Plan to Communicate!

I read BradJWard's latest post this morning and it was a fantastic post that's based on a paraphrased quote from page 110 of Seth Godin’s book, Meatball Sundae.

Brad works at Butler University as the Electronic Communication Coordinator in the Office of Admission and is a rising young leader in the world of social media marketing in Higher Education.

When reading his post I think it is especially important to pay close attention to the last line of item #4 of his breakdown of Godin's quotation. "Make sure they know you appreciate them having the conversation with you."

What does it mean to have a conversation with your target market? What you say will vary by institution and how you say it will vary as well. The only certainty is that we all will be dealing with the same stress of figuring out how to communicate in a way that creates conversation. In order to achieve this goal we must listen. We must let them finish their sentences before we speak; regardless of how bad we want to tell them that "...we understand, but..".

The only way to find out what another individual wants is to ask questions and then LISTEN to the answers. It is at this point, only they have finished talking, that you can respond by providing only what you can truly offer. It is then up to the individual to decide what he or she can go without realistically still succeed.

In higher education; we sometimes tend to forget about these simple points when building and refining our communication plans. There is obviously much more to this topic, but I have inserted a few slides from a presentation I put together on explaining the Integrated Communications flow(NOT!) Plan. I hope this will help you visualize how the plan should work and I would love to get feedback so leave a comment.