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 …
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For much of the past decade, Millennials has been the generation that was the comparative one whenever anyone talked about behavioural and other differences between generations in contemporary society. Not only in the cultural and consumer contexts but also in the workplace. It’s fair to say that marketers and brand managers now understand a great deal about that generation in terms of behaviours, expectations, preferences and other consumer indicators. Employers understand much about them in terms of workplace expectations and …
The ongoing angst about ad blocking by online publishers and advertisers looks set to move to another level following reports that Google intends to include an ad blocking feature in the Chrome browser. The Wall Street Journal reports that the ad blocking feature would filter out certain online ad types deemed to provide bad experiences for users as they move around the web. The Journal notes: Unacceptable ad types would be those recently defined by the Coalition for Better Ads, …
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 …
A new social network started up six months ago and began picking up speed last week as it echoes the early days of Twitter. It’s called Mastodon and was born out of frustration with changes being made on Twitter, according to an interview with founder Eugen Rochko in The Verge. Last year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed, Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. Instead of building a unified service, Rochko …
A topic that’s dominated our conversation in recent episodes of The Small Data Forum podcast is fake news and related issues. In episode 7, hosted by Thomas Stoeckle in conversation with regulars Neville Hobson and Sam Knowles, we consider world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s call to action on what he sees as three big challenges for the web: Loss of control of personal data; Spread of misinformation; and Questionable political advertising. The second one in particular – spread of …
Like everyone in the contemporary workplace, communicators confront information – data – on a scale unimaginable a decade ago. We’ve all heard the term “Big Data” but do we really understand what this means? Can we see what we must do right now to enable our competitive differentiation, operational effectiveness and early-mover advantage that are essential in the cognitive business era of the coming decade? In a presentation session at the IABC EuroComm 2017 conference in London next week, I’ll …
Most reasonable people are aware that if you publicly publish something defamatory about someone else that is false, you can be sued for libel. If you lose the legal case, it can be expensive for you in terms of damage to your reputation as well as a financial cost. (Related: the difference between libel and slander in UK law.) And I’d add that most reasonable people are also aware that the same rules on libel apply to all methods of public communication, including online. …
The recent rise and spread of so-called fake news is a topic that’s generating a great deal of opinion on what to do about it. I’ve weighed in, too, in a recent episode of the Small Data Forum podcast. Now, on the 28th anniversary of the founding of the World Wide Web, its creator Tim Berners-Lee offers compelling perspectives on this contemporary phenomenon, outlining three challenges for the web and, as he puts it, what we must do to ensure it …
