Insights
Notes on visibility, reputation, and the new shape of B2B trust
Editorial notes and longer pieces from It’s a Shovel. Senior strategic perspective on AI search, reputation work, founder-led growth, and how buyers now find, shortlist, and hire.
The Trick to Trust
Do you really have your stakeholders' trust? Why trust is earned through consistency and honesty - and how to build it before you need it.
Who you are is more important than what you do
For founder-led businesses, character and authenticity build trust faster than features. Why who you are shapes reputation and pipeline.
Leadership, Purpose and Ambiguity
Why leading with purpose matters most in uncertain, ambiguous times - and how it steadies teams, decisions and reputation.
The Economics of Purpose
The business case for purpose: how a genuine reason for being drives engagement, reputation and measurable economic performance.
About this publication
A few notes on what we publish, and what we do not
We do not write listicles. There is enough “five ways to improve your LinkedIn presence” content in the world already.
We do not write hot takes on industry news unless we have something genuinely useful to add.
We do write longer pieces on the structural shifts in how buyers find and shortlist B2B providers, and shorter pieces on what we are seeing in client work, in the research, and in our own AI visibility data.
We do write pieces that take a clear position, sometimes a slightly contrarian one. We try to be useful rather than safe.
The senior strategic communications discipline has, in our view, been under-served by online content in recent years. There is a great deal of tactical material on individual channels, and very little serious commentary on how reputation actually compounds across them. We aim to write the second category.
Most engagements start with the free AI Visibility Heatmap
If anything you have read here makes you want to know how your own business shows up in AI search, that is the simplest place to begin.