7-2 Milestone Three: Draft of External Communication Assignment

Milestone Three: External Communication
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 Milestone Three: External Communication
Introduction
  Organizations exist within a society made up of different entities. There exist other business organizations, consumers, and other potential customers, the media, business partners, government enterprises, and for a regional organization or global organization, the circle becomes even wider and complex. External communication functions to share information between the organization and these external entities to achieve a stated goal. Just as is in internal communication, different mediums of communication can be employed for external communication: emails, memos, reports, newsletters, press releases, and conferences (Oltarzhevskyi, 2019). External communication can be used to serve different functions including news dissemination, branding, and even increase the market base.
Communication Mediums
For the case of Research in Motion (RIM), several communication channels would be effective for external communication purposes. This is because of the diversity in nature of the external audiences. To adequately address the underlying problems facing RIM (incompetence and poor leadership), a press release pertaining to product launches, prices, shipping period, and the features of the products would be a good start. The use of press releases for information dissemination has the potential to reach out to a large number of external audiences when the big number of press contacts are involved and using social media platforms to disseminate the information (Sadler et al., 2018). Also, emails and newsletters to subscribed consumers and partners would be a useful approach. Actively informing the consumer on new developments within the organization using newsletters while requesting their honest feedback via emails will not only help build a healthy relationship with the consumer but also has the potential to increase customer retention. Besides, there are techniques in which the performances can be easily monitored when emails and newsletters are used as a means of external communication: click rate, unsubscribe rate, and open rate (Duquette et al., 2019). Other mediums that might be deployed for external communication may include reports and conferences. Email, in particular to the consumers is the selected medium for delivering the external communication message to address the problems that RIM faces. 
Target Audience
RIM has quite a number of external audiences. The consumers, business partners, stakeholders, investors, government enterprises, and the members of the press are the most obvious external audiences to any organization. The competitiveness of an organization is primarily dependent on the consumer market and therefore, an effective communication aimed at the consumer is vital. In this regard, the consumers are the ideal target audience for the external communication aimed at addressing the competency issues experienced by RIM. 
Several factors influence the customer to buy a product. Phones and tablets present numerous factors that need to be carefully considered by a customer before making a decision to purchase or even recommend to others. Being the core products of RIM, the information on these factors needs to be made available to the customer at their convenience in order to render the product buyable. These factors include the product price, new releases, and their additional features, simplicity features, the distribution mechanisms among other factors. Furthermore, other external factors influence the purchasing decision of the customer that needs to be put into consideratio...