June 1985, the author of this play graduated from college. He proudly shows his Certificate entitled: “Specialist in marine electronics”! The main subject of the whole program was communication. Three years of training have resulted in an almost perfect mastery of an art and craft called radiotelegraphy. This was an absolute requirement for the radio officer position, a role that had to be fulfilled on every ocean-going vessel. Regulatory compliance. Reason: the ship had to be able to communicate with the shore and with other ships under all circumstances, even the most extreme. The communication tool was technology, the transfer of information was done from person to person, according to well-described procedures and formulas. The cost of communication was billed per word, so every communicator had a vested interest in ensuring that a message was both clear and concise. All overhead and waste had to be avoided. And it was. A few messages were exchanged every day, a few dozen under very busy circumstances. One thing was for sure: every message contained important information and received the attention it deserved.
December 2019, same author scans his own mailbox … 125 unread emails … how many of them are really relevant to my business? Next to the inbox there are several open communication channels, and loads of so-called “valuable” information is being dumped into his head. The cost of a word is absolutely nothing, and therefore the cost of a sentence, the cost of a page, the cost of an entire information book … still nothing.
Communication procedures and formulas have disappeared and words have become less than a commodity, not deserving of much care and attention.
Here is the paradox of the technological revolution: Word-messages have become so “cheap”, in every sense of the word, that much more effort is being made to disseminate and reproduce them as much as possible, through as much as possible. possible channels (preferably in an automated fashion), hoping that some of them will find fertile ground and receive appropriate attention.
All these words, without value, are now classified as “data”, the new gold … These data are used to “profile” customers and prospects. “Know your customer”. This profile is sold as accurate and free from emotional noise; much better than the largely emotional knowledge one human has accumulated over another human … really?
We now come to the essence of human-to-human communications. It is summarized in the first Basic Hypothesis of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming): “The meaning of its communication is the reaction it triggers, regardless of the intention”.
If there is one area where this statement is important, it is obviously sales. If a seller sends a message to a buyer, the only way to verify if the content is understood and appreciated according to the seller’s intentions, is to get the buyer’s reaction, instantly, verbal and non-verbal. This feedback then allows the seller to refine or reformulate the message, if necessary.
Needless to say, non-verbal communication is often more relevant than verbal communication, since it reflects a crucial element in a sales or negotiation process: emotion. Let emotion be that thing that, despite the beliefs of some AI fanatics, cannot be captured and understood by machines … ever … because emotion just is not digital and cannot be captured and understood by machines. never will be.
It is my true belief that soon, rather than later, the pendulum that has gone from totally human to almost totally digital, will return to human and find a balance in the middle. The machine can serve humans in many ways, but humans will continue to deal with humans regardless of “progress” with fake humans called “bots.”
It applies to any transaction that has a significant impact on life, whether it is a loan, payment, investment or sale.
Companies and individuals who take the value of communication seriously and invest in the communication itself and the way it is transmitted, are bound by lasting relationships and business. Others may possibly surf one or the other short-lived hype but eventually and quickly disappear afterwards.
It’s not the quantity of posts that matters, it’s the quality of those posts. And this quality precisely can only be measured through the reaction to them.
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