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Beyond Gadgets: Strategic Communication in a Tech-Driven World

Published in Executive Excellence Magazine

By Shauna Bona

The explosion of new communication technologies—and of new uses for old technologies—gives business leaders ever-increasing ways to communicate. But better gadgets don't necessarily deliver better information. Although we live in a largely tech-driven world, strategic communication requires a different set of drivers: namely, the requirements of your organization, the needs of your target audience, and the nature of the knowledge you wish to impart.

Technology expands our choice of medium and can alter the context in which we deliver our messages. But technology does not mitigate the need for well-crafted content with a well-defined business purpose-in fact it compounds this need.

With every choice that technology offers comes a new set of decisions about how to communicate most effectively: How to use telephone messaging without removing the human touch from business transactions; how to use email without creating information overload; and most importantly, how to balance the competing demands of remaining fully accessible and maintaining clear priorities.

I like to joke that the benefits of new communication technologies are a mirror image of the drawbacks:

• Speed. Technologies such as email and Weblogs let you quickly communicate throughout your workplace and the world. But as anyone who has ever sent a volatile email to the wrong person can testify, speed of delivery is not always good. Too often, the quick message is the unplanned, unedited message-or the message that has no clear tie to your business strategy.
• Instant and, in some cases, continuous access. Solutions like instant messaging enable you to connect immediately with everyone from your stockbroker to team members working on a critical deadline. But instant access also makes it easier for team members to veer into communication rat holes-potentially losing focus on critical path processes because the technology creates a (sometimes false) sense of urgency and demands back-and-forth response. Instant access only serves your business needs when your team understands how to keep digital conversations mission-appropriate. Without gatekeepers and priorities, instant access not only reduces communication effectiveness, but can also be a serious distraction.
• Flexibility and mobility. Wireless and mobile technology and the rapid increase in Wi-Fi hotspots let you and your employees communicate effectively away from the office. And since many of the new devices are genuinely hands free, you can now be fully mobile while also fully connected. You can support team members in the field by giving them remote access to process and product data on your network or the Net. More promising for some industries is the ability to receive data from field workers and then push specific information to them based on that data-everything from decision support and diagnoses to system configurations and pricing. But increased flexibility and mobility come with inherent risks around data delivery and control. As leaders, we are responsible for managing the corporate message and for driving knowledge management initiatives. This responsibility becomes more complex and critical as we are forced to consider not just laptops and telecommuters but wearable computing solutions that make every employee a potential, mobile input/output device.
• Data integration. Smartphones and other hybrid devices blend the capabilities of phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and the Web, allowing you to synchronize all the personal data from your PC, LAN, and mobile devices. This means fewer problems transferring data from one work environment to another and a theoretical end to version control mishaps. But synchronized data is only as helpful as the data you start with and the processes you establish for sharing it. The more we automate information exchange, the greater the burden to ensure that the information is meaningful not only to the individual user but to myriad recipients within and beyond the corporation.
• Support for visual, textual, and aural communicators. Combine digital camera, video, and television with the hybrid devices mentioned above and you begin to see how new technologies let you communicate in nearly every possible way-with text, pictures, the spoken word, even music. Field workers can deliver images directly to the office without taking time to compose text, and they can capture sound to accompany the visuals. But the ability to deliver a message in any way obligates us to choose the best way. And failure to appropriately match our medium and message can leave us looking sloppy, inconsiderate, affected, or behind the times.

On balance, the benefits of new communication technologies do outweigh the drawbacks. But the price of our expanding choices is that information design strategies are more important than ever before. If you aren't familiar with the term, information design is the practice of identifying, planning, and creating information to meet the specific needs of a specific audience within a defined context.

In other words, it's about helping business communicators deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience in the right medium. It's about understanding much more than McLuhanist ideas of medium and message. It's about recognizing that your choice of medium is a metaphor for how you and your organization embrace change and for what you value in your interactions.

Whether you are first to adopt the latest gadget or a Luddite at heart, you communicate best when you consider questions like these:

• Who am I communicating with and why?
• What are my business objectives and how can I structure my message to help meet them?
• What does my choice of medium tell my audience about me, my company, and my message?
• In what context will this message be received and how does that affect the recipient's ability to interpret it and then act accordingly?

Starting with the right information design strategy lets you capitalize on the benefits of new technology without losing your message in the buzz of faster, more frequent, but not always better communication

Shauna Bona is a founder and copresident of McKinnon-Mulherin, a strategic communication and information design firm. 801-531-1027. sbona@mckinnon-mulherin.com. www.mckinnon-mulherin.com.