Cross-posted from the FIR Podcast Network

Jenn Floto and Christine Perkett join Shel Holtz for this week’s episode, which covered these stories…

• Chatbots seem to dominate the panels at this hear’s South by Southwest tech conference, but marketers are already starting to abandon the bots they’ve created. Are bots over before they’ve really begun?
• Advances in technology are raising the profile of earned media, which has taken a back seat to the paid and owned models.
• A study finds that Facebook likes aren’t worth very much unless you pay for them. Are we really still measuring effectiveness with likes?
• PRWeek argues that the CEO can no longer be divorced from the communications and culture of a company. To prove its point, they compared two CEOs: United’s Oscar Munoz and Uber’s Travis Kalanick.
• Dan York reports on the upcoming ICANN meeting in Copenhagen and web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s letter, “Three challenges for the web” on the web’s 28th birthday.

Connect with guest co-hosts Christine Perkett on Twitter at @MissusP and Jenn Floto on LinkedIn.

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

Join the FIR Gaggle for a chance to get a free copy of J. Kelly Hoey’s book, “Build Your Dream Network.”

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

FIR was recorded using Zencastr.

About today’s guest co-hosts:

Jennifer Floto is a veteran public relations practitioner who has worked on both corporate and agency assignments. She spent 10 years at TRW before doing stints at two of the world’s leading agencies: Ketchum and Manning, Selvage & Lee. An accredited communicator, Jenn continues to consult with such clients as the Beach Cities Symphony, Rotary International and the Keck School of Medicine. Floto was named “Professor of the Year” in 2006 and received the Mellon Mentoring Award in 2012.  She teaches an array of undergraduate and graduate courses and serves as adviser to TriSight, USC’s in-house PR agency, and PRSSA.

Christine Perkett founded PerkettPR in 1998 and SeeDepth, a PR analytics platform, in 2013. She has been named one of the ‘Top 25 Authorities Moving PR Forward’ in a recent industry study, and is routinely recognized as one of the most social media-savvy CEOs – currently ranked as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter (by Hubspot), a “Top Influential Woman in Tech on Twitter” (by Google’s Don Dodge, alongside such greats as Marissa Mayer, WSJ’s Kara Swisher, Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, and others), and featured two consecutive years in BusinessWeek’s Social Media Special Report (keeping company of notable CEOs from Zappos, Virgin, Digg, HDNet, Mint and more). Christine was also awarded “Best Communications, IR or PR Executive” by the American Business Awards.