People not channels?

I’ve seen a lot in the last couple of days about channels. Social media is clearly “the in thing”, and quite rightly internal comms folk are looking to make sure that they incorporate this into their thinking and take advantage of the active audience participation that derives from it.

There have also been a few things about PowerPoint recently. Unlike social media, this is now seen to be a bad thing. And quite rightly internal comms folk are advising that this is not always a good tool for presenters to use in support of their message.

But it made me wonder whether this emphasis on the method of delivery is distracting us from concentrating on our audiences/stakeholders. Social media is not for everyone. Lots of people don’t get Twitter or Facebook and we can’t force people to participate. PowerPoint is not always wrong. Bad PowerPoint is, but you can still do good things with it. A good presenter using PowerPoint is going to be better than a bad presenter using Prezi.

Analysing stakeholders and accounting for their different preferences is at the heart of effective communications. Because they like different things we need to use a range of channels to get the message across. Because they have different levels of understanding and different levels of interest we need to tailor messages to get them to land properly. We need to ask them what they heard, what they understood, what they took from our comms so we can keep it going and do it better.

And hardening my nose for a minute, we also know that some stakeholders are more important than others (which is why we do all that analysis, mapping and engagement plan stuff). Would you use social media to hit your most important stakeholders? Maybe not. I have to admit, though, that I have used PowerPoint for this (*ducks, awaits onslaught*).