3 Ways To Make Communication More Appetizing

3 Ways To Make Communication More Appetizing
Don't overwhelm your audience with too much information

What's the most effective thing you can do to improve any communication? Trim your message so audience members can easily and quickly consume it.

After all, we've become a grab-and-go society:

• Food is increasingly served in small portions. Amuse bouche, I'm looking at you. And snacks you find in the grocery store are getting thinner. Explains James Russo, senior VP of global consumer insights at Nielsen, "We are becoming a nation of grazing snackers as we shift away from the traditional meal times. Here is where the two trends collide-when it comes to snacking, consumers want both indulgent and healthy options."
• Information is processed on the go. More than half of emails are read on mobile devices, for instance. And we're more likely to consume news, video, photos and everything else on a small screen not sitting on a chair, but while standing, walking and even running.
• Even games have been downsized. As The Wall Street Journal reports, toymakers are making kids' playthings more compact and faster to complete (30 minutes? Ain't nobody got time for that.) The Journal quotes Richard Gottlieb, a toy-industry consultant in New York. "We snack on a lot of things in life," he says. "It's the rhythm of the age."

What does that mean to creating communication for customers, employees and everyone else? Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Keep it short. Fifty words are better than 100. Writing a tweet is better than composing an essay.
2. Focus on the key point. Decide on the one thing you want people to know, and emphasize that, above all.
3. Make it skimmable. Reading is so last century. Your audience wants to glance at your message and immediately get the point. That means conveying information visually and carefully choosing the most impactful words.

Your audience members don't have the appetite for a full meal of information. So give them a snack--or even just a bite--instead.

Thank you to Alison Davis for writing this article.