Contemporary Issues in Business Communication

Question: Write about theContemporary Issues in Business Communication. Answer: Business communication is the term that is made of two words that is business and communication. Business is considered as the commercial activity that is conducted by the people in order to serve the customers with range of products that are in demand. The main aim of the businesses is to earn revenue and profits. To cater the service to the customers, it is necessary for the firms to communicate and interact with its customers. Thus, business communication is defined as the communication and interaction of the business to its customers (Bovee Courtland., 2012). Business communication is not only about communication with the customers, it also deals with internal communication of the business that occurs between the departments. This is called internal communication of the businesses. Communication is business should be professional. Professionalism refers to putting in efforts beyond expectations. The communication in professional world is somewhat different from normal communicat ion. The process of communication in professional way involves a sender, communication channel and receiver. The sender encodes the idea in his mind and sends the messages through the channel. After that the message is being received by the receiver and is decoded for proper understanding. This is considered as the full communication process (Guffey Loewy, 2012). This communication in professional business may suffer many challenges due to change in the environment in modern business. On the other hand there are many opportunities that are available in todays world that supports this communication in the businesses. The first challenge that needs to be discussed should be the challenge of workforce diversity. As the transport business of the Queensland is considered, it has been analyzed that the business is facing high workforce diversity because of employees with different cultural background in Australia. This results in different languages and communication patterns. Thus, it becomes challenge for the businesses to communicate with each other (Shaw Barry, 2015). As Australia is the country with diverse communities so, the employees in the organization of Australia face the issue of communication. Transport business is facing t issues at large extent because products needs to be transported from one place to another and workers at different place has different culture and pattern of professional communication. Apart from culture, the next challenge is the ethical consideration of the place. Culture of the place as well as the industry affects its ethical consideration. This is because some o f the businesses consider different ethics at the time of making contracts while other businesses have different ethical aspects to be considered. This acts as the challenge for the business to deal with the ethical considerations. The main reason behind this issue is the globalization. Globalization allows the companies to conduct their businesses in different countries (Crews Stitt-Gohdes, 2012). As import and export allow the transport businesses to deal with different countys business and it may be possible that both have different ethical consideration in their contract so this creates an issue for both the countries to deal with each other. One of the major challenges in organizations is team communication. This is a great challenge for nay organization. Team work is essential for businesses these days and if a team with different types of people works together for the same goal then conflicts occur. The only solution to this problem is effective communication which is a big challenge. This is because different member of the team have different views reading the topic and thus have different solution to solve the issue. Difference in thinking act as communication barrier for the members and thus it is required by the management to take care of the communication effectiveness in the team (Ver?i?, Ver?i? Sriramesh, 2012). Why people have different culture and difference in thinking, this may be because of their social customs and beliefs. Different culture people have different beliefs in formal and informal communication and thus act as the challenge in the organization to deal with these differences. It is not necessary that the social beliefs of one person in the organization are similar to the beliefs of another person. This again acts as the challenge for the businesses that restricts the communication between the people. Writing and speaking with multilingual audiences is a great challenge for the businesses. This is because the company has to inve st large amount money in translations (Fatima Oliveira, 2013). This is because the organizations need to communicate with the employees, customers, stakeholders etc. In native language and because of multilingual audiences; the company has to translate the matter. With the change in environment around the businesses, change has been observed in the communication practices of the same. The biggest opportunity available with the businesses these days is the development of technology and specifically the development of social media to communicate and make contacts with each other. Australia is the country with many businesses that are using social media platforms as their marketing and communication tool (Wild, Wild Han, 2014). Some of the companies that are very much successful in their social media engagement are Woolworths, Telstra, Coles etc. Coles is the company that is using this tool very effectively for business communication. This is because it provides various opportunities for the business to communicate. Coles is the company that is a well-established and well-known brand in Australia. Its social media efforts are so successful because they have made intelligent, clever and creative use of social media tools till now (Sharma Kamalan abhan, 2012). As far as the company's presence on Facebook is considered, the company used to have a fan growth rate of 8.1%. Coles is very much active on its Facebook page. It updates its profile with around 120 posts daily and thus it reminds the people every time about the company and the products. As far as the average reply time of the people is concerned, it has been analyzed that the company responds to the customers in 2 hours and 15 minutes which is quite speedy (Jussila, Krkkinen Aramo-Immonen, 2014). This also provides the idea that company is very much active on social media tools to serve the customers. The below figure shows the average number of posts and the engagement score of the company. The company also uses youtube as the medium to make connections with the customers. On an average the company uploads around 1 video in two days which is quite frequent. It has been analyzed that most of the videos that are uploaded by the company are related to cooking recipes and also related to its offers and services such as TVCs that showcase its car insurance services. This suggests that the company is also using this as a successful tool to communicate with the users and the customers. Pinterest is the site that helps the companies to generate the visual content for the customers. It helps in attracting the customers as visual ads leave greater impact on the minds of the customers rather than just the ads with content. As far as the data is considered Coles have around 1300 followers on Pinterest and is experiencing the growth rate of around 6% (Meredith, 2012). The company has made its website very attractive with red color as the background that can attract the peoples atten tion very easily. One of the important things that have been noticed on the website of the company is that it has put all its social media tools on the top of the website so that people can easily access those sites. Coles twitter page is also very impressive (Coles, 2014). The tweets of the company involves videos, images, content everything. The company has around 30,000 followers on twitter and 27000 tweets till now. After analyzing the social media presence of Coles, it can be determined that the company has a dedicated social media team that is working towards its goals of enhancing the company's presence on social media network so that more and more connection can be made with the customers. The use of social media by the company creates a humanized effect and allows the customers to feel related. The company is very much active on the sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest etc. (Kwok Yu, 2013). Communication and social media is so much related to each other because it p rovides a two way communication to the businesses. Social media is not providing the opportunities for the communication between customers and businesses but also helps the businesses to communicate with internal stakeholders. Technology advancement results in formulation of internal communication apps and portals for the organization that remains connected with the intranet. The organizations that are having their businesses in different countries can easily communicate with each other. To summarize the discussion, it can be analyzed that there are many challenges and opportunities available in front of the organization these days. The challenges are because of the diversity in the workforce that restricts the communication between the employees. This is because of the difference in the languages, culture, social beliefs etc. (Wang, Yu Wei, 2012). These challenges can be overcome by using different opportunities that are also available for the companies these days. It has been analyzed the major opportunity is the advancement in technology and internet. This supports the companies to connect through internet which also helps in overcoming the distance barriers. The discussion has been supported by the Australian supermarket industry and the company that has been selected to know about the communication opportunities is Coles. Coles is the company that is using the social media tool to communicate with its customers and intranet tool to communicate in internal envir onment of the businesses (Castronovo Huang, 2012). It is very important for the organizations to use these tools in order to communicate with other businesses and with their customers. Communication is considered as the basis for every organization to get success and thus facing the challenges and using the opportunities at optimum level is the need of hour for these organizations. References: Bovee, Courtland. (2012).Business Communication Today, 10/e. Pearson Education India. Castronovo, C., Huang, L. (2012). Social media in an alternative marketing communication model.Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness,6(1), 117. Coles, L. (2014).Marketing with social media: 10 easy steps to success for business. John Wiley Sons. Crews, T. B., Stitt-Gohdes, W. L. (2012). 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