Watching and reading about the current negotiations on the fiscal cliff is reinforcing my belief that everything in life, including politics, centers on communication. The Washington Post ran an article this week, “Moral values and the fiscal cliff” in which the authors delineated how “Sharing moral commitments helps teams to function cohesively, but it also […]
PowerPoint alone doesn’t cut it anymore. We are too social and interconnected now. Sure, we still see projected presentations at conferences and in lecture halls, but audiences are demanding more interactivity, and Twitter feeds aren’t cutting it. Webinar tools were a start to interactive presentations. WebEx, GoToMeeting, and such, allow people to see presentations anywhere […]
Building rapport is important for communication. Starting a conversation with small talk surfaces commonalities that exist. Finding commonalities gives people a better ground upon which to communicate. But, as of late the trend has gone to the extreme. There is an epidemic of oversharing. Bloomberg BusinessWeek article “Enough with the Enemas: Why People Overshare at […]
I hear from many leaders that a key to good leadership is asking questions. I find this advice worthwhile in and of itself, since many want-to-be-leaders tend to talk more than listen. I also desire more. I want advice that is more to be actionable. So I have set about gathering advice on just what […]
This summer’s special supplement to the Atlantic reads, “The Dialogue Economy, Social Media and the Marketplace” and contains multiple stories on how the power has shifted to the consumer and how companies are learning to engage with customers in dialogue. The magazine has many examples of how the Internet has changed the relationship between those […]
I confess to texting someone in the same room. It can be more efficient and feel less intrusive than interrupting the activity in the room. But, according to Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at MIT and author, these bits of technology use to replace conversation are adding up to trouble. In the New York […]
Seems to be a trend that companies are realizing people need space – both mental and physical – in order to put forth the creative work required for the 21st century American innovation economy. The business section of the New York Times explored this concept in two articles on Sunday. The first “When Technology Overwhelms, […]
Gopi Kallayil, Product Marketing Manager at Google, called the smart phone the 79th organ of the body. At the Wisdom 2.0 Conference he depicted the smart phone as humanesque, with ears, eyes, voice, and brain, and claimed it is being used as a tool for collective consciousness. Gopi gave examples of people all over the […]
SlideRocket recently sent me this e-book on The Secrets of Compelling Presentation Design. It was worth the read and a good reminder of some of my favorite tips. Keep it Simple – your background, fonts, content should all be straightforward so your audience can easily assimilate information Use Images – a picture is really worth […]
Thanks to EF and NetApp for the invitation to the Silicon Valley Philanthropy Day awards luncheon. It was inspirational to hear from so many organizations and people who are making significant changes in our community through their philanthropic efforts. Leah Toeniskoetter was awarded Outstanding Volunteer Fundraiser for her work with Valley Medical Center Foundation. An […]
I watched the Vator Splash SF presentations through two lenses. The first was that of a technology enthusiast, always wanting to learn what bright people are inventing. The second was that of a communication expert, curious about how entrepreneurs are presenting. Through the first lens, I saw some interesting technology. The People’s Choice Winner was […]
Billionaire Vinod Khosla doesn’t want to be called a venture capitalist. And that is news. Both the Wall Street Journal and Forbes ran a blurb on this fact. Now that is good PR. “Call him a visionary for his role co-founding Sun Microsystems Inc. Call him a rainmaker for his prescient investments in companies like Juniper Networks while […]
As a university teacher, a lover of technological advances, and a communication scholar, the notion of 58,000 students participating in a free online course enthrals me. Today’s NY Times article, “Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course” describes how Peter Norvig and SebastianThrun are offering a course on artificial intelligence this fall through Stanford. Anybody, […]
Here is a quick presentation on how you can create more visual presenations. Download TipsVisualPresentationsJuly2011
We all know intuitively that communication is an important aspect of medical care. Each of us can recall experiences where a doctor did a good or bad job communicating with us. For me, the bad job was in the ER just before my mom was diagnosised with colon cancer when I was literally arguing with […]
Harvard Business Review did a short blurb on reserach by Emily Moyer-Guse of Ohio State and Robin Nabi of UC Santa Barbara showing that a narrative is an effective form of persuasion. The research study had 367 undergraduates view either a narrative or a non-narrative, news-style program about teenage pregnancy. Those who saw the narrative […]
When you want to get somebody to change an attitude, belief, value, or behavior — happens just about every day — you need to employ the art of persuasion. A quote from a student of mine: “Thus, to change a person’s view, their belief or their actions is to slide through their ears and into […]
Speech recognition technology has come a long way. I now use Dragon Dictation on my iPhone to send texts to others. It is as least as accurate as my touch typing. It is refreshing to have a different way to interface with technology. The future holds yet another way to interface — with our eyes. […]
At the recent Western States Communication Association (WSCA) Conference two panels “Social Networking and Beyond: Computer Mediated Communication and Community” and “Relational Communication and Social Networks” contained interesting research on how people are using social networking. The overarching theme is that people are using social networking as a means of simultaneously forming and communicating their […]
As an individual who prefers the spoken word over the written word, I have been longing for the day when I could have my eloquent phrases automatically turned into flowing text. When working on my master’s thesis a few years back, I purchased iListen for Mac in hopes of typing less. After 5 or 6 […]
Technology can be turned off. That is a reminder from Sherry Turkle director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self from a USA Today article, “2010: The year technology replaced talking“. According to the article “Americans are connected at unprecedented levels — 93% now use cellphones or wireless devices; one-third of those are “smartphones” […]
80,000 hours of video and 120,000 hours of audio recording. That is the massive amount of data collected by MIT Media Lab‘s Human Speechome Project to analyze how one child learns to speak. You can see a visual of the data on Forbes.com to get a feel for how words are gained over time. Just […]
Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs has announced an application called immersive communications that combines physical, virtual, and augmented reality into one. Forbes covered the story in Bell Labs’ Super Virtual Conferencing. The idea is that geographically dispersed people on a variety of mobile devices can have a virtual conference in which they all appear and sound to […]
Neurology is now being applied to persuading others through communication. The NYT article, “Ads that Whisper to the Brain” reveals techniques used to discover what activates the human brain when somebody watches a commercial. Researches use electroencephalographs (EEGs) to measure brain waves that become more active when people have heightened attention to determine if they […]
If you watch yourself in a virtual mirror as an attractive avatar for 90 seconds, you will stand closer to other virtual beings and be more confident about your own looks in filling out an online data application. What happens in virtual reality, effects reality. This I learned from a very interesting lecture video by […]
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country,” he said. “But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves […]
I am probably more easily amused by communication quirks than others, but this is entertaining. The San Jose Mercury news article on Adobe’s stock climbing on news of a secret meeting with Microsoft, explains that the companies are ‘frenemies.’ “Both Microsoft and the San Jose maker of expensive graphic design and Internet software are “frenemies” […]
In this Forbes article on The Cross-Generation Workforce, the digital disparity of generations is highlighted as an issue in the workforce. I completely agree that as tech-savvy graduates enter the workforce that issues around technology use will need to be resolved. The article puts forth some good suggestions on how IT departments can address the […]
A crisis communication situation is never fun and always complicated. Over the years, I have done my best to help clients in crisis navigate the waters. This NYT article In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do is an excellent overview of the common crisis communication strategies as applied to BP, Toyota, and Goldman Sachs. […]
Time is money. Something I learned just as I entered adulthood. I remember my first UCSD economics class and a graph that pitted time against money. The professor asked us students to put ourselves on the graph based on our own values — which was more important time or money? “It’s Free Only if Your […]
The NY Times SundayBusiness section ran an article titled, “Merely Human? So Yesterday” about the Singularity Movement. Singularity, according to this article, is ” a time, possibly just a few decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our […]
This month’s issue of Communication Currents covers the topic of bullying. Often bullying is thought of as a physical offense, but more often than not it is a communication offense. And, communication is always required to solve the problem. The article points out how prevalent the problem is in schools and organizations. It also addresses […]
There is a new feature in Office 2010 that I can’t wait to try. It is called Broadcast Slideshow and it allows you to create a link to your presentation so others can watch it via the Internet. Brent Whichel of Office.411.com explains the feature in this video. I think of the number of times […]
That is the question on many social scientists and communication scholars minds. When people use social networks and texting, does it hinder their ability to communicate in person? Are these technologies making us more social or less social? It is not clear how the rise in instant, computer-mediated communication will change the nature of social […]
The New York Times did a story, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint” about the military’s use or misuse of the presentation tool. As is common, the tool is blamed for horrible presentations that result. While I do not agree with the belief that PowerPoint makes you stupid and it is the […]
The Forbes article “How to Track a Cheating Spouse” is one way to find out if your mate is being faithful. Being that I am all about communication, I prefer the direct communication route. If you ask your spouse to their face if they are sleeping with someone else, chances are you will be able […]