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.

 

 

100 Posts! What's our focus been?

I sometimes wish that I was as prolific as some other people when it comes to blogging. However, what we have tried to do over the past year-plus is focus on giving you tips on communication as well as giving you some different perspective regarding current events like President Obama, Tiger Woods, Music and Sports.

So, for my 100th post, I wanted to use Wordle (which I previously talked about in this post) to see what our focus has been over this past year. I looked at the top 150 words used (minus common words like the), the top 50 words and finally the top 20 words used. Wordle is great because it lets you see what words you are using. Here were the results:

    

Looking at the breakdown, I am pleased to know that we are adhering to our passion - that of people. I'm not sure why 'something' is as prominent as it is. I might have a tendency to use that word as an adjective too often, which is great to know so I can avoid it in the future. Additionally, 'Presentation' and 'Presentations' are considered two separate words, yet are both in the top 20, which is a good thing. Sadly, 'however' is still in the top 20 - I really need to find a different word to use! 

For the most part, I like what we've done over the past 100 posts. While a lot of public speaking blogs only focus on improving your speeches and becoming a better speaker, I'd like to think we add a little bit to that in our posts. While we do focus on helping people become better speakers and presenters, we've tried to tie in current events and some things that you might not think have much to do with Communication and show how we can learn something (there's that word again) from that experience.

What do you think? Do you like the fact that we look at some different aspects of communication? Would you like to see other areas talked about? Is there a specific topic that we've missed that you'd like to see? Let us know and we'll do our best to accommodate those requests.

Thanks again for reading and commenting - it keeps us going!

Are You Focused on the Right Things?

A great web program called Wordle allows users to type in words or a website and create a Word Cloud from the text. You can personalize it, change the colors, the style, how many words you want to use, etc. There are two things that I really like about the program:

1. The visualization is just cool - and the fact that you can put in your brand's colors also helps (it would be nice if they would allow you to chose your brand's fonts as well, but I'm trying not to be picky).

2. It let's you see what you are talking about and what key words you are using the most.

The second part is what I wanted to focus on today. I copied and pasted all of my blog entries that I have made over the past 4 months. I cut all of the dates and the bookmark buttons. There is an option for you to click to remove common words, which I did as well.

What I have left with is a visualization of the things that I have talked about. The first image is a 200 word limit, the second image has only 20 words. This allowed me to see which words I have been using the most and which ones I was not using.

Let's first take a look at the larger image. The first thing I noticed was the word 'people.' I liked this a lot because the focus of Dahle Communication Group really is on how people communicate with each other and how that affects our lives. We want people to be the focus of our business. I was very happy to see that as the top one. Other words that stuck out included presentations, good, great, presentation, Twitter, and blog. All of those I was glad to see because those are things that are important to communication. However, I also noticed the words: something, lot, one, things and going. While those words are not necessarily bad, I am now more aware of them and am going to try to cut down on the use of those words: especially something, which was quite big.

The second image is neat because it is stripped down to the top 20 words. While those words were bigger in the first image compared to the other words, sometimes you just need to cut out the fat of an image to truly see what is going on.

If you are working on a presentation or a speech, you should use Wordle or a similar program. What it can do is tell you what you are focusing on. Are you using key words that you want people to remember? Are you using phrases that will confuse people? Putting your speeches and/or documents through a program that tells you which ones you are using the most will give you some perspective as to what you are doing and can help you fine tune your message. 

Others have already recognized the value of using wordle as a tool. Carolyn Elefant of myshingle.com, Nan Hu of The Daily Princetonian, Emily Cagle Communications, Sentence First and Inside Out are just a few of the blogs that have been talking about Wordle and using it themselves. This gives you a good idea as to what impact it is already having on the way people think and re-fine their information.

Travis