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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How to get the media on board to end AVE

Neville Hobson 1 Comment Advertising, Business, Communication, Ethics, Journalism, Leadership, Marketing, Professional Development, Public Relations, Reputation, Social Media, Trends
Fearless Girl

One of the hurdles along the road of seeing an end to the “advertising value equivalence” (AVE) measurement metric that’s decried by many in the PR and measurement communities is persuading organisations to stop using it. The issue with AVE is well summarised in a white paper published by The Institute for Public Relations in 2003, in which this succinct text appears: We urge you to move away as quickly as possible from statements of the nature, “Our news coverage this quarter was worth $X million in advertising.” Instead, talk about how you achieved your prominence goal, how your coverage gained in prominence over the year, or how you beat out your competitors in terms of the prominence of your […]

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Why the gig economy fits well with the lives of Baby Boomers

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Books, Business, Communication, Experiences, Guest Post, Personal Development, Society, Trends, Workplace

We Baby Boomers are benefiting significantly from the gig economy, says author, speaker and optimist Tim Drake. Not just as consumers by it providing lower prices and more convenience, but as participants too. It’s an important bolt-on to something bigger, he says, enabling new ways of doing business to emerge, and a fresh outlook on what ‘work’ is. But is it something we should think about taking a much more active role in? Baby Boomers fit into what I call Generation Cherry. Indeed, that is the title I gave my book on the subject. The profile is slightly wider than Baby Boomers, as Generation Cherry covers people in their fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties (possibly even forties and nineties). We […]

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SDF podcast 9: Either back to the future or fast forward to a new normal

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Business, Communication, Mainstream Media, Marketing, Politics, Public Relations, Small Data Forum, Social Media, Social Networks, Society, Technology, Trends, Web
Thought / via Pixabay CC0

In the latest episode 9 of The Small Data Forum podcast, hosted by Thomas Stoeckle in conversation with regulars Sam Knowles and me, we enjoyed a wide-ranging, lively conversation over the course of 45 minutes on topics as diverse as the 2017 general election campaign (what went wrong for Theresa May and the Conservatives with a clear focus on the politics) and the latest global communications report from the Annenberg School of Communications (we focused especially on PR and AVE). Writer of the show notes for this episode is Sam: News is neither a fixed nor a finite entity. There are some periods in history when it feels like there’s just more happening than at others. I’m not talking about […]

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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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