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The March installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions, which Burger King learned after one well-meaning but poorly thought-out tweet
• Do you subscribe to a podcast or follow it? (Or listen to it?) These verbs may have consequence, especially in attracting new podcast listeners.
• Another company has fired another employee who built a following sharing work-related TikTok videos.
• A racing drone’s 87-second flight through a bowling alley has captured Hollywood’s attention.
• Neville is trying Timely, an Android-based competitor of Clubhouse.
• NFTs — non-fungible tokens — are a hot topic right now. Will they become a staple of marketing and communication or will remember them as a flash in the pan in a few years’ time?
• Dan York has updates on WordPress and Google in his Tech Report.

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The February installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

• Can anyone moderate podcasts the way we expect Facebook and Twitter to moderate content?
• How communicators can make a difference when IT introduces new software or systems
• There’s a right way and a wrong way to engage in newsjacking
• Can “branter” build long-term brand value (and what the hell is it, anyway?)
• A deep dive into Clubhouse, the hot new audio social networking app

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The January installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report — which marks the beginning of the 17th year of FIR — includes reports on these stories:

• The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer is one of the bleakest yet
• Communications and the U.S. presidential transition
• Business, communication, and the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol
• The future of misinformation
• Why CEOs Need to Amp Up Their Social Media Presence
• The Heinz bottle competition
• Dan York’s Tech Report covers the deplatforming of Parler, the new White House website, U.S. government analytics, and sea shanties on TikTok (and TikTok’s duet feature)

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• Twitter’s plans to relaunch verification and what’s next
• Clubhouse is poised to become a major social media platform (if Twitter Spaces doesn’t squash it like a bug)
• How a company should say, “We’re sorry”
• Walmart and others expand their employee advocacy programs while Sherwin Williams fires the only employee engaged in it on their behalf
• Euphemisms for getting laid off
• Could Substack be a new channel for journalism (including brand journalism)?
• Dan York’s Tech Report covers more Twitter changes; screen sharing comes to Discord while Reddit acquires Dubsmash for its screen sharing functionality; Snap and Facebook take on TikTok; Walmart and TikTok introduce video shopping; WordPress powers 39% of the web (and more about WordPress); podcasting turns 20

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The November installment of the Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

• A spoof airline fooled a lot of people. Experts say it had some good ideas.
• A look at some technological behaviors adopted during the pandemic but that are likely to outlast it.
• Twitter is the source of some remarkable PR pitch fails.
• Digital-only financial services startups are turning to influencers to help build their brands.
• Retailers and other brands are pressuring employees to become TikTok influencers for them.
• What happened when humans stopped managing social media content? (It wasn’t pretty.)
• Dan York’s Tech Report explores Twitter “Fleets,” Google search results and “page experience,” and Google’s new webinars and its partnership with PRX.

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The October 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

• A look at how employees are handling life in the pandemic and what companies can do to help
• Techlash hasn’t gone anywhere, but it has fragmented
• Journalists need training on advanced verification techniques to curb disinformation
• Sonic logos and other company-used audio needs to change to reflect broad public sentiment
• Tesla has done away with its corporate PR department; apparently, all they need is Elon
• Voice connects us to others even more than video — and way more than text
• Dan York’s Tech Report covers Snapchat getting sounds, WordPress’s new ability to turn blog posts into Twitter threads, Cloudflare’s automatic platform optimization for WordPress, Spotify podcast promo cards, and the crazy amount of live streaming going on.

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The September 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

• The new crisis PR: What companies should do when they’re “canceled”
• Twitter’s plans to motivate users to “read before you retweet”
• How COVID-19 has changed the way we write content (and engage with video and social media)
• The arrival of the NHS contact-tracing app gives a big boost to QR codes
• Your company’s history could pose a risk for your reputation
• LinkedIn is making changes
• Dan York reports on Amazon podcasts, LinkedIn Stories, WordPress news, and TikTok at home and in China

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The August 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

• Twitter’s new conversation settings (which are not an assault on free speech)
• Instagram’s terrible attempt to duplicate TikTok
• What the coronavirus pandemic will do to our homes and offices
• How the pandemic is reshaping our approach to social media
• Google’s pandemic-related additions to travel searches
• Dan York’s Tech Report covers the release of WordPress 5.5, the TikTok war, the war against app stores, merging messengers, and the demise of Flash

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The July 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

• Emotional Intelligence as an Internal Communications focus
• AI avatars as a new tool for training and marketing
• The latest TikTok news
• What a better social network might look like
• The rise of Virtual and Augmented Reality
• The staggering jobs challenge the world is facing

Dan York reports on xxx.
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