After our mini snow break, we got back on track with our next speaker Ken Fairchild. Ken offered over 55 years to the business. He has done every type of communication work. His experiences include communications for the positive aspects of General Public Relations to the “dangerous but fun” field of Crisis Public Relations.
All modern communication consists of a simple model. A sender sends a message through a medium to the receiver. If noise doesn’t interfere, the receiver takes the message, evaluates it, and sends feedback to the sender. This works for all modes of communication, whether it is Socrates sending the message to his public through word of mouth, or newspapers sending their message through print.
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| Traditional Model |
We, as communication experts, throughout the years have realized one thing: Nothing has changed. The medium is constantly changing and evolving to meet current technology advances, but all that matters is your message! Fairchild summed it up perfectly when he said “use the medium, don’t let it use you,” because in the end “nothing matters if your communicating the wrong thing.”
Though I agree with the essence of this idea, I believe that, with the rise of social media, we have to focus on the medium just as much as the message.
Social media enables us to not only send a message and receive feedback, it allows third parties to enter into the model. Following Marshall McLuhan’s idea that he who makes the medium makes the message. This is evident in Facebook feeds across the nation, where an individual posts a comment on a wall stating their opinion.
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| Model of Social Media Communication |
A third, fourth or fifth party with a simple click of a button can like or comment on this opinion creating the potential for greater conversation. Any other medium of communication would remain between the original two parties, staying in the two-way communication model. Social Media takes it to a higher power by multiplying the two-way model times a factor of X.
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