During the last few weeks of 2005, I was repeatedly reminded of the value of the oldest form of human communication. This form of communication is low-tech and high-touch. It can be enhanced by fancy strategic communication planning and the latest technology. But none of that is needed for it to work.
This technique is one-on-one communication as well as its potent variant, face-to-face communication.
As a child of and an alumnus of the mass media, I have always argued in a knee-jerk way that the exact opposite of the ways in which I was instructed and inculcated could turn out to be the most powerful. Mass media is one-way communication, tradtionally. (Yes, mass media now often embraces feedback, but the main thrust is one-way communication.) One-on-one communication is two-way.
Mass media is one-to-many communication, with all the foibles of trying to transmit one exact-same message to hundreds, thousands, or millions of recipients -- and hoping they each receive it the same way, as they perceive it. One-on-one communication is customizable, flexible, and offers multiple opportunities for clarification of message and perception.
I have often told clients that the right one-on-one communication on any given day is better than the most successful news release, news conference, or mass-media interview. It was a good line, but I'm not sure that I ever believed it to the depths equivalent to the frequency with which I said it.
Events of the past few weeks have solidified my belief in the power of one-on-one communication.
On a professional basis, my colleague Ted Tollefson and I have been working to complete a client's assignment to interview a number of individuals who are thought to hold views inimical to the core beliefs of the client. We thought we were being sent to be slaugtered by the lions. But we agreed to do it. To our constant surprise, the one-on-one interviews have been cordial, civil (in the best sense of that word), productive, insightful, and in the main enjoyable.
Ted and I have remarked to each other repeatedly how surprised we are. Yesterday, we began work in ernest on our findings, conclusions, and recommendations to the client -- and we were so very eager to report on all this, to convey real insight that at times is contrary to the conventional wisdom within the client organization and yet we will say it without fear for we know that it is undoubtedly true and authentic. Thanks to multiple one-on-one discussions, we have built a perception about the members of this particular group that is more deeply felt than any reaction to a simple mass media report on the same people in the same group.
(An appendix to that last paragraph: I chose the word "inimical" and then looked it up. I thought it always had a sense of hardened contrariness, and indeed it does. But it is really distinguished by its marriage of the idea of "enemy" to the idea of "contrary," and in this actual definition of the word, its use is doubly believed to be in the right place at the right time.)
Powerful as this professional assignment has been, I have been pursuing a personal assignment of one-on-one communication during the past few weeks to a degree that I don't think I have ever attempted.
Earlier this year, I was struck numb by the death of the husband of a woman whose family I knew well -- both in terms of the family history and culture as well as in terms of the individuals in the family -- as I was growing up. As youngsters and as teen-agers, this woman and I were brought together by our families with some frequency, and we over time built a strong bond. Then I left the Northeast, where we both had grown up -- and where she remained -- and went to college in the South. I lost touch. In some ways, I revolted against the values and ways of the region of my birth. I married a woman from the Midwest, and we moved to the Midwest to make our lives and raise our family. Our life in Indianapolis has been fulfilling in many ways.
But when my friend's spouse died at way too early an age and after the sudden onset of an unexpected disease, I realized I had completely missed knowing about him. I met him once. More galling -- if such a thing under the circumstances could be more galling -- was that my friend has a daughter, a daughter named for her maternal grandmother, of whom I was quite fond and whom the daughter resembled. I met the namesake once, on the same occasion when I met her father. Time passed. A lot of time passed. Way too much time passed. And when the father died, the daughter was on the verge of graduating from high school and heading to college. Not only had I missed interacting with a man I should have known better, I had missed the entire upbringing of a child that, on paper, I should have watched for and cared for more closely.
When my friend's husband and father of her child died, I was sad for them but really angry at myself. I had given up responsibility to maintain an important relationship. It was an important lesson. I sent my friend the best condolence I could develop -- a condolence that used the lyrics to a song that has meaning for me because it was performed by its composer at the funderal for yet another friend.
This story would amount to unnecessary self-flagellation if I did not move quickly to the point. And so I shall. The point is that serious and important relationships, including the relationships of friendship and commerce, are interactive exercises maintained and made continuously viable by one-on-one communication. Indeed, this may the only effective way of keeping these relationships alive.
Later in the year, I drove east during a vaction week and went way north into New England where another old childhood friend now lives. We went out to one of those $5 all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurants for lunch and talked about our lives, our families, our children, our careers. (My children were with me but blessedly were oblivious to our conversation so we were able to proceed largely as though the children were absent.) On the way out of the restaurant, in a snowy parking lot, my friend confided two powerful confessions. One: he had always regretted an incident in which he thought all these years that he had marred my wedding to Amy. (He had not, and I relieved him by saying so.) Second, he confided that he had lately succeeded in battling an important challenge, and that while we had not spoken for years, he wanted me to know it. I have rarely been more grateful to receive anyone's confidence as I was in the snow drifts of that New England parking lot.
The power of one-on-one communication to rejuvenate important relationships continued to reveal itself to me in 2005, and then I began harnessing its power to do even more relationship reconstruction. I got in touch several times with a dear but distant friend whose family living on the Gulf Coast had suffered through but largely -- perhaps miraculously -- had escaped the worst wrath of Hurricane Katrina. And last night, on one of the last nights of the year, I talked long into the night with a new friend to restore a relationship damaged in mid-year by a truly unintended and mutal confusion. Earlier in the week, my widowed friend and I enaged in another round of one-on-one communication via voicemail and e-mail. I think it was healthy for both of us.
And then, returning to professional practice and away from private friendships, came the unexpected powerful insights from the client assignment in the waning weeks of 2005.
Moving into 2006, the power of two-way one-on-one communication will be a reality for me rather than a theoretical construct. It is the origin of communication, the foundation of the modern public relations profession, and still the state of the art. Everything else is more complicated. Every other communication strategy only means to replicate the power of one-on-one. But nothing else compares.
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