A cultural communication crisis

Our country is in the communication crisis. No one knows how to communicate with one another anymore. It's not just speaking to another person face-to-face. It's that we all have our own communication preferences.

Some people prefer email; others prefer Twitter; others are always on Facebook, and the list goes on.

Organizations and businesses are being stretched in ways they never imagined as they attempt to communicate with not only regular customers or members of their organization, but how do they reach new customers or new people?

It's a cultural communication crisis.

The problem is that when everyone has their own preferred communication stream, the communicate - whether an individual or an organization - has to use multiple mediums to communicate with people. Even then, you're not assured of your message being received.

Facebook is dying with the younger generation while email is often ignored as junk boxes grow like Godzilla and spam inundates and anesthetizes our attention spans.

Anecdotally, I don't use Facebook much for "email" or "messaging," but there are many who do, and when I'm sent a message on FB, it is usually several days before I check or notice it. (I do not have email notifications from FB enabled simply because I don't want FB as my central place for communication.)

In short, everyone is trying to understand and solve the issue of "how to be heard."

Where to post content

In addition to simple communication with each other, those of use that like to write and create content are struggling mightily to discern the best path or forum for our posts. For example, when I read a pithy quote or find a great paragraph in a book that I would like to share, I have a digital hesitation about where will be the most effective stream to post it in. Should I share it on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Tumblr, or my blog?

The experiment

To that end, I'm going to try a social experiment for 90 days. I will stop posting extended thoughts on any other social media except for my blog. After all, they are my thoughts, why would give them to Mark Zuckerberg to help his little site when my little blog needs more traffic? If people want to know what I think, they can just go to one central spot. At least, that's the plan for the experiment.

I'll use Twitter to drive my traffic to the blog and for occasional posts that are 140 character nuggets. However, all other content will be blog-based. To my FB and Google+ friends... I know the extra click to my blog is an inconvenience. The good news is that my posts in those digital arenas will be significantly reduced, allowing you to read along without my interruptions.

Maybe by reducing the amount of my chatter on other sites, I'll discover a more tightly knit form of digital community and relationships.

I'm pulling the trigger on August 1. I hope you'll bookmark journeyguy.com, create an email subscription, or add it to your Feedly account (or other RSS reader; feed link here). Leave a comment about what you think of the experiment and the reflections above; I'd love to know your thoughts.

Jeff Noble - "Notes from the Trail"

The dilemma of where to post creative content…

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