Garth Jowett, professor at University of Houston, on propaganda, media literacy, cognitive dissonance, Fairness Doctrine, media conglomeration, and absolute truth.
To watch the video, click here.
Enjoy.
Public Relations
Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part Two
Yesterday you learned a four-step process to overcoming communication palisades. Now I am happy to present the Public Relations checklist for overcoming communication barriers, also known as the 7 C’s of Effective Communication.
7 C’s of Effective Communication: Clarity, Conciseness, Consideration, Completeness, Coherency, Courtesy, and Correctness.
1. Clarity: The more you focus on something, the more clear it becomes. Make sure you maintain your focus by only communicating a specific message by using concrete wording and adding emphasis only to the message itself, not tangents of the message.
2. Conciseness: Many reporters will take pages of notes on an event and go back to high light only the important facts. Being concise is creating a message out of only those highlighted features. Conciseness involves minimizing word usage; it is the combination of “brief” and “point”.
3. Consideration: Quite plainly, know your audience. Stick your feet in their shoes and wear them out. Consideration is about tweaking the words that you have used to focus on what you want to deliver, so that they also adhere to the wants and needs of the audience who will receive the message. This is your opportunity to empathize.
4. Completeness: Completeness is about representation, about credibility, about conveying all the facts accordingly. In conveying all the facts, it answers any questions that may be sparked by the presented information. When you work on making something complete, it is the only time that it is expected to add more information to the focus so that it answers those questions.
5. Coherency: While a message may have all its facts, do they flow? Making a communication coherent insinuates adding transitional phrases, checking and re checking the wording, and breaking the message into segments while maintaining the connections.
6. Courtesy: Remember the end of Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part One? Be human and stay positive.
7. Correctness: Being straightforward, get an editor. In fact, get five editors, a few friends, and a couple of co-workers or other people in the PR field to review your message. Just do it, you may never realize how much it matters, but if you don’t do it, you will. That’s the unsatisfying result of correctness.
As everything in PR and communication, there are always more ways to look at definitions, tables, concepts, etc,. Other C’s that get thrown into the fray: credibility, content, context, continuity, capability, channels, and concreteness. All of which involve some part or another of the concepts I have presented.
Enlighten Others
Overcoming Communication Palisades: Part One
Yesterday I posted a laundry list of various Communication Palisades.
Obviously there are hundreds of ways you can go and tweak each individual one. For the sake of this post, I will share with you the four step process to overcoming any and all of the communication palisades.
Step one: Whether it is before the communication takes place or after, to overcome the obstacles of communication, you must begin (or re-start) by focusing on preparedness and design. This involves returning to the source and encoding steps of the Shannon-Weaver Model. Is your message as specific as possible? Have you chosen the medium of encoding and the channel with the least amount of noise?
Step two: This step is about running ladders in conversation. At every distance, implement a reminder of the source of where the communication originated as well as the reason for communication. This frequent return not only strengthens the connection of communication, but it allows you to maintain the focus as much as it communicates it to the receiver.
Step three: Communication has to have a certain vivacity to it. Communication isn’t effective if it does not get others enthused, excited, interested, and maybe even a little bit turned on… at your ideas. This third step is vital for those who are communicating something bland, something generic that it’s even hard for you to be interested in. As a PR Specialist, there will be times that you have to swing something, but in a positive sense. What makes the swing negative is when you fake your enthusiasm, when you channel deceitful excitement. A true PR professional will work on convincing themselves of the subjects animation before expressing it to another.
Once you convince yourself, it’s much easier to convince others.
Step four: Flirt with benefits. Communication is a transaction and as you can imagine, the only transactions that seem to “work themselves out” are the ones where the other person feels they are getting a huge benefit out of it. Ask yourself, how can you benefit them? But don’t just answer it yourself, tell them!
Whether you are analyzing your communication strategy before it takes place or revisiting ways to strengthen a communication attempt you have already made, following these four steps will get you past almost every barrier.
The most important variable to consider while taking these steps is to be human. Be real. Be honest. Be caring. But above all, just be human.
Enlighten Others
Communication Palisades
Here is a list of communication palisades, or barriers, which arise in every day life and professional work. Try to imagine specific examples that the barriers have shown up in your life, both for you or your client(s).
- Already tangled or broken lines of trust and committment
- Inconsistency
- Physical barriers
- Gender, age, degree
- Hypocrisy
- Physical behaviors
- Language, enunciation differences, volume strain
- Information overload
- Poorly influenced
- Audience enthrallment
- Time crunch
- Distractions/Noise
- Woeful retention rates
- No eye contact
- Attitude
- Presentation of information
- Lack of credibility
- Sentinels
We will take a look at overcoming these communication palisades tomorrow.
Enlighten Others
The Shannon-Weaver Model
The Shannon-Weaver Model, also known as the Linear Communication Model and the Mathematical Theory of Communication, demonstrates the process of communicating. It also helps you realize why the most effortless acts of communication can result in complete misinterpretation or misunderstanding.
It was in 1947 that Claude E. Shannon created this theory with the intention for it to be used in facilitating information transmission over telephone lines. Not surprisingly, it took on an entirely new role of being one of the most largely used inter-personal communication models to this day.
The model contains 8 key components: Source, Encoder, Message, Channel, Noise, Decoder, Receiver and Feedback.
Source: The source of communication is an individual creator or group of individuals who have a message they wish to be received by another individual or group. The source, or origin of the message, must also have a definite purpose of initiating the communication model.
Encoder: The encoder, also referred to as the sender or transmitter, puts the message into specific signals that will later be interpreted. The encoder must choose distinct forms of signals to represent the meaning of the message clearly.
A gesture of a handshake can be encoded as an image, but it would not work as effectively if it were put into a text format.
Message: The message is the content that is being communicated from one end of the model to the other. Naturally you will send multiple messages that are precise, rather than a single message which has too many meanings.
Channel: The channel is the path on which the message travels. The encoder, while deciding how to best transmit the message, must also consider the best path on which the transmitted message will travel. This channel can be any medium such as magazine, radio, film, internet, etc,.
Noise: Inevitably the channel is already filled with noise; anything that interferes with the transmission of the message. This can be the radio playing too loudly in the background or the encoder’s own inability to enunciate correctly.
Decoder: The decoder simply does the opposite of what the encoder does. The decoder interprets the original message in a way that the receiver will understand. Additionally, the decoder will act as a filter in the sense that the message will have as much noise removed as possible.
Receiver: The receiver is the individual or audience whom the sender had the intention to deliver the message to.
Originally the linear model of communication had stopped there. It wasn’t until Warren
Weaver worked on the fundamentals of the model and added a necessary component. Weaver made the effect of the model orbicular in the sense that he had attached feedback to the model. *See image above.
Feedback: Feedback is the receivers response to the message. The feedback’s intent is to let the encoder know exactly how accurately the message was interpreted as well as simply reporting whether the message was received or not.
Feedback allows the once linear model to become cyclical so that each party – the individual or group at each end of the model – can continue communication.
As an example, we will stick to the model’s origin by using the telephone.
You, the source, wish to convey the message that you have completed the report early to your boss. The message is then encoded as a voice message into the phone, with the phone, or the phones cable being the channel on which the message is traveling. The noise present is simply your daughter screaming in the background as you were working from home this evening. The decoder will present the message as a voice message for the receiver, your boss, to listen to. Your boss will than reciprocate the process and present you with feedback, whether that is simply telling you that you did a good job or hinting at a promotion in the future.
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The Five Stages Within The Diffusion Process
The Diffusion of Innovations, also called the Diffusion Theory, is a theory that strives on the interpretation of how people either adopt or reject new ideas, technology, products, or change in general.
There are five stages within the diffusion process:
- Awareness Stage: An individual becomes aware of the existence of an idea but lacks knowledge of what it does, or the benefits of it.
- Interest Stage: An individual has a desire to obtain more information on the idea: what is it, what does it do, how will it affect our culture, what are the possibilities of using it?
- Evaluation Stage: An individual mentally questions the selfishness that the idea can be used; how will it benefit me? The individual also begins to demonstrate interpersonal communication by requesting feedback on the idea from others.
- Trial Stage: If it benefits the individual, then the idea will be tried. It will be a personal experiment, a small sample to be tested in a way that concludes how the individual can benefit most from it.
- Adoption Stage: The individual begins to scale the idea and use it consistently. This adoption stage is largely based on continuous satisfaction of the idea.
A similar five stage process in the mental acceptance of an idea is Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation, Confirmation encompassing similar definitions to those I have presented.
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More Than Just A Decision
Everyday the PR world is filled with decisions, to take on this client or not, to place the ad here or there, to focus more on social media outlets or word of mouth – the decisions are endless.
It’s almost as if you’re the CEO, but what sets you, as a PR Specialist, apart from the CEO is that it is your job to not only make a decision, but to justify it.
It’s no wonder that taking a debate class is so highly suggested for those looking to go into PR. However, debate merely teaches you how to fend for your position, your opinion on a matter. You can debate which decision is better, but that’s not your job.
Your focus is to fend of those who do not support the action you took from the decision you made. Justification in PR is about the action already taken, not the decision to take action.
By the way, there is no guide to it. Sorry.
Practice makes perfect.
