Posts Tagged ‘organizational communication’

Interpersonal Communication Styles & Managing Conflict

(Just so you know in advance, there’s a contest at the end of this post.  If you want to play, please keep reading…) Yesterday, I met with Sarah’s organization, LifeCare Alliance, to discuss how I might be able to help them get things going on a few projects.  Just so you know, LifeCare won’t be a paying client of mine.  They have a great mission, helping hordes of people in and around the Columbus community and, frankly, Sarah has already paid their bill in supporting me throughout the start-up months of Social Business Strategies. It’s funny to me to admit this, but I found out during the meeting that I barely made eye contact with Sarah.  Rather, I focused on engaging with the people she brought to the table.  I stayed professional, but it was almost involuntary.  It was like some subliminal force kept my communication style in professional mode so, at all costs, I could avoid the perception of a potential conflict of interest. What’s most interesting to me was the conversation Sarah and I had while preparing dinner that evening: (Generally paraphrased) Me:  So how do you think it went?  The meeting, that is.  Was it okay? Sarah:  I thought it went well.  Everyone seemed to be open to the ideas.  But seriously, how come you don’t talk like that when we’re at home? Me:  What do you mean? Sarah:  You were so calm and collected!  You never interrupted anyone.  You listened really intently, and I could tell you were considering what everyone had to say.  Even your voice was more calm! Me:  Really?  I was that much different? Sarah:  I was starting to wonder what happened to my fiance?  If you’d been kidnapped and replaced or something. Interpersonal Communication Style & Conflict Our relationships and the level of closeness have a tendency to alter our style [...]

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7 Outcomes of Organizational Communication & Social Media – A Draft Framework

We seem to have been trained to lump all social media into the bucket of marketing and external communication.  Why is that? I believe that our gravitation towards looking at social media as only a new set of marketing tools has been largely driven by advertising and marketing agency’s quick adoption of them.  Their inrerest, largely driven by potential revenue streams to replace what is no longer working as well as before (like television, for instance), has shifted our paradigm accordingly. For this conversation, let’s shift the paradigm in a new direction.  Will you stand with me while we look at things from the inside out? What about organizational communication?  If social media is essentially a set of new communication tools where sending AND receiving messages is of high importance, where else can we apply the technology?  Even more important, what are the outcomes we should be focused on if we are to use social media inside our organizations?  How can we be better communicators through this technology? Speaking of Outcomes I have to give a hat tip to Jason Baer.  I stumbled across him via Twitter back in January and since that time, he’s become a key influencer in how I see the social media landscape.  The rest of this post was heavily influenced by his post and model discussing 5 Ways to Use Social Media (externally).  Jason is recommending that marketers (external communicators) stay focused on an outcome-driven approach to using social media, rather than on the luster of the shiny technology tools.  He goes as far as to argue that the term “social media” has become almost meaningless.  I agree with him, and recommend that you go back to that link and check out his model. This is what I believe is the other half of the [...]

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