Sentiment analysis has become a default metric for communicators. If sentiment is positive, trust must be high. But if your company’s words are diverging from its actions, trust could be eroding while sentiment remains constant. You won’t know until it’s too late. The new metric to consider is “trust velocity.” Neville and Shel unpack it in this monthly long-form episode for October 2025. Also in this episode:

• Is rage bait a valid marketing tactic?


• Lloyd Bank’s CEO and executive team are learning AI to reimagine the future of banking with generative AI


• A McKinsey report recommends that public affairs teams begin to factor geopolitical issues into their thinking


• When conduct, culture, and context collide: Three crisis case studies reviewed


• German firm launches ad campaign after its lift is used in the Louvre heist

In his Tech Report, Dan York reports on AI browsers and Mastodon’s approach to BlueSky-like starter packs, but in a consent-based manner.

Links from this episode:

• How thirst traps and rage bait affect workers on the clock


• Lloyds to put chief executive and all top bosses through six-month AI course


• Lloyds Banking Group's CEO and top bosses learn AI | Geoff Kates posted on the topic


• Lloyds Bank AI training course criticized as outdated and unnecessary


• Lloyds Banking Group scales adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot to supercharge their AI transformation


• Upgrading corporate affairs for a new geopolitical era


• Q3 Crisis Review: When Conduct, Culture, and Context Collide


• FIR #483: How Tylenol Handled a High-Profile Falsehood


• AI Models Measuring ‘Trust Velocity’


• AI and Reputation: Trust Data You Can Use


• ‘Quiet as a whisper’: German firm launches ad campaign after lift used in Louvre heist


• Louvre heist lift-maker seizes the moment with new ad campaign


• German Company Launches Viral Ad Campaign For Lift Used in Louvre Heist: ‘Quiet as a Whisper’

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

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](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/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.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson: Hi everybody and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 486, the long-form episode, the monthly ones we do for October 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz in the U.S. and we have a jam-packed episode for you today. So we’re going to jump right into it. Before we get into anything substantive though, I do want to ask that if you have any comments to share with us, and we always hope that you do, we have a number of comments to share with you today, please leave them on LinkedIn, where we share our posts, on Facebook, where we share our posts. You could even do this on threads or what’s, not WhatsApp, Blue Sky. That’s the one, Blue Sky. Yeah. You can send email to fircomments at gmail.com, attach an audio file. We haven’t had one of those in forever. You can record those audio files on our website at firpodcastnetwork.com. And you can always leave your comments right there on the show posts at firpodcastnetwork.com.

Neville Hobson: Blue sky.

Shel Holtz: And we do appreciate your ratings and reviews as well. So let’s get started with the rundown of our episodes from the last monthly episode in September till now. Before we do that, though, we had a couple of comments come in for some earlier episodes. You know, I was thinking, geez, these aren’t the episodes that we did between the last monthly and now. Then it occurred to me that, it’s a podcast. People can listen whenever they want. And apparently that’s what Sally Getch did. She said, yes, I am months behind listening to episodes, but I can’t believe no one mentioned the public library website is a way to get around paywalls. Contra Costa County Library gives you access to a ton of newspapers and magazines. So if you’re trying to get around a paywall, check out your local library’s website. They may provide access to that. And I have to confess, not something that occurred to me. Then episode 478, we have a comment from Steve Davis in Australia. Steve Davis says, Hi, Shel and Neville. I haven’t heard the term AI doomer before, and I don’t know if it’s right for me or not. We’ve been integrating AI tools for about two years in our practice, but we’re very focused on integrating them in a nuanced way. Maintaining the primacy of the human aspect of our creative and marketing business is key, and it’s what brings a lot of value.

Neville Hobson: Me neither.

Shel Holtz: AI tools and particularly large language models helped me do some grunt work in pulling some of our ideas together, but always on a short leash. Because of the name of our business, we have a great affinity with Oscar Wilde. There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. So I start every workshop with one of his quotes. However, at a recent one using AI in a thoughtful way, I actually wrote a song for Oscar to sing. You’re welcome to use any or all of this if it helps illustrate an approach to thinking about our charming little robots. I have a couple of thoughts on this before I go to his comment on episode 479. The first is, well, thank you for that little ditty, Steve. And rather than the usual music we use to play out the episode, we’ll play that and we will include a link to your musical channel on YouTube in the show notes. But in terms of P, the Doomer, these are the people who believe that AI is going to end humanity. And P-Doom is the percentage of risk that you think there is around the potential for AI to end the world. And in AI circles, they tend to ask each other, what’s your P-Doom? And everybody knows what that means. Oh, 70%, right? So. That’s what that means. I don’t necessarily subscribe to this concept, although I did listen to a podcast with a guy who’s been working in AI since the 1990s. And he has come around to actually believing very strongly that this is a likely scenario. So it’s always something worth considering.

Neville Hobson: It’s totally new to me. I’ve not heard of that term before.

Shel Holtz: It may be an American term that we bandy around here, although I hear it on podcasts all the time and you can listen to those anywhere, right? For episode 479, Steve writes, hi guys, I’m not sure you get these emails. And that’s because I only check our email once a month before this episode. We don’t do comments during our short form midweek episodes. So Steve, that’s why you di