The Role of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Communications with Christopher Willis

In episode 107, host Eric Dickmann interviews Christopher Willis. With over 20 years of experience growing companies in the technology sector, Christopher is recognized as a thought leader in the areas of AI, DEI, and Content Governance. He currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Acrolinx, an AI-powered content governance solution that improves the quality and impact of your content to produce better results. 

 Aside from leading his team at Acrolinx, Christopher is a speaker on the importance of content governance and brand alignment, sharing stories from his many years of working with some of the biggest tech names in the world.

 Christopher continually believes in having a well-balanced life. He is a CrossFit coach who is passionate about physical health; as well as sports discipline and team building.

 For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/diversity-equity-inclusion-communications-s7ep7/

A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.

The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at: 

https://fiveechelon.com

Transcript

Eric Dickmann: 0:31

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Chris welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast. So glad you could join us today.

Christopher Willis: 0:52

Thanks so much Eric. Excited to be here.

Eric Dickmann: 0:54

I'm excited to have you as a guest on the show today. You know, we love talking about content, the kinds of things that businesses can use to really drive growth and interest in their products and services. And you know, we love to talk about technology too and some of the fun tools that are out there. And before we really get into the main focus of our show today, which is really going to be around diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'd love for you just to tell us a little bit about your background, about the fun things that you're doing with AI.

Christopher Willis: 1:24

Fantastic. So I've been a CMO now for goodness, quite a long time, over 15 years. I originally came out of mobile development. So my first marketing gig actually was launching, I guess it was the first of its type, packaged mobile application company back in 2003 timeframe. Before there was a Blackberry or an iPhone, or an Android device, there was handsprings and compilots and word wireless. There was no wireless at that point.And learning on the fly what works in both launching products and generating leads, the two things that essentially get me budget. I've spent 14 years, 15 years in the mobile space, and over the course of time realized in owning content organizations that it's hard to develop business to business content in technical company when we don't have writers anymore. reallly a writers pool, right? So you don't go out and hire an author to come in and be your content writer. the by-product of what people do when they come to work, smart people that work in your organization to create content on a daily basis. And with that comes the challenge of they're not trained writers, and they might be writing super technical content English as a foreign language. Incredibly smart concepts, but badly formatted, badly written. And the editorial process just takes forever. It's super complex. There's a lot of back and forth because I can't just change this. It's not just wrong and I change it and it's right. I might be changing the context of what has been written. So in 2017, I discovered a company called Acrolinx and Acrolinx is an AI powered platform that improves the quality and effectiveness of content. Essentially what it does it manages that process. So. In the first writing of content, Acrolinx knows the words you want to use, the style guide that your company adheres to, the levels of clarity, inclusion, emotion that you want in your content. And it drives your writer in the first draft to create that content in that voice. And I think of it in terms of everybody has a whiteboard and all the things that they care about and their content is up on their whiteboard, and the problem with that whiteboard is that, Hey, it's in my office. And none of the writers in my organization are in my office, and B, they're not writers. So even if they could see my whiteboard, they probably don't care. Acrolinx takes all that right off the whiteboard digitizes it, makes it actionable, and then allows people writing content to leverage those rules to create great content the first time. And discovering that was, was very eyeopening. I recognized the value in the product right away. And now I'm not just a customer, but I'm the CMO, is there the other way around? I don't remember. The old commercial. But the idea of to go and work in this space, was really exciting to me. And we're doing some really interesting things around helping the biggest brands in the world. The top 20 global technology companies, many of the largest banks, pharmaceuticals, medical device manufacturers, and just big equipment manufacturers throughout Europe and the US build out their technical content, their marketing content, their support content, all of which encompasses their customer experience. So being able to align things like tone of voice across the entire life cycle of content that touches a consumer, it's exciting. And the people work here really are into it. They love what we do and, it appears, Yeah, it's really fun.

Eric Dickmann: 5:25

Well, you know, what's so interesting to me and this couldn't be a more timely conversation because this is sort of exactly what I've been dealing with this week is you know, I have external writers that help me with some of my work and getting them to capture sort of my voice, my brand voice is extremely challenging. There are some great tools that are out there. You know, whether you're looking at Hemmingway, at Grammarly, you know, Microsoft's got something, Microsoft Editor, those are kind of tools that help you with structure, right? But they don't really do a whole lot in terms of voice using that language, that vocabulary that you were talking about. How does the tools sort of take things a step beyond what those common plugins do then sort of put your voice, put that terminology into the content that they're writing. Is it suggestion based or is it sort of after the fact?

Christopher Willis: 6:17

No. So it's actually before that. So you lead with the capture of your global guidelines. And so what's a global guideline? Top of the hierarchy, guideline number one, we all spell the name of the company, right? So if you work at a company with a simple name, It seems like a thing that we all do, but American express, are we American Express? Are we Amex? Are we a E? And when are we those things, do we specify.com, when? So building out that simple rule, this is what we do when we refer to our company, this is how we refer to it. If you understand that as a guideline, then you understand the scope of what we can do. So we're different. I guess the first provocative statement of the day, PSOTD as I call it, is correctness as a commodity.

Eric Dickmann: 7:11

Okay.

Christopher Willis: 7:12

So everybody has a correctness plugin. Some of them are more graceful and attractive, like a Grammarly. Some of them are more utilitarian, like Clippy and Microsoft Word. But that correctness aspect, that's a thing that everybody does. Where we take this beyond in creating content that aligns across thousands and thousands of writers. So you talk about external content creators and your tone of voice. When I got here to this company in 2017, like any new CMO. I want to put my stamp on the business, I want to define our tone of voice. What are we and what aren't we in our communication? And we're not arrogant, we're not outrageous, we are confident. we're not aloof or boring, we're friendly. Maybe not corporate, but more on the wise side and all that super, right? Sounds like a great marketing fodder, what do you do with that? And where we go from a product standpoint is I want to be relatable. So I want to keep things simple. I want to know and adapt to my audience, I want to show feelings, I want to avoid hype language. I don't want to use marketing terms and hyperbole, don't speak in buzzwords. And then so take that technically now. How do I turn those into guidelines? I want to avoid long sentences, long paragraphs. I don't want to rely on marketing speak. I want to reduce and eliminate corporate overviews and acronyms. I want to use we and you to make connections with the readers. And those are all rules that can be turned into guidelines that allow you to create an invoice. And if you roll that across, we just started with relatable, then we moved to witty, then we moved to competent, then we moved to knowledgeable, and we built out a set of guidelines that have started to make me sound or make all of my writers sound like me, the way that I want our content to sound. Then you go beyond that and say for this particular piece of content, what am I trying to purvey? What's the emotion that I want built into that? How do I want to leave? What's the feeling that I want to leave a reader with? Living in a world of importance of DNI, how do I make this content inclusive? We struggle like everybody with very simple, very ingrained words. I talked about a master contract today and it doesn't like anything like, that doesn't bad., but from an inclusion standpoint, heads up, that's a problematic word. You should know that and make decisions based on that. So the ability to build that into the platform and give that guidance, and all of that. Is guidance. It's not automated changes. It's not, you said master, we never say master, take that out, it's pulled, it's gone. This is problematic. Here's why it's problematic. The choice is yours. Because it's possible that you were making a point. And that ties to the way we look at terminology as well. I want to say quality. You said test, kind of the same thing. But did you mean test, like specifically? Or would you rather use our wording, which is quality,

Eric Dickmann: 10:23

Yeah.

Christopher Willis: 10:24

Lots of ways to look at how the platform works. But it's really around to me, strategy alignment. What's my strategy for content creation? How do I align all their writers? So again, back to your model, you have external writers that you would like to be able to create content that sounds like you, that's very much the story of the way that IBM used our product. Thousands of agencies, a billion dollars worth of work being created, and they weren't providing guidance back. They were just reading the content with AI, looking for content that works for them, that sounds like them, that gets the points across. They're trying to get across that uses their language, that's at the clarity levels of their audiences, and they're able to make buying decisions, spending decisions, staffing decisions based on that data. Because you end up with this numeric score. Good. What's good content? Eric, go write something and make it good.

Eric Dickmann: 11:22

Yeah, it's a little ambiguous, right?

Christopher Willis: 11:24

Well, good could mean a lot of different things or it could mean that, you know you were wearing a black shirt that day and I don't like black shirts, and I don't think it's good. But if I could score good, good means that it's clear, it's consistent. It's got the right character, and it comes out with a numeric score., Then we start putting in place the ability to have gateways. So putting gates in my organization. I personally don't rate anything internally until it has an 80 or better Acro score. And I know that that's our best when you are using it.They're doing it throughout the nation. They're literally saying submit content to content repository, if score, then next step. And that can lead to next reviewer or a direct score can lead directly to production. So you're able to review a hundred percent of your content in a way that you want.

Eric Dickmann: 12:16

To be able to quantify it as really the key there to open up automation and external tools to be able to use this a little bit more. And what I think is so fascinating about this is that you know, things have changed dramatically. You know, we've certainly just gone through the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen a major shift in the company where a lot of people are moving into more of a freelance role. They don't want to be working for the same companies like they used to. And there is so much access to talent, and really creative talent out there. But now you not only have the problem of having people speaking in different voices, but you have them distributed all over the world so they may come with their own unique set of terminology, their own unique perspective on things, and trying to sort of usher all that in and make everybody sort of look at things the same way is a challenge. And that challenge is only going to grow in the years to come as we bring more of this freelance economy into our organization.

Christopher Willis: 13:12

Abs. Absolutely. And now multiply that problem with the next thing that happened as a result of the pandemic. So you've got all these people working at home. But also for the last seven or eight years, marketers across numerous industries have been selling with this fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the digital shift it's coming. You need be getting ready for this digital shift. Is your web presence, for instance, ready? Is your commerce site ready? For the day when you're primarily going to do business online. And I'm not sure that any of us really thought that was ever going to happen, but it was a great thing to tell prospects. And then according to my desk counter at my office, which I went and visited last week on March 11th of last year. I only know that because I have a flip calendar and it hasn't changed. On March 11th, the digital shift came. And so your only touchpoint with your consumer, at least for that first several months, and if not, for much longer than that has been through your digital presence. People are not coming to your store, they're not visiting you in person. And so your content matters in a way that it hasn't before. It's not just the content. We can create tons of content, it's the experience. So if you're a global brand trying to speak to your consumer like a human, it's everywhere. It starts in your product and the UI strings that live in your product. It moves into your technical documentation, it goes across into your enablement and your marketing, and then back out the post-sale with all of the support content and services that come along with this. Everything needs to sound like your brand is a voice to your audience. The thing is that's not how companies are built, right? So the tech docs team, the UI designers, the marketing writers, the people that are writing support tickets, they're siloed. They don't have interaction with each other. So they may each individually have a style guideline that they should be adhering to. But now we're talking about tens of thousands of people creating content in a wild west environment with no connection to each other or their departments, or specifically to each other as they write it. And that's been the big shift that we've seen in the last year is companies realizing that this customer experiences more than they thought, and the need for leadership to translate that voice across all of those channels. And interestingly, they're not always the same voice. Even though I want to talk as if I'm one person, as a brand, the way that I communicate in marketing, for instance, can be very different than the way that I'm going to communicate in my support ticket. Because marketing can be relatable, witty, and fun. But support tickets needs cell problems so they need to be clear and concise. And weaving in. emojis and fun, happy things into service tickets kind of annoys people as it turns out. Because when I did this voice, this tone of voice project at Acrolinx, I got power hungry. I was like, well, this is awesome in marketing and sales, were killing it. Support, you guys should use this, and they did. Until they got massive complaint saying is not, It's not cute. Please just answer my questions. And you learn that this is a multifaceted voice that needs to cover. It can be relatable and confident, but witty and fun might not have a place. It's able to weave out pieces of this, it's what we do specifically special.

Eric Dickmann: 16:53

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Well, all of this is really set against a backdrop of a lot of things happening culturally, too. As we've gone through the pandemic, we've also had the Black Lives Matter Movement, we've had really the rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion that has come to the forefront. It's very much a topic of conversation now, we've got a lot more cultural sensitivity that I think companies are looking at and how they portray themselves on their website, in their collateral. You know, are they using faces that represent their customer base? In their marketing materials? And then, you know we've sort of have the whole climate change, environmental issues, sustainability, all of that is now front and center. So companies may be talking about things that are even outside their core business, but they need to speak into the language of what people are thinking about, what's on people's minds, and what's influencing buying decisions. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this, you know sort of outside the product. How do you see things shifting? To me, that seems like a seismic shift. These are big changes that seem to be happening all at once.

Christopher Willis: 18:47

And it is. I mean, things always change. And there's always something that is at the forefront of that. But last year was a shift in the way that businesses think. And I think what happened was that around the middle of the year, companies started making statements about who they are and trying to define their brand in 2020. And the next step then is to. I guess it's on a graceful way to say it, but put your money where your mouth is. Are you just saying this is who you are or is that who you are? Is that who you're going to be moving forward? And part of that was communicating with the audience in the way that the audience wants to be communicated with. And you need to think through the words you use as a point of reference. Literally 10 seconds ago, I said something about, Hey guys, I struggle with this, That does not meet the definition of inclusive. And the fact that I think about that now is a testament of the world that we live in and the thing that I do, What we're aiming for, we put up our statement towards the middle of the year of what we thought of the world that we were living in. And we thought really we should think about how we're going to back this up. It can't just be a statement on an odd Thursday in the middle of the summer. It's gotta be more than that. And what we have control over because of the type of company that we are in, the product that we sell is both looking internally at our diversity and inclusion initiatives. And the first thing that we did was put together an internal DNI board to look at the way that our company runs and to think about who we are as a business. And the byproducts of that were handbooks and guidebooks that many of our big enterprise customers are using for their initiatives internally, best practices how to implement DNI in your organization. From a technology standpoint, though, We have a framework that allows the coaching of content creation. And so every enterprise, almost in the country put in charge of this area, a Chief Diversity and Inclusion and Equity Officer. And that person and their teams are tasked with things. One of those things is defining what the language is that the company is going to speak, how they're going to in the public domain. And we had originally set out to try and define what inclusive language was. And we quickly learned that everybody has a different view of that. Inclusive language really just seeks to treat all people with respect. It's a language that avoids the use of certain words, expressions that exclude silence, discriminate, assign negative connotations to personal characteristics of certain people in communities. And so has a different idea of how they want to build their lexicon. What we're able to do is help the management of that. So help these people in these roles, role out guidelines across the organization. They aren't just word plays because that's not terribly useful. For governance sake is okay. But beyond just saying, don't say this, lets talk about why, becomes a learning opportunity. So if I'm going to guide you to not say something, I better be prepared to explain you why. And then my expectation would be that you won't probably do it again because you'll learn something. And so it goes beyond just again, that correctness commodity into an understanding and education tool that explains that you shouldn't say this because of these reasons. And you know, we have customers that have master slave language in their code, thousands and thousands of times. And things like that, I mean, that's super easy to go in and identify across repositories, find and fix. But explaining to writers and coders in the organization, why they don't in the future use that language, if they do, they're making a very specific and potentially odd choice, but they're making the choice based on education and understanding. And what that, what that gets us is this more inward perspective. Now how a company talks to and about its employees and candidates, and then that external perspective of how a company brands itself and addresses customers in that wider public. And then the governance of that across the entire business.

Eric Dickmann: 23:40

Yeah, and I think it's so important to have a statement to stand behind it. But you know, when we're talking about things like environmental matters, you know, they call it greenwashing if you sort of take a stand, but you don't really live up to that. And the same can be true when it comes to cultural issues or inclusivity. It really means that you have to, like you said, put your money where your mouth is. You have to really live it. And you know, one of the things that I think is so interesting when you start to talk about inclusivity, when you start to talk about culture is you can get in your car, you can drive around town. And if you get into a Spanish part of town, you'll immediately notice that the billboards will suddenly be in Spanish. Or if you get into an area, like a Chinese part of town, all of a sudden, you'll see the signage takes on a new tone. And it's so easy to see when you're physically present in a location where maybe there is that cultural diversity really front and center. But then you sort of abstract that you come to content, you come to a website. And most of that gets lost. All of a sudden it's a very generic sort of presentation of the company. And in some ways, you are trying to appeal to a very broad audience. But in many ways, it shows really the lack of diversity and inclusion that many companies have that they haven't been able to find ways to include sort of that kind of cultural reference, at least in some of the content that.

Christopher Willis: 25:07

A hundred percent. I mean it's okay to ask questions in your interface to understand who you're talking to. People like that, that's a genuine conversation, you know? You're putting yourself out there and saying, I want to talk to you. Who are you? And then again, that genuine conversation of is this is how I communicate specific to include you in our conversation. And you don't get that very much on the web. I work in business to business. So as inclusive as business to business websites get in past years was are you in marketing or are you in sales or are you a developer? And that's not getting at it. It doesn't cover what we're trying to get to. It's kind of that role-based versus understanding the people that you're doing business with and treating them like people.

Eric Dickmann: 26:07

You know it's fascinating, and it's not easy. But you know, many of the businesses who listened to this podcast, they're small and mid-sized businesses so they can look at this and said, well, I don't know exactly how to implement this in my business. But I think it's so important that you understand who your customers are, what is the market that you're serving, and then make sure that whether it's signage inside a restaurant or you know, the menus that you have available, or whether it's what's on your company website or the downloadable collateral, it all should be reflective of who your customers are and be inclusive in that way. It should be a broad brushstroke if you will, to make people. feel and make them understand that they can see themselves using your product or service.

Christopher Willis: 26:55

Yep. Absolutely. I mean for any business, but if you're not going to use an AI powered platform, you just want to go about this, it's thinking about the fitness of your content for the purpose. And if you want to take that analogy, let's start with, I want to run a marathon. And so I have a goal, let's set a goal, I'm going to do it. And let's go beyond that. I'm going to run a four hour marathon. I'm going to finish a marathon, a goal. Then I need to put a training program in place, and that's essentially how am I going to get to that? So it's identifying how I want to communicate. Setting those guidelines and even without a platform, being able to define the guidelines that I care about, the way that I want to communicate, the lexicon that we're going to communicate from the style of guidelines or the style guides that we're going to leverage, putting all those in place. And now we're going to start training, that's the creation of content. So now I'm building to those guidelines. I'm ensuring that I'm creating what I intended to create, then it's racist. And I'm in production and I measure how production works. All of that is something that somebody can just do. It anything to try that. But that thinking through the process of what does it mean to me to create a voice? What are the things that I care about? I talk about clarity, consistency, and character. So thinking in terms of clarity, who am I writing for? Is it a complex audience? Is it a young audience? What's the education level? What is the type of voice that I want to have with that character? Am I creating lively, engaging content? Am I a European bank, and I just want to sound formal? What's the character that I'm building into? And then consistency. what are the words that matter to me? How do I want to communicate with specific language, whether that's brand language or product language, or inclusive language, or emotional language? What do I care about from words? And that becomes the overall guidelines set for creating content. And it's an intentional act, it's taking something that's been somewhat passive, the concept of content governance, which is this is how we'd like you to write. Good luck, go get them to making it more active. These are the guidelines that we've put in place, these are the goals that we have for the content that we're creating. And this is the measurement that we're doing to ensure what we thought upfront is correct. if I use those guidelines and I create that content to those guidelines, and I put that content out into production in the world, I better be measuring the results because if I think that I did perfectly set my goal, build my content, put it out there, it's perfect. If it doesn't perform? Somewhere, I was wrong. And that's the opportunity for iteration. So I put it out, it doesn't perform, I'd go back to the beginning and I changed some of my filters. I change some of the guidelines that I thought were important, and I deliver content that makes more sense. And any company can do that. If there's one thing that you should be doing on day one of content creation, for the purposes of conversion, for sales, for support, for service. It's thinking through what you're trying to do, building the guidelines for that, and then measuring post-production.

Eric Dickmann: 30:26

Yeah, I love the way you phrase that too. I think it's about intention, right? And this can be a big task, especially for large companies. But if you put a statement out, you say that this is what we believe in, and we have an intention to sort of get ourselves on the right track in terms of our content and representing our voice in the way that we feel authentic. Authentically that we can be representing our voice. I think that's a great place to start and then work on it over time, get your content aligned. I know as we sort of come to the end of the interview here that on your website, you do have some resources that people can go and get and download, especially around you know, this whole topic of, diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'd love it here just at the end, if you could tell people where they could find out more about Acrolinx and where they could find out more about downloading some of this content and finding you on the web as well.

Christopher Willis: 31:15

Sure. So we are at www.acrolinx.com. If you go to the website, you'll find a resource center. My general strategy for content creation is to create actionable content that anybody can use. You don't need to buy our product to\ get value out of our content. You may want to, because it doesn't absolutely accelerate the process. But I do expect that everybody will get value. And there is content on DEI, there's content on content governance, and taking content governance from being passive to being active, and everything in between. Please go and get some value from that. And to find me, I'm on LinkedIn at CP Willis, probably lots of other places too. But yeah, that's the easiest pathway.

Eric Dickmann: 32:03

Hey, that's perfect. I'll make sure that we have all of that linked up in the show notes so that people can find it. Chris, this is a great discussion. I think something that we need to talk about often, and I really appreciate you coming on the show today to talk about some of the exciting things that are happening with AI and the tools to help us in content creation and sort of the reasoning behind a lot of it.

Christopher Willis: 32:23

Excellent, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Dickmann: 32:25

Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.