Friedmann Anthony

Podstrony

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.You might think of a carpentry analogy.You measureyour wood before cutting it.You check the result afterwards to see if it is right before assembly.Media110 CHAPTER 6: Corporate Communications: Selling Telling, Training, and Promotingcommunication is an inexact science.Any way of stacking the odds in your favor to achieve a success-ful result is highly desirable.Numerous techniques have been developed in the advertising and publicrelations industries to ensure the success of campaigns for specific publics.Formative and summativeevaluations rest on many techniques that work equally well to assess training needs.FOCUS GROUPSA focus group is a handpicked group of people who represent a cross section of your target audi-ence and who have agreed to participate in the evaluation process.This might involve questionnaires,meetings, and discussions with a view to collecting detailed responses about a product, a service, orthe effectiveness of the message.Most formative and summative evaluation works best with focusgroups.It is advantageous to measure hypothetical responses and actual responses with the samegroup of people.It would not be hard to do an evaluation exercise with a focus group in a collegeenvironment.QUESTIONNAIRESQuestionnaires can be used on their own without a focus group to conduct formative or summa-tive evaluations.A good questionnaire provides an efficient way to collect information about theaudience and its attitudes.In an informal way, every writer asks and answers questions about thetarget audience.A formal questionnaire, however, needs to be designed to elicit specific results andeliminate faulty assumptions.At the high end, this requires training.The use of polls and researchinto public attitudes on given issues is a specialized fieldTYPICAL CORPORATE COMMUNICATION PROBLEMSTo understand the business of corporate media, you need to look at some of the communicationproblems that corporations and organizations face for which media can become a solution.Forexample, when I bought an early model cellular phone, Bell Atlantic, then Nynex, now Verizon sup-plied a video to explain how to use a cellular phone and how their cellular system worked.A profes-sional anchor or presenter talked to camera.Cutaways to close-ups showed how the phone worked.The video answered a number of the questions that come up for a person using such a product forthe first time.Most videos of this kind have a cost benefit.That is to say, the cost of making the videois compensated by a saving to the company in customer service calls and the employee time andoverheads needed to deal with basic questions.In other words, this company anticipated a problemand found a solution by making a video.There are other factors and other benefits.Forestalling cus-tomer problems and making the product or service more successful is a strong benefit that is hard tovalue in dollars and cents.It is worth a lot and justifies the video dollars that a management decidesto spend on the communication exercise.This example shows that there is a rationale behind any video that is commissioned by an organi-zation or corporation.Now corporate marketing and public relations employs nonlinear as well asTypical Corporate Communication Problems 111linear media.Brochures and catalogs are produced on CD-ROMs and DVDs.Product catalogs aresearchable databases on a website.So the need to match a solution to a corporate communicationsproblem extends beyond plain vanilla video.Production companies have to be more versatile than they used to be.The range of media solu-tions has increased, and video has become a component of fixed interactive media and websites.Corporations and organizations have multiple types of communication problems that need solu-tions.Solving those problems is a creative service that production companies provide.They also offerproduction and postproduction services.They deliver a finished product ready for distribution.Smallbusiness-card size CDs can hold a promotional brochure for products and services.Video is primar-ily motivational rather than informational, often a component of fixed interactive and online media.The range of media solutions has expanded so that step 6 of the seven-step method that querieswhat medium is appropriate and why becomes more urgent and a key part of developing a creativeconcept.In this process, the scriptwriter has an important role.You need to understand that role, and youneed to see how to develop your thinking and writing skills to make a career in that field.Breakinginto that market is easier than breaking into the entertainment market, which is smaller and highlycompetitive.It is easier to sell your talent to write a $1500 script for which the client or corporateproducer is taking a small risk than to persuade a TV producer that you can write a series or even anepisode of a series, let alone a feature film for which budgets run into tens of millions of dollars.Letit be said, though, that you should not limit yourself or your ambitions, and that you can migratefrom one market to another and back again.To understand the kind of problem that writers are given in the corporate market and for which theyhave to devise solutions, you have to start thinking from the clients point of view.You have to seetheir needs, their predicaments, and, sometimes, their shortsightedness about their own communi-cation problems.Corporate video is not about self-expression, or saying what you want to say.It isabout expressing what others want to say.Sometimes they don t know what to say or how to say it.Selling your visual writing talent to help them find a solution can be creatively demanding and per-sonally satisfying, as well as financially rewarding.It does mean, however, that you won t necessarilydeal with themes or topics that you would freely choose to write about.Because the client determines the subject matter and the message, the writer often has to learn aboutfields of activity, manufacturing processes, or technical information that are totally new.This makesthe field intellectually exciting and challenging.You never know what is going to be thrown at you.You learn about all sorts of things that you would otherwise never come across.That is why a goodgeneral education, an understanding of science and history together with strong verbal and analyticalskills, is important.Every company s business has unique products or special preoccupations thatyou have to assimilate and communicate to an audience.You have to read and digest manuals andbrochures and do background research, not to mention absorb verbal input from managers,subject matter experts (SMEs), and employees on site visits.You are often entrusted with confiden-tial or sensitive commercial information [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

bezglutenowo.pev.pl