Communication is getting harder…

02 mai 2011

Well, it certainly is here from where I am writing this PAGtour column. I’m in a small village in a rough land of pines, olive trees and almond groves in north-eastern Spain. No it’s not Catalonia… it’s next door in Aragón, some 100 km south of the regional capital, Zaragoza.

There’s hardly any tourism here and meetings are those that tend to take place with friends on street corners or in the village bar. To be fair, there are more visitors than normal at this time of the year. It’s ‘Semana Santa’ and in the Bajo Aragón (Southern Aragón) they have the Easter tradition of beating the hell out of large leather & metal drums and disturbing the normally peaceful countryside.

This small village of Belmonte de San José, of which I am one of 94 official inhabitants, is where I was crazy enough to set up a small communication company comprising one person... me.

So far so good, but what I did not realise three years ago was that it would be the only place in the developed world to rely on internet via a telephone landline, something which makes you lose the will to live. You feel as if you’re living in the Middle Ages, which is quite appropriate as tomorrow we have the annual Easter medieval market in the village!

Communication in general….

But Belmonte aside…Have you noticed how complicated communication is becoming? And how difficult it is to capture people’s attention amid all the buzzing and twittering? The more channels we have available to us, the less easy it is to communicate, except in sound bites. Maybe the real problem is that we now have more ways to communicate than things to say.

Has business lost all its spontaneity? We are supposedly more accessible with Smartphones 24/7 and yet we have become more difficult to reach.  People are being constantly interrupted by emails, texts and twitters. And yet, if you want to talk to them on the phone, you don’t just pick it up and dial a number any more. You have to exchange a series of emails first to arrange a time when you can organise a phone ‘meeting’!

To watch or to read?

People seem to believe video has more impact and they prefer to watch rather than read. I can assure you I don’t. There was an eight minute video interview a few weeks ago on the UK Meetings: Review website. It was with a Tourism Minister on the subject of Business Events and why the British have withdrawn any marketing support from this, the most financially rewarding aspect of tourism.

If it had been a written interview, it would have taken me 15 seconds to scan and see if there was anything remotely interesting. In the event I got bored after two minutes and turned it off. Video and reality TV can often be far less exciting than watching paint dry, especially when it involves politicians who do not have the first idea of what they are talking about.

Face to face?

Have you noticed? Even face-to-face meetings are changing.  They’re becoming side-by-side as participants sit next to each other in bars and restaurants talking into their laptops, rather directly than to each other. It gives a business lunch a whole new meaning…

A final word on social networks

And these days your social network is definitely one of your greatest business assets. By all means ask your network for help and advice, but make sure you also ‘give’ to others when they are looking for help. There are a lot of people out there who seem to just want to take without the giving.

When someone I don’t know invites me to be a friend or connection, I never accept unless they give me a good reason with a personal touch. Otherwise, I know they just want to use me and all my connections. And that’s certainly taking without giving…

Bruce Taylor