Forbes this month deepened its investments in C-title community with CxO, a platform designed to congregate points of view from CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, CIOs and CTOs. There’s new opportunity for pitching and relationship-building.
Forbes this week announced Journalist Entrepreneurs, a Forbes-branded newsletter platform, hoping to attract indie newsletter authors in the same way it attracted freelancer contributions ten years ago. Unlike the cattle calls of 2010, Forbes this time seeks to attract editorial stars who already have big newsletter audiences and social media followings.
Most PR pros know about the ten Forbes Councils, providing relationship-building services and the chance to be published on the Forbes web site. Fewer know of two other Forbes community plays — Forbes EQ and Forbes Ignite. They’re worth exploring if your org — or your clients — focus on social equality and improving our world.
Agencies and clients face a reckoning with contributed content. The latter still assumes that opportunities abound. More than 100 entries in the SWMS contributed content gatekeepers list proves them right. Then again, when it comes to Tier 1, it just might be best to pay whoever lifts the velvet rope.
There are hundreds, right? But only 40 have published content either in Forbes’s CIO channel or its cloud channel since Oct. 1. We think we got all of them — name, channel, email and a link to their work. The vast majority are analysts, though some are vendors, with an edit freelancer or two. Happy hunting and let us know whom we’ve missed.
To nail that elusive company profile, make sure you’re studying the lists. Yes, one can apply for inclusion and what happens after that is something of a mystery. One can glean a lot from list results, however. For example, we recently studied a list within a list — the 20-company Rising Stars list within Forbes’s Cloud 100 — and here’s what we learned.
Is the Forbes Technology Council worth the money? We hear that a lot from PR pros looking to place contributed content. In our view the answer is ‘yes’, though there’s actually something bigger going on, which we’ll get to in a sec.
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FRIDGE NOTES
Well, for now it’s Jim Jordan… but such news illustrates the kind of world we seem to be headed for. Adweek has the details, subscription required.
No “predictions” post will appear on this site. That said, quite a number of subscribers have asked for a Zoom/MS Teams presentation on what 2025 will bring. A conversation is precisely the right tool for the job. After the election — and with AI transforming publishing and life — “2025” is best discussed among peers, not predicted. So if you’d like to have a confidential group exchange on what stands to unfold, and why, and how comms pros can come out on top in spite of it all, drop a line and we shall schedule something.
According to Adweek, Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky were in merger talks for eleven and a half months before the transaction was announced this week. Amazing that it didn’t leak.
Should PR pros stop visiting X, with all its lies and hate? It’s only going to get worse. Or are tidbits from targets too important to walk away from? Click here to watch tech edit vet David Strom and I disagree (at high speed) about this, as one compelling visual after another pops up on your screen. In 2025, SWMS will officially launch “SWMS Sound Thinking,” designed to be “argumentative insight in six minutes or less.” Each segment will explore a timely and controversial topic of interest to tech comms pros. This prototype runs 5:25. Hope you enjoy it — feedback vital and welcome! –Sam
New EIC Jamie Heller has asked her reporters to start going on camera — for the BI TikTok channel — to explain the big, deep-divey story they just published. Other publications do this — especially archival Fortune. BI is now on that too. Game on.
At this time last year, Eric Newcomer and his two podcast co-hosts — Max Child and James Wilsterman — each formed an “AI startup fantasy team” and picked five AI startups to seed their rosters. We’re now in year 2 and it’s time to draft again. The podcasters wonder… which startups do they dump? Which do they add? The player whose startups accumulate the most total value by Nov. 1, 2028 is the winner, so there’s plenty of time to make adjustments. Here’s a link to the AI fantasy team podcast — you may need a password. Not sure.
