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Effective personal communication is the lifeblood of successful business interactions and relationships. But there are two varied strategies we can use for effective engagement in the workplace. Hyperpersonal and mass personal communication. Hyperpersonal communication plays a pivotal role in business by enabling exceptionally tailored interactions at an individual level. Mass personal communication, on the other hand, facilitates interactions that are more personalized and engaging for a broader audience.
Either way, personal communication serves as the foundation for building trust, understanding, and rapport with employees. In a world where digital communication often dominates, the power of face-to-face or direct interpersonal interactions cannot be underestimated. There is no doubt that personalized communication drives performance.
Research by IT research firm, Gartner, indicates that only 45% of employees believe their organizations see them as a person. Furthermore, when they feel undervalued, dissatisfied, and unhappy, they are likely to quit.
According to a McKinsey & Company report released late 2021, 71% of consumers expect that companies will interact in a personalized way. But 76% become frustrated if this doesn’t happen. The same sentiments apply to employees. Ultimately, the report says, personalized communication will drive performance, resulting in better outcomes.
There is no doubt that communication and effective engagement are pivotal in maintaining a positive business environment. They help to foster collaboration and achieve business goals. But when you are dealing with masses of people, it can seem like an impossible task. Cerkl recognizes this challenge and offers solutions. These include our Broadcast audience management and new summary tools that enable you to set your comms preferences to suit the employee profile of the business.
We’re going to delve into the effectiveness of hyperpersonal and mass personal communication, and help you explore ways that Cerkl Broadcast can help you.
Hyperpersonal Communication vs Mass Personal Communication
Both hyperpersonal communication and mass personal communication allow for the exchange of not only information but also emotions. This is vital for conveying empathy, sincerity, and authenticity. While information provides knowledge and data, being empathetic, sincere, and authentic builds trust, fosters meaningful relationships, and helps when you need to resolve conflicts.
Internal communicators need to find the right balance between highly personalized communication and inclusive mass communication techniques to effectively engage with a broad spectrum of employees. It is particularly important for HR. But it can also be relevant for marketing, public relations, or any area where communication plays a vital role in achieving specific objectives.
How effective is your internal communications strategy? Do you do regular audits to ensure it remains aligned and impactful? If you don’t, you can easily lose track of how engaged your employees are — or aren’t. Get valuable insights by using Cerkl’s free audit template today.
Download Your Free Strategic Internal Communications Audit Template Now
Our template will enable you to assess how well your internal comms are working and how your employees feel. You’ll be able to assess the core competencies, shortcomings, growth potential, and challenges of your comms, and move forward accordingly.
What is Mass Personal Communication?
Mass personal communication combines elements of mass communication with personalized touches to engage a broader audience in a more personalized way. The primary target is a broader audience or segments of that audience. While the communication is personalized, it is designed to resonate with a larger group of people who share common characteristics or interests. The use of data and automated personalization techniques, like those offered by Broadcast, enable internal communicators to tailor content and messages to the defined audience.
There are many strategies that you can use. These range from email marketing campaigns, and social media advertising to all-important AI-powered messaging.
An important caveat for internal communicators is that mass personal communication is not the same as interpersonal communication. This is important if marketing teams are expecting responses across social media platforms.
What is Hyperpersonal Communication?
Hyperpersonal communication aims for an intensely personalized experience tailored to an individual or a select few. It is more likely to happen online than face-to-face. It can be a great strategy if managed effectively, but it’s important to know what it involves.
Like interpersonal communication, hyperpersonal communication relies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) like email, social media, video conferencing, and so on. It can play a significant role in hyperpersonal communication by providing tools and platforms that facilitate highly personalized interactions.
For instance, CMC platforms can collect and analyze vast amounts of data about individual users, including their preferences, behaviors, and interactions. This data forms the basis for tailoring messages and content to the specific needs and interests of each user. CMC platforms can also enable the collection and analysis of user feedback and responses. This helps communicators to refine strategies and make them more personal and effective.
Through CMC, you can customize messages on a granular level. This is particularly useful for hyperpersonal communications.
Designing Strategies for Effective Personal Communications
People have been designing effective strategies for communication for eons. Some are successful, while others aren’t. For instance, a Walden University paper on Effective Management Communication Strategies written in 2018 states that 85% of managers struggle to engage effectively with employees.
Ultimately, the research found that motivation and employee engagement were key factors related to this problem. More specifically, it identifies effective executive communications, which we know are crucial for modern leadership, as well as characteristics like authenticity. It highlights the importance of effective employee engagement, stating that this increases productivity and the company’s bottom-line. It shows that employee engagement is critical to business success, underpinning the need to motivate employees by communicating effectively.
There are many strategies that organizations can use for effective internal communications. These include dividing the people you are targeting into smaller groups based on demographics, behavior, interests, or other relevant criteria. You can also include personalized data in communications sent out en-masse. Interactive content works well, as does the inclusion of compelling narratives that personalize your brand. User-generated content is another strategy for effective personal communications.
But again, the key is to find the right balance between reaching a broad audience and making each individual recipient feel valued and understood.
6 Mass Personal Communication Examples
Mass personal communication combines elements of mass communication with personalized touches to engage a broader audience in a more personalized way. The key to success lies in leveraging data, technology, and automation to deliver tailored content and experiences to a larger audience. By doing so, you can create a sense of personal connection and relevance that resonates with each recipient.
Here are 6 examples of mass personal communication strategies.
- Chatbots and AI-powered messaging using an AI infrastructure that supports platform capabilities.
- Email marketing campaigns that reach a mass employee audience.
- Social media advertising that targets specific demographics, interests, and behaviors.
- Direct personalized mail that utilizes printed or digital content.
- Events and webinars that personalize the experience for employees. These can include customized agendas and follow-up emails or news broadcasts.
- Loyalty programs for employees.
How to Achieve Successful Mass Personal Communication
Imagine your company has just been through an M&A and now you have thousands of employees to bring onboard overnight. Here are some typical pain points:
- Handling a massive influx of new employees in a short time frame can overwhelm HR and IT departments. This makes it difficult to ensure a smooth onboarding experience for everyone.
- Commonly, organizations struggle to provide consistent messaging and information to new employees. This leads to confusion and a lack of clarity regarding policies, procedures, and company culture.
- When very large numbers (sometimes thousands) of new employees come on board, it’s impossible to implement mass personal communication. The result is that personalization often takes a back seat. Employees may feel like just another number in the system, resulting in a lack of engagement and a missed opportunity to help them feel they are important and valued.
- It can also be very difficult to keep up personal communications with existing employees. HR becomes overwhelmed and existing internal comms suffer. This inevitably means that employees, old and new, may potentially be negatively affected.
A confident solution to this problem involves leveraging technology and automation while preserving a personal touch. Our systems will enable you to increase not only engagement but also productivity. For example, you can use Cerkl Broadcast to help you:
- Implement an integrated onboarding platform that connects HR, IT, and other relevant departments. Our platform will streamline the onboarding process, ensuring that all teams are aligned and coordinated.
- Use AI-driven tools to personalize the experience. This includes tailoring welcome messages, training modules, and information packets to individual employee roles and locations, both on-site and remote.
- Maintain clear and consistent communication with new employees. Our platform will enable you to provide detailed information about their roles, expectations, and company culture. Communicators can achieve this through a mix of messaging options suitable for mass and/or hyperpersonal communications.
- Create a feedback mechanism for new employees to express their concerns, ask questions, and provide suggestions. This demonstrates a commitment from the organization to their well-being and will help to fine-tune the onboarding process.
What’s Next?
When attempting mass personal communication, companies tend to opt for one-size-fits-all solutions. But mass personalized content, supported by AI on a larger scale, is massively more effective. For this reason, internal communicators will find the capabilities offered by our Cerkl Broadcast platform invaluable when designing strategies for effective communication.
Key features include automated Broadcast News Digest, and Audience Management, both of which allow effective and flexible setting comms preferences. In essence, Broadcast News Digest enables you to deliver tailored content to individual employees when and how you choose. Audience Management lets you manage your internal audience efficiently and effectively.
FAQ
Mass personal communication is the process used to engage a large (mass) audience in a personalized way. Hyperpersonal communication is customized to convey the same message, but on a much more personal level.
Well orchestrated, mass communication allows organizations to reach a broad audience through messaging. It also enables them to disseminate information efficiently and shape public opinion. Mass communication plays an important role in marketing, public awareness, and conveying essential information to a wide range of people.
Ideally, when you are dealing with large numbers of employees, mass personal and hyperpersonal communication should be combined. While they both offer effective engagement strategies, their approaches differ. But it’s important to balance the two strategies for success.
The best strategy for success will combine various methods and approaches to achieve a specific goal. It’s important to target employees so that they feel personalized and valued. But to do this when you are targeting thousands of employees, you need to embrace methods that allow you to deliver personalized messages en masse. Cerkl Broadcast will help you do this.
