Using technology to communicate effectively — part 1

Categories: Instruction

There are many different ways of communicating with people and new communication methods are being created almost every single day. Calling, video calling, voicemail, emailing, tweeting and instant messaging are just a few that come to mind.  How do we as professionals go about choosing which method will work best to simply get the message across? That can be a tricky question to answer because some of these platforms are better than others for communicating different ideas or for communicating with different audiences.

Communicating with groups. When you are trying to communicate with multiple people you will want to use a messaging platform that is appropriate. For example if you wanted to contact 15 people, calling each person individually might not be the best choice. Would it work? Yes. However, it would waste your time and would be inefficient. A much better choice would be send an email or using a Facebook or Google Plus group. This allows you to send a message to everyone at one time and members of the group could contact you back individually or could reply to the group as a whole. If you are communicating with a large group, your main objective may be simply to get a message out to people. In this situation using Twitter or blogging may be the easiest way to communicate with your audience. One important thing to consider when communicating with a group, give all of the important information that you can. However try not to constantly spam people with messages. When people feel that the messages are overwhelming, they most likely will stop reading them.

In the next post, we will cover communicating with individuals and the conclusion of the discussion.

Photo by Levi Arnold