Hey folks!

I was very sad to have missed Meltwater Summit on Tour in Sydney last week.

Australia will always be home for me, and our clients there are some of the sharpest data-driven communicators I get to work with, and Meltwater had real news to share — new partnerships, new reputation intelligence updates, the kind of conversations I genuinely love being in the room for.

I'll be honest, I did think I was going to go to Sydney, but I chose to sit it out for a good reason… My son’s elementary school graduation!

The event wasn’t anything extravagant, but it is a core memory for me, my son and our whole family. I’m sure Summit would have been awesome, but I can’t say it rises to core memory status for a dad and/or his son.🙂

One of the unexpected hits of our DDC Run Club sessions every Thursday has been the live polls. Quick questions, four answers, results on screen in real time — and somehow they end up being the thing people DM me about afterwards. "I had no idea everyone else was struggling with that." "I thought we were the only ones."

So we're bringing the concept here.

Each week, I'll ask one quick question about the things that keep comms leaders up at night. The kind of question you might not answer publicly on LinkedIn, but you'd answer honestly in a room full of peers. We'll publish the anonymous results in the following week's edition.

No login. No friction. One tap. Two seconds. And over time, we build a real picture of how the comms profession actually operates — not how the conference panels say we do.

Let's start with one that ties to today's lesson.

The DDC framework is built around six sources of data. Each one tells you something different about your audience, your market, or your business — and the best comms teams blend them together to inform strategy, track performance, and prove impact.

Here's what each source covers:

When we built the Data-Driven Communications Playbook, we weren't trying to invent something new. We were trying to name something most communicators already feel but can't quite articulate — the gap between having data and using it strategically.

Seven chapters. Each one closing a different gap. But before any of the chapters, the playbook starts with a distinction almost nobody is making properly: the difference between the three things data is actually for.

There are three uses of data when it comes to communications, analytics, and measurement. Most comms teams are only using one of them — at best — and they're doing it at the wrong time.

Here's what I see in the data from 500+ communications professionals who've taken the DDC Maturity Assessment:

The 92% who haven't reached Level 4 aren't stuck because they don't have data. They're drowning in it. Media monitoring, social listening, web analytics, surveys, dashboards on top of dashboards. They're stuck because nobody has taught them the difference between the three things data is actually for.

So let's break it down. (The playbook goes deeper on each of these in chapters 2, 4, and 6 — but here's the foundation.)

Research is the use of data before a decision is made. Specifically, to understand the audience better, the landscape better, and the business problem better, so that you can design the right strategy.

This is where most comms teams skip a step. They jump straight to tactics. "We need more press. We need a bigger social presence. We need a campaign." But they haven't asked the question that comes before that one: what does the business actually need to be true, and what do our audiences currently believe, and what's the gap between those two things?

Research is about combining three inputs:

Once you have those three, you can make much more strategic decisions about what your communications should actually do.

Once you've set a strategy that's rooted in research and tied to a business problem, the next use of data is measurement.

Measurement is what you do in real time, as close to real time as possible, while the strategy is in motion. You're watching your inputs — the things you're doing — and you're watching the outputs as the world picks them up. Are you showing up where you said you would? At the frequency you planned? Is the message landing the way you intended?

Measurement is not evaluation. It's the live read. The dashboard that helps you adjust course while there's still time to adjust.

Evaluation is the third use of data, and it's the one almost nobody is doing properly.

After the campaign, you compare your performance metrics — the things you controlled — against the perception you were trying to create, and then you overlay that with the business data. Did the perception actually shift? Did behavior follow? Did the business feel the impact?

Perception data takes time to collect, and perception takes time to change. If you start posting on LinkedIn differently today, you're looking at one to three months before you can measure a real perception shift in any of the five channels — organic news, organic social, search, LLMs, or primary research.

Evaluation is the through-line. What we did → how audiences reacted → what the business did as a result.

Here's what proper evaluation sounds like:

That's the loop. That's what the 8% are doing.

While most comms teams are stuck trying to justify an increase in share of voice to a CFO whose pipeline is down, or claiming three hundred million dollars in ad value equivalent from a viral moment that nobody in the business can connect to revenue — the 8% are using all three of these techniques, in the right way, at the right time.

The hard part is the discipline. The data itself is free and readily available, no matter which vendor you use or what's in your tech stack.

The 8% aren't there because they have better tools. They're there because they've built the muscle to ask different questions at different stages.

If you want to know where you actually stand on this, the DDC Maturity Assessment is built for exactly this. It takes 15 minutes. It tells you whether you're a Consumer, a Planner, a Storyteller, or a Visionary — and what the specific moves are to get to the next stage.

Meltwater's research team analyzed 9.5 million LinkedIn citations across 16 B2B categories — every time ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and the other LLMs pulled a LinkedIn source into an answer. Two findings sat with me.

The first: LinkedIn is the second most cited source in AI-generated answers, behind only YouTube.

The second: 75% of those LinkedIn citations were individual people. Only 25% were company pages. And more than half of the cited members had fewer than 10,000 followers.

For two decades, executive thought leadership lived on the "nice-to-have" side of the comms budget. The CEO's LinkedIn was a vanity project. Something you'd help with if you had time after the press release.

That era is over.

When buyers ask AI assistants about your category, AI is overwhelmingly citing people, not logos. Expertise, not reach. Individuals with under 10,000 followers, not corporate accounts.

This is a comms problem, not a marketing problem. Getting your executives genuinely discoverable on LinkedIn — with a real voice, real expertise, real perspective — isn't a brand exercise anymore. It's how your audience finds out you exist when they ask the machine.

This is the same loop. Research first: what do your audiences believe, what are they asking AI, where does your category currently live in those answers? Then measurement during execution: are we doing the right things, are we doing enough, are we hitting our activity goals? Then evaluation: did your visibility actually shift in the channels that matter now?

If you're trying to figure out where your brand stands in LLMs, the Meltwater Intelligence Hub is where we're publishing the research as we run it — AI visibility in higher ed, in sunscreen, in airlines, in luxury. It's the closest thing I've seen to a public benchmark for how brands actually show up when buyers ask AI.

If you want to know more about Summit on Tour in Sydney, be sure to follow my friends, Upali, Ross and Dave. They regularly share updates about upcoming events and have some fantastic pics and round-ups of the announcements and updates from the event coming soon.

The good news: there are two more Summits on Tour where I will be there in person. Singapore and London. I would love to see you there!

Thursday, August 27, 2026
9 am to 6 pm
Pan Pacific Orchard, Singapore

Thursday, October 1, 2026
8:45 am to 6 pm
22 Bishopsgate, London UK

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 →