For Immediate Release

For Immediate Release 100: Locked and Loaded

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Artificial Intelligence, Business, Communication, Ethics, For Immediate Release, Marketing, Politics, Public Relations, Reputation, Social Media, Social Networks, Society, Technology, Trends, Web
Using Twitter

In the August episode of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Shel and I talked about these topics: The Society for New Communications Research has launched an initiative to assess options for the communications industry to address fake news. An artificial intelligence bot can detect plagiarism (85% of the time). Supporters of US President Donald Trump are amplifying their tweets through a little-known Twitter feature that lets you create and name a Direct Message group. And let’s talk about that twice-daily folder the president gets filled with only positive coverage about him. Agencies are cropping up that focus exclusively on Generation Z. The Westin hotel in Buffalo, NY, is putting an Amazon Echo in every room. Ask Alexa for a toothbrush […]

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For Immediate Release 96: The crisis that keeps on giving

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Artificial Intelligence, Business, Communication, Employee Communication, For Immediate Release, Marketing, Public Relations, Reputation, Social Media, Social Networks, Technology, Trends, Workplace

In the July installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Shel and I talked about these topics: A 15-year-old participating in a work experience program took over the Twitter account of the beleaguered Southern Rail in the UK. The response to #AskEddie was undoubtedly a welcome break for Southern Rail’s social media team, but what did it ultimately accomplish? The online publication Quartz experiments with display-type ads in the text of stories that let users ask an artificial intelligence-based chatbot named Hugo for more information about just the stuff you’re interested in. Will artificial intelligence eventually take over the creative side of content marketing? Takata’s air bag crisis is in its second decade, leading ultimately to the once-mighty company’s bankruptcy. […]

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For Immediate Release 92: Marketing failures of the UK’s Conservative Party

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Artificial Intelligence, Business, Communication, FIR Podcast Network, For Immediate Release, Marketing, Podcasting, Politics, Public Relations, Social Media, Technology, Trends, Workplace
Labour won social media election - Guardian front page

We said we’d do one episode together of the For Immediate Release podcast as a ‘limited return engagement,’ emulating The Hobson and Holtz Report that Shel and I did for ten years. We did do that with episode 84 in April. We enjoyed it so much we decided to do another one, and so we recorded episode 92 yesterday. In keeping with our ‘hefty but good’ slogan, Shel and I enjoyed a conversation over an hour and forty minutes that covered a big agenda: There’s a new mobile-based social network that has been described as Twitter for audio. Neville has been using Hear Me Out for a week, and Shel has been listening to the 42-second audio clips. Neville delved […]

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For Immediate Release 84: the ‘limited return engagement’ episode

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Business, Communication, FIR Podcast Network, For Immediate Release, Podcasting

Recording episode 84 of the For Immediate Release podcast with Shel Holtz yesterday evening was like stepping into a new – but, at the same time, familiar – room to start a friendly conversation. It was The Hobson and Holtz Report again as we discussed a handful of highly-topical issues: Will social media will be a significant factor in the snap election called for by UK Prime Minister Theresa May? We also considered the role of social media in the French presidential election. Social media evidently had a larger-than-apparent impact on advertisers that pulled their commercials from Fox News’s “O’Reilly Factor,” the US cable news network’s biggest show. The Telegraph newspaper in the UK has launched a daily audio show […]

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One more time: A new episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report podcast

Neville Hobson 1 Comment Communication, For Immediate Release, Podcasting, Social Media
On The Air

In September 2015, Shel Holtz and I recorded the final episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report, a business podcast we’d presented for more than ten years. What started as a 30ish-minute show twice a week evolved over that decade into a 90-minute weekly talk show – “hefty but good” as we’d say – that then became the anchor in a growing network of podcasts that Shel had big plans for developing further. And so I hung up the microphone after well over 800 episodes. Since then I’ve been a guest on a couple of episodes of Shel’s replacement show, participating as a member of the discussion panel Shel puts together for each show. Next week, Shel and I will […]

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