Communicate through technology

Just thinking about the quote I gave from Les Potter (Tues 6 Mar) about not making assumptions when communicating. Oops looks like I’ve done just that. You may have thought I assumed you all knew about blogs. My apologies – I had some information (very light weight) on blogs on the power point slides. I’ll remember NEVER to include blank slides in my presentations again – it was the blank that lead me to think I had finished. Boy… is this confusing!

Anyway the slides basically said that blogs – a word that has evolved from weblogs – is an easy to publish website. There are millions of them – one figure says around 80 million and growing every day – but not as many business blogs. An article in the SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) about a month ago claimed that no CEO in Australia was blogging. Since things move quickly, that may not be true anymore.

The blog benefits are:

• no IT professionals needed
• easy to update
• easy to communicate to many
• low cost
• get customer/readers feedback quickly

You do need some time to write your blog, and time to read and respond to comments. A passion for communicating helps as well as an ability to write in a conversational style. This can be a challenge for some. I have a friend who is ex-airforce and his conversation is like a finance meeting. I imagine this is somewhat ingrained now and so conversational style doesn’t have the same meaning for him as it does for me.

I encourage you to look at many blogs to get a feel for the different ‘conversational’ styles. In general, the style can be characterised as more casual, certainly less formal than standard written communication materials.

Filed under: About blogs and