Hey folks!

I took a couple of days off this week to unplug and go “glamping” with the kids and some friends. Nothing like a bit of cooking in the outdoors, sitting around the campfire, and an adults-versus-kids soccer game to recharge the batteries!

Despite the short week, there was a great story I’d like to share from the field. It perfectly captures what happens when your leadership is unable to define your North Star for you, but you rely on the DDC Compass anyway and end up looking like a rock star.

Let’s get into it!

Last week I asked how many of the six data sources you typically work with. The results weren’t what I expected.

Coaching clients regularly on Data-Driven Communications, I actually expected three or fewer to dominate. Instead, the top answer was four — which is a good place to be. Work with four of the six common datasets and you're in solid shape!

What got me was "All 6" landing a close second with 7 votes.

My theory (and I could be way off) is that if you read this newsletter and you're the kind of person who clicks on a poll, you're already advanced, or working hard to get there. The folks running on one or two sources probably aren't reading this, and certainly could be too shy to raise their hand in my poll. Just a theory, but I guess we'll see what this week brings.

(Got a different theory? Shoot me a note, I'd love to hear it.)

This week I want to know how many of you have a North Star, a clear and specific goal or objective that your CEO is focused on that you have then built your communications strategy and measurement framework around.

Why do I want to know this? Because this week’s story is about someone who tried to find it, wasn’t able to, and ended up looking like a rock star anyway.

Disclaimer: The story I'm about to share is still unfolding, so names and details have been anonymized, but it's been building for a few weeks now.

A few weeks ago, my colleagues introduced me to Anita (not her real name). They said she really "gets it.” She’s sharp, driven, the kind of person who gets asked to speak at industry events. We hopped on a call, talked through all things data-driven communications, and the energy was great. Anita was all in.

And then she said the thing a lot of people say. "My head is spinning. I need to sit with all this for a minute."

I've learned to be wary of that one. It usually means we've waded out past the point where they can feel the bottom of the pool.

So I pulled us back a little. Forget perfecting all of DDC — let's just follow the Compass and start with the North Star. What are we actually trying to achieve? As luck would have it, Anita had a meeting coming up with her CEO and his chief of staff. She could ask directly. Perfect. We agreed to reconnect after, and see what we were working with.

A couple of weeks later, we caught up, and she showed me exactly why my colleagues said she gets it.

She'd asked the CEO point blank: what's our North Star? And he gave her an answer CEOs give more often than you'd think. "We're just trying to survive."

Anita was a little deflated. She'd taken my advice, asked the direct question, and come back with what felt like nothing.

But that's the wrong way to read it.

A North Star is the thing the business is built around, usually the lifeblood, often the number the CEO's own compensation is tied to. But sometimes there isn't a clear one. Sometimes there's a temporary focus instead: a problem, a threat, an opportunity that's pulled all the attention for now. I call that a comet. It sweeps across the sky, everyone looks up, and for a while it's the most important thing in the room. It won't last forever, but right now, it's everything.

So what do you do with a comet? You use it.

Because "we're just trying to survive" tells you one of two things. Either the strategy is genuinely mid-deliberation, in which case you can afford to wait a beat for direction. Or it's business as usual, and your job is the basics: serve the customers you have, win the ones you don't.

Anita didn't hesitate. "Bingo," she said. "We're competing hard, and we need to keep at it."

Now, Anita's company is a bit unusual. They’re in a highly technical field, and their customers aren't everyday consumers, they're large institutions and government bodies, often across several countries. High stakes, long sales cycles, a handful of relationships that matter enormously. But none of that changes the basic move. She still has colleagues whose job is to bring in revenue and deliver value to customers. That's who she needed to help.

Normally, once you've got your North Star, you move to the East point of the Compass — External Audience — and design a strategy to shift how your key stakeholders think and act. But Anita didn't have a North Star to design around yet. So we went South instead: Star Players. In her case, the heads of the business units responsible for landing and keeping those customers.

And she had a call the very next day with one of them — someone responsible for revenue from a specific set of prospects.

So we worked out what to bring. Anita, being sharp, said: "I know exactly what I'll do. I'll tell him that if he gives me some info and does a bit of prep, I can help him."

I stopped her there. Twenty years in sales taught me that pitch never lands. Nobody — not even a salesperson — wants to hear that in order for a colleague to help them, they first have to do more work on top of their own. No, thanks, I've got enough on my plate. What I want is a colleague who shows up and contributes without me having to spell out exactly what I need.

We're all just trying to survive. We've all got a job to do. None of us has time to do someone else's.

If you want something from your colleagues, they have to see the value first. They have to watch you take the first step and bring something before you ask for anything back. You might not nail it on the first try — but they'll see you took a real swing, and they'll see you got close enough that they'll know exactly what you could do with a little input from them.

So it ends up being the same conversation Anita was planning, but flipped. You don't show up empty-handed asking to be let in. You bring a bottle of wine, you knock, and you watch your neighbor whisk you inside.

Here's what the bottle of wine actually was…

Instead of pulling every clip that mentioned her company (which is a PR pro’s usual move) we used Meltwater to build something her colleague could actually use: a competitive battlecard for one of his target markets. Two prompts and about thirty minutes of prep. We asked Meltwater's AI assistant, Mira, to write us a detailed brief, then handed that brief to Claude to run.

What came back wasn't a coverage summary. It was a 15-slide intelligence report: who the real buyers were in that market, what they cared about, what they were worried about, how the competition was positioned and where it was exposed, the objections the sales team would hit and how to answer each one — every claim sourced. Thirty minutes of work, and she had something her colleague would've paid a consultant for.

A few days later, she emailed us. She'd walked into the meeting, put the report on the table, and “looked like a rockstar.” Her words.

So here's the lesson.

Anita didn't earn that seat by capturing 100% of her company's media coverage. She didn't do it by walking in with a dashboard of how many mentions they got last quarter. She earned it by producing intelligence about what her customers were saying — their problems, their worries, the things her company actually has answers for.

That's the whole game, and it's the thing most comms teams get backwards. You can spend a fortune perfecting your clip count…hand-verifying every mention, chasing every last article, and you’d still be flying blind.

Because all that effort only tells you what you said. It tells you nothing about whether anyone read it, finished it, or felt any differently afterward.

It's like transcribing one side of a phone call and calling it the conversation. You've captured every word your side spoke — and you still have no idea what was said back.

The takeaway: measure what changed, not how much you captured. Capturing your coverage proves you talked. Understanding your audience proves you're worth listening to.

That's the difference between the communicator who reports activity and the one who gets pulled into the room and asked, "So what should we do?"

Anita went looking for a North Star and didn't find one. Didn't matter. She found a comet, showed up with actionable intelligence, and now she's the person her colleagues want in the room.

Earning Your Seat is what happens when three communicators who've actually made the leap from order-taker to trusted advisor sit down and unpack how. No theory, no fluff — just honest conversations about what it actually takes to earn your seat at the table.

I co-host with two communicators I learn from every single week:

🎙️ Genevieve Brammall — Head of PR at News Corp Australia. Gen is the reason I have a working definition of "effortless impact reporting." She's the kind of practitioner who turns a 30-second answer into a framework you'll use for the next decade.

🎙️ Stephanie Lerdall — Director of Communications at Morningstar. Steph brings the strategic operator's lens — how to translate comms work into the language executives actually respond to, and how to build the internal alliances that make it stick.

If you've been enjoying this newsletter, the podcast is the audio companion. Same topics, deeper conversations, with two of the sharpest comms minds I know pushing back on me in real time.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts →