Hello, and welcome to this video on communication channels. Imagine that you are working for a marketing team, and you were just given the task to convey a message about a hot new deal or a hot new product to a very large audience. What would you do? How would you convey that message? What channel of communication, or medium of communication, would you use? Would you use graphics? Would you use speech only? Would you use video? Well, by the end of this video, you will be able to identify different channels, mediums, and modes of communication as well as be able to use those specific channels, mediums, and modes of communication for a specific purpose. Let's take a look, briefly, at what I mean by channel of communication. Basically, the channel of communication refers to the means through which the message is passed, and there are different channels of communication that we can think of. One of them is print communication. That is one channel of communication. Another is online, which is more of a relatively new channel of communication when you think about the history of mankind. So that's conveying a message via online communication. We also have audio communication. You can think of tape cassettes, or radio, or CDs, or mp3. We also have video as a channel of communication, and this is mostly visual in the sense that we're looking at moving pictures. And then we also have live communication as a channel of communication. And this involves mostly face to face communication or everyone is present in real time within the same channel of communication. So let's take a look at one of these channels of communication in a little bit more detail. And when we look at channel communication, we want to think about medium of communication. And if we take one of those channels of communication such as print, we could think of different things of mediums of communication within that channel. Different mediums of communication for print might involve newspapers, posters, brochures. For our purposes here it might include reports, if we're looking at a medium of communication for a business context. Now that we have medium of communication, we need to consider the different modes of communication. Remember back at the beginning of this video, I mentioned to you that we needed to think about things like am I using pictures, am I using speech, am I using graphics? Well, these are all different modes of communication. To illustrate this idea, let's take a look at an infographic. We have an infographic here that tells us about the pros and cons of using social media to brand a product in a company. And this infographic gives a lot of information. It tells us the costs of using social media but also tells us the benefits. It elaborates a little bit on both the costs and both the benefits of communication, and it also shows the relationship between the two. If we break this info graphic down to just the texts, the two main ideas that we want to convey through this info graphic, we have cost and benefits. Now, it tells us a little bit about the pros and cons of using social media, but it doesn't tell us a lot. So, we need to elaborate a little bit on these two ideas. And we can elaborate on these two ideas by adding more text and this text tells us a little more about the costs of using social media and also tells us a little bit more about using the benefits of social media. But it still really doesn't convey the message of the negative impact of costs nor the pro, or the beneficial impacts of using social media. And it doesn't really convey the relationship between the two. So, let's add a different mode of communication and that's the mode of graphics. By adding the mode of graphics, we can now get and idea about the negative impact of the costs of using social media and that's with the downward arrow in the color red. And we also get an idea of the benefits and how they add benefits. They increase the potential branding or product, and we can see this with the upward arrow and the color green. And than we can also see the relationship between the two, in the sense that they are balancing each other out. So, if we look at the infographic, we have modes of communication, such as the graphic mode of communication. We also have text as a mode of communication. And of course the color even plays as a mode of communication. Red signifies something negative, while green signifies something positive. So, now that we have an understanding of the differences between the channel, medium, and mode of communication, let's briefly look at the process of communication, and what happens. Well, generally you have the sender, and the sender has a message that they want to convey to someone or a group of people. And that person needs to encode their message, that is, they need to package their message into meaningful symbols, that someone else can then understand. And generally when you compact it into symbols those symbols are influenced by the message that you want to convey, but also the channel, the medium, and the mode of communication. Remember let's go back to that infographic, the mode of communication involved different modes. It involved text, color, and graphics, and those are all symbols of communication. Those have all been encoded by the sender to convey a message. Well, now those symbols need to be decoded. They need to be unpacked in a meaningful way so that the receiver of the information can understand what the sender wanted to convey. This is all part of the process of communication. And as a person who needs to convey a message, such as the situation I gave at the beginning of this video, you need to really understand how the channel, the medium and the mode of communication can influence both the encoding and the decoding of your message. Let's briefly take a look at some differences that involve modes of communication, because we'll go into more detail about this later on in the course. One of the things you need to think about is the difference between verbal communication, which is basically spoken or written words and nonverbal communication which includes eye contact, body gestures, body language, and that sort of thing. So these are differences between verbal and nonverbal communication. Both are different modes of communication. Let's take a look at this in a more concrete example. Let's say you're going for a job interview, and your channel communication is live, it's face to face, you're there in front of the person who's interviewing you for the job, and your medium of communication is mainly speech. Now you also as the interviewees should be well aware of your modes of communication when you're speaking. And this includes the words that you are choosing, but it also includes your body gestures your facial expressions and making contact with the interviewer. So as you can see now, by now you should definitely be able to identify different channels, mediums, and modes of communication. But you should also understand of being able to use those specific channels, mediums, and modes of communication for a specific purpose just like the one I gave you just now for job interviews. Think.
