For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by the way people communicate. It began with a passion for learning how to express myself in other languages — initially in Spanish and, over time, in German, French, and Italian. From a relatively young age, I saw these languages as a gateway into the cultures of the people who spoke them. In my view, those cultures often remained closed, at least in part, to those who didn’t take the time to understand how the people living within them communicated.

Over the years my appetite and aptitude for foreign languages fueled a broader interest in writing, finding simple and concise ways of expressing complex ideas, using my words to tell compelling stories, and developing strategies for how best to convey a variety of ideas to different audiences. I became a communications geek and channeled these interests into a career around one of the most fundamental components of communication: content.

No matter what form it takes — blog posts or eBooks, videos or infographics, radio advertisements or Tweets — content is communication in physical form. Eventually I discovered how powerful it is to be able to craft really compelling content that not only informs and engages your audience, but also triggers the emotional response necessary to get them to do something. Of course, in a world where we are all bombarded with more content than we could ever dream of digesting, creating even just a single piece of it that not only captures people’s attention, but that also compels them to react, is no small feat.

And yet that’s exactly what businesses and individuals alike need to do these days to build their brands, market themselves effectively, and ultimately drive sales. In today’s online world where we each have unprecedented access to information, we are able to discover for ourselves virtually all of the information we need to make a purchasing decision. As a result, traditional marketing tactics have become obsolete, while the ability to communicate to our audiences with compelling content that is useful, informative, and easily discoverable is paramount.

Of course content itself is only one aspect of communication. The other equally important piece is how you go about sharing your content with others. After all, communication isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you say it. Is your message best delivered verbally and in person, or will it have its intended effect just as well in written form? Should you Tweet it out or print it out?

With this blog, I hope to share the ideas and best practices that I’m seeing in my work at the convergence of  language, content, and communication, and the strategies being implemented around them. How we communicate is ultimately one of the most basic and yet critical aspects of who we are as people. It determines whether or not we will succeed professionally and in our personal lives. It’s one of the barometers that others use to evaluate us. And, above all else, it’s the thing that connects us as people and brings us all together no matter who we are.