299. Choose The Right Channel: How Stanford Finds Its Voice

Farnaz is the Vice President of University Communications at Stanford, where she oversees the institution's global media relations, digital strategy, and internal communications. Prior to Stanford, Farnaz served as the Vice President of Communication at Caltech. Her background includes public service with the US Department of State as a foreign service officer. Well, welcome, Farnaz. Thanks for being here. I look forward to continuing our coffee chats so everybody can hear.

That's the other thing that people don't always think about is you gotta really be thinking about who you're talking to. And the third is know your data. I think we're gonna probably talk a lot about listening today. So much of communications is about listening and not talking, and data is the way you listen. I mean, when you work in an organization like this, you are constantly having to go back and see what worked and what didn't.

So if you don't know your data, you don't know your audience, you don't know your goal. So it's all kind of a circle. So those are really our overarching principles when we think about this.

You also have to traverse a wide variety of channels, right? Social, there's written, magazines, newspapers. How do you think that landscape is changing, and are there certain messages that are better for certain channels? That seems to be another big variable you have to deal with.

The shorter, the better. We look a lot at, like, national polls, too, or international polls. Like Pew says that half of people right now get their news from social media. I mean, that's phenomenal. So if that's a place where we need to push out more news, we try to do that that way. Longform still has a place, right? Longform writing, stories, they're still really important, but people aren't gonna read 2,000-word stories anymore. Very rarely are they gonna do that.

So one of the things we do as a team is we sit down and let's say we have a story, we actually go through that exact process. We say, "Okay, is this better as a short piece in writing, maybe with an accompanying video, and maybe even with a media pitch?" Like, we have media relations. We have really strong people who talk to journalists. And sometimes people don't need to hear it directly from us. We're actually better off sharing it with the media, who will then share it with the public.

And so we go through that on almost every story.

One of the other things I'm super impressed with that I think others who aren't in a university setting who have some comms responsibility is you'll pull people together from different areas who all do communication work and have them share best practices, have them learn from each other, really empowering and enabling them, not just through the people process and infrastructure that you talked about, but by actually having them engage with each other to feel supported.

'Cause it can be lonely if you're a single comms person sitting out there, you know, in some corporation. But being connected can be really helpful.

Maybe they've discovered something new, or they've got some expertise that's being pulled to the fore. How do you help people be better communicators as a coach, as a guide?

And communications, if you do it well, is an art, and not everybody, to your point, can do that, right? And so we actually do. We offer that kind of training to faculty, to staff, to others, and it's as simple as, I mentioned I started out talking about the rule of three, right? You have three things that you wanna communicate and think about. And you just tell people even something like that, "Come up with your top three things that you wanna say," and that's life-changing for them.

They think about that, they process, and then they are able to more clearly communicate their thoughts. We can help people on camera. We can put them in front of a video camera and then help them see how they come across when they're communicating.

We talk to them about their work and kind of walk them through how to explain that in a way that is understandable because a lot of people are very good at being able to explain their work in the way that they understand it, but not necessarily in the way that other people would understand it. So there's a lot of things that we can do along those lines that we really actually enjoy doing. We think it's a big part of our job.

Because part of it, as you said when you talked about recording people, it's one thing to understand how to do it, it's one thing to know your message, it's another thing to get the reps in doing it. And so I think it's great that you help people in all those ways. Uh, in your various roles that you've held, especially here, you've had to deal with public crises. What advice do you have for our listeners who have to deal with challenges, perhaps not on the scale that you have had to?

So one of the things I've really loved doing the last few years in particular is going out and teaching about how to do crisis. And so maybe some of what I'll share is a little bit of what I say in these courses or talks that I give. You know, Benjamin Franklin said, "By failing to prepare, you prepare to fail." If no one ever takes away anything else having to do with communications, I hope they remember that. The most important thing to do in a crisis is just to have prepared in advance.

So what does that mean? Think about what are your top things that could go wrong in your particular job, in your particular organization. What are the top five scenarios of what kind of crisis you can have? And they're different, right? What could happen at a university could be very different than in a business, or even in someone's personal life. What are the things that could happen? And then you try to plan around those. Do you have the right tools?

If you're in an organization, do you have the right people? Do you know who's supposed to do what? Do you know roles and responsibilities? And so that whole process of actually thinking through what could go wrong and putting in place the tools and resources you need to address it is bar none the most important thing you can do.

You just have to communicate and tell people what you know. Be truthful, be transparent. Second is in today's world with how fast things are moving, and as we talked about the multiple channels and, for example, how quickly information moves on social, you have to do it early and often. So I think the days where you could wait an hour or two to communicate something, or a day or two in a crisis are long gone. And then you have to do it regularly over and over and over again.

Again, even if you don't know what is happening. Those are, like, two of the main things that I talk about when I talk about how to communicate in a crisis. The thing I always end with to tell people is forgive yourself, because here's what's gonna happen in a crisis. It is going to be the fog of war. No matter how much you have practiced, no matter how much you have prepared, it's not gonna go as you think it will.

The preparation will help you, obviously, because then you are better able to manage those curve balls. You're not spending time on the basics. You're spending time on trying to manage how things are going. But in the end, it's not gonna go exactly as you anticipate. Things are gonna go wrong, and a lot of people beat themselves up for that.

And I think that's the one thing is forgive yourself, go back, do that learning, incorporate those learnings for the next time, and just know that's the way a crisis works.

Is there, for example, it has to have some emotional appeal, or there has to be something vivid? For you, what makes for a good story?

You can be a great speaker. When I think about TED Talks, what are the ones that really resonate? It's when somebody gets up and they are vulnerable, and they share something about themselves and their background and who they are, and all of a sudden that connection is made, human to human. And that is the essence of a great story. And I think all the other things are really important, and I see it in my own personal life, right?

Anytime I'm talking to someone, whether it's one-on-one or I'm giving a talk or I'm somewhere else, when I share something about my background, how something in my life taught me a lesson that brought me to where I am, I instantly notice a change. And so I think that connection and that personal nature is absolutely core

As somebody who runs a communication organization, what is your approach to using AI to help and also being concerned about some of the problems that come with people who use AI in terms of hallucinations and other things? How are you approaching that, and what guidance are you giving your team?

But what that means is very different from person to person and from team to team. For some people, that may be my goal is I'm going to take a class and try to understand better how to write prompts. For someone else, it might be more of an incorporation into their daily work. And I largely let the team know. I said, "I want you to do this for you, not so much even for me, for

the institution." I think that having familiarity with these tools is gonna be so important for the next generation of people in communications, and so I think it's incumbent on me to help them learn how to use it. And there are some really great things that we can and are using AI for. It certainly can make a lot of processes easier, whether it be in the writing or editing phase or so forth.

We can use it, and we're thinking about more how to use it for targeting particular audiences, 'cause I think AI can do a lot to help us find the right audiences for our messages. But then to the flip side of what you asked about, there are a lot of problems too that can come with that if people rush to try to do it too much.

So the other thing we did is we worked with actually some great faculty and others around the university, and we created AI guidelines for communicators, and these are now publicly available. And they're just some basic common sense things that try to address the fact of attribution. If you're gonna use AI, don't tell people you've used AI in some process in this.

Two is, you know, understand the hallucinations are real, so make sure you have backed up in terms of fact-checking anything that you have out there. And I think that's gotta be, those two things have to go hand in hand. Explore in moderation. See how it can help you. And on the other side, be careful and make sure you know where the red lines are.

Farnaz, I knew this would be a great conversation. We always have great conversations when we grab coffee. I'd like to end by asking you three questions, one I'm gonna create just for you, and two I've been asking everybody for a long time. We started our talk today highlighting listening, reflection. I'd love for you to share a little bit of advice on how you try to listen well and any advice or guidance you give others to improve listening skills.

And one of the great things that people will talk about Bill Clinton all the time is that he is a great communicator, but one of the reasons that I thought, and I saw it firsthand, was when I got to meet him, is he makes you feel as if there is no one else except you, like he is truly listening to you. And I met him in a public forum in Florence with 1,000 people around us. But in that 20 seconds, I felt like I was the only person. There was a real connection there.

Not all of us can be Bill Clinton. But I felt very much that taught me something. If your attention is fully on someone, you're not multitasking, you're not looking over to the right, you're not doing something else, but you actually look like you're listening to someone, that can go a long way. And that one very short interaction taught me a lot years ago.

So we just talked about Bill Clinton and his ability to listen and connect. If you look at someone, let's say like an Oprah Winfrey, she's fabulous at warmth, and that is a really important part of connection. I spent many years doing technical or science communications, but when I look at somebody like a Neil deGrasse Tyson or a Bill Nye, their ability to simplify is their strength.

So it feels to me like you can take little pieces and parts of everybody out there, like the things that really matter to you, and say, "I want a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of that," and so no one person has that. I love a little piece of all of them.

Have you spent your time actually thinking about what the other person has said as opposed to trying to be the one to think ahead to what you're going to say? On the third point, I'm gonna diverge a little bit. I'm gonna say if you're an individual, you're doing it as a person versus as someone representing an organization. As a person, I think people hear this, but they do not always appreciate just how much nonverbal communication matters, right?

So how much your eye contact, your smile, your body language, your gestures make a difference. And so be thoughtful and be intentional about that. In an organization, if you're representing an organization for good communications, I had a great boss once who said, "Farnaz, a big part of your job is to educate your bosses. You think people know the same things you do. They don't know the same

things you do." So effective communication is to make sure that those who are decision makers around you are educated. They know what you know, and that will lead to good communications outcomes for an organization.

So the goal of communication is to educate, which certainly doesn't surprise me given the role that you have as head of comms at a university. Farnaz, this was fantastic. Lots of key takeaways from lots of different areas of communication, from how we can be better ourselves, how we can better our organizations, how we can handle crises, how we can deal with AI. Thank you so much for your insight, and thanks for joining.

And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, my AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community