Feature Articles Avoiding
Wrong Turns in the Shrinking Global Village
by Shelley Bird With the global village growing smaller every year,
more and more communication professionals are taking
on assignments that span a wide range of countries and
cultures. Cross-border responsibilities require that
you constantly expand your horizons and learn about
new places and people. At the same time, it can be more
than a little daunting to get up to speed on each country’s
business and social conventions—and when the two
do and don’t mix.
World
English—How to Communicate with an International
Audience
by Alan M. Perlman, Ph.D.
World English is the result of applying a set of
writing and editing principles to create a simplified,
highly-intelligible international dialect. The principle
is similar to that of Basic English, which was developed
by linguists during World War II. While Basic English
had only 800 words, you could really say a lot of things
with it. The number of situations where misinterpretation
can take place is practically infinite. But a fairly
small number of writing and editing principles will
cover a very large number of cases and considerably
reduce the burden on the non-native reader and listener.
Blogs:
The Fast Track to Getting Global Awareness
by Elizabeth Albrycht
“We need to get global awareness fast,”
says your CEO. “Make it happen.” When faced
with the need to rapidly increase your organization’s
visibility around the world, there are some daunting
and expensive challenges, particularly if your company
does not have a local presence in the countries it is
targeting. Hiring local public relations and marketing
communication talent, translating collateral into local
languages and identifying and getting into both formal
and informal business networks are just a few of these
challenges.
What
25,000 Employees Globally Say about Communication Effectiveness
by Katherine Woodall, ABC, APR, and Charlie Watts
Towers Perrin has brought together a group of leading
companies to establish The Communications Effectiveness
Consortium and annual benchmarking study. This study
assesses factors that drive employees’ perceptions
of communication effectiveness. The resulting tool provides
guidance on the best return on investments for an organization’s
communication resources.
Columns Working
Words
by Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz Doin' That Old Two-Step: A system for getting
your writing right Here's an awful question: "What is good writing?"
When we run writing workshops for businesspeople, we
often begin by asking for the characteristics of good
writing versus bad writing. The first list typically
contains words like simple, clear, accessible, concise,
lively and conversational. The second list is on the
flip side of the coin, with participants describing
bad writing as complex, wordy, confusing, illogical,
full of jargon and having no clear purpose.
Communication
in the News
by Angelo Fernando
Communicating in a State of Shock To say that the whole world is all shook up by the
movement of a techtonic plate in the Indian Ocean has
all the ingredients of a cliché. But what many
of us—including myself, a Sri Lankan—have
yet to grasp is how crisis communication can never be
played by the rulebook. When the tragedy struck on the
morning of 26 December in Asia (still Christmas Day
in North America), I was at a holiday party when someone
received—and dismissed—a text message from
Sri Lanka about the tsunami. Text, until then, was just
the latest flavor of a digital connection with my global
village and not a form of crisis communication.
Case
Studies
- "HP All-Employee Meetings," ROI Communications,
Inc.
- "Cotton Day Hong Kong," Cotton Council
International—Golin/Harris International Ltd.
- "SiOL TV Launch," Pristop Communications
- "BABW Comes to Canada," Strategic
Objectives
Industry
News
- Outsourcing Will Come Out of the Closet in 2005
- Cultural and Linguistic Differences between U.S.
and U.K. Workers Necessitate Training
- Improving Performance within Financial Services
Organizations an Elusive Goal
- More Than Half of Global Business Projects Fail
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