Posted On: 5/21/2009
This article is terrific for the current economy, if you can't answer these about anything you are working on, go home. Seriously, every communications campaign should start with the answers to these four questions. It might not make for flashy presentations but it will help you initiatives to stay focused and be successful. In the end it is important to be about concise communications that are clearly understood by your intended audience.
The four questions communicators should ask themselves
By Jim Ylisela
jimy@ragan.com
Use these questions to help you cut through the crap and improve your communication program
Simple is not dumb. And clear does not mean basic.
What’s the biggest problem facing communications today? Fear, you say? Yes, that’s certainly holding back a lot of organizations.
Incompetence? Sure, there’s plenty of that going around.
What about this: The overwhelming desire, among too many executives and even some communicators, to make things more complicated than they are, or need to be.
What is it with this obsession with convolution, whether it’s how we write and speak, or how we plan?
Which leads us to the four big questions you should ask anytime you’re doing a piece of communication. Use these questions to help you cut through the crap and get to the heart of the matter.
Big Question No. 1: What are we trying to do?
We’ve sat in meetings with executives who talk about communication as if they’re planning the manned mission to Mars. You don’t have to use a lot of fancy terms to talk about what you’re trying to achieve.
In fact, the simpler the better. If you can’t sum up your communication goal in a sentence or two, there’s trouble ahead, cheri.
Here’s the problem: Nobody wants to ask this question, because they don’t want to admit they don’t get it, and because the question itself sounds kind of dumb.
Exactly. If you can’t get a simple answer to that simple question, your communication planning can easily fall off track.
So in our consulting work, we ask communicators and executives alike: What are we trying to do? And if the answer that comes back is something we can’t understand, we ask again—and again—until we reach a point of clarity that lets us go to the next step.
Big Question No. 2: Who are we trying to reach?
You can’t do communications without considering your audience. Every organization has many audiences, and we’re not just talking about internal and external.
For example, internal audiences might include:
• Everyone
• Front-line workers
• Managers and supervisors
• Members of a particular department or division
• Executives and top leadership
Communication to each of these groups should be tailored to what they need to know, and what’s most important to them.
External audiences are the same way.
You might have:
• Customers
• Members
• Media
• Shareholders
• Analysts/regulators
• The greater community
Who needs to get these messages, and what’s the clearest and simplest way to construct them?
Big Question No. 3: What’s the best way to get there?
OK. So you know what you want to do, and you’ve figured out who you want to reach. If you have multiple audiences, you may have even decided what each group needs to know. Now what?
Vehicles, baby. Channels. Print. Online. In person. Social media. How do those audiences like to get their information? What’s the appropriate channel for each? What about using multiple channels?
We see print publications with stories that should never be in print. Print is about explanation and context. It’s not about timeliness.
Worst decision made over and over again: Running a meeting story in a monthly newsletter, weeks (or months) after the meeting. No one cared at the time you had the meeting, and they certainly don’t care now. But they might want to know how the decisions announced at the meeting will affect them.
We see online stories that are really print stories slapped on the Web. Online is about speed, action and choice. Present stories so they can be read quickly. Give readers actions to take. Allow them to choose if they want to read more.
Face-to-face communication is about the immediate and the emotional. It’s also about conversation. Too many managers and executives hold meetings and then don’t let anyone ask questions.
Big Question No. 4: Why should anyone care?
The most important question of them all, and one that is too infrequently asked.
Why? Are we afraid of what the answer might be? (As in, “I have no idea why anyone would care to read this, but the boss said we had to run it, and exactly the way it’s written.”)
If you can’t explain why the readers should care, then what business do you have doing the story? Once you figure out why, you’ll be able to organize the communication around your answer.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Elusive Information about Social Media
This presentation contains some elusive information about social media and how it is really used in Corporate America. The wonderful part of the presentation is that anyone, even the technophobic department head, can read the presentation and have a clear sense that social media is accessible to everyone. The big headline from the presentation is to embrace social media before it is embraced for you. Social media is wiley and uncontrollable but that is why consumers like it... it isn't corporatized.
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