Facebook Vice President: Doing this will lead to 66666666

Editor's note: Caryn Marooney is Facebook's vice president of communications. Not only does she have extensive experience in media and public relations for startups , she also has unique insights into internal corporate communications. In this article, she shares her experience and views on how startups and start-ups can build an impenetrable strategic system for internal communication and external public relations. It is very instructive for all startups.

Caryn Marooney is Facebook's vice president of communications. Prior to this, she co-founded the well-known public relations company OutCast and served as CEO, and has also worked in public relations for companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Netflix and VMware. Marooney not only has extensive experience in the company's media and public relations, but also has very unique insights into internal corporate communications.

Recently, First Round invited Marooney to give a keynote speech on the topic of internal corporate communication. After receiving this invitation, Marooney's first reaction was: Oh my God, I don't think I can share on the topic of internal corporate communication because this topic is too boring and no one will want to listen. However, internal communication in an enterprise is very, very important. It is only because there are certain misunderstandings and prejudices about it that everyone is reluctant to talk about it.

Morooney himself is well aware that internal corporate communications is not the boring cousin of external corporate public relations (PR). A company’s external public relations and internal communications are actually two sides of the same coin. If you don’t consider both of these aspects, in the long run, your message will not have the desired effect both internally and externally. So Marooney decided to accept First Round's invitation to give a keynote speech on the topic of how to achieve harmonious coexistence between internal communication and external public relations of a company.

Marooney first re-shared her previous experience and suggestions on how to do a good job in corporate external public relations. Successful public relations means that the information conveyed by the company can be absorbed by the public. Winning media attention is just the beginning; the benefits also include securing financing, recruiting talented people, and gaining the favor of mentors. Therefore, successfully winning high-quality media is not the goal, but to play a bigger game.

To craft an attractive PR message, Marooney recommends using the RIBS test, which stands for four elements: Relevant, Inevitable, Believable and Simple.

(1) Relevant

Who is your target user? Have their concerns been addressed? What are the advantages of the solution and why does it deserve others' attention? In Marooney's view, "the first prerequisite for gaining attention is to increase relevance." When Salesforce.com was first established, it could have directly launched an online CRM solution, which was a practical and interesting idea.

But in order to reach a wider range of target users, founder Marc Benioff planned a famous marketing campaign - "End of Software". At the time, the software had a poor user experience. It was not only expensive and time-consuming, but was also beginning to show signs of decline. Once End of Software was released, the clever planning quickly expanded the company's market and brought it closer to ordinary consumers and software enthusiasts. Public relations topics start from product attributes and gradually extend to changing the entire industry.

(2) Inevitable

Necessity means that companies must make people feel that your product is the trend of the times. “If journalists think your product is credible and practical, it means it has a certain relevance and has the potential to cause a sensation. On the contrary, if it has nothing to do with the trend, it is going against the trend.”

Mark Zuckerberg once said that before he founded Facebook, he believed that a technology company would take on the responsibility of "connecting the world", but he never expected that he would become the protagonist of the story. It is obvious that "global communication" is an inevitable trend, but no one expected that a group of young people would accomplish this.

(3) Believability

“Credibility means that users believe your company has the ability to turn ideals into reality. Perhaps your product is close to users and in line with the trend, but it is still a long way from being ‘credible’.”

Marooney gave an example, in Salesforce.com's program planning, the theme of 'End of Software' made the product both close to the masses and in line with the trend. But the most important thing is credibility - the founder Marc Benioff, who came from Oracle and understands software, has the ability to make products. Even so, building credibility takes time. Build up users’ trust, make them firmly believe that you will win, and make them want you to win wholeheartedly.

(4) Simple

In the Internet age, people's lives have been torn apart - they use Facebook for a while, check emails for a while, and everyone tries hard to balance the relationship between work, friends and family. If you want to find a breakthrough, try to simplify the information again and again.

“End of software”, just three words, it couldn’t be more concise. “Write your message down first, then try to get to the essence of it and think about the one sentence you want people to remember the most,” Marooney said. “If the message isn’t that condensed, then it’s not hitting the point.”

The above are the four major elements of the framework that Marooney recommends for doing a good job in corporate external public relations. But is that enough? Remember, this is only half of the equation. The problem is compounded by the fact that often the messages conveyed within a company and those communicated externally are inconsistent and contradictory.

What the media wants to report may be the exact opposite of what you want to communicate within your company.

Don't make a mistake: whether it is the company's external public relations or internal communication, these two tasks are equally important and must be kept in a balanced state. Imagine a company that is great at external PR but has no real internal communications. Such companies are only short-lived. You may have heard of them, but such companies cannot achieve long-term development. They are forgetting the forest for the trees and failing to grasp the full picture. Conversely, if a company is great at internal communications but doesn't have any external PR, it's like a pot that never reaches a boil.

Internal communication: remove noise and allow team members to hear the various information signals within the company

If the “RIBS” framework mentioned above is the key to doing a good job in external corporate public relations, then what is the key to doing a good job in internal company communication? Marooney also summarized a framework here: the "FAIR" framework. FAIR here does not literally mean "fear". It is the abbreviation of four English words, representing four changes in thinking patterns. If you want to improve your internal communications, Marooney recommends focusing on these four areas:

• F—Fail

• A—Attract

• I—Intense

• R—Rearview

The four mindset shifts listed above interact with a company’s external public relations, but they don’t always promote each other in a synergistic way. Below, Marooney details the four principles of the FAIR framework:

(1) Failure: Don’t make your success contingent on your competitors’ failure.

There is perhaps no better example of what it means to bring a company back to life than Steve Jobs' return to Apple. At that time, Microsoft had an absolute dominant position in the market, and even the Apple team itself believed that it could not win the competition - because it was impossible for Microsoft to fail at that time. But Jobs didn't see it that way. He said, "You're right. Microsoft won't fail, but that doesn't matter. Because the question is not whether Microsoft will fail, the question is how we win. This change in mindset is very important. Every startup faces this problem."

You have no reason to succeed because there are competitors in your industry that are larger and better resourced than you. All startups face this problem at the beginning.

Make sure your team understands that success does not need to depend on your competitors' failure. You don't need to climb over the mountain in front of you in one go, you just need to find a way to reach the other side of the mountain. It is very, very important to understand this.

External communication of the company : When the company communicates with the outside world, you can’t just say it as above, you need to convey a different message. Remember the relevance (Relevant) mentioned above that needs to be paid attention to in corporate public relations. When communicating information to the outside world, in order to ensure the relevance of the information, the first question to be answered is: "Which competitor must fail if you want to succeed?" If you tell the outside media: "No competitor will fail. This is a win-win result." Then you are violating the "relevance" principle. Because if you say that, no media will report on you, no one will know what you do, and you won’t provide any competitors with a reference.

You have to find a way to give media reporters and industry observers the information they want, and talking about your competitors and how you stepped on their corpses to get to the top is the information they are most happy to see. If you don't provide any competitors as a reference, and don't explain to everyone that your success is built on the failure of a certain competitor, then no one will write about you, report on you, or discuss you, and your final outcome can be imagined.

Solution: It’s a given that your team members will also see various media reports about the company. It’s important to ensure all team members have different measures of success, models, and milestones within the company than what is reported in the media . Otherwise, if everyone believes what the outside media writes, what they will always see is an insurmountable mountain in front of them.

(2) Attraction: Resist the attraction and temptation of dazzling projects, because every project is very important.

A startup company usually has only one core project. It's kind of like soccer for kids, there's only one soccer ball and everyone runs towards it. If your company has 3 people, then this is fine. If there are 5 people, there is still no problem. If there are 10 people, then the problem arises.

Everyone wants to work on the most core and dazzling projects. This is human nature. But a successful internal communication strategy requires changing this mindset. Why do I say so? Because your success comes from the overall effect of the work done by different members on different projects, some of whom are engaged in so-called core projects, and some of whom are doing marginal or seemingly less important work. However, if you want to be successful, all of these tasks are essential, and even the most insignificant ones are important parts of it.

External communication of the company: The outside media actually does not care about the real operation and growth methods of the company. If you convey this information to the outside world truthfully, it will instead discourage the media's interest in you, and the media will not increase their trust in your company. News is usually divided into three categories: The first category of news is good news. Your company is growing and developing nicely, but the media doesn't care about that and won't write about you because of it. The second category is bad news. The company was hacked, a key person left, or there was a falling out with a competitor. These are the kinds of things you don't want to happen, and whether you like it or not, journalists usually like to write about them.

The third category is new news. The new news here includes information such as the progress of major projects that the company is developing, which is also what everyone is most concerned about. You need to convey this information to the media. You need to communicate this information to the outside world again and again. This can result in a situation where there is a mismatch between what is being done within the company and the message you are sending to the outside world. Journalists don’t write boring stuff, so make sure what they write about your company is interesting.

Solution: It’s normal for your employees to want to work on the projects that will have the highest impact. However, within the company, you need to convey and make clear to employees that in the long run, those projects that seem very dazzling at the moment do not actually contribute that much to the company. At Amazon, how many people can join this cool star project, drones? If everyone wants to join this project, there is no way.

Marooney suggests that time resources must be allocated well within the company to determine how much time resources to allocate to dazzling star projects. The specific distribution ratio should be determined according to the size of the company. The reason for this is to ensure that all team members understand the real priorities within the company and avoid being misled by media reports. Because the content reported by the media is often inconsistent with the actual situation within the company, good communication must be done within the company.

Once these priorities are established within the company, they must be followed through on because they are what are truly important to the company. Inside Facebook, we value long-time employees and product bug fixes, but the media doesn’t report on these things. Yet, these things are what’s really important to Facebook.

(3) Focus and hard work: Actively create an environment that allows team members to focus on their work and be motivated.

I believe you must have had this experience: the entire team is focused on a project, and a group of people are working hard to overcome difficulties under the push of deadlines. Despite this, the situation may still be unfavorable to you. But because you are a team, because you have a common mission and a life-threatening deadline, you will find ways to overcome all difficulties and achieve results that you never dared to imagine before. The whole team is also very proud of it. However, such unity, such desperate drive and concentration will not happen for no reason. It requires you to work hard to create and build such an atmosphere. So how do we create it?

External communication of the company: For large listed companies, this external communication is very simple. Under the pressure of quarterly financial reports, team members have to work closely together in order to produce financial data that satisfies investors and the public. In addition, there are various press conferences and large conference events such as Dreamforce, Oculus Connect and Google I/O. If my company were one of these larger companies, I would have many similar opportunities to keep the team focused and motivated. The company ensures that it has a lot of interesting concepts to communicate to the outside world, and then spends another year turning the concepts into reality.

Solution: Startups don’t have the opportunities that large companies have to spontaneously motivate their teams. All you can do is create an atmosphere that allows your team to focus and work hard. Take Facebook's mobile version as an example. Zuckerberg once said clearly: "I won't look at any other products until the mobile version is launched." This sentence undoubtedly formed a strong driving force in the team. Everyone quickly transformed into a mobile engineer because they had to build the product quickly.

Hackathons are another great opportunity to get a team to focus on a project. Marooney shared the case of Facebook launching a rainbow profile photo filter to illustrate this point. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states. At that time, Facebook, which has always been open, launched a rainbow profile photo filter tool to celebrate this event, allowing everyone to add a rainbow representing homosexuality to their Facebook profile photos to "Celebrate Pride." At Zuckerberg's strong request, this feature was developed by two engineers working overtime overnight. This feature was developed overnight and everyone was very excited. Such collaboration, concentration and motivation will not happen automatically. You need to find ways to actively create the atmosphere and opportunities.

(4) Rearview mirror: Keep your eyes on the road ahead, not the rearview mirror.

Does anyone always look at the rearview mirror while driving? If you keep staring at the rearview mirror, something will happen to you sooner or later. In fact, the same principle applies not only to driving, but also to running a company. There is always harder work ahead. Just as there's ice on the road ahead, but you still don't want to miss it, you may need to pull over and put on snow tires. To drive well, you must know what is on the road ahead.

External communication of the company: The media likes to report mostly things that have already happened, but don’t be misled by their reports. If the internal team members of the company only pay attention to past events reported by the media, that is, they only stare at the rearview mirror as mentioned above, then they will not know how to look forward. You may be thinking: "Which direction are we going now? How do I know if the route I have chosen is correct? Should we use a coordinate as a reference?

Solution: It is your responsibility to provide a frame of reference for your team members. If your team members are only looking in the rearview mirror, it only means that they are now in an information vacuum. Therefore, we should strive to create a culture of purpose within the team so that everyone can better focus on the road ahead. How is it going now? Are we on track to our intended destination? Are we doing our job well enough? What goals should I seek? It is important to make sure you answer these questions regularly. Otherwise your team will have to look elsewhere for answers. At the same time, be as specific as possible and identify specific measurements and indicators.

Finally, a closed loop must be formed. Every quarter, you set a new goal for yourself, but you are not sure whether the previous goals have been achieved. If it is not achieved, it doesn’t matter. Just complete the closed loop of “setting goals - working hard for them”.

External communication is very important. When communicating with the outside world, you must always keep in mind the RIBS framework mentioned at the beginning of the article. Internal communication should not be neglected either. Whenever you make decisions that may shape your company culture, you might as well refer to the FAIR theoretical framework. If a VC emails you about a competitor, don’t let your team dwell on that information because it’s a thing of the past. Paying too much attention to it is like staring at the rearview mirror while driving. Reply to emails promptly after receiving them, because you know what you are doing, Move On! When you set annual goals for your company, think more about how you can win, not how your competitors can fail. Then make sure all team members understand the company's current priorities.

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