Category Archives: Teaching Social Media Skills

Twitter Exercise to Help Students Grasp the Value of Their Business Communication Course

This Twitter exercise can help students students grasp the value of the communication course and practice writing tight, focused messages at the same time. Have them write four messages of no more than 140 characters each to persuade other college students to take the business communication course. They should think of the first message as […]

Managing Communication in a Social Media Environment

Social media offer many compelling benefits, but managing business communication in this rapidly changing environment is not a simple task, for a number of reasons: The communication effort is more complex, with more internal and external channels to staff and monitor. Managers need to make sure that outgoing messages are consistent, that incoming messages are […]

Using Twitter to Teach Message Organization, Composition, and Revision

Twitter offers some interesting possibilities for teaching business writing skills. The 140-character limit forces writers to distill their messages to the essentials, and planning a multi-tweet message can expand this practice in clarity by encouraging writers to think through a unified sequence of points that support a primary headline tweet. Presentation expert Cliff Atkinson suggested […]

New Ways of Working, New Ways of Writing

[UPDATE: A video that discusses these nine modes and shows numerous examples is now available on the Bovee-Thill YouTube channel.] As businesses continue to adopt new media choices, the writer’s task is becoming more diverse and more demanding. In the old days, few businesspeople outside an advertising agency ever faced the challenge of writing headlines […]

Helping Students Adapt Their Writing Skills to Wiki Collaboration

The widespread adoption of wikis in both business and higher education is a testament to the collaborative value of wiki technology. However, wiki collaboration does require a broader set of skills than traditional business communication requires. It also requires a different approach to communication, one in which the authorial “me” is superseded by the collaborative […]