Saturday, January 28, 2012

Is everything dead, except communication?

Yes.

Can you tell I'm fed up with doomsday headlines? For heaven's sake folks, newspapers are dead, Google+ is dead, e-mail marketing is dead, Facebook's barely breathing or maybe it's just sold its soul in anticipation of a going-out-with-style IPO. Oh, and today's teens are never going to learn how to talk to each other, thanks to that damn texting fad.

Communication isn't dead, folks. A hundred years ago (or so) when I was in J-school (when we still called it J-school, and OSU's J-school was still accredited) I was taught that breaking through "the clutter" and making sure your message was carefully targeted and repeated (nine times - seriously, that's what my notes say) was the only way to communicate because we suffered from such ungodly information overload.

That was before Al Gore invented the internet. When, if you said something off-mic, but the mic was really on, it probably took, like, three days for the story to make the rounds.

Journalism is changing, like everything else, and communication isn't dead. Those who give up on communicating, however, will die. To be clear, please know that I'm talking about businesses, not people.

Decide what your message is. Figure out who needs to hear it. And share your news. Then repeat it. Nine times.

The tools have changed, but good communication really hasn't gone up in smoke.



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