EPISODE 76 | Guest: Ray Walsh, communications consultant & author of Localizing Employee Communications
Your company wants to promote its social responsibility initiative. You’ll need text and graphics to roll out a print PDF, PowerPoint deck, messaging on your digital signage system, as well as posts on your intranet, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And each of these platforms require different lengths of text and unique image file formats. Now imagine you need all of this in several languages.
The number of communication channels continues to grow and diversify, which puts a huge burden on content creation teams. Creating every message from scratch is impractical, and even repurposing content can be a burden when source files are hard to find or hard to edit.
In this episode, we talk with internal communications expert Ray Walsh. He gives us practical advice on working within a content operations mindset – the processes, people, and technologies needed for strategically planning, creating, managing, and analyzing all content types for all channels across an enterprise.
- Understand why handcrafting content is untenable in the long term
- Hear how multichannel planning can save a lot of work
- Explore tagging and tools that can make your job easier
- Discover why collaboration is key to operationalizing content
- Get links to expert sources for content operations advice
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Get more communications advice from Ray’s website and blog. Check out Ray’s book Localizing Employee Communications at Amazon.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Sometimes as communicators it can seem like you’re kind of out there all by yourself, tasked with creating content to feed an ever-hungry audience that wants more and more. But that’s not necessarily the case. First off, you may have a lot of content that’s been previously created that you can repurpose to some extent, and you’re not the only person out there in your organization. So, we’re going to talk today about different ways of repurposing content with Ray Walsh, communications consultant and author of the book Localizing Employee Communications. Hello, Ray, how are you today?
Ray Walsh: Hi Derek. I’m fine, thanks.
Derek DeWitt: Thank you for listening to this episode of digital signage done, right. And don’t forget that you can subscribe to this podcast.
A lot of people do feel like it’s all just me. I’ve got to constantly create new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. And that’s why they do things like data integration to streamline that process. But I think it can seem a bit overwhelming, but they’re not necessarily without resources.
Ray Walsh: I think a lot of communicators spend most of their time on these tasks, feeding their channel. And it, obviously it can be a lot. If I can go back a few years, I was at a conference and I had heard a speaker named Ann Rockley. She’s considered one of the gurus of content strategy. And what she was saying that day. This is probably about five, six years ago. Really was like a light bulb over my head. I was at the time working on a communications team, you know, across a few countries, but you know, we each had our own little fief and we’re each managing our own little channel. And what she was talking about was content creation as handcrafting. And it’s a great analogy.
And actually I’m just going to read something from her book, which is called Managing Enterprise Content. Attribute my sources because I use her metaphor all the time. And mind you, this was 2012. What she wrote was quote, the way content is created today with multiple versions for different mobile platforms, different versions for different web browsers, tweaks for PDF web distribution, as well as slightly different versions for each E-reader environment is untenable. It’s as if we’re in the pre-industrial age, handcrafting expensive artisanal products. With the proliferation of mobile devices, the task isn’t getting any easier. And that’s the end quote.
I love the analogy of handcrafting because that’s very much what we were doing on our team. You know, we had a certain content theme that needed to be put together, and there was the unique German version and the unique French version, and we’re all hammering this thing out. And a handcrafting process is incredibly time consuming and that’s what we’re all doing. So, it would be more interesting is a manufacturing mode of content creation. While you’re thinking about the components of your content. Now, mind you, her quote that I just read you is from 2012 and now it’s 2021 going on 2022. It’s still a problem. I don’t see it, uh, I don’t see that actually going away anytime, anytime soon.
But if we think about the components of what content is. So, you know, it’s not just the infographic, but it might be the individual design elements in that infographic. It might be also a JPEG version of that. It might be a PDF version of that. It would be, you know, little blurbs of content, you know, say our, you know, sales pitch on a particular service offering where that little blurb is always available, always findable. It’s on message. It’s up to date, it’s on brand. And if it’s necessary, it’s translated into different languages and it’s in the right formats than I need to use as a publisher. That would be the ideal that we’re going for.
And just to wind this point up. So, you know, Ann Rockley in this conference on localization, what they’re talking about for the most part are, we’re talking about big global companies working, say, in like customer support, new product releases and maybe they have 20 different languages. So, there’s lots and lots of updates. And when they make one change, the ideal is, let’s say in the terms and conditions somewhere, you know, that one change is made up in all the different language versions, you know, easily, and without this kind of having to go in and do it manually. Of course, with their system, we’re talking about content that is tagged with metadata so that it’s easy to find. And they have nice tools for this.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a CCMS, which I believe is a component content management system. So, you’ve got like, you know, what’s the healthcare blurb, what’s the automotive blurb, what’s the, you know, hospitality industry blurb? And it would be all identified for me. That’s a more, let’s say as they say in corporate language, a more robust kind of scenario. And they have, they have big, expensive tools for this that seemed to work pretty well.
And what we’re talking about now is a term called content operations. Not a term I invented. But if you are interested, if that sounds like a world that you’re in, um, I would check out the Content Wrangler. They’ve been doing a series on content for years, but lately they’ve been calling it Coffee and Content, and they’ve been having a lot on content operations. The host says that it’s actually, you know, a hot topic these days. So, if you’re interested in that kind of content operations, you’ve got a big company, lots of different versions, check out those. I think that you’ll find it helpful.
But for me, I’m, you know, I’m just responsible for one or just a few channels. And I don’t have the budget for new tools. And for me and my little newsletter and my little, you know, internet thing, it’s just faster and easier for me to handcraft it. So, I just go on and on in my old way of doing things.
Derek DeWitt: Sure, sure. I mean, so really what you’re talking… It kind of, maybe this is right, maybe this is wrong, but it kind of makes me think of like when some websites, like the Visix website for example, has a little chat module. And you know, there are the 20 most frequently asked questions. And you can write an FAQ all day, but the fact is people just won’t go to it. That’s why they’re using the chat.
So, they do have these kind of, let’s call them standard or boilerplate, answers to address those most common questions. And, you know, they’re written in a human sounding way so that it doesn’t sound like it was, you know, machine generated or something. And that does take care of a lot of the, the responses that are required. And then that frees the people up to be able to craft more individual responses for questions or comments that don’t fit into one of those categories.
Ray Walsh: Right. And this is not my area of work, but I believe whenever I’ve heard content strategist talk, when I’ve read their stuff, what they’re usually talking about is let’s make sure that that experience, that customer experience is integrated all the way across, so the chat is saying the same thing as the call center is saying the same thing as the sales force, is saying the same thing as the website. And that’s, of course, enormously complex. But you know, if you want a globally unified customer experience, it’s something that you need to focus on.
Derek DeWitt: It also seems to me like it might be a lot of work at the front end, but once you’ve kind of got it set up once you’ve done all that initial work, it wouldn’t be that much work to maintain it and adjust it and add to it.
Ray Walsh: Well, it depends on what world you’re in. I mean, we certainly have the tools for this now these days that can make that much more effective and much easier. However, I come from internal communications and most departments that I’ve ever had exposure with, you know, we don’t have those kinds of tools. What we have are spreadsheets. We have a content calendar in a spreadsheet somewhere, and we have a meeting once a week or once a month and we talk about it.
Even if we’re working at that level, even if we can’t, you know, plug in a new system that can manage our content components for us, we need to get into the mindset of content operations. If we can just get into a mindset that, hey, maybe this content will be reused at one point, I think it’s going to help us be a lot more effective and a lot more productive. If nothing else, it’ll get us collaborating with other groups in our company.
Derek DeWitt: You had mentioned to me earlier before we started talking that really, they’re kind of two strands to this, or two threads. One is finding ways to adapt previously created content, stuff that you’ve perhaps handcrafted to use the analogy. And then you can sort of just tweak it here and there to make it applicable in a new context. And then there’s, uh, reaching out to the greater organization that you’re a part of and using some of the content they’ve created.
Ray Walsh: They’re both very good examples of reuse. And the first one is you or your team controls it. I would think you would have more control over finding that content and then giving it a little tweak and repurposing it. And by the way, I’m a huge believer in that. Why not? You know, repetition is good. It reminds people of things that they maybe should have realized the first time. And I don’t, I don’t think the audience minds it either. So, repurposing your own stuff is good, but you know what? It only takes a few months before you can no longer remember, when did the sustainability report come out? You know, it feels like it was two weeks ago, but it was actually nine months ago. So where is that content exactly? That can be really tough.
So, and then in the second example you said, you were talking about other work groups in your organization. Can they have access to your database of content, to your spreadsheet, to, you know, to your shared folder where all those images are? That’s important. But, but here’s the, here’s the kick– that stuff has to be findable for people.
And this is where metadata starts coming in handy. And it’s metadata used the way the user is going to use it. So, if you’ve got somebody in France and they’re searching for, you know, sustainability report, you know, they may not search for sustainability report. It might be, you know, a French expression or something. It may be, um, you know, if it’s from the sales group, they wouldn’t think sustainability report, they would think like sustainability message for customers. So, tagging content with the terms that they’re likely to be searching for, you’ve got to get together with people and find out how they see the world.
Derek DeWitt: Is there a way to crowdsource that? Is there a way to, like, people when, I don’t know, let’s say there’s, there’s John. And John finds the sustainability report even though he approached it from a different keyword set. But then, he goes, you know what, while I’m here, I’ll just enter in the search terms that I initially started with just to make it easier for people. Is that a good idea or is that too many fingers in the pie, or?
Ray Walsh: I think it depends on the size and the complexity of your organization. The sustainability report let’s just stick with that. It’s a, it’s an external document. It’s on your company’s website and probably that’s where most people will go and get it. And then they pull that sustainability report. They pull the blurbs from it that they want. They retype it because it’s a PDF, and they retype it into whatever channel they needed it in. So now we’re back into that handcrafting world.
And, uh, the handcrafting world is also risky in terms of, first of all, it’s a productivity loss. That person has to retype and, and repurpose. That’s a huge waste of time. But also, they might garble the message. They might, you know, we’ve got the telephone game here and it’s like, you know, they might actually interpret the sustainability message in a different way. And now you’ve got two channels saying different things about what your company’s sustainability goals are.
Derek DeWitt: Something else that could occur could be that they just, because they were pressed for time or what have you, didn’t read it thoroughly. And so, like you say, they completely misunderstood what that graph meant. They didn’t actually look and see this tiny print down at the bottom and go, oh, I see, you know. And yeah, like you say, suddenly you’re sending out contradictory messages.
Ray Walsh: It’s possible. And that’s, that’s where I, you know, I really like this concept of content operations. Because if you’re putting in, you know, these are the statements we’re making about carbon emissions. These are the statements we’re making about community engagement. Categorized, and it’s up-to-date, it’s approved, it’s on message. It’s maybe in language. And you’re making it easy for people to get, so they’re not having to do that handcrafting and possibly misinterpreting, you know, what the original said.
So, content operations are, even, again, I have to go back to this idea of, you know, even if you’re working in spreadsheets, which I think a lot of organizations are. Especially if you’re only available, if you’re responsible for just a couple of channels or a couple of screens or a newsletter or something like that, you’re probably keeping the operation pretty small, and the idea of content operations just sounds like, well, that’s just making it, you know, needlessly complex. But it can enable this kind of collaboration with other work groups in your organization. This is going to be good on many levels. It’s going to be good for the repetition of messages, which is always a good thing in terms of, you know, being memorable. It’s good for the ease of production. If a graphic has already been created and I don’t have to go into PowerPoint and, you know, and redo it myself, that’s great. And it’s also just good for that kind of connection with other work groups.
So, for example, every company I’ve seen, the sales group is always like its own organization, an organization within the organization, and they have their own communication channels. But maybe you’re having a meeting with them talking about this, you know, how can we share communications assets? Because they’re, let me tell you, they’re doing presentations all the time. They’re creating graphics all the time, you know, basically for every big client. So, content creation is a big time commitment for them and they would love it if they could just pull something, assemble it quickly, you know, specialize it for their audience and then move on.
But, you know, in order to make that happen, you’ve got to start talking with them. And they may not really want to make much time for you because they’re in sales and they’re, you know, they got calls to make and all that. But they’ve got their own sales channel where these assets live. And maybe you find out in talking to them that their images need to be PDF. Whereas your CMS system is using JPEG. Well, okay, now you know that. Now you, now you know that if you’re going to make your visual assets available. You need to make them as PDF, also JPEG, and then label them, like “PDF for sales” or, you know, “PDF French”. Tagging it with metadata so that they can find it and putting it in a place that they’re likely to find it and use it.
Derek DeWitt: Sure. I mean, it almost seems like a, almost like a template sort of a, an approach to things. Like you say with the salespeople, uh, I always, in my mind have it that, you know, we’re selling the same product. But maybe for, you know, this grocery store chain, uh, I’m trying to sell them my product, but I want to brand this stuff. I want to show them, hey, this is what it would look like in your space with your logo and all this kind of stuff. And it’s the same product. But then I go to a different place. I go to an airport and I’m trying to sell them the same product, but I want to rebrand it again. So almost creating like a template so that the salesperson just has to very quickly go in and change the logo and change the colors and, you know, click, click, click, and it’s done.
Ray Walsh: Yeah. It’s easier. It’s, it’s obviously gonna be more cost effective, but I think it’s also safer. You know, you, you won’t look like this, um, you know, disparate, disorganized company that can’t seem to get its message together. You know, everybody will look and sound like they’re organized.
Derek DeWitt: Right. But of course, the question there of course is quality control. I mean, you do have a salesperson is not a designer and it may not occur to them, especially if they’re under the gun or, you know, suddenly they, they’ve been trying for months to get this meeting with the top brass at, you know, the grocery store chain. And suddenly they’re like, okay, yeah, you can come in tomorrow. They make a mistake. They grab a small version of the logo and stick it up there. Not realizing that yes, when you integrated that into the PDF, it looks terrible because it’s the wrong resolution and all that. I mean, is there a way to safeguard against that or you just have to kind of train people to look at things with a little bit of a design eye?
Ray Walsh: Well, you started that with, with templates. It’s probably the right way to think about it. But the underlying principle here has to be ease of use. You know, if you explained to somebody that no, first you have to do this to the logo, you know, lock it into whatever (I don’t know, I’m not a graphics guy), but you know, you got to do this and you gotta take it there and then import it here. No. You gotta make it easy for them or otherwise they will go out and do their own things. And that is where you get the distortion and the loss of efficiency and all of that.
So yes, absolutely ease of use. We have to think about that. And, I think we have to talk with them about where are you most likely to need this kind of template? Is it for posting to your sales portal where people go to get information, or is it really more a PowerPoint deck that you’re putting together for clients every week. You need to find out from them how they’re actually, you know, where do they need to use these templates?
And then the third thing, when I talk to designers in researching the book about how do they manage content for global audiences, they all said, uh, yeah, make it easy, you know, good user experience and all that. But there has to be user training. If design standards are important to your organization, then you need to make it unalterable. You need to make it easy for them to use and provide a little bit of a user training. Otherwise, people will go out and do it on their own and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.
Derek DeWitt: Right. I mean, the, the not very flattering term that’s often used, (and I, I don’t think anything of it, but I used it inadvertently not that long ago with someone I was working with, and they, they rather took umbrage), but I said, no, no, no, this has been idiot proofed, don’t worry. And from their reaction, I could tell, they thought I was calling them idiots. And I was like, no, no, no, no. I was just saying that like, seriously, even an idiot could do it. So you’ll be fine.
Ray Walsh: Right. Right. Well. Yeah, the ease of use is just a super important because people will take the path of least resistance and that’s not because they’re idiots, (though some are, let’s face it), but it’s because they are busy. They are extremely busy, and they need to put their time on the most important tasks of the day.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. That’s for sure. I think it’s interesting. You know, I talked to Sean Matthews, the president and CEO of Visix, not long ago about unified communications. And we were talking about how things are not there yet, but we’re approaching it. And it seems like one of the ways that that future is coming is eliminating steps. Like you said, you know, just like I create content and I’ve got to come up with a Facebook version, a LinkedIn version, a Twitter version, a video version for our YouTube channel. That’s just the social media stuff. Then I stick it on the digital signage. I’ve got the post on the intranet. I’ve got all these different formats that I have to deal with.
And in much of the same way we have this with, we’re using, these guys are using Teams, these guys are using Slack, these guys are using this. And each one of these requires you to sign up and download the app and create an account and provide an email. And now everything’s two-step verification. So, it’s this long, long process. And eventually we’re going to see that start to go away and we’re going to see it all just kind of become one seamless thing. Uh, I wonder if the same sort of thing’s going to happen with communications.
Ray Walsh: I think that’s going to happen to our tools. At least as far as I know, that’s what the, the content strategy world seems to talk about with, um, you know, these, these tools are getting more and more universal. At least that would be the hope. I do believe that, you know, the quote that I read at the beginning of this is, it’s still applicable. We still have so, you know, we have Slack, we have Teams, we have all these channels that, you know, is it a collaboration platform? Is it enterprise social? Is it a blog? You know.
And actually, in that same speech, that same address where I heard Ann Rockley speak, she did say, and I’m paraphrasing here so this won’t be a quote, but, you know, she was saying like, you know, every writer in your system should be responsible for, you know, let’s just pick a number, you know, three forms. So, there should be the long form, the medium form and the sentence form. And the long form may be the blog, and the medium form may be the LinkedIn post and one sentence is the tweet. It’s probably about the right time to think about that.
We’ve got a new piece of content; how many different versions are we going to need? Create those different versions. Put them in the places where the, you know, the channel managers are going to find them. But this is one way to assure, you know, that it’s consistent. And, uh, I mean, I think consistency is a little bit overrated. I’m not, I’m not obsessed with it as companies have been for the last 30 years. But, you know, I mean, it certainly is important. But I think it’s just more it’ll, it’ll make life a lot easier for content creators.
Derek DeWitt: I mean, it seems to me, a lot of this is really it’s about planning. You’ve got to plan all this stuff out. I need to know before I even start all the different ways. So let’s say for example, I’ve got to write a blog for the website. We know we’re going to stick it on social media. So, I’m going to need a little Facebook blurb about it, and I’m going to need a much shorter Twitter blurb about it and all this. And just sort of have a roadmap before I even begin writing that thing. I can then do it all kind of at once if I plan it all out ahead of time.
Ray Walsh: Right. That’s why I like this idea of content operations as a mindset. If you can get the tools to help you manage this, you know, go for it. I’m sure they’re going to make life a lot easier. But if you can just get into the idea of operationalizing your content, making it usable, making it findable to others, that’s really important. And the result is we start to get coordinated campaigns across our organization. People start to see things multiple times, you know, in a good way, not in a bad way.
If we continue to try to do this in a handcrafting way, it’s just going to be extraordinarily complex. But if we think about content as having reusable components, and if we can learn from other groups what formats they need, and then meet periodically regularly for planning, I don’t know if that’s quarterly or even weekly, but, but getting together regularly, we make things easier and we make things more effective for everyone.
Derek DeWitt: Now, of course, when you’re talking about the meta tag thing, which is interesting, that’s something that’s, that’s a fairly recent technological innovation. But how, like how is, especially someone who’s responsible for communications, they may sort of hand this onto an underling and say, hey, just go tag all this stuff, especially because we already have a back catalog of content and we’ve decided we’re going to, we’re going to do all this. We’re going to take Ray’s advice and we’re going to do all this. But that’s going to be a bit of a task for somebody to go in and tag all this stuff. Like, how do they even know what the tag should be? How do they know what are going to be the most effective, uh, search terms?
Ray Walsh: So we’ve done this, uh, manually. And, uh, we had all the headaches that you might imagine. People don’t agree on the tags. You have to get together and talk about what are we searching for? What are we most likely to need? But I wouldn’t, I shouldn’t say anything more than that. There are people who write on things like this that have far more expertise than I do. I remember Val Swisher; I’ve seen a post about the kind of tags you should use an images. Because people are going to, especially people that work on screens or screen networks, you know, they’re going to want a bank of images that they can pull and assemble their own things, ad hoc. How do you make those images findable by certain themes? I have ideas about how it should be done, but these are probably manual and there are people who’ve thought about this much more than I have, and I know that Val Swisher is one of them.
If these arguments make sense to you and you want to start doing it, I would read up a bit more on, you know, how should we tag our content so that others can find it. And it really is going to depend on your organization’s needs. Is it a global organization where everybody’s accessing a, you know, a collaboration platform or maybe even just a shared folder? If it’s people that are beyond the cubicles in your immediate vicinity, it may be hard to apply metadata that is, you know, makes sense to them.
Derek DeWitt: Sure, exactly. Right. You know, I’m in accounting and I don’t, uh, I don’t actually know the sales team’s jargon. You know, I don’t know what they call this, you know.
Ray Walsh: Right. But those, that same accountant often wants visuals for their presentations as well. They just may not know. And then their time is valuable, so we should make it easy for them.
A, it’s a mindset change for all of us. We have to think about operationalizing our content. And two, we have to think about enabling tools. And I think that the collaboration platforms are going to be much better than say traditional Microsoft tools. But so, it’s a combination of, um, our mindset and then the tools that we have, and then three, and I think this is really important, it’s a collaborative effort. We have to get together with these other groups. We have to find out where they are. We have to find out what kind of content they need. We have to find out what kind of content they produce. We have to find out the parameters of their channel and then start implementing those needs into our, you know, whatever we call our content operations.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Salespeople are very often, you know, hey man, I gotta go out there. I got quotes. I gotta, I gotta make sales. I gotta make sales. You know, the bulk of my salary is based on how many sales I make and how much those are worth. I don’t have time to talk to you communicator. And so, the more you can streamline, even that fact-finding process the better. And I also think you have to let them know, you have to make it clear to them, why it’s in their best interest in the long run to cooperate. And to give me the information I’m looking for, because in the long run, it’s going to save everybody time.
Ray Walsh: Right. And it may not be a single meeting. You’ll find out over time that the images you’re providing in PDF aren’t really usable to them because it’s not the right, you know, it’s supposed to be landscape when it’s portrait or whatever. You may find out that out much later, you’ve been feeding these things to them and they’re not using it.
But you know, another, another reason which you just cited is, you know, another reason to go to think about operationalizing our content is that we get more for the same investment. If we can teach others to fish, we don’t need to, you know, (I’m mixing metaphors badly here), but we don’t need to assemble that fish for them. We, you know, we give them all, you know, all the equipment they need, and they can go out and, and put together these things the way they need to. And we won’t get inundated with those questions about, oh, I just need a few slides. It’s easy for you.
Derek DeWitt: Right, right. Because that’s the thing. Oh, I just need a few slides, I guess I’ll just do it myself. It’ll be faster and easier. Except that actually, if we have this kind of a system in place, then actually it might not be easier for you. We may have tools that will make it faster than you could do all by yourself, starting from scratch each time.
Ray Walsh: Right. I think most people, you know, most busy people from accounting, from sales, you know, unless they’re from a creative field, they don’t really like working with, you know, slides. So, if we can make it easy for them, uh, and you know, it’s useful for them, I think that there’ll be much more apt to use it.
What I typically see in companies is the, you know, here’s the standard deck, the template, and they update it every few weeks with whatever little tweak they do on slide 89. And there’ll be like 150 slides of different graph types and different photo types and different. Nobody wants to download that monster again. You know, I think it should be, in my opinion, they should be like, you know, bite size. You know, 10 slides blue, 10 slides orange, whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know how to operationalize PowerPoint. But I mean, I think that’s the idea is just to make it not the big behemoth thing that they need to relearn each time, but the small bite-size things that they can adapt for their immediate need and not have to spend a lot of time with.
It’s hard to come up with the list of relevant points that are, that are applicable to every audience. And that’s another reason why the self-service model, you know, teach them to fish, is I think what’s going to help us in the long term. And in the medium term, you know, giving them the assets that make this process easy will make it easier for ourselves as well as for our customers.
Derek DeWitt: Sure. Do you think that eventually some nascent form of AI will be employed to help with this meta tagging and organization, and maybe even template management and creation? Do you think that might be being developed or will come along in the next few years?
Ray Walsh: I’m not in a place to say, but, of course, probably that is the case. One quick example, I found some AI for subtitling video that’s super easy and super-fast now, you know. And even just a few months before, it was a manual process where I had to like write a transcription of what they said, and then insert it at a certain point, enormously time consuming. Here was an AI solution that made it super-fast.
So even though I’m not really aware of the evolutions in technology on that level, I’m sure that’s going to happen really fast on some level. However, no matter what happens with the technology, the human interactions behind the scenes, which is what I’m talking about now, the collaboration that we need to think about in order to operationalize our various forms of content, that needs to happen. And I think that the tools are going to be ready for this before we are. So we need to get, we need to get cracking.
Collaboration also means inclusivity. And I don’t mean, you know, and making assets in formats that people are likely to use, it turns out, involves a conversation. To sum this up, this whole approach, another remark from Ann Rockley’s presentation that I saw some years ago. She said that the goal here is to create once and publish many. And whatever that means for your organization, whether you’re a small organization or some huge multinational, whatever that means for your organization, we’ve got to figure out what that looks like and how we can get there. That’s the kind of mindset we needed to develop.
Derek DeWitt: That’s super interesting stuff. And again, listeners, please remember to check the episode notes or the transcript on the Visix website for links to some of the things that Ray talked about. All about content operations and what it is and how it works for repurposing content that is created by yourself or created by others. And then you, you sort of bring it into the fold and adapt and, and start coming up with a much more varied, yet cohesive message from the organization, even a really, really big behemoth that’s an international, you know, global monster that’s communicating on thousands of channels to millions of people on a daily basis. Thank you very much for talking to me today, Ray. Uh, again, super interesting.
Ray Walsh: Thanks for having me, Derek. I want to point out that my book Localizing Employee Communications is available on Amazon. You can also find that information on my website. And please know that in the coming weeks, I will be releasing an audio book version. So, if audio is your thing, please look for that.
Derek DeWitt: When that becomes available, we will add that link to this transcript. I’d like to thank again, Ray Walsh, communications consultant and author, as he mentioned, of Localizing Employee Communications available from XML press. Their website is another place you can get it as well. We’ll probably have more to talk about in the future I suspect, Mr. Walsh.
Ray Walsh: I hope so. I always enjoy it.
Derek DeWitt: All right. Thank you very much for talking to me today and thank you everybody out there for listening.