September 2015 archive

Welcome to episode #2 of For Immediate Release, the successor podcast to The Hobson & Holtz Report

This week’s panel includes Redphlag CEO Gerry Corbett, former CustomScoop CEO Chip Griffin, and W20 Corporate and Strategy Director Lionel Menchaca. More details on the panel appear at the end of this post.

On today’s show, we explored the following topics:

• Volkswagen’s self-made crisis and what the company must do to rebuild trust with stakeholders including dealers, customers, and the public
• Speaking of rebuilding reputations, we discuss Brian Williams’ return to NBC (and his new reporting breaking news for MSNBC), and how Williams’ situation could be applied to a leader’s loss of credibility in any organization
• What do we really mean when we talk about the need for authenticity?
• The PR implications of commitments made at the Sustainable Development Summit
• Stephen Colbert has been interviewing tech CEOs, a departure from the usual late-night talk show fare. Should PR departments be wary of invitations to have their CEOs appear on similar programs?
• The Mayo Clinic’s content partnership with the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the ethical issues that could surround this and other similar agreements.
• The importance of building social connections at work, and the importance of face-to-face connections in developing those networks.
• The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Ray Lane, who was at the time chairman of Hewlett-Packard, tried to kill the disastrous $11 billion acquisition of Autonomy. What does a revelation about the company’s past mean to its present and its future?
• Heather Armstrong is giving up her ground-breaking mommy blog in the face of (among other things) extraordinary demands from sponsors. Could this be a trend in niche blogging verticals?
• What does it mean for Twitter and for users — especially communicators — that Twitter has enabled anybody to distribute a poll through the service?

Links to the source material for this episode are on Delicious.

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

Join us next week for our third episode. Joining me on the panel will be Dan York, Zennifer Zingsheim Phillips, and Scott Monty.

About this week’s panel:

Gerry Corbett is Chair and CEO of strategic communications consulting firm Redphlag LLC., Founder and Partner of Wise Counsel, and CMO of real estate tech startup Producers Forum, Inc. in Palo Alto. He also is an award winning career coach, blogger and Past Chair & CEO of the 32,000 member Public Relations Society of America, having served as Chair and CEO in 2012. Gerry is a versatile branding, marketing, public relations and communications executive and coach having served four decades in senior marketing and communications roles at Global Fortune 100 firms and earlier in his career in aerospace engineering and information technology with Silicon Valley firms and NASA.

Chip Griffin is a writer and entrepreneur with a particular interest at the intersection of communications and technology. Chip has helped clients communicate more effectively through strategic messaging, writing, digital advice, and innovative web-based software. He sold one of his companies, CustomScoop, in the summer of 2015. After first getting involved with digital marketing and communications in the mid-1990’s, Chip became one of the first individuals to serve as a Chief Digital Officer of any major public relations firm. He has written for clients and publications for more than 20 years.

Lionel Menchaca serves as director of Corporate & Strategy for W2O Group. In this role, he helps clients of all sizes to develop content and engagement strategies so they can connect directly with customers. He’s worked extensively on social media training for organizations and on helping organizations build and launch employee advocacy programs. He also works with teams of developers to build tools companies need to manage an increasingly complex flow of content. Before W2O, Lionel worked at Dell for 18 years and was the founder and chief blogger of Direct2Dell, Dell’s main corporate blog. Over the last 7 years, Lionel authored hundreds of posts on behalf of Dell. He helped expand it into several continues to extend Dell’s global presence. Before the blog, Lionel was one of the main architects behind Dell’s blog monitoring process begun in April 2006. He was Dell’s first full time employee paid to handle social media efforts.

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