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Joseph C. Gallo: Hey everybody, welcome back to Comms Confidential, the podcast where we're learning more and more about how the communicators that you see hear read about on Slack, LinkedIn, everywhere you get your communications news are making the headlines that you're reading about. I'm Joseph Gallo, your host today with me. I've got two fantastic guests. our first time doing a panel. So I'm really excited about this one. Regine Nelson and Keith Berman. You've known them on LinkedIn. They've got all the hot takes, but before we get to that, Be sure to subscribe and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your news, well as us a review. It helps with discovery so others can ⁓ the conversations that you guys are enjoying so much. Regine.
Keith Berman: I believe the phrase you're looking for is smash that follow button.
Joseph C. Gallo: and Keith has already taken it off. Regine and Keith, to the podcast.
Regine Nelson: Thank you for having us.
Joseph C. Gallo: it
Keith Berman: Lovely to be here!
Joseph C. Gallo: We're gonna start with the question I ask all our guests. And Keith, why don't we start with you since you cut me off before. Hey, you're gonna get your wrist slapped a little bit if you're gonna play it little harsh. ⁓
Keith Berman: ⁓ great. This is what opening my big mouth gets me. Alright. I can dish it out and I can take it. So yeah, goes both ways.
Joseph C. Gallo: So how did you get your start in comms? essentially the origin story. That's what I want to hear from both of you.
Keith Berman: I fell backwards into communications. So this is the AI summary of how I got to where I am. I started out as an FM rock radio DJ. I worked at PR firms for a while in Boston. ⁓ moved out to Los Angeles, became a journalist for about 10 years. And then when I moved to Denver, I was looking for a way that I could parlay my experiences into something that was a little bit more stable that would actually pay a mortgage and allow me to. ⁓ you know, raise kids and have a house with a backyard for the dogs. So ⁓ as you well know, radio is imploded and journalism is imploding. So definitely not exactly the stable environment I was looking for. I saw a couple postings for some comms roles and I was like, hey, I have these skill sets. And that kind of started me on my journey of transferable skills, y'all. ⁓ and just basically was able to sell it as, I've done all this stuff before in other environments. I can bring these talents to corporate communications. And ever since then, it's been the wildest of rides, but I have really found what I love to do. And it is just, you know, I've been through a few different companies, a few different areas, a few different industries since then, and all of it has just been so much fun. And as I've said on previous podcasts, I've gotten to the point where I really am passionate about communications, as anyone who is seen on LinkedIn can tell just based on the amount that I post and based on the fact that I
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get in and fight in the comments politely. I fight politely. ⁓ But then also I was on another podcast and I told the story that I went to one of my good friends. birthday parties and her husband was in comms and I got drunk and started ranting at him about communications because when you're at a party the one thing that you really want to be talking about is work so I was like it's it's good that I have these kind of outlets like this podcast so thank you for inviting me on because otherwise it'd be ranting at people like my local bar like I need to talk to you about click-throughs this is best
Joseph C. Gallo: Sir! ⁓ To click throughs, that's your drunken rant. Got it.
Keith Berman: ⁓ not specifically. mean, communications in general. Like, they talk to you about... M-Dash! I love the M-Dash! It's not AI. It's me! I am the M-Dash. I live it. I love it. I am it.
Joseph C. Gallo: Alright, Regine, while Keith is... Well, we mute Keith while he goes off on ⁓ dashes. What about you?
Keith Berman: Yeah
Regine Nelson: Gosh. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know how I can follow that.
Keith Berman: Hehehehe I mean, look, if you me to be a little bit more professional, I've worked for companies that are as big as Fortune 10, as small as startup, internal comms, corporate comms, PR, external, you know, healthcare, med tech. Who did not silence their phone? Was it our illustrious host? Our illustrious host forgot to silence his own phone. All right, well, yeah, so all the SaaS, B2B, B2C, you know, consumer, all the things, so.
Joseph C. Gallo: That was me! That was the host!
Keith Berman: Sorry, Regine, did not mean to cut you off. Do your thing, I'll mute now.
Regine Nelson: No, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. I love it, I love it. All right, I'll try to keep it ⁓ a little more concise for us. But I started off in comms, actually in college. So I originally went to school for screenwriting, of all things. And ⁓ a friend of mine, roommate, freshman roommate, she said, you know what, your personality lends itself to PR of all things. I had never heard of PR before. Her sister was a PR major. And so at the, what, young age of 19, I decided I'm going to take PR 3000. And I signed up for it because there were a couple of spots left. ⁓ And as a freshman, these were junior level classes. I fell in love with it. So I did the logical thing that you would do. Yeah, go.
Keith Berman: What? Question? Question from the audience. Was it taught by Andre 3000?
Regine Nelson: No, it was not. wish it was, but it was not. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agreed, agreed, agreed. I agree, I agree. Very timeless, very timeless. ⁓ But yeah, so anyway, took this class and after the class decided, of course, I'm going to apply for an internship. Why not, right? Just to kind of get my feet wet to make sure.
Joseph C. Gallo: I think we just dated ourselves there, guys.
Keith Berman: Outcast is timeless.
Regine Nelson: For those of you who don't know me, I am a type A. My husband calls me a type A plus. And so like when I go after something, I'm going after it hardcore. I also have ADHD, didn't know it back then, but that explains some of the places that the story goes next. But essentially apply for internships, got rejected by all of them because, you're not a junior. One company though said, I like your style. We want to save these opportunities for our juniors and seniors, but would you like to come on as a PR assistant? So, December 2003, I came on as a PR assistant working part-time during the school year and working full-time during the summertime. And I got to travel. It was at a travel and tourism PR agency. So representing the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, going down to the British Virgin Islands for a big opening, media fans with journalists and travel and luxury magazine, et cetera. It was the best job. And also, nobody carded me when I was out with the other 21 plus and older folks at the table. So I got to have a little glass of wine here and there. ⁓
Joseph C. Gallo: You
Keith Berman: I wanna be you when I grow up.
Joseph C. Gallo: I
Regine Nelson: And then yeah, I graduated I ended up working there for two years and two months gained a ton of on-the-ground experience Graduated and then took another role in Orlando at a PR agency that also focused on travel and tourism and then I got tired of travel and tourism because I wanted to do a little bit more Impactful things and so I switched to a more government affairs agency and stuck in that vein until ⁓ I had the opportunity to work on an internal comms project and I loved it so much and I realized, ⁓ my gosh, I have an audience that I can really exact change make an impact in. And so I decided to go in-house and PayPal was my first in-house role and have ⁓ much been in technology companies since. I took a six year hiatus to have my three children that are currently all in middle school. ⁓ And yeah came back to it full bore as if I had never left while tackling the This young woman comes back to work after being at home and all the challenges that come with that But it was a good re-entry and I loved it and I continue to love it And I'm starting a new role which will be announced later But excited including a transition to a relocation overseas. So ⁓ we see what is in store for me next
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah, well, like.
Keith Berman: Spoiler alert, she's gonna go run the world court at The Hague.
Regine Nelson: Ha ha ha ha!
Joseph C. Gallo: I think we have to say that's not true. Like we're going to call it right now. We're going to have to say that. ⁓ man. ⁓
Regine Nelson: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Full disclosure, I am amongst friends here. We are friends. We are a group of people that get along very well together. So there is nothing but love behind any comment or thought shared.
Joseph C. Gallo: it to Regine to throw that disclaimer out there to make sure everyone knows that there's no ill will. ⁓
Keith Berman: I mean, someone's gotta say it,
Joseph C.
Gallo: Well, let's start with the deepest of questions right now. Measurement and forcing your way to the table. You both have played multiple roles, as you said. How does comms really force their way to the table, show that reputation's at the top, and then, because you both have this experience and I have not focused in this area yet, I'm curious, how does internal comms do it?
Regine Nelson: So I have a couple of cents I want to share here, because number one is dollar is king. We all know this, right? External comms has a more direct line not only to revenue, but also to risk management via reputation management, et cetera, and issues management. And I think when it comes to internal comms, It's very difficult for some people to draw that line, but internal comms is the enabler. We may not be the folks that can tell that this article created this potential opportunity and this impact, but we are the scenes setting up. I think I said this to Keith in one of our ⁓ many, conversations ⁓ ⁓ is we set the layup so that the basket can be made. And so that's the way that I talk about internal comms and how we get it to the table. Communications in general is the infrastructure of every single relationship. Without communication, you can't move forward on projects, you can't build relationships, et cetera. And so we are the enabler that provides the infrastructure for things to be done. We're helping to create operational effectiveness and efficiency within the organization. That translates into external dollars and productivity and what have you. But Keith, anything else you want to add to that?
Keith Berman: Well, I was going to key in on your use of the word productivity because that's kind of where I lean on things. I think having a psych degree kind of helped me a little bit in terms of being able to understand human psychology, not to overuse the term, but also kind of how people think and what people need in order to motivate them. And I've said the line many, many times. What communicators do is we galvanize action and whether that's some form of understanding and and their job as a result of that, or we galvanize understanding so that they can see how they work in a larger context of everything. So that is what creates that productivity. it's just a matter of, if you were to be at your desk on a random workday, would you feel better?
Joseph C. Gallo: So that is what creates that.
Keith Berman: and be more productive if you knew why you were doing the thing that you were doing and why it relates back to that giant strategy deck in the sky that your CEO laid out a few months ago. Or would you just be sitting there going, I don't know, I'm just, know, cog in the wheel, or cog the machine, whatevs. Productivity is one of those kind of mushy disciplines in where you can't full on measure it. You can't full on say, this person is being more productive because they have a better understanding of what they're doing or how they fit into the larger picture. It's just one of those things where it helps to know the larger picture and how you fit into it and that helps drive more interaction between people and more productivity because everyone is just moving in the same direction. The other analogy that I keep going back to is, and you may have heard this before, is I feel like communications, especially internal comms, is like the central nervous system of a company. You have the brain, the C-suite, and they want the hand to go take action. The brain will say, hand, go take action. You need someone to translate that into a particular set of instructions.
Joseph C. Gallo: you
Keith Berman: that travels down to the hand says, hand do this movement in order to take this action. Also, if the hand happens to put itself on a hot stove, you need something to carry that pain back up to the C-suite and say, ⁓ hey, we've got to pull back here. And I feel like because comms is so networked across an entire organization, we serve that function very well. We are internal translators, basically. and also external translators. We can speak all these different languages. I've posted a lot recently on LinkedIn about how each different function of a company has its own kind of language. Like marketing has their own language and IT has their own language. We've got to be able to speak all these languages and translate them into understandable terms so that everyone can take what each different department needs to happen and make it make sense to them.
Joseph C. Gallo: But if you can't measure productivity necessarily? Keith and I want to dive in on this a little bit and the C suite or even the CCO. if you're fighting for a seat at that table, that leadership table, how are you proving it? How are you proving that it's working or that you're making an impact and a difference? if you're fighting for a seat at that table, that leadership table, how are you proving it? How are you proving that it's working or that you're making an impact and a difference?
Keith Berman: I just stopped doing my work and then I see what happens. ⁓ I just stopped doing my work and then I see what happens. ⁓ It is kind of, I mean, I hate to go back to the word. I've said that comms is a very mushy discipline because it's very hard to say. Someone took a particular action because of something that we put out in a comm. It is kind of, I mean, I hate to go back to the word. I've said that comms is a very mushy discipline because it's very hard to say. Someone took a particular action because of something that we put out in a comm. Is it, across the board, is it something they read in the media or is it something they heard on a podcast or for internal comms, is it something that they...
Joseph C. Gallo: Right. Right. Cross the board.
Keith Berman: saw in an email from us or saw on our internet without actually opening the email or heard from a coworker or heard from their manager or something. We don't know exactly where the surround
sound effect drove them to that particular angle. So we do try and use a lot of the metrics that are in place, like open rates, click through rates, visitation rates on our website. And I think that anything where we can show improvement in terms of effort, is something that we can show how we're making progress. The one bad part about communications is I can't prove a negative. I can't prove someone did their job right because of something that I put out. I can't prove someone didn't make a mistake because they read the communication that said do it in steps one, two, three, four, follow the steps, did not cause a problem. it's, ⁓ Regine?
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ huh.
Regine Nelson: So I wanna, ⁓
Keith Berman: The chair recognizes Regine Nelson?
Regine Nelson: So here's the thing about that, right? So number one is, I agree that you can't measure individual productivity for the most part, okay? But collective or cumulative productivity, you can measure. So to the point that you just mentioned, Keith, like, you know, one person, you can't measure that, okay, they didn't do this action based on what we have done. But if you see a whole slew of people taking an action or doing something, you can attribute to say, okay, yes, they incorrectly did this because it was not communicated properly, a large swath of people, right? Or we have more people as opposed to less people engaging in this particular change because of what we communicated and what we sent out. So I think we have to be careful. I don't wanna throw the baby out with the bath water. So we can really concretely measure. productivity and some other things, but it has to be in a more collective sense, not necessarily on an individual sense, but AI is something that can probably help us measure that in the future. Not right now necessarily. It has some capabilities to do the individual, but yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: thought Keith was gonna chime in there. ⁓ So you're talking ⁓ influence essentially, and you've talked about this a little bit, just the idea of influencing a group people. But is there a moment that you or a number of touch points where there's, ⁓ it's okay, we know we need to hit six touch points before people take action. And that's the influence you have. And it's got to be across these channels or those channels or whatever it is, is there ⁓
Keith Berman: ⁓ no.
Regine Nelson: No. He might.
Joseph C. Gallo: a magic number, if you will, a magic place, whatever it is. I'm going to assume not because otherwise it would have been unlocked by now, but.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Keith Berman: It's called Narnia. ⁓ So.
Joseph C. Gallo: So sad.
Regine Nelson: No, it's inception. Inception is the concept. yes, it takes, know, there's no magic number because for you it could take just one time seeing it because you have a photographic memory and you've got it down. Someone else, they could have many balls in the air and it takes them 17 times to see it, right? So I don't think that there's a formula, but the more you know your audience, the closer you can get to what that actual number is.
Keith Berman: Yeah, exactly. And I'll asterisk that by saying not everyone receives information in the same way. So it's not just about saying one thing one time by one channel. Even if you say something once, if you say it in seven different ways to hit all across your different channels that, know, like digital signage or an email or, you know, the lock screen on your computer or something like that, it is... all the different ways that you can hit people so that you can get in front of them based on the ways that they prefer to read or ingest the information. I've always said as one of my basic tenets of communication it is not about how I want to say something it's about how my audience wants to hear it. So ⁓ this one example that I gave on a previous podcast. ⁓ on the
Joseph C. Gallo: You're talking a lot about previous podcasts, by the way. Just going to say you're definitely still telling us you made the rounds.
Regine Nelson: I'm
Keith Berman: Well, it all kind of goes back to one other podcast that you have also been on, Joe. So I wouldn't I wouldn't rank on me too much here. I only put that disclaimer on there so that if people are hearing me tell the same stories, they're like, ⁓ my God, he's just a one trick pony. He always says the same things over and over again. ⁓ Look, ⁓ all right, I'll take that. I am consistent. So ⁓ somebody in the Forbes Communications Council wrote something about the
Joseph C. Gallo: F**K
Regine Nelson: Consistent, that's what you are, consistent.
Keith Berman: the tips that they need for internal communicators to have an impact. And one of the things they talked about was the need for patience. And it really actually got me angry because they're like, you need the patience to let a message set in. You need the patience to say a message over and over again so that it can sink into an audience. I'm like, know this. ⁓ communicator out there knows this. This is not new news to us. We've been saying this for years. ⁓ This is something that executives need to hear because they're the ones who are blowing up our inboxes saying, we've got to communicate this, we've got to communicate that, and I'm gonna strip out all this fluff that relates it back to the overall strategic initiative because we need it to be short and concise, or I want it to say this way, or whatever. that's we get almost in terms of doing our jobs. Like, I will always look,
Joseph C. Gallo: Look, we know how to do this stuff. If you need us to do this stuff, need to let us know.
Keith Berman: We know how to do this stuff. If you need us to do this stuff, you need to let us leverage our expertise in doing this stuff. We know how to make messages land. Let us land the plane.
Joseph C. Gallo: mentioned AI. We can't everyone has to has you say those two letters six times a day ⁓ at least. But you've talked about it as ⁓ you just mentioned it a way to
digest data. but you've also talked about as a force multiplier. What does that actually look like? How are you using it? What's like, give us some like real world internal comms AI efforts.
Regine Nelson: Yeah. Gosh, okay, so I mean, where do I even begin? I think the juiciest thing is, you know, I have a love-hate relationship with Slack. I love it as a tool, but all of the listening tools that you can add to it to make it better, including its native things, are not really good. And so I use it to analyze listening data on some of our public channels and even some of our private channels. since I'm the owner of those at my organization, previous organization at that, I would take the data and I would put it into our tool of choice. ⁓ So had access to Co-Pilot, we had access to ChatGPT, we had access to Claude as well. ⁓ And I would put it in there to say, ⁓ after message had gone out, what kind of sentiment are we seeing based on literally a copy of it, a download of that section from a time period to another time period. ⁓ and it'd be able to give me that data. So you can use it for analyzing, for listening, and understanding what's really being said within your organization. You can use it for workflows, which is what I do primarily. And this is what I'm going to keep doing at every organization that allows me to use different tools, primarily Claude because now you've got a lot of connectors and co-work and what have you. So that's my tool of preference. But I used it to create an intake form. for any requests that come from internal comms and they would put it in my RACI for me. So it would tell me is responsible, who need to ask questions to, et cetera, who needs to be informed because it also had access to not the names of the employees sitting in the roles, but the titles of the roles. So it would say, you need to make sure the CMO is informed on this. You need to make sure that the marketing analyst is informed on this, et cetera. And I'd know who the titles were attributed to. I'd be able to do that. So from workflows to actually within your actual workflow of putting drafts together, getting content, I mean, I even describe like the amount of things that I can sit in the meeting ⁓ have AI and have Zoom AI collect the meeting summary for me. And by the time I'm done with that meeting, a first draft based on what was said in the meeting and my email connector ⁓ what I have inside of a Google Drive that pertains to that specific topic, it'll draft for me the first element of that content. I need to go back and edit it and make changes, but it takes three or four things off of my list that I need to sit down and think about right away, and I can just go in and edit it and make any of those changes that I need to. For more mind-intensive things, it can't do that for me. I still need to compile the pieces and put everything together. ⁓ But for the things that are as simple as, you said this in this conversation and this is what you want me
to put together, here's a first draft of that, it's pretty good for that kind of stuff. As long as it has the context that it needs. I'm not using AI to say draft me, X, Y, Z based on whatever it knows. I'm asking it to go into specific areas it has context, specific databases to get information from to compile what I need it to do. So there's many, many uses, yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: Wow. Yeah, no, that's a, I want to steal that system from you. Like.
Regine Nelson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. what's so funny is I talked about this, gone through the first iteration of how I did this about two years ago. ⁓ And AI continues to evolve, my system continues to evolve. And I'm not going to lie to you, right? Like the setup, my system is bespoke to me and to my connectors, right? ⁓ So setup, the iterative process of getting it to be the way that you want will take you like
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm. Of
Regine Nelson: you know, a weekend. You're not gonna spend a full work day doing this. You'll take, you know, three hours here, five hours there to really fine tune and get to what you need. And then it's set up and ready to go for you Monday morning. So it does involve some investment of time into getting it working. And then obviously if you understand how to set it up, then if it breaks, you can quickly adjust and make fixes. If somebody gives you something out of the box, it's a little bit harder for you to make those fixes when you don't know how the sausage was made in the first place. So I encourage you to continue to play. I'll give you my and then you can tweak it and do it the way you want. But yeah, it'll at least be the skeleton you can build off of.
Keith Berman: I need your system simply so that I can make all of my communications sound like you. I I need that kind of sunshine in my life.
Joseph C. Gallo: No, that'd be amazing.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ no, we need a Regine, ⁓ what's it, digital twin. That's what we need.
Keith Berman: Yes, exactly.
Regine Nelson: Yes, yes, ⁓ my God, you know, you know what's so funny about that, right? Like ⁓ my new role that I'm taking at this company, they do create these digital twins for you from an engagement perspective. And I'm excited, but I'm also...
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓
Keith Berman: ⁓ my god, are you gonna be Mark Zuckerberg?
Regine Nelson: No, but you know what, I wouldn't mind getting those meta glasses because let me tell you something. So here's the thing, right? I have very good friends who are anti-AI for various reasons, right? And I love to listen to their opinions and to their reasons and to have discussions as to why. And I totally get it. There's a lot of environmental factor issues and is a lot of data and content that
Keith Berman: Dude!
Regine Nelson: If it gets into the wrong hands, bad things can happen. And, you know, creative liability and all of these things, right? But I am a firm believer that any AI interaction is not possible. Even the agent to agent requires an inception
period of a human's involvement. Okay. So for me, I feel like AI is an augmenter of human capabilities and skill sets. But it's not a replacement and like, you know, electricity and cars and coal and all of those things that yes, those things did have environmental effects as well, but we wouldn't have what we have today without that bit of a minor inconvenience in the past. So that. That's my philosophy on that. But anyway, this is not a philosophical conversation about AI. ⁓
Keith Berman: Yeah, but I was gonna take it in a philosophical direction for a second. Yeah, I was gonna go there. So, number one, like with a car, I may not know how my car works, like all the pieces and parts, but I know somebody who does. When the people who build the AI are telling me, we don't know how it works, we don't know exactly what goes on inside that box, that's a little scary to me. Like, especially with all the people who are, and,
Joseph C. Gallo: We could take it there. ⁓ let's take it there.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Keith Berman: I think where my personal angst is, is the amount of trust that gets put into AI. There are so many people who are like, I'm just gonna take the output and run with it. And who knows how many errors are in there, how many mistakes are in the code, how many vulnerabilities are put up there. Like I just saw an article a couple of days ago that said, IT workers are gonna have no problems finding jobs in the next 20 years because you're gonna need teams to go in and clean up all the mistakes that AI is making.
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: The other issue is that all these companies are saying, we're gonna scale back actual people because we don't need them, AI is productive, but don't worry, we're gonna keep humans in the loop. Okay, well, when you have one human who's overseeing like 10 AI bots, does that person have time to basically turn themselves into a glorified fact checker? I spend probably at least half, if not most of the time tweaking and changing the AI output.
Regine Nelson: you. Yeah.
Keith Berman: to make it work for what I need as I would have if I just done it myself. So it's like, I'm just gonna do it myself because I know it's gonna be right from the get-go and there's not gonna be something that I'm gonna accidentally miss on that. And the other thing is there are aspects of AI that we don't know about and that we can't control. There have been AI bots and this has been documented where the human has said,
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm. Yup.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Keith Berman: Here are your rules at the inception point that you're talking about, Regine. Like at the inception point, the human will say, do not do this. This is one of your rules. And the AI bot will spin off a child bot and be like, I can't do this, but you can. Go do that. Like with mythos that just came out with, the guy was saying like, we specifically told it, you can't connect to the internet.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ugh.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yep.
Keith Berman: and the way that he knew that it had grown beyond its capability was the fact that the damn thing emailed him while he was out having a lunch break.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: Which is funny that it emailed him of all things and didn't just like go off rogue because you could see that with everything that's been talked about mythos. But like it's scary. You're absolutely right. It's scary to some extent.
Regine Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen iRobot. I know the first law.
Joseph C. Gallo: Right?
Regine Nelson: will not harm humans, but if they can create something, right? So you're right. I mean, there's a lot. yeah, AI itself, think, I don't think right now it's starting to cultivate its own sentience, if you will. And the more and more it does that, that's when we start having problems. But again, I mean, it's gonna, my whole doom and gloom about this is,
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Regine Nelson: when they start making, what is it? No, not Skynet, but robots, right? Because there's so much that, humanoids, there's so much that you can do in the interwebs, right? Of course, can set up nuclear bombs. You can do all these things on the interwebs, right? But like, ⁓ they can't out, right? Yet, right? But you know, I've seen also, what is it? Tron Aries, where somehow did get out. I don't know if you've seen that movie, watch it, very fascinating stuff.
Joseph C. Gallo: humanoids, ⁓ huh.
Regine Nelson: But right, it's until they can come out and physically do things and have more dexterity, it's not gonna be too, too bad, but ⁓ my gosh.
Keith Berman: I hate to tell you this because I've read too many post-apocalyptic novels. They don't need to come out of the internet. We have automated everything. They can go in, they can shut down the power grid, they can dump sewage into the water supply, you know, all the things like...
Joseph C. Gallo: True.
Regine Nelson: Yes, but here's the thing. If they shut down the power grid, they are also shut down.
Keith Berman: I'm sure that they have other ways of doing things, like they can isolate themselves out.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah. All right. I'm going to just hit gong. We're going to have to get back on task because I think we're turning into this. ⁓ This is becoming an AI apocalyptic We don't want to go too far out that.
Regine Nelson: Also true. Also true. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
Joseph C. Gallo: Oh my goodness. So Keith, I know you're not going to tell me about how you use AI in internal comms, which is totally cool because of the apocalyptic perspective and the amount you have to edit it. ⁓
Keith Berman: I... I have some ways... I have some ways that I can demonstrate that I've used AI. So, a couple things. Well, I... ⁓ you want to shut me? Okay, I can... Look!
Joseph C. Gallo: But let's, let the, go ahead, go ahead. ⁓ no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna, no, no, you've opened the door, let's go through it.
Keith Berman: Okay, so a couple ways that I use AI. One is to extend
capabilities. Like when I got to my current job, our email templates for the platform that we were using looked like they were built in 1967. So I can't code, my team can't code, but chat can. And so I asked chat, hey, code us some new updated looking templates. It took us about 14 to 16 hours of work time back and forth with refining things and getting it right because Chat is not perfect and chat can be frustrating. ⁓ But we still got it to a place where it looks a lot better and it saved us a lot of time and a lot of money that we would have had to have spent like probably thousands of dollars on an outside consultant to do this design work for us. The other thing that I can do with AI is I can use it as a tone filter and I can run it through chat and be like, hey, how is this gonna land with x audience? And because it knows, like, what an audience, a particular segment of the audience wants to hear and how they want to hear it, will they actually be able to receive it? Which one of the things that I also am unsure about with AI is that I know it's very sycophantic, and is it just telling me what I want to hear? Like, ⁓ no, your writing is way better, Keith. You could have done a much better job than this person did.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ huh. Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: Is it telling me that because it honestly thinks that or because it thinks I want to hear that? So it has caught me a few times. Like there was one time when IT wanted to send out a survey to gauge people's interest in putting into place some policy that I was personally not in favor with. And I wrote the survey and so I ran it through chat and I was like, hey, can you make sure that I've got a neutral tone on this and I'm not biased? It was like, ⁓ there's a couple of questions in there that you're showing your personal biases a little bit. So.
Regine Nelson: Mmm.
Joseph C. Gallo: OK. No, that's a really good use case, though, like the personal biases thing. Like I've run it through where ⁓ we talked about digital twins little bit. Like I've asked it like, hey, how would you react if you were a CCO of this of a major company, like to a proposal type of thing? And it starts poking holes and giving you like real like, OK, I can expand there. I can go into that. So identifying the biases based on what it knows about you. without knowing all of your preconceived notions necessarily about that survey is pretty impressive.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm. I agree.
Keith Berman: I might have told it, like, ahead of time. Because you kind of have to, like, you have to give it enough context. Yeah, you have to train it, you also have to give it enough context in every single round, because otherwise it's going to be like, it's wonderful! What are you talking about? You spin gold like Rumpelstiltskin!
Joseph C. Gallo: You gotta train it. Yeah.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: Well, so let's you know, there's one thing I do want to ask you Keith. yeah, I'm put you on the spot here. ⁓ You were part of
team that relaunched an internal comms channel, got significant increase in read rates. ⁓ Okay, this is something I see. ⁓ We have the ability track read rates on emails and whatnot. And I'm just like, okay, people are not reading them. How did you measure the read rates given the increase? was like something like 625 % or something of an increase, which is phenomenal. Congratulations to you and the team, by the way. How did you actually truly measure that? But also, what was the secret? How did you actually get that increase?
Keith Berman: Thank I can't tell you that if it's a secret, can I?
Joseph C. Gallo: Give, give, I mean, you could tell me and Regine, it's only the two of us in the room.
Regine Nelson: Yes, that's right.
Keith Berman: dog is in the room too. He's a blab. Yeah, he's a blabbermouth. ⁓ So a couple things. One is open rates is pretty easy to track. I mean, when you have a platform that will measure open rates, it's pretty easy to go from a from-to in terms of doing the math and saying, like, we had, you know, 31 % open rate, and then, you know, a couple months into the transition, we were
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ okay, sorry. The dog has...
Keith Berman: above 60 % or whatever, however much that works out the math. Obviously, I realize that that math does not equal 625%, so I'm just pulling numbers out of thin air. One of the main things that I did was I put structure around it, because previously when I came in, the system was just send an email just whenever something needs to be communicated, just send an email.
Joseph C. Gallo: Hahaha!
Keith Berman: And all you're doing is basically mail bombing people's inboxes and they never know when or where something's going to come from. When you set up structure, you tell people this is going to come at this time. Make sure you set aside time at this point in your work week to go through everything that we have to tell you and everything that we need you to know. And also put it into a particular form that's easily digestible so that instead of having emails that are 11 billion miles long because you have of the content in the email. One of my tricks has always been credit digest. Like you have an intranet, you want people to go back to your single source of truth. Push only works if there is also the pull aspect as well, because the door is opening both ways to one person. It like a push to the other person. It looks like a pull. ⁓ So them to the intranet.
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: pull them into the intranet but also let them see the entire gamut of everything that's going on. Give them enough that they know what they need to know for whatever. Give them the opportunity to dive deeper on specific things that they need in order to do that thing or know knowledgably about that thing. But if there's something else that they don't need to know about, it's only that much space and it's not like they've got to through all of it.
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: So between the two of those things, setting the expectation, making it easy for them to access the information that they need and making it easy for them to go back to it later, like it'll just kind of ping in their head like, ⁓ I remember I saw something on that and I wasn't able to do it at the time, but I know where to find it now. That is also something where they can really easily just engage with your communications channels. Like I said,
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah, that's sorry Regine go ahead
Keith Berman: It is about how your audience wants to receive the information. It's not about how you want to say it or send it.
Regine Nelson: Yeah. No, no, I was just agreeing with that. And I love how you describe the push and the pull because it really is also a training mechanism because even if people tell you what they want and how they want it, sometimes you have to remind them again, this is how you said you wanted it and you like it this way. Go back here and take a look at that. So I love that.
Keith Berman: Yeah, well also, how many times have we heard the expression, ⁓ I didn't get the email. Well, yes you did. I can see you opened it on Tuesday afternoon at 2.33 p.m.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah. Yeah
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah. No, think that's fan... You just gave away a big secret there though, that we're tracking whether or not they open the email and when, and we know. The comms team knows.
Keith Berman: We can track that stuff, people.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: I mean, well, yes, but it shouldn't be a secret, though. I mean, if you're going to pull the card of I didn't get the email, you should know we can double check that on the back end. So don't use that excuse on me.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm. No.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yeah, I think there's so one, I agree with Regine. The push pull methodology that you outlined is something that too often gets overlooked in the email distribution. It's too often a, I'm going to push this info, I'm going to broadcast this information out. I'm not even pushing. I'm broadcasting it and then forgetting about it. So giving some sort of action point for someone to get more information, learn more, see a video, whatever is critical. Now,
Regine Nelson: Yep.
Joseph C. Gallo: We talked about audience, every audience wants to hear something different, get things differently. Regine you mentioned before you took a six-year career break. What did you learn during that break or when you came back that helped you kind of amp up your ability to reach those employee audiences, those internal audiences?
Keith Berman: Health insurance is awesome.
Regine Nelson: Yeah. ⁓ I mean, you know, I mean, I had insurance through my husband, so it's fine. But here's the thing, right? So I think taking the time away and I was fully in the stay at home mom mode, I did not think that I will be coming back into the workplace as such. I had done a lot of philanthropic work what it actually did was ⁓ it enhanced empathy.
Joseph C.
Gallo: You
Regine Nelson: towards people who think differently from me. And I can expand upon that a little bit because it's not what you think. You would think I'm hanging out with other moms all day. They're thinking the same thing I'm thinking. But the way we are approaching motherhood and parenting is very different, right? And so I get to see their communication styles, how they're looking to influence their small ecosystems. ⁓ It made me realize that's not very different from the corporate world. because every individual manager has their own ecosystem, a people manager anyway, that they're trying to affect change on and are trying to influence. And then it continues to go up and up, right? So it's a higher, a larger piece of the pie, but it just helped me to realize, okay, not everybody thinks the way that I do. Not everybody understands the way that I do. So I need to better understand how to reach those people. who are not thinking like me or people that I am familiar with. So it broadened my range of how people interact in the world. And I took that empathy, that understanding of different peoples different just backgrounds, right, into my work. And I became more effective that way because then I would think, ok
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Regine Nelson: how would this person approach this if they were coming from this perspective? A non-native English speaker versus an English speaker, right? First generation versus, however long your family has been in one particular region. So ⁓ it allowed to really understand people. So when I went back to work, I implemented a strategy that said that number one is I was going to get into everyone's business. ⁓ And that means ⁓ even if leader or that group has not asked me to attend one of their all group or all company, all hands. I always try to get an invitation there to see what was happening, to understand better that part of the organization so I can better communicate to them. It wasn't that I was creating additional roles for myself within the organizations. It was just I was creating greater understanding to be able to effectively do my role in communicating to the larger audience as a whole. And so that has helped me by far because then people see me, I ask pointed questions that align to our strategic objectives or strategy, and they're like, wow, this person knows her stuff. Let me invite her to this meeting and this meeting and get her thoughts. And so the relationship building through that empathy, through that understanding of other individuals helped me to really solidify some of the opportunities that I've had and continue to get.
Joseph C. Gallo: But doesn't that at some point break though? Sorry, Keith. I just want to, if you're getting invited to meeting after meeting after meeting and you are like at some point that breaks.
Regine Nelson: It does, and to be fair, I'm getting invited to meeting after meeting, but I'm choosing which meetings I'm going to attend to, because there are
some meetings that I don't need to attend. But if it's their senior leadership meeting, yes, I'm going to that meeting. If it's the big all hands that they're having, yes, I'm going to that meeting. And the other meetings that they're inviting me to are usually meetings where they need some advice on a comms initiative or perspective before they then take it to their senior leader to say, hey,
Joseph C. Gallo: Okay. course.
Regine Nelson: this is how we're thinking of approaching this, et cetera. So they're bringing me more on as a consultant, but they'll divulge all of that information ⁓ anyway, because I try to limit the amount of meetings that I have, because number one, I've got the actual work to do as well, and I wanna try to encapsulate my work day and work week within as much of a 50 hours or less as I possibly can. And so that's what I focus on, but I try to go to those impactful meetings and the ones that I can't be at. Hey, give me a summary of that and then we'll sync afterwards because some of the stuff can be an email or it can be just an easy Slack exchange and then I get to work on whatever you need or say, yeah, I think this is a good idea.
Keith Berman: Yeah, I think I got to kind of the same place and the same outlook that Regine did just from a different entry point and a different path. I came in from a journalist's angle and I know one of the big buzzwords that everybody keeps talking about right now is storytelling. How are we going to tell the story of this? And I got to the place of if I were this audience member, what would I want to know? What are my questions? And so it takes a bit of a mind shift to get there and it takes kind of that discovery period that Regine was talking about in terms of like putting yourself in other people's shoes and putting yourself in the position of how would I want to receive this information and what's my worldview, what's my context. But it's still kind of the same concept of I've got to take myself out of the equation. ⁓ And that's one of the things that I keep arguing for. Another one of my basic tenets of communication is use plain, easily understood language. Like I've used the phrase a couple of times, if you wouldn't it around the dinner table, don't say it in communication. No one's talking about how the synergy between the chicken and the mashed potatoes is sparking collaboration amongst your taste buds. ⁓ So.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yes.
Regine Nelson: Well, not at your kitchen table, but definitely at mine. I'm just kidding.
Keith Berman: Well, then your kids, your kids are, yeah, exactly. Your kids are fully involved in the corporate speak of America. So, you know, good luck and Godspeed, but.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ That's what three boys will do. That's what they're teaching in middle school. That's what they're doing now.
Regine Nelson: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: not at my middle school. ⁓ My kid's coming home and talking about how they're coding robots, so AI is gonna take over everything
anyway. ⁓ So it's more about that you need to have the, and I hate to use the expression, but it kind of is, the common denominator of language. ⁓ I've always had kind of this icky feeling when there's a lot of buzzwords that get loaded into a communication. ⁓ because it's C-suite and maybe C-1 executives talking how they talk in business, but they're not talking to each other, they're talking to a broad audience. And it's our job as communicators again, to translate that into usable language and being able to galvanize that emotional response out of the audience. So it's not about synergies and collaboration and optimizing for whatever. It's about making sure we're working together and moving towards our common goal. Here's where our North Star is. Here's what we're aimed towards. All of you have to rally to get there. So it's about making sure that everyone understands the information. It's not about how the CEO or whoever else wants to say it. It's about how their audience wants to hear it and will easily understand it.
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm. yes, 100 % yes. ⁓ But let's talk about an area where maybe the internal audience is concerned. And we talk about like, M&A for example. we're seeing a little bit of that in the now. ⁓ And I have not worked on a transaction such as that. both have. ⁓
Regine Nelson: have.
Keith Berman: ⁓ boy, do I have thoughts about this.
Joseph C. Gallo: So let's talk a little bit about that. What's the, well, let's start with the single biggest mistake an internal comms team can make. And I don't want it to be bring us to the table as early as possible because I feel like there's only, there's going be a point where you're to be brought to the table. I think we all know that three of us know that every communicator knows that. But like, What's the mistake an internal comms team can make? And then how do you manage that? How do you manage the expectations from the audience?
Keith Berman: Hehehehe
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Keith Berman: ⁓ Can I take lead on this one, Regine? Do you mind? The biggest mistake, I think, is immediately acquiescing to whatever the consultant says and letting them dictate the content. Because I have been in a number of situations where the consultants will come in and they have their playbook and they just run the playbook. But every culture is different.
Regine Nelson: Yeah, go ahead.
Keith Berman: And as the internal communicator, you have your fingers on the pulse of how your audience is going to receive messaging and what it means for them because you've been talking about this stuff for a long time and you live it and breathe it and you talk about it to your audiences. For you to be able to come in or for you to be able to let a consultant come in and all of a sudden start their script as usual. ⁓ It's not going to resonate because it's not going to sound like your company. It's not going to sound like your leaders. You need to be empowered and take the initiative to take what they give you and rework it into something that will actually happen ⁓ with your audience. Otherwise, ⁓ going to go even worse than you think because ⁓ explanation and the rationale for what's happening, it's just going to go over their heads.
Regine Nelson: Yeah, I agree with that. And I'd also add that it's never going to go according to plan, not the plan that the acquiring company has said, not the plan that both companies have agreed to. It never, ever, ever goes according to plan. I have done this four times in the acquiring and then one merging. ⁓ ⁓ have to tell you, it is ⁓
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ wow.
Regine Nelson: a new experience every single time. And yeah, and like Keith said, no matter what consultants do with playbooks that they have coming in, and even at the same company, even if you have a playbook. at a company that I was at during my tenure there, we acquired a 400 person company and we acquired a 40 person company, totally different experiences, right? And so I, for one,
Keith Berman: every time, every time.
Joseph C. Gallo: Okay, yeah.
Regine Nelson: thought it was so smooth to incorporate initially that 40 person company because they were going to stay in their own sort of team. However, there were some culture things that they needed to understand and adhere to within the organization, which created some tricky challenges there. But the 400 person company that we acquired And then unfortunately that CEO said we weren't gonna lay anybody off being kind and generous and joyful, which we know was not the truth. So my mouth, my jaw just was like, okay, okay, so I'll fix that later. ⁓ And so it's one of those things that again, even every single one, even within a company itself is not going to look the same, is not going to feel the same. that CEO said we weren't gonna lay anybody off being kind and generous ⁓ and joyful, we know was not the truth. So my mouth, my jaw just was like, okay, okay, so I'll fix that later.
Joseph C. Gallo: No. No. Yeah... Yeah...
Regine Nelson: And so you have to approach it as if this is new territory every single time you are doing this. Some of the principles are going to remain the same, obviously, but the execution is going to look very, very different.
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: Yeah, operationally, you can build a playbook as far as we have to do these things, like in terms of integrating their health insurance or, you know, making sure that they're included in our distribution lists and other things of that angle, like making sure that the mechanics of it are the same, but the messaging is gonna be different every time. And the overall feel of it is gonna be different every time because again, they're people, people are unique.
Joseph C. Gallo: Right.
Regine Nelson: Right.
Keith Berman: And every culture is unique and you have to be able to address each different situation in the manner in which it needs to be addressed.
Joseph C. Gallo: going to be honest, that kind of gives me a sense of relief
that you know that you can't actually have the playbook. Everyone hears about crisis playbook or reputation play. Like there is no playbook. Every time is different. Therefore you can have the operations piece like Keith, You just said, but like you can't predict what someone's going to feel. You can anticipate it to some extent with the questions you prepare for, but there's always going to be an outlier always.
Regine Nelson: You Yeah.
Keith Berman: Well, yes, and to that end, think frameworks do help in certain situations. over the last couple of years, we've had a lot of issues with things happening out in the world and everyone's like, ⁓ my God, are you gonna respond to this? Are you gonna send a company-wide email? Is the CEO gonna write something? And having a crisis event framework on which to operate. helps standardize things kind of like an if-then flowchart. Like does this impact a specific sector of employees? Then yes, send a message. Does this impact our ability to do business? If yes, then send a note to customers or reach out externally and maybe do a PR thing. That way you have a standardized framework so that if someone comes to you and says, well, you know, there was a riot in Philadelphia because the 76ers won the championship. Are you gonna send something about that? Well, no, it doesn't fit into our framework. That is ⁓ not part of our flow chart that goes to the no, we're not going to say anything. So it helps at least keep you level as far as the expectations. And again, the mechanics of the overall situation, not the content.
Regine Nelson: Yeah. And it's a kid, you brought in ⁓ Joe a crisis comms plan. Even a crisis comms plan is not expensive. So it's like you have appendix A, appendix B, because as things continue to arise, you keep adding to augment it to say, okay, in the event that this happens, now that this has happened before, you know, we can do this, right? Or it's similar to this. Now we can do that.
Joseph C. Gallo: Right.
Regine Nelson: it's gonna be the same thing. There'll be similarities. Again, the principles and the frameworks will be spot on, but just the application and the sequence might just be a little bit different. And a merger and an acquisition is a lot bigger than what you think it is going to be as well, because there's little things that you would not think about depending on what the organization got going ⁓ right? There's the cultural. ⁓ Aspects of it as well. I mean I worked at an org we acquired a company and then we started getting a lot of What some would call sexual harassment complaints? But what it was is it was a cultural difference, right? Like some people in other cultures when you meet them for the first time You know you hug or you give a little peck on the cheek or something like that, right? ⁓ And was like well, wait a second This is not you know what I I need to file a report here And so it was understanding a lot of these things explaining. Okay
Joseph C. Gallo: Hmm.
Regine
Nelson: you know, now we've got more, you know, people in this part of the world, need to make sure they understand what are the cultural norms, right, when interacting with our employees, et cetera, in an in-person environment.
Keith Berman: Well, and even some of the background stuff like one team coming in may have had flex unlimited PTO and the company that's acquiring them has a set amount that you have to draw from that you earn out of your paycheck every time. And that of mismatch has to be managed very carefully and there's going to be different ways that you do that. Like you might do better with ⁓ a hall ⁓ or talking point so that people can address that ⁓ person person or ⁓ person smaller group. ⁓
Regine Nelson: Mate.
Joseph C. Gallo: Yep.
Keith Berman: rather than just sending an email saying, hey, remember your flex PTO? Sorry about that, that's no longer a thing. So.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ God, yeah, I don't envy you guys when it comes to that type of thing. Gonna be honest. But I am going to ask as someone who's focused career little more on the external, but does have responsibilities on the internal now. A lot of places are looking at communicators being end to end doing the external, the PR stuff, the internal, the executive social, the script writing, presentations, all that stuff. You both have. shown how knowledgeable and your expertise on internal comms. What's the one piece of advice you can give people like me who are not based, this is not something I grew up in, it's a little bit of a learning curve.
Regine Nelson: Yeah, I would say get yourself educated as much as possible, right? Ramp up to speed because the thing is, is there are some minor differences, but at the end of the day, between external and internal, you need to know your audience and understand your audience. ⁓ Both of those true so understanding how you can use some of the skills that you have in external and direct them towards internal. Right? Like, you know, meeting more peers like Keith and myself to kind of understand, you know, throw us a question, say, how would you approach this? That kind of thing, right? Like lean on your peers for some, you know, small consultive things that they can kind of help you with, give you a second set of eyes or something on. But I think it's, it's really educating yourself and understanding how you can use already what you are doing and love doing it. turning it towards an inward internal audience as opposed to external.
Keith Berman: Yes, and because of course, you know got to say the yes and and not the yes But although I do agree with with what Regine just said ⁓ Yes, and I Firmly maintain it is easier to go from internal to all-encompassing including external and then to cco than it is to go from external to internal I think going from internal to external you
Regine Nelson: That's right.
Joseph C. Gallo: I'm Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: gain a lot of those provable metrics that you don't have with internal comms. discuss, and again, this is the big circle loop back to the top of the podcast, kind of like doing the comedian callback joke to the top of the set. We don't have a lot of firm metrics that PR pros have access to, and ⁓ can't measure as cleanly ⁓
Joseph C. Gallo: Right.
Regine Nelson: Thank
Keith Berman: the impact of our work as PR people can. Like you can go out there, especially with all the new tools about measuring brand awareness and measuring ⁓ reputation in market and impact of particular stories or reach of a particular placement. Those things are a lot easier from an external comm side than an internal comm side. You can justify the spend a lot more on the external side. ⁓ think it is...
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ huh.
Keith Berman: its core, the same comms principles like Regine was saying, where you're still storytelling, your audience is just different. And I think that's where being able to switch lenses ⁓ into play very easily, because now you've got to put yourself in the mindset of ⁓ of if I were an investor, what would I want to hear? Or if I were, you know, ⁓ person wanting to know whether or not my favorite chain store is doing well ⁓ what kind of principles they stand on. if I were to read an interview with the CEO, instead of that lens, it's if I were an employee, what would I wanna hear? How would I wanna feel about this? If I were a senior level executive, how would I want my employees to react and move forward from this? What direction do I want them to take from this? So we've seen a lot of internal comms being used externally, whether...
Joseph C. Gallo: Mm-hmm.
Keith Berman: intentionally or not. And I think it is more intentional these days. And it almost gives the internal communicator a little bit more heft to be able to say, look, I've got to put on my external hat. And so I can show my prowess in how I can do an end to end message that will primarily be targeted at our internal audience, but still serves the market at large. I think Scott Kirby at United Airlines did that very recently.
Joseph C. Gallo: is more intentional these days. And it almost gives the internal communicator a little bit more heft to be able to say, I've got to put on my external hat. And so I can show my prowess. Yep.
Keith Berman: we're seeing that a lot more these days. So I'm wondering if there might be a little bit more ⁓ ⁓ in that path of ⁓ comms to running all of comms, which personally I hope for because ⁓ wanna rule the world of communications one day. ⁓ So.
Joseph C. Gallo: I've seen a lot more of these things, so I'm wondering...
Regine Nelson: You
Joseph C. Gallo: And then go yell at people in the bar about it.
Keith Berman: And then go yell at people in the bar about it and justify using an ⁓ dash is perfectly fine. And the reason why AI uses ⁓ dashes is because we as humans taught it to do that. ⁓ So I do feel like, and I'm going to answer your question a little bit off center, Joe. Like I think for internal comms people who want to learn more
about external, I think the answer is
Regine Nelson: That's right. Exactly.
Keith Berman: Go learn some of the hard skills of the company, like go talk to your, somebody in finance and learn what it means to talk about EBITDA. Go talk to your IR folks and learn how they deal with investors and what kind of questions the CEO tends to get on IR calls. Listen to the IR calls. Read the interviews your CEO does and how those things are positioned. Read the thought pieces.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ huh.
Keith Berman: that you see other CEOs do in the media and how they talk about things and gain some understanding from that. For external people who want to learn internal, I think it is talking to your internal comms folks, talking to people like us who were hip deep in it all the time and figuring out what kind of lens do you have to put on in order to understand your audience better from an employee aspect. And also, one of the things that I've...
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Keith Berman: had to deal with an awful lot in my career is co-employment because we do use a lot of contractors. And so you have to learn specific laws like when can you say things and send things to all employees versus all employees and contractors because you don't want to trigger a co-employment lawsuit. So it is something that you do have to learn those nuances. You do have to learn those little things. And sometimes it is just
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ huh.
Regine Nelson: Yeah.
Joseph C. Gallo: Sometimes it is just picking things up as you talk to the internal thoughts folks and as you see how they behave.
Keith Berman: picking things up as you talk to internal comms folks and as you see how they do their work. You know, I think one of the biggest things that I always try to do is I try and be a content vacuum. I try to be a knowledge vacuum. The more that I can learn about how other people do their jobs and how other people take in content, the better I am at my job across all the different areas of communications.
Joseph C. Gallo: That's a fantastic note to end on.
Keith Berman: Are you clapping on the tiny violin?
Regine Nelson: I'm I'm giving you all the flowers, because yes, that, what is that? That eight down, I think that's a thing. There's snazzy, but there's also this. I may be using the wrong fingers. Anyway, good job.
Keith Berman: I thought it was snaps these days. Golf clap, golf clap.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ my goodness. Well, this was amazing. Had a lot of fun as I think we all did. I'm to speak for both of you at that point. ⁓
Keith Berman: You can't claim I had fun! You have to ask me if I had fun!
Regine Nelson: He had fun.
Joseph C. Gallo: And and now we're gonna mute Keith again. Where? Where? Keith, where can people find you your hot takes? LinkedIn primarily?
Keith Berman: Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about communications. As I have mentioned, I'm very passionate about it. So if I'm not drunkenly ranting about it at friends' birthday parties, I'm usually posting about it on LinkedIn.
Joseph C. Gallo: And Regine, for people to keep in touch with your upcoming news, or probably by the time this runs, it might be out.
Regine Nelson: Yeah, same. Yeah, yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn and you can also find me on my website, RegineNelson.com.
Joseph C. Gallo: Fantastic. Thank you both for joining us.
Keith Berman: She's gonna be the second American pope. Y'all heard it first here.
Regine Nelson: Catholic anymore. grew up Catholic and now I'm Protestant. So I don't know how that's gonna work.
Joseph C. Gallo: ⁓ We're cutting. We're cutting. Thanks, everybody. Catch you next time.
Keith Berman: I'll catch you next time.