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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

For most of history, corporate communications has been about taking whatever a company has to say and turning it into a nice, smooth surface. That era is over. The best comms teams have already moved on to spiky comms, meaning rough edges, personality, opinion, and perspective.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 11/09/2026

The Biden White House guys who had the meeting on AI with Andreessen have *just now* figured out that they should point out that Andreessen has been intentionally lying about it ever since in order to drum up support for the fascists. WHY THE FUCK DID YOU WAIT www.politico.com/news/magazin...

politico.com

Opinion | What Really Happened at the White House Lunch That Marc Andreessen Says Sent Him to Trump

Setting the record straight about the venture capitalist’s meeting with us in the Biden White House.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

More Californians need to know about the DROP program, the state's one-stop shop for having your info deleted by data brokers, as required by law. And it's free. privacy.ca.gov/drop/ (Sure would be nice to have a *federal* data privacy law.)

privacy.ca.gov

Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP)

Protect your personal information. Data brokers collect, share, and sell your personal information. You can stop that from happening.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Data centers sit somewhere above Somali pirates and below hemorrhoids in public popularity. New Person Familiar on the hardest comms job going. The industry doesn't have bad comms. It has bad facts. www.personfamiliar.com/p/how-do-yo...

personfamiliar.com

How Do You Solve Data Center Communications?

It isn’t a comms problem, and that’s the comms problem.

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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 04/08/2026

My (cynical) working theory is that the White House knows that its "AI Framework" is basically a much worse version than the AI framework the Biden admin released, which caused the VC bros of Silicon Valley to go all MAGA. Keeping it private avoids the comparison.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Your AI stack is fine. The main problem is what you're feeding it. Wrote up the eleven comms docs (Story, Audience, Voice, Gates) every team needs before their AI tools are worth anything: www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-eleve...

personfamiliar.com

The Eleven Comms Docs Your AI Tools Need to Actually Work

Your AI stack is fine. The main problem is what you're feeding it.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

PBS SoCal has a 24/7 Huell Howser livestream on its YouTube channel. It's been going continuously for over a year, and it is a balm to my soul.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

New edition of Person Familiar: is there a more put-upon consumer population right now than gamers? They're getting squeezed at both ends, hardware and software (as I felt with CFB27). That's an opportunity for comms/marketing teams... if you know how to harness it.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Next week, every big PR agency descends on Cannes with the same story: our AI makes the work faster, sharper, better. The efficiency *is* real. But it isn't landing on the client side of the ledger. Full piece in Person Familiar here: www.personfamiliar.com/p/whos-capt...

personfamiliar.com

Who's Capturing the AI Efficiency Dividend: Clients, or Agencies?

The conversation your AOR's execs don't want to have along the Croisette next week.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Most teams never say out loud how the work should actually get done: which channel is for what, what "urgent" means, what "off" means. So everyone burns the day guessing. New PF on writing the rules down: www.personfamiliar.com/p/your-team...

personfamiliar.com

Your Team Needs a Written-Down Workstyle

Turning the implicit into explicit is just good comms.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Either Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong hasn't actually seen/isn't aware of the plot of Heated Rivalry, or is clandestinely telegraphing that he and Jamie Dimon have torrid gay sex after their internet fights

Screenshot of an X post by Brian Armstrong quote-tweeting an interview of Jamie Dimon saying Brian Armstrong is "full of shit", with a fake promotional image for the TV show Heated Rivalry above it where the characters are swapped for Armstrong and Dimon

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

When the NYT writes about a startup trend, it's an obituary. This week: the $80K startup hype video. At seed stage, your brand IS your product. If brand marketing is your differentiator, you don't have one. New PF: www.personfamiliar.com/p/its-time-...

personfamiliar.com

It's Time to Call Top on Startup Hype Videos

A startup trend covered by the New York Times is its own type of obituary. But it's so much worse than that.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Typical SF tourist, didn’t layer up for the bridge

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Marin was Marin-ing extra hard tonight

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I joked recently that soon all content will be 10-second TikToks or three-hour podcasts. I was only half-joking. The middle is collapsing. Problem: comms has spent 50 years optimizing for the middle.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Wrote about the missing paragraph in every "AI is changing the way we work" CEO layoff email this year. Short version: the CEO never tells you what AI has changed about their own job. And they should, if they want legitimacy for their arguments. www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-missi...

personfamiliar.com

The Missing Piece in AI Corporate Transformation Memos: CEOs

Every corporate AI memo asks employees to absorb a transformation. None of them include evidence the CEO has.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I ran comms for Google during Oracle v. Google in 2012, tech's last big trial of the century. Watching Musk v. Altman has me flashing back hard. Fifteen observations on the trial comms war so far, in no particular order:

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

New Person Familiar: a check-in with @wexler.bsky.social on where DC actually sits on tech right now. Meta-takeaway: the most expensive mistake a tech company can make communicating in Washington right now is to confuse what is said for what is true. www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-state...

personfamiliar.com

The State of Tech Policy Comms in DC

Amid a shooting war in Iran and White House Correspondents Dinner week, a check-in on the Beltway with Nu Wexler

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Jason Kirk @jasonkirk.fyi · 23/04/2026

Kinda feels like this whole thing merits more coverage by the main stream media. Beyond just me posting it about it at ny times dot com. I dunno, just seems like an interesting thing. CC the media www.edsbscharitybowl.com

$1,056,067 raised for refugee charity by college football podcast community in roughly half of the annual charity event's run time

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Jury duty is no one’s idea of a good time, but at least in Marin you get to feel like you’re entering Gattaca

Escalator up to second level of the Marin County Civic Center, a key shoot location for the movie Gattaca

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

This should send a shiver up the spine of any major professional services/knowledge work firm. McKinsey (codewall.ai/blog/how-we-...) and BCG (codewall.ai/blog/how-we-...) have both been compromised this year by a whitehat using AI tools. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

nytimes.com

Anthropic Claims Its New A.I. Model, Mythos, Is a Cybersecurity ‘Reckoning’

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The best marketing of this century came from giving up control. What Formula 1's Netflix deal teaches every company trying to go direct. personfamiliar.substack.com/p/the-best-...

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

When you have senior white male military officers willing to end their career by raising concerns about the blocking of Black and female officers, it feels safe to say this isn't about ending DEI: the better historical parallel is Wilson's resegregation of the bureaucracy bsky.app/profile/nbcn...

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Retail participation has exploded and transformed public markets. But you'd never know it from the current comms "best practices" for IPOs. Here's how to change that, and what Taylor Swift and BTS have to do with it.

Enter the Stock Stans
The most engaged retail investors don’t function like, sound like, or behave like “shareholders.” They’re more like online fandoms. This shift is behavioral and cultural.

I’m calling them Stock Stans.

These are individual investors whose relationship to a stock is identity, not just investment. They build their thesis around it, argue about it online, create content evangelizing it, recruit their friends into it, and treat attacks on the company like personal affronts. Think Taylor Swift’s Swifties or BTS’s ARMY, but with brokerage accounts. Organized, vocal, fiercely protective, and loyal through the rough patches in a way fair-weather followers never are.

“Bang-up job, Jim, you discovered meme stocks five years late,” you say. But while Stock Stans are certainly involved in meme-y tickers, what’s novel now is every major stock now has them.

Costco (~30% retail ownership) shareholders treat the stock the way they treat their Costco membership: as a lifestyle

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Jensen Huang spent two hours on stage yesterday arguing less for @nvidia's products and more for the inevitability of a world that runs on them. What tech comms people everywhere can learn and apply from yesterday's GTC keynote. (link in reply)

Jensen Huang walked onto the floor of San Jose’s SAP Center yesterday and held a capacity crowd’s attention for over two hours, no teleprompter, announcing $1 trillion in projected chip orders through 2027, a new rack architecture called Kyber, a prototype data center designed for space, and a live robotics demo starring Olaf from Frozen. He closed with singing robots and an animated lobster performing a campfire song.1

If you’re a communicator looking for actionable takeaways from all this, I can save you some time. Here’s one version of a playbook:

Be the CEO of the most important company in the world for the most important technology in the world right now.

Have cool jackets or some other signature piece of clothing.

Double your revenue estimates once or twice a year.

If you can be Jensen Huang and Nvidia, I highly recommend it. It seems to be going great and really fun.

But most of us and our executives can’t be Jensen and Nvidia, sadly.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: It's time someone in comms said it: "GEO" is a racket, a fake optimization discipline being offered by some of the biggest agencies. If model makers can't tell you why these systems return what they do, do you *really* think Edelman can? www.personfamiliar.com/p/geo-is-a-...

Ever since ChatGPT 3.5 set off an explosion of LLMs and other AI technology, communications agencies have been trying to figure out not just the consequences for their clients, but for their own businesses. Namely: what do we sell now? They needed new offerings to fit the new world.

Enter “generative engine optimization”—GEO—positioned as the successor to search engine optimization (SEO), the roughly 30-year-old practice of reverse-engineering search ranking signals to make an organization appear more prominently in results. GEO claims to do the same thing for LLMs that SEO did for search.

But it can’t. The people selling it should know it can’t. But they’re selling it anyway. And the only things getting optimized are their invoices.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The reason most AI implementations in comms disappoint isn’t the technology. It’s the *context*, or lack thereof. That's why the next essential comms hire is the Forward Deployed Context Engineer, a person who blends comms knowledge with a systems brain.

A Forward Deployed Context Engineer in comms does three things.

The unglamorous foundation is capturing the tacit knowledge. That means interviewing senior team members to codify the frameworks they use but have never written down. It means building a relationship intelligence layer—not a media list with email addresses, but the qualitative intelligence about every journalist, analyst, and stakeholder the team interacts with that actually makes outreach effective. It means documenting editing patterns, voice standards, crisis playbooks. All the institutional knowledge that currently lives in people’s heads and evaporates when they leave.

Then comes building the context layer. Once the knowledge is captured, it needs to be structured so AI tools can actually use it. This is where the technical fluency matters. Meeting transcripts become queryable archives. Editorial standards become automated quality checks. Stakeholder intelligence becomes contextual input for outreach drafting. With

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

This is what a spine looks like. And at the same time, how is any other CEO in AI signing up for a military domestic surveillance program? Did we learn absolutely nothing from PRISM?

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Why are posts about AI from random Substacks and blogs moving markets more than AI products? It's a calibration gap between Narrative Consumers and Tool Users. (link in next post)

The Tomorrowland Effect

Walt Disney’s original Tomorrowland was compelling because it was a narrative about the future first and an engineering project second. Walt worked with scientists and engineers, but what made it resonate was the storytelling, making you feel something about what was coming, not just showing you a spec sheet.

The Citrini piece is a high-quality markets version of Tomorrowland: speculative fiction with financial fluency, built by people familiar with constructing market narratives. The Shumer piece is the gift shop version: mass-produced, shiny enough to catch the eye, but not something you’d put on a shelf.

Yet both move the same audience to the same action, and that’s actually the more concerning case. If only the Citrini piece had moved markets, you could chalk it up to the quality of the analysis. But when a clearly-AI-generated blog post produces a comparable reaction, you’re seeing something structural: the audience is grading the narrative, not the prem

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Public trust in AI is already deteriorating. Execs' rhetorical focus on capital-H Humanity over real people isn't helping. I'm calling it Dr. Manhattan Syndrome—and the nuclear industry already showed us how it ends. (Link in next post)

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The market isn't punishing SaaS companies for bad earnings, but for not having an answer to "What are you in five years?" But @zoink.bsky.social and @figma.com do. I analyze the many lows and a few highs of SaaS-pocalypse comms. (link in reply)

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

The ultimate litmus test of whether someone is an elder Millennial or just the garden variety kind: ask them who these guys are.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

A take so bizarre it's borderline disqualifying for a CEO of a trading platform. The AI trade has been one of the most accessible investment themes ever. Retail investors have made fortunes on it. If anything, that should be catalyzing *more* public support for AI, not less.

X post from @sourceryy paraphrasing/quoting an interview with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev: Robinhood CEO
@vladtenev
says AI lacks public support because everyday investors are shut out of the upside, and can’t invest in any of the significant AI companies:

“Aside from Google— OpenAI, Anthropic, all the startups, they’re basically out of reach for normal people.”

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Every generation gets the Harvard Facemash it deserves

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: I wrote about one of the sneakiest traps startup founders encounter with their comms: knowing when to steer away from the siren song of VC Twitter dopamine hits and toward deeper waters. Be Odysseus. (The Matt Damon version or whoever you have in mind.)

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

"Much can be accomplished by teamwork when no one is concerned about who gets credit." - John Wooden "Fuck everybody else, that shit was all me." - Bill Belichick (probably)

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

No matter who wins on the field today, San Francisco won this week. Most beautiful city in America. (h/t portra_papi on IG - go follow, he’s outstanding)

Sunset-lit San Francisco hillside with winding Lombard Street, flanked by homes and a cable car crossing at the bottom.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

ME, TO MY 70-SOMETHING PARENTS: How do you watch so much cable news!? I’d just be mad all the time! [Proceeds to stare at political news on social media for multiple hours daily]

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: J. Cole finally dropped "The Fall-Off" after an eight-year wait. I wrote about the very different ways he, Kendrick, and Drake cultivate attention — and the surprising applicability to tech comms. open.substack.com/pub/personf...

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Corporate storytelling and storytelling jobs are on the rise. I'm all for more importance placed on comms! But something about they *way* we're telling stories is wrong, because consumers don't trust them. I explore that and how to remedy it in my latest Person Familiar.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Interesting fact of the day: you’d need to stream an artist’s 12-track album once a day for 240-330 days to equal the approx. equivalent rev share they get from a vinyl sale. If you love a music artist, buy their vinyl.

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Almost everything written about AI and communications is about productivity. But the genius of these tools is they let you *build things*. "What can I build?" is now a comms question, the ultimate "show, don't tell".

The constraint for comms people building things is no longer getting engineering help. The greatest constraint is, quite honestly, that the profession’s use of AI is an inch deep and a mile wide. We’re not thinking about AI as a tool for creating things—interactive experiences, internal tools, games, prototypes—that are themselves a form of communication, the ultimate way of showing rather than telling.2

This is a new surface. And I mean that in the same way you’d talk about media relations or executive comms as distinct surfaces, each with their own logic and possibilities. A press release describes something. A tool demonstrates it. Those are different things.

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David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Weird that hiring away a few checked-out Tory alcoholics from British dailies and emphasizing op eds about Why Your Boss Deserves A Tax Cut didn't deliver better results but what can you do? What, at the end of the day, can you do?

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Jim Prosser @jimprosser.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

I came away from the Davos discourse certain of one thing: we need more workplace trends thought leadership. So I* built Workplace Buzzword Slots. workplacebuzzwordslots.com *Well, Claude did, but I wrote some pretty fire prompts for it, not gonna lie.

workplacebuzzwordslots.com

Workplace Buzzword Slots

Discover your next career-defining workplace trend. Pull the lever and become a thought leader.

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Greg Olear @gregolear.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

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