Mixternal Comms is about to storm the castle

by Shaun Randol:

Clinging to a traditional false divide results in redundancy and missed opportunities.

Most corporate comms teams operate like medieval fiefdoms, with internal and external groups jealously guarding their territories.

⚔️ Mixternal comms is about to storm the castle.

Corporate firewalls protect vital company data but shouldn’t dictate corporate comms strategy. The reality is that information flows freely between internal and external channels.

• We’re just wasting resources pretending otherwise.
• And with AI poised to automate much of our routine work, clinging to old divisions is inefficient (and career-limiting).

Consider this:

• Your company’s latest earnings call transcript appears on your company’s investor relations page. Within minutes, employees share snippets on X.
• Your product marketing team publishes a customer success story on the corporate blog. By afternoon, sales teams are using it in pitch decks.
• A video for an internal all-hands meeting could engage potential recruits on Instagram.
• An exec’s talk at an industry conference deserves space on your intranet.

Maintaining artificial barriers between internal and external comms wastes resources, dilutes messaging, and misses opportunities.

The solution?

✊ Dismantle the barriers that separate “internal” and “external” comms teams and embrace mixternal communications.

Mixternal comms will soon become an operational necessity in our AI-powered future. What follows is an overview of why that’s the case, broken down into these sections:

• Siloed Comms Teams Work at Cross-Purposes
• 💰 The Strategic Case for Mixternal Comms
• What Mixternal Comms Looks Like
• Obstacles and Opposition
• 4 Initial Steps to Transition to Mixternal Comms
• Scratching the Surface
• Bonus poll: what’s really holding you/your team back on mixternal comms?

Siloed Comms Teams Work at Cross-Purposes

When comms teams operate in silos, they create unnecessary complexity and risk.

Our industry doesn’t track how many comms pros manage both internal and external portfolios. This blind spot reveals how deeply we’ve institutionalized the artificial divide between these functions—you’re on one side or the other, never both.1

• Fortune 500 companies typically maintain separate internal and external teams.
• Professionals at smaller companies manage both by necessity.
  • 🙋 Everywhere teams of one be like I’ve been doin’ mixternal since before the Mixternal Comms Playbook named it.

The artificial division between internal and external comms creates real problems.

How often, for example, do employees first come across news about their company on social media or news outlets because the PR team didn’t alert or share the intel with the internal team until the last minute, if at all?

• When employees get news about their company from third-party outlets, trust erodes.

It cuts both ways. How often, for example, does the internal comms team produce a stellar video about the company’s latest product without alerting the media relations team, who could have shared clips with journalists starving for multimedia content?

• That extra content could be the deciding factor on whether industry media puts your news on the homepage.

Think about your current setup. Your exec (internal) comms team crafts employee messaging about a new strategic initiative. Meanwhile, your external team prepares press materials about the same topic. It’s likely the two teams are using different language, emphasizing different points, and creating different narratives—all about the same company story.

• The traditional bifurcated structure ignores operational reality and future demands.

As AI automates routine tasks across both sides of the comms aisle, maintaining separate specialists becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

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Shaun Randol is the founder and publisher of the Mixternal Comms Playbook. He is a #WeLeadComms honoree.

Image generated by Midjourney

Written by: Editor