What Makes a Communicator a Good Writer? Answers to 10 Questions From My Lecture at Columbia University.
The authority on mixternal comms
👋 I’m Shaun Randol. I have 15+ years of experience in mixternal communications (internal + external) for multibillion-dollar global corporations: Bloomberg, BlackRock, Splunk, and Lam Research. For Lam Research, I manage mixternal storytelling for the intranet and company blog. (The views in this newsletter are my own.)
For more than 10 years I also ran an online magazine and indie publisher dedicated to philosophy, arts and culture, international affairs, and literature.
Like that foray into publishing, Mixternal Comms Playbook is a nights and weekends effort. I must be nuts to do all of this while holding down full-time jobs. I guess you could say that writing, editing, and publishing are in my blood.
Recently I had the privilege to (once again) give a guest lecture (☝️) to students in the MS in Strategic Communications program at Columbia University. The topic: creating holistic content strategies that support business goals.
My “Six Steps to Create an Editorial Strategy” ($) is on the syllabus.
Related: Here are the notes from last year’s lecture, which covered a multimedia content strategy 👇:
This year the students asked a variety of incisive questions about content strategy, processes, writing, and more—they really had me thinking on my feet! And I thought… Mister Editorial’s readers also might like to know the answers to these questions. Professor Ethan McCarty has graciously allowed me to share the Q&A portion of my appearance. which I present below, edited for brevity and clarity.
The 10 questions I answered:
Which part of your content strategy work takes the most time?
How far out do you build your calendar?
What advice do you have for those who don’t have access to metrics or a lot of time to review and manage metrics?
How much do you look at things like the timing of when you send out an email or post something to the website?
Which internal comms channel do you think works the best?
When deciding on your editorial content, how much do you work with PR, Marketing, and other external teams?
Is the point of ghostwriting that nobody finds out the content was written by someone else?
How do you decide on the tone for an internal channel versus an external channel? Is it refined over time?
What makes a communicator a good writer?
What is a good engagement rate for internal communicators?
🤠 Giddyup!
Which part of your content strategy work takes the most time?
Of the six elements that make up a holistic editorial strategy, publishing and distribution take up a sliver of my time. It takes relatively little time to load something to a CMS (or three, or five) and hit publish.
Creating content takes up the most time. But it’s not the research, interviewing, and writing that takes up the time. It’s the review process. My priority—my job—is to run a content factory. This is nobody else’s priority, even if I’m helping them with a business outcome!
Regardless of the company, this is especially true if the content is going external, and it’s especially true if you work for a publicly traded company, because the stakes (and mistakes) are much more significant. Any good writer can bang out a decent 650 word article in a matter of hours. The review process for that same article can take days and weeks.
The last thing you want is for your content to cause a spike or dip in your stock price because of a misstatement in your tweet or blog article.
External comms (PR), investor relations, legal teams, and the boss’s boss’s boss are involved in the review process. The more people who are involved, the longer it takes to move the article from final final to final final final.
After content creation (and review), capturing metrics and doing the analysis takes up the second-most amount of my time.
Go deeper ($):
Six Steps to Develop an Editorial Strategy for Communications
Reviewing Data Is the Only Way to Know If Internal Comms Is Succeeding...Or Failing
How far out do you build your calendar?
In an ideal world I would have an elegant mix of medium- and long-term views into my content calendar. By medium I mean two to four weeks. By long-term I mean three to six months.
But comms happens. Has any comms professional ever gone a week without having something unexpected dropped into their lap? The same goes for content strategies: any given day a request for content can appear out of nowhere, and any given day an item you had planned for two months to publish on this very day suddenly can’t because of Reasons.
Sometimes it feels like we comms editors operate using two radars: one has everything we’re aware of coming down the pike marked clear as day and the other is on but it’s tracking fast-moving invisible objects that appear only when they’re right on top of you.
What stakeholders and peers don’t realize is that when you have content suddenly appear or suddenly drop it has a domino effect on everything else on your calendar in the near term.
To try and mitigate the disruption to my editorial calendar I maintain a lot of buffer days. I don’t schedule content to publish every day, which provides some elasticity in the schedule.
I also try to have a bank of evergreen content—material that is not tied to a specific date or event—that I can pull out of my pocket and publish when other material has fallen through.
At a minimum I try to know what’s publishing across my channels for the next two weeks.
Go deeper ($):
How to Manage a Content Calendar and Editorial Workflow (Part 1, Part 2)
Why You Need an Editorial Calendar for Internal Communications
Use Content Series to Optimize Your Internal Communications Strategy
What advice do you have for those who don’t have access to metrics or a lot of time to review and manage metrics?
You must make time to check a bare minimum of metrics that you can track, that you do have access to. You absolutely cannot just ignore metrics because otherwise how do you know you’re being effective in your role?
I do my metrics and analysis every Friday morning. (I put on music that makes me dance in my seat because the work can be tedious.)
Get a spreadsheet going and record your metrics manually if you have to. Count whatever you can count. Open rates. The number of articles that support a certain business objective. Video views. The number of thumbs up (or down) on your content. Whatever you can see, count it and track it.
At minimum you’ll be able to discern trends over weeks, months, and quarters. They should tell you something and you should be able to make some educated guesses on what you need to change in the coming months or next year.
Next Level Metrics
In addition to the table stakes metrics (e.g., open rates, clicks) I collect a lot of metrics that most comms pros don’t track, such as:
Demographics of the employees who appear in my stories, like gender, department, city where the employee works, etc., so I can understand whether my storytelling reflects the demographic makeup of the company
Readership demographics. If I publish a customer service story, are employees in the Customer Service department reading it? If the story is about strategy in Latin America, are employees in that region reading the story?
Go deeper ($):
How much do you look at things like the timing of when you send out an email or post something to the website?
So much research has been done in our industry about the best times to do/send/publish this or that. Tuesdays are a great time to send emails, Fridays are the worst. Lunchtime is a great time to hit people.
I prefer to test things out for three months, no more. After that I get diminishing returns.
Go deeper ($):
Which internal comms channel do you think works the best?
Next year you’ll read a story about the death of email, but I read that story 15 years ago. Email remains the best channel to effectively reach most employees and email newsletters are generally beloved by employees.
The number one channel favored by employees to receive information is the town hall, where senior leaders share updates about the business and take questions from employees. This outlet reigns supreme regardless of the industry.
The correct answer, of course, depends on the type of organization.
If you have a white-collar workforce attached to their computers, email wins all day long.
Time and again surveys show that manufacturing, retail, and deskless employees prefer to get the news directly from their line managers.
Maybe in the year 2050 internal comms will finally get the budget it deserves and they’ll be able to use hologram technology to connect with employees no matter where they are located. But maybe by then kids will be like, holograms are so 2025…
Go deeper ($):
Hologram Technology and Internal Communications: A Hypothetical Case Study
How and Why to Conduct a Channel Audit (and What to Do After That)
When deciding on your editorial content, how much do you work with PR, Marketing, and other external teams?
My holistic content strategy stands on one simple but critical pillar: everything we publish must support business outcomes. PR, Marketing, and anyone else publishing external content must stand on the same pillar, otherwise we are working against each other.
It’s important to maintain regular contact with your publishing peers, so you know what their priorities are. For example, you need to know when a product is being released, so you can create content to support the press release. And the social media team needs to be aware of your blog post so they tee up assets for LinkedIn and Twitter that link back to your blog article.
It’s a dance and everyone needs to hear the same music.
Often there is tension between Comms and Marketing on who should own the message and the content. As a practitioner of mixternal communications I’m on the side of Comms running point on these efforts.
Besides, generative A.I. can do a lot of the work that junior-level marketing content creators do now. Comms should embrace the technology so as to make the land grab for the sake of consistency and efficiency.
Caveat: Running a true mixternal comms team that does some of the work traditionally accomplished by marketing teams is easier at B2B companies, where the number of your customers is limited and they’re not leading boycotts on X.com. The marketing department at a consumer company like Coca-Cola is very sophisticated—I don’t think their marketing teams necessarily belong in Corp Comms.
Go deeper ($):
Six Steps to Develop an Editorial Strategy for Communications
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and the Comms Profession (An Introduction)
How Internal Communications Can Support PR Strategies pair with 👉 PR Can Increase ROI Simply by Helping Employee Comms
Is the point of ghostwriting that nobody finds out the content was written by someone else?
Most people don't realize that a majority of communications that come from company leaders are ghostwritten.
When readers (including employees) see a Wall Street Journal op-ed, a blog post, an email to all employees, or a LinkedIn post, they likely don’t know that someone else probably wrote that content.
People should believe that person wrote the article, and that’s what matters (in our field).
The idea is to always maintain the voice and character of the person for whom you are writing. This requires being able to switch between styles and tones to match distinct personalities. When they speak your CEO probably doesn’t sound like your CTO who probably doesn’t sound like your head of D&I.
Interviewing the subject and observing and listening to them in town halls, in YouTube videos, wherever they make an appearance—all that is research you need to do to get a sense of their style.
Of course, the person for whom you are writing must weigh in on the content before it’s shipped.
Check out this list of books on the craft of writing and editing.
Go deeper ($):
Communications As Craftsmanship (an eight-part series)
How do you decide on the tone for an internal channel versus an external channel? Is it refined over time?
I don't get much say in the tone of internal or external channels, really. The company’s culture decides that.
At a previous employer, a cybersecurity technology company, the vibe was that of a feisty startup—the company’s branding included bright pinks and oranges and their mascot is a pony, for whimsical reasons. The tone for internal and external channels was authoritative but fresh, effervescent but smart.
At my current employer, a high-technology and manufacturing company, the tone is much more subdued, more serious, thoughtful, and profound—there’s nothing loud or youthful about the way it presents itself internally or externally. The tone of my channels reflects the sort of deep, high-stakes nature of the technology they build and enable.
The tone for your channels begins at the top. I try to match it, not change it.
But…I am allowed a little bit of play with some of the internal channels, where I try to adopt the tone of an extremely knowledgeable fellow employee who speaks in plain language and has maybe a deadpan or wry sense of humor. I’ll throw in a wink or an inside joke, maybe get a little cute with the headline, but all in a way that respects the company’s subdued vibe.
I don’t play with tone very much on external channels because we’re a closely followed publicly traded company. The last thing I want to do is cause a hiccup in our stock price because I used a pun in a headline.
Go deeper ($):
What makes a communicator a good writer?
To be a good writer you need to be a great reader. You should read way more than you write. This is the case whether you’re doing exec comms, speech writing, internal emails, external blog posts, social media, novel writing, any kind of writing.
If you're not a reader, you won’t be a very good writer.
At a minimum you need to go deep in the field you’re writing about, so you can learn the lingo, players, history, and everything that surrounds the topic.
Be eclectic in your reading pursuits. In the past month I’ve read books on mutinies, longevity, business management, and fitness, none of which have anything to do with semiconductors, the industry I get paid to write about.
If you want to be a comms pro who is also a great writer, you need to read fiction.
Fiction teaches empathy and reveals the emotional and existential depths that are unavailable to nonfiction writers.
It teaches you how to get into the minds of people who are not like you. This can be very helpful when writing an employee profile or crafting a speech for an executive.
In addition to the nonfiction books I listed above, I concurrently read three fiction works on the topics of love, guerilla gardeners, and scientists grappling with the horrors of WWI.
When I hire writers one of the first things I ask is what they’re currently reading. I want an avid reader with wide interests because they will have a grasp of language and the human condition. If a candidate sticks to the business or sports sections, then it’s a hard pass.
For fun: Here are some novels that center on the workplace.
Go deeper ($):
Communications As Craftsmanship (an eight-part series)
What is a good engagement rate for internal communicators? For example, I’ve read that an industry benchmark of 3-5% is a good engagement rate on LinkedIn.
If you have good research that shows industry benchmarks definitely use it, but not as a crutch. Keep the numbers in the background so that you have at least something to compare your efforts.
Bosses love seeing that you’re performing above industry benchmarks.
Underperforming benchmarks, however, is too easy to explain away. If your management waves away the lackluster result with a dismissive Our company culture is different, then you have to wonder how relevant and useful the benchmark is to begin with.
A more precise benchmark is knowing how your peer companies are performing.
If you’re in the travel industry it’s interesting to see how airlines, railroads, and rental car companies are performing. But if you work at American Airlines you really want to know how United and Delta are doing.
The best gauge of success is to compare against your own performance last month, last quarter, and last year. Why? Because each company is different, regardless of what you’re peers are doing. Company cultures, traditions, behaviors, and expectations—especially around social media—vary between organizations even if they are direct competitors.
What happens if you’re killing it and besting your peers or industry? Are you going to coast?
Your success isn’t determined by whether you do better than your peers. Your success is determined by whether you’re improving your own numbers.
If you keep improving your own numbers eventually and naturally you’ll end up doing better than industry averages.
Go deeper ($):
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mixternal Comms Playbook, I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.
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Thank you for pointing to the need to read across a wide range. Man can't live on business self-help/motivation books alone.