Strategic communication

Communication is the means for exchange of ideas between people. Communication on the whole is simple and plain but when one wants to adapt communication as one of the key factors in their organization, it has to have some sort of strategy. Whether an organization is trying to enhance its reputation through corporate advertising, to communicate to employees about rising cost of healthcare, to convince shareholders that the company is still worth investing in or simply get customers to buy more products, using a communication strategy is very important. The three components for communication strategy comprises of organization, constituency and messages.
Communication strategy can be achieved by successful completion of its three components. In the first component, Determining objectives as their can be many reasons to communicate, Deciding what resources are available to determine how to communicate about something like employee benefits plan or introducing a new product into a market depends heavily on what resources are available within organization, including money, human resource, time; Diagnosing the organization’s reputation .
In second component, analyzing constituencies, analysis determines who are your organization’s constituencies? What is the constituency’s attitude toward the organization? What does the constituency know about the topic?
In third component, delivering messages involves a two step process, the communication channel and structure messages carefully. To assess the success of the strategy we need to check the results of the communication and determine if it gave to desired result. Feedback helps us to assess our result.

http://www.chass.ncsu.edu/ccstm/scmh/model.html
http://www.benton.org/publibrary/toolkits/stratcommtool.html
The above mentioned links gives an insight on the above discussed matter.

http://www.melcrum.com/articles/clutter_at_microsoft.shtml
The above mentioned article gives us an example of managing communication and reducing overload in a matrix organization. Here Mike love who is the senior director of corporate communications at Microsoft shares his experience of some tried and tested methods for generating more focused and relevant communication, and reflects on the role of new media in the mix.

From my personal experience, I believe that strategic communication is surely a leading path to success. I would like to share my views of when I worked at Emc Data Storage System, Everyone followed a very systematic way to communicate, and the best preferred way was to send an e-mail to state your query and the receiver would respond to it within a short span, answering the query with all the details, incase of any delay, a simple reminder would revert back with an immediate response. This was followed not just by the staff working in the same building in Bangalore but when the communication took place with the team in US too. Everybody is very prompt and very organized which helps for a clearer understanding of the issue which helps to solve the issue more efficiently.