ICYMI: Cybersecurity, Names, and a Request

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• CEO blogs are hard.

In case you missed it…

1.🚨 Wake Up! ‘Employee Experience’ Is Not Your Biggest Problem

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Recent cybersecurity attacks in the U.S. on a food supply chain, energy infrastructure, and a public transportation system have crippled corners of our economy. Recent “successes” in holding organizations hostage for millions in $$$ payments mean ransomware events are sure to increase and intensify this year and beyond.

• Imagine the struggle happening within affected organizations—in this case, JBS, Colonial Pipeline, and the Steamship Authority of Massachusetts—to communicate about and contain the breach.

Black swan: A recent study shows that this year internal comms pros are most worried about getting the “employee experience” right (whatever that means).

• If you think how employees feel about working at your organization is your number one problem, you have another thing coming.

Starting yesterday you should have set up regular meetings with your IT and Security teams to understand their priorities. What are the threats? Where are systems and employees most vulnerable? What is to be done?

Create a communications plan to:

• Help employees understand what’s at stake when they click hyperlinks, download files, fail to set up two-factor authentication, and walk away without locking their computers.

• Teach employees how to fix those problems.

• Change cybersecurity behaviors and mindsets.

Security Magazine shares five actions you can take to help mitigate cyberattacks, including:

Organizations should invest in proactive education, awareness building and training for their employees [my emphasis] around critical data security risks to both mitigate risk and better prepare their organizations for how to identify and escalate issues.

And this hot tip: It’s also important to remind employees about media and social media policies as a regular course of internal communications to limit the risk of public leaks during a ransomware event.

Showing how internal comms helped prevent multimillion-dollar cyber disasters is one way to prove your team’s value to leadership…and a surefire way to keep the seat at the table you’ve worked so hard to gain.

2. What’s in a Name?

Mergers and acquisitions create anxiety among employees. Top-of-mind questions include: Is my job safe? Will there be layoffs? What about bonuses and stock options? Am I changing teams? What’s going to be the new culture? And on and on.

Also, what’s the name of the new company? In the case of the recent Warner Bros.-Discovery tie-up, leadership decided to simply combine the powerful legacy brand names.

• Speaking to employees this week, Discovery CEO David Zaslav said, "We love the new company’s name because it represents the combination of Warner Bros.’ fabled hundred-year legacy of creative, authentic storytelling and taking bold risks to bring the most amazing stories to life, with Discovery’s global brand that has always stood brightly for integrity, innovation and inspiration."

Not bad.

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✨ Paid subscribers get access to a nine-part series on Mister Editorial that examines how internal comms professionals and teams can avoid The Innovator's Dilemma. 

The series concludes with a proposal for internal comms to adopt a truly disruptive communication effort.

• Part 1: How Internal Communications Can Avoid the Innovator’s Dilemma

• Part 2: Today Versus Tomorrow

• Part 3: A Lack of Resources

• Part 4: You Can’t Force Communications (forthcoming)

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3. Quick Hits

emily wilder@vv1lder

My statement on my termination from The Associated Press.

4:36 PM · May 22, 2021

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48.5K Reposts · 196K Likes

• The Associated Press fired an employee for violating social media policies, leading to an internal comms struggle (PRNEWS)

• Facebook employees are unhappy (again) about how the company is behaving (NYT)

• Insight Partners (U.S.A.) invested $44 million in Cognigy (Germany), a startup that offers a low-code conversational AI platform designed to automate customer and employee communications (PitchBook)

• Here’s the Disability Language Style Guide from the National Center on Disability and Journalism (h/t to colleagues at Integral Communications!)

• What a Compassionate Email Culture Looks Like (HBR)

• The corporate communications college degree, explained (Study International)

4. What I’m Voraciously Consuming

The Handmaid’s Tale

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

• The Story of a Novel (Thomas Wolfe)

• An Oral History of the Internet (Vanity Fair)

• The Pied Piper of SPACs (The New Yorker)

• How Rick Steves built a $100 million brand (How I Built This)

• The Handmaid’s Tale (season 4)

• Top Chef (Portland season)

I’m constantly on the hunt for a good read, watch, or listen.

• Request: hit reply and send me your best ideas.

☀️ You’re all caught up!

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Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter | Mister Editorial archive | editorshaun@gmail.com

Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I work in employee comms at Splunk. The views in this newsletter are my own.