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This week’s conversations featured Melissa Agnes on how two companies deftly handled surprise issues not of their own making, Kami Huyse on Richard Edelman’s assertion that PR needs to pivot from advocacy to education, and Sharon McIntosh on a Pew study revealing how workers feel about trending workplace issues. Also in this episode…

• Could Facebook be getting ready to kill the News Feed altogether?
• Facebook users accustomed to getting their news on the social network are going back to mainstream media for their news
• People are creating porn with AI, using the faces of celebrities; here’s why companies should worry
• Virtual Reality shipments were down in 2017; is this the blockbuster consumer product that never was?
• Microsoft is opening an R&D center for its Cortana AI-driven virtual assistant
• Jeff Bezos was taken by surprise by Alexa’s success
• A new app could make hyperlocal citizen journalism a lot easier

You can pre-order Melissa Agnes’s new book, “Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World.” The book ships on March 6. You can find more information on “Crisis Ready’ here.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

About today’s guests

Melissa Agnes is a founding partner of Agnes+Day, a crisis intelligence firm. In her role, Melissa is a crisis management consultant and keynote speaker, has developed an international reputation for crisis management, planning and training by helping large global brands prevent and manage a wide range of corporate issues and crises. Her client list includes government agencies, cities and municipalities, healthcare organizations, energy companies, global non-profits, financial organizations, the public and private sectors and many others. Melissa is an international and sought-after keynote speaker and guest lecturer.

Kami Huyse is the founder of Zoetica Media. She writes an award-winning blog, Zoetica Talks, on the topic of public relations and social media strategy. Kami is a national leader in the use of social media for public relations. She speaks at social media events and conferences all over the country and her work in social media has earned her the SNCR’s 2008 Reputation Management award and IABC’s 2009 Gold Quill of Excellence Award. Kami was a 2010 fellow of the Society for New Communications Research where she pursued a study on how cause marketing in social communities can benefit companies. She is also the co-founder and organizer of the Social Media Breakfast Houston and serves on the board of CiviliNation.

Sharon McIntosh is president of And Then Communications. With more than two decades of communications experience, she has a passion for creating and executing new ideas to drive employee engagement at companies both large and small. Most recently she served as PepsiCo’s vice president of Global Internal Communications, overseeing the company’s efforts to connect with its more than 274,000 employees worldwide. She and her team launched a number of innovative employee initiatives, including the company’s first social media training (SMART U), a social tool to share internal news externally and PepsiCo’s award-winning employee ambassador program. She and her team also developed a communications strategy to support the company’s first comprehensive, global and multi-year transformation initiative. Before joining PepsiCo in 2004, Sharon spent seven years at Sears. Among her greatest contributions there, she launched a marketing strategy for life events, ran user experience for the company’s e-commerce site and introduced the company’s first intranet. Prior to Sears, she worked at Waste Management, publishing more than 14 annual reports for various business units, managing shareholder meetings, drafting senior executive speeches and handling media relations. Sharon graduated with a B.A. in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. from DePaul University. She lives in Norwalk, CT.

Links from this episode:

• Instagram’s new text-only ‘Type’ feature for Stories is rolling out to everyone
• Facebook just dropped a big hint that the News Feed’s days may be numbered
• Facebook Nixes News so Consumers Turn to the Source
• Brand Crisis Management: Responding to the Tide Pod Challenge
• Crock-Pot’s Response to Its Tragic Role in ‘This Is Us’ Is a Lesson in Smart PR
• Fake porn is the new fake news, and the internet isn’t ready
• Davos: Edelman Wants PR To Shift From Advocacy To Education In Fake News Era
• Shock Stat: In 2017, VR Headset Shipments For Most Top Brands Went DOWN Compared To 2016
• Microsoft opens Cortana Intelligence Institute to make its AI assistant smarter in the workplace
• Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s Alexa: ‘We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often’
• Americans see both good and bad in trends that are changing the workplace
• Walmart’s new robots are loved by staff — and ignored by customers
• Google Is Testing a New App That Would Let Anyone Publish a Local News Story

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

• Instagram Is Turning Into Facebook, and That’s Bad
• Instagram’s new ‘type mode’ lets you add text-only pages to your stories
• Podcast Listeners Really Are the Holy Grail Advertisers Hoped They’d Be
• Turns out people really like podcasts after all (and now we have numbers to prove it)
• Google’s data-friendly app YouTube Go expands to over 130 countries, now supports higher quality videos

About Shel Holtz

Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is director of Internal Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco. Before joining Webcor, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives and communications research. Full bio