Learn about e-mail and how to write e-mails effectively.

I have been teaching with Frances Grimes in the Management Communications program here at Graziadio this fall and so business communication is on my mind.

Face-to-face business communication is difficult—attempting to read body language, facial expressions, and gestures (although some gestures speak for themselves), can be a challenge. Not to mention cultural differences that can blur the meaning to any one or all of the above.

Edelman convened more than 100 professors of communications, journalism, business and public relations from across North America and Europe to discuss how companies, organizations, and media effectively engage their stakeholders through social media.

The sessions were led by more than 50 practitioners who guide digital communications strategies within leading organizations – including AstraZeneca, CNN, eBay, Environmental Defense Fund, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Starbucks, The Lance Armstrong Foundation, UPS, and Whirlpool, among others.

This report provides best practices and actionable insights into how to engage employees, consumers, investors, regulators and media.

Cisco Sys­tems, the Sil­i­con Val­ley pow­er­house, has become the poster child for how to use video in the enter­prise. Recently I caught up with two of the key play­ers who made it happen.

• Jeanette Gib­son (above), direc­tor of new media in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions group, talks about how Cisco uses video and social media to drive inno­va­tion around how the com­pany does both exter­nal and inter­nal communications.

• John Earn­hardt (below), Cisco’s blogger-in-chief and senior man­ager of media rela­tions, describes how video pro­duc­tion has been dis­trib­uted through­out the com­pany. “See­ing some­one and hear­ing them is much more impact­ful than the writ­ten word,” he says.

When Steve Rubel (photo, left), senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital, spoke at the Edelman Change/EE Best Practices in Change and Internal Communications Summit last week, he demonstrated how today’s digital realities are playing out in the workplace. Steve also reinforced the immense potential companies have to successfully embrace these realities in how they communicate with their employees.

Steve shared several key ways people are consuming digital information that have real and direct implications for how companies communicate internally:

• We are now a culture of “snacking,” meaning we like to consumer our information in small pieces throughout the day (e.g., Twitter, YouTube).
• The continuing rise of mobile technologies is causing even more digital distractions that spill into every place we go, including our workplaces.
• The increasing presence of digital technologies in peoples’ personal lives is carrying over into the workplace. Employees expect the equipment and capabilities they have at home to carry over to the office.
• The competition to capture peoples’ attention is at an all-time high and continues to grow. The average American now visits 111 different website domains each month and only reads about 20 percent of an email or Web page.

It's more important than ever for your e-mail to stand out. How can you do this? What's the best way to get people to notice your email above all the rest? Watch this episode to learn four easy tips.

In the era of Non-Digital Communication, individual’s had limited choices to showcase & impress their persona to others, be it personal or professional.

The communication was primarily done through word of mouth & networking & was limited to one to one interaction. Not every one had the liberty to interact with a larger audience in a single interaction. Neither could an individual get an opportunity easily to interact with thought leaders.

Therefore non-digital era was an era of strong networking with great communication that was the privilege of select few.

The emergence of digital communication and social media has changed it all.

The business benefits of social software platforms will lead to e-mail being replaced as the primary means of communication by 2014, according to analyst Gartner.

Increasing business use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook has resulted in more demand for such systems, says the firm, which predicts that 20 per cent of organisations will use them as their key communication medium by 2014.

It's tough out there. There is no shortage of information on the web, and no shortage of tools with which to consume it, whether you're on your couch, at your desk, or on foot somewhere in between.

As a card-carrying member of the digital revolution, you should therefore be well-versed in the available news media at your disposal. Hacking though the weeds to find the most interesting and relevant things for you remains the primary challenge in this day and age.

What you need is a healthy dose of RSS.

I want to talk about the transformed media landscape, and what it means for anybody who has a message they want to get out to anywhere in the world. And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation.