This started as a comment on the the above titled post written by Carl Douglas on the Intranet Connections blog. The topic is a catalyst for my one soap box topic affecting professional communication.

I’ll start off by trying not to offend anyone but…

Would it be safe to say that you Carol and the other commenters have been principally text content creators in your professional lives?
Everyone has made points about what is good communication. And some have made the point that video is bad except when it’s good.

THAT is the point. Bad anything is still bad no matter what medium it uses.

Carol you posed the question about why someone would sit through a video wherein “the company CEO (is) talking about corporate initiatives”. Why would an employee sit through reading a 2 page text or worse, email, about the same thing? Answer is they wouldn’t.

I know all of you do this before you write something – you determine the audience, figure out the overall objective and determine the goals you want to achieve after someone has read the piece. You may not write this down at this stage in your career because it’s second nature and a kind of “Duh!”

The missing element is for THAT audience, for THAT objective, for THOSE goals which medium is best. If you’ve been a writer for years and years and you’re given an assignment then a written piece is probably the first thing that comes to mind.

As a professional communicator you must have much more in your bag of tricks than writing speeches, releases, documentation, etc. In the multimedia world we have lived in for the last ten or fifteen years you MUST understand all media and it’s optimal use. If not you are limiting your own professional growth and not serving your employer or client professionally.

I have a video production background. I have done the huge budget productions and the one man band productions. I have produced interactive multimedia for both consumers and business people, again from hundred thousand dollar budgets to Frankensteining PowerPoint on the cheap. I have designed websites for large e-commerce companies and for the neighborhood mom and pop business.

And no matter what kind of medium my client has asked for I scratch my head before every project and figure out if they have chosen the RIGHT medium. Sometimes they listen and thank me and I either use the medium I recommend (or I refer it out to someone who REALLY knows what they’re doing.) And sometimes they don’t hire me. And sometimes I walk away when I know their big mistake doesn’t have to have me as the fall guy.

So, I do all this electronic based communication. And I know enough about print communication to know that I need to bring someone in or refer it out. I can write a script or a web page but I know I am not a annual report or PR or documentation writer.

One last point. We are not the audience. We used to be but not anymore. The digital native is the audience. Those who have grown up with never NOT knowing a technology mediated environment. You can try to force them to read more than two pages at a time but they expect the message on a screen. Whether it’s well chunked web or email copy, audio clips (like podcasts) or video they want it when they want it and how they want it. In the 80s we all discovered “time shifting”; taping Magnum PI so we could watch it later. Digital natives are fully evolved time shifters.

Is video useful? Yes. Is PowerPoint (and Slideshare by extension) useful? Yes. Is text useful? Yes. But we have all seen bad uses of all of them. What we all want to avoid as communications professionals is to not have any of those bad uses be something we created.

Check out this  post over at UIE’s Brain Sparks. It’s a re-publish of something from 2003 but has some good points.

My comment on the post is pointed at a missing reference: What role does “production value” or “macro design” have in audience acceptance of a web property’s design?

Seth Gottlieb over at Enter Content Here has a very good, succinct post on choosing a content management system (CMS). Don’t know whether this topic is getting some recent traction because people are trying to spend money at the end of the fiscal year or planning to spend money next fiscal year.

I think an important note for people to remember, (but not necessarily addressed in this post) is that it’s all about the business, not the technology. Cost of ownership of any CMS, over 3-5 years, needs to be included in the choosing process. It’s easy to jump to “how” to manage your content. But the driving force should be the “why” do you want to manage your content? Technology is not a solution. It is only a means to an end.

A colleague passed this post from SEOMmoz.org on to me — 11 Best Practices for URLs — and it seemed to tie the whole URL naming issue up with a nice little bow. The author even addresses the sub-optimal URLs (http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1422) they use for the site.

Besides not posting for weeks (yes weeks) I realized that, so far, we’ve definitely had an online tilt to things (such as they are) here at Doing Media. Well, that’s got to change — but not yet.

So… I teach media communications courses, among them “Web Publishing.” Pretty broad topic but essentially it’s web production 101. For my students, naming their pages and their files (URLs) is part of our Information Architecture module.

It takes them awhile to get it because at this point in website consumption They take it for granted. They don’t notice page titles or URLs because I think they figure it’s the luck of the draw — if they bookmark a page they’ll figure it out later if it doesn’t come with a good title or URL. If it does have something understandable in the browser title bar or address box it’s a bonus!

Once I point out why good page naming and file (and folder) naming is good for them and for their visitors there is always an ‘A-ha!” moment. And so it’s interesting that after all these years of web site production professionals still have these conversations and reminders of best practice.

Read on. And I promise we’ll get to less online-ish stuff soon. No, really.

Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, has an excerpt from his forthcoming ebook about audience analysis in the latest Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) August 2006 newsletter.

I’m not sure I could have added much to his take on audience analysis. But without a good answer to “What do I want achieve?” you can’t even begin your audience analysis.

But more on that later.