2437 - The Growing Importance of Fractional Chief Communications Officers for Businesses with Beltway Media's with Joshua Altman

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it is Joshua Altman. We got a couple of Joshes on the show. Josh, you are the founder of Beltway Media. You're found on the web at beltway.media. Joshua Altman, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me here. You are speaking of the Beltway. You're just outside of D.C. there. You're in the D.C. area. Before we get going, talking about your superpowers, Josh, I always love hearing what high-level business leaders do for fun when they're not at work. And you are involved in something that I think a lot of us could get behind.

1:32What do you do when you're not at work? I'm a volunteer dog adoption coordinator for one of our local rescues here in the D.C. area. Wow. That means I process adoptions, interview the potential adopters. If you've ever adopted a pet, you're talking to someone, they talk about the animal with you, things like that. You're talking to someone like me. Yeah. And what is in the D.C. area? What's the pet population like? A lot of families have multiple. So if you're in D.C. A lot of families have multiple dogs and cats. Wow. Wow. Wow. And so when are, do you, are you going on site to events and you're bringing animals and you're trying to get them adopted?

2:18Yeah, we go on site to adoption events. We had a great one last weekend, another great one coming up. We have them almost every weekend. We're also, I work with the fosters. I am not a foster anymore. I kept my foster and we work with the fosters as adoption quarters. We coordinate the meets with dogs, with people, dog, dog meets. we make sure they get into homes for those types of things wherever they need to meet. Sometimes it's in a foster's home. Sometimes it's in an adopter's home. I've done meets or coordinated them at all different places. And we're the people that you probably talk with when you are adopting.

2:57Okay. Well, thank you for doing that work. I appreciate that. I love it. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Well, thank you. I'm sure you've started as a foster 10 years total. Yeah, I'm sure you've helped bring together a lot of great families. So your professional work, Joshua, you've worked with government organizations like Department of Justice, Department of Commerce. You've worked with Dow Jones, Department of Justice. Share with us a little bit about what Beltway Media is, what you do. We're fractional chief communications officers. That means that our focus is on two big buckets.

3:38One is shaping perception. The second is building and maintaining trust. All of communications really comes down. Your goal is those two things. People are generally more familiar with a chief brand officer or a chief marketing officer. Those are important roles. A lot of organizations have them, you're seeing this chief communications officer become a lot more common everywhere from Fortune 500s, major universities, major sports teams. And now even I was talking with someone recently, they work at a regional bank. They just brought on their first chief communications officer and brought all the communications functions, marketing, branding, advertising, internal communications, all into that one department to align it because that's really what we do is it's consistent storytelling across internal and external channels.

4:29Why is that consistent to bring everything together, you know, ultimately leading to one point person or, you know, kind of focus rather than, okay, well, I got my media people over here, got my social media people over here, got our marketing folks over here. Sounds like a dumb question, but why bring it all together? You don't want people singing different songs. They all need to compliment each other. And of course, the social media people will be saying different words than someone on the media relations team talking with big national news outlets. They're going to be saying something different than someone doing your internal communications versus someone who's making sure your product packaging and documentation that customers see is actually right.

5:21And your staff can explain it when asked. Because those are all part of your corporate communications. It's all like a symphony. Everyone's playing a different instrument, but they got to work together. So what is kind of a before and after of someone that you've worked with when, you know, maybe it felt a little disparate? You've got, you know, this going on over here. You're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to bring everyone together. What's kind of the before and after that you've experienced or witnessed or can testify of, so to speak? The before is a lot of like what you described.

5:56They might have a person doing the web. They might have a person handling social. They maybe did some press and some media relations, but they were never really thinking about in a coordinated way. We primarily work with small, medium businesses, B2B, professional services firms, and startups, which means these aren't companies that have 100, 200-person marketing teams. It's falling on a few people, and often it's a director of operations, a COO, a CEO founder. A CTO is probably handling the web stuff because that's the person who built it if you're in these smaller companies, small to mid-sized companies.

6:37And they don't want to. So one of the things that happens really early in that process is we take those tasks off someone who doesn't want to be doing it. Because that COO does not want to be handling messaging. That is not what that person wants to be doing. That CTO does not want to be working on the website anymore. We take all that. So that's one of the biggest changes they see right away. The other is it becomes consistent and thought out. It's not haphazard. It's not, we'll do a little here, we'll do a little there. We have two main frameworks that we use. The first is our story narrative brand framework.

7:16That basically, we always hear, tell your story, be a storyteller. That's what this is. Story has things. It has characters, settings, situations. It's the beginning, the middle, the present. we are still telling this story. Basically think of it like the story you tell your friends at a bar. It's not the most organized. It's fun. It's got events, but it's just what you're talking about. Narrative answers questions. When people say tell your story, they're really talking about narrative in this structure. It answers things. It answers what are we saying in this company about who we are? How do the events in our story, how do those story beats, how do they connect to our big themes.

7:55And just as important, very important, what should people conclude from our connected stories? And then brand is. We say brand is the swag, but it's everything. Anything stakeholders connect with. I mentioned product packaging before. That's part of it. Documentation, that's part of your brand. But people just think of it as logos and pens and giveaways. Everything people connect with is part of that brand. We take that, we put it, think about how they're actually receiving it with our next model, read, see, hear, and experience. And we take it into a coordinated, long-term planned communication structure.

8:37And how could someone, let's say someone is not yet at the stage where they're ready to work with you, but they want to start to adopt some of your ideas. What are maybe two or three of the biggest things that they could do to start consolidating their messaging? You're never too early to start working with a communications team. One of the reasons people call us in is they're not getting a result they want because they're at the brand stage. They have a product that's launched or ready to launch, and they should have been doing this two years earlier. That's one of the reasons we do this on a fractional basis is we can scale with you.

9:12We can start your project at five hours a month, scale you to 20 hours a week, anywhere in between. So it's never too early to really start laying that foundation, because that's what's going to give you success long term. As for things you can do, you can use our two main frameworks on your own. Take a piece of paper, divide it into thirds, story, narrative, brand. Just write character, setting, situation, facts, Narrative, just say what questions does it answer? And then for brand, say what do people interact with? And then answer those three questions. That's a very basic way to work out this framework.

9:51The second is use our other framework. It's our four languages model, what people read, see, hear, and experience. People kind of get read, it's what you read on social media, it's press releases, it's website content, it's everything. A lot of that you're seeing, people kind of get seeing intuitively. Here, now we're trying to get what people are thinking about, what are people hearing from my business? Well, if you do a video, they're listening to that. They're hearing it. They're also seeing it. You go on podcasts, you host one, that's something people are hearing. If you have a physical place, a retail establishment, an office, and you play music, that's something people are hearing.

10:29And there are some firms right now, some big businesses that are really doing a lot of research and studies into in-store audio. So what you hear in one aisle will be different from another aisle. What you hear at the store on Main Street is going to be different than what you hear at the same business across town. They're really making this very specific and they're studying how this influences buyer habits. So here is a lot more than what you play on your Instagram reel. And then experience is what people kind of get tripped up on the most. People think it's experiential events. It's stuff you go to.

11:06It's pop-ups. It's conferences. And that's absolutely part of it. But it's also how people experience what they read, see, and hear. So we're doing this podcast. We have video. But someone like me, I listen to podcasts. I listen while I drive. I listen while I walk the dog. I listen while I'm doing things. That's going to be very different than someone who watches a video. of a podcast. We're getting the same information. We're listening to the same thing, but we have two very different experiences. So take a piece of paper, divide it into quarters or half, one on each side, write down, read, see, hear, and experience, fill it out.

11:43What do people do with your business? And really think about it. And ask, does this work? Is this what we want people to be reading? Is this what we want people to be hearing? Is this the experience we want them to be doing it and having. That's how you could really start and take these two frameworks on your own and start diving into a coordinated, organized communications framework. Well, Joshua, your website is beltway.media. Again, you work as a fractional communications, a chief communications officer. And, you know, even that's interesting. Even if it's just like five hours a week, that's really kind of cool to be able to kind of start with smart strategy earlier rather than later.

12:35So this may be a little bit more accessible than one might think. But when somebody goes to your website, beltway.media, what would you recommend they do? You could click on the free consultation. That's there for you. Talk to us. Another thing you can do is we have some free tools. Use them. We have a couple of forms, their questionnaires, their surveys. Take them. They'll help you figure out where you are, what you need to do. We also have a handful of quick guides. We're adding more. We have one just for lawyers. We have one just for startups. These are generally applicable, but we also have them very tailored to specific industries or stage of your business.

13:15We're fractional chief communications officers. We're not working with Fortune 100 firms. We're working with small, mid-sized businesses and startups. So we're really tailoring these things, these resources to be useful. And the quick guides, they are online in HTML website versions, but there's also a download link. If you download and print it out or just use it on a tablet, an iPad, they're designed to have a lot of white space. Write on it, mark it up, use it. We've had people that use it, they come to our consultation with us and say, well, we downloaded your startup quick guide and here's all the stuff we wrote.

13:53This is what we're doing. It's a really great starting point for a conversation with us, with your internal team or whomever you have right now. Joshua Altman, your website, beltway.media. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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