Cross-posted from the FIR Podcast Network

Lionel Menchaca and Ike Pigott join Shel Holtz for this week’s episode, commenting on these stories…

• Pepsi was the subject of ridicule when the brand released a tone-deaf TV commercial accused of appropriating and minimizing the protest movements of Black Lives Matter and others. We talked about the commercial itself and the bigger issue how companies should approach their efforts to drive social change.
• Facebook has released a free version of Workplace, its enterprise collaboration tool.
• There has been more movement in the battle against fake news, including moves by Facebook and Google as well as a new initiative from the world of journalism that involves a coalition of players that includes a couple PR agencies.
• Is PR gradually becoming just an extension of marketing? That’s the conclusion of USC Annenberg’s 2017 Global Communications Report.
• PR publications are promoting the idea that practitioners should pitch reporters via cold calls, which is an absolutely terrible idea.
• Dan York reports on the sudden rise of Mastodon, which is being hailed by many as a Twitter killer.

Connect with today’s guest co-hosts at @lionelgeek and @ikepigott.

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

Here’s where to join the FIR Gaggle, which was mentioned on today’s show.

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

FIR was recorded using Zencastr.

About today’s guest co-hosts:

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.

After more than 16 years in television news, Emmy-winner Ike Pigott left to feed his passion for crisis communication. While building his consultancy, he started working with the American Red Cross – first as a local communicator in Alabama, and finally as the Director of Communications and Government Relations for a five-state region. It was during his time at the Red Cross that he pioneered the use of social media, developed the first disaster-response blogs, as well as the non-profit’s Twitter account all the way back in 2007. For the last seven years, Ike has worked as a communication strategist and spokesman for Alabama Power, an electric utility that serves more than 1.4-million customers. He helped shape the Social Media Guidelines for Alabama Power’s parent, Southern Company, and serves on the system-wide Social Media Advisory Council. In addition to media relations duties and serving as editor of the corporate NewsCenter site, Ike works across the company to help individuals and departments get the most out of social media tools. Ike has been a featured speaker at dozens of communication conferences in the United States and Europe, and is considered a thought leader in the integration of social media in utilities and other regulated industries.