Going back to communication basics
There is no other accomplishment a person can have that will make a career and secure recognition as quickly as the ability to communicate. As such, there is no doubt that you aim to be a better communicator whether you are a government official, a company president, a technical person, a physician, a social worker or a student because you agree that great communication is key to success. Your ability to create ideas and having them fly go hand in hand. As Lee Iacocca said, “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”
When you are aggravated or obstructed by something at home or at work, better communication can be your major if not only tool to get out of the rut. If you are a new head or manager who walks into a meeting for the first time, your every move is observed and scrutinized how you dress, how you sit, how you cross your legs, how you talk and what your tone is, and how you present or make comments. Of course, not every situation will be apparent, but your every situation will be observed. People will either try to truly understand your message, or maybe find fault.
Think about it. You communicate with your verbal or written word, your eyes, your body movements and facial expressions. They convey many things. You communicate with the tone of your voice, your head angles and hand gestures. You even communicate when you are silently praying, meditating, or getting in touch with your inner self. The fact that you cannot not communicate is a communication reality. Your every behavior is a form of communication, and any perceivable behavior, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by others as having some meaning.
This principle is excellently discussed in David Grossman’s book You Can’t Not Communicate. The title sounds like a tongue twister, and is seemingly ungrammatical, but the essence is clear and the logic is perfect. To be more effective and better understood, you first need to capture, embrace and nurture this fact, then take action to change your communications habits so you are able to communicate what you want to communicate, most of, if not all of, the time.
In the online world, you are your website or your blog spot. You communicate with visitors, who in turn may or may not communicate back. As can be expected, there can be breakdowns in the process either you didn’t catch and sustain the interest of those who visited, your strategy is wanting or your message doesn’t resonate. Offline, you may experience the same and may be confronted with even more serious reasons for the collapse of the process. In such cases, you should watch out for the following elements. Sure, they sound very basic, but the basics are what you should always take care of.
• Excess “me” talk. Your company, your accomplishments, your greatness or anything and everything about you this is a killer. People respond more effectively to propositions that talk about them, talk to them, and solve their problem. Messages that lack a strong customer focus will lose visitors quickly.
• Excessive jargon, gobbledygook and empty corporate speak. Read this: “Your company is poised on the edge of several strong vertical markets, and ready to leverage new media and web 2.0 technologies to blow away existing old world dynamics and surge forward with new synergies and exciting, action-driven initiatives.” Do you talk this way? Would your audience like being talked to in this way?
Perhaps you would be better off saying, “We like all the new technology out there and are looking forward to incorporating social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and using audio and video on the web to allow us to communicate with our visitors better.”
• How you care for your messages. Be an excellent writer, but if you feel inadequate in this area, hire an excellent one who will work with you to craft your stories, your website’s copy, improve if not perfect your tonality and attitude and, most importantly, make sure that your grammar and spelling are consistent and correct.
• Unwarranted typefaces. You can refer to two other books to help you on the appropriate use of this communication element Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How Type Works and Designing with Type. You should like fonts and typefaces because both are important to communication. Some typefaces convey trust, while others can suggest doubt. Experts in this area will tell you that if you are doing a layout for print or the web, you should use no more than three typefaces at a time one for the main headline, one for the copy and one for subheadings.
There are other essentials you should watch out for, but to improve your subconscious communication, it would help to regularly review the basics of the communication process what you say, how you say it, how you look, and what you don’t say. With these components in mind, there are at least four areas you can always revisit to do your communication job better: awareness of the pervasiveness of your communication, vigilance on how you pay attention to your communication styles in relation to your publics’ needs and reactions, your feedback mechanism, and how you prepare your plan.
Technology is likewise changing the communication landscape fast, but you will always find yourself going back to basics to make things really work. As basketball legend Michael Jordan says, “You have to monitor your fundamentals constantly because the only thing that changes will be your attention to them. The fundamentals will never change.”
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E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
