The Focus of "The Messagist"

Messaging means communicating specific ideas that you feel are important to your audience. Messaging is all about clarity. Clarity starts in your own mind, but the goal is for your message to be clear in the mind of your audience; what is crystal clear for you may be quite confusing to them. A message is also a two-way street: not only are you trying to evoke specific responses, you also need to be able to measure if you succeeded or not.

There are so many good, and bad, examples of how people get a message across. A lot of what I’ll focus on can be summarised in just the few words I used in the first paragraph of this entry:

• Communicating: what mechanisms do you use to get your message across? In what medium? The way to message on the web is very different from that of radio, and even more different from a one-to-one conversation. In front of a large audience your message may be reinforced or completely masked by the way you come across.
• Specific ideas: to communicate a message you must first know what your message is. This is far more difficult than it sounds. In many cases you may know your subject so well that everything seems important. But it isn’t. Rarely will your audience really need or want to know as much about your subject as you do. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff for them, especially when it all looks like wheat to you? Alternatively, sometimes you are called upon to create a message where none seems to exist. Turning your boss’s loose jumble of inchoate ramblings into an inspirational message can be an extremely daunting task. But don’t worry, it is possible: speechwriters do it for politicians all the time!
• Important: your ideas all seem important to you, but which ones are important to your audience? Even more crucially, which ones will motivate your audience to do what you want them to do? There may be many things you could tell your sales people; which ones will get them to sell the most high-profit stuff for your company? There is a lot you could tell your manager about the job you are doing; which are the ones that will make him give you a salary increase or bump up your bonus?
• Audience: Who is your audience? This is not necessarily the same as “who will hear your message?”. When you present in the staff meeting, your colleagues may be there but your boss and his or her boss may be your true audience. If you speak at a trade show, hundreds of people may hear you, but only certain ones are going to buy, or influence others to buy, your product. What can you say that will go straight to the heart of the matter for them? And can you be interesting for everyone else at the same time?
• Clarity: Humans are unique in our capacity for language. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Communication depends on words, but use too many of them and your message gets lost. Be too concise, and the message is ambiguous. And non-verbal communications can have an even bigger impact than words. Being clear depends on you and your audience. We will discuss how to provide the right level of clarity for every audience.

Other areas that are related and that I’ll be looking at are branding, slogans, and logos. All may be part of your message, but each has specificities that make them different.

Part of what is amazing about the massive variety of our cultures, mores, habits and languages. They are so varied I sometimes wonder how we ever communicate anything. But we do, and how you translate, transliterate, and transcend language, culture and geographic barriers are all part of what I want to do here.

I hope you will enjoy it, and that you will participate in one of the key aspects of delivering any message: feedback. What do you think of my ideas and suggestions? What are your ideas? Do you have examples of great messages, or messages gone awry? This is not a monologue – work with me here. I look forward to our dialogue.