Adrie's Blog

Communication

This week started for me with the sad news of the death of Martin Bril - who, at 49, died much too early. Martin was someone who had an uncanny ability to describe people or situations, often in his daily column in the Dutch newspaper "de Volkskrant". He could use a minimal amount of words and paint someone right to the bone, often with a hint of irony. I am sure he would have been, if not was, a great "Tweeter" - he of all people could tell a story in 140 characters.

This week we held a number of presentations on Social Networks and new media in general. With Martin still very much on my mind, I wondered if people actually do still listen to others, or look at others with interest when they write copy or talk to them. Or do they just live in their own narrow little worlds and does the rest not count? During a presentation we gave yesterday I was struck again by how each generation believes that they are the only ones communicating in the right way with others.

Take the current generation, 45+ who seems to think that everything is fine the way they have always done it. A small group of real friends, meet each other first before communicating online, build trusted relationships before you take the next step - that's their world.
Then you have the younger generation, those around 20 years old, who send each other endless Chats and Tweets and Text messages about everything they see, and everything they experience to whomever may happen to read it.

My/our job is to bring people together - to have people communicate with each other. That is why we built E.Factor - of course that is aimed at a specific group of people, entrepreneurs, but even there you have to deal with the various generations now in business. In my view there is not ONE perfect way of communicating. I personally will use whatever I have at my disposal, Facebook, E.Factor, Plaxo, Twitter, email, text but also network events and clubs and of course our lounges. I meet tons of people whilst traveling, at airports, in hotels, restaurants etc. that I can maintain contact with using all these new ways of communication.

I think it would be amazing if we could set up short courses for those that are 45+ to explain the sense, and non-sense, of using the new media. They are not so comfortable yet with personal branding, whilst with their experience and knowledge, they are the perfect candidates to share it with the younger generation in blogs or podcasts.

The younger generation ought to understand that they still need the older one - most of the power, and money, is still in the hands of that generation and therefore they should try and understand how those people communicate and think.

In short - the thoughts that rose to my mind this week were all about "Observe, look around you and try and understand the other person. Come out of your own little world and learn from another. Tweeting can be fun, it can open a whole new realm of possibility - but equally do take the time to do some old-fashioned networking and make a real connection.