Someone tweets an interesting piece of news or offer from their website. Intrigued, I feverishly click on the link to find out more. BLAM! The door is slammed in my face by the need to enrol, buy a subscription, and generally take time out from my day to jump a few hurdles before I can get to the news I was after.

The result?  Generally, I give up. Don’t you?

I’m not knocking the need for magazines to make money from their online news content, or other sites to garner much valued marketing information, but there must be a third way.

The chicken chase
If you were going to lure a chicken into a chicken coop for example (stay with me here), you wouldn’t chase her all round the garden and then, just as your harassed Henrietta looked poised to go into her coop, close the hatch and ask her to fill out a form. Of course not, that would be madness. You’d probably throw her some corn to show her the way, give her some more corn maybe when she’s safely in the coop and then close the door gently behind her (mind those tail feathers).

The point is, like chickens, we’re easily distracted; so don’t send out those Tweets linking to that website which are rewarded with, well, nothing. Feed us a little more, make it easier, and the rewards will surely come.

The Royal Institution, in partnership with Hiscox, is running a debate this month on entrepreneurship and whether innovation begins with the entrepreneur, or is it the technology that drives innovation (tickets are still available I think at http://bit.ly/A4Z5tw)?

Which got me thinking, a dangerous condition I know, about the role of technology in communication and how far the development of technology has helped and, in some cases, hindered effective communication?

For instance; does sending out a group email to everyone in the company on a particular issue mean you have successfully communicated with each employee? It’s a marvellous technological achievement but just because everyone has received your electronic missive, it doesn’t mean they have read it, or if they did read it, that they fully appreciated what you were trying to say.

Send a press release out on distribution to a wide press list and how many journalists these days say they haven’t seen it; the email no doubt buried in the lost hinterland of their inboxes.

E-clutter
You could argue that the sheer amount of e-clutter competing for an ever dwindling attention span is ultimately delivering a law of diminishing returns when it comes to effective communication.

It’s worth remembering that there is no chicken and egg conundrum when it comes to communication and technology: the message, the content, the story, whatever you want to call it, was firmly in place way before the advent of email, social media and the rest.

Don’t let the ‘how’ dictate the ‘what’
Technology has given us more options in the communications toolbox but it hasn’t provided us with the silver bullet. So whether you’re running an internal or external communications campaign, don’t let what you’ve got say be dictated by how you’re going to send it.

Get the message right and then look at how best you will get it out there which will most likely be a combination of the traditional and the technological.