Brevity is the Soul of Wit – 12 Years of Susan (and counting)
Where to start? Well, seeing 600 – 800 words is like a dagger to my heart. As a writer at 10Fold, a leading B2B Tech PR agency, I can on occasion get carried away as one gets into that ‘flow state.’ Colleagues should remain close-lipped at this point. But, as Polonius ironically opines in Hamlet, “brevity is the soul of wit.” The bard, as ever, has me covered.
I’ve known Susan since 2012, when we were introduced by a common friend, Angie Moxham, who herself is a force of PR nature back in London. At the time, I was extracting myself from the co-ownership of an agency that I’d built up with two partners. Sadly, money and egos conspired to erode trust, and when you don’t have trust in business, you have nothing. Susan was incredibly generous with her time, giving me some wonderfully sage advice and talking me through the separation process.
Strong women have always played a part in my life. From my family to my PR mentors. Susan is no exception. We’re both kids of the 80’s so there’s an automatic safe zone there that literally nobody else understands. Hello, Ray Bans, cassette tapes, unwrapping a vinyl album, Miami Vice, and the joy of no cell phones or social media… When people actually conversed.
Weirdly, I digress.
We stayed in touch of course, through the intervening years and then the COVID pandemic. As we emerged from hibernation, we talked, and I joined the 10Fold team in September 2020.
My initial role was really supporting across a variety of accounts, securing and drafting editorial content, and working with client SMEs to source information. As a writer at my core, this was an area I was to develop and expand to my current role of Senior Writer and Media Strategist.
Playing to our strengths is a big deal within 10Fold. The freedom to develop a role that exists at 10Fold is something I feel is unique within the B2B PR agency world. Identifying a need and stepping into that space is probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my time here. And it works very effectively.
I think what I am most proud of is not a project or campaign per se. It’s that clients see the value in the full-service we provide. They appreciate our collective ability to take often complex, sometimes opaque concepts, and pull meaningful narratives from them, tailored for specific audiences and dissemination platforms (editorial, social, broadcast). This is what makes our approach to B2B Tech PR so impactful.
What continually impresses me is the smarts of the team. Insanely talented. I think they’re secretly impressed by the fact that when I started in PR, we would fax out press releases or have envelope stuffing afternoons, where we’d literally put press releases in envelopes, address them and mail them out to the media. Or that I learned web design the painful way by hard coding the Chartered Institute of PR website back in 1997. Tedium infinitum. You pay your dues, right?
Suffice to say, the future is all about smarts. The art of storytelling thankfully remains important. The methods of doing that are constantly evolving. Words remain central, but we will see them increasingly augmented with video, audio, interactive elements, to become more immersive.
10Fold will have a handle on all of that.
That excites me. And in 577 words too.