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Deconstructing a Wall Street Journal Story on Innovation

Most companies want to be known as innovative. To bastardize the Wallace Simpson line, “you can never be too rich, too thin or too innovative.” The problem is those same companies often depend on adjectives to tout their breakthroughs. The Wall Street Journal challenged the use of the “i” word over ten years ago: “Businesses …more

White House Serves Up “Life Is Better Than Fiction” News Release

OK. I understand the pressure on the White House communications team to come up with something, anything, to show Americans that Trump deserves a second term. Rather than field questions from pesky journalists, it stands to reason they would brainstorm ways to go on the offensive. Offer free chalupas at Taco Bells in the battleground …more

Will the Communications Industry Change Because of President Trump?

  Update: I dusted off this post because the content remains relevant today. The President continues to struggle with the concept of delivering a clear and consistent message. Yet, he’s a “natural” at generating earned media. . Before addressing the question, let’s consider the high-level objectives of the typical communications campaign. Increase awareness, often in …more

Reaching Today’s 35 and Under Crowd

Every generation — boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, and beyond — brings its values and frames of mind to the world. For communicators and marketing pros with deep experience, say 20+ years, that experience isn’t necessarily an advantage when you’re targeting millennials. We don’t think like them. We don’t talk like them. Because we’re not them. …more

Top PR and Storytelling Posts in H1, 2019 (Part 2)

Monday’s post captured five of the 10 top posts this year (so far). Here are the remaining posts.   6. Game of Thrones Depicts the Best of Persuasive Language The final season of Game of Thrones played out this year. Rather than focus on the Iron Throne, we turned our attention to persuasive language, specifically …more

300,000 Books, Let Me In and Pogonophilia

The grab-bag post returns for the first time in 2019. As a refresher, I invented the grab bag as a forum to share three shards on business communications that otherwise couldn’t stand on their own. Here goes.   Who Will Get the Books? Fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld died last month. According to Le Figaro, the …more

The Best Storytelling Posts of 2018 (Part 2)

Breaking the Top 10 storytelling posts for 2018 into two parts, I published the first part last Monday. Here’s the second part, reflecting the diverse dimensions to today’s communications industry.     6. Nine Actions That Torpedo Global PR More companies invest in global PR than ever before. Yet, the missteps from 1990s are still with …more

The Best Storytelling Posts of 2018 (Part 1)

“Best” is such a subjective word. One person’s “best” is another person’s “meh.” Sometimes, the word carries zero meaning as in “You’re the best.” With the New Year philosophizing out of the way, we can skip to the posts that kicked the hardest as determined by me — not the Google Analytics.     1. Tim …more

Best Storytelling Posts for the First Half of 2018, Part II

As explained on Monday, I’m behind schedule in publishing the best posts of H1 this year. Here’s the second half of the list, and two posts related to President Trump made the cut. I believe the word you’re looking for is “restraint.”   .   1. Will the Communications Industry Change Because of President Trump? Since …more