Mike Tomlin spent his NFL coaching career proving that leadership is less about what you say and more about what you repeatedly do. The Super Bowl champion coach was the featured speaker at a Sept. 30 fundraiser in Durham, where he joined North Carolina Central University men’s basketball coach LeVelle Moton to raise awareness and…
The press release used to have one job: help a journalist decide if a story is worth covering. That job still matters, but now it’s not the only one. Today a press release can also shape how AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity understand a company, summarize an issue or compare…
What You Need to Know: Building relationships locally and beyond is most valuable when those efforts continue long after a facility opens, not just during the pre-launch phase. Manufacturing growth across the Carolinas is creating real opportunity — and raising understandable community questions. Companies that acknowledge both are better positioned to earn lasting credibility. Manufacturers that become part of their communities in a real way — as…
Last November, on a quiet Sunday morning spent watching CBS Sunday Morning, I heard Ken Burns say something that stopped me cold. Sitting across from John Dickerson, Burns was previewing his new PBS documentary, “The American Revolution” a six-part, 12-hour epic nearly a decade in the making. He called the American Revolution the most significant event since the birth of Jesus Christ. And then he observed that the second…
Okay, I’ll admit it: I can’t help myself. Show me any story about modern life and my brain immediately cross-references it with the Seinfeld episode it most closely resembles. It’s a reflex, a curse, and apparently the unavoidable fate of anyone who came of age in the 1990s. My wife rolls her eyes. My colleagues have learned to live with it. So when “The Journal.” podcast featured a small…
Let me be clear up front: I’m not an artificial intelligence engineer. I don’t build models. I build visibility. Generative AI is the newest – and most consequential – environment where visibility plays out. There was a time when every leadership team obsessed over one question: “Where do we rank on Google?” Search engine optimization (SEO) became a business imperative because organizations understood something fundamental: If you didn’t show up in search, you effectively didn’t exist. We are standing…
If you ask CEOs what’s standing between their company and growth, they’ll talk about capital, competition, maybe technology. But ask what keeps them up at night—it’s people. In North Carolina, we’re living in one of the fastest-growing economies in the country. According to the North Carolina Department of Commerce, the state is projected to add more than 445,000 new jobs by 2030—nearly double the national…
The U.S. men’s hockey team should be riding a massive high. An Olympic gold in overtime against our Canadian hockey rivals: That’s the kind of brand momentum that sells tickets, strengthens sponsorship deals, and builds the next generation of fans. Instead, the U.S. men’s hockey team is dealing with a completely avoidable PR mess –…
In public relations, staying ahead means anticipating how people want to receive and engage with information. For years, “new media” reshaped our field as blogs, social platforms, and influencers opened doors beyond traditional gatekeepers. But within this digital transformation, one medium has surged ahead: the podcast. What started as a niche audio format has become a mainstream…
Public Engagement Isn’t About Getting People to Agree In my years of experience working with organizations on complex projects – regulatory approvals, rezonings, and economic-development incentives – one truth has become clear: public engagement isn’t about getting people to agree with you. It’s about making them feel heard. That distinction matters. Fundamentally, public engagement…
On April 28, a social media post from the Raleigh Police Teamsters ignited a firestorm. The claim: Smithfield’s Chicken ‘N Bar-B-Q employees in Garner, North Carolina, had sung N.W.A.’s “F*** tha Police” while officers dined, forcing them to leave hungry. Within hours, the story exploded across FOX News, the Drudge Report, and the Associated Press, thrusting a beloved local restaurant into the center of America’s heated debate on race and policing.
Engaging local concerns directly — whether through town halls, direct outreach, or social media — allows businesses to demonstrate they are partners in progress, not outsiders imposing change.
