• 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 matters in the grand scheme.

• But the biweekly dispatch has worn me down.

• I’d rather pursue the kind of writing that doesn’t fit neatly into a “here’s your five-step framework” box.

So here’s what’s happening:

• I’m stopping all monthly recurring charges. If you’re a paid subscriber, you won’t be billed again. If you paid for a yearly subscription, I’m working out how to handle prorated refunds—bear with me while I figure out the mechanics.

• Everything new I write will be free for everyone.

I’ll publish when inspiration strikes, which might be a few times a quarter—or there might be radio silence for a while.

• The material likely won’t be tactical playbooks.

• They’ll be reflections on bigger questions about what we’re doing in this profession and where it’s all going.

If that sounds interesting, stick around.

• If you were here for the templates and frameworks, I completely understand if you want to move on. No hard feelings either way.

Big ideas to come…

See you soon-ish,
-Shaun

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 company with actual humans at the helm.

Meanwhile, your executives are drowning in repetitive interview requests from different teams across internal comms, PR, and analyst relations—all asking variations of the same questions about market strategy, company direction, and leadership philosophy.

Here’s the mixternal solution: Executive Ask Me Anything sessions—held on a chat platform like Slack—solve multiple problems at once while creating content that works across every channel you manage.

Why AMAs Are Perfect for Mixternal Comms

Traditional exec comms is inefficient. Your internal team interviews the CEO about quarterly results for the employee newsletter. Two weeks later, your PR colleague books the same exec for a similar conversation with a trade publication. Then your analyst relations manager schedules yet another briefing covering overlapping territory.

AMAs flip this dynamic completely. One conversation. Multiple outputs. Maximum efficiency.

🪄 Here’s the mixternal magic: A 60-minute AMA session becomes your core narrative that adapts across every channel you manage.

• The raw transcript becomes an in-depth intranet feature.

• Key quotes become social media content.

• Strategic insights become external thought leadership.

• And that authentic unscripted executive voice is what every audience craves.

Plus, the barriers to entry are basically nonexistent. Every employee already knows how to use chat platforms. No training required. No fancy video setup. No travel budget. Just dynamic conversations in a low-threat environment.

Three Types of AMAs for Different Mixternal Goals

I’ve identified three distinct approaches that serve different strategic purposes:

The True AMA opens the floor to any employee, regardless of hierarchy, with no topic restrictions. This format generates the most authentic content because executives can’t over-prepare for unknown questions. It’s perfect for creating raw material that demonstrates genuine leadership thinking.

Thematic AMAs focus on specific topics like “Market Expansion Strategy” or “Our Approach to AI Integration.” These work exceptionally well for mixternal purposes because the focused conversation creates content that’s immediately valuable to industry analysts, trade publications, and LinkedIn thought leadership while giving employees deep insights into strategic decisions.

Granular AMAs dive into highly specific topics with targeted audiences. Think “Sales Strategy for Product X” with the global sales team or “How to Integrate Company X” for the HR group during an acquisition. While these seem internal, they can generate compelling external content because they reveal how successful companies operate. It’s behind-the-scenes insight that business journalists love.

Convincing Executives: The Mixternal Pitch

Unless your boss is naturally comfortable sharing unfiltered thoughts with employees (spoiler: probably not), you’ll need to make the business case.

Here’s how to frame it: This isn’t a ploy for employee engagement (longtime readers know how I feel about that.) Rather, the AMA is strategic content creation for a comms campaign that serves multiple business objectives simultaneously.

• One hour of executive time generates weeks of content across mixternal channels.

5 selling points that work:

• It’s just 45-60 minutes with no travel required

• No prepared remarks or slides needed

• Direct employee engagement that improves culture metrics

• Creates authentic content for external thought leadership

• Generates quotable material for internal storytelling, media interviews, and analyst briefings

Here’s where AI becomes your secret weapon. Use role prompting to prepare your executive for potential questions.

• Ask ChatGPT to “act like a skeptical employee in engineering” or “play the role of a concerned sales rep in Europe” and generate potential questions.

• Your exec goes in prepared but not (over-) scripted.

The Technology Stack (Keeping It Simple)

Any chat platform works: Slack, Google Chat, Teams, even WhatsApp for smaller groups. The technology matters less than the conversation quality.

But consider these factors before committing to a platform:

• Security: External platforms store data off-site, creating potential vulnerabilities your risk team won’t love

• Scalability: Can your platform handle hundreds of participants simultaneously?

• Accessibility: Will the technology work in all your global locations?

• Content capture: You need to export the full transcript for editing and redistribution

Pro tip: Require participants to use their real names. Anonymous questions minimize silly off-topic submissions or provocations and ensure conversations stay professional enough for external repurposing.

The 8-Step Mixternal AMA Process

Here are the step-by-step instructions for planning and executing your AMA and what to do when it’s a wrap.

Step 1: Strategic Planning: Identify which executive should participate and connect it to larger business narratives. Is there a product launch coming? Strategic pivot? Market expansion? Use the AMA to create content for employee communication and external storytelling needs.

Step 2: Targeted Invitations: Craft invitation copy that generates excitement while setting clear expectations about the conversation’s scope. Your sign-up process becomes market research about which topics employees (and by extension, external stakeholders?) actually care about.

Step 3: Question Collection: Solicit questions in advance for multiple purposes: anonymous submission for sensitive topics, timezone accommodation, executive preparation insights, and backup content if conversation lulls.

• 💭 Use AI to analyze submitted questions for themes and sentiment before the session.

Step 4: Day-of Coordination: Send reminder communications and save participant lists for follow-up content distribution. This audience can be your employee advocates for future external content amplification.

Step 5: Live Facilitation: Open the conversation with clear ground rules and strategic first questions that set the tone. An hour provides enough content for weeks of derivative materials.

Step 6: Content Capture: Download the complete transcript immediately for editing and stakeholder sharing. This raw material becomes your content foundation for multiple channels.

Step 7: Success Measurement: Evaluate both participant engagement and content quality. Ask the executive about insights gained and comfort level with the format. Survey participants about value and future interest.

💰 Step 8: Mixternal Distribution: Here’s where the real value emerges. Transform that single conversation into multiple pieces of content:

• Edit the transcript into a readable Q&A for your intranet.

• Extract key quotes for external thought leadership.

• Create social media content highlighting employee engagement.

• Develop talking points for future media interviews.

• If the conversation generated significant strategic insights, pitch them to relevant trade publications as an exclusive executive perspective.

• And then some… You know the drill by now on how to remix content 16 different ways. Get creative!

AI-Powered Content Multiplication

Once you’ve captured the executive conversation, AI becomes your content multiplication engine. Use role prompting to adapt the same core insights for different audiences:

• Ask ChatGPT to “rewrite this executive response about market strategy from the AMA transcript as if you're writing for industry analysts who care about competitive positioning.”

• Then ask it to “take the same insight and write it for employees who want to understand how this affects their daily work.”

• 👉 Related: You might want to step through How to Teach AI to Write in Your Exec’s Voice to maximize the content creation potential from your AMA transcripts.

💥 One insight + multiple formats = maximum efficiency

The Mixternal ROI

Traditional exec comms require multiple interviews, multiple approval cycles, and multiple content creation efforts for each audience.

AMAs do away with all that. Simultaneously one conversation becomes a core narrative that efficiently serves internal storytelling, external thought leadership, and media relations objectives.

• Your execs get clarity on employee concerns that inform their external messaging.

• Employees get authentic leadership access, something they constantly crave.

• External stakeholders get genuine insight into leadership thinking rather than corporate-speak.

Most importantly, you get the breathing room to focus on strategy instead of constantly chasing execs for repetitive interviews across different teams.

At the end of the day, working smarter beats working harder—especially when you’re already behind next week’s campaign planning session.

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 multiple channels will show stakeholders (and the CFO) that the money you spend on video alone is worth the ROI across your comms ecosystem.

The math is simple.

• Your three-minute product update costs $3,000 to produce.

• Spread that across fifteen different deployments and suddenly you’re looking at $200 per channel.

• That’s ROI!

(But comms folks never claimed to be good at math.)

Comms folks are prone to being channel managers instead of content strategists, which explains why they’re always scrambling for fresh material or making last-minute requests to get their content on such-and-such channel.

• The IC team produces a video for the intranet and calls it a day.

• Meanwhile the newsletter editor is begging for material to fill gaps, the social media team is begging for evergreen content, and the web team is begging for multimedia content.

This siloed thinking wastes resources and misses the fundamental opportunity that video presents.

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The Multiplication Strategy

Your standard three-minute video—whether it’s quarterly results, product demos, or employees volunteering at the local food bank—should never live in just one place.

• That's like buying an iPhone and using it only to take photos. You can call people with it, too! And track your steps! And … and … and …

The complete video works perfectly for your intranet, company blog, YouTube channel, and town hall presentations, to name just four channels.

• No additional work required beyond uploading and maybe writing a quick intro.

But this is just the beginning of what’s possible when you stop thinking like a channel manager and start thinking like a content strategist.

• Simple editing transforms one asset into many.

Here are 20 more mixternal channels you can use to multiply the ROI on that vid:

5. Trim that three-minute video into thirty-second clips for digital signage (remember to use closed captions).

6. Extract key quotes for Instagram posts.

7. Create fifteen-second teasers for LinkedIn.

8. Loop it at your company’s booth at a job fair or industry conference.

9. The audio track becomes a podcast segment. Strip away the visuals and suddenly you have content for your audio channel. Add a brief intro explaining what listeners would see if they watched the full version on the intranet, and you’ve created valuable content for commuting employees or WFH employees who “work” while walking their dog.

10. Screen captures create photo essays. Six stills from your video, each with thoughtful captions, can live as Instagram stories, blog posts, or rotating content on digital signage. The images can also populate external and internal social media (e.g., Slack, VivaEngage) over several weeks, each driving traffic back to the original video.

11. Transcripts become articles. That executive interview you filmed? The transcript, with light editing to remove verbal tics and false starts, becomes a standalone piece for your newsletter or blog. Suddenly your video investment has generated both visual and written content.

12. Send the video to content-hungry media for them to publish on their sites (e.g., local news, industry publications) or to use as background information on your company’s latest achievement.

13. Is your company really fancy and has an internal video news channel, like a mini-CNN or BBC? The video is gold for those producers!

14. The HR team may want to include your video in new-hire orientation or training materials, so send it their way.

15. The video or segments of it can also enhance digital annual reports—like those for ESG, investors, philanthropy—spicing up what otherwise could be a check-the-box activity.

16. Take the potentially funniest or meme-ist three seconds of that video and turn it into an animated gif for viral sharing within the company.

17. We haven’t even mentioned X, Bluesky, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Weibo, WeChat, the metaverse, and other alternative channels I’m not coming up with.

Each edit requires minimal effort but extends your content’s reach exponentially.

Be constantly thinking: “Where else can the video content go?”

With practice and routine, cutting up your video for multiple channels gets faster, because the many deliverables are known in advance.

The Foresight Factor

Respect your audience. Sorry to break it to you, but your employees aren’t refreshing just one channel—they’re scrolling LinkedIn during lunch, glancing at digital signage while walking to meetings, listening to podcasts during commutes, and reading the intranet when they remember it exists.

• Meeting them across all these touchpoints increases your chances of breaking through the noise.

The secret to maximizing video’s potential is thinking beyond the primary deployment before filming. The video becomes the seed from which multiple content streams grow organically.

When your stakeholder requests a video for the quarterly town hall,1 immediately start planning how that content will cascade through your other channels.

• This is strategic thinking that prevents future scrambling and missed opportunities.

Smart teams build repurposing into their production process. They:

• capture extra b-roll footage knowing they’ll need stills for social media,

• ensure clean audio recording because the podcast team will want the clips,

• film executives delivering key messages as standalone segments (not just integrated into longer presentations).

You get the idea.

This approach requires shifting from reactive to proactive content planning. Instead of wondering what you’ll put in next week’s newsletter, you’re systematically extracting value from work already done.

Why This Actually Matters

Treating video as a single-use asset is a luxury most communications teams can’t afford.

• It’s also absurd.

Isn’t LinkedIn full of complaints that comms is constantly asked to do more with less? The teams that survive and thrive are those that maximize every resource.

Re-purposing video:

• Grows one piece of content into many

• Increases return on investment

• Demonstrates strategic thinking

• Stretches budgets and resources

• Increases the likelihood of employee engagement

• Increases your team’s value

• Gets your creative juices flowing

That three-minute video is raw material for your entire communication strategy. The teams that understand this distinction build influence, prove value, and secure their future in an increasingly competitive landscape.

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 in the blanks, edit, and polish. We’re not going anywhere.

Two and a half years later and it’s clear to many in our field that AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can produce high-quality writing that can be passed on with very little to no editing. You may have even passed on AI-written material without letting anyone know (🤫our secret), and you may have even consumed AI content without even knowing it (🤦our secret).

As comms colleagues slowly accept that AI-generated writing is here to stay, new laments for maintaining relevancy in comms have emerged. Among them is the claim that humans are needed to create or ensure “authentic” comms.

The siren call for authenticity isn’t new. Ivy Lee is widely recognized as the founder of modern public relations. The slogan of his PR firm, Parker and Lee, established in 1904, was “Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest.” (Among other firsts, Lee pioneered the press release.)

Alas, according to Michael Turney, professor emeritus of communications, Lee himself “ruefully admitted that even he couldn't honestly explain the actions of some of his clients well enough to make them palatable to the general public.”

Critics and scholars argue that Lee’s work sometimes involved manipulating facts or perceptions to protect powerful corporate interests, including his work for John D. Rockefeller to spin a crackdown and massacre of striking miners in Colorado (the 1914 Ludlow Massacre), to say nothing of Lee’s work as an unpaid PR advisor to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

An inconvenient truth in corporate comms is that “authenticity” is impossible to achieve because—from day one in 1904—it never existed in our industry. It’s not that authenticity is difficult to achieve in corp comms. I’m arguing that authenticity is a conceptual impossibility in an industry whose primary function is to craft strategic messages that serve corporate interests, organizational narratives, and business objectives, regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes.

It’s time to abandon the notion of authenticity in comms and redirect the energy to fights that actually matter.

In this essay I explore:

• what we mean by “authentic”

• performative authenticity

• fooling our audiences

• ethics of manufactured authenticity

• alternatives to the authenticity argument

I conclude with a call to redirect our energy to existential fights that matter for the future of our profession.

What We Mean by ‘Authentic’

What does authenticity even mean? My heavy-as-ship’s-anchor edition of the Oxford English Dictionary offers two relevant definitions:

1. Of first-hand authority, original.

2. Entitled to acceptance or belief as being in accordance with fact, or as stating fact; reliable, trustworthy.

The first definition creates an interesting paradox for comms pros. By this measure, corporate communications is already authentic because it reports what the “authority” wants to say. Whatever the executive or business—the authority1—decides is, ipso facto, an authentic message because it’s from that authority.

But that’s not how most comms pros use the term. We don’t like to think of ourselves as corporate mouthpieces. Instead, when claiming comms pros are needed to stoke the flames of authentic comms, we invoke the second definition—communications that are factual, reliable, and trustworthy. Communications that are “real.”

The problem? That kind of authenticity has never been the primary goal of corp comms. Our job is to shape perception, manage reputation, and advance organizational narratives—internally and externally (mixternally!). We’re not documentarians or journalists2; we’re corporate strategists.

Think about the most basic functions of our profession:

• We ghostwrite messages for executives who couldn’t write a birthday greeting

• We perform linguistic acrobatics to avoid calling a thing what it is (“reduction in force” vs. “layoff”)

• We massage unflattering facts into “opportunities” and “challenges”

• We create frameworks that ensure everyone stays consistently on-message

• We filter employee stories through the lens of what serves the corporate narrative

• We ensure gossip and rumors stay at the proverbial water cooler

We cry out for “authenticity” in comms when the day’s assignment is to create out of thin air someone else’s quote for a press release.

We plead for “authenticity” in comms when the last story that will ever see the light of day is the profile of Jenny in Accounting who is part of a 15% across-the-board RIF…er, layoff.

We claim to be the guardians of “authentic” comms when every. single. thing. we. create. is reviewed, edited, and “approved” by 16 stakeholders, some of whom are twice-removed from the topic at hand.

We strut around LinkedIn wearing our authenticity badges, yet we self-censor because our bosses—who are first-level connections—will wince at what we3 really have to say about the CEO’s very public position on [insert hot button political topic].

None of our work is inherently nefarious. It’s simply the reality of what corporate comms is designed to do. But “authentic” it is not.

So what do comms pros mean when they cry for “authentic” comms? Ask 20 of them and get 20 different answers. It’s the ol’ “employee engagement” debate under a new name: difficult to define but accepted as fact because it either sounds right or justifies the comms role/activity, or both.

The Performance Paradox

The pursuit of authenticity in corporate comms creates a fundamental paradox: the more deliberately you try to appear authentic, the less authentic you become. The moment an executive announces they’re going to “speak from the heart,” you can bet what follows has been crafted, reviewed, and approved by at least three people… and practiced.

I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s observations about the advertising industry co-opting anti-advertising sentiments. He noted that as audiences became more media-savvy and cynical—recognizing the manipulative intent behind ads—advertisers responded by adopting a self-aware, ironic tone. The effect was to make viewers feel “in on the joke,” thus neutralizing the manipulative efforts.

Are comms pros as manipulative as advertisers? We script “unscripted” moments. We choreograph spontaneity. We manufacture the appearance of candor. We’ve all been in that meeting discussing how to make the exec appear more “authentic” and “human” in the next town hall. Lose the tie! Shoot the video with an iPhone, selfie-style! In the end, the audience—employees—know there’s a team working behind the scenes to help the executive seem more approachable, genuine, authentic.

Advertising’s effects are corrosive, Wallace said:

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

Could you swap comms for ad in Wallace’s statement? I won’t go so far as to say comms’ stage directions and scripting lead to despair—we’re not that powerful—but the effects of our work could cause confusion in moments when employees truly need genuine leadership.

The Audience Isn't Fooled

Perhaps the most damning indictment of “authentic” corporate communications is that audiences—especially employees—see right through it.

Year after year, trust barometers and engagement surveys show the same pattern: employees are deeply skeptical of corporate messaging. Despite decades of authenticity consulting and countless initiatives to make corporate communications more “human” and “real,” employee trust in leadership communication remains stubbornly low.

Edelman, for example, reports that 68% of their 2025 survey respondents believe business leaders “purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations” (up from 61% the year before). So, exec comms is already starting from a disadvantage of disbelief.

Employees have sophisticated bullshit detectors after years of exposure to corporate speak (and 1984). They can sense when something is overly messaged versus genuinely direct. They can tell when “transparency” is selective and when “candor” is carefully calibrated.

What’s particularly ironic is that attempts to appear more authentic often trigger these BS detectors more strongly than straightforward corporate messaging. Employees don’t necessarily expect authenticity from corp comms—but they do expect consistency and respect for their intelligence.

The trust paradox is that claiming authenticity often undermines it. When you keep telling people how authentic you’re being, they immediately become suspicious that you’re not. Despite widespread efforts to appear “real,” trust plummets.

What employees need isn’t “authenticity”—it’s communications that acknowledge reality as they experience it, that respect their intelligence, and that don’t insult them with transparent attempts to manipulate their perceptions.

The Ethics of Manufactured Authenticity

Ethical dilemmas abound in corporate comms. For example, when should a company disclose potential layoffs, product problems, or financial difficulties?

Add the authenticity charade to the list. Is it dishonest (or ethically problematic) to craft “authentic-sounding” communications, or is it simply an accepted convention of corporate life?

Everyone knows the CEO’s “personal” email or keynote speech was probably written by someone else, just as we know actors aren’t actually the characters they play. The ethical issue isn’t the construction itself but the pretense that it isn’t constructed.

When we present heavily managed, strategically crafted messages as spontaneous authentic expression, we’re engaging corporate magic. We’re crafting the message and the illusion that the message wasn’t crafted.

This becomes ethically problematic when:

• We use “authenticity” to manipulate emotions and trust

• We selectively disclose information while claiming complete transparency

• We make meta-claims about our comms (“speaking candidly,” “being real”) that contradict the actual process of creating those communications

There’s also a deeper ethical question for us comms pros: Are we being honest with ourselves about what we do for a living? By promoting authenticity as a value proposition, are we engaging in a form of professional self-deception?

A Better Way Forward

If authenticity is an impossible standard for corporate communications, what should we aim for instead? What framework could replace this false idol?

Perhaps instead of authenticity, we could focus on:

• Intentionality: Being purposeful and deliberate about what we communicate and why, without pretending it’s unfiltered expression; avoiding manufactured casualness (salutations that are lowercase, really? hi team… )

• Respect: Treating audiences (especially employees) as intelligent, deserving of thoughtful, substantive communication (you’ve got a bigger problem if you think your employees are idiots)

• Coherence: Ensuring messages align with observable reality and organizational actions (e.g., call a layoff a layoff)

• Clarity: Communicating with precision and thoughtfulness (follow Hemingway’s advice: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English.”)

• Utility: Creating comms that genuinely help employees understand and navigate their work environment (don’t obfuscate; don’t talk about three topics when you need to discuss just one; explain WIFM)

None of these qualities requires claims of “authenticity,” but they might better serve both organizational goals and employee needs. (In the end, some of it may even become genuinely authentic comms.)

More importantly, unlike the chimera of corporate authenticity, these are qualities we can actually deliver.

Pick Your Battle

The next time you see a comms pro defending their role by claiming to provide “authenticity,” ask them what they mean by the word. The ensuing verbal contortions will tell you everything you need to know about the emptiness of the concept.

It’s time to stop defending territory that never existed in the first place. By abandoning this mirage we free ourselves to define our profession in more honest terms. Rather than desperately claiming we provide some ineffable “authentic human touch,” we can focus on the real strategic value we bring: the ability to craft comms that advance organizational objectives while respecting audience intelligence.

Our profession doesn’t need authenticity to justify its existence. Artificial intelligence will likely master “authentic-sounding” communication soon. Human judgment about intentionality, respect, coherence, clarity, and utility will remain valuable far longer (at least until AI masters them too).

In the Age of AI we shouldn’t tilt at “authentic” windmills. Rather, we must direct our energy toward clarifying comms’ purpose and value. That’s the real existential battle—and a fight worth having.

• 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?

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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.

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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?

Tomorrow (May 7) I speak at Simpplr’s Employee Comms and Experience Virtual Summit. Their description of my presentation:

Your replacement has arrived: AI and the future of employee comms

Shaun Randol, founder of The Mixternal Comms Playbook, confronts a hard truth: artificial intelligence is no longer coming for comms—it’s already here. What was once considered untouchable, uniquely human work is now being replicated by machines in minutes. In this provocative session, Shaun offers a three-part exploration of what this means for our profession.

• First, he delivers a reality check, sharing stats and trends that reveal how fast things are moving.

• Then, using a live demo (featuring tools like Claude Projects), he’ll show how AI can now execute complex comms work—from multichannel content creation to strategic planning—that once took days and entire teams.

• Finally, he outlines the path forward, urging communicators to adapt or risk becoming obsolete.

This session isn’t for the faint of heart—but if you’re committed to staying in comms, this wake-up call might just be your most important meeting of the year.

This year my presentation might ruffle some feathers. But I also hope to show the implications of current and near-future potential for AI in comms.

🚶 Ultimately I want you to walk away from my talk ... far, far away ... so you can think deeply about AI and what it means for your next career move in comms ... or elsewhere.

Sign up for Simpplr's virtual conference. It's free and the sessions will be recorded.

🙏 As a thank you for your support, for the next 24 hours only, I’ve unlocked one of my most popular AI-related articles.

• 🔓 You’ll learn three increasingly sophisticated - but easy - AI tactics to manage rote or annoying tasks and to elicit responses that match the tone and style of your stakeholders.

• 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!

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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…

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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:

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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 about in the Mixternal Comms Playbook. No…

☢️ They’ve gone nuclear:

• The employee intranet is now public-facing. I’m actually down with this, but not the way Initech is doing it. For example, they’re publishing every passive-aggressive comment about the copy machine being broken again for the world to see. Their CEO calls it “radical transparency.” 🙄

• They canceled their PR Newswire subscription. Okay, this actually makes sense too. Initech will now post all company announcements simultaneously to Threads, Bluesky, the Metaverse, and their new “Initech/Outatech” blog. (Seriously. That’s the name of it.)

• The pièce de résistance? The Q&A section of their quarterly earnings calls will now alternate between questions from shareholders and employees. I love this idea—after all, employees are shareholders, too! But can you imagine the questions?!

  • Goldman Sachs analyst: Could you elaborate on your Q3 revenue projections?

  • Employee from Accounting: Can we reinstate Meatless Mondays in the cafeteria?

🤪 It gets bonkers from here.

Employee performance reviews will be made public on LinkedIn. The head of HR announced managers and peers must post 360-degree feedback directly to the “Recommendations” section of employees’ LinkedIn profile pages.

• 🤦 Nothing says professional development quite like having your “needs improvement” areas broadcast to your entire network... and people “liking” it or “laughing” at it. (Support emoji, where are you?!)

To top it all off, the entire comms department has been renamed to—wait for it—the Office of Information Osmosis (OIO).

• 1984 much?

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Look, I'm all for smashing the wall between internal and external comms.

• It’s literally what I write about in this newsletter.

But Initech has turned the mixternal concept into what feels like a Black Mirror episode about corporate transparency.

As I was writing this, Initech’s legal team was reportedly working on a new format for SEC filings that includes a “But How Do You Really Feel?” section that includes conversation threads from the Blind social network.

• Because shareholders are dying to know last year’s free cash flow and to read the office goss about who’s dating whom.

Is this for real?

In a world where DOGE exists, does it even matter anymore?! Welcome to 2025, where the line between internal and external comms—just like the line between reality and absurdity—is about as clear as a TPS report cover sheet.

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Editor's note: If you’re wondering whether this is real, please check today’s date and remember that all TPS reports require cover sheets. (Didn’t you get the memo?)

P.S. Seriously, now. Here’s a real-world example of an executive memo on how not to inspire employees. I wish it were an April Fool’s joke.

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.

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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!

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💥🚗 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 company’s latest product innovation.

Guess what: your internal comms colleague already interviewed the product lead last week for an intranet story. They’ve got quotes, technical details, and even some extra b-roll footage they’re not using.

Bingo!

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PR pros don’t need to create everything from scratch. Maybe it’s professional pride, or maybe you’ve gotten used to working in a PR bubble.

• (Hey, at least in your bubble you don’t have to write another “work anniversary” article for the intranet, amiright? 😉)

But don’t be quick to knock that intranet content team. Many of them are stellar writers—former journos, creative writing MFA grads, and published novelists. They can be your secret weapon to feeding an external content beast that’s never satiated.

This is where mixternal comms comes in—the art of erasing outdated barriers between internal and external channels to create more efficient, effective corporate comms.

• It's about working smarter across traditional divides, not harder within them.

The internal/external division won’t disappear overnight.1 But that doesn't mean you shouldn’t find creative ways to work across the aisle.

The Internal Content Goldmine

Your internal comms team is basically a well-oiled content machine that’s already aligned with your PR goals. They’re supporting the same business objectives you are, just for a different primary audience.

• While intranet stories might not be ready for prime-time media coverage as-is, they’re packed with raw material you can shape into compelling external narratives.

💀 Employee-facing content often dies a quick, quiet death on the intranet, seen for a week before it’s pushed off the front page and into a blackhole.

• This reality kills internal content creators. All that toil for 700 pageviews… 😩

Save that hard work from obscurity—it’s the foundation of your next media pitch! It just needs your PR expertise to transform it into something journalists will love.

⚒️ Mine the internal content and transform it into media gold.

Inside Out

Let’s see how this works in practice.

Say your company is launching a new running shoe made from sustainable materials.

• Your internal comms team has already created a rich story package for employees: technical interviews about the innovative materials, manufacturing photos, field testing videos.

Let’s be honest—pitching a sustainable shoe story to the same journalist who got three ESG pitches from you last month requires some finesse. (At least it’s not another AI story??? 🙄)

Here’s where your PR expertise comes in. Instead of starting from zero, transform that internal content into media-worthy package by:

1. Taking their technical interview with the materials scientist and extracting the most newsworthy innovations for your media pitch

2. Transforming their manufacturing photo essay into visual proof points for industry analysts

3. Adapting their field testing footage into b-roll for broadcast media

And guess what.

💓 Your employee comms colleague will love you for this!

Adding the News Hook

Internal content gives you the foundation, but your PR skills make it media-worthy. Here’s how to transform employee stories into journalist catnip:

For the sustainable shoe, you might:

• Frame the innovation within larger industry trends (e.g., sustainable fashion, circular economy)

• Connect it to market demands (e.g., growing consumer preference for eco-friendly products)

• Add competitive context (e.g., how this advances the field of footwear)

• Localize the story for different markets (e.g., manufacturing impact, local sustainability initiatives)

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Making an Ally

Working across the internal/external divide takes some effort, but it’s soooo worth your time. Here are some tips on working across the aisle:

• Get in early: When you hear about a new product or initiative, immediately check what internal content exists or is planned

• Build relationships: Take your internal comms colleagues out for coffee (or happy hour) to talk about upcoming projects

• Share the wealth: When you get media coverage, make sure internal comms knows so they can share it with employees (mixternal!)

• Plan together: Coordinate your content calendars to reduce stakeholder burden and maximize impact

• Return the favor: When you’re privy to information or score a meeting with an exec, invite your internal comms-rade along for the ride

Strategic Benefits

This mixternal approach amplifies your impact (and makes work so much easier) because:

• Reduced stakeholder fatigue: Executives aren’t fielding the same questions multiple times

• Faster turnaround + ROI: You’re building on existing content rather than starting from scratch

• Consistent messaging: Your external story aligns with what employees are hearing

• Better resource use: No more duplicate photo shoots or video sessions

• Making new friends and allies: You never know when you’ll need a personal or professional favor…

The best PR pros know great stories can come from anywhere, even from the inside.

In a mixternal world a good story is a good story—no matter which side of the firewall it started on.

P.S. The intranet isn’t the only place to find inspiration for your next media package. Have you looked outisde comms?

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.

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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 channels.

• We're just wasting resources pretending otherwise.

• And with AI poised to automate much of our routine work, clinging to old divisions is inefficient (and career-limiting).

Consider this:

• Your company’s latest earnings call transcript appears on your company's investor relations page. Within minutes, employees share snippets on X.

• Your product marketing team publishes a customer success story on the corporate blog. By afternoon, sales teams are using it in pitch decks.

• A video for an internal all-hands meeting could engage potential recruits on Instagram.

• An exec's talk at an industry conference deserves space on your intranet.

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

The solution?

✊ Dismantle the barriers that separate "internal" and "external" comms teams and embrace mixternal communications.

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Mixternal comms will soon become an operational necessity in our AI-powered future. What follows is an overview of why that’s the case, broken down into these sections:

• Siloed Comms Teams Work at Cross-Purposes

• 💰 The Strategic Case for Mixternal Comms

• What Mixternal Comms Looks Like

• Obstacles and Opposition

• 4 Initial Steps to Transition to Mixternal Comms

• Scratching the Surface

• Bonus poll: what’s really holding you/your team back on mixternal comms?

Siloed Comms Teams Work at Cross-Purposes

When comms teams operate in silos, they create unnecessary complexity and risk.

Our industry doesn't track how many comms pros manage both internal and external portfolios. This blind spot reveals how deeply we've institutionalized the artificial divide between these functions—you’re on one side or the other, never both.1

• Fortune 500 companies typically maintain separate internal and external teams.

• Professionals at smaller companies manage both by necessity.

  • 🙋 Everywhere teams of one be like I’ve been doin’ mixternal since before the Mixternal Comms Playbook named it.

The artificial division between internal and external comms creates real problems.

How often, for example, do employees first come across news about their company on social media or news outlets because the PR team didn’t alert or share the intel with the internal team until the last minute, if at all?

• When employees get news about their company from third-party outlets, trust erodes.

It cuts both ways. How often, for example, does the internal comms team produce a stellar video about the company’s latest product without alerting the media relations team, who could have shared clips with journalists starving for multimedia content?

• That extra content could be the deciding factor on whether industry media puts your news on the homepage.

Think about your current setup. Your exec (internal) comms team crafts employee messaging about a new strategic initiative. Meanwhile, your external team prepares press materials about the same topic. It’s likely the two teams are using different language, emphasizing different points, and creating different narratives—all about the same company story.

• The traditional bifurcated structure ignores operational reality and future demands.

As AI automates routine tasks across both sides of the comms aisle, maintaining separate specialists becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

💰 The Strategic Case for Mixternal Comms

The underlying reason to embrace mixternal comms is to maximize corporate communications' strategic value and ROI.

Why?

Because corporate comms is an overhead cost. We don’t build our company’s products or services and we introverts sure as hell aren’t out there selling them.

• When push comes to shove and a company lays off staff, Marketing, HR, and Comms—typically in that order—are often the first to get the bad news.

Mixternal comms makes it easier to justify corp. comms’ existence.

Every piece of content should serve multiple audiences and channels.

• That video production you commissioned for the town hall? With minor edits, it becomes compelling content for your YouTube channel. Boom. Two channels for the price of one—an increase in ROI.

• The executive interview in your employee newsletter? Reshape it for the corporate blog. Boom. Two channels for the price of one—an increase in ROI.

• The analyst presentation your IR team created? Turn it into an infographic that explains company strategy to employees. Boom. You see where this is going.

AI technology is transforming how we create and distribute content. Generative AI can help repurpose content across channels, suggest optimizations for different audiences, and automate routine tasks.

• This means communications teams need to evolve.

Comms pros who embrace mixternal approaches and AI will thrive.

• Those who don't risk becoming redundant.

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What Mixternal Comms Looks Like

Imagine your Analyst Relations manager setting up one of your subject matter experts for a background interview with an industry trade magazine. In a traditional setup, that conversation stays external.

• In a mixternal world that same manager publishes an edited version of the conversation on the intranet, adapting the content for an employee audience while maintaining message consistency.

Or consider your social media team. Rather than operating in isolation (or aligning strictly with the marketing team), they collaborate with internal comms to identify employee stories worth sharing externally to help lure potential recruits.

• At the same time they curate external social posts for internal news roundups, helping employees understand how the company appears to the outside world.

Mixternal means:

• Your comms teammate creates content for all channels, each gaining perspective on different audience needs while maintaining message consistency.

• Content flows freely between channels. That award acceptance speech works on LinkedIn and the intranet and the podcast. Employee testimonials enhance recruitment marketing and internal culture messaging and share of voice.

• Resources deployed more efficiently. Instead of two or more teams creating parallel content streams, one team creates content that works across channels, optimizing for different audiences.

Obstacles and Opposition

😫 But… but…

I’m a change management expert and I don’t use social media!

—or—

What I do is complicated. No one else could ever do what I do!

—or—

I am in PR! I work with journalists, not employees!

🙄 Get over yourself.

• Didn’t we all begin with zero experience in our field and fairly quickly figure it out?

• Aren’t we all replaceable? (i.e., Corp. Comms will not collapse the day you turn in your two-week notice.)

Objections against embracing mixternal comms range from practical (lacking resources) to dismissive (that audience is, don’t make me say it out loud, beneath my skill set).

Some of the common excuses for not embracing a mixternal mode may include:

“I don’t have time to create content for multiple audiences.” That may be because you’re used to working with a single channel- (e.g., PR Newswire, email) or single-audience (e.g., product team, industry media) mindset.

• When you adopt a mixternal mindset, you create for all audiences—internal and external—from the start. Often this means a small edit or addendum here and there; rarely (if ever?) does it mean creating something wholly unique for different recipients.

"External comms requires different skills than internal." True, but these skills complement each other.

• External communicators learn to consider how employees perceive the messaging while internal communicators gain a media relations perspective. Some people call this upskilling or career development.

"We need to control information flow." In reality, you control timing and packaging, not information flow itself.

• Better to plan for mixternal communication than react to inevitable leaks. Ditto that for material that appears first in the media—do you think employees don’t have Google news alerts set up for their company?

"Our current structure works fine." Does it? Look at your content metrics, message consistency, and resource utilization.

• Now factor in how AI will automate many routine tasks and low-hanging deliverables. (Spoiler alert: ChatGPT doesn't care which side of the firewall it's writing for.)

Change is hard, especially when it threatens established power structures and territories.

But the traditional structure is inefficient and is becoming obsolete faster than an AI-generated LinkedIn post goes viral.

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4 Initial Steps to Transition to Mixternal Comms

Moving to mixternal comms doesn't happen overnight.

Start with these steps:

Audit your content. How much of your "internal only" material could work externally with minor modifications, or no changes? How many external communications could be flipped to serve employees?

• Could that employee profile series be shortened for Instagram to help with recruiting?

• Could your earnings call transcript be given the tl;dr treatment (with AI’s help) and posted on your intranet?

Map your workflows. Where do internal and external teams duplicate efforts? Where do they miss opportunities to amplify each other's work? This is mixternal comms’ sweet spot.

• Think about the last time you launched a product or service—was there duplicate work done by three teams working on a press release, product cheat sheet, and executive announcement?

Pilot mixternal projects. Start small—perhaps with a specific product launch or initiative—and document the benefits. Or go even smaller:

• Could the pics on your internal digital signage be flipped to social media channels?

• With permission, could you reprint the analyst report in your internal sales newsletter?

Train your teams. Help teammates understand all stakeholder needs. Build new skills across groups. Importantly, get them comfortable with AI tools so they can become efficient with optimization and repurposing.

• Spin up a recurring mandatory meeting where a different stakeholder/audience is defined. Teammates brainstorm how content not usually intended for that audience can be repurposed to meet their needs. (e.g., How could a local media outlet benefit from a repurposed town hall presentation?)

Scratching the Surface

The internal/external division in corporate comms made sense in an era of controlled information flow. That era is over.

• In a connected world, every message has both internal and external implications.

Smart comms functions recognize that artificial barriers between internal and external communications waste resources and create risks.

The future belongs to teams that craft and deliver messages that work across all channels and audiences, powered by AI tools that make content adaptation and optimization more efficient than ever.

The question isn't whether to make this transition, but how quickly you can make it happen before changing times force your hand.

Let’s stop pretending we can maintain separate narratives.

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P.S. If you found this article valuable, you might be interested in my mini-book Communications as Craftsmanship. It dives deeper into how comms pros can evolve their roles and increase their strategic value—concepts that align perfectly with mixternal approaches. Grab it here or give it as a gift to an ambitious comms colleague.

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

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