Jeremy Lang puts four words at the top of his website: "I make people care." On Stories That Lead, he explains the test behind them. He built it on a newspaper copy desk: what about this story would make my mom, my partner, and my best friend care?

Jeremy is a communications leader and consultant. He has carried that question from headline writing into bank marketing, the homepage of a new intranet for 350,000 employees, and in-store copy for Nike Basketball. In this conversation, he takes it apart for communicators:

- Why the first question he asks inside any organization is "How do we make money?"

- What Bill Hader taught him about stakeholder feedback: the note is right, but the suggestion is wrong.

- Treating LinkedIn as a channel for your own employees, not only your marketing team.

- The quarterly survey he built to measure whether employees understand where the company is going and their role in it.

- Why AI-written comms can be empty calories, and the three examples he wrote by hand that got an AI to 90 to 95% of the way there.

- Acting authentic versus being authentic, and what a mayor's Knicks bedtime proclamation says about it.

Find Jeremy on LinkedIn (JeremyLang1) and at jeremylangwrites.com.

Stories That Lead is the podcast where we focus on revelation instead of conflict. Hosted by Vernon Ross. storiesthatlead.co

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rosemary Cassie, a senior communications leader, points out how being a fly on the wall of a room you're not in. As

communicators, with or without AI, we've always had to absorb what's going on

without being directly involved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.