The Good, The Bad & The Ugly of Digital Communications with Marc Wright

Lottie Bazley: Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new Aspire to Inspire podcast episode. My name is Lottie Bazley and I’m a Senior Internal Communications Manager at Staffbase. And with us today we have Marc Wright, who I have had the pleasure of meeting a few times, actually, at various Simply events. So today, Marc, we are going to be chatting all things digital strategy, leadership communications, and particularly the kind of good, bad, and ugly in these areas.

But before we get into all of that, it would be great if you could give us a bit of an introduction to yourself.

Marc Wright: That’s very kind. Thank you very much, Lottie. Yes, so I’m Marc Wright from Simply, so Simply Communicate. We’re a community of about 8,000 communicators around the world who read our stuff and listen to what we have to say and come to our events in London and we not only talk about the space where digital workplace joins internal comms, that’s our space. So digital workplace and internal communications, where those overlap, that’s where Simply operates. And we don’t just run events and talk a lot and publish a lot of stuff, we also help large organizations put in digital workplaces. So we’ve just finished one for a large global bank, and that’s over 300,000 people, down to 3,000 people. So the full range and, of course, we work with Staffbase as well on some of those.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on the Aspire to Inspire Podcast, so as people are here to be inspired, let’s get straight into it if you’re ready.

Marc Wright: Okay.

Lottie Bazley: Fab. So I know you have an extensive background in internal communications and particularly digital strategy, as you mentioned. So what I’d love to explore a bit today is the topic of hyper-personalization. So I know it’s a term that I’ve kind of heard a little bit around and something that pops up on LinkedIn every now and again. So before we get deep into it, it would be great if you could kind of just explain a bit about what that means to you. Hyper-personalization.

Marc Wright: Yes, of course. Now hyper-personalization obviously comes from external media. So I think of an example. Let’s take Nike. So if Nike wants to get to you, they don’t wait for you to go to the Nike website and they’ll get to you via Instagram or Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. But they know when you’ll be on those platforms and when you’re most likely to be in the point of view that you’re buying something. And so hyper-personalization is using audience data to target your messages, and as you know, it’s been going for years in social media and it’s driven organizations to create wealth like Google, but it’s only really appeared in internal communications in the past couple of years. So until now, it’s been one-size fits all. You get a portal, you get an intranet.

But now we have the same tools at our disposal to really target messages, to create messages that we can shoot them off in different ways depending on when Lottie likes to get her stuff, you know, whether it’s on the train going home, whether it’s when you’re walking the dog, in the washing room, or whatever it might be. So hyper-personalization is really talking to an audience of one.

Lottie Bazley: Fab, thank you so much for going through that. And I think I’m a big advocate of, you know, when people are in work versus when they’re out of work that they shouldn’t feel like they’re being communicated to in any kind of a different way. So absolutely would make sense that we’re kind of bringing that hyper-personalization into internal communications.

But maybe if we explore a bit about when it comes to leadership communications specifically, have you seen any examples where this hyper-personalization has gone really well? Maybe not so well for leadership comms. 

Marc Wright: That’s a good question. Generally speaking, hyper-personalization is the enemy of leadership comms because what we’re doing in internal comms is we take, you know, the important stuff and we push it out to the organization. We make it as interesting as we possibly can. But if I’m personalizing stuff, so if I select the channels that I want to listen to, you know what, it’s quite unlikely that I’m going to click on internal comms global news. So even if we default that and people get around that, personalization does tend to make people who’d be doing social media live in a particular bubble. So it’s a real, real challenge for leadership comms to get through to people once you start using these techniques. And the reason why we use these techniques is because engagement, that was a much higher. So if I have stuff pushed to me, which is of interest to me, it has to do with my job, it has to do with where I work, and so on, I’m more like to read it. By the same token, I’m less likely to read the global stuff. And so we have to recalibrate the way that we go about leadership comms. Once these new tools are around and it’s relatively new, as I said, it’s only the past couple of years we’ve had these tools. So it’s quite hard to find great examples. But I do go back to the days when social media was first put inside companies, e.g. Yammer and these sort of tools and you can see some good examples there.

So to start with a good one, it’s the CEO of BT, Ben Verwaayen. He was a very good communicator, touchpoint background, and they’d started using, I think it was Yammer, but some sort of forums, discussion forums and there were these two engineers in India talking about a particular piece of work that they’re working on. And then one of the engineers said to the other one, you’ll have to excuse me, you won’t hear from me for two weeks, I’m getting married, so I’ll be away, and that was sort of the end of the post. And then on LinkedIn was a little post from Ben Verwaayen, from the CEO of BT, and that’s 65,000 people. I don’t know how many thousand people working there saying: Hey, fantastic! Congratulations! Really enjoy your wedding. We look forward to seeing you when you come back. And this is a little post, Lottie, buried down in the guts of the social media side of the Internet. And of course, that went viral. You know, the fact that the Chief Executive was reading a fairly technical post anyway, and then him saying, wishing someone, you know, a happy wedding, and there was a trick to it, of course, and that was a thing called the buzz director and buzz directors of people who worked in BT at the time, and they’d look around at what communities were particularly lively and what post were very popular. And then he or she suggested to the CEO, why don’t you have a look at this. So there was a certain manner of cheating involved in it. But that is an example of how as a leader, if you take part in the comments and even just like a post, that can be incredibly powerful. 

Lottie Bazley: For sure. And I think like you say, there was obviously an element of kind rehearsal to that, I guess. But I think, you know, something just as small as a comment from someone like the CEO of the business, it has such a huge impact on that individual. You know, like it shows that they care, that they’re interested in these things, brings them kind of down from this ivory tower that people might think that they sit in and that ultimately this is just a person who’s congratulating another person on the fact that they’re getting married. You know, so there’s definitely a lot that can be said for that. And hopefully that takes not too much time for the leader as well. It’s not this massive.

Marc Wright: Exactly. And it’s got to be authentic, it’s got to be his or her words.

Lottie Bazley: For sure. Cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing that example. Now, I know that you recently became a Digital Strategist for Simply. So congratulations on that one. But as I mentioned, you’ve been in the industry for a really long time and we would, of course, love to capitalize on this experience whilst we have you here.

So I’d love if you have any kind of success stories or case studies even, where effective digital communications strategies have led to a significant transformation or an impact that you’ve seen within an organization, particularly when it comes to that kind of leadership communications lens.

Marc Wright: Yeah. I think that I like to talk about CEOs and leaders who are no longer in position because as soon as you talk about a CEO who’s done something great, who’s still in position, they get fired or something goes wrong. So I’m going to talk about Ivan Menezes, who was the CEO of Diageo until a couple of years ago, because it’s a safe story now, he had a great career. And he saw the opportunity to do a digital blog, and what happened when he worked very, very closely with Ruth Kirkup, who was the Digital Comms Strategist at the time. And what she’d do is to give him a list of topics. And because when you’re a CEO, you know, you can’t actually get a breadth of what’s going on in the organization, you’re in board meetings. But so she can list topics on a regular basis, not a strategy at all. Just say said: “Look this is a hot topic.” And he would write a blog, and what he did was very clever is he did it on a Sunday night, so when he had time and when he could reflect on the week and also when it would be published so people could read it on Monday morning and it was totally consistent. You know, he adopted a persona and basically the strategy was is to make him look or appear like if you met him in the canteen queue, you can say hi. Can I talk to you? That was all of this, to make him accessible. And so he’d write his blog and it’s long-form and write, you know, 1,200 words. And there’s something about long-form these days, actually, which we’re seeing more and more of that because everything is about “Pow, pow, pow”. It’s yeah, if you get the subject right, long-form really, really does work. And we see that in other organizations like Wallix recently. But anyway, the whole thing was, is because it was a considered human almost like a, you know, column you might read in the Sunday newspaper, it’s very personal. And he did it every damn week, he was consistent and so to start with, it didn’t get many reads and so on. But as it went on, it had huge impact. More and more people read it and it was always aligned and tied into the company strategy.

Like I said earlier, you know, our job is to make the important interesting. You know, basically don’t write anything unless it’s got something to do with that very, very tight direction that you’re going as a comms team. You know, if it’s not relevant, don’t talk about it. If it is relevant, then put it out at the end of the blog. So I think yeah, I think Diageo is a good example and we saw in the financial results and just how well they did because obviously they were hit during COVID because people weren’t going to pubs and restaurants as much, but eventually growing the business.

Lottie Bazley: Nice. And I really love that example. And I think CEO blogs are something that we talk about. You know, I’ve spoken about that as a kind of, you know, how often high engagement content type because again, it’s that kind of personalization. It’s like a thought piece almost, you know, but it comes from the CEO. It shows that they know what’s going on, especially with a long-form format. Also is that that’s where, you know, we don’t want a long-form format of, you know, a business change that’s coming up because people need to be able to get their heads around it. And, you know, they’re not necessarily going to read for 10 minutes a change process, but something like leadership blog, where it is, you know, kind of an opinion piece is a really good way of using that long-form format. Love that.

So we’ve talked a little bit about kind of the good CEO communication so far. I mean, over the years you’ve probably experienced various approaches to leadership communication and perhaps to varying degrees of success. So can you maybe share some insights with us between what separates the kind of the good, the bad, and even maybe the ugly.

Marc Wright: The ugly, yeah. Okay. Well, I’m going to talk about an example that some of you will have heard of because it went viral at the time. And it’s a very instructive one. It’s about Andi Owen, the CEO of the office furniture giant MillerKnoll. Now she runs basically they kit out offices. It’s a large, very successful high-brand company and Andi, if you want to look her up, it’s A-N-D-I, and she was doing a town hall and it was online I don’t know how long of a town hall and then she was answering questions at the end of it, and one of the questions at the end was: “Are we going to make our bonus or not?”, because it was tough times, as you can imagine we’re not kitting out offices that much during the pandemic, tough times. And they were $26 million short of their target. And she lost it. She lost it. And she says, so I’m quoting, and you can see it online. It’s famously online. She said: “While things are tough right now, how can we help our teams stay motivated?”, was the question and her answer was, “Don’t ask me, what are we going to do if we don’t get a bonus. Get the damn 26 million. Spend your time in your effort thinking about the 26 million we need and not thinking about what you’re going to do if you don’t get a bonus. All right?” And then to use this phrase about, “You can visit pity city, but you can’t live there.” And of course, this was a webinar going out to all staff and of course it’s recorded. And it was leaked and it went viral and she was castigated. I mean, it was terrible for her.

Lottie Bazley: I’m not surprised. Yeah.

Marc Wright: I mean, she got death threats. It was that bad.

Lottie Bazley: Oh gosh.

Marc Wright: And we read interviews about her afterwards about why she did it. It’s very, very instructive. And it shows you how things can go wrong in the digital sphere. So basically, she’s a very calm person. She tends not to lose her rag, but she was told by her comms team, show some emotion, be fiery. You know, we got one more quarter to hit target, you know, give it some oomph. And so the way she gave it oomph was to be aggressive. Now, if she’d rehearsed it, you know, any comms professional would’ve said: “No, no, no, you’re coming across as aggressive, you know, don’t be saying that.” And obviously “pity city,” you can’t say that. And she bitterly regretted it. The share price went down. The biggest problem was that the teams didn’t get that bonus, but she did.

And that’s one of the big, it’s partly a story about presentation technique. If someone tells you to do something which you’re not used to doing, for God’s sake, rehearse it. But it’s also saying, you know, don’t whinge about not getting your bonuses when she was getting £1.3 million bonus that year. So, say and do is fundamental and anybody working in comms knows that you cannot say something which the senior team is manifestly not doing. But I think it’s very, the reason why she got burned by it is this is a one and a half hour town hall which went very well. And this is 90 seconds that went viral. And the thing about digital is that you’ve always got to be aware that you’re going to get cut down to bite size and you can be really misrepresented that way.

So it’s almost impossible not to make a mistake, you know, because people can cut things the way they want to cut things. But you do have to, there are no second chances, I suppose, is what I’m saying. So rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and then appear to be spontaneous.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. And I think there’s a bit in there as well. I know it’s a phrase. It gets bandied around quite a lot, is that internal communications is never entirely internal. You know, there’s always that risk that someone might be recording something or, you know, that they are going to share those internal memos. So it’s about understanding the impact of that externally as well as internally potentially.

Marc Wright: Yeah. I mean, the advice is never write anything, never record anything that you’re not happy to see on the front page of the Financial Times or the BBC News, you know, and you just have to work to that, to that basis. So it can make jokes difficult and it can make banter difficult, but you just have to work within those constraints. But still, we can.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. And I know now we’ve kind of touched upon technology specifically. I know it’s no kind of mic-drop moment for me to say that technology is ever-changing. It’s changing very quickly. Although I actually read a statistic this morning which has really blown my mind is that 90% of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years, only in the last two years, which is baffling to me, but it really shows you that kind of how much content is being produced all of the time and that, you know, advancements in technology is allowing us to do this.

So given how quickly everything is changing, particularly when it comes to things like communications platforms, how do we make sure that we’re staying ahead of the curve, adapting new tech, sorry adopting new tech, and kind of weaving that into your digital communications strategy?

Marc Wright: Well, extremely good question. I think, first of all, as communicators, we have to stay ahead. So you have to be very, very curious. So you do have to read Wire magazine. You do have to read some of the technical stuff. You do have to read what Staffbase publishes or Microsoft publishes, you have to kind of know, what is Microsoft Amplify? You know, you have to kind of know this stuff. And it’s a deluge because with AI and Copilot and so on it’s just so much stuff. But you have to stay au courant, because otherwise if you don’t you know, you’re going to be in a meeting at some point and someone’s going to throw an IC-related technical platform at you, or a question at you, which you can’t answer. And you just look as though you’re not doing your job.

However, organizations, large organizations, are probably the most conservative thing on Earth, they change much slower than other areas of life, like newspapers, television, radio, you know, and so on and so forth. Organizations change very slowly, and they kind of change at the speed of the person right in the middle of the organization. Yeah. So you got to be aware of all these wonderful devices and when you introduce them, you cannot shove your organization. If you shove your organization, you will fail. And every time we’ve seen this happen, I don’t know if you remember, but, you know, websites like Facebook put it inside their organization. It was a hell of a shove for a lot of organizations. And it failed for that reason. You’ve got to nudge. So it’s about baby steps. You look at what works well currently in your organization and you use technology to do more of that. When we think about digital, it’s like a magnifying glass, so if you put it on things that are good in your organization, you can get more of the good. But if you put on things that are bad in your organization, you get more of the bad. So for instance, at forums, communities, if they’re not properly regulated or set up or trained around, can become whinge fests for that for places, and particularly when times are hard.

And also, and this is the interesting thing about AI is that AI is not going to encourage collaboration. You know we all think, this is wonderful. It’s going to make us more productive. Because you used to go to a 3D designer or a 2D designer to design a logo or a poster. There were two minds on that job. Now you just go to Picasso and you put in what you want, and it produces you four or five versions until you see what you want and then you put it up there, great. That costs you a fraction of the money. You do it in a fraction of the time, but it’s actually your idea magnified, not two people’s ideas magnified. And what’s going to happen with AI, we already see it in internal comms, is we’ll see managers using generative AI to write articles and they won’t involve IC at all or they won’t involve other people, you know, they’ll just say: “Well, AI kind of knows what other people are saying, so why do I have to go and talk to the other people?” And so what AI will do, what I’m saying, is it’s going to reinforce silos and that’s a bad thing for any business.

And so what we have to do in IC is that we have to work very, very hard as AI is introduced, to make sure that we’re still working across. And that’s where a digital workplace is so important. I mean, if you’re an organization running off email plus AI, you’re just going to get, you know, email on steroids, you know. So it’s very, very important that companies, before they invest in AI, they invest in the digital workplace. I can’t stress that enough because I think workplaces do get this cross-fertilization and collaboration, you know, as well as communicating from top-down and better listening and so on. And you get this side-to-side communication.

Baby steps. Put in a digital platform first before you put in AI.

Lottie Bazley: For sure. And actually, something that you mentioned, you talked about silos a little bit and I guess with remote working becoming more and more popular and teams kind of being scattered globally, how do you see the role of digital communication evolving in the future, particularly when it comes to maybe deskless workers, remote workers, and what opportunities do you see there?

Marc Wright: Well, I think it’s going to take away a lot of our drudge work. So, for instance, I mean, as an IC professional, you know, it comes around with regular use of: “It can’t be time for the town hall again. Surely not. Ah, it’s a sales conference again. Now it’s the awards thing again, you know. And you look at it and ugh — you know what I mean — Groundhog Day.”

AI can really help you now because you can take everything, all the documentation, whether it was the microsite, whether it’s your schedule, whether it’s your budget, you can use AI now to recreate that, bring it up to date for your next one that 80% of the slog can be done like that immediately. Now that means that you’ve suddenly got more time to be creative. I think what AI will mean for IC folk is that it’ll take away the logistical side of our work and the day to day drudgery of our work. It will give us much more time to really focus on the “How do we land that message? How do we get people to read that article? How do we get people to go to that event or to watch that webinar?” And it’s all about better headlines, better photography, better writing, all those things. And obviously when you’re in a personalized environment, it’s about taking that message and rewriting it for the different audiences and the different media. And that’s absolutely critical.

Lottie Bazley: Nice. And I think it’s a really important point that creativity, particularly from, you know, personally from my own perspective, that part of the reason I enjoy being in internal communications is that element of creativity. But a lot of the time we know we’re talking about firefighting and there’s a lot of operational comms that we need to get out. That leaves us less time for that creativity. So the fact that we can use AI to do more of that stuff so that we can be more creative is music to my ears, of course.

Marc Wright: It’s tougher as well, Lottie. It’s tougher because being creative is not easy. You know, I can write you a boring article very quickly, and also writing short stuff, you know, there’s this famous letter that’s been ascribed to Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw and Pascal, which is, you write a letter and it says, I apologize about the length of this letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one. And that, you know, it takes time to edit and it takes time to refine. And these are the hardest things to write. It takes long.

Lottie Bazley: Sure, that’s such a good point. Yeah, I’ve never thought of it that way. But you’re absolutely right. It’s that shorter stuff that you’re like, Am I still getting everything in there? Like, am I getting this cross? Right? It’s that really long-form stuff that I’m like, cool. I can put all these words on a page and I don’t have to be conscious about that. Yeah, totally right. I’ve never thought of it that way before. I’m going to find that a lot harder now when I’m recognizing it.

Marc Wright: Long-form, as you said earlier, is for people who are mavens, i.e. people who’ve got something very interesting to say, if you have a specialist in your organization or the CEO and you want to hear what she’s going to do, you know, what she’s saying. But for comms stuff, for our stuff, keep it tight and keep it interesting.

Lottie Bazley: Fab and then bringing it all back around to that kind of leadership communications. We’ve talked about kind of user-focused communications. So from an internal communicator’s perspective, is there anything that we can be doing specifically to kind of support leadership to help with that hyper-personalization, user-focused comms digital strategy stuff?

Marc Wright: Yeah, we’re working with Unilever and Paul Polman was the CEO. A very, very successful CEO. And he wrote a blog and he was getting, you know, it does okay, he had about 9,000 reads a month. It’s a monthly blog. And, okay, in a large organization of 150,000, 9,000 is not many, but actually 9,000 is a lot of people, if they’re taking an interest in what you’re saying, that’s 9,000 people in an organization.

And so we analyzed his blogs over the years and he did 30 of them. And, well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you an example. And here’s a test for you, Lottie. 

Lottie Bazley:  Gosh, put me on the spot.

Marc Wright: I’m going to read you two of the opening paragraphs to his books and you tell me which one you think got more reads. So hear this one, why change in innovation go hand in hand. Classic sort of blog subjects. Innovations are the lifeblood of any company, they help differentiate you from others, respond to consumers unmet needs, and ultimately generate the margins needed for a company to guarantee its future. Innovation comes in many forms in every industry, in women’s apparel, in Zara’s fast-fashion... So it talks about innovation, which is, you know, a very legitimate thing to talk about when you’re running Unilever. Okay, That’s number one. Number two, survival of the fastest. It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change. This quotation is often attributed to Darwin. I saw firsthand the full truth of this observation last winter when I visited the remarkable Galapagos Islands, which played such a major role in the formation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. So which do you think got more readers, survival of the fastness or innovation?

Lottie Bazley: I’m thinking, I really don’t want to be wrong here, but I’m thinking the survival of the fastest.

Marc Wright: Absolutely, correct. 

Lottie Bazley: Okay, perfect. I’m going to tell you my reasoning. Yeah, tell me if I’m correct again, I think that one to me seemed I don’t know, it was a bit more corporate BS kind of, you know, it was quite long and it felt like it needed to be edited to a human being that was talking about it. Whereas the second one was much more personal experience. It just grabs me in a different way.

Marc Wright: I saw firsthand the truth is sublimation, and obviously there’s a picture of him on holiday with his wife in the glass.

Lottie Bazley: Love that. Yeah.

Marc Wright: And people want to kind of know a bit not just about the personal lives of their leaders, but they also, because it’s not cheap to go to the Galapagos Islands. But it’s also quite the glamor of that. And if I work for a company, I don’t want to work for someone who says, well, I didn’t go on holiday this summer. I spent my whole time doing double analysis of all work. No.

You want, yeah, I flew off to the Galapagos Islands and looked at turtles. And that’s personality. And brio. And we see it with brands and obviously is so important in leadership is to portray yourself not just as a human being but a human being that I would quite like to, you know, have a chat with and would aspire to. And I think that’s what Polman did particularly well. And so, yeah, they tracked it very closely. And that got like 30% more reads than the other one did. And so then he really went to town on because as a CEO, you travel around a lot and he talk about his journeys and he talked about what happened in Saudi Arabia. You know, we went to the ice cream factory. Yeah, it’s interesting. I want to know about this stuff. So personal, emotional stories. Well done. 

Lottie Bazley: Thank you! You really got me panicked for a bit there. But I’m glad. I’m glad I was right. Well, I mean, we’re really close to how much we’ve got time for Marc, and I’m sure that we could carry on going for an awful lot longer. So if people are feeling totally inspired by what we’ve been speaking about today, where could they hear more from you, from the Simply team? Where can I go?

Marc Wright: Well, first of all, we’ve got Simply IC the festival of internal comms. That’s coming up May 20th and 21st in London. It’s a wonderful event. I really like this one because it’s one where we go into multi-stream. So we start with plenty, but then we divide it into three streams. So you’re in groups of about three people that, but you’re in smaller groups in the streams and you can choose what you want to hear about and it’s a bit more intimate and it’s quite a fun one and Staffbase will be there. You’re our platinum sponsors. 

Lottie Bazley: I will be there personally. 

Marc Wright: Hurrah. Go for it. So I’m looking forward to that. And then in the autumn, November, we have simplyEXP, that’s the one which really focuses on technology, taking a larger venue. And we’re really very excited about that because not only are digital workplaces taking off, but obviously AI’s taking off. And so we’ll be featuring a lot of good examples of how AI is being used in internal comms and that. So that’s what it is.

Obviously, subscribe to our newsletter, join our community, and we’d love to talk to you there. We have a great community where people can ask each other questions. It’s very, very lively indeed, but it’s great to see face to face if you’re, you know, if you can get to London. We are looking to do events. We did one in Amsterdam last year. We’re looking to do events in the States this year. So we are getting out and about thanks to, we are now part of Gallagher and Gallagher is obviously a global company. So it does give us the opportunity to go out. So we’ll probably do Chicago this year and other parts of North America.

Lottie Bazley: Cool. Well, maybe I’ll see if I can get myself a ticket to Chicago as well. 

Marc Wright: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lottie Bazley: Fab. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Marc. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. It’s been great having you on. I hope everyone listening has enjoyed this episode of the Aspire to Inspire podcast and be sure to join us again.

Marc Wright: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you, Marc. Take care. Bye bye.

Marc Wright: Bye bye now.