Mark Evans on Communications 101 in Today's Digitally Enabled World
When I first came onto the blogging scene a year ago at VON Canada 2006, one of the veteran bloggers who made me feel most welcome was Mark Evans, whose Mark Evans Tech has become widely cited for his insight into various technology business issues.
Emerging from his career as a reporter, Mark last fall became COO of b5media, a publisher of over 180 weblogs in 14 vertical channels. But, with a very geographically dispersed team (Canada, U.S. and Australia), b5media...
....epitomize[s] the border-less, work-anywhere corporation. We live and breadth of communication tools such as Skype, e-mail, the occasional phone call, and rare (but extremely valuable) physical gatherings of the entire team. As a result, we are - for the most part - a digital communications company.
With this background and Mark's personality as a people-person, he often finds himself challenged to use the appropriate communications mode for a particular business or social activity in context. And Skype, with its voice, IM, video and file transfer tools provides a key piece of their communications infrastructure. As a result he has described, in a benchmark post entitled Communications 10: How to Communicate Better, his approach on how to use different tools to communicate effectively.
Note: It’s important to be clear there is a difference between having the “gift of the gab” and communicating well. This post is driven, in part, by my personal goal to become a better communicator.
Note II: I’m reading a book called “The Simplicity Survival Handbook”, which offers many tools/techniques to communicate better, including a suggestion that the key to writing shorter, better e-mails is a system called CLEAR: connected (how does it impact current projects and workload); list next steps, expectations (set ‘em), ability (how will things get done), return (what’s in it for me).....
In Person: By far, the most effective and powerful way to communicate. The ability to read body language, facial expressions, intonation, etc. makes person-to-person communications work and work well. It can also change the tone of a relationship. Think about how a long e-mail or phone call relationship took on a new dynamic after you met someone in person for the first time. You may never meet that person again but the relationship will always be warmer, more comfortable…and, well, better.
Phone Calls: Obviously, it’s not possible to meet every single person you do business with given the global nature of today’s working world. But a phone call can also be a very effective tool because voice carries many different messages beyond here’s what I’m saying. Voice conveys happiness, frustration, anger, exasperation, laughter, etc. Like meeting someone in person, a phone call offers an opportunity for people to offer nuances and details that are difficult, if not impossible, to do when you write an e-mail of IM. Phone calls also offer insight into someone’s personality as well as their ability to communicate on the fly. Even though Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone more than 100 years ago, it remains an amazing communications tool.Video-Conferencing/video phones: The magic tool that could bridge in-person meetings and phone calls. Of course, we’ve been talking about video-conferencing for years without much traction happening but maybe the rise of online video will start to change things.
E-mail: The so-called “killer app” of the Web is an amazing way to communicate but it’s also a challenging medium to use effectively (It doesn’t help that bad grammar, and the use of acronyms and emoticons have become rampant within e-mail) But if if you want to send short messages, documents, photographs, music and videos, there’s no better tool than e-mail, which is why billions of them are sent every day. But there’s a danger of over-using/over-depending on e-mail. For example, there are many companies where people are e-mailing the person in the cubicle beside them!
For many people, e-mail become their default communications tool. Most people now send long e-mails rather than deliver the same message in a minute or two on the phone. Why? I’m not sure whether we’ve become lazy, or they’re far too enamored with the convenience of digital communications, or maybe e-mail lets you say what want you want without having to listen to someone else (which is not always a bad thing).Instant-Messaging: The bastard-child of e-mail. Good for quick questions and answers but arguably little else from a corporate perspective. For teenagers, SMS is another beast entirely.
Maybe my approach to communications reflects the fact I’m not a digital child under the age of 25. Maybe I’m an analog dinosaur, desperately clinging to antiquated communication tools. But I do think digital communications is far from perfect, and people who rely extensively on e-mail and SMS today aren’t communicating as effectively as they can. Sure, they’re communicating but it’s communications-lite.
I’m certainly not suggesting we abandon e-mail and IM, which would be a big mistake because they can be valuable and extremely useful tools. But I do think that we can communicate better, and that stepping away from the keyboard is a good way to start. So rather than e-mail or IM someone, why not meet them for coffee/beer or, at least, give them a call?
Food for thought as Skype and similar services become part of our everyday personal and business lifestyle. And thanks to Mark for permission to quote his post so extensively.
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