Modern Day Pen Pals

As a member of Miss Beyers’ sixth grade class at Proctor Terrace Elementary School in Santa Rosa, Calif., I became part of a project in which she engaged the class in a pen pal effort to connect us all with kids our age from around the world.

My pen pal was a girl from Adelaide, Australia. I’ve forgotten her name but remember the thrust of our correspondence: comparing and contrasting our schoolwork, what we were studying, how we spent our free time, what it was like living in Santa Rosa versus Adelaide, what we aspired to, and the like. We exchanged photos of one another and wrote about our pets and friends. I eagerly looked forward to each of her letters and enjoyed the correspondence, as long it lasted – about a year – tailing off when we’d exhausted our troves of cultural idiosyncrasies from our respective countries.

This recollection came back to me recently when I found myself engaged in an online discussion on the topic of the relative differences between internal and external communications. In such instances, I “converse” with strangers around the world – like modern day pen pals.

In this particular discussion, I am arguing a point with a fellow from Mumbai, India, about a topic started by a woman in Moscow, who works for a company headquartered in Norwich, UK. Others involved in the discussion include people from Ottawa and Rochester, UK. So far, I’m the only American.

And all this is done in real time. What would Miss Beyers think? It’s not like my pen pal days when letters would take up to two weeks to traverse the Pacific. These are instantaneous communications. (Does anyone even have “pen pals” anymore? I guess that’s what Facebook is for.)

How far we’ve come – in just my lifetime. It makes me wonder what’s next. What further technological advancements can we expect in communications? And, more important, what will be their impact on our ability to expand our knowledge, to engage other people in topics of interest to ourselves? What will be their impact on improving cross-cultural understanding?

Meanwhile, my college-age son has made lasting friendships via real-time, on-line video games with people from around the world: France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Russia, as well as Massachusetts. No doubt he has learned far more about those people’s personalities and interests than I did in the entire year of my pen pal correspondence.

In making my point with the gentleman from Mumbai, I was able to look him up on Linked Up and learn that he is head of corporate communications with a software company there. So I was able to make my comments more relevant than they might otherwise have been.

These new social media are having profound effects on the way we do business today, both inside and outside our companies. The wiser companies are tapping into “the conversation” that is occurring out there about them. An Oct. 26, 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal told how Delta Air Lines has begun eavesdropping on Twitter conversations when the topic is Delta. 

The effort has proved fruitful and enabled the company to short-circuit a number of negative discussions, and correct gross inaccuracies about Delta. At the same time, Delta has developed greater loyalty and understanding among its customers by responding directly and promptly to their very real complaints about service.

At the annual “Best Practices in Change and Employee Engagement Summit” last month, co-sponsors Edelman Change & Employee Engagement, and Edelman Digital brought together a number of senior communications professionals in their New York City offices to discuss both the implications of social media like Twitter and Facebook on corporate communications, and their potential. In addition to the 100 guests present in New York, some 1000 people participated via webcast.

One of the 10 speakers, the former head of communications for Comcast, explained how the company successfully put the web site “ComcastMustDie.com” out of business by responding proactively to contributors’ actual complaints about shoddy service.

According to the Edelman web site, “While a number of valuable experiences and lessons came from the 10 presenters, the over-arching and recurring theme centered on the opportunities that lie in mining and translating the rich information embedded in various social media into organizational knowledge, action, innovation and development.”

I would urge you to take the time to visit the Summit web pages. In addition to a full report, it includes complete videos of each of the presentations.

Venues such as Edelman’s Summit web pages magnify the capabilities of the worldwide web, which today is limitless. I would expect ever-greater synergies and spread of advanced ideas about social media to continue in that manner as people leverage such events and web sites to share and spread new ideas and new thinking on a range of topics. 

You, too, can become part of that conversation, or any conversation, if you wish, no matter where you are: New York, Mumbai, Ottawa, Santa Rosa or Adelaide.