There’s no question that Google has been a leader in designing the modern workplace experience — more casual, friendly spaces where workers feel comfortable to be creative and social without giving up their productivity. The company’s Real Estate and Workplace Services team is a key part of the magic behind these famous not-so-corporate workplaces around the world. With a focus on innovation and sustainability, their goal is to design vibrant work environments that help Googlers around the globe collaborate more effectively and respectfully integrate with the communities around them.
In the fall of 2021, the team faced a challenge of scaling their ability to support global teams with quick, ultra-effective content support, while ensuring a consistent tone of voice across all communication channels. Here’s how Google’s team tackled this objective by partnering with Prose.
The Google Real Estate team’s main challenge was keeping up with the volume of content that they needed to produce, since focusing on content creation sometimes got in the way of focusing on other priorities, such as driving content engagement. They wanted an agency partner that could hit the ground running on a variety of writing needs. These included understanding Google's tone of voice so that it could be consistently replicated across a variety of public-facing content, and translating complex, technical concepts into clear language that people could quickly understand and identify with.
“We needed Prose because they assign writing support almost immediately and meet quick deadlines on top of understanding our voice,” explains Joe Vandenorth, the team’s Head of Marketing.
The team decided to try working with us because Prose already had a strong reputation at Google. After explaining their need for a solid team of reliable, go-to content and communications experts, Prose briefed several proven creatives, including a former Google head of communications. They started with some simple collateral and quickly built a trusting relationship with Prose, which led to a variety of content creation and strategy projects. These include writing and editing blog posts, ghostwriting thought leadership essays, producing internal fact sheets about new properties, proofreading documents, and researching content for upcoming editorial initiatives.
Whether Prose writers are involved in the kick-off meeting for a long-term initiative, or brought in at the last minute to complete a project on a tight deadline, they have the flexibility and adaptability to quickly craft content that reflects Google’s tone and values.
To stay on top of projects and continually build familiarity, the Real Estate team has a standing weekly meeting with Prose and an open-door policy to reach out to their dedicated account manager and quickly tee up new projects.
“Prose works fast, delivers quality work, and brings professional writing rigor to everything they do,” says Joe.
“One of our initial projects together was proofreading a 250-page book before a tight print deadline. We worked closely with Prose to incorporate grammar and punctuation edits, while also finding opportunities to improve the flow of the content. This helped us deliver on a company moment to celebrate the expansion of our headquarters with a very dynamic book that captured about 10 years of insight from our design and construction teams. It’s been smooth sailing ever since.”
After partnering with Prose, the Google real estate team is able to flex and scale its writing support in a way that was not possible before. The team continues to produce a larger volume of narratives, freeing up more time to focus on strategy and stakeholder engagement across channels. The impact on speed and thought leadership is clear, with Prose delivering consistent, high-quality content that meets the team's rigorous standards.
The successful engagement between Google and Prose demonstrates the value of partnering with a professional content marketing agency to achieve business goals.
“Working with Prose has just been so easy,” says Joe. “And we’ve only tapped part of their capabilities, so we’re excited to continue to see where Prose can take us.”