3 posts tagged communication

The abundance of opportunities to communicate in social media can be the medium’s greatest curse. Abundance means brands don’t consider their actions the way they do elsewhere where a scarcity demands a clear justification for participation. The result? Low-effort, but low-value communications that are a lot like white bread: cheap, easy and not particularly good for you. The fact is that brands can do better. They can eat whole wheat (even if it doesn’t taste as good).

In my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making. I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I’d write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night.

The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order. We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.

A knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating – meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks. Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done. And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.