Inside Walmart’s digital strategy

Such is the case with Walmart, a brand that has battled countless rumors about the way it treats its employees, customers and the communities it serves.

“We know what the stories are,” Chad Mitchell, senior director of digital communications at Walmart, told a captive audience at Ragan’s Social Media Conference for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications on March 28. “When you employ 2.3 million people and have 11,000 stores, you’re bound to have vulnerabilities.”

Here are their takeaways:

1. Create a functional structure.

Internal communications is dead. Or, if it isn’t, it will be soon, Mitchell said.

Internal communications messages tend to be known as the boring stuff, like emails about the parking lot getting repaved. Though that information is important in its own way, what employees really want to hear are the stories you share externally.

That’s why Mitchell and Kneeshaw’s teams work together to do what they call “eternal” (external and internal) communication. External and internal communications teams often want to tell the same stories, Mitchell said. By integrating the two, you avoid duplicating efforts and unnecessarily spending money.