When Google wanted to alert users to significant changes in its online privacy policy, it didn't couch the news in the formal language that corporations normally use for major policy announcements. Instead, it used phrases such as "This stuff is important" and "This stuff matters."

Whether or not one believes "stuff" is stylistically appropriate language for serious, high-visibility business communication, it strikes us as effective in this case. At the very least, it stood out from the thousands of other words that wander across our computer screens on any given day.

We haven't measured it, but we suspect this sort of studied informality is definitely on the rise. Language that businesses would not have dreamed of using for formal communication 20, 10, or even 5 years ago is becoming more common. Just this morning, for instance, Copyblogger Media sent out an email message in response to apparently widespread complaints about the pricing of its blog hosting services. The subject line? "How We Screwed Up Our WordPress Hosting."

Two forces seem to be driving this shift toward informality. The first and most obvious is the rise of social media. Just as conversations are less formal than public speeches, communication in a social media environment is more casual than communication in the old "we talk, you listen" model of corporate communication. Writing that comes across as stilted corporate-speak is rejected as inauthentic.

The second possibility is that formal business language is simply being worn out and trivialized in some instances by overuse and misuse. How many times a week do you see a print or online message that proclaims to contain "Important Information About Your Account," for example? If it's from your bank, credit card issuer, or cable TV company, it's probably not "important information" about "your account" at all but rather a sales pitch that may or not have any relevance to your account or your needs.

How do you see this trend affecting your business communication teaching? Have students raised questions about any disconnects between what they learn in class and what they see businesses actually doing? Let us know what you think.

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Identifying the key words and hot-button issues in a profession or an industry can be a challenge for students working on employment-related communication, particularly for younger students with limited work experience.

Glassdoor is a free community-participation website that encourages employees and job seekers to post salary information, reviews of their jobs and employers, and information about their interviewing experiences, including the specific questions they were asked. The interview information a valuable resource on its own, of course, but it also gives students an inside view of the language used in a particular company, profession, or industry. Students can search through this information for key words to use in their résumés, application letters, and other employment communications. Plus, these reports can reveal the issues that are on the minds of company recruiters—insights that students can use to make their communication efforts more audience focused.

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Some of us have been around long enough to remember when business communication was a fairly specialized activity. Writers wrote, typesetters set type, art directors designed, graphic artists created, photographers took photos, and production specialists equipped with X-Acto knives combined all these elements on the page.

Then along came desktop publishing software, word processors that were more than glorified typewriters, graphics software, presentation software, and eventually web publishing software. With each advance, more and more design and production responsibility wound up in the writer's lap. In addition to grammar, spelling, and syntax, business communicators now had to worry about typeface choices, leading, color palettes, page composition, image resolution, and a host of other aesthetic and technical concerns. "Business writing" gradually became "business communication" in the broadest sense, and often not to the benefit of communicators or their audiences.

In addition to burdening writers with creative and technical matters in which they often are not trained, this gradual melding of design and production into the writing task steals time and attention away from the writing itself. Presentation software is a great example of this risk: with so many tools (and toys) available in the software, it can be devilishly hard to stay focused on the message one is trying to develop and convey.

Templates and themes can be a powerful way to incorporate design sensibility and to eliminate some of the design decisions that business communicators would otherwise be forced to make. However, choosing and using these guides successfully requires at least a minimum degree of design savvy. Even the safest PowerPoint template or WordPress theme can be misused by communicators who don't appreciate how visual design affects their verbal messages.

Now that so many business professionals need some basic design skills just to survive in their day-to-day work, where are they likely to get this training? Given the many other learning goals you have to incorporate in the business communication course, how much time can you devote to visual design? Do your students get exposure to visual design in other courses (such as presentation slide design in a public speaking course)?

We'd love to hear your thoughts on how you address this challenge. And for ideas on teaching visual communication in your course, be sure to check out Bovee & Thill's Teaching Visual Communication magazine on Scoop.it.

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Newsfeeds from blogs and other online publishers can be a great way to stay on top of developments in any field. However, anyone who has signed up for more than a few RSS feeds has probably experienced the "firehose effect" of getting so many feeds so quickly that it becomes impossible to stay on top of them. Moreover, when a highly active publisher feeds every new article, from the essential to the trivial, the reader is left to sort it all out every day.

An intriguing alternative to newsfeeds is media curation, in which someone with expertise or interest in a particular field collects and republishes material on a particular topic. Business Communication Headline News, for instance, was one of the earliest examples of media curation in the field of business communication.

The latest curation tools, such as Scoop.it, make it easy to assemble attractive online magazines or portfolios on specific topics. To see these tools in action, check out Bovee & Thill's Online Magazines for Business Communication:

• Business Communication 2.0: Social Media and Electronic Communication
• Teaching Visual Communication
• Teaching a Modern Business Communication Course
• Teaching Business Communication and Employment
• Teaching Business Communication and Workplace Issues
• Teaching Business Communication and Interpersonal Communication

And on the right side of our Scoop.it home page, you can see the many curated magazines that we follow as well.

Curation promises to bring the power of community and shared expertise to a lot of different fields, and we're excited to see how it will shape business communication.

See media curation video.

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Happy New Year! From everyone on the Bovée-Thill team, we wish you a successful new term.

Looking at what lies ahead for business communication, this recent article in Workforce Magazine certainly caught our attention. The consulting firm MBO Partners predicts that over half the U.S. workforce will be independent by 2020. Reaching that threshold would require an increase from 16 million independent workers today to 70 million in just eight years, but even if the eventual growth falls short of that forecast, the rapid increase in unattached professionals is dramatically reshaping the nature of business—and business communication.

The sheer number is not the only important change going on here, either. In past years, corporate refugees made up an important share of the independent workforce. We know from our own experience that these people often benefited from the mentoring, formal training, "safe" learning opportunities, and professional networking that corporate structures can provide. When they went solo, they took these skills and connections with them.

However, with the spread of virtual organizations, the increase in freelance project work, and the weak employment market, we suspect that many workers will take—or be forced to take—the independent route without the broad skill sets that former corporate employees have.

Not only will more workers be operating outside a formal organization structure, in other words, but a significant number are likely to be fending for themselves without the benefit of much organizational communication experience at all.

Depending on how this scenario plays out in the coming years, the implications for business communication education could be profound. As freelance work has gone mainstream, from a relative rarity to an accepted career path to the very model on which some companies operate, the assumption that business communication takes place largely within a defined organizational context is becoming less and  less valid.

Moreover, in this new world of work, business communication skills will become even more important than they are now. On the one hand, less-skilled communicators without the support of an organization to carry them along face a rough future as independents. Even experienced corporate pros can be shocked at the demands that suddenly being one's own salesforce puts on their persuasion and negotiation skills. Many freelancers are in nearly constant job-search mode, always scrambling for the next project and the next client.

On the other hand, skilled communicators can use their talents to land the most interesting and profitable projects and to build sustaining client relationships that ease the pressure of constantly needing to sell, sell, sell.

We've addressed virtual work and networked organizations in our textbooks for some time now, and we'll continue to adapt our coverage and content as the business landscape changes. In the meantime, we invite you to share your thoughts on how this seismic shift could change the practice and study of business communication.

One this is certain: The communication skills you are helping your students develop now are going to mean the difference between struggle, survival, and success in the future.

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From Black Friday to Small Business Saturday to Cyber Monday, business communication over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is all about buy, buy, buy.

In this hypersaturated message environment, this email missive from the outdoor-clothing supplier Patagonia on Cyber Monday definitely stood out, starting with the large headline "Don't Buy This Jacket" and a large photo of one of its signature fleece jackets.

Rather than promoting the jacket as a must-get gift for holiday shoppers, Patagonia used the email to talk about the environmental impact of its products and to encourage readers to take the Common Threads Initiative pledge: reduce, repair, reuse, recycle, and reimagine.

Here's how the company explained its unusual message:

Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time – and leave a world inhabitable for our kids – we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.

The message wasn't entirely un-promotional. It did point out that the high durability of the jacket meant that wearers wouldn't need to replace it for a long time. However, this was done within the context of the "reduce" message, and it clearly stands in opposition to the planned obsolescence that drives so many product categories today—how many weeks until the next generation of smartphones replaces the perfectly functional current generation?

Was Patagonia's message a cynical ploy to gain favor with its environmentally conscious target consumer? One might jump to that conclusion, but we've been following the company for a long time and respect its managerial ethos. While the message clearly resonates with the target audience, we believe it definitely fits the criteria of ethical communication, regardless of one's personal stance on sustainable commerce: It includes the information readers need in order to make an informed response, it is true in both word and spirit, and it is not deceptive in any way. 

This is a great example of communication ethics to discuss with your students, as well as an intriguing case study in promotional communication. For example, can a company benefit in the long run by discouraging customers to buy less in the short run?

Please let us know what you and your students think about this unusual message.

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You know that feeling when the the words don't quite capture the spirit of your intended message, but words are all you have?

Let's say your project team has just been reprimanded by the boss for missing an interim deadline. You're confident that the team will meet its final deadline, so you're ready to brush off the criticism and get back to work. Your colleagues, however, left the meeting grumbling about being criticized in public, and you fear that morale will slip.

You could craft a restorative, inspirational message to soothe the bruised egos and get the team's energy turned around in a positive direction. However, writing such a message could be risky, because world-weary teammates might just brush it off as happytalk and resent you for trying to be a cheerleader. Moreover, to minimize the chances of a negative reaction, you'll have to spend a lot of time trying to get the words just right.

Alternatively, you could also suggest that your colleagues lighten up and stay focused on the ultimate goal of the project. However, you already know that telling grumpy people to cheer up is a sure-fire way to make most of them even grumpier.

Instead, you opt for a quick bit of gentle and jovial sarcasm, designed to help release the negative emotions in a collegial way. When you get back to your desk, you write the following one-line message via IM or email:

Well, let's pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and move on ;)

The over-the-top phrasing is a subtle way to remind everyone that the criticism wasn't all that traumatic, the use of "our" reminds your colleagues that you're all in this together, and that winking emoticon tells everyone to lighten up without actually saying so. The apparent sarcasm connects with people who are marinating in their negative emotions, but it's really a pep talk disguised as sarcasm. With apologies to Julie Andrews, you're feeding them a spoonful of medicine to help the sugar go down.

But wait: you remember reading somewhere that emoticons are "unprofessional," so you replace it with a simple period:

Well, let's pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and move on.

Oops. That one minor change to make the message more professional turned it into a statement of resigned sadness. If you were delivering the message in person, you could use a real smile to replace the emoticon. Even over the phone you could use a brief chuckle. But with IM or email, all you have are soulless squiggles on the screen.

You search your keyboard for any acceptable symbol that might help:

Well, let's pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and move on!

Great, now you've managed to sound bitter and demanding at the same time.

Under these circumstances, are emoticons really all that bad? And given the trend we're seeing in many industries toward a less "corporate" voice in business communication (spurred in large part by social media), is it only a matter of time before a few basic symbols enter the mainstream for all but the most formal messages?

When you think about it, is ;) all that different from !  ? They are both symbols designed to give words a particular emotional shape. In fact, the exclamation point would probably welcome the help. As the only emphasis character at a writer's disposal, the exclamation point is asked to do too much and is often overused as a result.

What position do you take with your students regarding emoticons in their writing for the business communication course? Is it time to introduce judicious use of a few subtle and simple emoticons, at least for internal communication? (Just to be clear, we're talking here about using text emoticons only, not graphical smiley faces, those collections of yellow cartoon characters available in many IM and blogging systems.)

Let us know what you think :)

Photo credit: VersatImage

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One of the more intriguing instructional questions we see on the horizon is how (or perhaps whether) to address video in the business communication curriculum.

Now that video is cheap to produce and often free to distribute, more and more companies are using video to supplement or replace written messages. Of course, video has been used for years, but it was usually concentrated in a few functional areas as marketing and training or reserved for special occasions. Significantly, video was often the domain of trained videographers who were comfortable making the many aesthetic and technical choices that quality video requires.

In much the same way that basic desktop publishing went mainstream, video is now a common media choice for many business professionals. The benefits for senders and receivers can be huge, whether it's an engineer posting a how-to video to the customer support blog or the CEO issuing an important public statement. The wild growth of YouTube and other video-sharing sites—even for clips that don't involve piano-playing kittens—is evidence of how readily professionals and consumers alike embrace content in video form.

Unfortunately, just as it was easy for the untrained to make hideous brochures and posters when they first got their hands on desktop publishing capabilities, making awkward or ineffective videos is easy, too.

Imagine a public, negative-news message from a CEO, such as the announcement of a facility closure or a product recall. A print form of this message would be challenging enough to write, given the multiple stakeholders in the audience and the level of emotional involvement. However, with a lean medium such as a news release or a blog posting, the number of nonverbal signals associated with the message is small, so the communicator can focus his or her energies on the words themselves and not have to worry too much about whether the packaging of the words will send unwanted messages.

In contrast, using video to send this message introduces a wide array of nonverbal variables. For instance, a CEO sporting a $200 haircut and $2,000 suit while sitting comfortably in a mahogany-paneled office won't be a very sympathetic character for delivering news of a major company layoff. At the other extreme, surviving employees who worry if they're next and community members who count on the company's economic activity might not be too comforted by a poorly lit CEO standing stiffly in front of a blank wall with a look of gloom and doom on her face. The same message delivered in two starkly different visual settings could trigger profoundly different reactions from the viewing audience.

Even for less dramatic messages, the communicator has to consider a significant number of variables: setting, lighting, props, camera angles, clothing, speech patterns, body language, vocal characteristics, whether to add musical cues on the fade in or fade out, and more.

With many instructors still trying to fit blogging and other new media into an already overloaded syllabus, we realize the thought of adding video might be enough to make one scream. However, as video continues to go mainstream as a business communication medium, how can today's and tomorrow's business professionals learn the nuances of good video production?

Video clearly falls outside the scope of a focused business writing classes, but what about broader business communication courses? Do you address video as a business medium now? If not, do you anticipate doing so in the future?

We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: Andrew Rennie

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Corporate calamities are a great time to observe business communication in action and to analyze the substance and style of a company's response to a crisis. Apologizing and offering restitution are among the more challenging communication tasks during such times, partly because these messages can be a challenge to write in and of themselves, and partly because the negative communication takes place within the company's ongoing (and generally positive) conversational stream with its stakeholders.

Striking the right balance is often difficult. On the one hand, you have to be sufficiently humble and contrite in front of angry customers—without wallowing in negativity. On the other hand, you have to find some way to move the conversation forward and nudge it back onto a positive track—without acting as though nothing happened or that you've already forgotten about it and moved on. For example, how much do you have to beat yourself up in public to show remorse, and how soon is it appropriate to shift from "apology mode" back to business as normal?

Research in Motion (RIM) is an interesting case of a company searching for that balance while trying to turn the public dialog around. After recent global service outages that left millions of BlackBerry users without email and web access for up to three days, RIM had to soothe angry customers while continuing to push forward with positive communication on other fronts. Those ongoing communication efforts are challenging enough on their own, as RIM tries to battle declining share and become a mass-market must-have in the face of strong competition from Apple's iPhones and smartphones based on Google's Android operating system. To make matters worse, the service outage hit just as Apple was introducing its latest phone and RIM was preparing for its annual developers' conference, where one of its tasks is convincing software companies to create more apps for the BlackBerry line.

The postings on RIM's Facebook page offer a convenient (if incomplete) way to track its outgoing communication efforts. Here is the essence of the first 10 messages that appeared after service had been restored around the world:

(1) October 13: Announcing that service has been fully restored

(2) October 14: Expressing thanks to customers for their patience and support, directing them to BlackBerry's Twitter account if they need support

(3) October 17: Announcing a "Thank You Gift from BlackBerry," a series of free software apps that will be made available to current customers over the next four weeks, with a total value of more than $100; more details to  come

(4) October 18: Promising more info to come on the free apps, but announcing a new operating system for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets

(5) October 19: Announcing that the first free app is now available

(6) October 20: Announcing that the second free app is now available

(7) October 20: Posting a video that promises to answer the question "how extreme is gaming is on the BlackBerry PlayBook?"

(8) October 21: Announcing updated Twitter capability for BlackBerry smartphones

(9) October 21: Encouraging customers to continue sharing comments, saying "We love hearing your feedback, Team BlackBerry"

(10) October 24: Announcing the winners of a meet-the-celebrity contest (unrelated to the outage or the free apps program)

The substance of the free app program is open to question—for example, more than a few Facebook commenters weren't too impressed with getting a $5 game (and a frankly rather juvenile-looking one at that) as the second app, and some complained that they should've been able to choose the apps themselves. In addition, by stretching out the delivery of the apps over a period of four weeks, rather than making them available all at once, RIM is forced to keep the story of the outage alive, because the announcement of each new app will remind customers of the service problem. (Although it might've been staged this way to prevent overloading the app store, or for some other viable technical reason.)

However, aside from these questions, RIM seems to have done a reasonably good job under the circumstances of addressing the communication issues related to the outage while pushing the dialog forward. The company simply can't afford to stand still or dwell on a problem that has been fixed, given the challenges it faces from Apple and the Android platform. For the first week after the outage (posts 1-3 and 5-6), the Facebook messages focused mostly on rebuilding goodwill with customers. Following that, the messages were all forward-looking announcements on other matters.

From the messages we've reviewed, RIM apologized in a straightforward, unemotional manner and identified the technical reason for the outage. Calling the free apps a "thank you" gift also puts a positive spin on the make-good effort. (Although thanking people for their "patience," when they had no choice but to sit and stew, is always a curious if perhaps unavoidable choice.)

We'd love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you are a BlackBerry customer who was affected by the outage.

Image: RIM media gallery

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Judging from the vociferous comments in the social media atmosphere, one might think that Netflix's decision to split itself in two or Bank of America's introduction of a debit card fee were some of the worst horrors ever visited upon the human race. BofA isn't likely to reverse its decision, even if thousands of people really do drop their banks for a credit union on Bank Transfer Day. However, the online uproar certainly prompted Netflix to first apologize for not doing a better job of explaining its decision—and then to reverse the decision entirely. [Update 11-1-11: In response to an overwhelming number of complaints, BofA just announced it is scrapping plans to introduce the debit card fee. The crowd has spoken!]

When we began covering social media in our textbooks some years ago, it was soon apparent that these new tools were much more than tools: They were disruptive technologies that were going to fundamentally alter the relationships between companies and their stakeholders. Sure enough, consumers have more power to influence business than ever before, and they aren't always yielding that power with a gentle touch and a kind word.

In addition to aggregating consumer voices, social media can amplify consumer moods and emotions. Unpopular decisions that might have once caused little more than isolated, ineffectual grumbling can now spark organized protests that tarnish brands, deplete goodwill, and even cause changes in corporate strategy.

The message to companies: You better get it right, you better get it right the first time, and you better explain yourself before, during, and after every change you make. Effective communication has never been as important as it is in this volatile new world of business. And even if you're doing something that makes strategic or financial sense, prepare yourself for a negative response.

Photo credit: tomboy from morguefile.com

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