Good morning 👋
Hope you’re keeping well lately 🙂
I’ve been working in the communications industry for over seven years now, and I think that we all have to be more honest with each other. This is something I am going to start in today’s blog.
Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!
If you’re unfamilar with what working in communications means, don’t worry, let me explain quickly:
Communications is the creation, management and distribution of messaging from one party to another. Say you watch the news every morning, that’s a form of broadcast communication. Say you check social media, that’s another form, receive an email, get a phone call, see a story about a business or anything else – that’s communication, created by somebody who typically works in the communications industry (or comms for short).
Following the Welsh Social Media Conference last year, Social Media Conference Cymru 2025, a couple of us stayed behind to have a chat. We were chatting about all sorts; however, one theme kept coming up:
Mental health and wellbeing in comms, and how we’re really feeling.
It’s a chat that I’ve been having a lot lately, as I’ve been speaking to people from all over the comms world, and is one that I firmly believe we need to make more space for in our lives 🙌
The comms space has changed so much over the last few years, whether that’s:
🤯 Burnout, information overload, or differing expectations around what people’s roles actually are (when budgets get tight, the first thing typically to go, be reduced or fundamentally changed is marketing – for better or worse)
😅 Redundancies, workload pressures, and the evolving role of social – including how we even define Marketing Return on Investment (MROI).
🙃 Managing multiple platforms, trying to switch off from social or the debate between quantity vs quality of messaging.
I’m not going to pretend that I have all the answers to these things; I don’t.
Nobody has, and that’s a part of the point.
My aim with this post, and what I want to do more of this year, is to get people reflecting, and to encourage more of these conversations in everyday life. While we may work in different countries, industries or job roles, remember: you’re never alone. We can all make a difference in this.
By talking more, in open conversations such as this, we get to share what’s working, what’s not, suggest ways to improve things, and generally, remind ourselves why we love working in this field. There is such a power in storytelling, it’s why I love doing what I do, and it’s something that, no matter what the future has in store, isn’t going to change.
We’ll figure it out. It may take a little time, and it may not be on our first run of trying, but gradually, things will start to make sense. I strongly believe that, and am going to be doing what I can to make it a reality.
So, all that’s left to say for this blog is, how are you really doing recently?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you’d like to see more blogs like this moving forward 😊
Thanks for reading and I hope you’re having a lovely day!
James
Sweeney's Blogs 