Running heads: COMMUNICATION PROCESS

Panera About Us Carmen M. Roman Dr. Victor Villarreal Managerial and Business Communication (MGT-505) January 27, 2013

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Abstract Individuals visit the About us section of a website to comprehend the companys function and goals, and decide whether to trust the organization. Like in any conversation, saying who you are and what you do is basic to manners, in business, it's also good to establish credibility and respect by explaining your company's origins, how you view your business, and how you relate to the community. Having an excellent About us section facilitates this understanding. Clearly stating what you do to helps customers comprehend your website as a whole. Your About us page is an outstanding way to communicate to your visitors who you are and to provide them the confidence to know that you and our company posses the skills and experience that they require to have the ability to solve their particular problems. Your About us page should address the following questions: Who are we? Why should you choose us over someone else (WIIFM What's In It For Me)? What do we do? When did we start? How do we do it? It will be many different types of visitor who check out About us pages, like first-time visitors, regular visitors, people that wish to share a relationship with you and to be potential customers. To every sort of visitor the website needs to be able to supply enough informative and useful information to persuade them to establish a much stronger connection with the searcher and the website business (such as becoming a fan, user, future worker or customer).

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Identify the Web site, the sender, and perceived receiver. I decide on Panera bread About us at http://www.panerabread.com/about/ for my analysis. Communication is one of the essential aspects of making an excellent website. It is important for a beneficial individual experience and for an effective web site that genuinely profits its owners. Regardless of the website type in question: an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant demand to communicate effectively with visitors. Web sites communicate with visitors in a many various ways, text is the most noticeable form of communication that occurs online. Whether the content is in the main body content of the page or a headline, most website visitors depend on text to understand the basic messages of a website. Titles and headers are good tools to communicate major points and concepts to the visitors, and they tell visitors exactly what to expect from the rest of the content. The Panera web site About us page start displaying We are, continuing with the page content, a photo image of baker with a oven holder of fresh bread, and the phrase at the bottom of the photo image: fresh bread makes friends. Websites are designed with a particular target audience in mind, but even within that group of users, some diversity will still exist. A web site is must likely to attract site visitors from all over the world, and a visitor in one part of the world will differ from a visitor in another part of the world. Age and sex will also be essential factors. Past demographics, not every site visitor will have the exact same purpose in visiting the website. They may be seeking different things or have different agendas on the site. Not all the site visitors have the same degree of knowledge of the subject matter of the website. All of these points make each site visitor unique, and they all have an impact on the communication between the site and the individual. In order

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for a message to be clear, there need to be a clear purpose and concern of the web site that is easy to understand to the visitor; there must not be too much noise or clutter; and the message must be communicated in a way that it can be understood by the visitor. These distinctions can have an impact on the communication of the website, do to the fact that not every visitor will respond in the same way or understand the same messages. Sender / Encoder is a person who sends the message. A sender makes use of symbols (words or graphic or visual aids) to convey the message and produce the required response. Sender may be an individual, a group, or an organization. The views, background, approach, skills, competencies, and knowledge of the sender have a great impact on the message. The verbal and non verbal symbols chosen are essential in ascertaining interpretation of the message by the recipient in the same terms as intended by the sender. Medium is a means used to exchange / transmit the message. The sender must choose an appropriate medium for transmitting the message else the message might not be conveyed to the desired recipients. The choice of appropriate medium of communication is essential for making the message effective and correctly interpreted by the recipient. This choice of communication medium varies depending upon the features of communication. For instance - Written medium is chosen when a message has to be conveyed to a small group of people, while an oral medium is chosen when spontaneous feedback is required from the recipient as misunderstandings are cleared then and there. In this case the sender is Panera and the medium is the About us section on their website. Recipient / Decoder is a person for whom the message is intended / aimed / targeted. The degree to which the decoder understands the message is dependent upon various factors such as knowledge of recipient, their responsiveness to the message, and the reliance of encoder on

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decoder. In this case is me and everybody else around the world thats open Panera: About us website section. Analyze the integrated business communication The integrated business communication type of Panera, About us section is mass communication. Littlejohn and Foss (2005) define mass communication as the process whereby media organizations produce and transmit messages to large publics and the process by which those messages are sought, used, and consumed by audiences (p. 273). McQuail (1994) states that mass communication is, only one of the processes of communication operating at the society-wide level, readily identified by its institutional characteristics(p. 7). To understand mass communication it is important to be aware of some of the key factors that distinguish it from other forms of communication. First, is the dependence on a media channel to convey a message to a large audience. Second, the audience tends to be distant, diverse, and varying in size depending on the medium and message. Third, mass communication is most often profit driven, and feedback is limited. Fourth, because of the impersonal nature of mass communication, participants are not equally present during the process. Mass communication continues to become more integrated into our lives at an increasingly rapid pace. This metamorphosis is representative by the convergence occurring (Fidler, 1997) between technology, and ourselves where we are not as distanced from mass communication as in the past. Increasingly we have more opportunities to use mediated communication to fulfill interpersonal and social needs. OSullivan (2003) refers to this new use of mass communication to foster our personal lives as mass personal communication where (a) traditional mass communication channels are used for interpersonal communication, (b) traditionally interpersonal communication channels are used for mass communication, and (c)

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traditional mass communication and traditional interpersonal communication occur simultaneously. Over time, more and more overlap occurs. Innovations in communication technologies have begun to make the barriers between mass and interpersonal communication theory more permeable than ever (OSullivan, 2003). Through mass communication, media shape, entertain, inform, represent, reflect, create, move, educate, and affect our behaviors, attitudes, values, and habits in direct and indirect ways. Assess the media richness of the section. Using four criteria, Daft and Lengel present a media richness hierarchy, arranged from high to low degrees of richness, to illustrate the capacity of media types to process ambiguous communication in organizations. The criteria are (a) the availability of instant feedback; (b) the capacity of the medium to transmit multiple cues such as body language, voice tone, and inflection; (c) the use of natural language; and (d) the personal focus of the medium. Face-toface communication is the richest communication medium in the hierarchy. From a strategic management perspective, the media richness theory suggests that effective managers make rational choices matching a particular communication medium to a specific task or objective and to the degree of richness required by that task (Trevino, Daft, & Lengel, 1990, in Soy, 2001). One of the major goals of communication for website designers, developers and owners should be to present a clear message through the website. Regardless of what methods are used to achieve this clarity, the message must not be difficult for visitors to recognize or understand. By the time visitors leave the website, they should have received and understood the primary message. The website must has a welcome message that clearly states its purpose. When visitors arrive on the website and are greeted by this statement of purpose, they know immediately if they fit into the target audience. If they do, theyre much more likely to feel at home on the

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website because they know it is for them. In order for the website to maximize effectiveness, the communication must be relevant to the target audience of the website. If the website targets a specific audience, but the communication isnt catered to them, the content will be ineffective. Make it a priority to meet the visitors at there level, whatever that level may be will range About us section as a lean media richness communication. Describe how the message is framed Robert Entman defines framing as selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation and/or solution (Text book, page 18). The Panera, About us section is frame under We are and the phrase fresh bread makes friends. Websites are a shop front for businesses, professionals and individuals. They are a virtual representation of the person, people, or products that are featured. Because websites are representations, they need to appeal and reach out to the target audience. Not just through the design and usability of the website, but also to allow the audience to get to know the people it represents and to build that rapport between seller and buyer. This rapport and trust is best built through a websites About us page. That is the place where you can reach out to the audience/viewer and allow them to see who you are, what you can do or offer and why they should put their faith in you. Panera About us page did a good job appealing to establish family and friendship warmest environment at the who they are message, inviting the searcher to learned more about the company. Identify opinion leaders Opinion leaders include politicians, business leaders, religious figures and other individuals we classified as experts (Text book, page 20). Panera, About us page highlight

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section In the Community, I found the at the end of the day, they donates all unsold bread and bakes goods to local are hunger relief agencies and charities as part of its local Day-End DoughNation program. Collectively, Panera bakery-cafes donated a retail value of approximately $100 million worth of unsold bread and baked goods in 2010 to help neighbors in need. Many of these organizations are served by Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), and the nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization. Make a recommendation for improving word choice Word choice is an area of writing concerned with using clear, descriptive words that engage readers. People rarely read web pages word by word. Instead, they scan pages, picking out individual words and sentences. They do this because they are task-focused and need to ensure the page will have their answer before they commit to reading it fully. Panera About us section use common English language, go right to the point through couple of sentences in every section making appealing to the searcher, the page can be read in less than ten minutes, which its pretty good. Giving a complete understanding of what the company its about, my personal opinion Panera page developer did a good job choosing the themes and words for the page.

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References Stuart, B.E., Sarow, M.S., & Stuart, L. (2007) Integrated business communication: In global market place. Hoboken, NJ: Willey Daft, R.L. & Lengel, R.H. (1984). Information richness: a new approach to managerial behavior and organizational design. In: Cummings, L.L. & Staw, B.M. (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior 6, (191-233). Homewood, IL: JAI Press. Galbraith, J. (1977). Organization Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Trevino, L., Lengel, R., Bodensteiner, W., Gerloff, E. & Muir, N. (1990). The richness imperative and cognitive style: The role of individual differences in media choice behavior. Management Communication Quarterly, 4(2). Fidler, R. (1997). Mediamorphosis: Understanding new media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Littlejohn, S. W., & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of human communication. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (8th ed.) McQuail, D. (1994). Mass communication: An introduction (2nd). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. OSullivan, P. B. (2003). Masspersonal communication. Unpublished paper, Illinois State University.