Is that your final answer? Why the hell were we playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire at a comms conference? (It was Who Wants To Be A Social Media-naire, to be completely accurate, tenuous pun fans). We were digging into the lore of our host city, Nottingham, at the LGcomms Academy event to find out what makes it special and unique. We've done a bit of dissecting and discussing lore right here - there's a webinar you can watch back if you missed that. But what are the practical building...
28 days ago • 2 min read
The underrated art of acknowledgement My brother does nature conservation. No real reason for you to know or care about that, but he does. What I'd completely forgotten about was how a letter from Sir David Attenborough had played a large part in that, until he was recounting the story around the great man's 100th birthday celebrations a few weeks ago. When he was 12, Paul sent him a letter about reptiles he was rescuing near our house (our shared bedroom was always full of snakes and lizard...
2 months ago • 2 min read
They don't teach you that at college No matter what type of comms qualification or experience you have, some things you just can't train for. You may have either got along to the UnAwards Masterclass event in Birmingham (well done if you bagged a ticket) or been able to join the online webinar last week. And, as always, it was brilliant to hear the stories behind the award-winning work - how it was planned, created and executed. (By the way, one of the top comms hacks out there is the Comms...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Sell the benefits, not the features It's always there. Everyone knows it. But no-one says it. I've just finished a messaging refresh with a national charity. It covered a really important initiative for them, one they wanted employers to jump on board with. On the surface, there was nothing hugely wrong with what already existed. But then I put on the glasses of the intended audience, which always helps to reveal the most important factor - will they care? There was plenty in there about what...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Real people. Reel results Timing is everything, isn't it? I've been knee-deep in a social media review for a fire service this month, with brilliant comms data guru Alex Waddington. And having analysed their most successful posts, we found their top content featured real people - staff, volunteers, animals (always animals). Everyday hero content, as Alex terms it. Then dropped a brilliant study to explain why. Emplifi's recent research on Facebook Reels showed: Videos that include human...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Praise the lore - storytelling takes a new shape First I winced. By the end I was punching the air in agreement When this LinkedIn post went semi-viral last week, I was ready to jack it all in and retrain as a dentist (always fancied it for some reason). Death to Storytelling is not the sort of headline you need to see when much of your work revolves around the subject. But as with everything, times change and things evolve. Pretty Little Marketer (LinkedIn) Lore has become the new buzzword...
5 months ago • 2 min read
'Trusted voices on social media open closed doors' How's your campaign or project going? Feel like you're knocking on a brick wall? Maybe it's time to look at who's doing the knocking (not that sort, mucky mind). The Edelman Trust Barometer is a report that emerges at the start of each year to largely tell us we don't really trust politicians and billionaires - who knew? But beyond the headlines, there can be some interesting nuance and the headline above 👆 was one of the more interesting...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Did Brooklyn-gate help us see through 'authentic'? Before last week, I knew very little about Brooklyn Beckham, other than why he's called Brooklyn (which is a bit weird now I think about it). So the chances of this being a psuedo-gossip column hot take on the family feud are nil. But the whole drama surfaced a question that had been troubling me anyway: what 'authentic' really means now. This piece on the Beckhams fallout highlighted how 'authentic' has now become a comms commodity in its...
6 months ago • 3 min read
Your 2026 superpower? Not to speak like AI Happy New Year - how's 2026 treating you so far? If you escaped a broken-down car, a trip to hospital and snow on the first day back, then you're already doing better than me. So, what does the second quarter of the millenium hold then? Of all the guides to 2026, seeing talking like a human being described as a "linguistic superpower" really did feel like we'd stepped through the looking glass. We talk about sounding human in comms all the time - but...
6 months ago • 3 min read
