This episode of Nutshell Brainery is

brought to you by The Courage to Succeed:

Discover and Achieve What Matters Most

(and tell everything else to take a hike), by

Lon Schiffbauer. Now available at Amazon.

Let's talk pigeons. In early October 1918

Major Charles White Whittlesey and close

to 500 men are trapped behind enemy

lines at the Battle of Verdun. With

no food or ammunition, they needed help

and fast, so Whittlesey dispatched a

series of carrier pigeons, only to see

each one shot down by the Germans. Soon

he was left with only one pigeon, a black

check cock named Cher Ami. The men knew

the pigeon well. The bird had already

delivered 11 messages for them

throughout the battle. So with the

message attached Whittlesey sent Cher Ami off.

The German saw him rising up out of

the trench and so opened fire. For

several moments the carrier pigeon

managed to avoid the artillery, then

Cher Ami was shot from the sky and

tumbled to the earth. Somehow though the

bird managed to take flight once again

and disappeared off into the smoke.

In the end Cher Ami managed to deliver the

message,

despite having been shot through the

breast, blinded in one eye, and with a leg

hanging from a tendon. Help was sent out

immediately and 194

survivors were rescued, a group

heralded as the Lost Battalion.

In recognition for his heroic service,

Cher Ami was awarded the French "Croix de Guerre" with Palm. Major Whittlesey had

a clear purpose: to get help fast. His

audience was equally clear: the commander

of the reinforcements. But pinned down

behind enemy lines Whittlesey only really

had one channel available to him, a

humble little carrier pigeon. Sure, he

could have sent off a man up over the

top and running through no man's land,

but odds are he would not have made it

very far. Whittlesey chose the carrier

pigeon because it was the right

channel for this particular purpose, and

for this particular audience, and in the

context of the battle in which he was

entrenched. Likewise, the channels that we

choose should be those the best suit

our purposes. So what's a channel?

Back in episode one we talked about what

it means to communicate. We learned that

communication is about sending the right

message to the right audience at the

right time through the right channel in

the right context for the right purpose.

Since then we've explored what it means

to communicate for the right purpose, to

the right audience, and in the right

context. In this episode we'll see how

purpose and audience leads us to the

right channel. As we saw from Major Whittlesey

and Cher Ami, the purpose of the

communication decides the right audience,

which in turn decides the right channel.

Channels are the media we use to

communicate our message. Any single form

of communication is in and of itself a

channel.

This includes the obvious, such as a

phone, email, face-to-face conversation,

but it also includes the not-so-obvious,

such as facial expressions, body language,

and vocal tone. Now when it comes to

communicating, the challenge isn't a lack

of channels. There are already any number

of channels out there from which we can

choose. The question is what is the right

channel, given our purpose and our

audience, and the context? When we look at

the list of available channels through

this lens the choice becomes pretty

clear. For example, leaving a note on the

kitchen table telling your parents that

you're engaged to get married may not be

the right channel. Sure, it's an available

channel, but is it the right one for the

situation?

Likewise, sending them an emboss gilded

card telling them that you're out of

milk might be overkill.

So you see, in many ways the purpose

audience and context really tell us what

the appropriate channel is. But that

doesn't mean we shouldn't be careful in

how we choose our media. Even though the

purpose audience and context has

narrowed our choices, we still need to be

careful as we select the right channels.

That's what we're going to talk about

over the next couple of episodes. In

today's episode we're going to talk

about how channel richness affects the

channels effectiveness as well as

efficiency.

Then in our next episode we'll talk

about channel characteristics that we

need to consider when putting together a

media mix. But right now let's look at

channel richness. To understand channel

richness, let's consider this richness

scale. On the right we have channels with

a high degree of richness. Richness is

determined by the number of ways a

channel can effectively communicate a

message.

Now if you're not sure what I mean by

that, bear with me. It'll become clear.

Right now though the thing that you need

to bear in mind is that rich channels

are very effective. The richer the

channel, the more effective it will be in

communicating your message. Now when I

say effective

I mean that the channel does what it's

supposed to do, and very well to boot. And

as we see here, channels with low

richness are for the most part fairly

ineffective.

So why do we use them? Because these

channels are extremely efficient.

By efficient

I mean they go a long way for very

little investment--that they give you

basically a lot of bang for your buck.

Whereas rich channels are very

inefficient, they require a great deal of

investment to do what you need them to do.

Okay, so you might be a little bit confused,

so let's move on and look at some real

world examples and see how they fit in

the spectrum.

Let's first look at terms and conditions--

you know, the legal policies that you run

into now and again.

Well now when I say you run into them,

that's about what I mean. You've never

actually read them.

These are the things that are 2,000

words of written text and

incomprehensible legalese that you

scroll through without reading, just to

find the accept button at the end. These

sort of communications are very

efficient. All the company needs to do is

write it out and post it on the website

for the whole world to ignore. But while

they're very efficient, they're not very

effective.

Like I say, when was the last time you

actually read one? In fact, Amazon Web

Services had a little bit of fun with

this and added clause 57.10. This

section states that the restrictions

previously stated will become nul and void

in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

Really, I'm not kidding.

Go check it out. My guess is the writers

added the verbiage as part of a bet

to see how long it would take

for someone to find it. On the other hand,

maybe they inserted the language as an

easter egg to reward those that

carefully read the company's terms and

conditions. Who knows, but it's a pretty

great stunt.

Next let's look at email. Email is highly

efficient. One email can go to thousands

of people, which means it's pretty

ineffective when used in, say, a blast email.

However, email can also be very targeted,

sent to specific individuals for specific

purpose.

This makes it somewhat more effective.

Still, not too terribly effective. Many

emails are so long and poorly targeted

that they are deleted before they're

even opened. That and email communicates a

message only through the words that it

contains. This means no facial

expressions, no vocal tonality--things

that give a channel richness.

This brings us to online discussion

groups. Like emails, they lack facial

expressions and vocal tonality. However,

they're much more targeted to a specific

person or group.

What's more, they can maintain a

conversation thread somewhat more

effectively than can email. For a channel

to be truly rich however it needs facial

expressions, body language, vocal tonality,

and real-time feedback. This is where

live speeches come into play. They're much

more effective than the channels we

discuss this far, but they tend to be

one-sided. True communication is a

dialogue, not a monologue. Dialogues begin

with a telephone conversations. True, we

lose body language and facial

expressions with this particular channel,

but we still have strong vocal tonality

to rely on. It's also a real-time

conversation--synchronous conversation--

something we'll talk about in our future

episode.

However, you can only have so many people

on the line at once before the

conversation starts to fall apart, so

this is why the channel is very

effective but becomes very inefficient.

Next we have video conferencing,

basically a phone conversation but this

time with facial expressions. And as

before, we're moving up the scale in

terms of effectiveness, but now it's even

less efficient. Lastly, the most effective

communication channel

is a face-to-face conversation. This

channel has everything: words, body

language, facial expressions, vocal

tonality, and real-time feedback.

However, since face-to-face conversations

can only be had with small groups of

people, they're very inefficient. Now that

we understand the concept of channel

richness and how this affects a channels

effectiveness vs efficiency,

next we need to consider the specific

characteristics associated with each

channel. This will help us select not

only the right channels but to put

them in the right sequence so that we

can have the best possible outcome.

That's what we're going to talk about

next time, so I hope you'll join me.

This episode of Nutshell Brainery was

written and produced by Lon Schiffbauer. Our

theme music was composed by Scott Holmes.

You can learn more about Scott's music

by visiting free music archive dot-org,

forward slash music, forward slash Stott underscore

Holmse, forward slash.