Cool Hand Luke and social networking

I’m not a movie buff. Years pass between my forays to the cinema. This should help you understand my reference to the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke. I’m sure many of you were not even born when Strother Martin, the stereotypical southern prison warden looked down on a beaten and bloodied Paul Newman (Luke) and drawled that immortal line, What we have here…is a failure to communicate.

When we want to tell someone something it’s so easy to assume that once we’ve said it, or written it, we've communicated. And if we’ve repeated it once or twice we've really communicated. Seldom is that true. Real communication is as much about listening as it is about talking. It involves dialogue, questions, responses, more questions.

For as long as I have been involved with the Georgia Society of CPAs, and it's been a very long time, we have struggled with the one-way nature of so much of our communication. It's easy to assume that when information is disseminated, communication has occurred. We will be developing new channels of communication.

We’ve seized on social networking as an untapped means of communication. At lease it has been untapped by the GSCPA. Gary Julian and I, after completely missing social networking 1.0, have waded in knee deep to social networking 2.0. We’re blogging! We have facebook pages! We don't tweet...yet. There’s more to come.

Hopefully, this blog will be a step toward improving communication among members. At least it provides a way for you to comment on what I write. Others can see the comments and we can have a dialogue about things that affect our profession. What would you like for me to write about?
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