Every great B2B story is told the same way a journalist would tell it.

Everything is storytelling and narrative. Message is the spine. Whether it's for our own company or for a client, I spend a lot of time on it. What do we need to say, and how does that change depending on the audience? Internal communications is one register; external stakeholders and media are another. The requirement to simplify, to create a story that demonstrates why someone should care and why it matters to them, stays constant.

The work is figuring out how to simplify until whoever you are talking to understands it. If the comprehension isn't there, you have done a lot of nothing. The discipline is finding the moment when somebody asks themselves why should I care, and answering it before they walk away.

The channel comes from the audience. I'm a firm believer in the power of LinkedIn. A corporate page will always push the news, but I always think back to the leader. The news should start with them, because that gives the opportunity to speak in a personal first-person voice and express more emotion than a company post or blog. I steer clients toward conversational tone over corporate tone.

We're inundated by content every day. When something feels stiff or impersonal, the filters go up. When it feels like it's coming from a human, when we hear I care, I believe, we do this, we are naturally attuned to it. Active verbs. Demonstrate the action. Speak from the heart, with grammar checked and the right internal sign-offs, but in your own words.

A design client brought me the topic. Breast cancer awareness month was coming up, and the data is clear: the more women who get screened early, the more lives are saved. The screening experience is also poorly designed and carries a lot of stigma. She had the rough idea, and we worked through what it could look like as a contributed piece. I don't tend to call these op-eds because the work is rooted in experience and expertise. Fast Company loved the idea. The piece took three months to develop and went live last week.

The amplification was its own piece of work. I asked her to let the piece run live on Fast Company's LinkedIn first, then share it on her own platform with an additional top layer adding context, passion, and a clear call to action. Her own life has been affected by breast cancer in her family, so she was able to explain why she had written the piece in a way that no one else could. Thought leadership has to inspire someone to do something, to change how they think, how they act, or to take an explicit next step. Her additional 200-word framing made the piece much more poignant. Her agency then shared the post, and the cascade continued from there. The piece on its own is beautiful. With the context, it lands.

When the work is contributed thought leadership, the ideas need to stay close to the person who has them. Don't dilute the message through a corporate filter. The strongest pieces are the ones that sound unmistakeably like the person whose name is on them.

We do guarantee outputs, though I think of them as inputs: a certain number of pitch efforts, press releases, campaigns we'll drop, speaking gigs. On a quarterly basis we give clients a level of confidence on the activity. We score ourselves against those KPIs.

PR is genuinely hard to quantify. Everyone wants share of voice, reach, engagement statistics. LinkedIn doesn't even feed into Coverage Book, one of our platforms, and yet you've heard me talk at length about how important LinkedIn is. There are gaps. Clients who ask for those stats get them, and they also get the insights layer alongside. We can tell them this byline ran in this publication, then went out in this newsletter that hit this many inboxes that morning, and our reporter and editor relationships tell us when a piece lands in their top five for the week, even though those numbers won't be published. That insight goes back to the client. Where it makes sense we will compare an earned panel slot against the cost of sponsoring that same slot. The harder the numbers are to find, the more important communication becomes. You have to put the insight back into the client's hands so they can see what the activity has done.

Everyone defaults to thinking about the customer in terms of new business and outreach. Retention is the other half of the equation, and in an uncertain economy you can sink yourself fast without it. I place a more significant emphasis on the current client base. How do we refine and build out and expand the relationships we already have? How many one-to-one face-to-face meetings did we have at this week's event? How many in-person moments did we create for clients to speak from? Those are stats I report back to the team. They are at least as important.

We spend significant time on the messaging before anyone has to write anything. We get inside the client's stance on a topic, draft pre-written commentary or even a byline, and bring it to them. Not everyone loves to write. Honestly most people don't. But we'll deliver eight hundred words, or six hundred and ask them to help us get it to eight hundred, and the response is they really know me, they listened, this sounds pretty good, I wouldn't mind having my name on this.

We've coached them through the process and built their confidence. They get the first piece out, and the second feels easier, and increasingly they're willing to participate in spokesperson sessions and to trust the quick-turn commentary because they've spent enough time with us that I can draft something they can sign off on quickly. The journalistic background helps; I learn how each person sounds and weave that voice into anything written on their behalf.

More C-suite leaders are willing to embody what I'd call a different kind of thought leadership. A willingness to be vulnerable, to tap into something professionally adjacent to their role, and to weave that in. Senior people coming to life in a new way. It used to be the norm for founders and start-ups, and I'm now seeing it in agencies, holding companies, and networks. The journalist in me thinks: be a real person, connect with people on a human level, and everything else follows.