In the digital age, words are currency — and we’re all writers! In this episode, host John Arnold is joined by KBR communications manager Rebecca Lewis for a discussion about how KBR’s new Content Community of Practice is exploring the art of the possible with the written word, building consistency in how writing is done at KBR, and safeguarding a global brand in the process.
In the digital age, words are currency — and we’re all writers! In this episode, host John Arnold is joined by KBR communications manager Rebecca Lewis for a discussion about how KBR’s new Content Community of Practice is exploring the art of the possible with the written word, building consistency in how writing is done at KBR, and safeguarding a global brand in the process.
IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST
Season 4, Episode 3
Everybody Writes! – Building Brand Unity Word by Word
INTRODUCTION
John Arnold
Hello, I'm John, and this is In Orbit.
A warm welcome to all you listeners out there. Whether you found us for the first time or listen regularly, we appreciate you checking in with us and staying in our orbit. If you've listened to the podcast before, you know we cover a lot of ground from space, cybersecurity, engineering, sustainable technology, mental health, even differentiated approaches to marketing. The list just goes on. We've been fortunate to have guests on the podcast to talk about those topics, who are recognized, often celebrated experts in their fields. Well, on this episode, we're going to talk about a subject that is very close to my heart, one that I happen to know a little something about, and it's actually something most everyone knows about and that's writing.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, but I'm not a writer. Why should I care about this? Well, don't touch that dial. I was recently reading Ann Handley's excellent book, “Everybody Writes,” and in the introduction she says, "If you have a website, you're a publisher. If you're on social media, you're in marketing. And that means we're all writers."
Now, the topic of writing has of course been much in the news of late because of ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms. There are all the implications around AI replacing human writers and artists. There are lots of lawsuits because of allegations of plagiarism, and odds are, if you've heard about any of that, then you read about it somewhere, right? Well, maybe it's the fact that as human beings, especially in developed or developing countries, we take our ability to communicate and to read and write for granted.
Well, at KBR, I'm proud to be a part of a small but mighty group of marketing and communications professionals that care a lot about the art of writing and the possibilities of what can be done with it. And I'm thrilled to have another member of that group with me today to talk about all of this and some of the work we're doing to prioritize storytelling, to build consistency in how we write across the company, and ultimately to better represent KBR and safeguard the global brand. And that person is the wonderful Rebecca Lewis, communications manager for KBRs Integrated Solutions, America's business and co-lead of the KBR Content Community of Practice (COP). Welcome, Bex.
Rebecca Lewis
Hello. Thank you for having me.
John Arnold
Thank you for joining me at the last minute, all the way from England. We're separated by several hours, but I am so excited to have you on today.
Rebecca Lewis
Me too.
John Arnold
So yeah, we're talking today in broad strokes about KBRs Content Community of Practice, which was modeled after something at KBR called Communities of Interest, which span a lot of very technological, forward-facing, future-forward solutions like AI, machine learning, things like that. And so this group was founded — why was it founded Bex?
Rebecca Lewis
Well, I think there were various reasons. I think one of the main things that we kind of were aiming for was to create a consistent guide that anybody in the team could use and refer to as a way to help them when it comes to writing internal communications, press releases, social media content, content for the website, loads of different things. And we didn't really have anything that existed, but we did have definitely a need for it. So that was one of the things that we kind of immediately discussed, and everybody within the COP was on board and thought that not only would it be a really good deliverable out of the practice, but also a really good exercise for us to all contribute to and something that we could all contribute to being such a global team.
John Arnold
Yeah. Absolutely. As we can get into a little bit of why we had this style guide, and I'll also say just a shout-out to our writing, our Content Community of Practice members. It's been an awesome opportunity for these individuals and we're talking about in Australia, and the APAC region, and India, in the U.K. and here in the United States, people from all around the world coming together to talk about pain points of being a communications or marketing specialist to talk about best practices, to share ideas. And it's been a really, really excellent experience. But yeah, as you were saying, it's one of the fundamental things that we identified was this need for a KBR writing style guide.
So I guess we'll go and answer the question, why. Why does this thing need to exist? And you and I were just talking a moment ago about how on LinkedIn, and I'm sure it's curated content meant for marketing professionals, but I see all over the place companies looking for, there's a real need for this kind of a resource. And I'll read the preface to the writing style guide that we've created or paraphrase it.
But big companies like KBR have a lot of different mechanisms in place to protect the business and to protect their people. We're talking about risk and governance, HSSE policies — that's health, safety, security, and environment — and sustainability policies. And at KBR, that platform that covers both safety and sustainability is called Zero Harm, which in our parlance is about doing zero harm to the planet, our people, and the business. And so just as we do zero harm for those things, we should also strive to do no harm for the KBR brand, including when we're writing. And so KBR is known for doing all of these amazing things that matter to the rest of the world, known for our expertise. If you've listened to the podcast at all, and if you haven't, I encourage you to go back people and listen to some past episodes because we have a catalog of just experts that are talking about some of the great of our time, and KBR is known for that expertise.
So similarly, it's crucial that we communicate about those solutions and expertise to the world in the most consistent professional manner possible. So how do we do that with a style guide? So it's good stewardship of the KBR brand. Again, you can think of it as a form of governance of KBRs image as a professional company, it can help to reduce risk to KBR. It certainly can improve consistency in terms of the mechanics of writing, grammar, punctuation, and so on. And like you were just saying, Bex, KBR has a team of marketing and comms specialists working all across the world in different countries. They're different local needs a lot of times.
So it's great to have a standard set of guidelines that anyone can check their work against to make sure it's accurate and that whatever the deliverable they're working on might be, that it's written as well as possible. That can also only help reduce any chance of error and yeah, just build consistency around the brand voice. So we're hopeful that not only we can use that, but that we can send it out to the rest of the company, maybe work with other companies to help as we're doing more of marketing our communications as a service, perhaps in the future, helping other companies develop brand and style guides. So yeah, that's the big like why we did this, I guess.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah, I agree. No, I think there's obviously so many reasons that we've kind of just touched on, but maybe this is a good opportunity to just go through what exactly we included. This is obviously just our first phase style guide. It's obviously an evolving document. It's always going to change, just to reflect the business that is always changing and growing. So maybe we can just talk here about what actually did we include? Why did we include it? Do you want to go through that kind of stuff, John?
John Arnold
Absolutely. So a lot of big companies in the U.S., KBR’s house writing style, and a lot of KBR people might not know this, but it's modeled largely on the Associated Press Style Guide, which is the style that most major newspapers, magazines, other media outlets use for writing. So we took much of the most researched AP Style guidance and developed a whole section in our guide that outlines that same guidance, that includes rules for things like punctuation, capitalization, different ways of using numerals, like when to spell out a number or just use the number itself. And a lot of people might wonder, well, why is stuff like that important? Especially in the era of we're such a text message, instant message focused society now that punctuation largely goes out the window for a lot of people. I know a lot of people that text me back, "Why are you mad? Why do you text in complete sentences?" And it's just, yeah, I'm compelled to do it. I kind of have to do it. It's just the way I am.
And I mean, there are several examples, I can cite one from back in my agency days that was sort of popular, that there was a shipping company, I think it was a trucker's union or something that was suing a company for wages because of a contract dispute. And because of the lack of a comma in that contract, the company had to pay out $10 million to these employees that they otherwise weren't going to pay because of a lack of comma. So punctuation is important, friends.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah.
John Arnold
Never forget. Yeah. And yeah. And then as we've already talked about a little bit, we have people working for KBR marketing and communications in the U.S., Australia, the U.K., India. We have a whole section that talks about common English language localization practices. So that's when to use a Z — or a Z if you're in the U.K. — or an S. When to use those things, how spelling “color” with a U or without a U. If you're localizing it or if you're using it for a press release that's going to go out worldwide, you probably would drop the U. We have a whole section on social media best practice, which anyone in our company and any company could benefit from. It talks about optimum word count of posts, how to properly use hashtags and how to tag people or companies, which a lot of people also don't know about, but it's super helpful for visibility of posts and getting more impressions.
There's also guidance on what days and at what times is best to post on because you don't want to be posting at 6:00 PM on a Thursday night after people have gone home because no one's going to see your post. It's going to get buried in the algorithm. So that's really important. We also have a section on commonly used words and terms. It's a general glossary of industry terms that we see both on the government services side and in the sustainable technology side, especially on the government side. There are always lots of acronyms. So we've tried to take a lot of the ones that we use a lot and spell those out so that people would know what we're talking about or a reader would know what we're talking about, when and how to spell those acronyms out.
We also have a section that outlines guidance for KBR specific trademarks and service mark product solutions and taglines, because a lot of times if you are using one of those taglines and you forget to throw the trademark symbol on there, it can cause problems. And there's a lot more. But those are some of the major sections that we chose to include in the guide.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah. And actually when you were just talking about the difference in the country spelling, that was actually so useful for me and at the perfect timing because when we started the COP was probably roughly around February, March of 2023, and that was the exact time that I relocated from London to Houston for work. So I was kind of going through that same change of writing for my audience based in the U.K. and then going over to the U.S. spelling and the way that you format the dates differently. So that was super interesting, but also so helpful to go through that at the exact kind of time. And it's really amazing to have this kind of resource now to be able to look back, check, make sure everything's as it should be. Okay. So who would you say is our main audience for the style guide and who should be really going into it and having a look and using it?
John Arnold
Well, to quote the title of that book that I cited in the intro, the Handley book, "Everybody Writes." So anyone can and maybe probably should check out the style guide. If nothing else, they might learn something they didn't know. At the very least, it'll help familiarize people with KBRs brand tone of voice and provide best practices for writing for a lot of different kinds of deliverables and different kinds of audiences. That includes writing for press releases or internal communications.
So that would be valuable for human resources professionals, social media across the board. Literally anybody that works at KBR that posts on LinkedIn should know the social media best practices. Also, helpful to know basic grammar rules and things like that for our style when writing a post that might be reflective on KBR, and then also writing for white papers and business proposals. One of the big things that we really hope can come out of this is that it can help even our business development people take their craft to the next level because that's something that's directly producing ostensibly income for the company. And how important is it that those documents are really well written?
Importantly, Bex, we also included a section about guidance for using generative AI. Now our robot overlords are here, and they could do some very cool stuff, but at the end of the day, if you've got a critical eye, you can tell when a person wrote something and when a machine did. So my partner and I — she is also a marketing professional, and she reviews things that AI writes a lot because she deals specifically in the human resources employee handbook space, which is really, really interesting, especially if you're a writer. But it's, like, she gets a lot of things back and she can tell when people have used AI to write things because there's a lack of sophistication from machines. The machine tries to use metaphors that don't jibe, that don't work together.
One example that we keep seeing is that the generative AI will desperately try to link like a maritime reference to fixing a car. “Your employee handbook is the chart upon which you sail the seas of yada, yada, yada. So let's look under the hood, and …” It's like, wait a minute, what? What are you talking about? It's like these two things do not go together. So yeah, AI is helpful for me. I've used it a lot to get the ball rolling on a project, to get an idea started, because, for me, that's most often the most difficult thing to do, is to get the first idea out. And then once I've got the lede on paper, everything else kind of flows.
But AI is there for me as a tool, but I think a human touch is still needed to finesse whatever it is that is produced by AI. And also to ensure that it's not plagiarized because AI is just spitting out what it's been fed by and large. It does learn. It is going to learn over time and improve, but it's still just producing things that it's been fed. So it's important that a human goes back over that and edits it as needed to ensure that it's still original content and not something that belongs to someone else potentially.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah. No, that's so important. I actually use it quite a bit now as well, mainly for if I'm stuck on a certain sentence or paragraph and I'm like, it's fine, but it doesn't sound amazing, and I'll just copy and paste it into ChatGPT and just see if it comes up with maybe some words that I would not have thought of before. So it is really good at just giving you maybe some more options to go for. But yeah, absolutely agree. Always got to be double checking the facts, make sure that you're not taking it word for word. Super important. But it's helpful. I mean, it's great that we've got this now and it's become kind of accustomed for people, and it's kind of seen as like a normal thing to use.
John Arnold
Yeah. Well, and I think it's important to remember also that the generative AI platform can only go so far to communicate something that is important or is particular to your company or your brand. Right. It doesn't know the nuances of language that marketing professionals, for example, at KBR, or Apple, or any of these big companies, use to communicate about their brand, at least not yet. Again, it'll learn, it'll become more sophisticated over time, but it's still going to be incumbent upon people like you and me to go through and then look at that and be like, “Does this sound like KBR? Does this sound like Bex? Does this sound like John?”
Rebecca Lewis
Exactly.
John Arnold
And then make sure that it does.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah, 100% agree. When will the first draft of the guide be available?
John Arnold
Well, the first draft … it's finished, thank goodness. But it is in a review process now with [KBR] Global Marketing and Communications (Marcom) leadership. It should be available, we hope, in the next few weeks. Once it is, KBR employees can be on the lookout for communications indicating such. And then we're also going to be doing a social media campaign, which will feature members of the KBR Global Marcom and the Content Community of Practice team introducing the guide and talking about some of the more interesting pieces of guidance that people can find there. I would encourage people when it comes out to remember that it's a living document, like you were saying. This is something that's going to change over time because even the AP Style is not infallible and ineffable. It changes all the time.
And so we recognize that and always want to be flexible and adaptable to the changes, if they're good for KBR. And so we've already gotten some feedback about adding a section that covers writing about KBR subsidiaries. We know there's interest from colleagues, like I said, in business development as well. And yeah, we want people as they're using it, to reach out to us with questions if they have them, or suggestions about things that should be added. So yeah, soon. I would say in the next month or two at least, and then you'll be hearing more about it via our internal social channels, maybe on LinkedIn, but especially through KBR communications.
Rebecca Lewis
Yeah, it's super exciting. It'll be really good to see everyone's feedback. I think it's definitely got really great basics in there that people can learn a lot from already. But if you do have ideas or suggestions or things that you think or things that you ask yourself quite a lot when you're writing, yeah, definitely get in touch, feedback to us. We want this to be a resource that is really useful for everybody in the business. And yeah, it's going to be an evolving document, so we can always update it.
John Arnold
And one thing that I don't think it has yet, but we are going to be adding search functionality so that people can just go to it and if they have a question about a specific topic, they'll just be able to search it and it'll go right to the page or show all the pages where those things are mentioned so they don't have to sift through the whole thing, even though you might want to read the whole thing. But anyway.
Rebecca Lewis
I love that feature.
John Arnold
Yeah.
Rebecca Lewis
Okay, perfect. Anything else that we want to cover on the style guide?
John Arnold
Well, I just as a parting thought, and I won't wax too philosophical here, but just … I've been thinking a lot about writing in preparation for this episode. So I have a set daily practice of activities for myself, and that includes journaling. So yesterday while I was journaling, my thoughts turned to doing this episode and roping you into it and why we should even do one about writing. And I was thinking about writing in context of the world today, like the current geopolitical climate, which can seem like a pretty grim, bleak state of affairs honestly. The doomsday clock is ticking away what could be, but we hope are not the last precious seconds of human existence as we know it. And if leveler heads didn't prevail somehow, and this is me just thinking, if leveler heads didn't prevail, then analog methods of disseminating information, writing things down may once again be widely counted upon to do the heavy lifting of preserving some of the treasures of humankind, like poetry, literature, scientific discovery and discourse, accurate objective historical record, just the basic instructions for how simple things work.
Those are the things that would need to be preserved, and they would all need to be written down, and they'd need to be written down legibly and coherently. So that's my thought, is when people think about why is it important that we write is that, I mean, think about your ability to read something. I mean, you are literally cracking a code. You're taking letters and phonics and putting things together and then comprehending whole major thoughts. So writing is really important, and it's pretty cool when you think about it in those terms. So yeah, that'd just be my parting thought, is to appreciate your ability to read and write.
Rebecca Lewis
What a very profound thought to end this episode on.
John Arnold
How about you? Any parting thoughts from you, Bex?
Rebecca Lewis
No, I think it'll be interesting to see where we take the writing COP this year. I know obviously we want to refine the guide and we'll officially launch it and there'll be opportunity to get feedback from everybody. But I think it's really cool that we've actually got the COP now specific for this, specifically for writing and for our team …
John Arnold
Yeah.
Rebecca Lewis
… that maybe we can extend out to other colleagues and maybe people externally. I mean, I think the opportunities are endless with this, and it's really exciting to be part of it.
John Arnold
Absolutely. Could not agree more. Well, I want to thank you again so much, Bex, for jumping in for this conversation.
Rebecca Lewis
Thank you so much.
John Arnold
I want to give a special shout out to the entire Content Community of Practice and our leadership sponsor, Caitlin Gardner. She's the senior manager of KBR Global Communications. You all are amazing. Big thanks to our producer, Emma, for helping get this episode out the door as always. And many thanks to our listeners. If you like what you heard today or loved a past episode, or if you have an idea for a future episode, let us hear about it by emailing inorbit@kbr.com. And we know you've got a lot of different things vying for your attention. We appreciate you checking in with us and keeping us in your orbit. Take care.