Crazy 'bout Communication

How to be persuasive

2008-04-10T15:23:00.006+01:00

The art of persuasion is ultimately important when trying to influence people whether it is in your private of professional life. Success might depend on your persuasive powers, but how much thought have you given this type of communication?
Some people are naturally good communicators, they can persuade people to buy sand in Sahara (sorry, I know this is a much overused cliché), they have charisma and everybody likes them.

Luckily, for the rest of you (HAHA) the art of persuasion can be learned, and I am going to teach it to you! (See, you ARE lucky!)

Before I start handing out my hard earned wisdom (in the sense of me hating to read instructional books and still managed to get through university), I am going to sum up the essential parts.

To get anyone's attention and persuade them to anything, you need to be aware of your words, your bodylanguage, you need to listen carefully to what the person you are communicating with is saying to you, pay attention to what their bodylanguage is telling you, and be able to emphatize with him or her.

Oh, and by the way, I will be using the terms sender and receiver quite a lot, and what I mean by this is the most basic of all communication models. In a communication transaction there is a sender of a message, and a receiver of a message. These roles swap all the time in order for the receiver and sender to process the information they have sent and received, respectively.

Okay, let's start.

Once upon a time there was a vey wise man, and his name was Aristotle. He was a much respected philospher that some of you might have heard about, and he lived roughly about 2400 years ago. Aristotle laid the down the groundwork for what we know as communication today. As he puts it, persuasion is the art of getting people to do something they wouldn't ordinarily do if you didn't ask. He discovered that when you start speaking with a person he or she is at point A, then with a little help from our friend persuasion you should be able to move them to Point B.

He described three ways of appealing to a person (to get them to do what you want to), namely:

Ethos Pathos Logos

Logos is what we in the Western world usually apply when we try to reason something out, we live in a world that is centered around logic, so our arguments refer to logos. This includes a conscious choice of words and referrence to stories, quotations, and facts.
(I, for instance, don't feel all that comfortable just writing this down, but I can' remember where I read it or who said it exactly, so I can't make footnotes or refer to other sources. If I were writing a report for a course, you can rest assured I would do a much more thorough job backing up my statements.)

Pathos relates to the emotions of the receiver of the message being communicated. Ehrm.. oh yes, those people are what you would call the audience. Pathos is used much in the Arabic world, for example, where one way of adding value to an argument is to swear that it is true. It doesn't make much sense to us in the Western world, we're cynic and think that people might lie. Haha...

Anyway, Ethos is about appealing to you moral codex or ethical frame of reference. How sincere is the communicator, is he trustworthy, do we believe him? - In the light of this, image branding is quite important.

Although how we argue has much to do with our cultural backgrounds, I will write from a Westerner's point of view. We tend to use Pathos and Logos to build up a strong Ethos, using facts and emotions to appear credible and sincere to ultimately genereate trust between the sender and the receiver.

okay, I'm exhausted right now, so I will continue on this subject later. I will, however, post this now, so you have something to read until then.

Manage your online reputation

2008-03-25T23:44:00.001Z

Well, some of you might have followed through from my old blog, but to let everybody know what I am about, I might just as well tell you all that I am in the process of job hunting right now.

Actually, it�??s been two months since we moved to London, and even though I have been offered positions here, I haven�??t found the right one yet. Someone said to me that I might get a job easier, if I already had a job. I think that is fine, but as I am looking for my first real job, I think I can afford to be picky just a little bit yet.

That is not what this blog post is about. It is, however, about online exposure. A certain someone is afraid that my online activities will harm my job finding possibilities.

I have given this some thought, but I think that what I do online �?? network and blog is helping to show who I am.

I do realize the hazards of being online a lot.

What can be found on a Google search on your name? Does it help you land the job or does it send the possible employer running screaming away? There exists a codex or a sort of moral code among some employers about consciously choosing not to search for information about job candidates on MySpace, Facebook, or what other social networking tools there are out there. The question is: can you afford the risk that the next person you apply for a job with is one who works by this moral code?

Online Reputation Management is a way to make it easier to be found. It consists of two parts, really.

If a potential employer searched for you online what would they find? Would it help you get a job, or hurt your chances?

Online Reputation Management gives you the chance to gain an unfair advantage in your job search, by making it easier for you to be found. However, if not managed, your Online Reputation could deliver damage to your job search.

When managing your content, make sure that your profiles and resume is consistent. It goes for all communication: consistency, consistency, consistency!

It�??s also fine that you use pages like MySpace or Facebook, but be sure to use the privacy settings, and make sure that you aren�??t tagged in any compromising pictures available on your friends�?? photos. �??The same goes for dating history, i.e. if you hooked up with someone. It might be fun for you and your friends, but does your future employer really need to know how many you hooked up with this weekend? Make sure that you don�??t have online dating profiles showing up �?? or if you do, make sure that you don�??t have compromising information on it. Then there are of course the rants and ravings on your blogs.

See �?? I�??m having problems with this one, as I really enjoy my rants and ravings, and I use my Thai Family name as my blog name. I guess I will stop doing that �?? keep my personal blog clean and get an anonymous one for all the weird stuff I write sometimes.

From then it�??s all about branding. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not a bad place to start.

When you post comments, blog posts, and interact on social networking pages you increase your ranking on Yahoo and Google�??s search engines. This high ranking in turn promotes your subject matter expertise. Why do you think I�??ve started this blog on communication?

Okay - First Blog Post

2008-03-05T10:27:00.000Z

The idea with this blog is to write about communication and stuff. My definition of Communication if quite broad, and so is my definition of stuff. However, in general I will try blogging about Visual Communication + Business Communication, and if I blog about something else (that doesn't go to my personal blog Thamawat) it will go under Stuff. :) -oh yeah, will probably blog about design I like as well!

Easy isn't it?