Dahle Communication

My favorite posts from 2010

Two years ago I wanted to have a website up where I could talk about my ideas regarding communication. I've had a lot of ideas over those past two years and it is time for another year in review.

If you want a quick run-down of my thoughts on communication, you can take the abridged version and check out last years top posts list and then check out this years.

There were a lot of issues that I looked at over the past year, but these were my favorite:

Get off line to get some perspective - and work done. - Do we all spend far too much time on-line these days? It seems that sometimes we are so focused on keeping up to date with Twitter and Facebook that it kills some of our focus. I was off-line during the day for several days in a row and I got a lot accomplished in that time.

 

Is President Obama Speaking Too Much? - While I do think President Obama is a great public speaker, he seems to be on TV all of the time. At a certain point, saturation can get overwhelming - causing your effectiveness to decrease. In fact, the Decker blog once again put Obama on the top 10 worst speakers in 2010.

 

100 Posts! What's our focus been? - This was a fun post looking at what I had been talking about with my 100 posts since I had started my blog. Using Wordle to see what I was talking about was a great way to make sure I was focusing on the right things.

 

Are Super Bowl Ads Worth the Cost? Maybe, but what can we learn from them? - Super Bowl ads almost always have some very memorable ads each year. Is it worth the money spent? It depends on how effective it is.

Avoid making the big mistakes - what the Minnesota Vikings can teach us about public speaking - Being from South Dakota, I am surrounded by Vikings fans and saw the devastation of the fans when they lost the NFC championship game to the Saints. However, the mistakes that the Vikings made can also teach us a thing or two about presentations

 

Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr. and Style. - I loved the new Sherlock Holmes movie directed by Guy Ritchie and starting Robert Downey Jr. The style that was used is a great example of how changing up a style is a good way to give some new life to an old presentation.

 

Educators need some new branding. - This one is a bit personal for me since I am in education and my daughter wants to be a teacher. However, I think it brings up some interesting points on what educators need to do if they are going to be respected.

I Hate Public Speaking song. - I found this song and a lot of people really seemed to like it, so I wanted to make sure to include it here as well.

Know who you are following on Twitter - don't just use Keywords. Being on Twitter, I am used to people just following you at random times. However, I got really annoyed one weekend when I was being followed by a lot of wedding people because I had posted a couple of comments about the wedding I was at - the following post was my response to those people.

Native American Day versus Columbus Day. - This is an issue that I feel strongly about. In South Dakota, we celebrate Native American Day - the other 49 states - Columbus Day. Once I learned the entire history of Columbus and his treatment of Native Americans when he reached the new world, my thoughts on this matter got even stronger. What are your thoughts?

Should Obama become the Hulk? - This relates mostly to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and how Obama was responding to it. Our body language and voice inflections tell us a lot about how we are thinking and feeling. A lot of people felt that Obama needed to be a lot angrier at BP and felt that his attitude was far too light.

 

Foursquare Badges Tell Stories - Which One is Another Story. - I use FourSquare and I remember the old foursquare game. The badges can tell some stories that might not be what you want to be told.

 

 

Foursquare Badges Tell Stories - Which One Is Another Story

If you don't know what Foursquare is you are not alone. There are a little more than 3 million users currently on Foursquare. Now that is quite a jump from the 725,000 users in March, but it is still quite short of the 500 million users on Facebook.

What is Foursquare? Well, I am not talking about the game played on playgrounds with four squares and a ball, but a mobile application that "aims to encourage people to explore their neighborhoods and then reward people for doing so." If you visit a location often enough you can become the 'mayor' of the location. Some businesses are taking advantage of Foursquare and giving away things or offering a discount to those people who check-in to their location. For example, Granite City in Sioux Falls offers a free 20 oz beer to the mayor of Granite City.

Along with being a 'mayor' you can get 'badges' for going to certain locations, checking in a certain number of times or at certain times. While the badges can be fun, you have to be careful what you are saying to the rest of the world, because they can become a story unto themselves.

For example, there is the Bender badge - where if you check-in at locations four nights in a row. Or the Crunked badge - where you check in at 4 stops in one night. Now are all of those bars? Not sure, but what story is starting to develop if someone sees those badges? And really, do you want to broadcast that information to everyone out there?

While there are some articles that talk about privacy, you also want to be careful about sending mixed messages. While it might be fun to check-in everywhere and go over everything, make sure that you are not sending a mixed message to everyone (like getting a 'player please' badge when you are out on the town WITHOUT your significant other - didn't happen to me, I'm just saying). If you want to see a compiled list of badges, this website is doing a pretty good job of keeping it all up.

What you can take away from this as far as communication goes is a simple one: Communication is all about getting the right message out. If you don't have a clear message when you are speaking, people can get the wrong idea. When that happens, they will either be uninformed, misinformed or utterly confused. When that happens, your speech will suffer.

So make sure when you are writing and giving your speeches that you use language and images that are not going to have double meanings in them. Being clear, concise and unambiguous is very important in making sure that your speeches are successful.

So if you are on foursquare, make sure to think about what you want posted for everyone to see. And if you are interested, you can find me there trying to keep my Mayorship of Queen City Bakery!