Going back through nifty communication stories brought me to one with a very interesting topic: why relying on an internal Chief Communications Officer for all your ideas/stories has (like most things in life) some disadvantages.
Get to that in a second, but to be fair it's important to note the benefits. Your company can glean important insights from someone who's most likely to understand your mission, and thus meet your aims. And they better understand how the company operates, so they know who to contact to enhance insight, gain approvals, and in other ways get the deed done as desired.
But external POV often helps
Obviously those are great plusses. But being so "home-bound" as a staffer creates certain negatives.
For example, how do you ensure you're likely to keep adding to your company outreach? Even if you focus on a specific niche, reaching them the same way over and over can often make insights boring...stuff your niche is seeing elsewhere. That's one of the reasons I look through a variety of outlets for story ideas and keep expanding that variety.
I had a client a few years ago whose work was about as narrow a niche as one could imagine. He was (and still is) a leader explaining medical billing to a variety of audiences...and even more specifically how Alzheimer's issues need to be recognized and billed.
He could have been happy to just let word-of-mouth bring in new clients, but he wanted to establish a new presence on LinkedIn. So he hired me and I got to write not just basic news items but truly interesting features conceived during short monthly meetings. The topics ranged from multi-generational households to a two-parter on elder abuse (one that health pros needed and the other was educating families/friends). He found he got explosive recognition.
Now notice: neither of these topics are specific to Alzheimer's or billing or any combo of those two. Rather, they educate current/potential clients on issues relating to aging populations, thus enhancing my client's rep.
And let's not forget politics
No, I don't mean if you decide you'd like to run for company CEO. Rather it's a matter of coping with ideas from higher-ups that are disappointing...even dumb.
I've luckily never been part of the latter, but I can remember all sorts of projects where someone up the chain turned down what my fellow staffers and I thought was a smart headline, even a story idea. Many times there was no real solid feedback; rather it was along the lines of "It's not right for us."
Uh...OK. But why isn't it? After all, how do you stop handing in "bad" ideas without real feedback?
Tim Anderson, an independent brand strategist and transformation expert, was the expert quoted in the MarketWatch story that inspired this. His final words are that if you're the internal communications office "...you better be careful because you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.” ###
You're savvy to search for outside health communications, so contact Wendy Meyeroff today. She's helped Merck, NIH, Johns Hopkins, AstraZeneca, and Sonosite (to name just a few) with B2B and/or B2C materials for 20+ years.
SOURCES
1. "Chief creative officer role proliferates inside brands. Are agencies losing out?," P. Adams, MarketWatch, 5/17/21