🔮 A Little Empathy, Connect to Your Audience, Psychic Vision
The authority on mixternal comms
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Empathize With De-Prioritized Leaders
How do you shine the spotlight on leaders and departments that aren't a business priority this year?
Say, for example, your company’s strategy includes increasing sales in India versus Mexico this year. The Mexico sales lead may complain that coverage of her team went from two articles per month last year to just two per quarter this year.
It needs to be explained that because Management says India is more important this year, they’re going to get more coverage.
After all, your content strategy is designed first and foremost to support business goals, right? (Editorial Strategies Must Incorporate Business Goals, 🔒)
To get around complaints offer other ways to plant the name of their leader/team/product/project into other stories. Examples:
A listicle of 10 leadership tips may include advice from the Mexico sales lead
A story about how to grow your career at the company can feature someone on the Mexico sales team
Highlight a team member in a sales best practices how-to article
This is easier for employee comms than PR to do. Why? Because the internal content team has more publishing opportunities. If you publish just two articles/week to your intranet or blog, that’s 104 articles/year. Surely you can give one or two slots as a favor to something that is out-of-favor.
Bottom line: Practice empathy. Everyone believes their department is mission-critical (including you?). If someone complains they’re being shortchanged on the storytelling front, it could be because they think the value of their role or department is under question.
Instead of shutting them out of the strategy completely, find creative ways to sneak them in other places.
Quick Hits
🥤 “Introduction to Corporate Communications” is a new class at the University of Georgia to be taught by Ben Deutsch, former VP of corporate comms Coca-Cola. Deutsch had a 25-year career at Coca-Cola, the last 11 years of which he led external and internal communications for the global beverage company. (Univ. of GA)
🔍 How do you effectively communicate cybersecurity best practices to employees? To reach people outside the world of IT and cybersecurity who don’t understand tech jargon, it’s necessary to ban the buzzwords. (Security Magazine)
💰 San Francisco-based Cleary announced it raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Cleary is an “employee experience platform.” (When will we altogether stop calling them “intranets”?) (TechCrunch)
🙊 When is it OK to use corporate jargon? Pair with 👉 the Infernal Comms podcast episode on cursing. (Atlassian, Staffbase)
‘Stop Being an Order Taker’
Here’s a short (1:30) video from Mister Editorial guest contributor (🔒) Sia Papageorgiou on how to be more proactive in your comms career.
Connecting Content to the Audience
There are six ways people connect with content, according to Brendan Kane (☝️), a viral marketing professional. These connections are based on how people perceive the world.
30% are feelings-based
25% are facts-based
20% are fun-based (entertaining)
10% are about values, opinions, and trust
10% are imaginative, reflective
5% are action-based
Virality for the sake of it is not worth your time. Comms pros are not living a hustle-culture. (Unless you’re running Mister Editorial 😉 .) But if you’re struggling to understand why certain company stories do better than others, Kane’s framework may provide a useful POV.
Watch the main video (21:13) on hookpoint.com to get the context around Kane’s perception. (This list appears ~8:00-minute mark.)
“In my view as both practitioner and researcher there is a latent insecurity within public relations practice because of a lack of management knowledge, professional standards, and fear of public misunderstanding to own the term ‘public relations.’”
—Stephen Waddington in an essay on how practitioners need to own PR as a management discipline
Interesting Opportunities
BP - Communications and Media Relations Manager (Houston)
dentsu - Executive Comms Manager (London; hybrid)
Mastercard - Director, Comms (London, hybrid)
SpaceX - Communications Manager (Washington, D.C.)
Workday - Executive Communications Lead, Product & Technology (NYC; hybrid)
You Heard It Here First
In December I predicted that saying something about social issues would take a backseat this year.
In 2023 the shift in power dynamics will move from employees back to executives. One result will be fewer communications about social and political issues—internal and external. Comms pros will breathe a sigh of relief.
Why will this shift happen? To quote the American political strategist James Carville, “The economy, stupid.”
A recession, sinking stocks, declining revenue, and, thus, the threat of layoffs will outweigh any concerns employees have about their company speaking out on social issues.
Employees will want their leaders to concentrate on keeping the ship afloat.
The media is catching on. Axios notes how “companies that were once very vocal on human rights and societal issues have held statements close to the vest or stayed completely silent following the recent streak of tragedies in America.”
Why? Axios suggests four reasons, including a shift in power dynamics (see above), economic uncertainty (see above), ESG pushback, and fatigue (see above).
“Whether it's due to the economic climate, hopelessness, numbness or defiance, the pendulum is resetting when it comes to how and when a company, brand, or leader responds to outside events or national crises.”
Pair my prediction with When Should We Say Something About Social Issues? A Way Forward. (Mister Editorial, 🔒)
👊 And remember where you heard it first.
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.