Internal Communications.
Workplaces are not exempt from the attention economy. That's why good internal marketing builds brand loyalty internally, and helps distill the complicated aspects of running a business towards a common goal everyone can visualize.
A decade in startups and tech means I've worn a lot of hats. At Flywheel I ran a department that owned internal comms. At WP Engine I fully owned internal comms and employee engagement at a company of 1,300 people.
Your voice deserves a brand
To land a client you repeat a message until they trust you. Once they're onboarded as a customer, the job changes: now you have to remind them that what they're paying for is worth it, that the experience they signed up for is the one they're actually having, and that the problems they thought they'd solve by partnering with you are the problems getting solved. If they're stuck, there's a path for recourse. If there's a downturn, it isn't forever, and there's a plan.
That's the whole job on the inside, too. An employee is a customer you already closed, and nobody stops selling to a customer they'd like to keep. So it gets the same care and polish and attention that anything customer-facing gets, and you know very distinctly when the company is sending you a message, because it's branded, and because it's part of a coherent strategy.
Employer brand isn't a poster in a break room. It's the story you tell about how people here are treated and what their voices are worth, told well enough that they believe it.
You have to earn the tune-in.
Plenty of companies set a recurring all-company meeting and then talk, because this is the time we set aside to talk. What gets said is an afterthought and people can tell. They can always tell.
Every word of Internal Comms is in direct competition with every other application on your employee's laptop. Slack. Email. Customer tickets. Open PRs. And that's before the ever-ready temptation of their phones. There's no test at the end of a Town Hall to prove employees absorbed anything. For far too many companies, the all-company meeting is just a ritual, a corporate tradition born out of a time when your audience actually paid more attention.
So you have to compete and earn that attention. Some of that is surprise and delight. A lot of it is letting people see themselves in their own meeting.
The mandatory asks get the same treatment. Open enrollment landed in the one meeting we shared with Europe, so the video ran two channels at once: enrollment details for the left eye, puppies for the right. The handbook acknowledgment sat near Valentine's Day, so everybody renewed their vows with the company. The engagement survey got a guy in costume who showed up to bug you until you took it, and by the end we only had to post his picture.
Put the extra polish on the thing you most want remembered, and let everything else do the quieter work of leaving an impression: I know we talked about this. Where do I go to find it again?
I've had leaders ask why we were spending two minutes of the most expensive meeting in the company celebrating work anniversaries, and the answer is that when every one of your peers is messaging you to say they're glad you've been here, you log in to find out why. You justify the existence of the meeting by filling it with something worth the hour.
Power to the people.
It matters that people hear strategy from the people who chose it. It matters that it's repeated often enough to internalize, pared down enough to actually carry around, and paced deliberately instead of dumped. That's table stakes.
What's worth more is the chorus, voices from up and down the company, the people actually executing against that strategy, saying it in their own words. It's bad journalism to write a story with one source. A company that only ever hears from its executives is a single-source story about itself.
Those people usually aren't your best presenters, and that's a production problem, not a reason to skip them. Do a pre-call. Find out what they need to say, build an outline together. Then in the back half of the same call, turn the cameras on: move them toward better light, load their outline into a teleprompter if that helps, or let them yap and trim it down to the coherent parts. Build visuals over the top that add the detail the top-line message couldn't carry. What comes out is the impression that everyone is working the same problem together, which is true, and hard to fake, and worth the effort of capturing properly.
Phil constructed a town hall that was absolutely golden, completely scripted, and actually sounded like [both of us] ... after 30 minutes of listening to us banter about nothing.
Phil has continually kept our culture ... alive and thriving ... Phil builds driving and engaging content and experiences that really help communicate a company message in a world where Zoom Fatigue is a real thing.
The Surveyor was a hilarious character that brought levity as well as focus to an important employee engagement moment! The participation speaks for itself getting to 85%!
This is also where employer brand stops being abstract. ERG programming, the employee resource groups, did that better than anything else I ran: people proud of their culture, saying so. And past that, anyone with an odd hobby who wants to brag about it. Encouraging people to be proud of what matters to them, and putting a camera and a budget behind it, says this is a place full of interesting people, which is the most durable recruiting message there is.
It also means deliberately sourcing from the teams that get waved off these things. Support and sales sit closest to the customer and get the standing excuse to skip, then everyone acts surprised when they're repeating a talking point from two quarters ago.
Built for the inside. Ready for the outside.
Know what good enough looks like, then build a little past it. Licensed music. Assets that hold up. Brand guidelines followed tightly enough that when someone on social says that clip from town hall, why aren't we saying that publicly?, the answer is give me thirty minutes and I'll cut you a vertical.
That isn't a workflow trick, it's a consequence. If you're surfacing real people telling real stories about things that really happened, and you're producing at a caliber that doesn't embarrass anyone, you've already made something the outside world would want. The internal-external wall is mostly a caliber problem wearing a policy costume.
It kept happening to me, which is how I got pulled into brand in the first place.
And it should feel like flipping to a channel you like. Your genre, your flavor. The company voice carries the serious material, but keeping it entertaining isn't a betrayal of the information, it's what makes the information survive contact with a human being. Hubs got their own halls with their own theme songs, and the holidays got Deck the Town Halls.
Put the extra polish on the thing you want people to remember most. That's the whole discipline, compressed.