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The most intriguing business story of the past week as far as I’m concerned has been the announcement of the ‘Atlantic Gateway’ – a plan for historic city rivals Manchester and Liverpool to link up and create a regional zone to stimulate new jobs and investment. The zone, to replicate the ‘Thames Gateway’ would bequeath Liverpool with a deep-water port and include a £10 billion redevelopment of the Mersey waterfront as well as the BBC’s Media City development in Salford.

It’s no secret that we communicators are often accused by our stakeholders of “dumbing things down”. So it was something of a surprise when someone suggested that I had made a message a bit too complicated last week.

It’s meant I’ve spent the weekend revisiting a fundamental truth about communications (don’t worry I’ve done other more interesting things as well!) . I settled on the view that clarity is not an end in itself. Meaning is what we’re striving for.

Prediction: we should see signs of Nestlé’s share price recovering from its latest issue within about 15 days.

Prediction 2: at some point this year, 2010 will be named the Year of the Social Media Crisis. So I’m doing it now just to be the first. (If I’m not the first then please let me know so I can link to that person’s blog and boost my traffic But it didn’t come up on Google today).

You! Yes, you! Welcome, once again (presuming that you’ve been here before - if you’ve stumbled across this whilst searching for pornography then I apologise in advance for the lack of nudity but offer you a sincere first-timers’ welcome) to Web Curios.

Its Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week. But I’m really looking forward to tonights BBC Sport Relief programme.

If you’ve been watching the Eddie Izzard documentary about his incredible feat of running 43 marathons in 51 days you can’t help but feel inspired. What he did was simply incredible.

Each year Hill & Knowlton staff donate their time to a worthy cause - not to write press releases and make media calls but to get our hands dirty. For instance last year we supported London Play and helped clean, paint and repair playgrounds around the Capital for a day.

This year we are donated 200-odd staff to children’s charity Kids Co.

After last week’s change and communication event at Hill & Knowlton I’ve been following up an answer I gave to the question: ”What do you tell internal audiences about a change program, compared to what you tell external audiences?”

Yesterday I started to follow up a question from last week’s panel discussion about the relationship between organisational change and communication, in particular the idea that internal and external audiences should be given the same information.

In this post I’m going to expand on the idea of information security.

It’s not unsual for Hill & Knowlton’s Head of Change & Internal Communcation, Scott McKenzie, to catch me on the hop, but he had a couple of good cracks last week at our panel discussion about the role of communication in managing organisational change

My colleagues and I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about what we offer our clients.

We’re beginning to question whether the title of our Practice: Change & Internal Communications is right? It’s broadly accurate I suppose but does it really cover what we do?