1. Week 11. Corporate communication and measurement.
1. Corporate communication measurement uses the same standards as business measurement, but communication measurement is not clear-cut because it is not isolated in the economic transaction.
1. Communication’s actual impact on any one economic transaction is probable and imprecise.
2. Measurement involves a message, medium and noise.
3. Communication success is measured partly in terms of wealth.
4. The completion of economic transactions is still the starting point for corporate communication measurement.
2. Exercise: Have each student take two minutes to discuss the feedback and measurement used in the most important medium at his or her organization.
1. How does your organization respond to feedback?
2. How does your organization validate measures?
3. NEXT week’s exercise: Develop an input/output diagram for your department that ties its communication to the strategic message.
3. Communication measures six components: message sender, message, medium, business environment, message-receiver and action.
1. Communication measurement in advance of outcomes is never precise. It measures probability, often with large variation.
2. Subjective and objective measures.
4. Corporate communication and feedback
1. Feedback is an essential bi-directional measure used during communication. It is measurable as the strength of message transmission.
2. Feedback has three parts: Reception confirmation, understanding, action confirmation.
3. A manager is always safer assuming a message was not received until there is proof that it was.
4. Feedback can be simultaneous with message sending.
5. Feedback cannot measure the intent to act.
6. There is pro-active and reactive feedback.
7. In noisy environments, feedback strengthens transmission through repetition.
8. Managers automate feedback whenever possible.
9. Feedback is a matter of perception unless it is verified.
10. Feedback may be a perceptual trap when individual response is substituted of that of a population.
11. Feedback is limited.
5. Measurement and facts
1. Fact-based measurement is independently verifiable.
1. Usually not immediate. Takes time to develop facts.
2. Gauges communications the same way that feedback does.
3. The difficulty that a manager faces is that it is impossible to measure each variable. A manager often estimates because formal testing is costly.
4. In controlled environments, fact-based communication measurement can go to great lengths because testing is repetitive. Casinos.
5. With all the uncertainties, it is no wonder that some managers do not use fact-based measurement in communication. However, failure to do so is a poor alternative. Communication thus becomes an exercise in the quixotic or self-referential.
6. In the end, managers are not bound by fact-based measurement. They make decisions to help a company survive and succeed. Even if measures show that a product is on the edge of success, a manager might cancel it, if it is draining cash flow.
2. Internal communication measurement is similar to external measurement.
1. Managers should not compare communication in one business location or department to that in another without adjusting for variations in people and tasks.
2. Four events tell a manager when a fact-based communication measurement is insufficient.
1. Actions according to messages are not replicated regularly.
2. Actions according to messages are consistently done wrong or not carried out.
3. Response to messages consistently exceeds expectations and one does not know why.
4. Response to messages consistently meets expectations, but one does not know how.
3. A manager can tell there is too much communication measurement if employees send more time reporting than acting, if there are too many measures to monitor and if it becomes clear that some measurements work just as well as, or better than, others.
3. Variation is the ultimate challenge to fact-based measurement.
6. Communication measurement techniques.

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