Communications

5 Ways To Eliminate Ums and Improve Your Public Speaking Credibility

You want your presentations to show others that you’re credible, confident, and engaging. Using disfluencies such as um, uh, ah, eh, er, etc. erodes your speech. They bore audiences and make them question if you know what you’re talking about. Think you don’t use disfluencies? Use your Smartphone to record yourself; you may be surprised by the results.Read… Read more »

5 Ways Phone Systems Can Improve Customer Service

The interaction your customers have with your company directly impacts your bottom line. Think about it. Have you ever had a bad experience with a company, whether on the phone or in person? What did that do for your feelings towards that company? Did you stop being loyal to them? Most people do, which isRead… Read more »

The Death of Disposable Content

By Emily Grenen, ICF International If you work in social media, you’re likely quite aware that creating new content is an intensive process. It often requires a good bit of creativity to find material that resonates with your target audience, but that also fits the guidelines that you, a partner, or a client have developed.Read… Read more »

$250 An Hour? For What? Who Knows?

Some communication tasks are highly valuable. For those you really need to pay what they’re worth. Take branding for example. Many people pass themselves off as brand strategists, brand gurus, brand visionaries, brand designers, brand ideationists, brand creatives, brand disruptors, brand innovators, and on and on. Most of them are not good at what they do. BecauseRead… Read more »

Calling All Writers! Be a GovLoop Featured Blogger

Thanks for all of your submissions. The application is now closed. At GovLoop, we pride ourselves on our community. There are over 200,000 of you — government employees, industry partners, and knowledge experts — who are extremely engaged. You comment on nearly a thousand posts and discussions each month. You talk to each other inRead… Read more »

3 Tips for Designing Better Forms

This is the second installment of “Build Better Forms,” a series in which we review online government forms and suggest some improvements. As we discussed in our first post, a clear and intuitive form reaps many benefits: lower data processing costs, fewer support requests, higher completion rates, and greater citizen satisfaction. Let’s run through threeRead… Read more »

6 Synergistic Listening Tips: More Than the Sum of the Communication Parts

Knowing what gets in your way names it. Then you can work around, or through it. Agreeing to disagree when it’s not possible or unnecessary to agree preserves the relationship. Preparing your points with potential objections and probing questions in mind makes you look unfazed by road blocks. Multi-tasking when distractions win out keeps up… Read more »