Six months and change into 2019, and I’ve written a grand total of one post on President Trump. I’d like to call that progress. I suppose it also reflects fatigue. This is the time of year when I take a breath, scan the body of work this year and select what I consider the best …more
Our 2019 mantra “The story is always there” points to the importance of the discovery process in business communications. Anyone can sit down with Apple’s Tim Cook after Elizabeth Warren has made her case for greater regulation of the tech industry and come away with a story that triggers clicks. It takes much …more
You periodically hear that someone is “good TV.” Bill Hader is good TV (looking forward to binging “Barry” on my next overseas flight). Tina Fey is good TV. Sometimes an event or a product like an Apple iPhone launch is mentioned as good TV. Semiconductors are NOT good TV. The technical nature of a semiconductor …more
Reporting on the storylines in a given Game of Thrones episode doesn’t require much creativity. Littlefinger overplays his hand and gets his due Daenerys Targaryen impersonates Abe Lincoln and frees the slaves The White Walkers were this close to taking over when the Night King makes a tactical error. Instead, the real storytelling comes through …more
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
This headline serves as our mantra for 2019. Every company, even those who fancy “math is fun” buttons, has something interesting to share with the outside world. But these stories rarely sit on a desk with a label that reads “good story with killer anecdote inside.” Instead, it’s up to us as communicators to poke …more
Journalists get anecdotes. PR not so much. A few years back, we analyzed three months’ worth of tech stories in The Economist breaking down the content type by category. It turned out that 17 percent of the articles were anecdotal. . We consistently find that the anecdotal content in business publications ranges from 15 to …more
What does a shovel have to do with storytelling? Everything. Many of our clients come from the B2B tech world where hearts race from inventing a way to increase the spin-torque efficiency of a memory device. While these types of stories hold great importance to the people who use a given technology, they typically aren’t …more
