Everyone thinks they can name things. Toss some words around in a brainstorm, pick the one that sounds right, hope it passes trademark. But naming done right is storytelling compressed to its most essential form, and getting it wrong costs more than most organizations want to admit. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host…

What if sustainable growth isn’t about becoming the biggest player in the market? Agencies triple in size and lose their soul. They chase national footprints and abandon the community relationships that made them valuable. Meanwhile, regional firms with deep roots are building something holding companies can’t replicate. In this episode, host Dan Nestle sits down…

Does PR have Stockholm syndrome? We’re held captive by every disruption that promises to kill us—internet, social media, now AI—and what do we do? Fall in love with each threat, scramble to prove relevance, then wait for the next existential crisis. In this episode, Dan Nestle sits down with Barrie Cohen, founder of Barrie Cohen…

Authority-building has entered a new era—visibility hinges on context and credibility, and your expertise must be discoverable not just to humans but to machines. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle explores these seismic changes with Stephanie Grober, Marketing and PR Director at the Horowitz Agency and a true trailblazer in legal…

**NotebookLM HAS TAKEN OVER THE TRENDING COMMUNICATOR. AGAIN.** Generative AI is shaking up the world of communications—and the debate is on. In this special takeover episode of The Trending Communicator, Abel and Iris weigh the promise and pitfalls of AI adoption for comms professionals. Is AI truly a strategic superpower, or does it risk eroding…

Companies love to talk about AI transformation. They’ve created policies, distributed tools, checked boxes. But behind closed doors, overwhelmed employees are phoning it in with AI slop, leaders can’t tell the difference, and the workforce is too exhausted to learn anything new. That’s not transformation. That’s theater. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host…

Companies keep approaching AI the way they approached every other tech rollout: install it, train on it, expect immediate returns. But AI isn’t software. It’s imperfect by design, doesn’t follow a predictable implementation curve, and the gap between what leadership promised the board and what’s actually happening is becoming a serious problem. In this episode…

You can’t communicate your way out of a values problem. Yet every day, communications leaders are expected to do precisely that. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with ⁠Emil Hill⁠, principal of The Creshiem Group and a public affairs strategist with 25+ years navigating the intersection of business, government,…

Your customers are changing because of AI. But so are you—whether you realize it or not. Host Dan Nestle welcomes back Mark Schaefer, whose new book How AI Changes Your Customers reveals a transformation most people aren’t prepared for. As one of 300 futurists who contributed to Elon University’s Being Human in 2035 study, Mark…

You can be the smartest person in the room, but if no one knows you or your point of view, you don’t have authority. This “authority gap” is why most professionals struggle to earn attention, build trust, and gain influence. In this episode, host Dan Nestle sits down with Amanda Russell, author of The Influencer…