La capsula Informativa: frankly… Episode 79: Communications’ Newest Role is Chief Conscience Officer
The transcript below is AI-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies. Tune in to the episode audio to hear the full conversation!
Transcript
Rachel
Hi, welcome to Frankly.
Dan
Welcome.
Rachel
We have Chris Barger on the podcast today. And he is the chief communications officer for Spin Sucks, which might sound familiar because the founder of Spin Sucks is Gini Dietrich, who we’ve had on the podcast before.
Dan
Yeah, and funny story how they kind of came together after, you know, as Chris put it, I think, you know, knowing each other for 20 years and talking about one day working together and now they have the chance to. So, a small world moment, but Chris comes on to talk about not just that, but his history in social media, in all forms of communications, really, but with some big names from IBM to GM. And kind of gets into where things have gone in communications, but also now where they are going and maybe a new role that a lot of us haven’t thought about for ourselves as the chief conscience officer.
Rachel
And we had told him that wasn’t a term that we had heard before, but it makes a lot of sense. And I feel like if he’s coining it, then he’s got quite the runway to work with that because it makes a lot of sense. And I think as you listen to us have the conversation about what that means as communicators, being the chief conscience officer, it’s a role that, you know, no matter where you’re at in your career in communications, you’ll get there eventually.
Dan
Yeah, probably sounds familiar to most of us.
Rachel
Yes. And so he’s got some really good tips and advice.
Dan
Yeah. So with that, we’ll turn it over to Chris. I think you’ll you’ll enjoy this one. And here he is. Hi, Chris. Welcome to Frankly. Thanks for coming on.
Chris
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Dan
So give us a little bit about your background. I guess, what has your career path looked like and what brought you to where you are today with Spin Sucks?
Chris
My career has been a little bit of everything in communications. Started at IBM, internal communications, settled in as executive communications, and for a while it looked like I was going to be the next speechwriter for the CEO. And then, like so many of us communicators, I’m a frustrated writer. And I started a blog in about 2003, just writing about whatever was on my mind, ranty pants or anything else, and developed a little bit of an audience. It was it was anonymous. And I was just, you know, being this persona online. The head of communications at IBM called me into his office one afternoon in 2004. and said, the first thing that you should know is that I’ve known about your blog for about the last six months. And instantly I go, oh, what did I do? What did I? I’m going to get fired. This is not good. And instead he said, I’m not sure what the blog space and podcast space is going to be for communications and for industry and for brands. And I don’t think you know yet either, but I think you know how to do it better than I do. So congratulations. You’re going to put IBM into the into the social media world. So kind of by fluke, I got into social media and I ran IBM’s social for about a year and a half. I got recruited and hired away to go to General Motors and do the same thing. So came out here to the Midwest in late 06, early 07. Thought I was going to be building a communications program and a social media program for GM. And then the industry went did what it did.
Rachel
I was going to say bad time. You didn’t know it, but bad time.
Chris
Yeah, I think I might have been the last person hired by the auto industry before everything went south. But what that did was give me, you know, 20 years of crisis communications experience in the space of 18 months. You know, I had four different CEOs that I was working with and four very different styles on social media and how they wanted to interact with people. You had some people who were very obviously very angry at the way things were going and what General Motors needed the government to do. And so if you’ve been called anything, if you can be called anything online, I have been called it. You know, people get really creative with their with their hazing and with and with some of the things that they say. So sometimes you just have to laugh at that.
Dan
Yep.
Chris
And then was hired away to lead the digital evolution at Porter Novelli and did that for about just under five years, got the idea that I should, I’m making everybody else all this money. We should start a business of our own. So I reached out to Scott Monty, who had been my counterpart at Ford, and he and I started a consultancy. We did that for about two or three years. I left that and went back into, you know, I found out, one of the things I found out is that I am not a very good new business development person. You know you learn where your strengths are and where they’re not. And mine, I am not a salesperson. I learned. So I went back into the industry. I worked with the Society for Manufacturing Engineers for about three years as their head of communications. So again, a little bit of everything from media relations to internal to executive to digital, all the way up and down the event planning even. Then went to Owens Corning, was there for two years. And now I am with Gini at Spin Sucks. And Ginni Dietrich and I have known each other for almost 20 years. And we have been saying for the entirety of those 20 years, we have to find a way to work together. Someday it’s going to happen where we’re going to work together. And earlier this year, like in February or so, she pinged me and said, I think we actually might have this opportunity. And here we are six months later, and I’m enjoying everything. Gini is brilliant. I’ve always said, if you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s time to go find another room. And I have very definitely found another room. I am warming every day working with Ginny now.
Dan
Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s so funny how that works out. I mean, I’ve heard a couple of familiar names from our podcast here in your history.
Chris
It’s a small world.
Dan
Yeah, it truly is.
Rachel
I love what you said about consulting though. It’s funny. We just the other day we were doing a new business pitch and we were kind of all laughing as we were preparing. And I said, I never wanted to go into sales. I always see people like, I don’t want to be in sales. And then my husband always goes, you are. Not in the maybe like traditional sales way of cold calling, but he was like, you’re constantly selling to, even once you have your clients, you’re selling to have them keep you or do more. And I think it’s such an interesting thing because when you’re at in-house or at an agency, you can forget because the work is coming and going and things are moving. But when you have to be the practitioner and the salesperson, or you don’t pay the bills, that’s a whole different ball game. I mean, networking times a bajillion just to make sure that the pipeline is full and at the right time. So I feel like everyone loves the idea of consulting until you face it. And it’s like, okay, I love the work, but everything else that goes into this and running my own business and doing the business development is just not for me.
Chris
Absolutely. And it gave me a whole new level of appreciation for the people who are able to make that work.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
Yeah.
Chris
It’s a very distinct skill set. And part of the growth process when you’re doing that is learning to appreciate the people who have that skill set. And I was definitely not one of them.
Dan
So I want to go back to earlier in your career when you mentioned, you mentioned a couple big names that you really helped launch social media with. So IBM and GM, huge companies. Talk about what that was like at the start of, really the start of companies using social media. outside of your personal friends. This was really the first time that social took off as a business channel.
Chris
Well, you had two different philosophies at the early stages of corporations and companies adopting social media. You had the Microsoft model where Robert Scoble, and everybody remembers Robert and knows what he did. Robert was the face of Microsoft and he was representing 400,000 employees out there. And trying to be all things to everybody and be the Microsoft person. That was one school of thought. The other school of thought we adopted at IBM is that there was no way with a company that broad and that big that I was going to be able to speak intelligently to all of those folks. So we took a different, we took the approach of, we’ve got some of the most brilliant researchers in the world. We’ve got software developers. What if each of them could go out and cultivate an audience of the 100 people that really matter within their sphere? Nobody’s going to be as big as Robert, but we are going to have presence in the communities where we need to have presence. So I took the approach of it’s time to teach 400,000 people to do blogs and podcasts and make them the stars in their own little universes. So it was interesting to see where which companies were going to lean heavily on one person’s personality. And don’t get me wrong, that played out well for a lot of companies that, you know, you, you humanize the company by having that one person there versus let’s try to just be present in the communities where, where we can be really influential. And that’s, that’s kind of what we did at IBM.
Rachel
I think they both, It’s funny because you see both of those models today. And I think you see a lot of it now as brands having a personality without even a face behind it. Maybe there is like a mascot that they’ve created, but you tend to see a lot more brands almost The brand is a person in itself. They took that model. And your approach reminds me a lot of like the traditional communications approach that you take in media relations, creating thought leaders and it’s just giving them a different platform. It’s really your owned and shared channels, right? Versus going all earned media and trying to get placements and pitch media. It was for the first time you had your own spot to be saying exactly what you wanted.
Chris
Right.
Rachel
Other than just your traditional website. And I think it’s interesting because you do see both of those today and we know the power of executives or employee advocacy, basically them as influencers, right? Because they have the audience already. So instead of trying to make that audience follow a whole other page, How do you make them kind of the star, give them a voice in both places?
Chris
Right.
Rachel
So you see that approach still today. So talk about kind of what led you that way and how it worked out for you in that very beginning. Because all of that at that point was trial and error. Like both maybe worked in a different way. What were you tracking? How did you know whether you were successful at that time?
Chris
Well, there’s two different questions in there. One, what led me to adopt that approach? And it was simple. I got out there as the face of IBM on the social platform. And at that point, there wasn’t even Facebook open to the public yet. It was really blogs, some of the earliest podcasts. And that was the realm in which we were playing. And I started getting questions from software developers that I couldn’t answer and questions from people who were doing deep research into what would become AI. I’m going, I’m having to go back and ask people inside the company for their answers on this. So why not cut out the middleman and just plug the experts in with the other experts and let them talk? So that was, that was, you know, call it insecurity, call it smart, whatever you want to call it.
Rachel
It’s community is what, I mean, it really is building community.
Chris
And that’s how we measured success, to get to the second-half of your question, was not could I create 15 or 20 or 30 people who had thousands of followers, but could we build small communities with lots of engagement? And are we seeing people going back and forth? Are we seeing the IBMers exchanging thoughts with people from outside the company, establishing their own expertise, sort of setting IBM up as the the thought leaders that we wanted them to be. And if you had that, even if your community was 100 people, but they were interacting on the regular, that’s when we would look and go, okay, we have succeeded with this person. Now let’s see if we could do this again with somebody else. And I took that same approach when I got to GM too. And you can see another case study in the comparison. Ford’s presence was very, very focused on Scott and his personality, and he’s really good at that. I went in thinking, I want to create, I’m going to bring, the approach I took was I’m going to bring in people on my team for 12 months. And for 12 months, they’re going to be completely immersed. They’re going to go to every conference that I go to. They’re going to go represent the company online with me. And then in 12 months, I don’t want them on my team anymore. What I want them to do is go somewhere else in the company and build their own program, just like I showed you how to build one here at Central, at General Motors itself. So I had people going off to Chevrolet, to Cadillac, to fleet management and building their own programs based on what they’d learned during their time with me. And that just always felt like more natural. Look, when we all got started, the whole idea was, humanizing the brand and you heard that a lot. We want to put faces to the names we want. And I kept thinking, well, if there’s only one name and one face, there’s only so many conversations that a one person can have. And that’s why I took the approach both at IBM and GM to spread it out, to create that community and to find people who could engage with many communities. That’s what we wanted to do and I think that’s what we were successful in doing.
Dan
Yeah, and even just from like a leadership perspective, that’s nice for your team at GM where if you have the opportunity to kind of build your skills and then go off and be a leader on your own also. That just, I feel like that would, instill a bit more excitement or passion in the work if they knew, if at the end of the day that you’re able to kind of take what you learned and go and build your own, elsewhere in the company.
Chris
For the most part, I think that’s right. I think it became a little bit, well, a lot daunting when the industry crisis came and all of a sudden you’ve got, you know, I still remember I had a war room of 20 people on the day that the bankruptcy was announced. And we’re all trying to engage in small communities here and there and try to have as many direct conversations as possible. And I mean, man, you take a lot of abuse out there too. So it’s empowering, but it’s also, you’ve got to have the certain, you got to have the certain rights perspective to be able to let things roll off your back. And when people are insulting or people are trolling to not let that get to you. And that’s hard to do for a lot of people too. So you never want to plug somebody into a community where they’re not going to thrive.
Dan
Yeah, that’s a great point.
Rachel
You were the first level of customer service when that first started. That’s how people were viewing it. I can’t get a hold of customer service or get the answer I want. I’ll put it online and I’ll get an answer.
Chris
Absolutely. And we started. started to do that before everything went crashing, we had started to go, okay, well, tell me what dealership you’re working with. Tell me who this is. You’re trying to solve problems. And we really were that first line of customer service. And at the same time, you’re trying to give people peaks behind behind the curtain a little bit. How do we test whether the seating is right, the seating is comfortable in a new vehicle or what’s really goes into a crash test. And then you’re trying to give people that inside look that they’re not seeing somewhere else. So you’re doing 2 jobs. One, you’re trying to give them a view into the industry that they might not have had. And the other very much is a customer service role. And I’ll be honest, I think that’s a little bit of what’s gotten lost. And I don’t know if you can blame it on the companies, marketers ruin everything. We all, we always get in there and we ruin everything, right? You can blame it on the companies. You can blame it on people. But people, you had the rise of people going, all right, well, I’m not happy with the customer service that I’ve received. So let me elevate this line online because then they’ll respond. And you had sort of pot stirrers in that direction. You also had, from a marketing standpoint, we stopped looking at it as the opportunity to build a connection or to talk to as many people as possible. And we started looking at it as a big channel to get our messages out. And so you lost that conversational back and forth sense of community that I think is the big difference between the way I see social media now versus what it was like when I was first getting started in it.
Rachel
We even see the shift in today of engagement not being a great marker of how well your content’s doing, right? A lot of it is, are you getting eyes on it? People are just less inclined to like comment, share certain content on social media now. A lot of it is like, did you just get it in front of them? Did they consume it? And then can you continuously get in front of them so you stay top of mind?
Chris
Right.
Rachel
Not necessarily needing them to engage with it to be successful on social media. Like we’ve completely swung that opposite direction. And I don’t know if it’s algorithms or just there’s so many channels now and they all behave differently. Like it could be a lot of things, but yeah, we’ve it’s no longer. two-way communication. It’s like you said, somewhere for you to put your news and say what you want to say.
Chris
Look, there’s value to that. I don’t mean to spit on the entire concept. It’s just very different from what we thought it was going to be when we were all getting started and sort of that OG social media community. We always thought it was going to be this brand new channel where we were really building relationships with individual consumers. And maybe it was just that we couldn’t scale it. Maybe it was just because eventually the money was going to take over and it was going to turn it into a channel. But that’s just very different. And I feel that loss a little bit. It was fun. And we were able to do that.
Dan
I feel like that was kind of the utopian time of like of Twitter, especially back in that time when you could just have a full on conversation. People were open to sharing ideas. It just, it seemed much more personal and it seemed much more like you say, conversational. It was a different time.
Chris
And it was, it was, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Rachel
I was just going to say, I still remember when I had to save the text number for Twitter and my phone to be able to tweet it and have the internet on my phone. Like what a different time. I mean, and it was just blasting out thoughts that nobody cared about because you didn’t, there wasn’t this. Social media seems like it has to be so perfect and polished now versus then it really was just like an online diary or journal and you weren’t so concerned about who was looking at it and the fact that it would live forever. Like that wasn’t even something in your mind.
Chris
Right.
Rachel
Now that’s the whole thing is you’re like, be careful what you put online. It’ll stick with you forever.
Chris
I can remember with the IBMers that I was that I was training on blogging and podcasting and getting their own community started. A lot of times they would come back and say, what is the IBM position on on subject X, what should we say? And it would frustrate a lot of them because I would say it doesn’t matter. You know, don’t worry about how polished or whether you’re toeing the company line, be real, be authentic and go out and talk to people. And you could never get away with that anymore. It’s absolutely not how it works.
Rachel
A lot of red tape.
Chris
Yeah, a lot of red tape. And let’s be fair, some of that is warranted and necessary. It’s a different environment now.
Dan
Yeah. I think that’s kind of a nice segway into something else that you’ve written about recently of kind of how the world is changing and what maybe a new role even for communicators is today. And you build it as the chief conscience officer. Tell us a little bit about that and what you mean by that.
Chris
Sure. Well, what I mean by that, first of all, there’s a statistic that I find particularly alarming as a brand representative. If you look at the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 64% of consumers are now either aligning with a brand or avoiding a brand because of their stances on political or social issues. So all of a sudden, the audience expectation has changed and we’re supposed to be making values-based, taking values-based actions, making judgments based on our own value, on the company values. At the same time, and we all are painfully aware of this, it’s a very polarized environment. Anything you say is going to be viewed through a political lens, and approximately half the audience is going to be real unhappy with whatever it is that you’ve done, even in something as simple as a logo change. And we all know the Cracker Barrel situation from a couple of weeks ago, where that was viewed through a political lens. So when you’ve got an audience that’s expecting you to take stands and choosing to be your customer or not based on whether they like your stand, and yet you know as a brand that we’re gonna lose 50% of the population of the audience as soon as we say something, you better be darn sure that your values align with the statements that you’re making or the actions that you’re taking. If they don’t, now you’ve made it worse. Now you, you know, and to use a polar example target, Target had made diversity, equity, and inclusion as such a huge part of their persona, their brand, and also that was the part it was important to the people who shopped at Target when they chose to. pull back from their DEI stands because they thought it would appeal to a certain demographic. Now they’ve just upset and annoyed and frustrated the people that were with them for that very same reason. So now in trying to please everybody, they’ve pleased no one. And so that’s why I think communications people need to be the conscience of the brand. And I want to be very careful about how I say this. It’s not that you’re imposing your own personal values on the brand. In fact, sometimes you’re going to have to overrule your own personal values in order to do what’s best and right for the brand. But as the communicator, we have always been the ones looking to see what is the audience expectation? What is the audience needs and pain points? It’s our job to know the audience better than the company knows the audience themselves. And that allows us to be that conscience and go, well, this is what our audience is expecting of us, or here’s what we said about DEI or about influencers or whatever else. And you have to have that in mind. And I think the communications person is the right person to have in that role.
Dan
Yeah, and I think, from a messaging standpoint too, like that’s always been the communicator’s role of, you know, looking at something and trying to assess how it will be received. Because I think in a lot of cases, you know, it’s not intentionally going against companies’ values when they make a decision. But like you said, there can be like, this political angle assigned to things that were never meant to be in that way. So like looking at all the angles of a message and thinking, oh, that could be seen or strewn as, you know, A or B, being able to identify those and kind of think through it to say, you know, how do we say this in a way that does, going back to it, go back to our values and tie into what we stand for.
Chris
And that’s one of the things that I think is different for communicators and for the people that we report to. For a very long time, it worked to try and please everybody to issue the vanilla statement that says nothing that, you know, we all became wordsmiths. We all knew how to say something without saying anything. And that worked. And that was what companies were supposed to do. You were rewarded if you if you were able to pull off a crisis management or a political situation or a social situation. If you handled it by issuing that say nothing statement, you did good. I don’t think it works that way anymore. I think audiences are expecting that we’re going to have to take a stand one way or the other. And again, if you’re going to lose up to 50% of the audience, no matter what you do, you better be sure that you’re staying aligned to your brand values and who you want to be and the people you want to serve.
Rachel
I think there’s a level of accountability consumers are looking for too. And issuing a vanilla statement isn’t going to give them that, right? So if you do mess up or something might be wrong, being able to say, we acknowledge as a company that maybe wasn’t the correct approach, but we did what we could with what we had at the time. And, you know, like, There’s just a level of what people are looking for and needing, just like they want humans to, right? We want humans to take accountability. And if we’re humanizing brands, you’re kind of getting that same thing all around. I mean, this was a little while ago too, but. the American Eagle jeans, Sydney Sweeney commercial that also had people very polarized. And they came out after and basically said like, yeah, we knew what we were doing was going to be polarizing. And that was the chance that we took. And like, we’re not pulling it down. This was something that we did. And if you aren’t really interested, then that’s okay, right? Like they knew what they were doing. And I think it was kind of like great. I mean, I, as a consumer was like, okay, they said like, that was what their intention was. And we all So it made people move on because they already made their choice at that point. So then like being wishy-washy wasn’t going to save the people they lost, right? So at that point, being honest and just being straightforward, yeah, we sat in a room and all decided this is what we were going to do when we were standing by it is probably the best way of approaching that.
Chris
I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s a great example of the dissonance or the the split you have to have between what’s right for you personally as a communications person and what’s right for the brand. I will acknowledge I was a little uncomfortable with what they did, but as a communicator, in my profession, I’m looking at the way they handled it and thinking you did exactly what you should have done. You stood up and said this was what we meant to do. If it’s not for you, we, you know, okay. I would have advised the same thing if I were sitting in that room.
Rachel
I think that’s a really important point that you bring up about being a communicator. And I even think it’s important when you’re sitting at the table, not to maybe give everybody the answer of what to do. That’s not necessarily your job, but to show them these are the potential outcomes and now we have to weigh those, right? Because that’s how you’re going to take your bias out of that is just saying, In my brain, in my experience, in my knowledge, in everything that I have, this is, it can go these two, three, four ways.
Chris
Right.
Rachel
What are we okay with and what are we prepared with for the outcome that we’re looking for, right? And that’s really what, and then as a comms marketing executive team, whoever legal, because legal’s always gonna be at the table.
Chris
Oh yeah.
Rachel
You have to decide Everyone together collectively has to decide that angle, right? It’s not, you just have to be the conscious to say to them, like, these are the outcomes, go in knowing that, and now let’s make a decision with that in mind.
Chris
Here are the potential outcomes, and here’s not only how the street or our employees would respond, here’s what our buyers think.
Rachel
Yeah.
Chris
And there’s another example of a a beer brand, and we all know the one I’m probably thinking of, had a partnership with the influencer and was probably the right thing to do from, it felt good to everybody inside the company, but they failed to take into account what the brand audience was going to think.
Rachel
Great point.
Chris
I’m just going, sometimes there’s what you feel is the right thing to do, and then there’s sometimes where you’re going to have to play the devil’s advocate and say, I don’t think our audience is ready for this, or I think our audience will rebel against this. That’s, it really, and that’s not hypocritical of the communications person, by the way. It’s not, you can’t say, well, I personally believe this, but I wanted to, that’s your job. Your job is to make everybody think of all the possible permutations. And if you’ve done that, and you’ve done it well, and everybody understands the different four or five ways that this could go, you’ve done your job because now everybody was prepared. The worst thing that can happen is a reaction that you weren’t anticipating because that’s your job is to anticipate everything and let everybody make the decisions that they’re gonna make.
Dan
Yeah, I think there is, I don’t know, there’s a lot coming towards the communications profession, I think, in the next couple of years. And that’s, that is a, it’s an unfair question to some extent to say you need to see everything that’s coming and you need to predict it, but it is, you’re right, it is in a lot of ways the job that we’re tasked with.
Rachel
Well and in the day and age of AI, it’s what AI can’t do, right? You are the one that has to critically think around that. There’s no replacing that.
Chris
That’s a great point. That’s a great point. As much as there’s, as has been written about the influence of AI on everything from search results to doing the basic grunt work that we have traditionally done as comms, people forget that level of human interpretation, that level of instinct still has to be applied and it can’t be replaced. No machine is ever going to be able to say your audience will do X, Y, or Z. Here are the different ways that this could go. I mean, the AI can help, but at the end of the day, it has to be a person who’s interpreting it and making the recommendations.
Dan
Yeah, I mean, in most cases, these these cases are things that haven’t necessarily happened before or aren’t on paper. Like these decisions being made behind the scenes aren’t on paper for AI to find and evaluate and say, here’s the outcome that happens when you choose X path. So I think, you know, without that knowledge for AI to work on, that is the job security of communications is being able to kind of take a process.
Chris
Absolutely. And go ahead, Rachel.
Rachel
I was just going to say, do you think if you think about it as AI, as a copilot, though, if you know your audience, and this is kind of thing, right? If you have those demographics, if you have the data, which you should about your audience.
Chris
Absolutely.
Rachel
It can be a good tool to help you evaluate their behaviors, right? Things that it does have access to. You’re not asking it even in relation to your brand, but tell me about this group of people. Tell me about their behaviors, their buying behaviors, whatever it might be to help you make that decision or find an outcome that could potentially happen. It’s a good tool for that, but you have to be the brain power then once you are armed with all of that to be the final say and actually put all of that together.
Chris
100%, 100%. You as the communications person, and Dan, you put it well with, you’re saying that’s job security for the communications people. You, the people who do really well in the next 10 years are the ones who are using AI as that tool and learning from it, working with it, not the ones who are fearing it. And I’ll be the first to acknowledge for a while, I fought it. I didn’t want the rise of AI. And then, you know, over the course of the last year, I’ve really come around to, this is a phenomenal tool for those who are willing to use it. So I’m not threatened by AI anymore, and I don’t think our profession should be threatened by AI. It’s a great tool, especially for audience analysis like this and helping you make the recommendations that are going to be best in the best interest of your brand or your client.
Dan
Yeah, know its strengths and you can use it for a lot of different things.
Chris
And I have, I will admit that I used it to create the draft strategy for my fantasy baseball team this year.
Dan
Oh, there you go. Okay, I like that.
Chris
And it failed miserably. I have. Dead last. Dead last by not even close. Worst finish I’ve ever had in this league. So it’s not perfect for everything.
Dan
Yeah,
Chris
That’s kind of my chuckle thing as I did it for fantasy baseball and it killed me.
Dan
Maybe some training data for next year’s draft?
Rachel
Yeah, feed it the results and say learn from this.
Dan
Don’t do this again.
Chris
But that’s part of the fun of it too, though, is exploring what you can do with AI and learning along the way both good lessons and bad, what to do, what not to do. It still comes down to it’s a phenomenal tool if you’re willing to learn from it.
Rachel
Absolutely.
Dan
So one thing that we always like to close on here. It’s kind of a fun question but looking back at your career and from where you started to where you are today, what’s one piece of advice that you would give your 21-year-old self, kind of just getting into communications and marketing?
Chris
Oh goodness, that’s a really good question. I think what I would advise my younger self is that there is such a thing as luck, but you have to be ready to do what you can with the luck that you have. It was purely lucky in the evolution of my career that the head of comms at IBM happened to stumble on my anonymous blog. But when that piece of luck happened, I knew what to do with it. I made the most of that opportunity. So sometimes lucky breaks are gonna happen. There were people working with me at IBM. at the time who were probably better communicators with me than I am, but never got that break, that kind of a break. I did, but I made the most of it when I had it. So that would be my advice to any younger listeners or people who are just beginning in their career. Luck is gonna happen, but it’s your job to do the most of what you can when it happens.
Dan
I love that, you know, recognizing the opportunity and taking advantage. That’s great.
Chris
Absolutely.
Rachel
I also think though, was that luck. You put in the work of starting that blog and doing it too, right? So luck may find you, but it’s not for lack of like your effort. You still have to put in the work and also like be, like to be prepared, you have to do the research and know where you’re going to take things or, you know, like just be good at what you’re doing and always be hungry to learn more.
Chris
Right.
Rachel
That was lucky that they were able to figure out that it was you. And I love that story, by the way. That is, that’s a really cool jump. Like, just honestly, it was like a springboard for your career that you could have expected.
Chris
It really was.
Rachel
So that was incredible. And absolutely lucky, but you did a lot of work to get there, so don’t discredit yourself either.
Chris
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll take that. I’ll take that compliment.
Rachel
It’s a good way to close us.
Dan
Yeah, but you’re, I mean, today you’re no longer anonymously blogging. Where can people find you nowadays?
Chris
Thank you, Dan. If you want to go to spinsucks.com slash blog, You will find not only all the things that I’m writing about, whether it’s chief conscience officer or other elements of the PESO model. You’ll also hear from Gini Dietrich there, Travis Claytor, our leadership team. So go to spinsucks.com/blog and you’ll learn an awful lot and we’ll be glad to have you.
Dan
Beautiful. We’ll link it down below too.
Chris
Thank you.
Rachel
Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
Chris
Absolutely. Thanks, my friends. Good to talk to you.
Dan
All right. Well, thank you so much to Chris for coming on again. I really enjoyed this conversation. And if you haven’t, definitely check out the blog. We will link that below in the description. And give a read to the Chief Conscience Officer post that he put up not too long ago. Has some really interesting takes and insights on kind of how the role of communicators is shifting and growing.
Rachel
Absolutely. And with that, we’ll see you next time.
Dan
See ya.
