Infographics have multiplied across the Internet in the past couple of years as web publishers look for creative ways to attract readers. These eye-catching graphics can also serve as a great teaching tool to discuss the fundamentals of effective business communication. Have students review one or more infographics and analyze them according to these criteria:

• Do they have enough audience-centered appeal to be noticed amid all the clutter online?
• Do they provide practical information?
• Do they give facts rather than vague impressions?
• Do they present information in a concise, efficient manner?
• Can readers grasp a unified idea rather than a collection of discrete data points?
• Is visual design used with purpose, in a way that enhances understanding (rather than simply decorating the document)?
• Is an infographic the best choice for communicating this particular information?

The graphic design firm Column Five offers dozens of examples of the infographics it has designed for clients. Here are six in particular that have a business focus appropriate for class discussion:

• How Is the Newspaper Industry Trying to Save Itself?
• The Growth of Distance Learning
• Where Is the Next Generation of Innovators?
• Startup Ecosystem: Predator vs. Prey
• Stormy Weather: Are Americans Financially Prepared for a Rainy Day?
• The World's Leading Innovators

If you use infographics for class discussions, please share your experiences.

Image: Column Five

Generational differences can be a source of workplace conflict in the best of times, and in today's workplace, the potential for conflict seems particularly acute. Between a sluggish job market, structural changes in the employment landscape, and a logjam at the top caused by Baby Boomers who can't or won't retire, many younger workers feel like they're not getting the same opportunities as those who came before them. In this climate of dissatisfaction, recurring issues such as media preferences and communication styles can become magnified, as the generations get snarkier and snarkier with one another. ("Baby Boomers are preachy and technologically obsolete!" "Millennials have no work ethic and need constant handholding!")

On the plus side, these conflicts and controversies can provide some great opportunities for exploring the factors that influence communication success in the workplace. Here are some thought-provoking questions to trigger discussion with your students:

1. Do students feel like they "belong" to their generation? For example, people born in the early 1960s are often classified as Baby Boomers based on birth year, but not all of them feel a strong sense of kinship with that generation.*
2. How do students perceive the next-older generation (those likely to be holding the jobs they want to get) and the next-younger generation (those who will be eyeing their jobs)?
3. Do students perceive intergenerational conflict to be a real problem in the workplace? In society as a whole?
4. How important are personal appearance (including body art), technology and media preferences, and communication style—three issues that come up frequently in discussions of generational conflict?

Workforce Management has just started an interesting series of articles about changes in the workplace from one generation to the next, starting with the 1950s. These articles would make good reading material to support a class discussion on intergenerational conflict.

*While there are no official labels or year boundaries for the generations, we find the following definitions to be useful:

The Radio Generation (born between 1925 and 1945)
Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964)
Generation X (born 1965 to 1980)
Generation Y or Millennials (born 1981 to 1995)
Generation Z or the Net Generation (born 1996 and after)

Employment references have been one of the more volatile areas of business communication in recent years, and the situation is often frustrating for everyone involved. With the threat of lawsuits over negative references, many employers now offer nothing more than confirmation of dates of employment. On the other side of the equation, recruiters are frustrated by the time and work it can take to track down anyone willing to provide balanced feedback on candidates, and candidates are sometimes frustrated by their inability to provide meaningful references.

In response to the challenges faced by prospective employers, a new class of software is helping recruiters get the information they need to make informed hiring choices—and the implications for job seekers are huge. These systems essentially automate a confidential online survey of a candidate's references. The candidate provides names and email addresses of a specified number of references, and the references then respond to a standardized questionnaire. As this article in Workforce Management explains, employers who use the systems report dramatic increases in the quantity and quality of information they're able to get on candidates. Given an opportunity to provide confidential feedback, past employers and other references are much more willing to offer candid assessments.

Now for the implications for job seekers, particularly less-experienced workers who might not appreciate just how long a bad reputation can follow one throughout a career. Employers who use these systems require candidates to provide references, and those references are protected by anonymity (and liability waivers, in at least one of the systems we looked at). The chances of botching up a job and moving on with no damage to one's career are going to shrink as more employers adopt these tools. Students should be aware that even those part-time and entry-level jobs they can't wait to escape from could come back to haunt them if they leave behind a negative reputation.

On the plus side, these systems should benefit employees who exhibit professionalism and dedication to the job, because their former managers will be free to provide in-depth information to future employers.

One of the more intriguing aspects of age diversity in the workplace is the degree to which technology has shaped the communication habits and preferences of each generation. For instance, Generation Y (roughly speaking, those born between 1981 and 1995) has a well-documented preference for electronic media, from texting to IM to social networking. Coupled with a generally more casual approach to information privacy, this reliance on electronic media can clash with the habits and expectations of older workers and managers.

As Generation Y continues to move into workplace and up the managerial ladder, these cultural mismatches are only going to get more common. Moreover, as a recent article in Workforce Management ("Gen Y Execs Shake Up Office Culture") points out, this generation's embrace of entrepreneurship is creating new organizational cultures built around electronic media.

The differences in technology preferences can be significant on their own, but the changes run much deeper than just the tools themselves, of course. Here are some of the issues to consider:

• Lean versus rich media. Lean media, those with the fewest informational cues and least potential for feedback or personalization, are at the core of this culture clash. For example, Baby Boomers accustomed to walking down the hall to a colleague's office or using their phones for actual voice communication are sometimes dismayed at the tendency of younger workers to fire off a terse text message in situations where they believe a more nuanced live conversation would be more effective. Gen Yers, for their part, can sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about, having grown up texting and IMing.
• Synchronous communication with real-time feedback. Richer media, including phone and face-to-face conversations, can make it much easier to resolve misunderstandings and negotiate shared meanings. We've probably all had the experience of getting stuck in time-consuming email loops where neither side seems to be getting the message, only to resolve the confusion with a quick phone call.
• A comfort level with distributed, virtual team communication. As networked and even unstructured organizations become more common and traditional employment gives way to independent contracting for many workers, the ability to communicate without a fixed organizational framework is becoming increasingly important. For all their perceived shortcomings in other areas, Gen Y communicators have a big head start here—and could be developing information encoding and decoding methods that work well in this environment but are perhaps underappreciated by older communicators because they don't fit established patterns and process models.
• Illusions of communication efficiency and effectiveness. Every mode is vulnerable to the illusion that communication efforts are successful, of course, but email and other asynchronous modes are particularly prone to this because it is so easy to fall into the trap of believing that hitting the "send" or "publish" button is the same thing as communicating.
• Attitudes about privacy and sharing. These concerns range from publishing sensitive company information (or inappropriate personal information) to treating information as a resource to be shared, rather than as a "power lever" to be hoarded and used selectively.

Given the range of important differences involved in media choices, how far should the business communication course move toward reflecting these emerging preferences? There is never enough time to cover everything we'd like to cover, naturally, so how do we find the optimum balance? For instance, many instructors like to devote time to telephone skills, and understandably so, but should some of that time be shifted over to skill development with instant messaging (as one example), given the shifts in workplace habits? On the other hand, one can argue that the very lack of practice and finesse with phone conversations makes this mode even more important to cover in the business communication course.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you've already made changes in your topic coverage or teaching style to accommodate these evolving habits and preferences.

Image credit: woodleywonderworks

We've written here before about the power of storytelling in business communication, and all our textbooks now cover storytelling as a compositional mode, so we are definitely intrigued to see how businesses will be using Facebook's new timeline feature as a storytelling tool.

This article in Ad Age highlights a number of firms that have extended their Facebook timelines back in time to tell the company's story from its founding. The tone and presentation vary widely, as one would expect, from the quirky nonsense of Old Spice to the journalistic presentation of the New York Times.

These timelines offer a great opportunity for a student activity. Have your students analyze several Facebook timeline histories and compare them with the About Us pages on the companies' websites. Which medium presents each company's story in the most compelling fashion, the Facebook timeline or the website? What are the potential disadvantages of the Facebook timeline feature? (Students should recognize, for example, that the linear, chronological format can be a frustrating way to find specific information and to read the company history in proper order, one has to find the very bottom of the timeline and read upward.)

What do you think of the timeline as a communication feature in general and as a storytelling tool in particular?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.