Guest Post - Nikhaar Shah

Nikhaar is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.

Daiki To, a Japanese businessman, tries to hurry through the last meeting of the day in Los Angeles at 5 in the afternoon. Noticing his anxiety, a co-worker inquires to which Daiki exclaims “It’s almost 9 AM in Tokyo! My daughter will be waking up anytime, it’s her birthday!” After he completes the meeting on time, he grabs his coat and races to his hotel. As soon as he makes it to his suite, he opens his notebook and gleams with happiness as he virtually watches his daughter smile while she cut the birthday cake in front of him.

This is not a lone occurrence; 32 million [1] such stories happen each and every day to form a total of 300 billion [2] annual minutes from the free video call provider Skype. In comparison, for the same year, the total telecom minutes for the 2011 in USA were 2250 billion [3]. With everybody from governments, corporations, institutions, universities and personal users shifting to virtual communication to save cost, resources and time, the question perturbing everybody is – Is virtual communication an effective and sustainable replacement for physical communication?

As software engineers from India video-chat with their European counterparts to discuss daily progress in projects, governments set up video meeting times to address issues of their subjects and legal decisions based on video conferences with a witness from a secret location – there is no denying that virtual communication is facilitating immense savings in time, resources and cost. It is only due to virtual communication that these software engineers don’t need to travel to Europe every month, these governments don’t have to establish infrastructure in rural areas and these witnesses can be assured of better protection.

But a study from Cornell [4] shows that virtual communication is not as effective as faceto- face methods. The survey also states that a majority of executives prefer face-to-face communication to its technical counterpart, citing reasons like differentiation in bonding, multitasking, quality relationships and body language analysis. Another study [5] in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication discovers that virtual communication leads to a lot of trust issues between teams, and the trust developed is fragile and temporal.

So, to summarize – given the present state of the economy, virtual communication will increasingly keep on replacing physical communication but physical communication should be given preference during meetings where trust and bonding is of pivotal importance.

[1] http://skypenumerology.blogspot.com/2012/02/32-million.html
[2] http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/-metro-drives-magic-across-all-ourexperiences--
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[3] http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/aid/10323
[4] http://cornellsun.com/node/44228
[5] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00080.x/full

Guest Post - Swetha Patil

Swetha is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about virtual communication.

Communication has been derived from the Latin word "communis", meaning to share. Man is a social animal and communication is part & parcel of life.  We don’t realize but we are so dependent on technology and used to virtual communication that life seems impossible without laptop, smart phones, internet, cellular network & cell phones. But what is virtual communication? Virtual communication is interacting with others in virtual reality. There are various forms of virtual communications like video conferencing, telephone calls, emails and text messages. Technology has advanced to such an extent that geographical distances do not act as hindrance for communication.

Be it any culture, to have an effective communication certain things are essential like communication is not all about talking but also listening. When we interact we should be relaxed, which is the key to effective communication. In virtual communication we virtually connect but there has to be a bonding and respect for each other while communicating. One should be prepared, polite, enthusiastic, passionate, confident, direct and simple while communicating. Virtual communication is being extensively used in education, healthcare and entertainment to name a few. There can be two type of virtual communication i.e. synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous virtual communication is like a phone call or video conferencing where person from each side communicates like real time conversation. Each side waits for the reply from the other side. On the other hand emails, text messages are asynchronous type of communication where people email or text and continue with their work and do not keep waiting for the reply. There is delay in asynchronous communication and does not have the non verbal element. This is why we have emoticons in instant messaging and email. These emoticons convey more than words.

I use virtual communication almost on a daily basis. I am so addicted to my iPhone that I can’t imagine any time of my day without my smart phone. I use it to make local and international calls, text my friends, surf web. With Wi-Fi and 3G, I even use it to “Skype” with my parents and friends back in India. Phone calls and Skype make me feel close to home even though I am in a different continent. Skype has become so popular that it is almost used as a verb. Virtual communication has made earth a closely bound planet. I am in Pittsburgh and my parents are in Bangalore, India but distance does not seem to be a problem because I am virtually connected. I bought a pair of boots last week and was so excited that started showing it to my parents on Skype. Virtual communication gives me confidence and a sense of attachment as I am not far from my loved ones anymore. I stay in touch with my school and college friends through googletalk, Yahoo messenger, Facebook, Skype and the list goes on. Another advantage of virtual communication is that one cannot feel lonely at any point of time. No matter where you are, if you have internet or phone, then you are connected.

For me the value of virtual communication is not just limited to personal life. I worked at Oracle for three years as an IT consultant. I worked with clients across the globe and had to interact with them at regular basis. In IT consulting communication plays a key role. Working form off shore wasn’t a big challenge as I was virtually connected with my clients and peers. We had Voice over IP phones and whenever wanted to reach someone from our desk, just had to dial a number and got connected to people in any part of the globe. Our team used to have calls, web conferences with clients which made our work simpler and faster.  Business at global level gives you the opportunity to interact with people of different cultures and learn new things about them and their culture. I worked with Asian, European and North American clients and learnt a lot of things about their business, work culture even though I did not travel to all these continents. I really find this technology amazing of connecting to someone who is miles away, in seconds.

In business the current belief is that virtual communication is replacing face- to- face interactions. Virtual communication is efficient, inexpensive and easy to use. But a study by the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research found that under certain business conditions, face to face interactions are more effective than virtual communication¹.  To some extent it is true that virtual communication cannot be equivalent to face to face communication as it lacks the personal connection that you have when interacting with someone face-to-face.

With life moving at a fast pace we cannot connect to people every time by having face to face interactions. We keep moving, our loved ones keep moving but with virtual communication we no more feel isolated. We are all connected and bonded by this great innovation of mankind i.e. virtual communication

[1]  http://cornellsun.com/node/44228

Guest Post - Tan Li

Tan is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.

With the development of technology, communicating with other becomes much easier than before. Virtual communication has been seen in business frequently nowadays, such as emails, video conferences and etc. Most big companies rely more on the Internet and global technologies. As a result, how to make effective virtual communication plays a vital role in business.

Definition

Virtual communication is defined by Umea University as, “the information, communication, and action, mediated by new information technologies, where contents, intentions, or actors may be nonexistent, distorted, replaced, or created – intentionally or unintentionally.”[1] Virtual communication also means that people work in a team without actually seeing others. In 21^st century, it is a common way for completing projects in large companies with departments spread all over the world.

Purpose

The intention of virtual communication is to send the ideas and thoughts clearly without meeting one another. It is only considered to be successful that people send the message and the recipients receive the message correctly and timely.

Types

Virtual communication has different types. The internet is the most common medium in virtual communication. It could be used for emails, video conferences, social networking, online chatting room and instant messenger. On the other hand, mobile phone is another powerful tool for virtual communication. Text messages are considered effective in business, even though they are used more for interpersonal relationships. It is very important to know the appropriate type of virtual communication to use. For instance, if there is something important to announce, I will prefer to use emails or telephone calls rather than text messages.

Worries

Even though there are so many benefits brought by effective virtual communication, we still need to consider some issues that could lead to bad communication.

The first thing we should think about is the time zone. If the company has branches all over the word, the time zone will be a major consideration. For example, in United States, people in the east should make the contact after 12pm because it is just 9am in the west. If someone in United States wants to communicate with others in China, they had better choose to write an email rather than make a phone call.  

Another worry about virtual communication is the dependence on technology. For a company that relies greatly on technology, once the network fails or the database breaks down or even a slight outage for several hours, people will have nothing to do but wait for the engineer to fix it and the company may lose millions of dollars. So these companies should keep monitoring their network status and back up their databases frequently.

The last thing people should worry about is miscommunication in virtual communication. Email is frequently used these days and it has been proved to be efficient. However, something emotional like tone is lost when we type the words in the email. Communicating in a virtual world, people are not able to read your minds as easily as talking face to face. Some useful signs like facial expressions and body languages will not be seen. As a result, it will increase the potential for miscommunications. All in all, in order to make effective virtual communication, we should consider the difference in time zone, the dependency on technology and the potential for miscommunication.

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[1] Papa, Nicole. "Effective Virtual Communication" eHow | How to Videos, Articles & More - Discover the expert in you. | eHow.com. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://www.ehow.com/about_6756180_effective-virtual-communication.html>.

Guest Post - Venkata Anirudh Gorthi

Anirudh is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.

It was the annual technical festival at our college and there were lots of events happening all around the campus. Having finished organizing the informals for the day, I decided I would relax and was scanning through the posters and the header just stuck to my eye, a talk on “Talent Vs Attitude: What do you need to succeed “. Though tired and in a mood to relax, I found this topic so intriguing, it made me curious and drew me towards attending the talk. The speaker, Harsha Bhogle, was from my home town, was one of the country’s most sort after cricket commentators. He had made a phenomenal rise in the broadcasting industry after doing his MBA from one of India’s best B-Schools. Very popular among the youth of the country, he started off his presentation by initiating a discussion on what the audience thought about the talent and attitude. Some of us were pumped up listening to others talking about things we did not agree with. Then Harsha had his take on this topic and came up with a story about his childhood and how he combined attitude and talent on his way to climb the ladder of success. One of his slides had a picture which weighed success against talent and attitude and this picture in a way summarized the importance of each of these characteristics for success. I was able to connect with Harsha and it was we were having a one on one conversation. After the lecture, all of us came out of the room feeling relaxed, enlightened and in a way lucky to have attended such a lecture.

Few days later, as the technical festival ended, we were back to our routines and I was strolling towards one of our lecture theatres. I went through the blackboard and we had this lecture on “2D and 3D normalizations” in Database systems. At first look I thought we are talking about various dimensions and was wondering how this was related to databases. The stroll from the hostel to the lecture hall in a confused state made me late to class. Disinterested, confused and fearing that I might find it tough to follow, I tried to concentrate on the lecture. My professor generally had his slides which were very verbose and rarely had any pictures or illustrations of what he was teaching. Also, his style of teaching made us assume that he thought that students sitting in the first two benches were ones who would be listening to him. He never bothered to address us or make any eye contact with us. This created an impression that we at back didn’t belong to the class. In order to draw attention of the professor, one of my friends asked the professor a question about the 2nd normal form. When asked, the professor gave a puzzled look and tried to shy away from the question and continued his lecture. These turn of events and the approach of the professor made me feel even more disinterested and I walked out of the lecture. Later in the day, me along with few of my friends sat down to discuss about what happened in the class. One of my friends, who was familiar with all these topics, started explaining us using a combination of illustrations and lecture slides we used in the class. He used an abstract example of all of us being team managers of our favorite football teams and related it to how we could use the concepts of the class to manage these teams. This made the topic even more interesting. We cracked a few jokes about how incompetent the professor was in his class, and post our session we thought we achieved what the professor could not – Understanding the topics of the class in a better way.

After I finished my graduation, I started to work and four months into my job, I had to present the second phase of our project. We had worked so hard on it for the past few weeks. My manager thought that I could present the progress of project competently as I had a good and sound understanding of the project. With no experience of doing presentations in my short cooperate life, I was a bit skeptical about

how I could manage the responsibility given by my manager. That night after I was assigned the role of presenter, there was some uneasiness within me about the presentation. As I laid back on my bed after a stressful day, I started to think about how I should handle the presentation, pondering over this, I started to think about the various presentations. The first things that came to my mind were Harsha’s amazing presentation on attitude Vs talent and my Databases professor’s dull lecture during my third year. Both of them though contrastingly different in their styles, helped me analyze the pros and cons of the two styles of presenting. Having thought over the various aspects of their presentations I felt a bit relieved and was more confident about being a good presenter. My change in attitude towards the presentation was best summarized by Mr Richard Saul Wurman, The inventor of famous TeD talks quote which said:

“What to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand “.

Having being in a position where I was confused as to how to interpret two extremely different styles of presentations, I understood the things I need to take care of when I am presenting. The analysis helped me realize what I should present and how I should ,so as to convey my the story to my target audience. Looking back I am grateful for the experiences I had, they helped me become a more confident and composed speaker and presenter.

Guest Post - Cheng Song

Cheng is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virual communication.

Virtual communication can represent any form of communication that is not face to face. For example, Video Conferences and Skype calls can both be considered virtual communication.

Here I want to share with you about some DOs and DONTs during Video Conferences.

DOs:

1. Do have a clear purpose of the meeting.

Compared to off-line meeting, on-line meeting is more demanding on clear purpose. Every meeting participant has to know the objective, things to be discussed and even the agenda of the meeting before video conferences. If people don’t know what is going on, they might get lost during the meeting because 1) they could not make preparation before the meeting; 2) once the meeting began, it is difficult to have a consensus about the objective and process of the meeting while everyone is sitting perhaps hundreds of miles away from each other.

2. Do have people participated in the meeting.

It is very dangerous to have a one-man show during a Video Conference. Unlike off-line meeting, in video conferences you cannot observe the eyes and faces of people accurately so in most cases, you could not know if people are bored about the topic or distracted by some other things.

So the only to guarantee that people are focusing on meetings is to get them involved. The meeting leader should assign major roles to different people, so people could share their ideas, have arguments and have a good feeling of participation.

3. Do have point in the meeting.

It is difficult to keep the meeting on the right way if people have too many ideas to share and too many arguments to settle. A good way to solve this is to have clear point of the meeting; statements like “The focus of the project is…” or “The most important thing is” are good examples of having points during a conference meeting.

4. Do set rules for the meeting.

To get people focused, the meeting should have some rules. Rules like “Everyone should get him/herself well prepared before the meeting”, “People should make notes about the meeting while others are concluding or valuable ideas are proposed.” Rules will make the meeting run more formally, because in most cases, people will not consider video conferences as serious as off-line conferences.

DONTs:

1. Don’t be distracted by other things during the meeting

When you are sitting in front of computer, there are always interesting things that might distract you from the meeting especially when the meeting didn’t reach you expectation and seemed boring. The right thing to do is to try getting focused, because unlike off-line meeting, there is no strict supervisor during a video conference.

2. Don’t refuse listening to others

“You create a wall before listening by evaluating what other people say.” In virtual communication, it is also true. You need to appreciate other ideas and voices during the video conference. If everyone refuses to do so, the meeting can have two alternative results: one, people are debating with each other which makes the meeting messy; two, people are talking, but others don’t consider it seriously.

Guest Post - Jinguang Zhou

Jinguang is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.

Definition of Presentation:

Presentation is the practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or learner. Presentations come in nearly as many forms as there are life situations. In the business world, there are sales presentations, informational and motivational presentations, first encounters, interviews, briefings, status reports, image-building, and of course, the inevitable training sessions.¹  From the definition of presentation, we know that there are two main parts in a presentation, person who makes this presentation and audience. The purpose of presentation is to let audience understand what you talk about and persuade them to agree with your opinion. In order to make a perfect presentation, well preparation is the most important thing.

How to prepare for presentation?

Just as I said before, a good presentation must consider audience so we should do research about the content we will represent and people who will listen to our presentation.

1.       Content.

The first thing is to confirm the goal of our presentation. Only when we understand the purpose of presentation, can we collect related information to support our opinion. In real world, the purpose of each presentation is different so we should customize our content. For example, if we make a presentation for business purpose, we should make our content professional. Graphs, figures ans statistics present strong persuasion for business people because they care about how the project can increase profits for the company, what’s the break even, what’s the revenue and what’s the opportunity cost of this project. For these concerns, numbers are much more direct and efficiency for them rather than verbal words. However, if we make the same presentation for customers or people not in this field, the content is totally different. For those people, we cannot use professional terminologies and statistics because they don’t have related background. For these cases, we should make complex content easier and make some stories for audience. If audience are attracted by our stories, they will focus on what we say.

2.       Style

As we know, audience cannot absorb everything from the presentation so our presentation style should be diverse and novel to attract attention of audience. For example, if we want to introduce the background of the presentation, we can use a related video. Professor Labash once used videos to show some mistakes in a job interview. It’s so impressive so all classmates focus on that video and get a lot of information about how to take a job interview. Besides, interaction also plays an important role in our presentation. We can organize some small games to attract attention of audience.

3.       Appearance

It also depends on who are audience. For some professional audience, we must wear professional. For audience who are teenagers, we can dress causal to reduce the gap.

4.       Other Preparation.

Before the formal presentation, we should come to the presentation place to check all facilities we will use work. Does the projector work? Is there enough room for audience? Is there white board to make notes? If facilities don’t match our requirements, we should change another place or ask staff to make some changes.

Conclusion

Preparation is the priority of any presentation. Good preparation will increase our confidence and attract audience’s attention. In addition, give the mock presentation to your friends before the normal presentation. Let your friends give you some suggestions which can help you find which part is not good enough.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation#References

Guest Post - Daniel Lozano

Daniel is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.

At some point in time, every individual is tortured with having to create or be a part of a presentation. These presentations can range from persuasion, building good will, or just general information.[1] Whether or not a certain individual learns from a presentation doesn’t necessarily depend on the structure, but the combined relation of the participant and the structure of the presentation itself.

                Usually we determine a presentation to be informative if we were really engaged or if a concept discussed, sparks a new interest. However, experience tells us that outside sources also really influence our motivation to be a part of the presentation.  Haven’t you ever found yourself starting to drift off during a presentation and suddenly you’re completely lost? This is can be a result of a lack of sleep, hunger, personality type, and even an unstructured presentation. Most seminars/presentation creators don’t realize that creating the right setting is actually pretty vital. Having the initial attention of the participant and holding it is actually the greatest accomplishment of a presentation. Obviously, people that register for a presentation usually don’t have this problem but a greater number of presentations are more geared towards requirements such as job opportunities, school activities, training exercises etc. So when these types of participants are forced into a situation where a presentation just has to happen they already go in with the wrong mindset. Some would believe that they would learn more and of course others would see it as a waste of time. Honestly, when done correctly every presentation can grab the audience while actually getting them to learn something.

                I like to call this idea “grabbing the audience,” pretty similar to Billy Mays’ idea but implemented in the presentation world. A good example would be defensive driving. Nobody would ever do defensive driving if it took place in a classroom. So usually they conduct it in a restaurant with a pretty informal setting. This allows the participants to feel more comfortable and put aside those distractions such as hunger and no focus. My interpretation would be pretty similar but rely on different tactics. Calling out participants randomly, maybe introducing a joke or two and altering your tone of voice. This would really create uncertainties in the audience and would actually require everyone to start paying attention because of fear of being called on or missing a good joke.

                At the same time presenter qualifications are just as crucial. It is very easy to dismiss a lecture if the person speaking doesn’t have the right credentials. That’s why a thorough examination of speakers must be done prior to a serious presentation. Certain traits such as charisma, physical appearance, and publications are also just as crucial. Even certain situations would require these characteristics to change. If your audience is very technical savvy, then having the speaker introduce technical lingo would not be a bad idea because it would be expected that the audience would have no problem understanding.

                Once presenter and audience attention have been attained the last and final piece is to mesh your structured presentation. This part isn’t necessarily the most important, as discussed, but here you can easily lose your audience if you aren’t careful. Always maintaining audience attention is very difficult in this new technology era. For instance, when browsing Google, how many times have you honestly gone to the second search result page? Some people would say sometimes and most people would say never. This is because we want information as fast as possible, as accurate as possible, and when totally unrelated, we immediately shut it out. So as a presenter your goal is even more difficult. As your audience is digesting the projected information, it’s essential that you maintain your focus and relate most of the lecture to the bigger picture.

                As for the presentation structure, the presenter must begin with introducing himself. This brief interaction with the audience will give the presenter a personality instead of just being the voice of the lecture. This can also be used as an attention grabber because he can introduce some of his publications and why he feels that he is worthy of giving a presentation on a specific topic. Once the introduction is over, the proceeding of the presentation should be continuous and not too robust around any particular area. All specific details must be documented and cited according to educational and legitimate standards.

                Real-World Presentations take place throughout any professional’s career and whether or not your audience learns from it is dependent on presentation quality, audience engagement, and eliminating those humanistic distractions.

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[1] Presentation (2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation Retrieved 11 February 2012