February 2016 - NevilleHobson.com

Consider the human side of robots

With all the talk about how robots will take everyone’s jobs and basically bring on the Apocalypse, it’s not hard to get worried. The robots haven’t just landed in the workplace – they’re expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts. One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device…

Digital agencies must learn how to speak the CEO’s language

Digital technology has become key to how brands survive and thrive, which means agencies will have to take on the C-suite directly

Samsung (and Facebook) raise the mobile game

The smartphone market continues to rapidly evolve. Who thinks about a smartphone these days as simply a device to make phone calls and send text messages? I don’t – a smartphone is a powerful computer that also makes phone calls and sends text messages. That thought came to me more than once or twice while I watched and listened to Samsung’s press event via live video stream from the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona on Sunday evening. The company…

UK blogging snapshot in new blogger survey

An overnight email from Vuelio: How’s your blog doing? How big is your audience, and what are you doing to grow it? Is blogging a hobby, an awareness-raiser, or a money-spinner? We’ve joined up with Canterbury Christ Church University to launch our first ever UK Blogger Survey in a bid to find out what blogging is all about in 2016. We’re asking bloggers all over the country what kind of blogs they’re writing, how popular they are, and how commercial…

The rise of the cognitive PR machines

Within two years, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines or “robo writers,” as Gartner puts it in its list of ten predictions of an algorithmic and smart machine-driven world that the analyst firm published last October. It was a topic I used as a focal point in my presentation about PR measurement and how it’s getting smarter partly through automation that captured close attention from the 50+ PR pros in the audience at a CIPR event…