Getting your message across powerfully, practically and persuasively - rule of three.

The next time you are at a trade fair or exhibition take time out to do a 360 degree whirl, view the banners and give them a score out of ten. You won’t find many that grab you.

Here is an opportunity to make yours work when others don’t.

I visit the NEC and ICC regularly and in a day take in several hundred of these displays. The number that stay in the mind are pitiful. Assume your audience scans you for a couple of seconds at max.

A visit to Earls Court or Olympia, provides fertile ground for observing one of the most misused business marketing tools around. We are talking of the seven foot pop-up roller banner and its cousin, the airship-dimensioned display frame. Erected apprehensively, knowing they may collapse on you or snap down like a mouse trap. We have all been there.

How many of them really catch the eye? Have company managers dominated the design process and content? Have the graphic artists, speech-writers and copywriters had their creative skills pruned? Have we kitted the stall-holders with tools that just don’t work? How many exhibitors pack up their displays, wondering whether the ROI has been justified? The same rituals are played out thousands of times a day.

This is how it goes. After an outlay for the stand, possibly running into thousands, our intrepid exhibitor lays out the gizmos to attract the punters. The bowl of sweets, key fobs, mouse pads and corporate blurb come out of the bag. The backdrops of course are the banners and this is what they remain - a glorious vehicle to market the organisation but woefully misused.

So where does it all go wrong? Well it could be the content of the banner for starters. There could be too much of it. As the punters walk the aisles they will give a fraction of a second to each banner, so you need something to bring them in. The name of the organisation and the logo don’t work and they are usually the dominant graphic and text. Punters want to know what you do, what makes you different and whether you are any good.

Banners can be run off in a day, but it takes time and skill to put one together which is eye-catching and discourages a high bounce rate. Walk the aisles and make a note of the banners which pull you in. Those that do make you think, tug at your emotions and give the reader something to do.

Next, borrow some rhetorical speech-writing devices from the political worlds i.e. rules of three, contrasting phrases, witty play on words and reversal phrasing eg “Building is what we do best and the best is what we build.” Useful and snappy copy for the press release and website. Living in a five second culture, we do not tolerate lots of text so keep it down. Cut out the jargon.

Space on a stand can be at a premium so why not use the banner itself as a demonstration tool? Something you can engage the client with. It is almost as if the production of the display banner becomes an end in itself when in reality it is a starting point for promoting goods and services.

Ineffective banners emphasise company name, logo and contact details and have no call to action. The punchline is simple: create banners that are pithy, witty and engaging.

Of course you need presenters who can bring them to life – but that is another story. www.younevercantell.co.uk

Does the Wikileak affair mean a return to pencil and paper? Do the leaks tell us anything we could not have guessed anyway?

It will take time for the dust to settle over the Wikileak revelations so that a reasoned assessment can be made of their publication. Words such as hypocrisy, embarrassment and incompetence will be bandied around by the population, as they see the revealed workings of its political and diplomatic elites. Governments should be receiving more in their input tray than high level gossip. Are the diplomatic positions revealed any different from what a professional analyst knew anyway? Security services and diplomats will jump and down over the “irresponsible” exposure of sources and positions taken. However much redacting takes place, humint may have been compromised, and there is only so much one can glean from remote sensing and drones.

The digital communication revolution has seen the inexorable onward and upward rise of traffic and there has been nothing to date to question this curve. The Wikileaks will give everyone pause for thought. What information is being hoovered up, why and to what end? We have information overload drowning in a sea of data.

For the first time, there has been a massive leakage of digital material to the global press. How much of this quarter of a million pages will provide interesting copy is questionable. In the five-second culture, the public will not be listening as the next story emerges.

Security tightening will be a given. Beyond that, we are likely to see a more circumspect use of the digital networks. We may see a return to a more humble way of communication i.e. word of mouth and paper and pencil. They have their flaws, notably dated and partial pictures of a situation. On the other hand easier to erase and deny.

How ever do young people learn the skills of oratory and debate? A golden opportunity for Michael Gove and his White Paper.

So we have yet another Education Minister bringing forward a White Paper to reconfigure the educational structure of the country. Business and other employers know that it is hard going, to get the right home-grown people with the right skills at the right time. The desire of educated and articulate workers to enter the country is symptomatic of this.

Never have so many qualifications been awarded to so many and yet something is missing. It might be the inability of school leavers and college students to be at ease when using their voice confidently, presenting and holding a coherent conversation. It might have something to do with the recent finding that people in the UK, are spending in excess of 30 hours a week in front of some type of screen, and detached from those with whom they are communicating.

Michael Gove would serve students and society really well, if he were to put in place more curriculum opportunities for students to learn speaking skills. It would prepare young people for later times, when they have to deal with customer-care, start up a business, contribute to political activity or be a confident member of the community. It is about assertiveness and self-worth.

The prescient observations of Gertrude Stein in the early 20th century are more apt than ever: "Let us stop communicating with each other, so that we can have some conversation."

Lessons from Ashes to Ashes - future elections will be anarchic and fast-changing battlefields.

The Ashes to Ashes billboard spoof between the Tories and Labour at the last election, stood out as an oasis of quick-thinking and imagination in an otherwise drab and sterile media campaign. In the heat of battle, it did not get the deserved attention from media analysts.

Labour’s billboard attempt to build on Gene Hunt’s character with Cameron sitting on the Quattro and a strapline of “Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980’s”, was neatly turned against them with a Tory reworking of the image: “Fire up the Quattro, it’s time for a change.”

Apart from that, the billboards became yesterday’s tool. Those adverts that did reach the hoardings were the scenes of “improvements” from local graffiti artists. This has ever been the case. The difference this time was that the enhancements got a later airing on Twitter, Facebook and the blogsphere. A national audience was reached. Copywriting was democratised. Central party straplines were ridiculed with wit and insights.

Future elections will be largely fought through the blackberry, apps, blog, text and mobile. Imaginative, concise, quick-thinking and memorable messages will be needed for local leaflets if they are used, SMS circulation or Twittered in 140 characters. This can be a golden age for campaigners to generate witty, subversive, pithy and tight messages which tap into the voters’ psyche. Parties need to put in place, the infrastructure to harness the possibilities of a virtual reality campaign.

When everyone belongs to Linkedin, Ecademy and their ilk, everyone belongs to nothing.

It is the business ritual after attending a fair or convention to scan the delegate list and peruse cards exchanged. Invitations to expand your connections follow. Said sites expand exponentially, more struts to the network are completed and the mesh gets tighter. This really is Grand Designs! So what?

It might seem heresy for this blog post to deliver a critique of a sister platform, but the question must be posed: how much business actually emerges from this accumulation of lists? What is the connection list for and how will I use it?

Is the expansion of one’s list merely an ego trip in sending out messages to others that you are an important person? Is your list just the outcome of the hoovering-up of names just like new trawling techniques for fishing? Is one collecting car numbers?

The warning signs come when you have established such a long list that you stop looking at it. Things get worse when you begin to realise that added connections are people who are already on the lists that you already know. The network becomes incestuous and parochial. When everyone knows the same everyone knows nothing.

The question arises: what is the connection list for? Is it a contingency list for when you are made redundant, an easy access mailing list or just a gizmo diary to beat the Filofax?

Pursuing the fishing metaphor further, nets need to be checked, mended and used in the right way. Your electronic business network is no different. The best conversations at a social gathering come from a diversity of interesting people bringing value to the table. Think upon the Linkedin network in the same way. Are your members likely to do business with each other? Do they complement or duplicate their skills? Are they decision-makers with their hands on the levers of power? Are they people with potential or status which is waning? Will your list develop a reputation that others will want to join without cajoling from you?

Others make judgements about you from the company you keep, and the virtual reality variant is no different. It used to be said that networking was about who you know. Actually, it is who knows you that counts and your connection strategy can shape this.

Is David Camerons’s decision to have a personal photographer the first signs of a rather different communication battle leading to the next election?

David Cameron’s decision to appoint a personal photographer – albeit salaried as a civil servant, has a little more behind it than accusations of vanity and cost.

The last election is receding rapidly in the memory and 2015 beckons. The last election was a game-changer with televised debates. What innovations will we have next time around?

Hustings, leaflets through the letterbox, canvassing, party broadcasts and big hoardings have reached their sell-by date. One may question the efficacy of databases and telephone canvassing. Not much left really. Four years is a long way off, and social media, apps and the blogosphere may have developed a presence and maturity beyond their current infancy.

People absorb information in different ways. Reading and listening can be turgid media, especially if the message is tedious to start with. Could it be that the photographer will herald the start of a pictorial narrative which can be taken to the public for the next election?. The success of OK and Hello stems not just from the subject matter, but also the balance between the photos and words. An easy scan which is just what politicians seek to get their message across.

You need a pictorial bank and you need to start now. You need photos with a message and context beyond record shots of the great and the good. Good photos might bring to life ethereal concepts such as The Big Society. It will be interesting to see how the Photoshopped-photographs are drip-fed through to the media. What, when and to whom? We can’t believe that they are just going into a photo archive for posterity and to show the family. This seemingly innocuous move from Cameron may have more behind it than meets the eye. Watch this space?