Tom Keefe

Spirited Communication

Category: communication (Page 5 of 5)

IABC Leadership: The silence is maddening!

May 21, 2007 /

As a professional communicator and a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, I’m growing increasingly frustrated by a lack of communication from IABC leadership on two subjects.

The first subject is the IABC’s own international conference, set to open in just about a month (June 24-27, 2007 in New Orleans, LA, USA). I’d think that the association would have been promoting the conference for some time now, but with just weeks to go before the event starts, we’ve heard barely a word.

The last mention of the conference on IABC’s official blog, the IABC Cafe, was one I wrote related to a planned crisis communications preconference workshop. That post was on April 18. It was followed by two weeks of silence from the rest of the Cafe bloggers, until 2006-07 Chair Glenda Holmes, ABC, wrote a brief post on May 4 on an unrelated topic. No one has posted on the Cafe since then about…well, about anything.

No update either on In Session, the “official blog of the IABC International Conference.”   IABC staffer Chris Grossgart told us in a May 4 post to expect weekly podcasts, insider information and more from two well-known podcasters and a team of bloggers. Chris did state that the blogging wouldn’t begin until the start of the conference. My question is: Why wait? Don’t we want to generate interest in the conference in the weeks leading up to the opening sessions?

The second subject that has remained undiscussed online by IABC is the emergence of  opportunities and challenges created by social networking sites and ad hoc event planning. Professional organizations including the IABC historically have provided their members with a package of services and benefits that have added value to memberships. Join and receive networking opportunities with other members, proprietary research and opinion relevent to the member’s profession, and the opportunity to attend events developed and managed by the member organization.

As proven by MyRagan, the social networking site for communicators that recently was launched by Ragan Communications, Inc., people are willing to look elsewhere for the products and services that used to be tied to professional associations. When you toss in the fact that these social networking sites don’t charge for membership and basic services, you beg the question that has remained unaddressed by IABC and other associations: What is the business case for professional associations in this new world?

I can think of some answers, but like I said, it’s time for IABC and other associations to join the conversation.

FORE! Drilling Communications Best Practices Into My Family

August 8, 2006 /

I’ve sometimes had to be creative in linking a thought or experience to a communication lesson or principle. It’s worth the effort in this case, so that I can tell you about how I accidentally drilled my 10-year-old daughter in the butt while golfing last week.

My wife and I had bid on a golf package offered at our church’s annual silent auction—and won. It covered greens fee and cart for a foursome at the same golf course where my company holds its annual charity golf outing. We decided that it would be fun to take our 12-year-old son, Kevin, and daughter, Caitlyn, for an afternoon of non-competitive golf. It had to be non-competitive because my wife had only golfed one other time, my kids were beginners, and on my best day, I have a bad day in terms of golf shots.

Communication lesson #1: Explain the rules clearly and before your son decides to tee-off. My friendly conversation with the starter turned ugly when my son decided that he was ready to tee-off—without waiting for the elderly gentleman who was about 75 years away on the near fairway, taking his second shot. As Kevin’s ball whistled past the elderly golfer, the starter began to yell, “Tell your boy to wait until the golfers are out of range!” I was so rattled, my subsequent tee shot dribbled about 20 yards.

Communication lesson #2: Establish the proper order for tee-shots. How many times have the best communication ideas gone flat because someone decided to jump out of order and messed up the timing or message flow? In this case, as the only member of the foursome who was hitting from the back tees, I should have hit first, while the rest of the foursome stayed behind me until after the shot. Their failure to do so resulted in Communication lesson #3.

Communication lesson #3: It doesn’t help to yell “fore” after the ball has tattooed your daughter’s rear-end. Yes, crisis communication needs to be ready in advance. In this case, my family had decided to take positions on the front tee before I had shot from the blue tees behind them. I was upset that they didn’t know the basic rule of golf etiquette that tells you to stay out of the way of a golf shot. I was about to say that, when my wife started driving herself and Caitlyn toward the rough on the right. The cart was moving slowly away from me, and was a little over 100 yards away, when I decided to tee off.

It was my hardest tee shot of the day, and it sailed straight toward the cart carrying my wife and daughter. Kevin said he yelled “fore,” but I was mesmerized, watching the perfect trajectory of the ball as it traced the path of my wife’s cart, and then caught it. We heard a loud crack that I thought was the sound of the ball bouncing off of the cart. But when I saw that my wife was hugging my daughter, I rushed over in my cart. Somehow, the ball had cleared the golf bags and the cart frame, and had struck my daughter’s butt on the fly. Kim was muffling Caitlyn’s cries, which was good, because anyone who would have heard Caitlyn crying at full throttle would have thought that we had amputated her leg without anesthesia. That gets me to the final point.

Communication lesson #4: People don’t want to hear facts when they are hurting. As it became clear that Caitlyn would survive the golf “spanking,” I grasped for words to express my feelings. Unfortunately, my feelings were less than sympathetic. “That’s why proper golf etiquette tells you to stay behind someone about to hit the ball,” I said, in as kind a tone as I could muster. In retrospect, I probably should have been clubbed myself for that comment.

Anyway, after some more hugging (with me reminding them that we were holding up the foursome behind us), we continued. My family stayed a respectful distance behind me on every shot that followed—even the putts. My daughter eventually forgave me, and stopped trying to hit me with her golf ball. My son enjoyed the day, because he constantly out-drove me and sometimes out-putted me.

My wife is still trying to figure out why she bought me golf clubs for Father’s Day. Next year, I get a tie, or something else equally soft.

Presenting: A Train Wreck

July 30, 2006 /

Sigh!

Just days after communications consultant Shel Holtz celebrated his earning the top rating as one of 73 breakout session speakers at the 2006 IABC International Conference, I received my evaluation. This comment from one of the attendees seemed to sum it up nicely:

Don’t ask him back next year.

To use a baseball analogy, if Shel’s performance ranks him as the Detroit Tigers (the best in the league), mine would rank me with the Kansas City Royals (nowhere to go but up). I wish I could have compared myself to the Chicago Cubs–although they are perennial losers, some people consider them lovable. Unfortunately, my results were just plain ugly!

I actually can identify more with the major league debut of a Seattle Mariners player: infielder Ron Wright. Here’s how San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Chris Jenkins described that first experience in the “big leagues”:

Wright’s mistake was just getting out of bed, let alone Tacoma, the Mariners’ AAA locale. Indeed, we’re talking about perhaps the worst major league debut of all time.

For the record, Wright struck out in his first major league at-bat, then hit into a triple play on his next at-bat. The tail end of the triple play came on Wright’s ill-advised break for second base, where he was thrown out by the pitcher. “Hey, dude,” Jenkins quoted second baseman Bret Boone as saying to Wright, “that was bad.”

Things got better in Wright’s third trip to the plate, when he “only hit into a 6-4-3 double play,” Jenkins wrote. “For those keeping score, that’s six outs in three at-bats. Gotta be some sort of record.”

Well, records were meant to be broken, and I believe that my recent presentation has lowered the standard for a debut. Rather than sulk about it (I did that on the day that I received the evaluation), I prefer to believe the quote that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

So to make your presentations stronger and to let you benefit by NOT doing what I did, here are some thoughts to consider if you ever are asked to be a last-minute fill-in speaker at a major conference or event.

  1. Be sure that you understand the topic. I know that this sounds very basic, but consider my recent experience. About 3 1/2 weeks before the 2006 IABC International Conference, I received an email from an IABC staff member, asking me to serve as a fill-in. She mentioned a couple of communications professionals who “suggested I contact you, as you know the subject matter – managing change brought about by social media.” I was flattered to be asked, and considered it a great opportunity. But I dismissed the fact that the heart of the presentation required experience with building online communities –experience that I didn’t have.
  2. Make sure that you have enough time to prepare. Sure, we’ve all had experience with pulling all-nighters and weekenders to complete some rush project. I wasn’t concerned about getting the IABC presentation done on-time–particularly when I emailed the original presenter, who was very willing to share his thoughts on what he planned to deliver. I’d just combine some of the original material with my own experiences. That way, no one would feel cheated, I reasoned–incorrectly. I spent too much time trying to weave together the unfamiliar material with my own thoughts. In fact, I was tweaking the presentation all the way up to the day it was to be delivered. That led to another big mistake:
  3. Don’t ever, ever, ever read the slides. I knew this; I hate this when other presenters do it…yet I still read some of the slides. Why? Partly due to nerves, partly due to the lack of time to practice enough, and partly due to a lack of time to create presentation handouts. I wanted to emphasize some points, and since I couldn’t assume that everyone in the audience could quickly spot and read the points on my slides, I started reading. As Jethro Tull sang in Locomotive Breath: “old Charlie stole the handle and the train won’t stop going –no way to slow down.” My trainwreck was underway!
  4. If you can’t do justice to the original topic, try to adjust it to something you can discuss well. With the feedback from the original presenter, I felt that I could prepare a hybrid presentation that would go over as well as the new hybrid cars. The reality was that if hybrid cars had the same performance specs as my presentation, we would all soon be riding bicycles. I would have been better off speaking entirely on material I knew well–or declining the invitation to speak.

Good thing that I have this blogging thing to fall back on.

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