Internal or External?

I went home for dinner last weekend. After a few glasses of wine, I ended up having a very intellectual conversation with my father about the necessity of internal communication and culture building vs. external communications.

He is a business operations guy and oversees a 6 store retail business. We discussed the problem of communication in his circumstance versus my internship experiences at large corporations.

It seems that every business owner wants to be on Yelp, Facebook and Twitter. It’s easy for someone within an organization to point to these platforms and ask why they aren’t there. It’s also easy to blame any short fallings on a failure to adequately utilize these online resources. It’s easy, but it’s ignorant.

As we discussed, we both agreed that all of those great forms of online media will do NOTHING for your business long term if similar efforts are not invested internally. In a retail environment, you can tweet and facebook until your fingers fall off, but at the end of the day, a positive in-store experience is what is going to drive repeat business. Therefore, it is important to value, appreciate and communicate with your employees before you can expect success with external communications. If your employees are brand ambassadors, they will be passionate about their work and their satisfaction will lead to more satisfied customers. Satisfied customers tell their friends. External communications are sexy, but internal communications are sustainable.

Just a few days after I had this conversation with my father, the Founder and CEO of a social media strategy company ended up visiting my New Media and PR class. As he spoke about all the cool things he is able to do externally, I couldn’t help but ponder the fundamental issue of internal. Naturally, I just had to ask him a question along the lines of : All of this external stuff about creating brand ambassadors is great, but do you really think a company /brand can be successful if they don’t also focus energy on ensuring employees are brand ambassadors?

As soon as I said it, I realized that it sounded like I was questioning the validity of his entire business model. I don't mean to question social media, and I am SURE I will have to be extremely talented in it in order to be successful in my career. I get that it is important, I just question how much it can do without a strong foundation of internal brand ambassadors. Fortunately, he didn't  take it as an insult, and he actually answered it very well. Because to be fair, if you aren’t online in this day in age, you are WAY behind. The internet is still necessary for driving people to your business in the first place. And in fact, the internet can be much more beneficial to driving short term sales. However, he did agree that for long term success, it is essential that you can transform employees into brand ambassadors.

Long story short, we’ve just got to be good at it all… great!

Corporate Culture- Thoughts on the secrets of success...

Today I had the great pleasure of sitting down to talk company culture with the CEO of a large Boston area non-profit organization devoted to providing food and supplies to children and families that cannot afford them otherwise.


I must admit that I have never left a meeting feeling more inspired to do good. Many of the employees at the organization perform a ton of manual labor for small compensation, but they all just seemed so satisfied. It is such a unique feeling to be able to go to work every day and understand the greater benefit of all you are doing, but just by interacting with people who were so passionate about the organization, I left wanting to donate money and resources in any way that I could.


After my meeting, I ended up in a conversation about corporate culture with my OB professor. I suppose in a non-profit it’s easy to realize the benefit of your work… Just because you went to the office and put in a hard day’s work, hundreds/thousands of hungry people will be able to eat. How then, can this idea be carried over to build a culture in for-profit organizations.


As we spoke, I realized that I have never had a job that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve always been able to feel good about a hard day of work, whether I was 15 years old and working in a gourmet hot dog restaurant (true story) or 19 and working as a pharmacy technician… Or even in my twenties and enjoying a wealth of rewarding and educational internship experiences. How then, can you develop an organization filled with people who love coming to work every day? Is it a matter of positive feedback and customizing your management technique to ensure every person sees that their effort is valued? Or is it a matter of riding the wave of CSR so employees feel that the work they are doing benefits the greater good rather than just drives sales. In many ways I am excited to get out into the real world and find out. I understand that success in this way cannot be bottled- there is no fool proof formula for corporate culture. On the other hand, I believe my generation is uniquely poised to really drive a change here with a combination of social awareness and new skills and resources that may not have been available 5, 10, 15, and 20 years ago.