Lessons in Crisis Preparedness for Communication Pros

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, university leaders—indeed all organizational leaders—are evaluating their crisis preparedness. Those leaders who actively seek to employ a comprehensive, all-hazard preparedness plan—not just one that deals with a troubled-turned-violent-person—will emerge best equipped to safeguard their students, employees and others.

Doyle, Jerry. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Communication>Risk Communication>Crisis Communication

Lessons Learned in the Corporate Blogosphere

As the publisher of CEO Blog Watch, I pay close attention the evolution of corporate communication, especially as it pertains to blogging. In fact, the mission of CEO Blog Watch is to chronicle the continued rise of corporate and CEO blogs. As someone who monitors CEO blogging, I can tell you that the most commonly asked question on the subject is, "Should a CEO blog?" Here's my take on the subject.

Cornett, Brandon. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Blogging

Lessons on Focus Group Methodology from a Science Television News Project    

While many bemoan the fact that television is a central source of science information for much of the United States, professionals charged with informal science education tasks have welcomed opportunities afforded by the medium. Creating TV programming that meets both institutional goals and audience preferences, though, is a challenge fraught with difficulties. To develop such programming, one tempting formative research option is to conduct focus groups with potential audience members. In this article, we present guidelines for focus group implementation as well as crucial caveats to which we should adhere in interpreting data from such efforts. To illustrate the guidelines, we discuss a formative evaluation undertaken for the Discoveries and breakthroughs inside science television news project to understand how some people respond to science news stories.

Southwell, Brian G., Stephanie H. Blake and Alicia Torres. Technical Communication Online (2005). Articles>Scientific Communication>Methods>Focus Groups

Linguistic Politeness in Professional Prose    

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of 'suggestion letters' written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

Hagge, John and Charles Kostelnick. Written Communication (1989). Articles>Language>Business Communication

The Link Between Communication and Teambuilding

In today's world, employees are searching for meaning in their work. They want to understand the big picture and how they can contribute to it. Companies are increasingly being asked to put the values they mention in their mission statements into practice. It is against this background that teambuilding is acquiring a whole new meaning.

Cambié, Silvia. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Communication>Collaboration

The Link Between Leadership Style, Communicator Competence, and Employee Satisfaction    

The current study examined the influence of supervisor communicator competence and leadership style on employee job and communication satisfaction. Participants were 220 individuals (116 men and 104 women) working full-time for a variety of companies in the Midwest. The findings indicated a strong relationship between supervisors' communicator competence and their task and relational leadership styles, with supervisor communicator competence being a stronger predictor of employee job and communication satisfaction. More specifically, the findings indicated that supervisor communicator competence accounted for 68% of the variance in subordinate communication satisfaction and nearly 18% of the variance in subordinate job satisfaction. More important, these findings provide an association between communication, leadership, and employee job and communication satisfaction.

Madlock, Paul E. JBC (2008). Articles>Management>Business Communication>Workplace

Listening to the Learners: A Case Study in Health Information Website Design  

An important mantra of user-centered design is to 'know thy user.' Accomplishing this requires one to decide what should be known about the user and how to gather the information. In this paper, we focus on the specific instance where the user is a learner. Specifically, we describe our efforts to listen to the learners of an information website, the Arthritis Source, and to act on this information.

Turns, Jennifer and Tracey S. Wagner. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Scientific Communication>Usability

Long or Short Copy? Part 2

Why doesn't everyone determine copy length based on the needs and expectations of his site visitors?

Usborne, Nick. ClickZ (2001). Articles>Writing>Business Communication

Look Before You Leap: Marketing Communication Strategies for Practitioners and Educators  

Too often, the emphasis in marketing communication is the tactic—the specific promotional piece clients—or your bosses—think they need. But what should drive marketing communication are the intended audience and the ultimate goals of the effort. Part of the marketing communication practitioner’s job is to assist clients, whether they are internal or external, to step back and decide “what for,” “to whom,” and “when,” before plunging into “how” to implement marketing communication. Part of the marketing communication educator’s job is to make sure students learn that the marcom process determines the marcom product. As a result, the tactic in many cases presents itself.

Teich, Thea, Carol M. Barnum, Sandra Harner and Tom Zimmerman. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Communication>TC

Look Who's Talking: Teaching and Learning Using the Genre of Medical Case Presentations    

In a pediatric teaching hospital, the authors examined 16 novice medical case presentations that were classified as instances of a hybrid apprenticeship genre. In contrast to strict school and workplace genres, an apprenticeship genre results from the sometimes competing activity systems of student education and patient care. The authors examined these novice case presentations for the amount and patterns of time devoted to student learning and expert teaching, the difficulties created for participants, the sometimes misunderstood implicit messages delivered by experts, and the opportunities to address educational objectives. This study offers professional communication researchers a model that combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess the effects of competing activity systems in the development of communication expertise.

Spafford, M.M., Schryer, C. F., Mian, M. and Lingard, L. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>Case Studies

Lying Is Good For You

If I told you lying was good for you, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But trust me--I’m not lying.

Rose, Lacey. Forbes (2005). Articles>Communication>Business Communication

Maintaining Staff Writing Skills

Use these five tips to reinforce the use of good writing strategies at work.

ULiveandLearn.com (2005). Articles>Writing>Business Communication

Make Your Internal Communications Memorable with Strategic Storytelling

Jean-Paul Sartre said, “We understand everything in human life through stories.” I believe that is true. We comprehend better when a message is related in story form, and we also feel a stronger rapport with the person telling the story. Why not use these memorable stories in your internal communications? When you cram too much information into a communication, training session or presentation, you’re doing a data dump on your listener. Nothing sticks. Yet, if you’ve ever had a supervisor tell a story to illustrate a point, you learned the lesson and probably enjoyed the learning process, too.

Stevenson, Doug. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Business Communication>Workplace>Rhetoric

Making a Crisis Worse: The Biggest Mistakes in Crisis Communication

All businesses are vulnerable to crises. You can't serve any population without being subjected to situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, sudden changes in company ownership or management and other volatile situations on which your audiences—and the media that serves them—often focus. The cheapest way to turn experience into future profits is to learn from others' mistakes. With that in mind, the following examples of inappropriate crisis communication policies, culled from real-life situations, will provide a tongue-in-cheek guide about what not to do when your organization faces a crisis.

Bernstein, Jonathan. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Risk Communication>Crisis Communication

Making Disability Visible: How Disability Studies Might Transform the Medical and Science Writing Classroom      

This article describes how disability studies can be used in a medical and science writing class to critically examine the assumptions of scientific discourse.  An emerging, interdisciplinary field, disability studies draws on feminist, postmodern, and post-colonial theory and extends their critiques to the medicalization of disability.  Deconstructing the medical model of disability helps students understand how science is socially constructed.  After conceptualizing disability studies, this essay discusses sample disability-related classroom activities, readings, and writing assignments.

Wilson, James C. Technical Communication Quarterly (2000). Articles>Education>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Making Meaning and Value for Edison’s Light and Power in the Human World: A Rhetorical Project  

Of all the early electrical inventors and manufacturers, Thomas Edison seemed particularly aware of the many meanings electrical light had to establish. It was attention to the successful representations of the light in many different communities and networks of communication, as much as his technical accomplishments, that led to Edison having a dominating role in the early electrical industry. He had to create valued stable meanings within each communication realm in each social network that would grant incandescent light and central power the necessary status to be accepted, supported, approved of, employed, or otherwise actively a part of each system brought together over communication.

Bazerman, Charles. Lore (2001). Articles>Communication>Technology

The Making of a Successful Entrepreneur: Tapping into Drive, Direction, and Common Sense

When Christopher Gergen talks about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, he speaks as someone who's been there, done that, and is still doing it today. In 1994, he left the security of a burgeoning career as a writer for CNN Headline News to move to Santiago, Chile, where he opened a restaurant and bar. That proved to be the first of many business ventures.

Steigman, Daria. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Management

Making Research Actionable: An Introduction to Design Criteria

What happens when people want a company’s product, but are frustrated by the process of trying to get it? Obviously it should be reworked — but doing so can be easier said than done. When we’re asked to redesign a process, we often start by exploring the problem space with in-context research, which generates a large amount of data. That data tends to point teams in the direction of a number of possible solutions. But how should the team decide which direction is the right one? In such cases, I’ve found that Design Criteria — a set of rules a design team can follow — can be a key tool so when a design team creates or reworks a service or product, everything it does supports the user.

Nelson, Sarah B. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Research>Design>Business Communication

Making Social Responsibility a Strategy for Business Perpetuation

With intense competition and demands from shareholders, customers and employees, companies need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. Many companies are looking to corporate social responsibility, as a way to do this—by both protecting and enhancing their reputations. Some CSR practitioners are driven by a belief in the company mission and vision, others by top executives, and others see it as public relations and marketing opportunity.

Vale Marques, Juliana. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Public Relations>Case Studies

Making the Business Case for Single Sourcing  

Discusses ways to communicate the financial benefits, customer value, learning and growth opportunities, and internal process improvements made possible by single sourcing.

Hackos, JoAnn T. and Tina Hedlund. ComTech Services (2004). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Business Communication

Making the Rules: A Day in the Life of a Regulatory Drafter

David Spicer, Senior Regulatory Drafting Officer with the CFIA, discusses the regulatory drafting process, writing complex texts in the context of federal plain language principles, and what it’s like to write the words that define and protect Canadians.

Boucher, Lorie. Writer's Block (2003). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Managing Electrons For Fun And Profit: Technology For The Scientific Communicator  

Too much of the information on new technology tools is of little value to the scientific communicator. This session provides topic overviews and discussion of three topics: SGML, electronic networks, and specialized word processing software. Please note that these discussions are introductory; other ITCC presentations cover SGML and the Internet in more depth.

Gunn Bronson, Judith, Jeffrey L. Hibbard and Thomas C. Stickels. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Scientific Communication>Software>Word Processing

Managing Life Sciences Content

Life sciences have been called the least automated industry in the world, but some pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare-related organizations are working to dispel that image by implementing targeted content management solutions aimed at shortening the amount of time it takes to get new products to market.

Rockley Group, The (2004). Articles>Content Management>Scientific Communication>Workflow

Managing PR to Save Time and Money—While Increasing Results

Public relations tactics are supposed to be cost-effective, but all too often, programs seem to come at a high price tag with questionable returns. This is often due to the fact that too many public relations functions are inefficient and too many programs are not targeted.

Cohen, Ephraim. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Public Relations

Managing Project Risk  

Risk management is as much art as science. Being aware of what risks are and how they can affect a project can be the difference between success and failure. Three elements of risk management—regardless of project size or scope—will influence success: understanding what risks are; developing and detailing categories of risk; and building a mitigation plan into the project plan. This approach to risk management benefits the project manager by bringing into focus—as early as possible in the project life cycle—many potential detriments to project success. When folded into a repeatable project management methodology, these processes can translate into dollars as the probability of meeting calendar and budget goals increases.

Bierbower, James G. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Project Management>Risk Communication