Communications Insight

Hi–I’ve been exploring both of these services, trying to get familiar with how to use them and how they might be helpful to me and/or to my clients.
I joined the WSJ community several weeks ago and at first was enthusiastic, then haven’t had time to go back and really work with it. Just recently joined [...]

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The other day I was talking to my very smart client, Chloe Jackson, over at WaveMaker. WaveMaker has an easy programming environment for app development for the cloud.
Chloe has been with the company for several years and is very well-versed in all things-cloud related. She and I started talking about companies that are recession-friendly and [...]

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Apparently last year Pepsi reportedly spent over $1 million dollars to redesign its logo, hiring the Arnell Group to do so. Yesterday, Gawker, made public an internal document, supposedly written by the design team to explain/justify their redesign.
The 27-page document, which very well could be an Internet hoax, explains how the logo redesign is [...]

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I’ve been wanting to post on branding–Business Week just came out with it’s annual Top 100 Brands story–but it just doesn’t seem relevant somehow!But, it is. The stronger brands will weather the storm better, and come out the other end that much stronger. We all know that. It’s never a good time to STOP investing [...]

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Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has a post today about the practice of PR in today’s blog-intensive world. Basically he posits that PR professionals are not keeping up with nor understanding how to work with bloggers and new media, and are consequently delivering less and less value to their clients. The whole post is worth [...]

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The Reputation Institute, a private consultancy dedicated to corporate reputation management, has just published its 2008 Global Pulse Report which attempts to measure corporate reputations. A synopsis of the U.S. study is available for download at the Institutes’s website and it makes for interesting reading by anyone in the business of advising clients about reputation [...]

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So, what are the lessons any executive can take from these “D” interviews (see my post) and generalize to their own interview preparation?
1. Preparation is paramount. Before going into any interview, you need to review your business top to bottom and become familiar with all the relevant issues and perspectives. Specifically review all public information [...]

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A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to attend the annual “D: All Things Digital” conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal and co-produced by preeminent technology journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. The format for “D” is somewhat unique in that, instead of executive keynotes or ‘fireside chats” that are typical at [...]

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Today I sat in on an interesting conversation between a group of public relations professionals and a blogger from a leading business publication. As typical, the journalist began to complain about all the misguided pitches he receives from PR folks.Someone asked, “what’s your favorite” pitch to receive. The answer was a stark reminder of the [...]

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Today I had a client ask me for advice on giving great product demonstrations. She wanted to know if her demos were effective and was looking for ways to improve. She’s a smart executive for asking the question.Product demonstrations are one of the most necessary communications tool for any tech company; software, hardware or online [...]

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