How can I tell a great speaker?

Well, I am guessing we might not all agree on what makes a great speaker. But I doubt anyone would vote against Majora Carter, speaking here at Technology Entertainment Design's conference in February 2006. After you've seen the talk, or maybe before, read Guy Kawasaki's deconstruction of the talk that describes why he thinks she's so effective. One way to learn is by using the example of other effective speakers. I think she's pretty inspiring.

Writing Good EMail

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to leave email in my "in" box for future reference. The mail software I use for my personal account, Thunderbird, makes it easy to sort messages by sender, so I can find messages, and the mail server I use for work, Gmail, allows search by any text string, so I can find most mail that way. But when I am scanning a list of mail from a single person, it sure helps if the message titles are meaningful. This is one of the tips mentioned in this excellent article at Office Watch about creating good email. By the way, that site is full of good information about a range of software subjects - The Office for Mere Mortals section describes how to do any number of things in Office that you might find useful: working with Watermarks in Word, for example.

And in the meantime, make sure your email titles mean something. "Check it out" is not as useful as "Picture of the Recent Blizzard."

The persistence of words and the power of search engines

Jon Carroll's excellent column from today's San Francisco Chronicle points out that in the world in which we now live, even your most monumental blunders are easily and trivially preserved. He mentions a word coined in the past year, Googleschaden. Here's his definition: "Googleschaden refers to the feeling you experience when you google people and find, deep within their pronouncements and predictions, blunders of monumental proportions." It is, of course, based on the fine word we have from German, schadenfreude, which essentially means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. The modern twist is that with a search engine, it's not difficult to uncover a web page, even an obscure one, where facts and words are posted. This is worth remembering as you write about your day in a blog or personal site. Here's an article from the NY Times showing how online words can affect your business life in unintended ways. Remember, there are even web sites dedicated to preserving pages no longer available on the web, so posting and deleting may not be good enough.

Adding Visual Punch

A picture is worth a thousand words, according to the old proverb. Many times we can show with an image what we cannot adequately describe with text. Good visuals can also break up text to make a report easier to read and digest. Check out this excellent collection of different kinds of visuals that you can use. Run your mouse over each block to see examples. There is a lot of content here, so if you are on a slow connection, give the file a little while to load.

Take a Deep Breath, Count to Ten

Is business communication suffering from hastiness? That would be the claim in this article about how communication is changing. The examples noted are mostly of emails fired off in haste, but the consequences are alarming: everything from a one day 22 point stock drop to a some very bad press. The solutions suggested by the author are nothing new or fancy, just a return to the basics: focus on the audience, practice good writing skills, be sure to edit and proofread your work before you hit the send button. But you knew that, didn't you?

Who's on your top ten list?

One way to communicate better is to borrow ideas from good communicators. Here's communications coach Bert Decker's list of the ten best (and the ten worst) communicators of the year. Barack Obama tops the list of the ten best; Nancy Grace tops the list of the worst. Think about who would make your top ten list, and try to figure out what they do right.