Factors Influencing the Adoption of Interpersonal Communication Media among Small and Medium Enterprises in Hong Kong

This research paper investigates the factors influencing the adoption of interpersonal communication media among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Hong Kong. With SMEs representing a significant portion of Hong Kong's economy, understanding the communication strategies that enhance their competitiveness is crucial. This study examines how industry types and entrepreneur characteristics affect the selection and effectiveness of various communication media. Utilizing quantitative surveys, the research identifies key trends and correlations that can inform strategy development for SMEs. In terms of communication media preferences, surprisingly, FtF communication is the most preferred by all four industry types. However, the different industry types also exhibited some differences in their choice of mediated-interpersonal communication media aside from FtF. Two industry types of Hong Kong SMEs - the garment and the manufacturing industries - prefer traditional media (i.e., emails and postage) while the service industry do not. Entrepreneurs’ communicative adaptabilities, social experience has the strongest correlation with three types of communication media preferences, face-to-face (FtF) communication, followed by new mobile messaging media and old messaging media; social confirmation has the second strongest correlation with two types of mediated-interpersonal communication media, new mobile messaging media and old messaging media; while articulation adaptability was found to only be significantly correlated with FtF, and appropriate disclosure was not found to be correlated with any of the communication media preferences. This study found that, in the Hong Kong case, younger SMEs’ entrepreneurs with appropriate disclosure in communicative adaptability and who are working in less established but larger sized SMEs tended to be able to achieve positive financial performance. In addition, they have to meet up with their mainland Chinese business acquaintances through FtF communication that is supplemented with other mediated-interpersonal communication media, such as emails, text/voice messages, faxes, mobile instant messages, and post, to improve their personal connection as well as the business operation process. The findings also pointed out that appropriateness is the most important communicative adaptability for entrepreneurs; therefore, articulation adaptability is not important as long as the communicators can interpret the meaning underneath the messages. The Chinese are more concerned with appropriate behavior than accuracy.