3567: What a Chief Communications Officer Really Does and Why It Matters

[00:00:04] Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily Podcast. Quick question for you all, is audio making a comeback as the most human way to connect, while video becomes the default that few had actually asked for?

[00:00:18] These are just a few of the questions we'll talk about today, because I think over the last decade, communication tools have multiplied. Meetings span oceans, and AI now listens in on conversations that we never expected to be transcribed. And with all this progress, communication, collaboration should feel easier. But many leaders admit it feels heavier and messier than ever before.

[00:00:47] And my guest today, Joshua Altman, he's a fractional Chief Communications Officer based in the DC area. And he's lived inside newsrooms, video production floors, and the budget meetings that decided what actually needed to be filmed, edited or shipped as audio. And his early career began in video news production, a world that taught him quickly that video is one option, not the only, and sometimes the least helpful one.

[00:01:14] But we're not going to talk about just his origin story. I want to discuss the changes of a communication strategy and how that is shifting inside every organization around the world. And what happens when messaging alignment matters earlier than expected and why teams can win back hours, energy and momentum when the right specialist own that communication layer. A little bit more than just another tool like Slack, email, Teams, etc.

[00:01:44] So we've got a lot to talk about today. We'll bust a few myths and misconceptions and talk about exactly what a communications officer is and the value that it can offer. Here at the Tech Talks Network, we now have nine podcasts and approaching 4,000 interviews. And that is only possible with some of the great friendships that I've developed over 10 years of podcasting. And a company I'm proud to call friends of the show is Denodo.

[00:02:12] Because not only have they been on this podcast multiple times, they also help make sense of the AI data chaos that we're seeing now. Because the data world is louder than ever. AI hype, lake house complexity and pressure to deliver more with less. These are things that I talk about every day on this show. But Denodo is helping businesses make sense of it all because they provide a unified data foundation for trustworthy AI.

[00:02:37] So if you're ready to unlock real outcomes, simply visit denodo.com today. But now it's time for today's interview. Let me introduce you to today's guest. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? My name is Joshua Altman. I am in the DC area.

[00:03:00] And what we do at myfirm.way.media is we are fractional chief communications officers for small, medium businesses, professional services firms and startups. Well, there's so much I'm looking forward to digging in deep with you today. And so we don't leave anyone behind here. There's so many buzzwords and fancy job titles. Now, the question I've got to ask you, let's just set the record here. What exactly is a chief communications officer?

[00:03:28] It's a person in your organization, in your leadership, whose focus is on shaping perception and building and maintaining trust. And what we do is we take an integrated big picture view of how messaging impacts things like reputation, growth, and stakeholder confidence. It's different from your chief marketing officer who's just focused on marketing. It's different from your chief brand officer who is focused on your brand.

[00:03:55] What we do is we work hands-on to develop consistent storytelling across internal and external channels. So we're not there. We're not project-based. We're not there to help you launch a widget. We're not goal-based. We're not just doing email marketing or SEO. It's really a big picture, all-encompassing of your communications functions.

[00:04:19] So if I was to Zoom you directly into, I don't know, a meeting room full of stakeholders inside any meeting room, whether it be corporate America or anywhere in the world, what is the role of that corporate communication role in an organization? What would they say there? Well, what we're doing there is it's a lot of listening. Yeah. Because what we're trying to do is see how that messaging is going to impact a lot of different things.

[00:04:49] So if we're sitting in that meeting, we're listening to, you know, what the product team is saying. We're listening to what the finance team is saying. We're listening to what, you know, HR is saying, you know, where growth is going to be in terms of people. And we're going to take that and then sort of combine it. Because a lot of people bring in, you know, their marketing function or a brand function too late in the game.

[00:05:16] Because, you know, they're thinking, okay, we have our thing, now we got to market it. Whereas what we're thinking and what we're doing is starting right at the beginning of those conversations. So if the product team is laying out a roadmap for the next, you know, two years of updates and launches and releases, we're thinking, how can we put that out there early? So people not only know what to expect, but are ready for it.

[00:05:45] And as this is a tech podcast, I have to say, there's so many tech tools now from instant messaging to Slack to email. And we're supposed to be, it's supposed to be easier than ever to communicate inside an organization. But I think many people listening will nod their head in agreement when I say it's often more difficult than ever. So why is corporate communication important in organizations right now, despite having all these tech tools? And what should they be focusing on to be more effective at it?

[00:06:14] Because I think it's more important than ever in this AI first world, isn't it? Being human and being able to communicate. So focus on simplicity and clarity. There is what we've seen an instinct to overcomplicate, to overexplain. And that doesn't mean don't explain. That doesn't mean don't get out the information because you need to do both of those things.

[00:06:38] But you don't need to give every nuanced detail of the minutes of the meeting that led to the decision. Because people aren't going to read it anyway. Pick a channel and use it. If you're a Slack office, use Slack. If you're an email office, use email. If you're a SharePoint office, use SharePoint. You don't need all of them. Because then it just gets lost. And people don't know where to look for information anymore.

[00:07:07] So pick a channel and use it and use it well. A lot of these things overlap. So if you have your SharePoint, you probably can get the same information out there as a document repository. Or, you know, just a simple file share. You don't need a complicated tool to do everything. When looking at this, I mean, email was going to improve how we communicate. Then Slack was going to kill email.

[00:07:35] Now we have AI assistants inside every meeting transcribing literally every word, including those awkward icebreaker moments, talking about what you watched on TV the night before. Everything's documented in there. And as you said, there is so much noise. And when you're trying to even find a document or something that someone's asked you to find some information, knowing where that was and where to find it is so hard sometimes.

[00:08:00] So for people listening, what would that one step be to communicate more effectively, do you think, to give everyone listening that valuable takeaway? I tell people, and you kind of touched on this, be the signal, not the noise. So make sure the thing has value. And what we focus on is that everything should have value. So we don't do an ad for an ad's sake. We don't just put out an email blast to do an email.

[00:08:27] Everything has to provide some kind of value. And if you can't figure out what that is, you don't need to put it out. Yeah. And of course, we've both seen so many big changes throughout our career, whether it be internet websites, mobile app stores, and then the productivity tools, shadow IT, now AI. How have you seen technology change the workplace since you started? Whether it be for the better, the worse, indifferent. What have you seen here?

[00:08:57] Anything that you've noticed? Well, right now, what we're doing is a great example. We have people across an ocean in two different time zones, different countries doing a podcast. If you try to do that with video, and of course, we're not recording video, but if you try to do that with video 15, 20 years ago when I started, that would have been big budgets. Doing that with a phone would have been certainly possible,

[00:09:23] but you would have heard quality loss at a certain point. But doing high-quality video or even high-quality audio back then would have been a lot of money. Now it's Zoom, which is available to everyone with no monetary cost. So that's one of the big ones. The systems I learned on aren't used by anyone today because just the core technology changed.

[00:09:52] And by that, I'm talking tape. Inner office systems that we just don't use anymore because they're out of date. Because we're not sending paper that way anymore. It's all electronic. We're not waiting for a paper draft to come from someone in another building. It's just a live-edited Google Doc in our Google Workspace. So we're all seeing it at the same time.

[00:10:20] And another, you know, these are kind of related is to what I already said, was, you know, you have AI, which you touched on, but also the accessibility and affordability of big computing. You know, we can do these things because it's there. It's not, you know, really expensive just to spin up an internal app that does one thing that you need. Whereas before you would have needed teams of external developers

[00:10:47] and a lot of very expensive computing resources. The cost of that has come down dramatically. It really has. And we are relatively at the beginning of a new year. There's a lot of excitement. A lot of people trying to predict what are going to be the big hit tools of the year, the big hit technology. What's going to change? What isn't going to change? How can we work differently? Can we finally retire that phrase? But we've always done it this way.

[00:11:15] I've got to ask you, what tech changes excite you or do you see on the horizon? What are you following closely here? Yeah, I like, you know, I use AI. I like it. It has a lot of value. It's great for research, you know, and speeding up some of those tasks is really helpful. Yeah. Because it lets me focus on things that can't be automated or are much less efficient to automate.

[00:11:42] But if you need to get, you know, background information on the demographics of 25 global cities, you know, you could put that list into an AI tool and you could come back with that. And really all it's doing is running a bunch of Google searches and getting the same information you would get. It's just doing it a lot faster so you could focus on the human part of it. And before you came on the podcast today, I was doing a little research on you guys,

[00:12:11] reading how you are this full service communication consulting firm. But one of the things that stands out is that you're all about the human side, the human communication, but you also combine modern data-driven analytics, time-tested strategies, and behavioral science to connect with audiences that help them achieve their goals. I don't expect you to name any names here, but are there any use cases or any examples that you can share of how you do that,

[00:12:39] whether it be in a startup or a large enterprise? Is there any stories you can share maybe? Yeah. So we were working with a healthcare practice. And, you know, they were sending out emails for, you know, marketing purposes, sales, you know, buy their books, their courses. They were, you know, sending it to current clients, you know, with just, you know, weekly tips, things like that. And it wasn't converting for them when we came on.

[00:13:09] You know, they were doing this every week. They've been doing it every week for years. They had another company working on it for them. And they just weren't getting any sales, you know, off of it. People weren't buying, you know, the workshops that they did. And, you know, that was why we came in. So we looked at it. We just sent out one or two emails, you know, exactly how they had been. No changes. And then we looked at some of the data and they're like, okay, well, this is pretty easy.

[00:13:39] People aren't scrolling. How do we get them to scroll? Or how do we get the stuff above the scroll that we want them to click? There were no call to actions above the scroll. So you couldn't, you know, this was, you know, a mental health practice. So they had, you know, self-guided, you know, workshops. They had things you could do at home. People weren't buying them because they had to get to the very bottom of an email. So we just moved that stuff.

[00:14:08] And then over time, we don't make all the changes at once because then you really can't tell if something was effective if you did everything. So over the course of months, we, you know, gradually, and this is very common with, you know, tech companies, you kind of, you know, roll things out incrementally. So we took that approach and we kind of just rolled out, you know, we're going to move this stuff up to the top. We're going to change some colors. We're going to make this bigger. We're going to do a little layout change.

[00:14:37] And people started clicking. They started scrolling down because of how we laid out the newsletter. And that got them conversions on their sales for the things they were trying to do. It got them, you know, people booking them for events, which they were trying to do. So sometimes, you know, just have to, you know, look at it and see because people's behavior

[00:15:03] was relatively consistent before when they were just seeing, you know, the static information, don't click here, nothing to do. Change that layout, got new data, changed the behavior. This month, I'm partnering with Alcor. And if you've ever tried to hire engineers in another country, you probably know just how painful it can be. Different laws, patchy support, and partners who don't truly understand engineering roles.

[00:15:30] So Alcor approaches this from a different tech point of view. They specialize in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and they're able to combine EOR capabilities with recruiting. So you get one partner handling everything, and they help you choose the best location for your stack, find developers with the right depth of experience, and run proper assessments so they can onboard people quickly.

[00:15:56] And they also give you a model that respects both transparency and margin. Most of your spend goes directly to your engineers, and the fee will decrease as the team expands. And you can even transition everyone in-house at that time when you're ready without having to worry about a penalty. And that structure is why a mix of early-stage and unicorn-stage companies use them as they scale. So if you want to take a look, visit alcor.com slash podcast, or tap on the link in the show notes.

[00:16:26] But now, on with today's show. We take a look inside any corporation, whether it is a startup or a Fortune 500 company, that you're likely to find Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Asana, Trello, Monday.com. There are so many different communication and collaboration tools. I'm curious, when somebody approaches you from any size business, are there any trends in

[00:16:55] the kind of problems that they're coming to you and asking for your help with? Because you've got the vantage point here of being the ear of everyone that's coming to you and saying, oh, we need to do this better, and these are the problems that we've got. Are there any trends in the kind of things that people are raising with you? So there are a couple. You know, one of the big reasons people come to us is, especially if they're, you know, a startup or a smaller company, you know, especially like a professional services firm, you know, law, finance, healthcare, things like that. They're the person, you know, they're the owner, they're the founder.

[00:17:25] You know, the early office manager who's doing all their communications for them because there's no one else to do it. They don't want to hire someone because they don't see it as a 40-hour-a-week role because it's not for this company. That's where we come in in this fractional role. And we just need someone to spend, you know, we do anything from, you know, five hours a month to 20 hours a week in some cases, you know, just on this communication role. Take it off me.

[00:17:55] We need to do it, but I don't need to be the one to do it anymore. A lot of times they tried using AI to automate it. And again, I said, I use AI. I like AI. But you still have to use the AI. You may be that person was, you know, cutting down, you know, from 20 hours a week to 10 hours a week that they were spending on communications, which isn't their core job. But now they're still spending 10 hours a week on it that they don't want to do.

[00:18:24] And that isn't their job. And this isn't their expertise. That's why we tell people, you know, we're the expert at communicating your expertise. Your expertise is your business. We're the experts at communicating that. So that's another big problem that we see is they're just doing it and using every tool out there, like you mentioned, because they heard about, you know, how they can use Slack or Monday or another tool. And they just kind of added it on.

[00:18:53] No one really ever thinks about what can we remove? Is this really still working for us? Can we cut this? They have a lot of tools that have features they don't use, but they're there and they overcomplicate their systems. So we look at, you know, do you need all this? And can we simplify it? Can we streamline it? You know, and can we cut some of the tools that are in place?

[00:19:18] And maybe just use one that gets us, you know, 95% of the way there instead of seven that get us 99% of the way there, but overcomplicate by a lot. And we will have many people listening around the world that'll be nodding in agreement with everything that we've talked about today, thinking maybe we need a chief communications officer. Maybe they need to work with you. They come away after listening to the podcast a little inspired on the way to their, to

[00:19:47] on the commute to the office. But then of course, every tech project, every application for resources can quickly feel deflating when you've got to justify to a bean counter what the ROI of doing this is. How do you answer that ROI to business leaders, that ROI question? Well, it really can depend on the company, you know, especially when you're looking at the, you know, you have a founder or, you know, a CTO or, you know, a chief operating officer who's doing this.

[00:20:16] One of the earliest, you know, things you can see as a return is you're not doing this anymore. You were doing this. Now you're not. Now you're taking this, that same amount of time and putting it into your actual job. Yeah. And that's a really easy return to see right away because they don't want to be doing this function. It's not what they should be doing. Just like we shouldn't be out there developing your app with, you know, coding from scratch.

[00:20:45] That's not what we do. So that's a pretty easy, you know, quick thing for them to see. Yeah. And then in terms of the longer one, you can see, do you have, you know, better integration across your divisions? You know, is your marketing, is your, you know, branding that we're putting out there publicly actually aligned with your product roadmap? Because if you're those two things are, you know, talking about, you know, opposite, you

[00:21:14] know, developments, that's not going to help you. So it's very rare to see that, you know, someone saw an ad, they made a purchase, and it's a very one-to-one. People need to see, you know, seven to 14 touch points is kind of the, you know, traditional metric that has been around for decades. So they're not going to see an ad and take an action.

[00:21:42] You have to get them on as many platforms as much as possible. So we try to take away, you know, that you'll get that one-to-one, but you do see an overall shift. Well, a quick look on your website, you'll see your past work includes Department of Justice, Department of Commerce in the US, Dow Jones, so many big names on there. For anybody listening, want to find out a little bit more information, connect with you or your

[00:22:12] team, or even check out some of the free tools I think you've got on your website too. Where would you like to point everyone listening? Yeah. If you have any questions, you could always just email me. That's actually my preferred. It's the easiest. It's very straightforward. Jay Altman at Beltway.media, no.com. You could just visit our website, Beltway.media. Check out our free tools. We have free guides up there for, you know, startups, scale-ups, professional services firms.

[00:22:40] We have a couple of, you know, self-assessments that you can do to see what your communications position is, depending on kind of the type of company that you are and your stage of growth. You could also check us out on LinkedIn. You know, I'm on linkedin.com slash in slash Joshua I Altman. Well, I will add links to everything. I'd encourage anybody listening to check that out. I'd love to stay in touch with you. And maybe later in this year, I'd love to hear more about the trends that you're seeing,

[00:23:10] the technology, and everything that you're seeing happen there. And if communication is improving or not from the conversations that you're having. But more than anything, thank you for shining a light on this today. I think in an age of AI, communicating and collaborating alongside not only our human colleagues, but indeed our AI colleagues as well is so important. So thank you for sharing your story today. Thank you for having me.

[00:23:34] I think listening to Joshua today there reminded me that communication has become cheaper to produce, but harder to trust, organize, and act on. And roles like the one that Joshua is championing today is gaining traction because founders and operators are handing off tasks that distract them from the work that only they can do. Yep, AI can accelerate research, create draft material, but alignment still demands a human

[00:24:04] brain, human judgment, and human handoff. And one of the things that stuck in my mind most was Joshua's newsroom mindset. Not everything needs to be video. Some things need to be heard, understood, and felt without adding cognitive weight. And leaders listening, maybe you find some clarity in asking what can be removed before asking what can be added. So I'll leave you with this.

[00:24:29] If you were designing your company's communication stack today, would you choose fewer channels, a fractional owner, and a cleaner signal for your teams and your customers? Let me know. Tech blog writer outlook.com, techtalksnetwork.com. And if you enjoyed the conversation, connect with Joshua and his team at Beltway Media, and let us both know your thoughts on where your organization's communication will go next,

[00:24:57] and will it be technology driving it, or a human? Let me know. But that's it for today. Time for me to go. I'll speak with you all again tomorrow. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now.