The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #133: May 1, 2006

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #133: May 1, 2006

Content summary: Another pay for placement scandal; the rise of the non English-language blogosphere; FIR Listener Survey results; Lee Hopkins reports; PR and the education curriculum; kids and communication: Part 1; listeners’ comments discussion; FIR Frappr community update; vote at Podcast Alley; the music, and more.

Show notes for May 1, 2006

download For Immediate Release podcast

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 78-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Download the file here (MP3, 32MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

  • Detailed show notes to come.

FIR Show Notes links
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info. If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday, May 4…

Posted by neville on 05/01 at 10:49 AM
  1. Hi Shel and Neville,

    Shel, bringing your daughter in to kick off the Kids and Communication section was a brilliant intro to the subject.

    I sit somewhere in the middle ground between digital immigrants and digital natives. Being of the right age range to be a native but coming from a poorer background and not having a PC in the house until I was 18 makes me feel something like an immigrant.

    Neville, I share your interpretation of the geographical divide when it comes to choice of instant messenger program. AIM is for North America, MSN Messenger is for Europe.
    MSN is what I use myself. The phone is more interruptive than IM. The phone is a demand for attention. Leaving to ring isn’t an option because the ringing is annoying. When an IM comes up you can leave it until you reach a natural pause in the work you are doing. It doesn’t shatter you’re concentration like the phone going off does. Text messaging is the same again; difference being that you can be away from the PC.

    Email is for registration and notification. Ebay, Amazon, newsgroups, forums or widely distribution messages (only until XML feeds take over) are the main things that email is used for. I use it to communicate with long distance friends, where our respective time zones don’t allow us to be online at the same time.

    Two key things that came from what Rachael said:

    1.She recognises the absence of tone, emotion that comes with the short written word. Natives tend to know this where immigrants tend to require teaching

    2.The ability to be succinct without interruption by using written comms. This is vital for the quiet spoken yet intelligent folk that will often be right but get railroaded by a more vocal colleague should the conversation be oral. In fact, in business that’s why a conversation should ideally use both media as some are stronger writers and others are stronger talkers. You’ll get the best out of all parties if you allow them to communicate via their preferred medium


    Great topic to bring up guys. I’m looking forward to hearing more of it.

    Posted by Dan Hill  on  05/02  at  02:29 AM
  2. G’day chaps,

    In case I don’t get a chance to record an audio comment, this is backup!

    The Feedblitz service I use is part of the Feedburner offering, and yes, you can directly import your existing mail list into the Feedblitz service, without going through the double opt-in again. BUT you have to say that those names absolutely positively have agreed to receive emails from you, and that if Feedblitz receive any complaints about spam they will come down hard.

    Forced-migrating my newsletter subscriber list across to Feedblitz has been, so far, a worthwhile investment. Only two subscribers have unsubscribed (and perhaps one of them because they are already tech-savvy and subscribe via rss), but seeing such a large subscriber number on my blog is encouraging more take-up of both Feedblitz and regular rss subscription, perhaps because a higher number is a surer sign of content worth reading—“surely if that many people are reading it, then it must be good”.

    My $0.02 worth, gentlemen, FWIW.

    Posted by Lee Hopkins  on  05/02  at  03:49 AM
  3. Hi, guys.

    I haven’t listened to the whole episode yet (no long drives the last 2 days), but wanted to make a couple of points before I forget them:

    1) You kept saying it was episode 132. ;-)

    2) I’d listen to the show if it were twice as long—but I’ll listen if you make it shorter, also.

    3) I’m curious as to why FIR has “schwag” when everyone else has “swag”. Also, I’d love to see something there which I could wear or carry in a professional situation, at networking meetings or when attempting mass healing of </i>podcastus ignoramus</i>. T-shirts and baseball caps just aren’t appopriate. A button, perhaps? Bumper stickers? Notebook skins? iPod skins? I can make most of those myself, but that won’t help defray your bandwidth costs.

    4) Regarding the relationship between newsletters and blogs, I created my backup blog as a place to repost issues of my backup e-zine. I don’t do much additional blogging on it, given that backups are only a sideline and I’m still more of an essayist than a blogger. I suppose you could say my approach was the reverse of Lee’s.

    Looking forward to hearing the rest of the show,
    Sallie

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  05/02  at  07:06 AM
  4. Shel and Neville and Gang, Excellent show today as always.

    The interview with Shel’s daughter, Rachelle was so illuminating and Richard Baily’s perspectives on Luke Armour’s post helped me round my understanding of the study of PR. And that brings me to my main point which is the length of the show and the cries for it to be shorter. I actually believe that the unconstrained time length is part of what makes the show so interesting and valuable.

    The first part of the podcasts today was dedicated to some of the survey results. That’s something that all your avid listeners have been waiting to hear about. It sounds like a lot of people love the show but many believe it’s too long. I can appreciate that but I would like all of you that are in that camp to consider whether the length is what enables some of what you like most about the show. A lot of you said that you love when Shel and Neville riff off each other. If we stat putting an hour glass on this I think it will change the quality and richness of their answers. I’m worried that an arbitrary time limitation on the show may cause a conscious or subconscious self censoring.

    I get the sense that when they started out, Shel and Neville planned for it to be about an hour but since this is podcasting they were willing to stretch it. Now we see the average length is closer to 90 minutes. If the show naturally wants to be 90 minutes, I think a time limit will make their job harder and this podcast more work.
    Furthermore, It’s my understanding that it is Shel edits the show. Let’s think about him. If he’s trying to fit 90 minutes of audio content into a 60 minute slot then he’s always going to be perplexed about what to keep and what ends up on the cutting room floor.

    For example, let’s go back and look at today’s episode. This was another great episode. If this show was going to be one hour what would you have cut out? What part of Shel’s interview with his 17 year old daughter, Or, what part of Richard Baily’s response to Luke Armour’s question, or what part of Lee’s report? The nuggets that get cut out just might be the nugget that you would find most valuable.

    I agree, it’s not easy to find the time to listen to every minute of every episode. I think that as the producers, it may help if Shel and Neville start the show with an overview of what they plan to cover in the show. That may help some of your select the sections to skip over before the show notes are posted. But hey listeners, let’s not take this for granted, we have two industry experts who are willing to give us three hours of their time per week commercial free (for now) discussing and educating us on topics that are near and dear to our hearts. This is free education.

    So my plea to Shel and Neville is don’t mess with the length becaus i think it will mess with the mojo. If all you have some days is an hour then do an hour, but feel free to pontificate if you have somting to say say. I think many other listeners in the blue states want to hear about it.

    Remember guys, If you don’t want it to be sooo long, you can always use those little buttons on your iPod to stop and fast forward.

    Posted by Stephen Turcotte  on  05/03  at  06:50 AM
  5. Hi Shel and Neville,

    Just to let you know, I really liked the “Kids and New Forms of Communication” item. Shel, your daughter really came across as quite intelligent and it was a pleasure to hear you both talking (by the way the previous commenters seem not to agree on the correct spelling of your daughters name…).

    At the end of the interview you asked Rachelle (my guess) about her thought on workplace communication, having only phone or email available. She replied she would be frustrated for waiting for an email answer. Now I understand that for some kind of work communication you really want to “do things quickly”, but there is other kinds of communication to, of the type that does not require the instant reaction. For instance when doing projects I often proactively ask people questions I have, the answers to which I plan to use for a report due in the week after. Some questions really require the other person to think things over. IM is not really suited for that, especially not when you are “killing” people’s attention to the specific work the are doing. 

    All in all, I think the New Work force entrants will bring in the IM tools, but find it suits only for a very specific set of communication tasks and they may need to use email for a lot of other tasks. But maybe I am to old already to understand all of this (35)...

    It is a pitty my kids are only 2 and 5 years. I would really love to talk to them about this the way you did Shel.

    Best regards,

    Marcel de Ruiter

    Posted by Marcel de Ruiter  on  05/03  at  10:42 AM
  6. Just when you thought it was safe…Sallie returns at the eleventh hour to finish her comments.

    First, on academia and education (which are certainly not identical): departments (in whatever field) at different universities have quite distinct approaches to the discipline, partly as a result of what the faculty members specialize in. Within the academic world, “everyone knows” that you go to, say, Oxford if you want one approach and Cambridge for another. If certain PR/Communications departments are known for a lot of hands-on work or instructors who have been or still are active in the field, one would expect students who want to go straight into a job to study there. On the other hand, students who want to remain in academia and study the theory and semiotics of PR and media relations might go to a theory-centered department.

    Of course, those kinds of choices are much easier for postgrads to make than for undergrads, who choose their universities for a lot more reasons than one academic department.

    I share Rachel’s (I prefer that spelling because it’s my middle name, but perhaps Shel could clear up this issue in the show notes as Yours Pedantically wants to be accurate), antipathy to the telephone. And I remember what fun it was to discover instant messaging back in the ‘80s in the basement of the computer center getting a retinal sunburn from the mainframe terminals. But while text of any kind is very effective for leaving brief messages and getting away, IM is just as bad as the phone for interrupting and diverting.

    I’m sure MySpace and its like can and will be adapted to the workplace—but there will have to be some adaptation, or no one will get any work done with their colleagues pestering them continually. At least you can make your e-mail wait until you’ve finished the critical project you’re working on.

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  05/03  at  06:18 PM

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