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.