Your internal/external teams are working against each other. Mixternal fixes that.
Clinging to a traditional false divide results in redundancy and missed opportunities.
📣 In the coming weeks paid subscribers will receive:
Analysis of and lessons from how Google, Spotify, and AT&T managed crisis comms, including the complete all-employee memos sent by the CEOs
Advice on how external comms/PR can leverage a source of content hiding in plain sight
One powerful AI prompt (template) you can use to analyze original content and adapt it for different channels and audiences—while maintaining message consistency and strategic alignment
And so. Much. More.
And now, on with the show…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or, if you’re in “employee comms,” the U.S. government doesn’t even count that as a job. But don’t get me started on that again.