Author: Shaun Bernstein

Is the internet over? I was just chatting with a very wise friend yesterday about the recently-announced changes to Meta. Fact checking on social media may quickly become a distant memory. The very conversation was wild to me. I did my journalism training in the days before social media became an unofficial news source for the world. At the time, if you wanted your news you went to Twitter. However, you knew to official feeds from people who were actually in the room and could report in real time. Today Twitter, now X, has largely morphed into Elon Musk’s social...

What do people think that you do for work? How do people think that you help others? What do they understand about the services that you provide, or the skills that you have to offer? It’s an interesting question, and one that professionals and business owners don’t think about nearly enough. The truth is that we (usually) know what we do for work. We understand how we help people. We get our business, and then we wonder why people aren’t bursting down our door. The reason is simple: they’re not in our heads! A real world example In my past life...

This is my first blog in far, far too long. More months than I am proud of for sure. I make no excuses for it, but it’s always interesting to look back and ask why. Why would I, a professional blogger, have allowed my own blog to lapse? The truth is that I fell into the same trap that so many of my clients fall into as well. I got busy. At the start of the year, I set goals for the Write Stuff that seemed lofty even to me, but I dutifully wrote them on the whiteboard in my office and stare at them daily. It’s September, and I’m on track to meet them if...

How many times have you seen a website and felt nothing? What made that website fail to stand out? You’re searching for information, and your search engine sends you somewhere that it thinks might be helpful. You browse through the site, and the information is there, but it’s a completely unmemorable experience. There’s absolutely nothing to stand out. You may walk away with what you need, but unless you saved or even printed specific pages, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember where you found the information. That’s the challenge of having a...