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.
Leadership, Purpose and Ambiguity
The greatest gift of leadership is the ability to create positive impact at scale. It’s a gift, but it’s also a sometimes an overwhelming…
Are you managing your internal reputation?
Most CEO’s understand the importance of proactively managing their external reputation, but how many make the same effort to understand and manage internal reputation?…
Leadership Branding for Differentiation
Most companies fail to leverage one of their most compelling and distinguishable assets – their leadership. Business today is not about B2B or B2C…
The Reputation Game Has Changed
As the recent #MacroTrends report put out by the Reputation Institute says: “We are at a global strategic inflection point.” With so many macro…
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.