Communicating for Impact:
The measure of successful writing
You write and publish: to introduce others to your work and demonstrate your expertise; and to add to your credibility, security, and impact. You do these as you contribute to general and scientific knowledge, and attempt to accelerate change in your audiences.
Dissemination and visibility of your work is seen as part of your professional and career development, demonstrating your skill in gathering information, repackaging it, and then communicating it in an appropriate way to those who need it. Those with greater skill in communication have more opportunities to be rewarded for their expertise.
Publishers have similar interests, and express them with statements such as:
“Our main aim as a company is to make a genuine contribution to academic research and teaching and to professional practice through our publishing....We will make a conscious effort to raise your profile and influence in the communities we serve.”
Blackwell Publishers say they do this through author relationship development, readership expansion, and brand (reputation for quality publications).
The above thoughts can be summarized into the single word: Impact.
Publishing makes you feel you have done something useful because there are readers of your work, and that creates an impact on the body of written information, and on your audiences.
You can measure your impact by the number of times your work is quoted by others. Your journal impact factor measures how many times your article is quoted in other articles. Today, in as little as three months from submission to an online journal, the first citation to your article may appear. When pre-print archives are used, article citation can appear in as little as a few weeks. The presence of your article contents on the internet now has a direct relationship to citation frequency, and to the impact that your writing has on your audiences.
Principles of building a communications strategy
In order to be quoted and to gain more impact by future audiences, I must focus on those who will find my work relevant to their own, and appropriate to be quoted in their articles. I cannot think only of getting my own writing into one single print medium. To impact my audience in the future, I must clearly address:
1. Who exactly are my users?
Who could use my expertise and information?
How can they access my expertise and information?
Who can pay for access to my expertise and how?
Who should not pay, but may use my expertise as my contribution to their success?
How do I balance my desire to share freely with others with my desire to be recognised and be quoted by others?
2. What combinations of delivery are best for which users?
How and when can they go to my work (the "Pull them in to my work" factor)?
How can I send it to them if they need it (the "Push my work out to them" factor)?
3. How can I address my users'' exact need(s) for my expertise?
What precise content do they need and when?
What forms of presentation, style, and design will be easiest for them to use?
What are the cost barriers for them?
What delivery speed and access do they need? Is speed more important than perfection?
How could frequent updates to the content make it more valuable to users?
How can I provide expertise in adequate time to an adequate number of users?
How can I prove that my answers to these questions are reliable?7
Your primary goal in publishing is to increase global use of your expertise, your impact.
In this presentation, I clearly share how to increase the global use of your expertise, your impact, through multiple, dynamic, communications channels.
This is one of my most popular presentations, and is frequently updated to include new tools and techniques to help listeners become more successful communicators.
Contact me:
Jon Gresham
INTL at Securenym.net
Tel: 334 - 300 - 2109
USA
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