4.2 Choosing the Channel

Choosing the Channel

Choosing the channel is an important aspect of understanding your audience and how they will best receive the message you are sending. Do you call your grandmother on the phone or send a letter to check in? Do you email your best friend or send a message on Threads or Instagram when asking if they want to? Do you choose to let an employee know that are fired in person or on video chat? Do you give your new product pitch in person in the office, via an online platform live, or distribute it as a recorded presentation? 

In the present day, there are many channels to choose from, and it seems like a new channel appears every month. Below is a list of channels, though not all-inclusive. I'm sure you can think of others to add to this list. (Image 4.2)

Making this choice may require digging into the demographic or situational analyses of your audience. It also may require a little better understanding of the characteristics of different channels. The three characteristics involved in different channels are richness, speed, and control (Adler et al., 2022). 

Richness involves the amount of information that can be conveyed. How much can be communicated and can the channel handle the amount of cues? Face-to-face would be the highest in richness from this list because it allows for verbal and nonverbal cues, simultaneous feedback, and personal focus. It allows for tone and emotion, whereas emails often do not and often can lead to misunderstandings because of this.  

Speed involves how quickly the transactional process can occur.  Is the message going to be received synchronously or asynchronously? Synchronous is generally the fastest communication because the sender and receiver are both engaged at the same time. Examples of synchronous channels include face-to-face, video chat, telephone conversations, and sometimes instant messaging if both parties are active/"green." Asynchronous channels such as Emails, Voicemails, and hard copy would be considered low-speed because there is generally lag time between the sending and receiving of a message.  

Control involves how much control you have over how you encode your message. Because communication is two-way, there is no way to have complete control. Written communications or asynchronous communications allow for more control in encoding the message by spending time crafting it and editing it to perfection…but you can’t control how the message is received.  It could be read or viewed with low attention, with a lot of noise or interference, depending on the situation the receiver is in when reading or viewing the message.  

Oral vs. Written Channels 

Many of these characteristics are dictated by whether the channel is an oral (spoken) or written form of communication. Oral and written forms of communication are similar in that they can be divided into verbal and nonverbal categories. Verbal communication involves words (what you say), and nonverbal communication involves how you say what you say—your tone of voice, your facial expression, body language, and so forth. Written communication also involves verbal and nonverbal dimensions. The words you choose are the verbal dimension. How you portray or display them is the nonverbal dimension, which can include the type of document (email or report), formatting, typeface or font, use of punctuation, use of emojis, or the appearance of your signature on a letter. In this sense, oral and written communication are similar in their approach even as they are quite different in their application.  

The written word allows for a dynamic communication process between source and receiver, but is often asynchronous, meaning that it occurs at different times. When we communicate face-to-face, we get immediate feedback, but our written words stand in place of that interpersonal interaction and we lack that immediate response. Since we are often not physically present when someone reads what we have written, it is important that we anticipate the reader’s needs, interpretation, and likely response to our written messages. 

Attribution: 

Some information for this section was modified from 

Business Communication for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. 

References: 

Adler, R. B., Maresh-Fuehrer, M., Elmhorst, J. M., & Lucas, K. (2022). Communicating at Work: Strategies for success in business and the professions (13th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.