Communications are leaky, so what?

I blogged recently about the new reality that any communications will leak beyond the intended recipients to all sorts of other stakeholders, particularly departments of the business in different countries.

So how should you construct your communications? Shel Holtz has a nice summary of the implications:

The core message absolutely must be consistent.

...

However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.

But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.

Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.

Of course, defining the boundary line between the "core message" which must be preserved and the "details of specific interest" which can vary from audience to audience isn't easy. But that's why they pay us...

 

Technorati Tags: internal communications,law of leaky communications,multiple audiences,segmentation

The Law of Leaky Communications

Today's formulation: "What plays in Mexico doesn't stay in Mexico."

Or, more formally, since this is the first time I've posted this:

"Any communication designed for a particular audience will find it's way to other audiences that have an interest in you."

Or:

"Targeting might let you speak to a specific group of people, but don't forget to consider how other people might react if they heard what you are saying."

 

Today's example comes from the blog "Strange Maps" which I highly recommend as regular reading if you like graphics and maps. It seems that Absolut Vodka tried to propel sales in Mexico with a clever ad about how an alternate history regarding the USA. Unfortunately of course, what "plays in Mexico doesn't stay in Mexico" and the ad moved from paid circulation to viral circulation in the USA, prompting some backlash there.

This is particularly germane to cross-cultural contexts in organisations. We've all seen the simple strangeness where HQ tells the Indian division "India is our most important market" whilst telling the Chinese division "China is our most important market." Or the notion that in some regions it's perfectly acceptable to tell the stock market about job cuts before you tell your employees, but not so acceptable elsewhere.

People used to get away with a lot of these risky behaviours because communications did not "leak" far beyond their intended audiences. This is no longer the case and it imposes new problems for communicators.

One reaction is simply to be better prepared for blowback, but I would urge everyone to think more clearly about the different cultures in their organisation and how different messages will affect them.

 

[The title is a homage to Joel Spolsky's excellent phrase "The Law of Leaky Abstractions", which I've loved since I read it and if you're in software or any kind of systems design and haven't heard of, I urge you to go and read about.]

 

Technorati Tags: cultural translation,law of leaky communications,multiple audiences