Cracking the code on corporate visibility

by Tom Johnson on Mar 8, 2026
categories: technical-writing • ai

Back in 2019 I wrote a post titled A hypothesis on how to exert more influence and visibility inside the corporation in which I said:

One of the paradoxes of my career is to be recognized as a thought leader and influencer on the web among tech comm circles but to feel relatively insignificant and invisible at my place of work. In other words, to be a blogebrity online among the tech comm crowd, but to just be a nameless commoner at work with everyone else. This year I’d like to fix that … somehow.

I hypothesized that if I were to write internally about the customer audience, it might be a common throughpoint that would make the content relevant to many different roles.

Well, that never worked well for me because I’m not in a position to understand customer pain points and frictions like partner engineering groups (who regularly meet with customers). However, I did sort of figure out how to achieve corporate visibility, at least within tech comm.

At my work we have a regular AI education group for tech writers. We call it “AI for Authors.” There are various subgroups (Education, Outreach, Tools, Metrics, Best Practices, etc.). I’m leading the Education subgroup. As part of this subgroup, we provide biweekly lunch and learn sessions (held at noon for an hour), usually featuring a specific presenter and topic. We included all tech writers in the company in our group in a common mailing list, so every time I send out a message on this list, it goes to all the tech writers at my company.

Attendance at the lunch and learns varies but fluctuates between 50 to 90 people every time. As I’ve been managing these lunch and learn sessions now for over a year, frequently advertising them to the group, following up with recordings and slides, etc., as well as other educational offerings, I’ve become much more visible. Additionally, I’ve given several of these lunch-and-learn sessions myself.

It’s odd because even before our AI for Authors group existed, I had my own little ragtag band of AI-enthusiast tech writers for over a year. Every two weeks I would produce my own agenda, topics, etc., and about 4-5 other tech writers would participate. Another person was doing something similar with another audience. Granted, these groups were much less formal and more discussion-oriented. One day someone with more organization and directional clout said hey, let’s join forces and make a central group, rather than having so many independent ones all pursuing similar goals. We stopped our small AI groups and consolidated efforts into “AI for Authors.”

This turned out to be a great move. The project leads are extremely well organized and have put much bandwidth into different workstreams and efforts, including producing polished websites full of resources, outreach groups, internal courses, newsletters, extensive guides, and more. I’m able to continue functioning in the education role without taking on a more significant effort (it’s all a side hobby from my real job).

Anyway, I didn’t realize this at the time, and I have never sought it, but it turns out that leading the tech comm AI educational efforts at a big tech company that includes a lot of tech writers is quite a visibility boost. Just like the visibility online has opened doors at many companies, I’m hoping that this internal visibility provides similar rewards.

Just to make it clear: I’m not a self-aggrandizing or egoistical person. I couldn’t care less about being recognized or noticed. However, I’m not naive in understanding that there are some strategic benefits to visibility.

Consider the benefits of my visibility online. When you think about API docs, who comes to mind? I’m probably somewhere on the radar for that. Even though there are hundreds of highly intelligent API documentation tech writers all over the globe, people know me. It’s probably similar with AI, though not as much. People know and recognize me as a tech writing AI expert.

This visibility comes because I’ve written so much about both of these topics (AI and APIs) that I’ve saturated the web when it comes to the intersection of AI and APIs with technical communication. It’s routine now that if I kick off a Deep Research with Gemini query for something related to technical writing, there’s a high likelihood that my site appears in the list of sources consulted. I recognize that this produces a bit of an echo chamber, as now AI is telling me partly what I already told it, but it’s also reassuring to know that my online presence is having an impact on the content AI generates.

In some ways I want to shape that AI-generated content. You’ll notice that I’ve been pushing augmentation and acceleration narratives rather than replacement (duh) and other tech-writer stories around AI. I could probably do much more, to be honest. But that’s somewhat beside my point.

My point is that I’ve unlocked corporate visibility (at least among tech writers) by doing the same thing I’ve done with my blog: provide content to large numbers of people on a regular basis. You can do the same thing. Start an education group focused on AI and tech comm (your company will love this, trust me). Subscribe (by invite, preferably) every tech writer in your company to the group. Then produce biweekly lunch and learns regularly for at least a year, if not two years.

That longevity is surely the trick to making this work. I started my blog back in 2006, and I’ve been posting regularly to it ever since. That’s 20 years of writing regular blog posts. Do you know many posts that is? How many words? I’m not sure, but looking at my date-based archives, /all/, there are more than 3,000 posts and probably more than a million words. Had I been more book-minded, I’m sure I could have written at least one book in that time. But apparently the book format isn’t one that comes to me easily. (I applaud those who do write books, though.)

What I find odd is that so many technical writers — people who identify as writers, as wordsmith people, as creatives working in tech — don’t blog. Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti has also written about this question, in Let’s blog more about technical writing, wondering why more people don’t blog and encouraging people to do so. I’ve also wondered about it too, though my wondering phase took place about a decade ago. I eventually shrugged my shoulders and just kept writing. I realized that I must personally have an itch to write, having a background in nonfiction creative writing.

Perhaps because there are so few tech comm bloggers, I’ve been the recipient of even more visibility due to their absence. I would struggle to name more than a dozen tech writing blogs that have consistent content that I could count on from month to month. (See the tech writing blogring for a list of some blogs.)

I would also be selling myself short, though, by assuming that everyone who starts a technical writing blog has content worth reading. I’ve read many blogs and quickly started skimming or clicking elsewhere due to lack of interest. (Maybe you’re doing the same here, sigh.) But writing a post is actually kind of an art, and not something that is without effort.

Writing blog posts engages a different part of the brain than writing tech docs. Just as there are plenty of authors, and only some books are worth reading, it’s also the same with blogs. For sure, probably most of my posts aren’t worth reading. But some are — often the ones that are worth reading might speak to different people at different times. Some of my favorite posts are ones that almost no one cares about (like Using curiosity to decenter). Anyway, this is my humble attempt to say that it’s not enough to blog; you actually have to produce interesting content.

All right, let me wrap this up. Visibility is an asset. I’m an introvert who doesn’t even like eating lunch with other people on a regular basis, so visibility isn’t something I’m looking for. Visibility just happens when you find yourself creating content (whether blog posts online, or internal lunch-and-learns at your company). That visibility can open doors, move you up career ladders, and (crossing my fingers here) help me tip the scales in my favor the next time people start choosing who to keep and who to eject. This technique can work for you, too. Do what you enjoy — create content, and share it with people. Keep doing it.