CWC: Comms' Seat at the Table

THE WHO:

Tara Smith?has 25+ years of experience in technology marketing and communications. She is currently Managing Partner at?Voxus PR, a boutique PR and marketing agency focused on B2B technology companies. Tara recently joined Voxus from Intel Corporation, where she was Chief Communications Officer, Corporate Vice President, and General Manager of Global Communications, responsible for promoting and protecting the company’s reputation across all internal and external audiences. She was instrumental in advancing the narrative around Intel’s corporate transformation, “supercharging” communications at the edge and re-establishing Intel as the voice of the semiconductor industry.?Tara took over as Intel’s Chief Communications Officer in 2020, having previously served as Intel’s Vice President, Technology Communications. Before joining Intel in 2016, Tara was a Senior Vice President at WE Communications, where she served as an executive lead on the agency’s Microsoft business, heading up the Windows and OEM teams. She has also held senior-level communications roles at Marqui, a software start-up, and Sterling Communications, a Silicon Valley-based PR firm. Tara holds a degree in Classics, with an emphasis in language and literature, from UC Santa Barbara.?

?

THE Q&A:

Q: How’d you come up in comms?

?I fell into it, and I'm usually very transparent about that.

?I've always loved technology. My father was in semiconductors, and I grew up playing at his workbench, I would take things apart, so I always loved understanding how things work. But really when it came time to go to school and think about my profession, I studied classics. I have a degree in classical language and literature. I wanted to be an archaeologist. The plan was to go to graduate school and continue down that path. But when I graduated, I start looking at the math and it's very expensive to go to graduate school.

I thought, okay, I need to get a job, a short-term thing. I'll try this PR thing out. A friend of mine helped me get my foot in the door at a firm called Sterling Communications. This was down in the late 90s in the valley during the dot com era. Yeah, it was very much in demand, and I thought 'I can do this but I'm not going to do it for very long'. I started as an account associate at Sterling Communications, which is still around and I'm still friends with a bunch of folks there.

I really discovered this love of blending technology and communications and what that means. I enjoyed, in particular, working with the technologists, the entrepreneurs, hearing what's coming next. I loved that, and I just never left it.

Then I joined one of my clients at the time at a Vancouver based startup that was an early software as a service company. Before people even knew what software as a service was, they were doing it, and it was marketing automation software. We were pretty cutting edge on the marketing front and if you're going to sell to marketers you have to be you know at your A game. We started with a paid blogger program, which at the time was considered scandalous. At the time that you would actually pay people to write about your company was not the norm. And then as part of the learnings at that company, I also learned that startups run out of money. And so that company ran into some problems, and it was time for me to move on. And I decided, okay, I've done the startup thing, I've done the agency thing, I'm gonna go work at a bigger agency that's stable.

I want to work in a big account as stable as the time in my life where I wanted to start a family. So, if you live in Portland and you want to work on the agency side with a big company, you go to Waggener Edstrom, now WE Communications. I then spent 10 years working on the Microsoft account where I tended to gravitate towards the more technical areas.?

Then I got to the place where I've worked at a bigger agency and now, I want to go work in house at a big company. I went to Intel and started lower in the organization as a PR manager there and took a step back because I just really wanted to work at Intel. And within four years, I was running all global communications for Intel. I left Intel as the chief communications officer as a role I had for three years. That was all internal and external communications and more than 30 markets around the globe, which was an incredible experience to be running communications with Pat Gelsinger as the new CEO. Incredible all around but at that point, I'm like, I've done this, and I want to go back to the agency said I want to go back to working with startups, which brought me to Voxus.

?

Q: Let’s talk about the Chief Communications Officer role and how its evolving? ?

I think it's one of the interesting things with communications, where it looks wildly different depending on which company you're at. Probably one of the things we could do better in our field is applying some of the best practices consistently. Because for instance, if you go into sales, it's a little more standardized.

While I was in the CCO role at Intel it was internal and external communications. I had employee communications at a global level, all external communications, that included media and analyst relations, and included executive event production. I always like to be clear on what parts we owned because it is so different at each organization. It was a pretty good-sized team that gave us a lot of breadth and I am very strongly supportive of keeping that internal and external connected. The value of having consistency of messaging across your internal organization, and your external audiences, I felt like that made us much more agile, and frankly more effective. It was so one it was one of the things I was very passionate about and you'll see the pendulum swing at companies of decentralized and deep and centralized. I really wanted to keep things centralized.

Q: Why do you think why do you think there is sometimes the perception of comms people being scrappy, or you know, us being able to handle a smaller team than our marketing counterparts for example?

A combination of reasons- I think there's a lack of understanding of the difference between marketing and communications or PR and, and my preference is to call it communications because to me, communications is a strategic function and PR is a tactic within communications. But I'll tell you having come back to the startup life; people don't understand it when I say communications. If I say PR, they know what I mean, or at least they think they do. So, they think marketing should get the bigger people play because of advertising and things like that. I think just this this view of PR, maybe as being kind of tactical, smaller, it's easy to get that coverage, etc.

?

Q: What in the news lately has your head spinning from a comms perspective?

I would be remiss if I called out anything but AI. You know, I think there's enormous opportunity. There's obviously some fear mongering. I think there's a lot of people confused about what it can and can't do and also what it means for communicators. I was just on a call with someone who was talking about whether PR people will need the pitch in the future because it'll all be automated. And I was like, whoa, whoa, like think of all the spam mails? Probably not the best application.

That's something I think about - how do we make sure that we're applying AI for our field in the right way where it's augmenting but we're not delegating to AI fully, because I don't think that's the right answer. I think about that from a broader technology perspective of are we actually putting the right policies and governance in place around AI to make sure that as a technology community it's coming to life in the right way. That’s a topic where I spend a lot of time reading because there's so many different points of view and it's super interesting.

?

Q: Now that you’re at Voxus, I’d love to hear you talk about the state of agency from your perspective at the moment.

When I was initially talking to Voxus business was coming in the door, it was booming, I think towards the back half of last year right as I signed and joined the company. But then, things just kind of fell off a cliff versus the end of last year. I think there was concern about the global economy. It just felt like companies paused budgets, we saw some turnover in a lot of marketing teams, not just at our clients, but all over LinkedIn. Everything just got a bit quiet. And then in the last, I would say four to six weeks, we've really seen things pick up to where it feels like companies are announcing funding rounds, they're getting funding rounds, which has been exciting.

What we're seeing is that marketing to drive lead gen is taking a long time and is definitely a longer cycle that’s taking people more time to make a decision. Where instead, if there’s an existing relationship, that just converts really quickly. That’s where we're focusing more of our time is leaning into the relationships and keeping an eye on where people end up as changes are made and movements happen.

?

Q: Since Voxus is mostly remote, what’s your view of how that is impacting folks early in their career being remote?

I like the remote set up and I think it is really effective. It gives people the flexibility that they need. Frankly, it also lets us expand to a bigger pool of talent, since markets can get pretty saturated very quickly. What I am mindful of though, is I think back in my early days of how I learned, and I was sitting next to the executives at the agency who could lean over and tell me if I was doing something wrong, or when we pitched by phone to have them tell me ‘Oh that pitch was bad’. They don't have that exposure.

We have to find ways to build that in and still teach people. I also think it's hard to drive a culture unless you really work at it. We do regular socials, we've got a lot of active Slack channels of like everything you can imagine - the pet channel, there's the parents’ channel, I mean, there's the women of Voxus channel. We have a little slice of everything, and people can spend time socializing. We really work hard to bring people together and then we also do have in person co-working days where we'll go do something fun together in the evening. For people just starting out in their career you have to make time for them to build relationships and it gives them a chance to do that when we come together in real life.

?

Q: What do you think is the most valuable skill someone can have to be successful in comms?

Intellectual curiosity - hands down it's what I most want to see in candidates. I don't expect people to be great at everything. I just want them to be curious about what they're working on and how to get better. I think particularly if you're in technology, you have to have an interest in how things work.?

Q: Going back to you getting a C-suite role, can you talk about the importance of comms having a seat at the table long term?

?We must be there because think of all the different examples of companies when things start to go sideways- I believe that there's a fundamental communications issue associated it most of the time. And then, to be clear, it's not a communications problem, it is a business problem that has communications inputs that were not well thought out.

Comms’ ability to be in the room and help people understand the consequences, or the downstream impacts of some of these decisions is so important. Because we can think about, well, how will that feel to employees? How will that feel to customers? How will that feel and be perceived by the media?

It's not just a press thing it’s all the different audiences that we can touch and helping people think through that full picture, which is very powerful. I don't see any other stakeholder have quite that view, and it’s an opportunity that we really need to embrace.

I think there's an opportunity for communicators to not just be experts in the domain of communications, but really take the time to think about the business and invest in understanding the company. Just take the time. If people are early in their career, take something that helps you understand how to read a P&L because that lets you have a conversation at a different level.

You often have to push forward and fight for that seat at the table and show you belong there and then keep earning it. And it's hard, but I do see people kind of hanging back and that's the easy route, because it's scary. It's scary to be in some of these discussions and to take a risk and maybe have a different point of view or to say, hey, look, you haven't thought about all the pieces.

And in fact, if I think about one of the values that I've been trying to bring to more and more companies is don't think about PR communications as just a press thing. Think about it across your audiences, your investors, your customers, your partners, your employees, all of these stakeholders who matter. That 360 view, if you can bring that together, that's where there's a lot of power. You can't just think about siloed audiences and have different people thinking you can address them without engaging that higher level strategic thinking.

QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS

Q: Coffee, mocktail, or cocktail?

If I had picked one, it's a double cappuccino, no sugar, nothing, just a double cap. ??

Q: Online or print?

Online.

?Q: Favorite publication?

I read them all, but I love WIRED .

Q: Oxford comma – yay or nay?

No. And it actually makes me really mad because Grammarly obsessively prompts for the Oxford comma and I'm not here for it.

Q: Slack – love it, hate it, love to hate it?

Um, love to hate it. I think we just created another channel that I have to check which can be exhausting for sure.

Q: Do you think AI will take your job?

It will make me better at my job.

Q: Guilty pleasure?

I play Candy Crush. It's embarrassing, I won't play it in public. ????

Q: Comms role model?

Frank X. Shaw - I think he's many people’s role model for good reason.

?

?