Tips & Trivia
Successful Business Commmunication
By
May 18, 2005, 08:55

There are eight essential elements to successful business communication:

1) Structure
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is understood by your audience. Every good communication should have these structural elements: the opening, the body, and the close. The opening allows your audience to quickly understand what your communication is about. The body is where you get to the heart of your message. The close is where you sum up your communication, remind your audience of your key points, and leave them with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next.

2) Clarity
Be clear about the message that you want to deliver. Giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with your message being ignored.

3) Consistency
Multiple messages from the same source must be consistent, as well as consistency within your message for best audience comprehension. Make sure that your tenses remain the same, that your viewpoint doesn’t change from the first person to the third person and that your overall theme or message doesn’t change.

4) Medium
There are a myriad of ways that you can deliver your message. The trick is to use the right one – the one that communicates your message with the greatest accuracy, with the largest likelihood of being understood, at the lowest cost and in the right timeframe.

5) Relevancy
Unless a person is interested in the subject matter, they are unlikely to pay attention to any of the message. If you force them to listen to your message, they will actually turn against you and be even less likely to pay attention in the future.

6) Primacy/Recency
One week after hearing your message, a business communication is remembered by the power and memorability of its opening and/or the power and memorability of its close. People remember the first few items (Primacy) and the last few items (Recency). So build up your opening statement and summarize your message in the last statement or two.

7) Rule of 7+2
Our brains have a finite capacity to hold information – short term memory. The brain is also able to retain anywhere from between 5 to 9 pieces of information at any one time (7+2). If you want you key points to be remembered even five minutes later, it is essential that you limit your business communication to between five and nine points.

8) Repetition
The more people hear your message, the more they will remember it. When you are giving a presentation, tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them what you want them to know, and summarize what you told them.


© Copyright 2003 by YourSITE.com