A rant on the state of technology and communicators
eriksr on August 13th, 2008
I’m not gonna pull any punches today: Communicators fail at technology. Hard.
Whether you’re an account manager who desperately needs to email a large file or a senior partner who doesn’t know how to post to their blog, just face facts: You’re doing a crappy job of taking advantage of all that computing power.
I bring this up because, without fail, I regularly found myself to be the one person in firm after firm that knows technology best. I was the one who knew how to edit a PowerPoint presentation in just such a way as to achieve a desired result. I was the one who knew how to quickly and easily find information on the labyrinthine network storage space, or find a specific email lost in a sea of tens of thousands. I built impressive looking blogs within the space of a couple of hours — complete with digital images I made by hand. And of course I know a lot about all the wonderful social media technology out there, too.
I shudder to think what marketing and public relations professionals could do if they had all this knowledge and experience. Yes, I’m certainly an exception — I was raised by a Commodore 64 (suckah!) and am self-taught until I reach proficient or expert status on anything technology related — but I really shouldn’t be.
The secret to getting to my level
If you cannot muster the enthusiasm for learning about some new piece of software, or how to operate some new gadget, don’t fret — you don’t need that, though it certainly helps.
What you need to do is to take thirty minutes alone in a quiet room away from everything else, and you need to start fiddling. Whenever you don’t understand something, Google it. Look around in the options settings of your application or gadget, see what else the technology is capable of.
There’s no need to overextend yourself — there’s no need to learn how something works in great detail, try to focus on learning only what something is capable of. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what tool you’ll need for the job and you can learn as you go thanks to the power of Google.
