Get Your Message Across
in the Age of Too-Much Information

By Susan E. Fisher

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

In a popular TV commercial promoting a big name cellular service, the answer to the question is straight-forward. To succeed, the person with the flagging cell service just trades up to a new phone company with better geographic reach. Victory is apparent in the now-happy caller's knowing nod and affirming smile.

The moral of the story: Communication can succeed when you obtain a better means to convey the message.

Yet, to an ambitious marketer in our too-much-information age, the message behind the ad couldn't seem farther from the truth. Ironically, the more sophisticated and sweeping our means of communication becomes, the harder time we seem to have getting our own specific messages heard.

Data is bursting from our handhelds, handsets, laptops and head-sets. We are simply overwhelmed with what writer David Shenk has labeled "data smog." In MIT's Technology Review, he bemoans the "incessant barrage of stimuli captivating our senses at virtually every waking moment."

How do we use electronic communications effectively when our business customers are overloaded with information? At the risk of seeming flip, I have an answer: very carefully. I promise to provide a more detailed answer later; first, let's look at some of the hard points on data.

The amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media doubled between 1999 and 2002, estimates a study by researchers at UC Berkeley and continues to grow at an impressive clip.

That collection of storage media produced an estimated 5 exabytes of new information in 2002 alone. Electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet — produced three and a half times more, or almost 18 exabytes of new information, the study noted.

(One exabyte = 1 thousand petabytes = 1 million terabytes = 1 billion gigabytes.)

Yet, the more we know, the less we know. That's what Shank concludes, interviewing a UCLA memory expert. "We're exceptional at storing information. But there are retrieval limitations. Memory is stored according to specific cues — contexts within which the information is experienced. When the contexts begin to vanish in a sea of data, it becomes more difficult to remember any single piece of it."

That certainly isn't good news for business communicators. How do we make sure our messages aren't swept away in this data tsunami?

Hear me now: Here are five action steps to use electronic communications effectively.

1. Learn to accept and even love the very competitive nature of the communications marketplace.

   To know where you stand, consider the explosion of email. In 2006, the total number of email messages sent daily is expected to exceed 60 billion worldwide, projects IDC, a research firm based in Framingham, Mass. That's nearly double what it was in 2002. The annual volume of business email worldwide exceeded 1 exabyte beginning in 2003, according to IDC.

   Does that mean you should simply stop sending email? Of course not. That means you must try that much harder to stand out before your reader hits the delete key.

2. Take to heart a simple reading of communications guru Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message." The channel of communication may supersede content in importance.

   For example, a potential customer contacted me. He wanted to create a weekly e-newsletter with a digest, analyzing key findings of the Federal Register, the daily compilation of federal regulations and legal notices.

   I ran the idea past a lead researcher at a major law firm. The researcher told me that lawyers would find such a service valuable only if it would save them time. They care little for analysis; they want top line information as soon as it is available. Also, they want very targeted information, only the information that pertains to their practice, and sent in a format they frequently use — text via RIM BlackBerry PDA.

   A broad-based, weekly e-newsletter was clearly the wrong format approach. The medium — an RSS news headlines retriever service optimized for a BlackBerry — would be the way to go.  

3. Be a relevant, credible and compelling source of information. Provide meaningful, contextualized targeted messages to nurture your customer relationships. Do you know what your customers want to learn? Make sure the information you provide fulfills customers' needs and tells them what they would like to know, rather than simply what you would like to tell.

4. Evaluate your effort and react accordingly. Ask the hard question: is anybody really interested in reading this? Be honest. Track the results. Tailor your messages in reaction to those reactions. Test and re-test how you send your messages.

5. Be powerful in a "blink" of the eye. In " Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," author Malcolm Gladwell considers the power of rapid cognition, the snap judgments and first impressions that heavily influence what we do. How do you influence the quick thinking that helps your customers make sense of their business world? What are the critical pieces of information you provide at a two-second glance?

   See Sarah Eaton's review.

To be heard through the din of all this 21^st Century data, apply communications savvy. Then, your business customer can truly say, "I can hear you now."

Susan is the Editorial Director at BeTuitive Marketing. Susan's articles have been published in both the print and online versions of a variety of publications including Investor's Business Daily, the Boston Herald, Fortune magazine's Technology Buyer's Guide, InfoWorld and the Chicago Tribune.

Copyright © 2005 BeTuitive Marketing

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