THE COMMUNICATIONS CHALLENGE OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

As we zoom into another year of the digital revolution, people have more and more sources of easily-accessible information. This is a fantastic thing. But it gives rise to the biggest business communications challenge of our age. How do we grab and keep our audience when we're competing for attention with an ever-exploding number of information sources? And how do we get our message across when - as a consequence of the upsurge in available information - our targets have less and less time to listen to us? This challenge is reflected in the media world by the ever-diminishing length which television gives people to make their point in news reports. In America, where they make a point of studying such things, the typical length of a "sound bite" on television - the time the news bulletin gives to a person being interviewed - has fallen from forty-three seconds in the 1960s to nine seconds now.    This has unkindly been interpreted as part of a "dumbing down" process by the media. But you can also interpret it as meaning audiences are becoming more discriminating, and so are inherently gravitating to information packaged in more easily digestible chunks. Whether we are trying to get across a message on TV or face-to-face or through the internet, we're faced with the challenge of making our point in a shorter, punchier more memorable way than was previously necessary. And in the business world, getting across your message is something you must do - amidst this tougher competition in the information market place. As the American businessman, Lee Iacocca, observed "You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere." Of course it often takes more time and thought to ensure that our message is constructed in a more succinct and impactful way. It's a truth Mark Twain noticed when he confessed: "I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." These days, time constraints and digital competition mean most long versions just don't stand a chance.

MAKING YOUR POINT - IN TIME WITH TOAST Having been mulling over the challenge of getting through to ever-busier audiences, I've come up with a new offering for the year. It's called "Your 2013 Message In Sixty Seconds". The idea is to help you make your point in a more powerful way - in the time it takes to cook a piece of toast. There's a keynote version for conferences - so audiences leave better equipped to hit their targets in the information jungle. This can involve a few volunteers on stage who we work on to sharpen their sixty- second messaging as the keynote progresses. Their improvement levels are measured by audience votes. And there's a half-day master class version for business leaders and others. In these workshops, every participant can leave knowing that in their next professional conversation, meeting or webcast they can make their point more succinctly and effectively - and in a way that sticks. As a primary school student, I remember being taught how to put bread in a pop-up toaster and being told it would take a minute to turn brown. So putting this to the test, I've recorded part of my 2013 new year message with some timing assistance from the Dodd family toaster. Having said that, if you study it with a stop watch in hand, you might find the Dodd toaster takes slightly more than 60 seconds to deliver the goods. But here's hoping it's nonetheless helped produce a crisp, tasty, bite-sized message.    The full range of communications-boosting master classes is here. http://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/workshops_for_business_leaders_groups.php POLAND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON I've just been helping to run communications skills sessions in Poland - a country which has undergone an amazing transformation over the past quarter of a century. Compared with my first visit there in 1988, it's now amazingly well-organised, efficient and creative. On my first mission to Warsaw during the Cold War there were long, miserable queues in the streets for food; shoddily built and badly-maintained apartment blocks and communist secret police who would monitor and sometimes attack those who took on the system. When I arrived in Warsaw Airport twenty-five years ago it was a grim, forbidding place. This time it was so vibrant, the airport arrivals hall was being used as a movie set - with participants only too happy to explain what was going on as they awaited their moment in the spotlight.    At the airport and beyond, Warsaw proved to be hugely cleaner and better maintained - with far more freedom than on my initial visit when, as a foreign journalist, I was trailed by secret police. It was of course Polish campaigners for freedom who did more than anyone else to bring an end to the communist dictatorship imposed on Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. So when I was able to travel to Gdansk in the north to do an interview with Lech Walesa - the leader of Poland's Solidarity Free Trade Union - it was of interest to the secret police as they fought to suppress the union's heroic efforts to overturn the system. Getting to meet Lech Walesa - at a time when a new wave of coal miners' strikes was kicking off - was a highlight of my 1988 visit. But there was one character who stood out even more than the man who went on to be the first fully democratically-elected Polish president. This was another Solidarity activist called Jacek Szymanderski who was regularly put in jail for his pro-freedom activities.  Jacek Szymanderski, left, in a 1989 election campaign poster with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in historic elections which helped free Eastern Europe Conditions in the jails run by the Polish communists were not great, as you might imagine, and the food was normally dire. But I particularly remember Jacek telling me in his vibrant, broken English how on one occasion in 1986 he and his fellow inmates were surprised that instead of the usual drab food they were suddenly given lettuce. "Great leaves of salad," was how he excitedly described them. This was a particularly rare treat as even Poles outside of jail found fresh produce extremely hard to come by. The prisoners devoured the lettuce leaves with gusto. But afterwards they experienced what Jacek colourfully described as much "vomitation". It was only later the democracy-campaigners found out where the lettuces had originated. It was a place called Chernobyl. They'd been exported to Poland from the Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the world's worst nuclear accident there. Jacek's story is among those I tell in my new after dinner speech called "Tales and Tips from Six Continents". More details in the After Dinner Speaking section at: http://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/international_speaking.php THAT'S NOT A ROCK!!! I'm looking forward to my first international mission of 2013 - next week in Gibraltar. Given the British territory's location on the southern coast of Spain, temperatures are bound to be higher than we're experiencing in wintry London at present. I'm fortunate enough to be going there courtesy of the Academy for Chief Executives. I await with much anticipation my first view of the Rock of Gibraltar - which I'm sure you'll agree looks pretty magnificent.    In the world rankings of monoliths (big rocks, to you and me), The Rock of Gibraltar rates as the ninth largest in the world. Mind you, I will have to be careful what I say about it. Coming from Australia - the land of earth's biggest rock - I might be tempted to scoff at the size of Gibraltar's. You may recall the Australian movie character, Mick "Crocodile" Dundee, famously and disparagingly saying to a would-be New York mugger "That's not a knife" while producing his own much larger weapon. I was thinking of taking a picture of Uluru - the seriously large rock pictured below - and saying to Gibraltarians about their pride and joy: "That's not a rock".    If you need a reminder of how Australian's can drop in such a line with masterly understatement, click here. Wishing you the rocks you deserve in 2013. Keep smiling, Michael