Are you controlling the narrative of your organization? Who’s Listening?

You haven’t heard from me in a while. I can certainly say it’s because, for many of you, I’ve been working on your content. But, really, it’s because my commitment to our own message has not been my focus. That’s going to change because controlling the Red Mallard narrative starts with me.

And it starts with you too.

Big or small, every organization has goals divvied up by four big departments (or people with many hats…or one person with all the hats):

Business owners and CEO goals:

  • Grow the business and staff accordingly
  • Replace oneself and scale
  • Acquire or get acquired

HR goals:

  • Hiring the right people
  • Retaining the best talent
  • Fostering corporate culture and compliance

Marketing goals:

  • Demonstrate ROI
  • Stay on (under) budget and meet deadlines
  • Play nice with the sales department

Sales goals:

  • Sell
  • Sell
  • Sell

The job of telling an organization’s story typically gets kicked to the marketing department. When there’s no specific department, it often gets kicked to the VP of Sales & Marketing who rarely has any bandwidth to sit down and write a thought-provoking blog post about your process, your IP, your awesomeness because they’re selling!

When an organization’s (internal and external) content strategy is entrusted to a department that is focused on other goals, you can imagine what kind of treatment said content strategy receives: misunderstood, forgotten, and unenforced.

Do you know what happens when you neglect your content strategy? Two things:

  1. New opportunities won’t learn about you the way you want them to, and
  2. Your own people will forget about you more than they already do.

Here’s a suggestion: develop the often-overlooked department of Stakeholder Audience. These are the raving fans, the people who consumer your content because they value what you have to say and they love the experience you provide.

Try this template:

Stakeholder Audience goals:

  • Content is being generated by multiple departments consistently, backed by a shared calendar
  • Employees are engaging from their personal channels
  • Clients (fans) are consuming and reacting to your content

I believe I made up the above goals right off my noggin. However, after a decade of advising both public and private companies, start-ups and non-profits, I think you can trust me.

Now, take this opportunity and use it to get excited about where you work, about the company’s stories of innovation and the lives it has impacted. Get excited about sharing those things with the your sphere, your world.

When you take a moment to share about what you do and how you enjoy it, people respond.

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