Definition

🎵 It's happened again, it's happened agaaain, someone's built a corporate tool to make you sound like a corporate tool, it's happened again 🎵 Anthropic have gone down the same road as Apple Intelligence, offering you a crossroad of options for how your writing can sound. The problem? 🤴 Unless you're writing a legal letter to the King, you really don't need to be making things 'Formal' (and even then...) 🤯 It's confusing when the different things you write sound wildly different 😶 Whatever option you choose, it won't be your brand's tone of voice - it'll be the same style as everyone else using AI Here's more on why Apple Intelligence (and other AI re-writers) aren't all that: https://lnkd.in/ebrsrisn

Vision is a powerful business tool. It articulates where you want to take your brand. If you do it well: - you'll get a clear lens through which your people can make decisions - it'll help you decide what to do and what not do to - it'll unite your whole company behind a common purpose. Success starts with knowing what you stand for. Our Brand Alignment partner, Gary Moss, has some key tips on getting your brand vision right.

Want to win big this festive season? 🎉 No, we're not flogging Euromillions tickets. We are giving away something almost as good though. Want the chance to win one of our services for free? Enter our Season’s Treat-ings draw. Our lucky winner will get to pick a service, of their choice, no strings attached. Enter the draw now (link in the comments).

Let's talk about Apple's new ad. It's for Apple Intelligence, a tool that's apparently going to help us 'Write smarter'. What's your favourite part of your job? Your lovely colleagues? The fulfilling work? Just picking up the payslip to survive another month? Whatever it is, we’re willing to bet it isn’t “having to use super formal business language”. The buzzwords. The acronyms. The endless, over-complicated sentences – like everything you write is a plea to a benevolent uncle in a Jane Austen novel to release some of your funds forthwith. In which case, Apple Intelligence is going to be a mixed bag for you. Our Senior Writer, Chris L., gives us the good news. And the bad. (Spoiler alert: it’s mainly bad.)

We caught up with our Director of Science and Engineering, Andrew Bartlett, to hear what keeps him passionate about STEM, his career highlights, and his tips for staying ahead in the industry. Andrew’s journey began in the car industry after studying Metallurgy & Material Science. His interest in promoting tech came later, when his company started working closely with a PR agency. That’s when he thought, “I could do it better.” And we agree. Andrew then made the bold move to switch careers and start fresh in STEM PR. And the rest, as they say, is history.

“Any sizable company operating without an internal AI tool is already behind the curve.” That’s straight from Meta’s Product Director, Esther Crawford. If you haven’t made AI part of your daily workflow yet, now’s the time. Worried about security, privacy, or which models to use? We’ve got you covered. We’ll tailor a demo AI suite to your brand, giving you the world’s most powerful language, image, audio and vision AI models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and AWS, in one place – including OpenAI’s new reasoning model, o1. Click through to see o1 use case suggestions for your team.

We talk about it a lot, but it’s worth saying again – clear comms are important. But how do you make it happen? It's all about your culture. If your whole company doesn't (at the risk of being insanely cliché) live and breathe it (told you), it won't spread and you won't feel the benefits of it. At our Duty Calls webinar, Anne Marie Cooklin, Head of Customer and Healthcare Comms at Bupa, shared her top tips on building a culture of clear comms.

Brand alignment is about delivering your vision, inside and outside your organisation, through communications and experience. Failing to do so can be catastrophic. Our Brand Alignment Partner, Gary Moss shares six steps to align you brand, turning strategy into action. Not sure how aligned your brand is? Take our brand alignment quiz. In only two minutes, you’ll get a score and personalised advice – link in the comments.

Writing in your brand’s tone of voice can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Stick to the company style, and you end up writing in a way that doesn’t feel right. That can mess with your job satisfaction. But go off-script, and you risk an inconsistent brand voice. And let’s be clear – consistency matters when you’re building a brand that sticks. When your writing is all over the place, customers get confused. One voice on your blog, another in customer support, and a different one on your website? They won’t know what your brand stands for – and that can make you seem less trustworthy. A brand needs to sound the same across every channel if you want to build trust and loyalty. Without that, you can forget about turning first-time customers into loyal ones. But don’t stress. Matt Boothman, our Senior Writer has a good idea on how to write like your brand without feeling like a drone.

It’s a big night for us. We’ve been shortlisted for Large Consultancy of the Year at the PRCA Awards. Wish us luck. 🤞 We’re still on a high after winning Best B2B PR Campaign at the Prolific North Marketing Awards – let’s see if we can add another trophy to the shelf.