1. Week 10. Corporate Communications and Media
1. A medium is any physical entity, including one’s own body, that carries information from one individual to another. It uses sound or light waves, electricity, nerve endings and cellular structures to transmit concepts.
1. All media are crafts requiring physical tools.
2. Managers rarely become skilled in more than one or two media, yet they are able to coordinate organizations and complete economic transactions with the few they use.
3. Professional communicators sometimes assist in delivering messages persuasively, but even communicators know only a few media well.
2. Exercise: Have each student take two minutes to rank media in his or her company by economic importance.
1. What is the most effective medium? Explain why.
2. What is the least effective medium? Explain why
3. NEXT week’s exercise: Use the medium that you have ranked as the most effective in your organization and report on its feedback and measurement elements.
3. What Media Do
1. Deliver effective messages to support economic transactions and business survival and to receive information indicating whether a message was effective.
1. Every medium has strengths and weaknesses.
2. No combination of media remains optimum for any length of time because a business environment changes constantly.
2. All media carry messages in addition to the intended message and how a medium is used also expresses meaning.
1. A manager’s choice of media is as important as the development of a message.
2. Media changes have occurred so rapidly that inertia in adopting new media can harm an organization.
3. Every medium is defined from two points of view – the message sender and the message receiver.
1. Message receiver is free to act or not.
2. A message sender defines a medium as a way of sending a message to gain action for business survival and success and of observing whether the message was understood.
3. A message receiver defines a medium as a way of receiving a message directing action for business survival and success and of showing understanding.
4. A corporate communication medium is a two-way link between persons with self-interest in the outcome of an economic transaction. A medium transmits a desire, or lack thereof, to complete an exchange.
5. Managers can push messages or message receivers can pull them.
6. A manager uses any medium that best serves his or her purposes at a moment in time and abandons any medium that does not work.
4. Communicators often let skills outweigh messages.
1. A communicator’s desire to create in a medium can take an upper hand.
2. Corporate communication media are not arts to be appreciated in themselves. To judge business media on creativity and style is to miss the point. The goal is not art but the economic transaction.
5. Choosing corporate communication media
1. Managers choose media that best express a meaning to target individuals and persuade them to act in accordance with explicit message content.
1. Media is never mass to message receivers: it is mass only to message senders.
2. Ideally, managers choose media that will provide the most timely, persuasive and secure transmission of a message to an individual at the least cost.
3. Managers should be willing to change a medium when the economic potential of a new one becomes apparent.
4. Only if two media are judged equally effective should a manager choose the one he or she prefers. When it is not clear which medium is best, a manager should test them first. This is another reason why managers should understand message receivers better than do communications professionals.
5. A final criterion in choosing corporate communication is cost. Too often cost is the first hurdle and not the last.
6. A manager’s job is to know the message, the individuals to whom a message is sent and the results to be achieved. He or she guides communicators.
7. Ultimately, because a message receiver defines clarity, a manager must adopt the viewpoint of the message receiver.
8. When a medium is used badly, effective communication is more difficult and managers must work harder.
9. Managers often blame media when the message is at fault.
10. There are hundreds of media in every organization and new ones are invented daily, but a manager does not have the time to direct them all. Corporate communication is concerned only with media that directly support business survival and success.
11. Media that do not imperil an organization can survive as long as they do not absorb to many human and material resources.
6. Types of Corporate Communication media
1. Primary: multisensory communication among individuals with immediate feedback. Face-to-face.
2. Secondary media: limited sensory communication among individuals with either immediate or delayed feedback. The benefit is reach.
3. Noise: For every advance in sensory transmission, there is an equal and simultaneous advance in noise.
7. Integrating corporate communication media
1. Managers coordinate and protect critical information pathways to core individuals.
2. Ideal corporate communication is an integrated core of media and databases.
3. Media integration is an optimum and temporary mix of both personal and impersonal and verbal and nonverbal message delivery which is adjust for differences among message receivers, noise levels, transmission security and persuasive force.
4. Ideally, managers integrate communication from the outset. In reality, inherent limits and interference from the business environment may make integration impractical.
5. A manager should never depend on any one communicator or medium too heavily in building an integrated mix and should search continually for better solutions.
6. A medium should fit the business function and since the function of an effective message is to gain individual action, integrated media should fit both a targeted individual and the desired action.
7. Every department and specialty in an organization contributes to the integration of corporate communication media. The role of engineering.
8. The manager’s job is to choose media that express the maximum amount of a strategic message at any given moment.
9. The manager selects media for integration that carry the greatest amount of information about economic transactions.
10. The choice of media integration begins with research.
11. In every choice of media type and weight, a manager should start from a zero base.

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