Monday, November 17, 2008

Information: give them shishkabob

Information is like steak and shishkabob. In the old days, we were all used to sitting down for a big meal. Now everyone just eats snacks.

A week ago, I attended the Thin Air Summit conference. One of the major highlights was a keynote talk by Jeremiah Owyang, a luminary in social media (and beyond). He urged us, as communicators, to package the information we give into bite-sized chunks, so that the public can get our point quickly. Or at least we need to use newspaper-like hierarchy in saying our main point right up at the top - and then trickling down to the finer points.

This is true more for the Gen Y and Gen Z people, as they are so completely used to getting information that way. Digital immigrants, such as myself, don't mind a steak every once in a while.

Here is the slideshow of his talk. Here is a great summary by Carol Ross.

What are some of the ways you can make your information more digestible?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Paul,

Thanks for mentioning my summary of Jeremiah's keynote. I love how you've taken one major point from the talk, making information digestible, and turned it into both an insight and action for your readers.

Anonymous said...

Hi Paul,

Our biggest challenge is extracting our information from legacy tools that don't support Web syndication. Our tech writers our leading the way by adopting wikis to create and share information. If only support engineers were allowed to do the same. Too much IP locked in proprietary knowledge bases ...

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