Is your company really “English only”?
This post is an adapted excerpt from my new book, Localizing Employee Communications: A Handbook (Content Wrangler/XML Press, 2020). Many companies rely on English as their corporate language. But is it really working? Whenever I’ve seen measures of engagement with digital corporate channels, employees outside the home office aren’t paying those channels much attention (to […]
Webinar: The Need for Employee-Focused Communication
Join me and the panel in this free webinar organized by Content Wrangler (recorded October 4, 2018). We discussed the challenges of reaching employees in global settings and some of the steps you can take to reach them more effectively. Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler moderated the discussion, including data management expert Aaron Baldwin, […]
LocWorld Warsaw 2018
I had a great experience at my second LocWorld. I had the privilege of presenting on the pitfalls of communicating with global employees and why Marketing should care about it. (photo: Lazienki Park, Warsaw, by R. Walsh)
Can intranets speak what users want?
It’s still relatively rare to find websites where users can choose the language, and those that offer it tend to be from large, global, commercial organizations. Yet even for the few that offer this option still artificially reduce the world. In the US, you might see English and Spanish as options, despite a consumer base […]
Lose the lorem ipsum ASAP
Pay attention to the what of brand identity, not just the how. When companies create a brand identity, they typically go through months of iterations, working with a creative agency to fuss with all the details of logos, colors, fonts, and layouts. The supporting written content is normally produced last, and that’s when they bring […]
Breathing and communicating: Pros do it better
If I told a group of corporate attorneys that the wording in their NDA needed more storytelling, or a team in finance that their announcement of the quarter’s financial results had third-act problems, I’d be laughed out of the room. That’s because they have advanced degrees and we have faith in their expertise. Their work […]
Where you end up is where to start
When I’m asked to edit something longer than a few paragraphs from someone who doesn’t write for a living, I can almost guarantee that the concluding sentence should be the lead. The lead is the intro to a piece of journalistic writing. It’s sometimes spelled ‘lede’ (but that seems to be from an era when […]
Don’t leave your writers hanging
One type of difficult client is the one who can never be pinned down on what they want to say. In the same category is the subject matter expert who claims to be so busy that there’s no time to brief the writer. Instead, they send you two endless PowerPoint presentations that are so text […]
“Seen any mistakes lately?”
I used to teach evening writing classes, and my students knew that I had a day job in corporate communications. Sometimes they’d ask, ‘What mistake do you see most often?’ Most of them worked in corporate settings too, and some lacked confidence in their writing. My sense was that they wanted a punch line, an […]
Jargon: Making it all about you
Everyone says they hate it. But they continually invite it to the party, then act surprised when it shows up. Do we even know what jargon looks like? Many think it’s acronyms or their company’s internal language. Others say it’s trendy buzzwords and phrases. (With the 90s well behind us, I thankfully haven’t heard of […]
