Good communication does not just involve the transfer of information from one entity to another. Prior to the exchange of information, a basic and important element of good communication is the confirmation and validation of facts that will be conveyed.
To validate data, appropriate tests need to be run, such as running the data through business cases, usability testing, and case models.
To validate fluctuating data, appropriate meetings can also be set up to establish and authenticate the information, such as when you need up-to-date information for a status report.
To validate any data received from others, make sure beforehand that you were clear as to what information you were asking for. It is a good idea to give an explanation, and then follow through with an example for further clarification of what material you were seeking.
To check the correctness of any data gathered or received, apply the following tips before communicating the information to others.
One – Use your interpersonal skills to partner with subject matter experts to ensure validation and accuracy of information. Also, engage and increase collaboration with other internal communicators to learn about their procedures for authentication.
Two – Partner with stakeholders to make sure all requirements for the information were met. Also make sure that management approves of all the information that is to be distributed. But mostly, make sure that the information is relevant.
Three – Apply your time management skills to make sure all requests were met and that all gathered information is organized and ready to be disseminated. This skill set will allow you to work effectively to deliver the objective.
Four – Develop procedures and processes to make sure all information will be validated and finally distributed either verbally, or through manuals handbooks, and/or presentations (written and verbal).
Five – Apply your knowledge management skills and experience to ensure that all information is appropriately authorized and correct. Manage and maintain good records by double checking that the authentication and distribution procedures have been completed.
Six – Track outcomes of validated information. Conduct assessments, analyses, evaluations, and surveys to ensure that all vital information is precise, accurate, and distributed.
Seven – Remain on top of all developments, changes, updates, etc. by monitoring and evaluating all tasks involving the specific information. Assist those that need help in either finding more specific data or in organizing and presenting the information. This way, facilitating improvements in the future for gathering or confirming the information can be accomplished.
To ensure the information and work has been authorized and confirmed (prior to distributing information), ownership of the task has to be taken. Be involved and validate the data yourself especially if you have to disseminate the information globally.
This is not to say that the above guidelines fit every scenario, but at least it provides a beginning as to how to ensure validation of data before disseminating it.
If you have performed a similar task, please leave a comment. Thank you.
[Editor’s note: We are in the business of looking at the best ways to persevere through ugly situations, so when we saw that Jacquelyn Lynn had penned a collection of conversations regarding how to survive an active shooter event we felt drawn to share. The below is a preview of her newly released book, How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life.]
If you find yourself in an active shooter situation, you have four basic action options:
Flee
Defend
Oppose
Defeat
This excerpt from How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life discusses the first option.
How to Survive an Active Shooter is based on an interview with a terrorism and security expert. Questions are in italics; answers are in plain type.
Q. Let’s talk about the first tactic, which is to survive by running away.
A. Okay. As soon as you realize you’re in an active shooter situation, your first thought should be to flee. It should be flight. If you are a moving target, you are almost impossible to hit with a gun. Also why would you want to stand still, and thus volunteer to be the target of choice in a crowded room?
As you run away, don’t run in a straight line. I’m not telling you to serpentine, but you don’t want to run in a straight line. With just a little zigzagging, you’ll be nearly impossible to hit and every inch you get further away is an improved chance you have at survival. Distance is your friend.
If you need to hide briefly to get that distance, hide briefly, let him walk past you, and get that distance. If you need to play dead, play dead and get him past you so you can get that distance.
Now, something to keep in mind as you’re making the decisions necessary to survive, is that if you hide or play dead, you are going to have things that may draw attention to you. Any twitch, any cough, any motion, or your cell phone will draw attention to you.
I’m sure everybody reading this has at some point sat in a restaurant or a bar and noticed that if a television is on, it doesn’t matter if it’s underwater pottery that’s on, you are going to watch it. The mind is programmed to pay attention to whatever is in motion. It’s part of the way the human mind works.
If you’re going to play dead, you’d better do it well. What is keeping you alive is the motion of others because that’s what the shooter’s attention will be drawn to. Somebody else will be that target, but it won’t you, though, because you’re not drawing attention to yourself, you’re not moving.
It’s not that you aren’t going to be seen or that he’s going to be fooled and say, “Oh, I already shot that one,” it’s that among the 100 or 200 or 300 people in the room, you are not drawing attention.
Q. He’s looking for motion. His eye is drawn to motion.
A. Yes. That’s what will attract him—motion.
Q. It seems almost cold-hearted and selfish to say that your first goal should be to not draw attention to yourself so that the shooter will focus on someone else. I think most people are going to have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that they need to take care of themselves first and that the person next to them may die but that’s just the way it has to be.
A. It’s the airline rule of “put on your own oxygen mask first” because if you’re dead, you can’t help anyone else. You hear this on every airline flight: When the oxygen masks drop, put on yours first then help those around you.
That’s the mentality here. If you’re alive, you’re either going to escape and be a witness or you’re going to stay and hopefully be a force for good in thwarting the attack. But you are useless to everybody if you’re dead. Put on your mask first, then put on the masks of those around you.
Learn more in How to Survive an Active Shooter: What You do Before, During and After an Attack Could Save Your Life. Go here to order on Amazon.
Jacquelyn Lynn is an inspirational author, business writer and ghostwriter whose dynamic books and insightful articles have been helping business leaders work smarter and more profitably for nearly three decades. More recently, her inspirational books have provided comfort and encouragement to thousands of readers. Her credits include writing or ghostwriting more than 30 books; 3,000+ articles in over 100 regional, national and international publications; and countless blogs, ebooks, newsletters, white papers, news releases, and more. Jacquelyn is also the co-creator of two series of coloring books for adults: Faith Works, a series of Christian coloring books with inspirational messages and The Experience, a series of event and/or destination coloring books.
There are two distinctions your should worry about when trying to expand your audience on social media audience – the difference between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy, and how your content competition differs from your business competition.
Let me clarify each of these before we proceed. A content strategy doesn’t account for marketing and distribution without which your content will remain undiscovered. Yes, that viral video didn’t set itself on fire, it was lit and fed until it caught on. Second, giants whom you may have blind-sighted as business competition remain your competitors in content. Why should readers pick your articles over theirs? Answer this question and have a content distribution strategy in place before you proceed with this list of tactics.
Generating new leads advertising strategy. Aiming at target audience. Attracting followers, follow us on social media, subscriber counting concept. Bright vibrant violet vector isolated illustration
Enable social plug-ins on your emails, blog posts and newsletters
Ideally, all media you use as part of your marketing strategy should be interconnected to create a web of traffic.
Your website, blog posts, emails and newsletters should have social sharing/following plug-ins enabled. You and your employees should include social plug-ins in your email sign-offs. That way, every website visitor or person you come in contact with via email could potentially follow you on social.
Your blog is also a great source of traffic for your social media pages. Your blog visitors should be able to share the posts/quotes they like to their social pages. Automatically picked tweets are good, because they simply the sharing process further and encourage more of your visitors to share, giving you an increased visibility.
Tool to use
SumoMe has social media plug-ins with a counter for your blog. The counter reflects the success of a post and pushes more people to share. Most email clients offer hyper-linking to add social links to your emails and newsletters.
Identify your sneezers and engage them in a content dispelling program
That’s what Seth Godin calls them, your sneezers. People who have the power to infect your specific niche, can be called your sneezers. How do you get access to and influence over a large audience instantly? You can’t. Even with influencer marketing you have to get on your influencers’ radars and then work at building relationships with them.
One sure fire-way of attracting the attention of influencers is by creating and sharing content that they’re interested in and are likely to pick up. Sometimes, simply doing that is enough to earn a wider visibility. To streamline the process and initiate actual influencer marketing programs, a good tool can help.
Tool to use
FollowerWonk is a great tool that focuses on identifying influencers you could connect with on Twitter. It works based on keywords and your location helping you locate the right influencers for your brand.
Organize your employees into an influential advocate army
Employee advocacy is an alternative means of commanding social media influence. Employees are both the most credible sources on social media and the widest reaching channels (when put together). According to studies, employee advocacy can increase the reach of your content by as much as 561% and increase your engagement by about 7X.
With employees, you already have existing work relationships to begin with. Most of your employees will appreciate being a part of something more than simply their work. All that’s necessary to initiate an advocacy program is their support and a tool to organize the efforts. Make you content accessible to employees and enable them to help you distribute it on social media.
Tool to use
With DrumUp employee advocacy platform you can share content with your employees with ease, and they can share it without much effort to their social media accounts. The leaderboard on the platform helps with keeping employee advocates motivated. If you want to track the success of your employee advocacy program, you can do it with the platform’s analytics.
Invade new content territories by re-purposing old content
Expand the reach your content has by converting pre-existing content into new formats. Not only does this increase the visibility of your content by introducing it on new platforms, but also helps you reach people who don’t consume one format or the other.
Convert a blog post into a SlideShare, an infographic, a podcast or video. You simply need to section the write-up, state takeaways under each subhead and type them in/represent them on new formats. Videos aren’t hard to create when they’re a simple slide-show or words and images rendered with the most basic animation. Every image or infographic that you create could turn into a pin for Pinterest.
Tool to use
To create an infographic you could use Venngage which has drag and drop modules that are easy to use. Google Slides are a great choice for making slides for SlideShare and PowToon has pre-made templates to help you animate a simple video.
Leverage the right hashtags and @mentions to help your target audience discover you
On social media, there are certain words that can give you access to large audiences – like hashtags and @mentions. Hashtags are used to index conversations so they can be found easily. By using relevant hashtags on your tweets, you give information seekers an opportunity to stumble upon your content. Have you noticed how Twitter suggests hashtags and related hashtags when you type a query in its search bar?
More than often, Twitteratti use those suggestions to find their content. By adding hashtags to your tweets you increase your discoverability. Using hashtags and @mentions you can increase the reach of your content marketing efforts on social media.
People love shout-outs on social media and it often encourages them to share your content. Tag and @mention them to include them in your promotion process.
Tool to use
Even though Twitter suggests hashtags, it doesn’t tell you how popular each of those suggestions are. You could however access that information through a hashtag analysis tool like Hahstagify.me. Based on the popularity of the hashtags and the influencers who are using them (both provided by the tool), decide on which hashtags to add to your posts.
Co-create & partner with industry experts and similar businesses for content
Building a large and engaged following is an indefinite and effort intensive process. Instead of waiting until you achieve that status on social media, you can connect with everyone you need even before you develop that following. How? By co-creating content with industry experts and social media influencers.
All you need to run this tactic is a good topic to work with or a good set of questions that your niche’s experts are likely to be interested in discussing. While reaching out to the experts is a time consuming task, it is worth the investment. Not only do you gain valuable insights to share with your audience, but you also initiate relationships with experts in the process, and enlist their support and influence in promoting the content that you co-create. Co-creation with anyone who has value to offer is a great idea. Even if your content partners don’t have larger following than you do, you still earn new insights and the possibility to reach a part of the target audience that you may have not connected with yet. The only necessity for this tactic is the target – ensure that your co-creators also work with the same target audience.
Tool to use
A good social listening tool can help you identify people who are actively talking about topics that are of interest to your company. Brand24 lets you separate keyword search results by source – social media, blog posts, forums, news or even video. Using it makes it easier to find the right person for the content format you have in mind.
Superannuation and dog racing provide examples for this guest post
[Editor’s note: Many thanks to frequent contributor Tony Jaques for allowing us to use this article, originally published in his Issue}Outcomes newsletter. Tony often covers news out of Australia and the surrounding regions which lets us take a look at great crisis management case studies we may not have seen otherwise.]
One of the challenges for policy makers and managers everywhere is how best to communicate a major change of mind. Will it be negatively perceived as a back-flip by a weak leader, or recognised as a positive outcome resulting from flexible consultation with stakeholders?
This issue management conundrum was highlighted by two recent high-profile developments in Australia.
In the first case, Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison had to explain why the Government had backed down from some unpopular changes to the national superannuation [retirement fund for those not in Australia] system. His communication strategy was clear and unapologetic. The Minister told reporters he had listened and then made the right decision – and the story pretty quickly went away.
Contrast this with the issue management debacle surrounding greyhound racing. Reacting to a television exposé of cruel practices in the sport, New South Wales Premier Mike Baird announced a total ban on greyhound racing in the state. Predictably, animal welfare groups praised it as trend-setting and courageous, while the greyhound industry, along with their allies in politics and the media, were outraged and angry.
Aside from the arguments for and against the ban, what is of interest is how the NSW Premier managed the growing controversy. After three months of damaging headlines, and repeatedly denying reports he was about to change his mind, to the apparent surprise of no-one, the hapless Premier announced last week he had dropped the proposal.
Mr Baird certainly tried to emphasise that new rules would be introduced to clean up the sport. But what appeared on news bulletins across the country was of a sombre-faced Premier declaiming: “I was wrong. The Cabinet was wrong. The Government was wrong.” The perception was a humiliating defeat.
The question is: Did it have to be that way? There is no doubting the Premier’s sincerity, but the first important precept of issue management is to fully understand your stakeholders. Mr Baird very evidently over-estimated the extent and persistence of public attention to animal welfare, and under-estimated support for the greyhound industry and its economic reach.
Second, keep your allies and potential allies inside the tent. NSW was not able to rely on supporters from leaders in other states and increasingly looked out of step with the rest of the nation.
Third, leave yourself room to manoeuvre. While a total ban was a bridge too far, the Premier could have demonstrated leadership and secured political credit by a more measured response to a legitimate matter of public concern. Issue management is a two-way process and he needed to do more listening and consulting before jumping in at the deep end.
Finally, in the words of Kenny Rogers, know when to hold, know when to fold. The Premier’s repeated denials left him no dignified way out and he waited far too long. There is an important difference between being firmly resolute and stubbornly blind to reality.
So it’s worth considering the two strategies for managing a policy reversal. The Treasurer framed his superannuation change of mind as a virtue, responding maturely to feedback. Naturally his critics labelled that as spin to cover up a back-down, but he seemingly suffered little lasting political damage. By contrast Premier Baird went from being one of the nation’s most popular politicians to being perceived as misguided, inflexible and plain wrong. There has to be a lesson somewhere there.
A recent workshop discussion led to this question: what kind of communicator are you, really? What are the best practices to adopt in order to be a great communicator? The class participants thought about what kind of attitudes we sometimes bring to communication, and came up with this list of best practices.
As you read the list below, be aware that we tend to judge ourselves not by our actual behavior but by our intentions: “I meant to listen; it’s just that I was so busy when you called…” While it is true that your heart is probably in the right place, the pressures of time, stress and multi-tasking can undermine those best intentions and leave you with less-than-desirable behavior.
Starting today, take a look at what you actually do, since this is what the people around you actually experience. Or, if you are feeling especially brave, ask someone you know and trust to give you some feedback on how well you approach communication. Specifically, how are you doing in your communication approach?
Here are some hallmarks of the approach great communicators consistently take:
Be polite, respectful in communication. Do you say “please” and “thank you?” Do you check with the person to see if this is a good time for them? Or do you bark out orders on your way past them?
Be sincere. Do you really notice the others around you? Do you see them as whole people with lives and feelings? Or just as someone who can do something for you–or get in your way? When you travel, do you take time to notice all the people who serve you, from the taxi driver to the flight attendant? Do you take a moment to reaffirm the people around you, and to show them sincere appreciation?
Be professional. Do you watch your language or let it fly? Do you have good grammar? Do you speak clearly? Do you have an obnoxious laugh? Do you tell dirty jokes? Do you gossip? Or do you try to speak professionally everywhere you go, knowing that “you never know” who might be listening.
Be patient. Yes, you are under stress. Probably so are those around you. When you travel, do you shout at drivers ahead of you? Or are you like the passive-aggressive traveller behind me in the “professional traveller” security line who kept grumbling criticism of those ahead of him? Those stressful times are exactly when you should remind yourself to breathe.
Be empathetic. Sometimes it feels good to vent, but not so good for the person on the receiving side. Take time to ask yourself how that person facing you feels. A smile and thank you could really help someone, and cost you very little. A brief apology if you have been unkind may make both sides feel better.
Think, plan and prepare before talking, typing or sending. Of course you are in a hurry. Of course you are thinking of three (or ten!) things at once. But before you shoot off that hurried e-mail, think it though. Before you call someone onto the carpet, be sure you are speaking with the right person, at the right time. Before you send that newsletter, e-mail, invitation, or any other document, clear your mind and re-read it. Watch out for incomplete sentences, typos, and fuzzy thinking.
Communication is a complex, important human skill that requires your full attention. Be a great communicator. Check your communication approach.
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