5 Must-Read Business, Communication Articles from October

It’s hard keeping up with all the good content being generated, right? (I know my Reader has more “unread” items than I’d like to admit!) Here are some of my favorite articles from October. I hope you’ll share a link in the comments to your favorite article (or articles!) from the past month. This way, at least we’ll be sure we’re reading some of the best-of-the-best!

• 5 Cultural Trends Shaping Business Communications and Public Service — A guest post from Mark Drapeau on Brian Solis’s blog, this is one of my must-read articles. “Large organizations are often out of touch with such changes in culture, for a variety of reasons. Maybe their workforce is aging and not following what younger generations are doing. Maybe they become overly reliant on demographic data and stop paying so much attention to focus groups and random conversations. And maybe a large organization even picks up on such trends, but dismisses them as irrelevant … The thing about trends in culture is, even if you’ve misjudged some, they keep happening. Monitoring, analyzing, and internalizing is a continuously ongoing process.”
• Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media — From Jay Baer, “B2B social media is one of the most nettlesome of all social media marketing topics. There are plenty of half-truths and misunderstandings about what, where, why, and how B2B social media works (or doesn’t).”
• Is Social Media Driving the Economy? — A fascinating research study from Richard Florida: “But what are the characteristics of America’s leading social media centers? What factors are associated with its greater adoption and use in certain kinds of metros? … We examined key factors like economic development and income; clusters of high-tech industry; the human capital; creative class vs. working class job structures; the presence of artists, musicians, designers, and other artistic creatives; and openness to diversity and tolerance for immigrants and gays and lesbians.”
• 27 Twitter Ready Consumer Trends You Need to Know — AdAge compiled “Twitter-ready demographic and consumer trends with fairly obvious marketing implications.”
• Deliberately Uninformed, Relentlessly So [a rant] — Love this from Seth Godin: “If you’re in the idea business, what’s going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks. As for the deliberately uninformed, we can ignore them or we can reach out to them and hopefully start a pattern of people thinking for themselves…”