podcasts and across social media. LinkedIn lit up. Email marketing specialist Beth O’Malley, whose post on the subject drew widespread engagement, described it as reflecting a wider problem: that the drive to get the open, to get the click, to make the metrics go up, has overtaken something more fundamental. As one commenter put it simply, whoever was involved in creating and sending that email forgot that there are real human beings on the receiving end. Wowcher issued an unreserved apology. They described the wording as unacceptable, said it should never have been written and was never approved for use, and committed to urgently reviewing and strengthening their creative approval and sign-off processes. Which, of course, raises the obvious question: if it was never approved, how did it reach what is presumably a very large mailing list? We don’t know the full answer to that yet. There has been speculation that AI may have been involved in generating the content, and that’s possible. But I want to be clear about something. Whether a human wrote those words, or an AI generated them and a human failed to catch them, the root cause is the same. It’s a failure of humanity. You hear this word “humanity” applied a lot, but it’s a real word, and it’s worth paying attention to. A failure of empathy. A failure to pause for even a moment and ask the most basic of questions: how would the family of that little boy feel if they opened their inbox and read this? That’s not an AI problem. That’s a people problem. And it sits at the heart of a broader crisis in email marketing culture, one where the relentless pressure to perform, to stand out, to optimize for attention, has gradually crowded out the human judgment that should be the last line of defense, if not the first. So here’s the question I have. In a world where content is created faster than ever, approved under pressure, and distributed at scale, who is actually responsible for ensuring that basic humanity remains in the loop? And what does it take for an organization to lose sight of that so utterly completely?
Shel Holtz: It’s unbelievable. Just staggering. I have no problem with newsjacking — this is the term that David Meerman Scott coined. He wrote a book about it. He had great examples of it. I even have a Claude Cowork skill set up that runs at 4 a.m. every Monday morning to scour the news for stories that I can leverage and write on their coattails. I haven’t found one yet that I’d actually want to use, but it’s giving me some interesting stuff, and I’m convinced that one of these days it will. I’m tweaking it every now and then based on the results I see. I am a fan of newsjacking, but for God’s sake, use your head before you go with one of these things. Was the wording clever? Yeah. It was also insensitive and inhuman and horrible. I don’t know what else to say about this. I will comment, though, on the apology. I love the fact that it was an unreserved apology. They were unequivocal in their condemnation of it. But I think they needed to end the apology by saying, “We will report on the steps that we are taking in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, and we will continue to report on what we learn about how this happened,” and then follow up on that. Just to leave it to say “we’re going to change our procedures” is woefully inadequate. I think people need to know that you’re actually taking the steps that you say you will. The trust gap is huge here. After you have done something like that, just to say, “We’re sorry, we’re fixing it,” is not enough.
Neville Hobson: Yet it looks like people are willing to accept that. So, I mean, this is a business that is hugely successful. They do really imaginative, creative TV advertising campaigns. And the play on the name Wowcher, you know, “voucher” with a “wow” — I mean, it’s smart, it’s very clever.
Shel Holtz: Sure. Well, it’s like Groupon — “group” and “coupon,” right?
Neville Hobson: Yeah, very clever. Yet — what bothers me, I think, is, are we as a society — you know, condemnation was universal, people expressed horror at what they did, all that, and the poor little boy was savaged by crocodiles — yeah, they’re still buying stuff from Wowcher. They’re still doing business with Wowcher.
Shel Holtz: No boycotts, huh?
Neville Hobson: I’m not suggesting, for instance, that they shouldn’t be doing all those things. But isn’t what happened so grotesque that you’d think it would stimulate people to be, “That’s it, I’m not doing anything more with this company”? And the campaigns online — I’ve not seen anything like that. So what does that tell us about our society, is my kind of rhetorical question, I expect. But I think the point that Beth O’Malley raises — that this reflects a culture in email marketing where anything that drives opens and clicks is tacitly approved — is worth looking at. Is this a Wowcher problem? Or is it symptomatic of how the entire performance-metrics model of email marketing has just normalized a race to the bottom in judgment and taste? What do you think?
Shel Holtz: I think you’re looking at two sides of this issue. The first is the creation side, where all of what Beth O’Malley talks about comes into play. And yeah, I think she’s right. I think the drive for clicks is overwhelming the application of judgment and common sense. The other side is the reaction, where people are horrified for 15 minutes and then they continue to use the product. They’re not boycotting. It’s not a revocation of their license to operate. So I think on the societal side of this, I wholly agree. I think we tolerate a lot more these days. We tolerate corruption in government a lot more these days. I mean, Vice President J.D. Vance was on some show — this happened while I was traveling, so I just read it in passing — but basically he said, if what Richard Nixon did that cost him his presidency happened today, it wouldn’t last in the news cycle for 15 minutes. And I’ve read news outlets say, you know, he’s probably right. It’s not that what he did wasn’t illegal and probably should have ended his presidency. It’s just that today people would have shrugged and gone, “Yeah, just business as usual. Those marketing guys, they’re terrible, but I love their product.” So yeah, I think the bar has been lowered considerably for what we’re willing to — I mean, outrage is everywhere, so I’m reluctant to say “outraged about” — but what we’re willing to act on, that bar has dropped precipitously, I think.
Neville Hobson: ‘Tis.
Shel Holtz: Yep. Let’s move on to our final report, which is really fascinating, because there are two studies that have reached entirely different conclusions. And I have to say, this casts any study that I look at into doubt when I see this. So let’s take a look at these, because they’re both studies that would be of interest to anybody engaged in internal comms. A Fresh Intranet Employee Attention Recession report, which came out in May, found that just 12% of employees read internal communications in full. That’s 12%. The other 88% are skimming, filtering, and ignoring it unless a manager flags it, or they’re handing it to an AI tool and reading the summary instead — at the same time that they’re saying, “I don’t like AI.” Now, here’s the part that makes that number really uncomfortable: 91% of those same employees say the communications feel relevant to them, always or most of the time. So this isn’t disengagement. These are people who want to engage, who say the content speaks to them, but the sheer volume has made reading the whole thing an unsustainable act. Mike Klein, writing this up for Strategic — a great magazine, if you’re not reading Strategic, you probably should — points to the cause. The single biggest factor in whether someone reads a message in full isn’t the subject, the sender, or the format. It’s the cumulative weight of how many other messages arrive before it. And the internal communications index backs this up. Most employees now have ten minutes or fewer per day for internal comms. The most common answer is five minutes, and that window’s been shrinking every year since 2023. Now, here’s the twist on this, and it’s why I wanted to pair these. A second study, from Corbett and Reworked, which Chuck Gose’s ICology was involved with, found almost the opposite. Half of workers say the volume of messages they get is about right, and yet 44% still tune out. Chuck Gose’s read on this is the scarier one. This isn’t overwhelm, it’s passive disengagement. And when employees stop noticing that they’re overwhelmed, your satisfaction scores start lying to you. 89% of workers are only moderately confident that they’re not missing something important. So, which is it? Too much volume, or something else? And I think the answer is both, and they’re not actually in conflict. Volume genuinely destroys attention, but cutting volume alone won’t fix a tune-out that’s really about relevance and trust. Because when you dig into what makes people actually pay attention, it’s specific. 57% engage when a message is timely or urgent. 56% when there’s a clear action required. What makes them tune out is repetition. And I think that’s important, because a lot of communicators operate under that formula that says you have to tell people something seven times before it sticks. They also tune out because of vagueness, and content that could have been sent to anyone. There’s a brilliant one-line test in the report: before you hit send, you should be able to finish the sentence, “After reading this, employees will ___.” If you can’t fill in that blank, the message isn’t ready. And the finding that crosses every one of these studies is about who’s talking. 73% of workers say the sender is the number one factor in whether they trust a message. “From the leadership team” doesn’t cut it. People trust people, not titles. Which leads straight to the manager gap. Across all of these reports, managers are the most trusted, most critical link in the chain, and the most under-supported. 87% of comms pros call manager capability their single biggest risk, and fewer than one in four organizations actually give managers a toolkit. And there’s one more thing I want us to really pay attention to: Mike Klein’s argument that we’re measuring the wrong thing entirely. 70% of comms teams are still tracking opens, clicks, and page views. Only 12% measure anything close to business impact. As Mike puts it, reach without understanding isn’t communication, it’s noise. So the question he leaves hanging, and I’ll leave it here with you, Neville, is whether the profession responds to all of this by refining its content or finally changing what it measures.
Neville Hobson: That last option — changing what it measures — is the one that interests me, because AMEC is a big proponent of, let me call it, proper measurement. Opens and clicks don’t cut it, the same way how many impressions something has got — eyeballs. It’s like, I don’t care how many eyeballs saw the content. I want to know what they did when they saw the content. Did they just move on? Did they click something? What did they do?
Shel Holtz: Yeah, outcomes-based.
Neville Hobson: So I think it’s most interesting. And reading about the other survey that you mentioned that was in the other publication you shared, ICology, that had some interesting findings in there too that struck me as worth attention. You mentioned one: direct managers are the missing link most organizations keep overlooking. Employees trust their manager more than anyone else — yeah, absolutely. But I found this one interesting, the shadow comms finding. That’ll resonate, if you listened to the story earlier, with anyone who’s worked in internal comms. They’ll recognize it immediately: when official channels fail, employees don’t stop getting information. They just go somewhere else — Slack DMs, WhatsApp groups, text messages, hallway conversations, all of those things. So that’s shadow comms. That’s a good way of describing it. Not approved channels. But it has ever been thus, hasn’t it, Shel, for goodness’ sake? It’s not new. The tools and the means have shifted over time, but this has always been the case. You’re going to find other ways of finding out what Harry down the hall thinks about something and share your thoughts with him. And now you’ll do it on WhatsApp. Before, you might mosey down to his cubicle and surreptitiously chat with him. Look, if you haven’t seen the show The Office —
Shel Holtz: About the —
Neville Hobson: — but it’s nothing new in all of this. And yet we still don’t seem to be addressing these things. I wonder why that could be. Could it be it requires some big changes to happen in how you act as a manager, how the leaders behave, and so forth, and indeed how regular employees themselves behave? That’s a leadership issue, it seems to me, first and foremost. So there’s plenty to digest in both these stories. Mike Klein’s piece is a good one, I agree with you. And I think “not measuring the wrong things” is excellent. And Richard Bagnall at AMEC would have some views on that, I’m sure. Are we measuring the wrong things? So plenty to take away from this show.
Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And the shadow communications has always been real, and more so now that there are digital tools that enable it. How many communicators have mapped their influence networks? If you know who people go to when they want to know about something, then you can reach out to them and say, “What are people asking about?” And you can figure out what communication has been missed. But if you don’t know who those people are, you can’t do that. So we’ve been talking about mapping employee influence networks. I know Katie Macaulay likes seven different networks. If you can only do three: who do people go to when they need to know how to do something? Who do people go to when they need to know if something is true? And who do people go to if they want a reaction to what they’ve heard? So, “How do I do this? What’s going on? And should I trust this?” Those are three separate influence networks, and people tend to go to different people for those things. But if you can do some research and find out who those people are, then you can get ahead of this game. But I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about using our intranet tool for a greater targeting of information to the audiences that care about it, and not sending it to the people who don’t, so that our communication is more relevant. And I have been thinking about our next internal comms survey. I’m going to rethink the questions around these issues, and then I’m going to think about a substantial change to our internal comms that may be phased in over a couple of years. But I absolutely see this applying to us. We have people out on project sites who are on ridiculous time schedules, and how much time they have to read a 2,000-word article is none. I don’t need to do the research to know that. So this needs a serious rethink.
Neville Hobson: What to do, indeed.
Shel Holtz: Yep. And that’ll wrap up this episode of For Immediate Release. We hope that you will comment on any or all of the stories that we have discussed today. Send email to fircomments@gmail.com, drop a recording in there and we’ll play it. It’s been forever since we’ve had an audio comment. We make it easy: if you go to the FIR Podcast Network website, you’ll see SpeakPipe voicemail on the right-hand side of the page, and all you have to do is record. You don’t need your own recording equipment for that. And then we’ll get it. You can leave comments on the post on this at firpodcastnetwork.com, or on LinkedIn, or on Facebook, or Threads, or Bluesky, where we share the release of each episode. We want to hear from you about these. And Vincent, we want to continue to hear from you. We enjoy your comments. We would love an audio comment from Vincent one of these days. And the next monthly episode will drop on Monday, July 27th. We’re planning to record that on Saturday, July 25th. But in between now and then, look for our short midweek episodes.
Neville Hobson: We have an interview coming up with Pete Blackshaw.
Shel Holtz: We do. Pete Blackshaw, who — I believe he was the first person we ever interviewed on FIR Interviews, wasn’t he?
Neville Hobson: No, he wasn’t the first, but he was in 2005 when we started. We’ve interviewed him three times, up to about 2009, and now we’ve got this long gap till now.
Shel Holtz: So looking forward to that. He’s talking about using artificial intelligence in order to figure out which product you want to buy, as opposed to other mechanisms, and why it’s better. I have lots of questions for him. We’re not going to get to them all. I’m sure you do too, but —
Neville Hobson: We do. Yeah, we’re interviewing Pete on Monday the 29th of June, and that interview should be published within a week or so of that.
Shel Holtz: Looking forward to that. And that will be a 30 for For Immediate Release.
The post FIR #520: AI’s PR Meltdown appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
