“We tweet, we text, we e-mail. Everybody’s chatting, but is anybody listening? Why America needs to revive the vanishing art of conversation. We need to talk,” says Skip Cohen.

After my last post for the Zookbinders blog, I started thinking. “Here we go again, talking all about using social media with no focus on whose behind the messages – people.” Then I caught Skip Cohen’s recent blog post entitled “Just Say NO to Email Today and Pick Up the Phone!” If anyone knows the importance of marketing it’s Skip, but good marketing isn’t all about social media, it’s a balance of many different forms of marketing. And having good people and conversation skills is an art that is being lost to the Internet.

The issue, according to Skip, is to find a way to talk more and email less! “We don’t talk to each other enough, but instead we Tweet and email. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we all need to do a better job of doing both! It’s especially important since we’re all part of an industry that thrives on human contact – we’re in the business of capturing those special moments – moments of people interacting, not communicating through their computer!

If we don’t talk more we’re all going to lose our ability to communicate. I’ve already noticed that I’m spelling things phonetically as I struggle to capture a thought in just 140 characters. While it might B gr8 2 B able 2 do, we’re even frgetting how 2 writ! Photographers became photogs and then just togs…grammar is out the window, words like “at” has been replaced with @, two, to and too is just 2 and the list goes on & on & on!”

David Dudley said it best in his close: “We’re in danger of becoming a nation of hyperconnected hermits, thumbs furiously working our BlackBerrys!”

“So, let’s clarify my point…it’s a balancing act. Social Media is as necessary to building your business as a website is today or a yellow pages ad was twenty years ago. But, it’s a balancing act with personal contact and you’ve got to have both. Keep the connections “live” with close friends and good customers and let’s not let having a live conversation with somebody become an obscure art form!”

I say kudos to you Skip for reminding us how to communicate and how in our industry, where personal interaction is so important, that you cannot rely exclusively on the web to be truly connected to you clients.