Tag: the wall street journal

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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

Constructing an Innovative Message … with Another Company’s Technology

I’ve always viewed Intel as the gold standard when it comes to communications in the electronics sector. They know how to translate technology into narratives that land. They know how to leverage owned media to fling warning shots to the chosen few. And they’re always striving to put a face on the company, whether that’s …more

The Top 10 Storytelling Posts of 2020

What a weird year. Being the mug-is-half-full type, I believe 2021 will (eventually) bring us some semblance of normalcy. As for the past year, I could have devoted every post to the antics from the White House. Exercising restraint that would have made my mom proud, I found plenty of other topics to parachute into. …more

How the Hell Does This Trader Joe’s Story Land in The Wall Street Journal?

The Journal published a feature story about people using Twitter to deliver updates on the lines of shoppers waiting to get into Trader Joe’s. As the first step in reverse-engineering the “why” behind the Journal devoting significant real estate to the topic, we ask the macro questions: Does the story reveal something new about the …more

This Is How Many Executives View Anecdotes

Particularly in Silicon Valley where most executives started their careers on the engineering side. Coming from a technical orientation, they tend to think of anecdotes as inconsequential and yes, a bit fluffy. Yet, the science suggests that PR should be sourcing anecdotal content as part of media outreach. We leaned on a couple interns to …more

Putting a Face on a Company

Check out the headline in The Wall Street Journal last month. “Apple Teams with Jack Ma” The headline didn’t say “Apple Teams with Alibaba.” Why? And don’t say because the word “Alibaba” wouldn’t fit in the space for the headline. It turns out that both words take up seven characters. I think it’s because the …more

What the Hell Was Huawei Thinking?

You’ve heard the phrase, “read the room.” Huawei can’t read the room. In spite of an in-house communications team that includes talented pros from the West, they continue to make amateur mistakes. The latest comes in the form of an open letter to the U.S. media published last week in The Wall Street Journal. If …more

Revisiting Trump’s Conversational Language

Roughly two years ago, I wrote a post about then-candidate Trump and how he used conversational language as a differentiator. Given his communications since moving into the White House, I decided to dust off the point of view that riffs on a Wall Street Journal column. Unfortunately, skipping to the end, bombastic did win the …more