Navigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Lulu Cheng Meservey was formerly head of comms at Substack (where I host my newsletter and podcast) and is currently the Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer at Activision Blizzard. She also writes one of my favorite newsletters, “Flack,” where she shares tactical advice for company comms, PR, and messaging. In today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of PR and comms. We discuss why taking risks is crucial, how to gain attention as an underdog, and why it’s important to have a super-specific audience. Lulu outlines several frameworks I’d never heard of before, including a concentric circles framework for identifying your audience, the cultural erogenous zones, and even a physics-based framework for comms.
Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/navigating-comms-and-pr-lulu-cheng-meservey-substack-activision-blizzard/#transcript
Where to find Lulu Cheng Meservey:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lulumeservey
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulu-cheng-meservey/
• Newsletter: https://www.getflack.com/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
Referenced:
• “Binders full of women”: Mitt Romney’s four words that alienated women voters: https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/oct/17/binders-full-of-women-romneys-four-words
• Bill Bishop’s newsletter on Substack: https://www.sinocism.com/
• Hamish McKenzie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie
• The Network State: How to Start a New Country: https://www.amazon.com/Network-State-How-Start-Country-ebook/dp/B09VPKZR3G
• How to increase virality: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/increasing-virality
• Ryan Petersen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/typesfast
• Brian Armstrong on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong
• Palmer Luckey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey
• Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/
• NYX: https://www.nyxcosmetics.com/
• Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae: https://www.amazon.com/Gates-Fire-Novel-Battle-Thermopylae/dp/055338368X
• The Last of Us on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us
• Notion: https://www.notion.so/
• Lex: https://lex.page/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Lulu’s background
(04:36) What helps an idea spread
(06:17) Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”
(07:19) Advice for coming up with contagious phrasing
(08:36) Lulu’s esoteric reference that left her Twitter followers confused
(11:08) The importance of taking risks, and Lulu’s thread on standing for free speech
(12:53) An example of another sticky phrase
(14:40) The cultural erogenous zones framework
(16:08) How Kamala Harris made people care about education
(17:29) How to get attention as the underdog
(20:25) How Substack used the concentric circles framework to spread information
(21:32) Understanding the layers in those concentric circles
(25:44) How to get started figuring out your concentric circles
(27:03) An example of aligning messaging with people’s values
(28:19) Lulu’s mathematical formula framework for comms for a purpose
(28:54) A physics-based framework for comms
(35:56) How Balaji Srinivasan used the concentric circles approach with his book The Network State
(39:46) The importance of a super-specific audience
(41:12) Reasons your comms are failing
(42:40) Why you should focus on one direct communication channel at first
(46:58) Why not every founder needs to be on Twitter
(48:02) Who LinkedIn works better for
(49:23) Examples of messaging with a human voice and hopping on trends quickly
(51:11) Reasons for direct comms
(53:52) How to get started setting up a direct channel
(56:09) Why consistent, good content is better than trying to go viral
(59:28) Lightning round
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I often say to find your audience's cultural erogenous zones. |
| 0:06.6 | So what it means is people have things |
| 0:10.1 | that they either care about or don't, |
| 0:12.0 | and you're not gonna to change that. So it's a huge lift to try to |
| 0:17.6 | change someone's worldview or their passions. It's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape |
| 0:26.9 | it into to fit into their worldview or their passions. There's not always a fit. |
| 0:33.4 | There's going to be people who are just not your natural audience and you should know that and |
| 0:37.1 | not waste your time. |
| 0:38.8 | But if your natural audience cares about X and you're offering Y, then it's your job to create sort of the |
| 0:45.2 | API, right, or to create the bridge from X to Y. It's not with messaging, it's not |
| 0:50.4 | build it and they will come. It is so hard and you'd have to be super-humanly gifted to the |
| 0:57.5 | extent that I can't recall seeing in my entire life where you create a message and a story so powerful that someone who didn't care at all before suddenly makes that their passion. |
| 1:06.2 | It's so much easier to take what they're passionate about and understand it and then convince them that if they care about that, |
| 1:12.0 | then they should care about your thing because of this |
| 1:14.8 | connection. |
| 1:15.8 | Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. |
| 1:27.6 | Today my guest is Lulu Missouri. I met Lulu while she was head of Combs at Substack, where she was infamous for taking big risks and bold stands, |
| 1:36.4 | and as a result creating a lot of attention for Substack and other companies she's represented. |
| 1:41.2 | Lulu is definitely the most innovative and interesting Compsperson I've worked with. |
| 1:45.6 | She's currently Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer |
| 1:50.2 | at Activation Blizzard, and she writes what I'd say is the best newsletter on PR |
| 1:54.8 | and Com Strategy newsletter called Black. In our conversation we get tactical |
... |
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