The Trending Communicator

Why Thought Leadership Deserves to Be a Discipline - with Bill Sherman

What if the phrase that makes so many of us wince was misunderstood from the start? For most people who use it, "thought leader" describes an output: a book, a keynote, a

Defy Organizational Gravity with Synthetic Personas - with Dr. Matt Wilkinson

What happens to a customer's words between the research readout and the campaign launch? Usually they survive in meaning and die in language. Every review cycle sands off

The Profession That Makes Everyone Else Look Great - with Heather Campbell

Try this at your next industry conference: ask a communicator when they last looked at a piece of work and said "that was good," and stopped there. No "but." Chances ar

Authority Intelligence Is Built for People, GEO is for Brands - with Erin Lanuti

Who handles generative engine optimization for you? Not for your company - for you. A brand has an answer to that question: a team, a vendor, a budget line, a dashboard s

The Research PR Couldn't Afford Until AI - with Rich Gallagher

Somewhere along the way, PR research came to mean a survey reverse-engineered to confirm whatever the client had already decided to say. Real research, the slow and expen

Why Human Conversation is the OS for AI - with Sarah Neely

Can you build word of mouth on purpose? Few people are better equipped to answer it than Sarah Neely. She's spent two decades engineering the conversations most brands

You're the Top of the AI Sandwich - with Brian Piper and Matt Wilkinson

If AI writes a better prompt than you can now, what are you still being paid for? In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle is joined by two of his c

AI Forward, Not AI First - with Brian McHale

Plenty of companies have bolted AI onto how they already work and called it transformation. Far fewer have rebuilt the business around it. In this episode of The Trendi

Open your AI Authenticity Loop - with Allison Shapira

Authenticity might be the most abused word in business today. Every AI tool promises to preserve it. Every leadership guru sells it as a brand pillar. And the more it get

The AI-Enabled Archivist and the End of Corporate Amnesia - with Jason Dressel

Companies are racing to stuff AI into everything. They're also throwing away the only thing that would make their AI actually useful. Decades of institutional memory, har

Your Adult Brain Is Your Last Unfair Advantage - with Dr. Michael Netzley

The story you've been told about your aging brain is wrong. Strategic attention peaks in your late 50s. Innovative cognition in your early 60s. Integrative reasoning arou

Judgment Is the New Advantage - with Bo Breuklander

AI transformation isn't a strategy problem. It's a leadership problem. And until CEOs and boards stop asking for an AI strategy and start asking for a change management s

Why AI Risk Is a Communications Problem Now - with Alec Crawford

You don't roll out AI. It's not an ERP system. And yet most organizations are still treating it like a procurement decision, reaching for governance frameworks and compli

Organic Isn't Dead, You Just Stopped Talking to People – with Dorien Morin-van Dam

People keep writing obituaries for organic content. And every time, communicators chase the paid shortcuts instead of doing the work. Now, as AI-generated content floods

Naming is Storytelling, Just Harder - with Scott Milano

Everyone thinks they can name things. Toss some words around in a brainstorm, pick the one that sounds right, hope it passes trademark. But naming done right is storytell

Stockholm Syndrome in PR: The Boutique Uprising - with Barrie Cohen

Does PR have Stockholm syndrome? We're held captive by every disruption that promises to kill us—internet, social media, now AI—and what do we do? Fall in love with each

The Art and Science of Earned Attention - with Stephanie Grober

Authority-building has entered a new era—visibility hinges on context and credibility, and your expertise must be discoverable not just to humans but to machines. In th

AI Debates The Future of Comms - with NotebookLM

**NotebookLM HAS TAKEN OVER THE TRENDING COMMUNICATOR. AGAIN.** Generative AI is shaking up the world of communications—and the debate is on. In this special takeover ep

AI Transformation, or AI Theater? - with Anne Green

Companies love to talk about AI transformation. They've created policies, distributed tools, checked boxes. But behind closed doors, overwhelmed employees are phoning it

Stop Treating AI Like an ERP Implementation - with Chris Gee

Companies keep approaching AI the way they approached every other tech rollout: install it, train on it, expect immediate returns. But AI isn't software. It's imperfect b