The core of communications
One of the sessions I enjoyed the most during my time at the U.S. Chamber's Institute program last week was a talk Bill Graham of Graham Corporate Communications gave on the keys to good communications. A few takeaways I got from what he had to say:
- Graham asked participants to think about the best speech or lecture they'd heard in the past year. "Now," he said, "tell me the 10 most important points you got from that speech." I have to admit, off the top of my head, I couldn't come up with 10--or even five. In fact, no one in the room could come up with 10 points from a recent talk they had heard. Which led to Graham's central point: When preparing to speak to an audience, you need to focus. "What is the one idea want your audience to remember a year from now?"
- Another comment of Graham's really struck me, as an association communicator: "Helping the person you're talking to is the number one concept in good communications." Is "helping our members" or "helping our stakeholders" the true core of your association's communications efforts? When you measure the success of your communications plans, are you really measuring how much your members or stakeholders are helped--or are you measuring the (often easier to measure) number of registrations, items sold, or grassroots activities undertaken?
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Comments
Bill has an excellent point. I remained blissfully ignorant (after grad school at least) of most communications theory until I had to teach it at Loyola last year and one of the bigger concepts that stuck in MY head is the 'span of control'--the idea that we can handle x number of concepts at any given point to process, store, manipulate, prioritize, etc. (I'm mangling the concept but it is articulated and monetized well in works such as Barry Schwartz's 'Paradox of Choice.)
Often we can't expect our readers or audience to process more than three things .. and I bet if Graham asked people to remember just three, most would still fail the test.
Last year I met someone coming out of a very crowded session at Annual Meeting, presented by a pugnacious, colorful presenter who always fills the room. I was curious and asked her what he big takeaway(s) were from the session since I'd never heard him speak--she thought hard and finally said one thing which, judging from her own facial expression, wasn't terribly profound ... or much psychic ROI for having spent 75 minutes in a crowded classroom.
This wasn't a reflection on the speaker, the audience member, or me for asking an unintentionally embarrassing question, but rather a good reminder of the limits of our ability to impart something of real value to another human being using any communications vehicle. The upper limits to our ability to impart is pretty much the same from a podium, from inside your outlook folder, or from your in-box. Just getting you to listen or to open me is only a fraction of the overall challenge.
Perhaps the goal for us who write and who speak should be to make that one thing stick with an audience member, even if it may be a variety of things that are likely to stick with each audience member.
At the end of the day metrics are much harder for communications than for marketing, but by staying focused on the individual and their information needs, we generally achieve our goals by fulfilling their need for information first.
Posted by: Kevin Whorton, WM&R | August 5, 2008 5:56 AM