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  1. 9h ago

    OTSP #4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary?

    Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of “On the Same Page,” Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn’t, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences. Transcript: Steve Crescenzo Hey Shel. Shel Holtz Steve, how you doing? Steve Crescenzo Doing good, doing good. We’re doing this on a record I’m doing this on a Saturday, which is fun. well, I mean it’s it’s what else am I gonna do? It’s too early to drink, so what yeah, this is this is good time spent. but I’m really glad I’m excited about our topic. More importantly this this week. we decided to talk about values, corporate values. And I think there’s there’s two camps of people when it comes to values. There’s people that really believe they can drive the culture and affect how people feel at work and how they work and how they treat each other and Shel Holtz Yeah, is it? Steve Crescenzo All that good stuff. you know, and there are companies where that happens. I I’m not gonna say there’s none. Second camp is people who just think they’re completely worthless and they just are posters on a wall and nobody pays attention to them, nobody can name what they are. And I’m in the third camp. I think they do some damage at some a lot of companies for two reasons. Number one, they’re they’re too generic. You look at it, I could pull up any and it’s it’s integrity, respect, excellence, agility. Teamwork, putting people for you it’s all the same crap. So it’s so generic that everyone just agrees with them, and of course who’s not gonna agree with that? the second thing though is that if you don’t live your values, if it’s I I go into so many corporate communications departments at companies where one of the values is innovation, and their intranet looks like it’s from nineteen ninety five. they’re not innovative. they’re in a you know, so agility, no no. Transparency, absolutely not. Not so you gotta poster on a wall with this list of stupid words, and everybody sees what’s in front of them and says, That’s not us. That’s not us. So I think they actually might do more harm than good. Shel Holtz Well l let me read you some corporate values. these are from one company, these are their values integrity, respect, excellence, and teamwork. Steve Crescenzo For the swords I said. Who’s it? Shel Holtz Yeah. Yeah. You see anything wrong with those, other than the fact that they’re generic? Steve Crescenzo I I think that’s great. I’m glad they operate that way. That’s great. you making Shel Holtz Yeah, well that’s Enron. Yeah, it is. Liv they were literally Enron’s values. excellence and teamwork. Steve Crescenzo teamwork. That’s classic. Yeah, that’s that’s my experience too. I I’m I’m with that I’m with I’m with that example. Shel Holtz Well, we will talk about that. We will talk about your other issues too, because I think they’re spot on. But I do believe that when it’s done well and done right, they can really rock an organization. Steve Crescenzo Not gonna disagree with that, but let’s talk about it. Shel Holtz So before we jump into the values discussion, I did want to share one comment we got over on LinkedIn where I shared the last episode where we talked about employee voice. This is from Vincent Bruneau, who is commenting pretty regularly on our show and also on my other podcast for immediate release. and he’s always got he’s he’s he’s got great stuff. I I I want to know more about him. but he says in terms of employee voice, the most effective employee listening strategies don’t start with asking more questions. They start with demonstrating that previous feedback led to meaningful change. When people can see the connection between their input and organizational decisions, participation becomes much easier to sustain. Yeah. Steve Crescenzo Absolutely. That’s why that’s the point you made, is that we don’t have a survey fatigue. We have a nothing happens when we take a survey fatigue. Shel Holtz Yeah, the way I heard it at a conference was it’s it’s not survey fatigue, it’s b******t fatigue. yak because if we if we survey you and then don’t tell you what the survey results were or how things are changing as a result of that, that’s b******t. Steve Crescenzo Yeah, you know, Cindy does probably, you know, she’s she’s our measurement arm of Crescent Communications. She does, you know, fifty surveys a year. And her first question is, Why are you asking that question if you don’t if you if you it’s ac if you don’t have the power to change something? And they do it. They load the survey up with a j a wish list of things and they can’t change any of it. And they still ask and nothing happens and then they do it again the next year. Shel Holtz And nobody wants to take that survey. Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s jump into values. And I think a good place to start is what are corporate values supposed to be? And the way I see it, the way I’ve always heard that values are supposed to be presented to employees, is these are the underlying beliefs that drive decisions and behavior in the company. These are the things that we believe. And how do you get to that? I I I think, you know, first of all. Steve Crescenzo Right, exactly. Shel Holtz It has to be shared between the leaders and the employees. Nothing is going to turn employees off more than leadership coming to them and saying, hey, everybody, these are our values. And employees look at it and say, well, first of all, I don’t see those values reflected in decisions or behaviors. And second of all, they’re not my values. I worked for an organization once and I left them in 1993. They have changed owners a couple of times. I don’t think anybody is there. Who was there when I was there? So I’m going to go ahead and name them. It was Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. where yeah, they came up with the values and and I wasn’t involved. I was director of communications, but this was like the executive committee. And they came to me and said, we’ve decided these are the corporate values, go communicate these. And I looked at them and I I said, do we have employee buy-in on these? And they almost literally said, Employee buy-in, hey, this is my way or the highway. If they don’t like these, they can go work somewhere else. Steve Crescenzo I remember that. Yeah. my God. Shell, so we’ve done this kind of work with five or six companies over the years, mission, vision, and values. And you know, our we they they hired us to help them write these statements in these words. And our thing was we always said, we’re not gonna do it unless we can talk to employees first. We’re gonna do focus groups. So this company sent us to London, Paris, Singapore. We did focus groups globally to get to the mission, vision values, what people really believed, what was in their core, what brought them to work every day. You know, we did. Cindy led the focus groups and she’s good at that, and we got such great stuff. Then it came time to present it to the C suite. This was a big company. And here’s why everything ends up sucking so bad. It’s all written by committee. Like we we gave them three great examples pulled from their own employees that were unique. You couldn’t pull them out and give them to any other company. They were, they were good. And by the time we walked out of that half day session, they had been watered down. Because yeah, you had eight eight guys in there, eight guys and two women, and they all had their own ideas and they all just wanted to be safe. Well, safe. Yeah, they all always default to safety. Like, let’s just be safe. That’s why you get integrity. Who’s gonna argue with integrity? Transparency, who’s gonna argue with that? Well, by the time I d I don’t even know what they ended up with, but I know that they watered it way down from what we gave them. And our communications people loved it. Our clients loved us. We worked with them again and again and again. But when you’re up against that C suite in that that lemming like thing like to not take a chance to just be safe and you know and they wanna be kinda corporate and we gotta be serious and that’s where it all falls apart. It’s writing by committee. You wanna have values. I mean it just it’s really hard. Shel Holtz Yeah, and another place this falls apart is what you mentioned at the outset, which is that the behaviors don’t match the values. I’ll tell you, I was doing a focus group with employees of a technology company. It was in their Los Angeles office. They’re headquartered up here in Silicon Valley, but this was in their LA office. And their values were printed on the back of the security badge that they all wore on lanyards around their necks. And I said, What do you think about those? And they laughed. I literally laughed out loud. And I said, Okay, tell me about that. And one of them turned his badge around and he read off the values. He says, You see all of these? There was a guy who was just promoted to executive vice president and he violated every single one of these. He he he got the car and the stock options and the huge bonus potential. And he violated every one of these, but he blew his numbers away. So Steve Crescenzo Ha ha. Shel Holtz Every employee in this company knows that we can do what these things say or we can do what gets us ahead based on what we see actually happen in the organization. And that’s where values become a source of incredible cynicism and derision. Steve Crescenzo Yeah, yeah, I I I can I I can tell three or four different clients that we’ve had. One of the one of the values was transparency. no, I’m sorry, one of the values was innovation. I have a transparency story too. was innovation and ri risk taking. You know, that w

    30 min

  2. 5d ago

    FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You?

    We have known about 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. While the research was focused on political issues, the underlying cause applies equally to misinformation about brands, companies, and business issues. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel find that the PR industry has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon, which requires strategies to address it. Links from this episode: Think the Media’s Biased Against You? You Probably Think Misinformation Is, Too The Hostile Media Effect The Influence of Hostile Media Perceptions on Misinformation Beliefs and Sharing Hostile Media Effects on Twitter, Social Identity, and Media Bias Perceptions Fake News Has Real Effects on Consumer Demand The Impact of Fake News on Consumer Behavior and Market Outcomes Political Identity, Media Trust, and Susceptibility to Misinformation The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 29. 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 Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 519. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. When you think about all the misinformation out there—fake news, bad-faith spin—do you think it’s mostly aimed at your side of an argument or the other side? Most of us, if we’re honest, feel like it’s aimed at us. And there’s now research saying that feeling is nearly universal. Even though the research was based on political discourse, it has a direct connection to organizational communication. We’ll explain right after this. All right, let’s start by backing up for a second. There’s a concept called the hostile media effect. It’s been around since the 1980s. The original study showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students the exact same news coverage of the exact same event. Both groups walked away convinced it was biased against their side. Everyone saw exactly the same footage, but they reached opposite conclusions. And the more committed you were, the more certain you were that the media was out to get you. That finding has held up for 40 years, and it’s a big reason trust in news has collapsed as politics has gotten more tribal. Now let’s add the new wrinkle. A team at the University of Amsterdam asked whether that same instinct applies to misinformation—to fake news. They surveyed 4,000 people across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European elections. Nearly half said their preferred party was particularly targeted by misinformation. Ask about the party they liked least, and that number got cut in half. They’re calling it the hostile misinformation effect, and it got stronger the more politically engaged people were. The more plugged in people felt, the more victimized they felt. Now, Neville, you might think that’s a political science finding. But the mechanism underneath isn’t about politics; it’s about identity and motivated reasoning. Every brand, every company, every department is an identity group. Your most loyal customers are partisans. Your most engaged employees are partisans. The research says the people most attached to your organization are exactly the ones primed to believe any criticism out there is unfairly targeting them. Now think about a crisis. Your defenders don’t need convincing that your critics are unfair. They already assume it. The minds still open are the uncommitted people in the middle. Among neutrals, knowing more made them see less bias. It’s only partisans who dig in. So if someone criticizes a brand that some people love, the brand’s biggest fans may see that as an attack rather than just an honest review—and respond in kind. There was no crisis, but now maybe there is. There’s an internal angle here, too. Picture a layoff memo or a return-to-office announcement. Leadership reads it as fair. But every faction inside the company—by department, by level, by tenure—is wired to read the same message as unfair to them. “We said it neutrally” is no defense because neutrality is in the eye of the beholder. This notion reveals a trap for communicators. When bad coverage hits, it’s tempting to wave it away as misinformation. But “fake news” self-destructed as a term the moment it got weaponized to mean “any story I don’t like.” Cry misinformation every time you’re criticized, and you train your audience to tune out the label. You also look evasive to the exact neutrals you need to reach. So this is where I want to bring you in, Neville. We’ve spent years on this show talking about declining trust and the misinformation environment. This research says the problem isn’t just that there’s more bad information out there; it’s that people are wired to feel personally besieged by it. And I’m not sure our profession has reckoned with what that means. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it, Shel. I don’t think so. It’s actually quite fascinating looking at the Nieman Lab article you shared with me in our Slack channel and seeing the depth of the research on a topic that I had no idea was even a thing to look into. I found it interesting in a number of areas. For instance, the study you quoted from the 2024 European Parliament elections got me thinking. The tendency to see misinformation as directed at you seems more pronounced the farther right politically someone is. That caught my attention because isn’t that precisely what we’re seeing in the United States with the Trump MAGA movement? Here in the UK, we’ve got Reform and an even newer party that’s emerged further to the right. Those groups often function as an echo chamber for the kinds of messages Trump promotes. They’re constantly criticizing anything anyone else says as an attack and talking about issues in ways that rile people up and stimulate hostile reactions in return. We see a lot of that in this country right now. It’s interesting that this study has been done, and I think the way you’re connecting it to organizational communication is a good call. It certainly gives us a lot to think about. One question it prompted in my mind concerns the point about engagement and partisanship. If the more engaged and partisan someone is, the stronger this effect becomes, does that mean an organization’s most loyal stakeholders are actually its most vulnerable to this kind of perception? What do you think? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. I think that’s exactly the connection we can draw between this study and organizational communication. If somebody criticizes the company based on an experience they had—and let’s say that criticism goes viral—and it was sincere and well-intentioned, then the partisan defenders of that organization are going to feel attacked. They’re likely to respond in kind and escalate a situation that probably would have faded into the background if left alone. I think that’s one of the fallouts organizations can experience from this phenomenon. The more partisan you are, the more besieged you’re going to feel when you perceive something being said about the brand or organization as unfair—even if it was perfectly fair. Neville Hobson: So how do you address that within the organization? Shel Holtz: That’s an interesting question, and it’s hard to fight because you really can’t argue people out of it. One related concept is the third-person effect—the idea that other people are more susceptible to media influence than we are ourselves. In other words: I can see what the media is trying to do, but other people are going to be fooled by it. When you stack that together with the idea that your group is being unfairly targeted, you get a complete worldview: I’m clear-eyed, my group is the victim, and everyone else is gullible. There was a fascinating study where researchers took 661 Coca-Cola drinkers and showed them a real fake-news story—a 2016 hoax claiming that Dasani water was being recalled because parasites had been found in it. The finding was that the people most confident in their own ability to spot fake news were the most convinced that other people would be fooled by it. They were also the ones most loudly demanding that Coca-Cola take corrective action. Sometimes the stakeholders who are screaming “Do something about misinformation!” aren’t reacting to the actual threat. They’re reacting to a belief that other, less discerning people are being duped. That makes the challenge even more complicated for communicators. Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? The next question that comes to mind is this: If both sides feel targeted regardless of what’s actually out there, what should communicators do? Is there an approach that works when perception is this detached from reality? Shel Holtz: From an organizational standpoint—and I’m less interested in the political implications for purposes of this podcast—I think there are a couple of things. First, the more prebunking you can do, the better. When one of these situations comes up—a bad review, criticism from the media, negative reporting—you can immediately point people to information you’ve already published that addresses the issue. Having a bank of credible material you can

    18 min

  3. 5d ago

    ALP 310: In the age of AI, people skills matter more than ever

    You’re using AI to handle more of the work that your team used to do. That’s exactly why the human side of the business has become a competitive advantage. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that as AI slop floods everyone’s inbox and feeds, the bar for genuine human interaction has dropped so low that clearing it will make you stand out. Demonstrating real experience and expertise in conversation — not just in content — is where agencies will win. That starts with having actual conversations. Chip argues that meetings have become more valuable, not less, because you can’t fake a real-time interaction the way you can a written deliverable. And Gini adds that it extends to one-on-one meetings with your team, which can be used to get the specific decisions needed from you. Written content is increasingly hard to trust, and Chip admits even he can’t reliably tell his own writing from AI output. Video helps close that gap for now. So does the handwritten note, which Chip still sends to podcast guests when he can track down an address. He jokes that the illegibility is proof of authenticity. In person beats everything. Chip pushes agency owners to budget for it deliberately, with clients, prospects, and remote team members alike. Gini mentions the Augusta Rule as one way to offset some of those costs, though both are quick to say talk to your accountant before you try to benefit from it. [read the transcript] The post ALP 310: In the age of AI, people skills matter more than ever appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    17 min

  4. Jun 15

    FIR #518: Is the PR Industry Blowing It Again?

    The history of public relations over the last 30 years is a litany of one failure after another — failures to recognize and embrace technologies that represented seismic shifts in how people and organizations communicate. The internet. The web. Social media. Smartphones. The video shift. And now, with AI, the industry seems poised to do it again. As many organizations explore how AI will reshape them, PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate. In this short midweek episode, Neville looks at a post from Stephen Waddington that laments the industry’s intransigence, and Shel and Neville discuss what PR should be doing. Links from this episode: The future of jobs in PR: will we get the third technology shift wrong too? (by Stephen Waddington) It looks like PR has its head in the sand about AI (by Neville Hobson) Senior practitioner neglect of digital/social skills a huge threat to PR’s future (2015 post by Shel Holtz) Once Again, This Time with AI, the Communications Profession Will Be Late to Embrace a Valuable Technology (2023 post by Shel Holtz) The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 five hundred and eighteen of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. So here’s a question I want to put to you right at the start, and I’d like you to sit with it as Shel and I work through this topic today. Public relations as a profession has faced two seismic technology shifts in the last 30 years. In fact, more than two, but I’m just going to mention these two. The internet arrived in 1995. Social media arrived around 2007. And in both cases, PR largely got it wrong. Not wrong in the sense of ignoring the technology. Wrong in the sense of fundamentally misreading what it meant. In 1995, we thought the internet was a publishing problem. In 2007, we thought social media was just another broadcast channel. And the disciplines that grew out of both—search, content marketing, influencer marketing—were largely built by people who weren’t us, people outside the profession who saw what we missed. So the question is: are we about to do it a third time? We’ll address that question in just a minute. That’s the challenge Stephen Waddington lays down in a piece he’s just written for Influence, the member magazine of the CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Stephen is someone whose thinking I respect considerably. He’s been one of the sharper and more honest voices in UK PR for years. And this article comes off the back of a book he’s just co-edited, AI and Public Relations: A How-To Guide for Implementation and Management, published in May. And what he’s arguing in this piece is that this is no longer a theoretical debate, as job reductions are happening now. He gives specific examples. Three account executives doing media monitoring—that’s now one tool. A two-person intranet team—that’s now a fraction of the effort. The UK government has listed public relations professionals among the twenty occupations most exposed to large language models. We’re on the list. Early career employment in those sectors is also in relative decline. Now, Waddington is not a pure pessimist. He sees a plausible optimistic path. The career pyramid becomes a diamond. Firms building roles around insight and risk management rather than billable hours. A rough near-term reduction of perhaps fifteen to twenty percent in entry-level positions, followed by net growth as scope expands and new roles emerge, the way digital did after 2000. He thinks in-house teams especially have an opportunity here. When AI absorbs the routine, it frees space for the work that corporate communication teams have always needed but rarely had capacity for. But he gives serious, genuine weight to the pessimistic case too. And this is where I think the article gets interesting. He references Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots in 2015, and Ford’s argument that previous technology waves hit one tier of the workforce and the tier above absorbed the displaced. This time Ford says there’s no tier above. The advisory work that absorbed previous shifts is itself the target. Waddington doesn’t fully accept that in his article, but he doesn’t dismiss it either. And then there’s the argument that I think should be keeping every agency head and comms director awake at night—the pipeline. He’s hearing a common response from firms right now: freeze your apprenticeship schemes, freeze your graduate intake, let AI cover the production work. And he calls that, bluntly, organizational self-harm. Because in five years, those organizations will have nobody who understands how the systems actually work, why they fail, and crucially when to override them. You cannot run an advisory profession without a pipeline. And you cannot build a pipeline if you spent five years dismantling the entry points. So that’s where I think we should start today’s conversation. Not with the technology, with the choices. Because Waddington’s closing argument, and it’s what I find compelling, is that human agency still exists here. The technology isn’t making decisions. We are. The question is whether we’re making them wisely, or whether for the third time in thirty years, we’re about to hand the future of our profession to people who aren’t us. Shel, what’s your instinct on this? Shel Holtz: Very much what yours and Stephen’s is. I have been saying for decades that the public relations industry is always, always, always late to the game when there is a new technology that is going to shape the way communicators do their jobs. We were late to the internet, for sure. We were late to the World Wide Web. My first book on communicating online—well, actually, my first book was on intranets, but the first one that got any attention was Public Relations on the Net—came out before the World Wide Web, before there was a graphical user interface. So there were plenty of opportunities for PR before the web, based on the capabilities of the internet. Then we missed the web, then we missed social media. In between we missed some other seismic shifts—mobile, being able to communicate with people based on the fact that they now had this computer in their pocket. We missed the pivot to visual communication, we missed the pivot to video communication. And now, yeah, we are poised to miss the pivot to AI. And that’s not to suggest that PR people aren’t using it. I think they are, but I think they’re using it at a very superficial level and are succumbing to a lot of the hype out there about things like job loss and “get rid of your entry-level people.” That’s all mundane drudge work that the partners and senior people don’t want to do—the account execs—so hand that all off to the AI and you don’t need to pay those people anymore. And you’re exactly right. I was listening to a podcast over the weekend where they were talking about the same issue, but they were talking about it in the context of law firms. And they were making the point that the associates that are brought in out of law school do the drudge work that the partners don’t want to do. They write contracts, right? They do things like that. And now that the AI can do that, who needs them? Well, the question becomes: where do the future partners come from when the ones who are already at the partner level retire? There’ll be nobody to take those jobs. We are not rethinking the industry, and we’re not rethinking it from two perspectives. One of those perspectives is the agency. The other perspective is the in-house side of communications. They’re two sides of the same coin. But I think we need to split them apart and look at them in terms of how we need to reinvent the profession. You and I have talked about reinventing how we bill, how we price, because the hourly model makes no sense anymore. But what does an entry-level person do if the AI can handle a lot of that drudge work? And it can. I mean, we’ve talked about on this show that I’ve set up a Hermes instance and it is out there. In fact, I haven’t checked my Telegram account yet, but there should be 10 links to recent news stories that are prime for me to news-check because I set up an agent to do that. I have an agent set up, a skill set up, that I can deploy anytime I want to. It is set up to analyze the websites of twenty-two of our competitors. And all I have to do is tell it what I want it to analyze. Do I want it to look at how they handle their project portfolios? Do I want it to look at how they handle their thought leadership? I can ask it any of those questions and it’ll come back and give me a very nice report. I could absolutely set it up to do media monitoring. I’m starting to question the need for my media monitoring service at work, although the agent that I have set up to do some of this certainly can’t get behind the paywall the way that the media monitoring service can, because they pay the licensing fee for all of those. So if the AI can assume all of this work, it’s not a question of saying we don’t need entry-level people. It’s a question of reimagining what entry

    23 min

  5. Jun 15

    ALP 309: Is your agency easy to work with?

    Most agency owners think their clients have it easy. But the gap between how you believe your agency operates and how clients and prospects actually experience it is often wider than you’d expect, and it’s usually the small, everyday frictions that do the most damage. In this episode, Chip and Gini ask if you were on the receiving end of your own agency’s processes, would you be happy? The answer, for a lot of agencies, is probably not. Their point isn’t that agencies should cave to every demand, but if you market yourself as a partner, act like one. The friction can start before someone even becomes a client. Contact forms loaded with qualifying questions scare people away. And back-and-forth emails to find a meeting time have no excuse in 2026. Use a scheduling tool, have a link ready, and make it especially easy for prospects. Once someone is ready to talk, the goal is to respond fast and remove every obstacle. When it comes to the handoff from prospect to client, agencies should have a standard proposal template so they can turn paperwork around in 24 hours, not days. Make invoicing and payments as easy on the client as you would want it to be if you were in their shoes. And when it comes to project management tools, if the client already has one they’re using, just use it. The tool matters less than having one. [read the transcript] The post ALP 309: Is your agency easy to work with? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    18 min

  6. Jun 12

    If It's Not Two-Way, It's Not Communication

    Are employees suffering from survey fatigue? The question is asked often, frequently because someone high up in the organization doesn’t want to hear what employees think. But if employees see change as a result of someone taking their feedback to heart, you can survey them all day long. If you’re sending emails, publishing articles, and posting videos, but not asking employees for their perspectives, you’re not communicating. You’re just messaging. In this episode of On The Same Page, Steve and Shel discuss how to ensure employees’ voices are heard in meaningful ways to drive engagement and business success — and to avoid crises, since employees’ voices can serve as the organization’s smoke alarm. Links from this episode: Return to Office 2025: The Corporate Mandate Wave Reshaping American Workplaces How CEO Satya Nadella Reset Culture at Microsoft Strategy Studio Transcript: Steve Crescenzo: Hey Shel, how are you? Shel Holtz: I’m great, Steve. How’s everything with you? Steve: Awesome. Friday, sunny. Got the boat this weekend. We’re heading out on the boat, so everything is good. We’re about an hour away from happy hour. Shel: Anything to keep your mind off what’s going on with the Cubs, huh? Steve: All right, enough is enough. Dodgers fan. Nothing’s worse than Dodgers fans with all your money. anyway, but you know, before we start, I know we’re gonna talk about the employee voice today and the importance of giving employees a voice. And before we start, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this, I’ve read what you’ve written about this, and I know in your communication model, which I really respect, you’ve got it as one of the four drivers of employee engagement, along with strategic narrative, engaging managers, which we talked about on our first podcast, employee voice and integrity. And I don’t argue with any of that. I agree with ninety five percent of everything you’ve ever written about this or said about this. Employee voice matters, I get that. Employees should be you know, communication should be a conversation, not a broadcast. Employees should be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem. You know, all of that I get. No argument for me. But do you think maybe employees are getting tired of being asked about shit? And here’s why I ask. I mean, think about it. Surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay interviews, focus groups, listening tours, town halls. The average employee’s been asked for their opinion so many times they’re ready to send the company an invoice. I mean, these employees have completed enough surveys to qualify for a minor in organizational psychology. And after all that voicing and talking, employees will still say in every company we work for, nobody listens. Which makes me wonder if we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe companies don’t have a problem with employee voice. Maybe they have a leadership listening problem. I think most companies, I think, have plenty of ways for employees to speak up. It’s not whether they have a microphone; it’s that nobody on the other end is paying attention. So employees end up feeling like, you know, they’re yelling into a well. Which is why most face to face town halls when there’s Q&A time, nobody says anything. So the question is: Is it about giving employees a voice, or is it more about coaching leaders to listen? And that’s what I’d like to talk about. Shel: Yeah, I would frame that just a little differently. I agree with you a hundred percent. The way I usually talk about this is saying that you know, we constantly hear about survey fatigue. Employees have survey fatigue. And my answer to that is there’s no such thing as survey fatigue. What there is is b******t fatigue. And that’s being asked for your opinion and then finding that nothing is being done with it once you share it. I once had a senior VP of HR, I reported to him. This was on the client side many years ago. And I wanted to do an environmental survey, find out what employees thought about the environment in which they worked. And he said no. And I said, But Rick, you wrote a book about employee surveys. Why don’t you want to do one? He says, Well, if you read my book, you’ll find that the only time you should do a survey is when the leadership has an appetite to make changes based on what they hear. And the leadership here has no appetite to make changes based on what employees say. So there’s no point in doing a survey. And I think that other companies should take that to heart. Steve: Ha ha. Bingo. You’re exactly right. Once again, I can’t disagree with you, Shel. I think the reason there is survey fatigue I think there is survey fatigue, but it’s not because they hate filling out surveys, it’s because nothing ever happens. Why waste your time? Shel: Right. I think employees will fill out surveys all day long if every time they do they hear about what’s changing as a result of that. Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Shel: Sure Steve: So before we dive back into that, and I can’t wait for that conversation, I got a nice comment from a Carrie Knight on Substack, believe it or not. She put it on my Substack, which I didn’t even post this podcast on my Substack, but I’m going start doing that. It’s about episode two when we talked about this mythical knights of the round table, get-a-seat-at-the-table. And she said, Currently midway through listening to On the Same Page, second episode: There is no table. And she quotes us and says, There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. She said, Brilliant. I’ve been on the side of earning a seat at the table, but this conversation is shifting my perspective from what I thought that meant to what I actually believe in real time. Then she quotes us again and says, We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And how do you get those? You earn it. And she says, Carrie says, I don’t disagree with this at all. Perhaps it’s this concept of a table that’s broken. Leaders show up at every level of a business, which I love that line. Leaders show up at every level of a business. That’s brilliant, Carrie. In my honest opinion, leading from within is the biggest flex over having a seat or job title that demands leadership. And then she quotes us again and says, You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel. She said such an insightful episode that expands into the disconnect between leaders and employees’ cons and channel choices. And she closes it with another one of our quotes Leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. Fabulous episode. Thanks, Steve Crescenzo and Shel Holtz. Keep coming. And we sure will, Carrie. Thanks for the comment. love to hear feedback from our listeners. Shel: Absolutely, Carrie. Thanks for listening. We had a number of comments come in through LinkedIn as well.  one of them from Vincent Bruneau saying the seat at the table conversation has always been a proxy for the real question are you actually shaping decisions or just being informed of them afterwards? Consequential is the better word, and it’s available to more than one person at a time. referencing that notion that only one communicator in a company can have that seat at the table,  regardless of how many. Communicators work there. Louise Thompson said, Hmm, not sure I’m with you guys. Moaning about it? Agree, that needs to stop. We know what we need to do and how, but as someone who has been in the room and out of it, there is no doubt that being an active participant around that table, and yes, it does exist, is going to lead to better outcomes for the organization. And yeah. Steve: Right. I think that I don’t think we should read any comments that disagree with us. Shel: That’s not a good idea, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s true. We’re gonna listen. Communication is a two-way activity. And yeah, I understand what Louise is saying, but again, you know, there are organizations with hundreds of communicators, there are organizations with dozens, there are organizations like mine with a handful. But if there is a communicator at that table, it’s only one. Steve: That’s what most companies do. That’s what today’s all about. Employee voice. Our employee We are gonna listen. Shel: So for every communicator to say, I want that seat at the table, that doesn’t fly. But any communicator can start to wield influence and have consequence. So I think that was our point. Janet Hitchen said, Halle-flippin’-lujah. That was her comment. Love that. Kathleen, yeah, Kathleen Bell said, Ha, so 1990, totally agree. And then Jared Brough, you know Jared, in New Orleans. Steve: Love in Jared Brodkin. Shel: Yeah, he said, I remember that discussion. My response is if you wait for an invitation it never comes. You get your seat by walking in the room and taking it. Steve: I think he sa I think I actually had drinks with him in Orleans and he said, No, you don’t you know you know you kick down the doors, I think is what he said to me, which I was I always remember that. Shel: Yeah. But you have to have built that influence and have developed that consequence or they’re just gonna throw you out of the room or have you escorted out of the room and away from the table. Steve: Exactly. Or you’ll be or you’ll be a token. You’ll they’ll they’ll give you a seat, but you won’t have any influ I mean having a seat doesn’t give you influence. Influence being respected as a counselor gives you influence. You could have a seat at the table. I have a seat at my dinner table and I it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t no nobody listens to me. You can have a seat, but it doesn’t mean they’re gonna listen to you. Shel: Well, you have mostly cats

    36 min

  7. Jun 9

    FIR #517: How to Communicate AI Whiplash to Employees

    First, they were told to use AI. Experiment! Add it to your workflows! Go wild! Then the bills started piling up, and companies realized the cost was not tenable. Now the walk-backs are happening. Usage caps! Caution! Slow down! Among the issues communicators need to address is employees questioning leadership’s judgment. In this short midweek episode, Shel and Neville explore approaches communicators can take to help employees understand the pivot while maintaining the perception of leader competence. Links from this episode: AI can cost more than human workers now Microsoft reports are exposing AI’s real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees When AI Costs More Than the Worker It Replaced AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds AI layoffs may be backfiring on companies Uber, Microsoft, and Others Burning Through AI Budgets. Now What? Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it Uber Burns Its 2026 AI Budget In Four Months On Claude Code Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token spender uses 100 billion tokens a month — and they’re not even the world leader OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits AI token costs are becoming ‘a huge issue’ — company seeks improved value as overspending becomes a meme Token Billing Exposes AI’s Missing ROI And Puts Billion-Dollar Bets At Risk AI savings misses should make executives uncomfortable AI saves workers a day a week, but they don’t know what to do with it The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 517. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz. In some companies right now, that AI that was supposed to replace expensive humans is costing more than the humans it replaced. The numbers are kind of breathtaking. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. In fact, I just heard today that they’re introducing a monthly AI spending cap of $1,500 per employee. One unnamed company, a real one though, spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month because nobody had bothered to set a spending limit. An NVIDIA executive flat out admitted that for his team, compute now costs more than the engineers using it. A lot of these companies didn’t just overspend, they made decisions on the strength of what they thought AI could do. And in plenty of cases, those decisions cost people their jobs. The pitch was that AI can do this work for a fraction of the cost. Then Bain and Company studied a thousand companies and finds that most aren’t getting those savings. Gartner found the layoffs delivered no better returns than not laying anyone off at all. In its study, Bain looked at the books and saw money leaking out of the top, companies spending the budget without the savings showing up. And Boston Consulting Group went and asked employees and found that the leak runs from the bottom too. Over 40% of regular AI users say they’re saving a full workday every week. But Boston Consulting Group’s point is that saved time doesn’t automatically become value. If nobody tells an employee where to redirect those reclaimed hours, that value just evaporates. So two consultancies looking at two completely different ends of the organization landed on the same diagnosis. This is a management failure. It’s not a technology failure. So put yourself in the shoes of employees who are still there. They watched colleagues walked out the door because they were told the machine could do it cheaper. And now they’re watching leadership start to walk it back. In most cases, walk it back really quietly. What does that do to employees who see their leaders’ judgment, their competence? Because that is where this becomes a communication story. It’s about trust, credibility, and what we as communicators are supposed to do when leaders make a big public painful bet that doesn’t pay off. We’ll share our thoughts about that right after this. Now there’s a lot we can talk about with this story, like communicating a suddenly altered governance model. But let’s start here. The bet companies made was about people, that AI could replace human labor at a fraction of the cost. When that turns out to be wrong, employees don’t just see a line item on a P&L. They see leaders who either didn’t understand the technology they bet the company on, or who used the AI story as cover for cuts they were going to make anyway, what we’ve come to call AI washing. Both of these readings are poison. The second one travels fastest. A communicator’s first job is to make sure that the accurate story is the one that gets out there. And to add a little context to that idea, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just recently said that this cost discussion is new. It started early this year. Before that, nobody was talking about it. And that’s probably because before early this year, most employees were prompting AI chatbots, and that didn’t blow up budgets. What changed early this year? Agents. Now employees have agents running complex tasks in an endless loop, and that burns tokens like nobody’s business. I heard about one employee who burned through a billion tokens in a month. That means costs are exploding. It’s not something anybody really anticipated, and a lot of CEOs were caught unaware. You know, they paid for the subscription cost to say Anthropic, now they’re paying the subscription, but they’re also paying for tokens. So Neville, if you were leading a comms department in a company that laid off a bunch of people because AI could do their jobs, and now it’s either costing more for the AI to do those jobs, or the AI isn’t doing it as well as the people did, how do you communicate that without making leadership look like fools? Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s a good question, isn’t it, Shel? I mean, you’ve painted a picture that’s pretty dire, it seems to me. And I like to think that this is a kind of outlier territory we’re in. This is not the mainstream. But I’m willing to be proven wrong. You know, I don’t recognize this in the UK, so it could not yet be a big deal over here. But I’m thinking you mentioned that the original AI narrative, if I can describe it that way, was sold to people as we’re replacing you with robots or we’re replacing you with tech. I wonder, is that the case everywhere? Because I would have thought it was, many would have sold it as additive. It’s AI plus you, not AI instead of you. And that’s a wholly different kind of message if that were the case. Either way, they’re walking it back. And I think there’s a handful of things the communication leader should do. And that person would also be the counselor and the advisor to the leadership of the organization. So I think one of the first things, if not the first thing, is that you mustn’t let the leadership hide behind euphemisms. You know, restructuring, right sizing, optimizing for the future, that kind of stuff. Employees see through all of that, particularly in this example. And it makes things even worse, I think. The communicator’s job is to push for plain language, even when that’s uncomfortable. So that’s one thing. The second, and again, this may well be the first. I’m just putting these out there as bullet points effectively without saying which is the most significant. Acknowledge the whiplash directly. Acknowledge it. Don’t pretend that the earlier message just didn’t happen. All those lovely messages about this rosy future’s coming when we’re introducing AI. You could say, we told you AI would be a productivity multiplier for everyone. We believe that. The reality has turned out differently, and you deserve an honest explanation of why. Of course, your next bit is so what are you going to say? But that’s the framing you need to do. Separate the human cost from the technology story. The people losing jobs are not a line item. Communication that treats them as a budget adjustment will destroy trust with everyone who remains behind. And the people who remain are watching very carefully. Give the survivors something real, not platitudes about the future, concrete information about what the new operating model looks like, what’s expected of them, and what support they’re getting. And there’s a harder truth for communicators, it seems to me, and this kind of popped out of the woodwork sideways when I was looking into this. If you’re the comms person in a situation like this, and leadership won’t let you be honest, won’t acknowledge the contradiction, they won’t speak plainly to people losing their jobs, then you have a professional and ethical problem, not a communication problem. And that’s a different ball game. And if you’re in that situation, I would say, easy to say this naturally, is get your resume brushed up and start looking around someplace else. You don’t want to be in that kind of environment. So the best communication advice in the world can’t fix a leadership team that wants to paper over a broken promise. And that’s worth saying out loud. And I think these are the things that should be on

    26 min

  8. Jun 8

    ALP 308: Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise

    Most owner-led agencies know they should be doing more than media relations. One barrier has always been capability: you can’t execute paid media if nobody on your team knows paid media. AI is removing that barrier, and Chip and Gini dig into exactly how. Gini built a PESO model operating system AI that prompts you instead of you prompting it. Many agencies are strong in one or two media types and need scaffolding to think through the rest. The tool can be used to help agencies execute unfamiliar disciplines step by step. Chip frames this as an opportunity to do things that were theoretically possible two years ago but practically out of reach. A paid campaign to amplify a blog post no longer requires hiring a specialist. Beyond drafting, both hosts made a case for AI as a learning tool instead of merely a content machine. Gini tested this directly by vibe-coding a PESO model diagnostic, working through multiple versions with AI troubleshooting each step. The practical upshot is that you can use AI to build separate knowledge-rich agents for each media type, loaded with client messaging and context, and treat them as thought partners for areas where your team lacks depth. It won’t eliminate the need for people or strategic thinking, but capability is no longer a credible excuse for staying stuck at one letter of PESO. [read the transcript] The post ALP 308: Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    21 min
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