Show number 21 of Better Communication Results the podcast is now ready for your downloading delight.

In this edition I begin a two-part series on Listening. Today’s edition discusses 12 blocks to effective listening.

Update: link to download below has been corrected — it originally had an extra http:// in it. Oops!

Download the show directly right now, or else subscribe to my rss/webfeed and have each and every sparkling edition delivered automatically to your podcatching software next time you go online. Confused? There’s more information right here.

Show notes:
00:01 introduction
00:59 Listening (Part I): 12 blocks to effective listening
09:51 Summary
10:25 Feedback and comments
12:58 How to give feedback and send in a comment

Links:

• IABC Malaysia interviews me about podcasting
• Sebastian Keil
• Ben Hamilton / DynamicWebHosting
• Feedburner
• Neville Franks
• IESpell
• Sallie Goetsch
• my Writing for selling or relationship-building? post

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Well, a little while ago I commented that I found Apple’s 75% market share a bit hard to swallow.

Looks like I might be wrong.

According to Podcasting News:

Over 100 small and medium-sized MP3 music player factories have closed in China over the past few months.

“In Shenzhen only, three brands of MP3 players die out silently per month on average,” Jia Yaoyong, general manager of the north China branch of the Dazhong Electronic Appliance Company, was quoted as saying.

Two years ago, there were at least 300 MP3 player brands in the domestic market. The figure has declined to around 100, said Jia

I can only assume it is the relentless onward surge of iPods causing it…

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A colleague has asked me for advice on encouraging employees to leave comments on discussion threads attached to articles on their company intranet.

As my colleague points out,

I haven’t done a hard sell yet as I wanted to build up a number of stories with the discussion threads on them, but so far I’m not getting any take-up from employees. At all. This could be due to a lack of familiarity with this sort of communication technology (whereas I’m used to looking at blogs and message boards all the time) or a culture where people are reluctant to stick their head above the parapet and contribute their thoughts - and put their name to them.

Encouraging employees to leave comments is a HUGE uphill battle, as it entails changing behaviours and expectations. As my colleague quite rightly points out, if folks are scared of putting their heads over the parapets then getting them to do anything another than comment anonymously, or sycophantically, is going to be hard.

Competitions are always a useful standby, as is repeated assurances that contrary views are respected, welcome and encouraged as long as they remain on-topic and courteous.

But the communication culture of the company is one of the biggest drivers of non-engagement. If the culture is one where top management don’t encourage open and honest two-way dialog with employees then encouraging said employees to open themselves up to possible adverse effects is going to be a hard sell.

So I put the issue out to my colleagues and readers here: how would you encourage comments?

If there are any resources online you can point to about selling the benefits of discussion threads/blogs to employees who are unfamiliar with them, my colleague (and I) would be most grateful.

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My main man Jenkins has left we devotees of his blog precariously perched in mid-air, whilst we wait for further installments as to the cluelessness of Bacons Information Inc.

After an extremely witty intellectual deconstruction of their form email to him, he closes his post with:

A train wreck.

Oh, there’s more…. I wrote Christine Birkner.

To be continued…

Oh you cruel and vicious man, Jenkins!

I’ve been waiting all weekend for the next exciting installment to appear in GreatNews — spill the beans, man!

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Neville Franks has informed me of his new product, Surfulater.

It appears to be a combination of uber-bookmarks collector, information collector, content saver and information manager.

Neville’s site says the $35 product is “the ideal tool for researchers, students, teachers, hobbyists and web surfers across the board.”

I’ve downloaded it and am going to give it a trial, with a view to letting you know my views, both good and bad (regular readers know that, like Allan Jenkins, you can’t buy a favourable opinion here at Better Communication Results).

The trial version comes complete with a database already populated with some examples. You can quite rapidly see that under the rubicon of ‘Knowledge Base’ you can save links and/or copy to sites of interest to a particular topic, leave your own notes about those links or text, and attach additional material to supplement the already-saved material.

You can create and save your own ‘To Do’ list, save interesting bookmarks for later reading (and unlike a rapidly unwieldy traditional browser-based bookmark filing system, actually remember why you saved the link), and conduct searches on your saved material.

I can forsee that this would be helpful to tertiary students who, perhaps, use the web extensively for their journal searches; they can save the text from the pages found by their google searches, then search within their saved texts for the relevant reference/paper/article/abstract.

I’ll give it a bit of a bash and let you know what I think. But straight off the cuff I wish the website, surfulater.com, had an easy to download/capture promotional image I can use in my blog.
Update: image now supplied and in place.

I worked with the guys at Skylook on making their logo blog-friendly and it was of great help.

Incidentally, speaking of Skylook, the software was a real help in recording the interview with IABC Malaysia’s President Ghazalie Abdullah, the fruits of which you can hear on an mp3 file located on this site’s ‘My podcasts’ page. So thanks again, chaps, for creating a great tool.

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Oh man, this chap can write!

Steve is an extreme planning advocate, an evangelist if you will. He has a regular column over at Doug Johnson’s D*I*Y Planner.com and in his latest post he continues on his tour of self-discovery with planning, paper-and-pen style.

As he says,

“I’ve recently come to see myself as a proponent of extreme planning, paper-based planning, on the edge as it were, and this week’s topic explores another aspect of extreme planning. ”

…I believe that a person should be ready for anything, and so should their planner. In this crazy world, you never know what you might be called upon to do, and so you never can be sure what you might need. This being the case, I take just about everything a person could ever need. So, without further ado, I present my extreme planner.

Which he then proceeds to do.

Here’s just some of his list of extreme planning essentials:

• Funk and Wagnell’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
• Large Gargoyle - to protect your extreme planner from evil
• Darth Maul Lightsaber
• Large Teddy Bear
• Medieval Sword

Hilarious stuff - and a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!

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Or, as Sab says,

“If you plant rice, rice will grow. If you plant fear, fear will grow.”
Kwai Chang Caine

If you plant trust and honesty…

Who says watching TV is a poor man’s education?

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Nova Spivak has put a call out to anyone who reads him, asking if they would like to trade links.

No, this is not a cynical or cheap ‘rank building’ exercise; Nova wants to create a ‘virtuous circle’ of like minds who enjoy reading him, enabling him to see who his readership is.

To me it’s a very good idea. If you would like to join in, just create a post and link to the following permalink; Nova will pick it up in Technorati in a few days and add your blog to his list.

It’s a useful way of finding other like-minded souls.

Nova’s Permalink

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