1.2 From Smoke Signals to Snapchat
While communication is certainly more of an art than a science, you can essentially boil communication down into a simple equation.
The Message × The Medium Used to Communicate the Message × The Context in Which That Message Is Received = How Effective the Communication Is
In some ways, communications strategies haven't changed since the dawn of time. In fact, even our brains haven’t really changed much in recorded history. Understanding how the brain works, how dopamine works, and how logic works is the foundation of any effective communication strategy.
Some of the best orators of all time had a clear grasp of how humans communicate and what it takes to inspire, motivate, and drive action. Winston Churchill as he rallied England against the foreboding Nazi army. Gandhi as he argued and protested for Indian independence. Abraham Lincoln as he struggled to unite America while states were beginning to secede from the Union just months before he took office.
In essence, storytelling is the main tool in any marketer’s toolbox, and that will always be true, while the other half of the communication equation (the communication medium and the society in which the communication happens) is developed faster than the rate of technology development.
Smoke signals are considered to be among the first forms of communication over long distances. Smoke has been used by Native American tribes to signal things of interest or danger, by the ancient Chinese to signal threats of invasion, and even by the modern-day Catholic Church to indicate a decision has been made concerning the next Pope.
By nature, smoke signals appear limited in breadth and depth when it comes to what they can communicate. When signaling danger with smoke, one need not concern themselves with nuance, prevailing attitudes in society, or misinterpretation.
However, in a remarkable display of human ingenuity, Polybius, an ancient Greek born in 200 BCE, developed the Polybius square. The Polybius square was a method of communicating individual letters of the Greek alphabet over long distances using only two torches and an imaginary 5×5 grid.
The Polybius square was the very first recorded case of humans using numbers to communicate over long distances. In many ways, it is similar to how we communicate over the internet today, with words, audio, and images being represented as numbers (binary) as they’re sent over the web.
The Romans adapted the Polybius square and used it for cryptography (a method of encrypting messages sent between two parties) and a tap-based communication system (a precursor to Morse code).
To communicate, the sender needs only to first tap a certain number to get to the correct column (in the case above, three taps), pause, and then tap to get to the correct row (in the case above, four taps).
This method of communication was used by Vietnam prisoners of war, most notably Colonel Thomas Curtis whose helicopter was shot down while flying over Vietnam. He was captured and spent over seven years in a prisoner of war (POW) camp. Colonel Curtis had previously learned this tap code system and was able to teach it to the other POWs on the rare occasions when they were together.
Using this system, the POWs were able to communicate information they learned about the outside from new POWs, encourage and uplift each other, maintain a chain of command, develop plans to resist enemy interrogation tactics, and, perhaps most importantly, survive a grueling 2,703 days of torture, harsh conditions, and mentally taxing realities. This is the power of communication technologies.
As communication develops, becomes more complex, and gains the ability to convey subtle thoughts and inferences, questions begin to arise at a rapid pace. What does it say to send this email at the beginning of the day versus the end of the day? What will most people interpret this emoji to mean? Is it appropriate to even use an emoji in this context? Should business communication on social media platforms use proper punctuation and risk coming off as stuffy or forego punctuation and risk appearing unprofessional and untrustworthy? What kinds of communication are appropriate for a platform that’s more permanent (like a blog post), versus a platform that’s more temporary (like a social story or Snapchat)?
Not understanding how your message will be interpreted is a sure signal that you’re headed for a misstep and will decrease your chances of business communication success. More and more, the medium and context have a lot to do with that understanding.