The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer characterized the current communication environment as one infected by grievance. Another commentator claimed that we are living in an age of ubiquitous malignancy. Communicating with a broad audience of stakeholders is especially challenging in this landscape. While the Trust Barometer identifies business as the only one of the four sectors trusted enough to do anything about it, the options at this point are anything but clear. Also in this long-form episode for January: Different AI large language models (LLMs) portray brands differently, making it a new requirement that communicators consider how AI will position them when developing their messaging. Muck Rack’s 2025 survey on how PR professionals are using AI is out, and it contains a few surprises. The state of content marketing is at the heart of a new report from the Content Marketing Institute. It is apparently harder to quit Meta than it is to ditch X, leaving a lot of people sitting on the fence (your co-hosts included). Meanwhile, Bluesky’s growth is surging, and the company is planning to introduce an Instagram competitor as some of the most important voices that had made their home on Twitter have made the transition. In his Tech Report, Dan York explores the tale of two TikTok bans.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, February 24.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

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

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Links from this episode:

• 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer


• Reversing the Descent into Grievance


• Corporate Affairs Trends for 2025 – FleishmanHillard in the United Kingdom


• Marshall Manson on the challenges of messaging about your business


• How AI Search Platforms Characterize Brands


• What Does Meta’s Pivot From Fact-Checking To Community Consensus Mean In The AI Age?


• OpenAI Releases AI Agent That Helps Book Flights, Order Food for Users


• Reactive PR & AI: How to capitalize on trending topics faster


• Muck Rack’s State of AI in PR 2025


• Muck Rack State of AI in PR 2025: Full Report


• From Bluesky to Substack: Evolving Your Social Strategy to Avoid Brand Extinction


• How Brands and Agencies are Approach Bluesky — and How Meta’s New Policies Could Impact the Platform


• Bluesky is Getting Its Own Photo Sharing App, Flashes


• Bluesky Saw a 17x Increase in Moderation Reports in 2024 After Rapid Growth


• Twitter Quitters Help Bluesky To More Than 27 million Users


• Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos


• A New Campaign Aims to Safeguard Social Media from Billionaires Using Bluesky’s Underlying Tech


• ECB Launches Presence on Bluesky Amid Musk’s Political Maneuvering


• How BlueSky, Twitter’s One-Time Side Project, is Challenging X


• Neville’s Facebook Post on Meta Fence-Sitting


• Neville’s Threads Post on Meta Fence-Sitting


• Why I Have Finally Quit Facebook. It’s Not Just About Fact-Checking


• Lawyer Fires Meta as Client Over Descent into Neo Nazi Madness


• I Have Struggled with How to Respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Descent into Toxic Masculinity


• Enterprise Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2025


• How B2B Brands Can Leverage Employee Generated Content in 2025


• Reflections on 2024 and the Road Ahead for Content Marketing


• Brands targeting Gen Alpha are heading to Roblox

Raw transcript:

Hi everyone and welcome to for immediate release. This is episode 4 4 7 and our long form monthly episode for January, 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the uk and I’m Shell Holtz in the us. It’s great to be back with a long form monthly episode. Artificial intelligence figures prominently in this episode.

What a surprise. I’m sure you’re all shocked, falling outta your chairs. Ai really, and it’s, it’s interesting timing based on open AI’s announcement yesterday that they have released their first AI agents. You have to have the $200 a month account to use them. Right now. I don’t, I have the 20 bit of a hurdle.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it’s definitely a hurdle. Yeah. But he, he Sam Altman did say it’s coming for the, the regular $20 a month account in the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to that. Okay. We’ll hang on to our hats in that case. No, you’re right. She is it this, there’s this, this topic features large in many of [00:01:00 ] our.

Topics of discussion today and all from slightly different angles, so we have some useful stuff to share. Before we get into much more, let’s have a look at what we have done since the last month of the episode. We’ve actually done five episodes since then, which is one more I think that we’ve done.

Yeah, we’ve been busy previous. Yeah, I mean, that’s true. So just a quick rundown on all of them. We’ve got some comments on some of ’em too, but a quick rundown. 4, 4 2 on the 26th of December we talked about the it’s still in the news, it’s not, certainly not gone away. The issue between Blake Lively, the actress, and Justin Bald on the movie they were on, whose title escapes me completely as I’m speaking these words.

But it’s all over the news. We discussed. Well topic or the answer, or not the answer, a