Face-to-Face Meetings

• Face-to-face meetings offer the richest form of communication with stakeholders, as organizational leaders can communicate using body language, emotions and logical messages simultaneously. The richness of in-person communication enables meeting managers to more easily build trust by exhibiting integrity, competence and openness. The time and place constraints of face-to-face meetings mean that all stakeholders are not likely to be able to attend unless a series of meetings is offered, requiring significant company resources.
  
  

Video Meetings

• Video meetings can have various degrees of interactivity, from an interview on a call-in television news show to an interactive live broadcast. While not as rich as a face-to-face meeting, video can still provide viewers with a good approximation of body language and accurately represent emotional tone and logical content. The primary constraint on video meetings is time, especially for stakeholders who are geographically distributed in different time zones.
  
  

Email

• Email is free from time and place constraints, and offers a relatively low-cost method of communicating with stakeholders who are dispersed geographically. Emails can be gathered from stakeholders through "contact us" forms on a company website or as responses to widely broadcast messages. A company can also attach relevant reports to email messages, further enriching the message content. Many people receive a high volume of both legitimate email and spam, however, and it is becoming more likely that stakeholders will ignore or delete company emails unless they have subscribed to a company newsletter or email service.
  
  

Instant Messaging

• Instant messaging is popular for real-time updating using brief messages and links to relevant websites. Instant messages using Twitter can potentially access more than 145 million users who create more than 1 billion messages each week, David Chartier says in his book "How and Why To Search Twitter." Companies wanting to reach out to stakeholders who are Twitter members can search for their company name, products, complaints, issues, and events in the Twitter database, and respond to stakeholder concerns quickly.
  
  

Online Social Networks

• The two most popular online social networks, Facebook and LinkedIn, offer several methods for communicating with stakeholders who are members. Facebook has more than 500 million users and is oriented to general audiences. Once a business has set up a Facebook account, it can send regular status updates to those people who "like" the company web page. Businesses can also purchase advertisements on Facebook that are sent to specific users based on each user's network and profile information. LinkedIn is a career-oriented social network of more than 100 million professional and business users. A company can send targeted messages to stakeholders based on specific search criteria, create groups to which stakeholders can subscribe, and make itself searchable to all members of the network.
  
  

Selecting a Technology

• Managers need to select a technology for stakeholder communication that supports the company's communication strategy, whether that is to inform, persuade, instruct or engage stakeholders in an ongoing dialog. Once a strategy has been defined, the company should develop one or more messages that support the strategy by providing relevant information. Based on the characteristics of each message, the company can select a technology that enhances the clarity and impact of the message and that reaches the targeted stakeholder audience.