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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Missing the broadband boat

Sad to say, but the organizational communications profession is way behind the curve of a major technology shift. The first time, around 1985, desktop publishing replaced gallies and rubiliths and waxers. The profession didn’t see it coming. Rather than plan its use, we were confronted by departments publishing their own crappy newsletters just because they could. The writing was often atrocious and an 8-1/2 x 11” newsletter featured six columns and eight fonts. It took years to rein it all in.

The Internet was next. Communicators were cranking out one-way, top-down publications while the IT department built the earliest Web sites. In many organizations, communicators still struggle to gain influence over the use of a medium that is primarily a communications tool.

Now it’s broadband. In July, the scales tipped: More online users accessed the Internet through broadband connectdions than dial-up. What does that mean to business, exactly? According to an article in CMP’s TechNews, “the long-awaited age of broadband is now making possible an explosion of e-business opportunity that will see transaction rates doubling over the next few years.”

In other words, there’s great anticipation in sales and marketing circles for the possibilites broadband opens up. In communication circles, we seem to be excited only by a new delivery mechanism for traditional b-roll footage, speeches and meetings.

We need to be thinking instead about the always-on, untethered nature of broadband and wireless connectivity, and figure out how we can leverage it. The analysts expect consumers to buy and communicate more online. It so happens that those consumers have jobs in (among other places) the media, the financial community and government. They are activists and community members. They vote. And they’ll come to expect the same capabilities from us that they expect from the sales-and-marketing side of the business.

Couple this with the fact that the Internet plays some role in the day-to-day lives of nearly 90% of Americans, and you’ve got a pretty compelling reason to start envisioning the future of broadband in organizational communications.

12/22/04 | 0 Comments | Missing the broadband boat

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