My first job was at an MBA institute, in the PR-Comms team on the admin side. Our job was to maintain the college social media; ensuring that the many many departments and programs were mentioned, the Dean’s speeches covered, special days and events celebrated and talked about. We would also work on the print magazines and newsletters released monthly, quarterly, special editions.
After the release of each edition, we would receive complaints of us having missed some event, some felicitation went uncovered, spotlight lectures did not have the right photos, and so on.
At the time, I was too new, too young, and too inexperienced in the system to suggest any changes with respect to streamlining this communication process. But little did I know that the idea of a process I had as a 21 year old, would become mandatory 9 years later.
Today, I work for the most part in marketing and communication projects – as a communications and content consultant; which includes everything from creating long-form content calendars, to social media strategies and campaigns, as well as designing offline activations, having brand building conversations, making influencer collaborations happen, and more.
Companies, no matter which sector they are in, whether they are B2C or B2B, heavy industries or medical and health or automobiles, insurance, or banking and finance all want in on the new digital media strategies of today:
Connecting with their audience
Putting people first
Focusing on the brand story
Building community
Sparking discussions for audiences to connect with the brand beyond the product itself.
The Apple-aspirations are real.
Routinely, the team at C4E and I will go to our clients with smart-alec suggestions:
Why don’t you focus on your employees this month?
Let’s create a campaign where we show the day in the life of one leader.
We need to stop using stock photos; here are some photo guidelines to build a better internal repository.
Can we get photos from the team in that other city?
Why don’t we set up a spreadsheet tracker so that you can tell us about internal events in advance?
All the ideas are approved in principle, the internal communications teams get hyped up about the potential outcomes.
But we never get to talk to the employees on time (as third parties). The photos are never good enough – they either look too staged or lack any finesse. That social media tracker never gets filled. If it does, no one is able to stick to it. Events come to us, the marketing agency, ad hoc. We work with a designer to use illustrations. We make do with photos clicked on the phone or buy stock images, which woefully under-represent Indians and their diversity.
This is where hiring an internal journalist would change things.
An internal journalist is different from a content writer/lead/manager. This is the organisation embracing its life in a new, digital-first era of communication.
A journalist’s job is to report from the field. If there is an event happening, the journalist makes sure that there are the right photos, the right details are captured, there is an angle to the story.
A media house, among other kinds of cultural organisations (such as archives), has some of the smoothest data-management systems – they have records of newspapers going back even a 100 years, and photo banks of almost every photo ever taken.
It’s no doubt that with the rise of social media and content marketing, every company, as long as they have an Instagram page and Linkedin presence, is at some level, also a media company (We could go out on a limb and say that every individual is a one-person media company today). This means being online constantly, tracking trends with the eye of a hawk, going up against reducing attention spans, fast-changing trends, and trying to stand out in a clutter.
All of this requires the media training that journalists go through. So no matter how much you spend on an agency, media buying, and more, unless you also spend on centralising the knowledge repository of the company, you are unlikely to see results.
An internal journalist, or internal media team, should be treated just like reporters; go out in the office to report live.
You see a hint of this in founder-driven brands who are building in public. They are essentially creating media products and personalities to tell the stories of their company. Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, books like Humanise by Plum, are home grown examples. At the giants like Facebook and Google, you will see their content strategy rely on human-first stories – employees in their natural, candid environments, telling the world how fun it is to work at these places.
Someone with that journalistic eye can tell your brand story, company culture right.
This includes: Take the right photos and video clips of events and individuals, get the right quotes from the right people, observe the in-person vibe of any office gathering/meeting, find interesting things to pick up on during the office hours (not petty gossip), offer to summarise this as lessons, know which events are going to happen in which department (even if its something as casual as a team lunch), and make sure to record it, take BTS pictures (with consent and comfort of course).
Hire an internal journalist. Let them interview each and every member of the organisation – have either free-wheeling chats or pointed discussions.
Collect this data. See how it can be put to use later.
(I can help you. Write to me prakruti.maniar94@gmail.com and we can set up a call.)
As Chandni Menda, my colleague at C4E articulated, this does not only fulfil a content marketing purpose, but helps convey the company’s culture, allowing an outside-in perspective to share with the world. As far as the future of business goes, this is what will help build for scale and longevity.
This is not a wasteful exercise, neither one that needs to wait. The sooner you start documenting as a story the everyday journey of your organisation, the more your marketing efforts will be authentic and fruitful. The greater the ROI on your marketing budget.
Most marketing efforts are well-intentioned and well-planned. But organisations, especially big companies which have over 50-100 people, are often ill-suited to make the most of the spends without the right data to give to an agency.
You might set up photo shoots, create a bank of photos of their empty, lifeless, physical spaces, make attendees and dignitaries pose for awards and distributions, none of which really helps tell the organisation and brand story the way a journalist can.
With the rise of AI, the era of pretence and automated, formal content will truly come to an end. What is real will mean infinitely more.
Is your organisation prepared for this cultural change?