Communicating effectively across different cultures and demographics is always a hot topic for communicators in international business, as it represents a very real challenge and part of our daily lives. So I was interested to see that this was the subject of the latest event by ASPIC (The Association for Strategy and Planning in Internal Communications).

During the event, speakers outlined that there’s no such thing as ‘common meaning’. People derive their own meaning, in their own context, from the messages you send – so the potential for misunderstanding is huge.

Culture, which also includes all forms of diversity, matters for every business as it can exaggerate misunderstanding, though speakers warned that we mustn’t assume that a person’s culture completely determines their communication choices and responses.

So how can we tackle cultural diversity? Well there was plenty of food for thought as speakers shared the various ways they have overcome the issues relating to culture:

•    At telecoms company O2 they adopted a ‘Talk don’t tell’ culture where employees where given several ways to communicate back to management, who in turn listened, learned and reacted to staff, right across the business.
•    At TFL, they have instilled a socially inclusive environment that ensures that all policies are appropriate to all staff and that there is no ‘tokenism’.
•    They have also adopted Plain English in all communications, excluding all jargon and unnecessarily complex language to help comprehension.

Reassuringly, the conference highlighted that two of the most prominent tools for communicating effectively across cultures are: knowing your audience and how they see the world; and measuring and evaluating your communications and learning from the results – something that most competent communicators are already doing.

Melitta

No don’t change the channel…the Geneva Communicators Blog has tranformed into the Geneva Communicators Network! Due to popular demand we have enlarged our team, partners, the events we will offer – and our look with a smashing logo designed by Yona Lee…

.. stay tuned for more news on our offical launch on 8 December in Geneva.

Interesting article about social networks: ‘Not a Site, but a Concept’: Tapping the Power of Social Networking from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm

Li was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

“The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage,” she said.

Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilize online collaborative tools, yet much of today’s Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose.

“People’s lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small,” said Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research whose work focuses on user Internet experiences. “That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the ‘who, what, where and how’ questions, and qualitative data to answer the ‘why’ questions. For example, we know from research done by [photo sharing website] Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?”