Messaging is the single most important part of any communication strategy. Get that wrong and everything else falls apart like a house of cards. Currently, the Dutch and UK governments are showing two radically different approaches: one structured, one not. Let’s take a look.

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A plurality of stories will create new political and social discursive spaces from which new realities can grow. But first they have to be written.


Weapons of Choice (2016)

“Were he around now, Foucault would likely remind us that history is a series of fictions — the most interesting thing about history being not what happened, but how people were brought to think what had happened.”

After the farce of the Brexit referendum, the US presidential election, and the absurd fallouts of both, it should be clear that today’s political leaders are skilled in writing ‘winning fictions’ from any squalid discourse they choose. Read more …

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Storytelling Tips

In Five Rules of Storytelling, Jon Favreau, Obama’s former Director of Speechwriting, helps improve your speechwriting skills. But with some unpacking, Favreau’s advice can also help you become a more effective storyteller, regardless of your discipline. Check out this post on LinkedIn where it gathered over 30,000 views. Or download the

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The Holy Grail of Communication

Five tried and tested communication principles to help digital communicators design adaptive content. In my follow-up post, I’ll share my Seven Building Blocks of adaptive content design. These should kick off thoughts about how agencies and in-house teams could make their digital content creation processes that much smarter.

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The_Hero__s_Journey_by_Dunlavey-BW

Hero’s Journey image above excerpted from Action Philosophers! © Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente.

All storytelling has inherent structures. But for the most part, communicators and creators employ just one.  It really is time to move beyond the Hero’s Journey. Here are four alternatives to get you in the mood.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate

As a rule, every business discipline has tried and tested processes and techniques others can understand, learn, and even apply for themselves. These give credence to that discipline. Communication is often seen as an exception to the rule — its success determined by the art of storytelling. In reality, it’s not true. Welcome to GAME, a four step process to improve the quality of your communications, and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling.

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Why Great Stories are Important in Business: the Essential Truths

by Steve Seager

Despite all the hype on storytelling, articulating why stories are so important in business can still be tough. It helps to make the distinction between story and communication a little clearer. Down below is a write-up drawn from the introduction of a workshop on story and communication I recently gave … We can communicate in […]

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Christian Bluemelhuber New Brand Marketing & Communication Model: ‘Porn, Style, and Series’

by Steve Seager

While at EuroComm this year I grabbed 5 minutes with one of our most provocative speakers, Christian Bluemelhuber, Professor for Communication at the University of Arts in Berlin. In the quick interview below I asked him about his presentation on his wonderfully different marketing and communication model for brands. Although I haven’t yet had a […]

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10 Essential Content Marketing Questions and Answers

by Steve Seager

Is content marketing finally coming of age? Despite the backlash, I’d argue it is. From what I’ve seen to date, our backlashers (ahem) are asking the wrong questions – and definitely not focused on making their content great. If you’re serious about your content marketing you need to be able to answer the essential questions management […]

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The Anatomy of Great Content

by Steve Seager

Down below is a free PDF download of The Anatomy of Great Content – a content marketing model for both marketers and strategic communicators. It explains what makes for successful content marketing content. It sounds obvious, but there’s two words in content marketing. Over the past couple of years consulting I’ve noticed that marketers tend to […]

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