Observed

When Odysseus left for the Trojan War, he realized he needed help while he was away.  So, Odysseus asked his friend, Mentor, to be in charge of his son, Telemachus, and his palace until he returned.

While the meaning has changed a bit, we still seek and offer mentoring.

What’s the best platform for such a trusted relationship?  According to my friend, Nick Gargala, Ed.D., the best results occur when the mentoring happens face to face.  In interviews for his recent dissertation, Nick found that over the phone is a distant second, and e-mail mentoring is the weakest.

Where trust is important to a relationship (e.g., in business development), the more personal the better.

Seth just posted a thought about the importance of relationships and how to build/maintain them.  “The experience I have with you as a customer or a friend is far more important than a few random bits flying by on the screen.”

My advice?

• Be tangible.
• Be tangible.
• Be tangible.

So, touch somebody.  Do something tangible.  Any questions?

Why all the fuss about intimacy in marketing communication and, especially, sales?  Does it really matter whether you stay in touch with a client or prospect via Twitter or something more personal?

I believe it does.

Sure, it depends on the stakes.  In my case, I’m a freelance writer selling into a mature market.  If I want someone to hire me, I must offer them something more than my experience and credentials.  Something more than the promise or intention that I’ll be accountable.

So, here’s a re-frame for my last few posts on memorable communications from my own business development perspective…

• In order to hire me, a prospect must first trust me.
• In order to trust me, they must believe I care.
• In order to believe I care, I must demonstrate that I care…not merely assert that I care.
• In order to demonstrate that I care, I must be as tangible and personal as possible.  The more I sacrifice (e.g., my time, money and the like) in communicating that, the greater the value and impact.  The more I prove I care.

What I’m seeking is to be in relationship with someone.  Because I’m asking them to trust me with their baby.

Back when I was in-house, I got hundreds of messages a day and was striving to stay connected to a couple hundred clients.  And that was before Twitter and other social media.

There were often times I felt that a shovel would have been more effective than my keyboard.

Know what I mean?  Was any of that promoting intimacy?  Or, was I doing more good by putting on my suit coat and taking a partners’ walk?

So, we know that repetition is key to having a client or prospect remember you.  Furthermore, it’s a blend of the quality of what you say and the frequency of the impressions you make on your target.

What, however, about the delivery platform?

My sense is that the more personal the impression, the better.  After all, which are you more likely to remember?

• One of the hundreds of text messages you might get in a day? or
• A face-to-face meeting?

I can offer only a little research to back this up.  Here’s one item .

Actually, what caught my attention was the comment:  “Is twitter nothing but a series of text ads put in the context of perceived intimacy?”

The Battle of Jericho, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1851-60. Joshua and the Israelites marched around the walls of the fortress seven times before blowing their horns and bringing down the walls.

Looking for a good way to be remembered?  One route is literary.

Another way is more quantitative than qualitative.  More about deployment than style.

I’ll call this one The Rule of Seven.

Most behavioral psychologists will tell you that it takes between about five and seven impressions for most humans to store anything in their long-term memory.  Short-term memory, BTW, lasts about 18 seconds; long enough to remember, for example, a phone number. (more…)

OK, maybe the only place where size counts is in sumo wrestling.  After reading a reporter’s account of what it took to cover the Tour de France, however, I was reminded of the size of the platform it takes for some stories to get told.

It’s not that newpaper reporters are typically smarter or harder working or whatever than bloggers and others in the non-MSM. (more…)

What could ensure a more accurate portrayal of What Happened than having someone there?  Someone who was there and felt what it was like to be there.

That’s what I read when I learned this morning that the United States Marine Corps has an artist in its ranks, a painter deployed to capture combat scenes.  “We have somebody who was there who can tell the story,” according to Col. Robert Oltman, USMC, referring to Sgt. Kristopher J. Battles, the lone remaining Marine combat artist.

Why not photography?  I’ll let the New York Times answer that one. (more…)

Here’s an excerpt from a blog I recently started following.  It’s a post about Apple’s head industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, and the process he used for the iPhone 4:

“It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it,” Ive explains, going on to add that years upon years of making his own models with his own hands is what gave him a deep understanding of the materials he’s worked. “And it’s important to develop that appetite to want to make something, to be inquisitive about the material world, to want to truly understand a material on that level.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Roycrofters.  These American arts-and-crafters espoused the same kind of creative process over a century ago.  The furniture, books and other everyday objects they designed, built and fabricated expressed the exact nature of the materials used.

Ive, Apple and the Roycrofters understood.  They found the true nature of the materials in their products.  They knew that for the user to be the most pleased required total honesty and that this required gemba.

A debate is under way about the pluses and minuses of books versus the Internet.  There’s mounting evidence, for example, that books do a better job helping us develop critical thinking, reading and math skills.  All of these seem to suffer once a home gets hooked up to a high-speed ISP.

This news comes at a time when I’ve been thinking (again) about the virtues of the tangible…particularly in marketing and business development communications.  It made me wonder about the many, varied ways we value the ability to touch, hear, smell and see a person, place or thing — ways such as… (more…)