• After five and a half years of (mostly) biweekly templates, frameworks, how-to guides, and the occasional provocation that have defined this newsletter I need to recharge.

I still have things to say about our profession. Big picture things. Essays about where we’re headed as an industry, what our work means, whether any of this matter…

Read more

You’ve got 30,000 employees spread across 12 offices in five countries. Post-covid, they’re even more scattered, working from kitchen in Kansas and co-working spaces in Copenhagen and garages in Karachi. Your CEO hasn’t set foot in the Lisbon office since 2019.

• Your regional teams feel like they’re working for a faceless corporation rather than a compan…

Read more

Video isn’t my preferred medium for comms storytelling.

• My heart belongs to the written word and the humble email.

But…but… nothing beats the mixternal opportunities presented by video.

• Video is the ultimate content multiplication machine.

When it’s time to battle for budget dollars, you need armor and ammo. Video-derived content that lives across multip…

Read more

Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn had to walk back his AI memo. Shopify’s Tobi Lütke didn’t. The difference? One understood mixternal comms, and one didn’t.

You might have heard about it … two tech CEOs announcing the same radical transformation within weeks of each other.

• Both declared their companies would become “AI-first.”

• Both said employees must prove they can’t use AI before asking for more resources.

Yet only one memo required damage control.

• Duolingo: CEO Luis von Ahn published his memo publicly on LinkedIn, then had to walk it back three weeks later after employee backlash and negative headlines. (There’s a lost in translation joke in there somewhere.)

• Shopify: CEO Tobi Lütke sent his memo to employees first, shared it publicly later, and faced minimal controversy.

The difference was the messaging. While both CEOs announced fundamentally similar strategic shifts, their communication approaches reveal crucial lessons about navigating AI transformation in the mixternal era.

In this edition of Insider Comms™, I analyze how two tech leaders handled identical strategic announcements with vastly different results, including:

• Why von Ahn’s memo felt like a layoff announcement (even though it wasn’t)

• How Lütke turned potential controversy into a competitive advantage

• The hidden audiences both memos actually addressed

• 🧑‍🏫 Four key lessons for comms pros managing AI transformation messaging

As usual, I share the full memos below.

¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ WIFM, you ask? Chances are your team will manage some heavy (consequential) messaging about AI’s effect on your workforce. A recent report from MIT says that ~27% of jobs could be replaced by AI in the long term.

• Over 80% of executives surveyed in tech and media anticipate reduced hiring over the next two years because of AI.

• And most companies are backfilling workers with AI rather than replacing them.

🔮 An AI-forward memo like the two I compare below is likely in your future.

🔬 Let’s dissect what happens when AI strategy meets communication strategy, and why getting the tone wrong can undermine a smart business move.

• 🔖 The most revealing difference between the two memos appears in how each CEO justifies the AI transformation.

Read more

Stop torturing your SMEs with six different comms people asking overlapping questions. This AI-powered interview workflow can feed your entire communications ecosystem and give your SMEs a break.

Let’s say your company is launching Widget2 next month.

• The PR lead needs market disruption angles.

• The storytelling team wants employee pride talking points.

• Social media is on the hunt for customer benefit snippets.

• Exec comms needs strategic vision sound bites.

• Internal comms for the Sales department needs competitive differentiators.

• And regional comms needs localized impact data.

Previously I’ve described similar scenarios:

In the old world, the Widget2 product lead gets pinged by six different comms pros over two weeks, repeating the same background information while each comms person extracts their tiny piece of the puzzle.

• Aren’t you all on the same team? she asks, her annoyance clear. Don’t you guys talk to each other?

Your mixternal teams are working against each other, creating redundancy and missed opportunities. As I’ve previously shouted from the mountaintop, maintaining artificial barriers between communications functions wastes resources and causes stakeholder fatigue.

Here’s an AI workflow that fixes this dysfunction.

How This Template Saves Your Sanity

This three-part AI workflow consolidates team questions, helps conduct comprehensive interviews, and distributes insights—all through one conversation with a single point of contact (🙈 not it!) on the comms team.

In this article, I share:

• ✅ Part 1: Pre-Interview Consolidation: Team members submit their needs; AI generates a master interview guide

• ✅ Part 2: Live Interview Assistant: Real-time guidance for pivoting when conversations take an unexpected turn

• ✅ Part 3: Post-Interview Distribution: Raw notes become team-specific deliverables in seconds

• ✅ A recap on how to use the workflow before/during/after the interview

• ✅ Why this works

🖼️ I also share screenshots of a chatbot’s output for a hypothetical use case, so you can see what this workflow looks like in action. You will:

• immediately grasp the benefit

• instantly recognize how you can tweak the prompt for your needs

• 😮 be surprised—as I was—at the thoughtful additional material the chatbot suggests to enhance and improve your stakeholder conversations

The Template

The designated interviewer (i.e., the single point of contact, however that’s decided) handles everything in this AI-assisted workflow.

• Your team members will appreciate getting time back to catch up on Love Island put out the brushfire du jour.

PART 1: Pre-Interview Consolidation Prompt

🚨 Note: You can tweak this prompt to suit your needs. The more information you provide about your company, industry, team makeup, expertise, etc., the better the outcome.

For example, in the first paragraph of this prompt, you can add something like this (in bold):

• You are an expert corporate communications strategist in the pharmaceutical industry with 10 years of experience. You are skilled at conducting comprehensive stakeholder interviews that serve multiple needs simultaneously. You do comms work at a Fortune 100 company that’s been around for 80 years but maintains a startup mentality. The executives at your company are savvy, highly accomplished, and understand the benefits of corporate communications and the need to effectively communicate with various audiences with equally varying needs. [etc., etc., etc.]

Or whatever you need to say to get the AI into the right mindset.

• If you have supporting documentation (e.g., PPTX files 🤮, product specs, transcript from a recorded Zoom call, market research), upload them to the chatbot and add language like reference the attached documents.

And now, the template…

You are an expert corporate communications strategist skilled at conducting comprehensive stakeholder interviews that serve multiple corp comms team needs simultaneously. [ADD MORE CONTEXT; SEE ABOVE FOR AN EXAMPLE] Help me create a master interview guide.

STEP 1: First, identify the interview type based on this context: [DESCRIBE YOUR SITUATION; FOR EXAMPLE, A PRODUCT LAUNCH, AN ACQUISITION ANNOUNCEMENT, ETC. PROVIDE AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE.]

Interview Types:
- HUMAN INTEREST/PROFILE: Employee spotlights, team features, personal stories
- PRODUCT/INITIATIVE LAUNCH: New products, services, programs, or major announcements  
- CRISIS/ISSUES: Problems, challenges, negative events, or damage control
- EXECUTIVE/LEADERSHIP: Strategic vision, company direction, leadership perspectives
- CORPORATE INITIATIVE: Merger, acquisition, organizational changes, earnings or financial updates, leadership changes

STEP 2: Based on the interview type you identified, use this framework:

Read more

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene a couple of years ago many comms pros didn’t panic. The writing the tool generated was clumsy, anodyne, often laughable. It’s a decent first draft, they shrugged, but you still need experienced comms pros to fill …

Read more

• They might not even know about the duplicative work.

• They might not even know about the duplicative work.

  ---

👀 You're reviewing next week’s comms calendar when you spot it: your VP of Engineering is speaking at an industry conference about your company’s innovative approach to sustainable manufacturing.

• The PR team has their press release ready.

• Marketing has their social media plan set.

• And you're supposed to write an intranet article about it.

Three teams, three different messages, three separate workflows—all about the exact same story.

Sound familiar?

The artificial divide between these functions is problematic:

• it’s inefficient, therefore

• it’s costing your company money, and

• it’s diluting your impact.

Get Out of Your Own Way

Every piece of content you create should serve multiple audiences and channels.

• The press release should rhyme with the Instagram story should rhyme with the intranet article should rhyme with the town hall prezo should rhyme with…

Maintaining artificial barriers between internal and external comms wastes resources, dilutes messaging, and misses opportunities.

It’s also embarrassing and annoying. Three or four members of the comms department pick off our unsuspecting stakeholders, demanding they answer questionnaires, fill out templates, and agree to a 45-minute meeting where they talk about the same things they told your teammate last week. 

• Stakeholders don’t have time to meet with so many people who are supposedly on the same team.

Back to the engineering conference prezo. With minor adjustments a singular “narrative” (or “messaging doc” or “storyline” or “single source of truth” or whatever you call it) becomes compelling content for:

• your intranet

• social channels

• media advisories

• department town hall

• engineering newsletter

• etc., etc., etc.

In just minutes your communication ROI has quintupled without quintupling the work.

A single source of truth—a cornerstone of mixternal strategies— can help.

🔑 A Single Source of Truth Is Key

Let’s return to our engineering conference example.

Instead of creating separate content streams, approach this as one cohesive story that adapts to each audience’s needs. The core message remains consistent—your company’s innovative approach to sustainable manufacturing—while the depth, technical detail, and call-to-action shift based on the audience.

What does this look like in practice?

Read more

Your company’s talent acquisition team needs to fill specialized engineering roles—yesterday—but they’re struggling. The market for these skills is brutal and your competitors are dangling everything from on-site kombucha bars to free puppies after three months in role 🐶.

• “We need better content to attract these candidates,” moans your head of recruiting while you two scoot between meetings. “Something that shows what it’s actually like to work here.”

You know very well that tucked away on your intranet sits a goldmine: a series of employee spotlights featuring your engineering team talking about solving fascinating technical problems, their flexible work schedules, and that time the CTO personally jumped in to help debug a critical issue at 2:00 a.m.

• 🤖 There's even video footage from your hackathon where engineers built a custom popping-and-locking robot for the holiday party.

Pure recruitment gold.

• 🙅 Except...”That’s internal content,” says your old school CCO. “We can’t put intranet stories on LinkedIn.”

Meanwhile, over in another corner of your company’s digital kingdom, the marketing team (with a shockingly large budget) controls the blog and social channels where potential candidates could see these stories.

• “Sorry. Our content calendar is set through Q3, 2027” says the social media manager, who reports to the CMO. “Plus we need to keep our feed consistent with our new brand campaign, mmkay.” (Did you detect … smugness?)

Three teams. Three agendas.

• Three separate workflows—all supposedly working toward the same company goals.

• But your ideal engineering candidates will never see the stories that might convince them to apply.

🤬 Just another day to rage against the machine. (Lights out! Guerilla radio!)

When Silos Work Against Business Goals

Maintaining artificial barriers between internal and external comms wastes resources, dilutes messaging, and misses opportunities. This recruiting pickle is a prime example.

Marketing operates in the realm of brand polish, customer acquisition metrics, and campaigns with names like “2H Engagement Acceleration Initiative.”

• Their presentations have more gradient backgrounds than a sunset Pinterest board and their video production budget is big enough to make Tyler Perry envious. (Seriously, how do they get so. much. money??)

Communications prides itself on substance over style, relationship-building, and what many comms-rades call “authentic messaging” (which is our Latin for “we tell it like it is...sort of”).

• They’re (we’re!) the ones who know what’s happening inside the company because we talk to employees instead of customer personas.

The social media team is caught in the middle.

• These on-trend gurus typically report to Marketing. But Comms is constantly pestering the social media team with requests to share the CEO’s latest exec insight, which, to be fair, is often about as exciting as IKEA assembly instructions.

🥊 This frustrating standoff actively sabotages business goals. Take the recruiting challenge above: the exact content that would attract those hard-to-find engineers exists within your company. It’s just trapped in the wrong silo.

• The missed opportunity is inefficient and ineffective.

Stories from within your company are exactly what external stakeholders crave.

• But organizational structures built for a pre-digital, pre-social media world prevent these stories from reaching the people who need to hear them.

Tighter coordination isn’t the complete answer.

Mixternal communications, which presents a fundamentally different approach to orchestrating stakeholder engagement across the entire storytelling ecosystem, can smash the artificial barriers that stymie success in recruiting (and other externally focused campaigning).

This article is broken down into the following sections:

• Describing the stakeholder engagement ecosystem

• Introducing the Stakeholder Alignment Framework

• The five parts of the framework with examples and key insights for each component

Stakeholder Engagement Happens in an Ecosystem

The traditional approach to stakeholder engagement treats each audience as if they exist in separate universes.

• Internal comms crafts messages for employees.

• External comms develops content for media and industry.

• Marketing speaks to customers and prospects.

• And HR talks to job candidates.

😵‍💫 Reality check: stakeholders don’t experience your company based on your org chart.

• Your employees read your press releases.

• Your customers follow your execs on LinkedIn.

• Your job candidates talk to current employees.

• And your board members probably saw that TikTok the comms intern made (you know the one 😬)

The mixternal opportunity is recognizing that stakeholder engagement is an ecosystem, not a collection of walled gardens. This approach creates a coherent experience throughout the stakeholder journey by nurturing consistent themes across all channels:

• Those engineering stories move from the intranet to the blog to LinkedIn.

• Recruiting materials draw from the same narrative that current employees experience.

• Marketing campaigns reflect workplace reality instead of aspirational fiction.

For recruiting, the potential ROI is clear: faster hiring, better culture fit, and lower turnover. All because you stopped pretending that internal and external content should remain forever separate.

📢 Tearing down the artificial barriers is increasingly a competitive necessity in a world where stakeholders have more access to information about your company than ever before—from Glassdoor reviews to social media to press coverage to the overheard conversation at the coffee shop next to HQ.

The Stakeholder Alignment Framework

The Stakeholder Alignment Framework below is a practical, five-part approach to harmonize discordant stakeholder comms:

1. Stakeholder Mapping

2. Content Audit

3. Content Planning

4. Distribution Planning

5. Amplification

For each of the framework’s components I provide a (fake but plausible) example of a (fake) tech company (Initech) facing a recruiting challenge.

Read more

Your executive just forwarded a link to a 92-page McKinsey report with the cryptic “thoughts?” message. (Comms-rades love those emails… 🙄)

But you know what she's getting at. A month ago your exec decided she wanted to be seen as a “thought leader” among her peers. (Your first thought: she's setting the stage to leave. Your second thought: OK, but I've never heard her express much originality…how do I start??).

Like everyone else you could summarize the report’s key findings and slap an original paragraph on top with a bland declaration about how urgent it is for XYZ leaders to pay attention to world-changing trends like these.

🥅 But if your goal is to position your exec as a genuine thought leader—not just another voice in the LinkedIn echo chamber—you need a different approach.

Here’s the thing about using industry reports and white papers as springboards for thought leadership: everyone reads (er, scans) the same reports (Edelman Trust Barometer, anyone?), but few take the time to develop an original perspective.

• It’s too easy to simply repackage the main points, maybe add a quote from an exec, and call it a day.

That’s not thought leadership. That’s the equivalent of retweeting re-posting without reading the article.

💭 Idea: what if you could actually add to the conversation?

• What if your exec could turn heads with a tightly crafted creative take on a popular, otherwise non-earth-shattering annual report?

What if your exec’s LinkedIn post got forwarded more than the report she cites?

⚒️ You can use AI to help mine these annual reports for unexpected angles, identify compelling counterarguments, and craft perspectives that actually advance the conversation.

• (And in the process you get to work on something more exciting than a formulaic quote for a press release or obligatory employee note on XYZ program.)

Using a Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) as a model executive and McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2023 report as an example research document, I’ll show you:

• ✅ how to use AI to transform door-stopper industry research into distinctive thought leadership

• ✅ how to remix the resulting article into content for six mixternal channels

• ✅ a repeatable process that works with any industry report or white paper that lands in your inbox

• ✅ 6 AI prompts and actual chatbot outputs from this exercise, so you can see the work in action

• ✅ 4 guardrails to put in place to keep you from going astray

Reality check: The goal isn’t to have AI write your thought leadership. (Though, yep, you can do that, too.) Rather, the idea is to use AI to help identify unique angles and pressure-test arguments, so you can write something original for your exec.

• The final product still needs your expertise, your exec’s genuine perspective, and most importantly, your exec’s and company’s actual experience with the topics at hand.

👀 Spotted elsewhere: This article, “STAY HUMAN - How to Avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease,” advises B2B marketers to create unique, human-centered content by avoiding clichés and focusing on authentic stories that reflect their company’s distinct perspective.

Set the Stage for Success

For this exercise I’m using ChatGPT because a) anyone can access the tool for free and play along and b) because it’s good enough to get the job done.

• I would use the paid version of Claude if I were doing this IRL because the 3.5 Sonnet version is more interesting, clever, and writes better than ChatGPT.

But before we dive into the report, we need to get AI thinking like your exec.

This step is crucial because it helps frame all subsequent prompts through the lens of someone with real industry experience and authority.

• 🛣️ This is #1 of six AI prompts in this essay.

Here's a basic prompt:

You are the Chief Human Resources Officer of a [industry] company with [X] years of experience. You are creating thought leadership content to raise your profile among senior HR leaders and contribute meaningfully to conversations about organizational transformation. Your approach blends academic research with practical experience leading large-scale change.

You can make the prompt more concrete. Since we're working with McKinsey's State of Organizations report, here's how I'd customize it (for my imaginary CHRO):

Read more

"And back again, after the most popular session last year, Shaun Randol of the Mixternal Comms Playbook brings another dose of AI reality."

• "most popular" are Simpplr's words, not mine.

• Can I make it two in a row?

Read more

• The usual nods… and note-taking… and promises to do better. (I should set up a calendar reminder to check-in with So-and-So once a month…)

But it’s business as usual at next week’s content planning session—the Argentina office can translate the sustainability announcement whenever they get to it, right?

Meanwhile in Buenos Aires…two comms-rades are quietly doing what they've always done:

• Seamlessly managing the entire comms spectrum for Latin America—from employee newsletters to media relations to executive bylines—and they’re doing it without a moment’s thought about whether something is “internal” or “external.”

Here's what HQ doesn’t get about mixternal communications: your regional teams mastered it forever ago.

• Not because they read about it in Harvard Business Review1 or attended a workshop on breaking down silos.

• But because they literally had no other choice.

When you're the only comms person within 2,000 miles, antiquated divisions between internal and external comms are about as useful as fax machines.

The irony? While HQ comms teams congratulate themselves on their sophisticated approach to integrated communications, regional teams have been practicing mixternal comms since day one.

💪 And they're crushing it.

🧑‍🏫 Every day regional teams hold a masterclass in mixternal communications.

Take this hypothetical (but realistic) example of a recent event at a Fortune (or FTSE) 100 company: Their Buenos Aires office produced a video showcasing local engineering talent for a recruiting event. Simple enough.

• But the regional comms lead saw bigger potential.

• She added English subtitles, trimmed it for social, and shared it globally.

The result? It became the company’s most engaging Facebook post that quarter, was featured in the global employee newsletter, and got picked up by industry media interested in the company’s technical talent pipeline.

Meanwhile back at HQ, that same initiative would have required five different teams (HR comms, a vendor for translation, the multimedia team, social media, and PR), six meetings, a project brief, and too.many.damn.emails (the emails!) to pull off that cross-channel effort.

This is the mixternal advantage regional teams developed out of necessity.

👒 🎩 🧢 🪖 When you wear multiple comms hats—sometimes all the hats—you naturally start seeing content opportunities that transcend artificial channel boundaries.

• You don’t have the luxury of thinking “that’s not my job” or “that’s for the employee comms team to figure out.”

In this article I provide specific lessons HQ can learn from regional teams, including:

• ✅ How regional teams naturally develop a mixternal mindset

• ✅ Examples of regional content success stories that are more onerous under traditional silos

• ✅ 4 ways HQ can tap into and learn from regional mixternal expertise

• ✅ One bonkers idea 🤪

¡Vamos!

Read more

The Mixternal Comms Playbook is pleased to present part two of an exclusive three-part series from Frank Dias that explores how a solo communicator can effectively run an employee engagement survey with the help of artificial intelligence. Frank breaks down his step-by-step approach to building and executing a survey aligned with business priorities. He uses AI tools to streamline tasks such as question development, data analysis, and reporting. He highlights the importance of AI in augmenting human expertise, emphasizing that communicators can use it to boost efficiency, save time, and generate actionable insights.

Read part one here:

And now, part two…

Subscribe now

This article is focused on one of my IC+AI use cases: the employee engagement survey.

In my three-part behind-the-scenes series, I’m breaking down my workflow into which parts are person-owned and which parts are AI-augmented/enhanced in running an employee engagement survey. I highlight what I did and how I did it.

The challenge

Is it possible to run an employee engagement and communications survey with the help of AI to a global 3,000+ employee audience to provide valuable, actionable insights to present to a company’s leaders aligned with their priorities?

• Part 1: Survey Development, Feedback & Preparation

• Part 2: Survey Execution, Communications & Data Collection

• Part 3: Reporting, Analysis, and Leadership Presentation

In the second installment of my series on AI-enhanced employee engagement surveys (you can read part 1 here), I explore survey execution, the communications, and what to do with the collected data (preparing it for AI use to get it ready for deep analysis to build out my report, which I’ll talk about in part 3).

A quick recap

My simple survey workflow looked like this:

Together with AI I developed, shaped, and landed on these five themes, which link to what a healthy organisation should be interested in measuring and improving against where necessary:

1. Leadership, Strategy, Progress, & Direction

2. Employee Connection & Communications

3. Performance, Productivity, & Development

4. Work Environment, Culture, & Wellbeing

5. People Management, Feedback, & Recognition.

Here’s a copy of my list of 50 questions I used for my survey. In hindsight, 50 is way too many.

I’ve already covered how I developed the survey and its design. Now, it's time to tackle the survey execution, communications, data collection, and analysis process.

1. Go-live: Launching the survey

Survey tool – the organisation I was in used the Google Workspace Suite, so to keep things simple and accessible to the target audience and to keep it in-house, I used Google Forms. I didn’t need to pay for an external fancy survey tool.

Once I laid out the question set, it was easy to create, branch, and identify the types of questions and how I wanted people to input their answers. I break this down in my list of 50 questions.

Identifying the target audience – This was simple, everyone! However, I needed to engage with key stakeholders to sense-check the questions and survey approach and what I was aiming for in terms of the outcomes to add value to these stakeholders.

As I mentioned in Part 1, connecting with my manager was the first connection, then to the right senior leaders including HR, the Social Equity/DEI team, my marketing and comms team, and several other trusted contacts. I was also after their support in the promotion once I’d taken on board their feedback and tweaked it.

Drafting the communications – I also kept this simple: a CEO email out to all, with chaser reminders over a two-week period, and targeted emails with league participation tables to department heads to motivate their local support call to action. I created two specific assets:

1. The CEO comms – An example of the CEO comms I sent out. I had it translated into French and included it after the English as a single email to everyone.

2. About the survey one-pager – This covered more details I didn’t include in the CEO comms, such as how I would manage any sensitive data collection, usage, access, purpose, objectives, and measurement.

Run-time – I ran the survey for just two weeks. Ideally, I would recommend three as a minimum and four as a maximum. After it was out, it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the closure date. However, I regularly peeked at the answers to help me see early trends.

2. Using AI to analyse the data collection and initial analysis

I won’t dwell too much on this as I cover some details in Part 1. After trying and comparing some of the other tools, I used ChatGPT’s analysis feature, the most reliable AI tool at the time.

AI usage for this data-heavy lifting was vital to speeding up the process of finding insights, generating analysis, and comparing the data with some of the demographics to do in-depth reporting.

Once the survey closed, I looked through Google Form’s visual analysis of the results, which included graphs, to get a feel for the initial take on the stories.

A sample of two of the visuals:

Read more

Initech, the IT consulting company, is taking mixternal communications to a level that even I—your resident mixternal evangelist—didn’t see coming.

What’s happening: Initech boldly declared they are eliminating ALL distinctions between internal and external communications.

But not in the smart, strategic way we talk a…

Read more

When Google's Gemini AI began generating biased images last year, CEO Sundar Pichai had to explain to employees why their flagship product failed so publicly.

• What happened? Google was criticized when Gemini, its gen AI product, depicted inaccurate scenes when prompted to create images of people. The company stopped accepting prompts for people in the image generator while it tried to fix the problem.

Pichai’s memo invites comparison to another response to a recent crisis: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's emotive message to employees during the Joe Rogan controversy.

• Remind me: Since Spotify signed a deal in 2020 to be the exclusive home of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the company has had to defend the controversial host. That came to a head in 2022 when Spotify employees loudly expressed their anger at Rogan’s transphobic comments, his promotion of vaccine misinformation, and his use of racial slurs.

While Google faced a technical failure and Spotify a values-based challenge, both CEOs had to address angry customers and concerned employees—all while the media had a field day.

What's revealing is how these leaders approached their respective crises. Both had to acknowledge failure swiftly and chart a path forward—but their strategies differed in telling ways.

👉 Dig comparative case studies like this? Check out this analysis of how Meta and Amazon managed comms around rolling back their DEI programs. Their drastically different communication approaches reveal how to tiptoe through a tense political environment.

In this edition of Insider Comms™, I provide an in-depth analysis of how two tech giants handled vastly different controversies, including:

• ☑️ Why Pichai and Ek took opposite approaches in tone (and why they were right in doing so)

• ☑️ The strategy behind each memo's structure

• ☑️ How the CEOs position themselves within the crisis (personal vs. institutional)

• ☑️ 4 lessons comms pros can draw from these exec comms

• ☑️ The full text of both memos

🔬 Let's inspect Google’s and Spotify’s differing approaches to crisis comms and see what we can learn.

Read more

A massive network outage disconnected millions of AT&T customers.

CEO John Stankey's job? Reconnect with upset employees, anxious consumers, and watchful investors.

📝 All through one memo.

• Remind me: AT&T experienced a massive network outage on Feb 22, 2024, affecting about a quarter of their customers. The company blamed an “incorrect process” during network expansion efforts, though that clinical description hardly captures the chaos of a morning when millions couldn't make calls, send texts, or access TikTok (the horror!).

• Three days later(!)—on Sunday, Feb 25—Stankey sent the memo to employees.

What's revealing about Stankey's memo is its high-wire act:

• acknowledging failure while projecting confidence

• apologizing while minimizing

• managing employee fears while calming market jitters

Does he succeed? That depends on which audience you're asking—and which paragraph you're reading.

• Despite a few shortcomings, Stankey’s memo is very good—one of the best in the Insider Comms™ archive.

• 📌 You’ll want to bookmark this for future reference when you experience your own outage or customer service crisis.

Here's what you'll learn in this edition of Insider Comms:

• ✔️ The subtle art of Stankey's “yes, but” strategy (so clever!)

• ✔️ Why this memo is actually written for Wall Street (despite being sent to employees; a classic mixternal move)

• ✔️ Three tightrope-walking techniques for crisis comms pros

And, as usual, I share the complete memo.

🎪 On with the show!

Read more

💥🚗 Not so fast.

The last-minute requests arrive, right on time 😉:

• Now the CEO also wants a press release.

• Marketing needs something for LinkedIn.

• Your head of Manufacturing wants talking points for an upcoming town hall.

• And the Regional Sales lead is begging for a tip sheet to share with the field.

Welcome to life as a solo comms pro, where you're expected to do it all—internal comms, PR, exec comms, social media, and more.

• It’s called mixternal comms.

The pressure to provide quality content for every comms channel is relentless.

But what if you could take the exec memo you wrote and transform it into channel-specific content in minutes?

• Not hours or days. Minutes.

With AI and one powerful master prompt you can analyze your original content and adapt it for different audiences and channels—while maintaining message consistency and strategic alignment.

• No more working late to craft separate pieces of content.

• No more wondering if your social media reinforces your press release.

• No more struggling to remember which message points resonate with which audience.

For comms pros doing it all, this article is about working smarter, being more efficient and impactful, and getting to your kid’s soccer (ahem, football) practice on time.

When you can quickly adapt content across channels while maintaining quality and consistency, you demonstrate the strategic thinking that leaders notice.

• You show how to maximize comms ROI by getting your message in front of more audiences… without burning out.

Setting the Scene

Let's use a plausible (but imagined) example to show how this works. Say you do comms for HarvestCorp, a small-ish agricultural equipment manufacturer debuting its newest innovation: the FieldMaster X300, a super fancy, tech-forward harvesting tool.

Per usual for the CEO, you’ve drafted a stellar all-employee email announcing the news 👇.

To: All Employees
From: Sarah Chen, CEO
Subject: Introducing the FieldMaster X300: the Future of Harvesting

Team,

Today marks a significant milestone for HarvestCorp as we unveil the FieldMaster X300, our most advanced harvesting system to date. This autonomous system represents years of engineering innovation and customer collaboration, combining advanced sensor technology with precision cutting capabilities to transform how our customers approach harvest season.

The FieldMaster X300 delivers 40% greater efficiency compared to traditional harvesting methods, while reducing crop waste by 25%. These improvements directly address our customers' two biggest challenges: labor shortages and operational costs.

Initial field trials with select customers have exceeded expectations. Beta testing across diverse crop conditions showed consistent performance improvements, with some users reporting labor cost savings of up to $100,000 per harvest season.

Production begins next month at our Illinois facility, with first deliveries scheduled for Q3. The market opportunity is substantial—our analysis suggests a $500 million addressable market in North America alone.

I'm incredibly proud of everyone who contributed to this achievement. The FieldMaster X300 demonstrates our commitment to innovation and our understanding of farmers' evolving needs.

You'll hear more about this launch in the coming weeks. Thank you for everything you do to keep HarvestCorp on the cutting edge!

-Sarah

There's your starting point.

But how do you efficiently transform this informative memo into a press release, LinkedIn post, town hall talking points, and sales tip sheet—each tailored to its specific audience while maintaining consistent messaging—without losing your mind?

I'll show you exactly how to use a master gen AI prompt and examples of what you get from the chatbot (screenshots!).

• ⏱️ In just 12 minutes you’ll go from that exec memo to having content for four more channels.

• (Be prepared for a hallelujah moment.)

The Master Prompt That Makes It All Work

Here's the AI prompt template that will help you analyze your source content and adapt it for any channel:

Read more

• And your CCO just pinged you about complaints from senior execs who are tired of fielding repetitive requests from six different comms teams about the same topics.

• But… you need to write a blog post about your…

Read more

Amazon and Meta both announced major changes to their diversity programs in recent months. But how they announced these changes showcases a fascinating study in contrast.

• Remind me: This month Meta announced an end to its diverse slate hiring approach and disbanded its DEI team. Last December Amazon said it was “winding down outdated programs” as part of a broader initiative review.

• Candi Castleberry, VP of inclusive experiences and technology signed Amazon’s memo while Meta’s was sent by Janelle Gale, VP of people.

What's revealing is how they communicate the end of their programs. Their memos demonstrate two radically different approaches to delivering contentious news in an era where every “internal” message is essentially public.

• Mixternal much?

While both companies made the same decisions, their communication strategies couldn't be more different:

• Amazon opted for strategic ambiguity, wrapping changes in corporate process-speak.

• Meta went for detailed transparency, spelling out specific program cuts.

• Both approaches are risky.

What emerges is a rare comparative case study in the tensions facing today’s comms pros:

• How do you write for employees knowing your memo will leak?

• When does transparency help—and when does it create headline headaches?

Why This Matters Now

As President Trump settles into his second term, U.S.-based corporate comms teams are bracing for a wave of cultural and policy changes that will demand careful messaging.

🥊 DEI is the first fight.

• Trump ordered all federal DEI employees placed on paid leave.

• In the U.S. McDonald’s, Lowe’s, Target, Tractor Supply, and Walmart are a handful of well-known companies that have curtailed or eliminated DEI efforts.

• Yes, but companies like Cisco, Costco, Microsoft, Pinterest, JPMorgan, and Apple are defending DEI.

🔍 The DEI rollback memos analyzed below offer valuable lessons for what’s potentially ahead:

• They preview how comms could handle controversial policy shifts.

• They demonstrate techniques for balancing multiple, mixternal stakeholders.

• They show how to (attempt to) maintain company values while adapting to new realities.

🖼️ The big picture: These won’t be isolated incidents. As more companies re-evaluate their DEI programs and prepare for potential policy changes, especially around immigration, comms teams need proven frameworks and language for simultaneously delivering sensitive news to multiple audiences.

• Seriously. Buckle up. The next four years are gonna be cray cray.

In this edition of Insider Comms™, I analyze how Amazon and Meta navigated DEI comms challenges, including:

• ☑️ Why Amazon and Meta took opposite approaches (and which was better)

• ☑️ The hidden audiences both memos actually address

• ☑️ A contrast in how much detail to include

• ☑️ Four key lessons for comms pros facing similar challenges

• ☑️ Four language templates you can use to frame a controversial move around DEI

• ☑️ The full memos from both companies

Let's go.

Read more

Most corporate comms teams operate like medieval fiefdoms, with internal and external groups jealously guarding their territories.

⚔️ Mixternal comms is about to storm the castle.

Corporate firewalls protect vital company data but shouldn't dictate corporate comms strategy. The reality is that information flows freely between internal and external channe…

Read more

Welcome to the Mixternal Comms Playbook…

…formerly known as Mister Editorial.

The Mixternal Comms Playbook focuses on helping comms-rades:

• master mixternal (internal + external) comms,

• save hours weekly through AI-powered workflows,

• improve executive comms,

• and advance their careers

  ---

😲 Why the change? The upgrade and renewed focus reflect my commitment to help you master the future of our profession: mixternal communications.

So what is mixternal comms? It's the recognition that in today's always-on, digital-everything, work-is-life-is work world, the lines between internal and external communications are blurred.

🥊 Indeed, the lines so many comms-rades myopically defend like ideologues at the barricades—internal comms vs. PR, for example—should be erased.

• Who in PR hasn’t mixed it up on the inside?

• Who in employee comms hasn’t drafted something for the outside?

• Messages crafted for employees can easily reach external audiences, and vice versa.

And let’s stop pretending an employee’s life stops when they badge in and Society’s influence disappears at the office’s front door.

Mixternal comms recognizes the reality of our blurry communications landscape.

As comms pros we must adapt by:

• Embracing the mixternal mindset and finding ways to align messaging across all audiences

• Developing strategies that account for the increasing overlap between—and inevitable merging of—internal and external comms

• Staying attuned to the latest trends and tools shaping our field, especially the rise of AI

✅ Rest assured, the core of what you've come to expect from Mister Editorial will remain unchanged in the Mixternal Comms Playbook:

• Actionable insights, useful guides, and real-world case studies to help you excel in your role

• Thought-provoking analysis of the key challenges and opportunities facing our profession

• A commitment to helping you navigate the ever-evolving comms landscape with confidence

👉 Learn more about the Mixternal Comms Playbook and read four of the most popular articles of all time—free!

Whether you're a seasoned comms veteran or just starting your career, the Mixternal Comms Playbook is your essential guide to a successful career at the intersection of internal and external communications.

• If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, I invite you to join our growing community of forward-thinking professionals shaping the future of our field.

Together we'll navigate the mixternal world with intelligence, nuance, a healthy dose of curiosity, and a dash of irreverence 😏.

🚀 Onward,
Shaun

Follow along on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.

P.S. Refer colleagues and earn access to paid content using your personal referral link.