Jess Zafarris

1 day ago | ragan.com | Jess Zafarris

Many executives treat social media as an afterthought, and doubly so for intranets and internal social media platforms. It’s a recurring battle that sends the comms pros who carefully curate those platforms into a quiet rage spiral because you know full well that no one asks the value of the sales team’s work. After hours spent on a campaign that made employees and followers alike do exactly what you planned, how do you explain to the bigwigs why it worked and why it matters?

1 week ago | ragan.com | Jess Zafarris

While comms and PR pros are thinking on behalf of their organizations, they often forget to feed their own minds and tend to their professional development. Between media monitoring, policy development, social pivots, crisis responses, and the constant content churn, who has time to stay sharp, news savvy and inspired? Podcasts can be a helpful medium by which to absorb a knowledge nugget or two while your hands are busy with something else.

1 week ago | prdaily.com | Jess Zafarris

Comms leads are expected to make executives sound good, keep messaging clear and consistent, and ensure internal messaging doesn’t turn into an unread email graveyard. Executives have big ideas, strong opinions, and — let’s be honest — a tendency to believe their own press releases. Your job is to translate their vision into something employees and the public can actually engage with while filtering out the fluff, the contradictions, and the self-congratulatory jargon.

2 weeks ago | ragan.com | Jess Zafarris

Nearly every professional on the planet has at one point or another been guilty of overestimating what exists outside of brains and inboxes. We reassure ourselves that someone somewhere knows how the crisis comms matrix works, or where the CEO’s favorite town hall anecdote lives, or what precisely we meant by “Q2 pivot plan – FINAL_FINAL” — until that someone isn’t here anymore, and suddenly we’re frantically reverse-engineering strategies from a Slack graveyard and a half-baked Google Doc.

3 weeks ago | ragan.com | Jess Zafarris

Comms leads are expected to make executives sound good, keep messaging clear and consistent, and ensure internal messaging doesn’t turn into an unread email graveyard. Executives have big ideas, strong opinions, and — let’s be honest — a tendency to believe their own press releases. Your job is to translate their vision into something employees and the public can actually engage with while filtering out the fluff, the contradictions, and the self-congratulatory jargon.