Archive: June 2013

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Extraordinary Communications During a Corporate Cat Fight

When founders get the boot, they don’t always go quietly or humorously into the night á la Andrew Mason. For communicators, this poses a quandary. Typically, the founder serves as the face of the company with his or her persona baked into the brand. If the founder reacts with “hell hath no fury like a …more

The Wall Street Journal Tries BuzzFeed Storytelling

BuzzFeed reaches over 25 million unique visitors each month. No doubt, business publications ogle this number, but I didn’t expect The Wall Street Journal to actually try its hand at BuzzFeed storytelling. Not satisfied with the standard fare that recaps a Department of Labor study on how Americans use their time, the Journal created a slide show …more

Storytelling Alone Won’t Advance Business Communications

I conducted a storytelling workshop last week. Yes, the objective for the session was to help this corporate PR team apply the concepts of storytelling in business communications. But I’m hoping for something bigger. I’m hoping for two interrelated actions: They question the status quo. They experiment in their day-to-day jobs. The Holmes Report has …more

The Next Best Thing to “Failure” in Business Storytelling

Virtually every great story encompasses failure or at least a crisis. Apple flirted with bankruptcy. J.K. Rowling lived on welfare before Harry Potter came to the rescue. Everyone told Freddie Patek he was too short to play professional baseball (naturally a favorite). As Fortune Journalist Patricia Sellers noted in discussing storytelling in business, “If failure …more

How the Fourth Richest Person on the Planet Goofed at Twitter

I had a hunch this was going to happen. While the media trumpeted the arrival of Warren Buffet on Twitter, I wondered aloud if he would have staying power. To help his onboarding process – communicating in staccato-like bursts can throw off the most brilliant of minds – I even crafted 20 evergreen tweets that …more

A Case for Building a Social Media Function in Customer Support

The most visible intersection of social media and customer support has to be Twitter. At any given time, you’ve got twitchy customers taking their complaints to the masses. A quick look at the tweet stream from one of the whipping boys of social floggings, Comcast, brings us “deep” customer interactions such as: Just in case …more

Intersection of Social Media and Storytelling

I never quite understood how social media could actually add new content to the conventional storytelling in news reporting. Until now. Last week, I got an email from a college buddy and fraternity brother – and no, they’re not one and the same – with the subject line, “My story went national.” My first thought …more

Tips for Landing Your Executive’s POV in Mainstream Media (via ProfNet)

We are huge fans of the ProfNet service from PR Newswire. By sending daily alerts on media stories in motion, ProfNet eliminates much of the guesswork in pitching a client source to a journalist. Two variables go a long way toward determining whether your ProfNet effort produces a thought leadership win. The first can be …more