INTERNAL COMMS
What makes content GREAT? Not just good, but great?
It must be relevant and timely and useful and compelling, engaging and insightful, memorable and entertaining, educational and interesting, helpful and easy to comprehend, unique and motivating, well written, and a story worth telling.
In Q1 of 2013, under my leadership, my team at PayPal launched an unprecedented communication program called Great Content to deliver just that – really great content. This internal communication program for PayPal employees in customer-facing roles served the purpose of providing information that could easily be consumed and shared externally with customers and prospects when appropriate. Our content ranged from internal-only educational tools like talking points and FAQs on upcoming company announcements and product launches, to sell sheets and research studies designed to be distributed externally.
Great content is the foundation of a great internal communication program and a great customer communication strategy.
Our Great Content program filled a huge communication gap at the time and grew by reputation to 6 times its original distribution. Followers included other business units, executive leadership, and international teams.
A favorite Great Content was our Best of the Year email. It recycled our most popular content. For continuous tracking and monitoring, all emails linked to content on our internal SharePoint site. This data was used to fine-tune future emails and was also used to determine content featured in this email.
Added to the editorial calendar in 2014 was our Current News series. We curated content from across the company, industry and internet to deliver relevant news of the week. The articles and information were easily shared externally with prospects, partners and customers.
A new Great Content series added to the editorial calendar in 2015 was Meet the Leader. Each month, we interviewed a key PayPal executive and shared the Q&A with our followers. The series provided insight into why they loved PayPal and what it takes to be successful in business. It also included a few amusing questions to provide a glimpse into their lives outside of work. Initially started as an internal-only communication, the plan was to morph questions and profiled executive to customer-facing content.
Partnering with Corporate Strategy and Market Intelligence, we successfully turned an internal document into a critical White Paper that outlined PayPal’s Point of View on the Future of POS. It was the basis of our keynote and distributed at the annual retail conference, NRF in 2014. It was then distributed to our key retail prospects and customers by our enterprise sales and strategic customer relationship teams. It was also the basis of a PayPal blog by then company president, David Marcus.
On September 30, 2014, I woke to local breaking network news that PayPal was separating from eBay to become an independent, standalone company. Knowing the importance of supplying the sales organization with separation content as soon as possible, I successfully delivered Announcement Guidelines that included talking points and Q&A by 8:00 am. Within 48 hours, two customer communications on the announcement were fully approved and distributed externally.